Key takeaways
- Every pursuit spends the same scarce resource: the hours of the few people who can write, price and review.
- Score every opportunity against the same short list of criteria, written down before you read the solicitation.
- Make the decision at a fixed checkpoint, with a named owner, and record the reason either way.
- A disciplined pass is not a loss. It is capacity you just gave back to a better bid.
Why most teams bid on too much
Public bidding rewards persistence, and it is easy to confuse persistence with volume. A new solicitation arrives, it looks close enough to what you do, and someone says the familiar words: we might as well take a shot. Two weeks later the team has pulled three late nights for a response that never had a real chance, and the bid that did fit got a rushed review.
The cost of a weak pursuit rarely shows up on a report. It shows up as a tired estimator, a proposal manager who skipped the compliance check, and an owner who signed a form at the last minute without reading it. Those costs land on the next bid, not this one.
A bid/no-bid discipline exists to make that trade visible. It does not tell you to bid less. It tells you to bid on purpose.
Write the criteria before you read the bid
The single most useful habit is to agree on your scoring criteria in a calm week, not in the hour after an exciting solicitation lands. Once a team has read an opportunity and started to want it, every criterion bends.
Keep the list short enough to fill in within fifteen minutes. Most firms land on six to eight questions, each scored on a simple scale such as strong, workable or weak. The criteria below are a sound starting point; adapt the wording to your trade.
- Fit: is this work we already do, at this size, in this kind of place?
- Eligibility: can we meet every mandatory requirement today, including licenses, insurance limits, bonding capacity and certifications?
- Relationship: do we know this buyer, its evaluators or its history, or are we a stranger reading the notice cold?
- Award method: is it lowest responsive price, best value, or qualifications first, and does that method favor how we compete?
- Capacity: do we have the people to write it now and to deliver it if we win, without starving current contracts?
- Timeline: is there enough time between today and the due date for a real response, including questions, signatures and delivery?
- Competition and pricing room: what does past award history suggest about the field and the price range?
- Strategic value: does winning open a new buyer, a cooperative contract, a new region or a reference we need?
Separate the gates from the scores
Not every criterion deserves a score. Some are gates. If the solicitation requires a license you do not hold, or a bond larger than your surety will write, no amount of strong fit makes up for it. Treat those as pass or fail before you add up anything else.
The useful distinction is between unknown and failed. A requirement you have not checked yet is not a failure, and it is not a pass either. Write it down as unknown, give it an owner, and give that owner a date. Many lost bids began with an unknown that everyone assumed someone else had checked.
An unknown requirement is not a yes. Give it an owner and a date, or it will become a no at the worst possible moment.
Who decides, and when
A decision without an owner turns into a drift. Name one person who makes the call for each opportunity, usually the capture lead or the owner of the business line, and name the people who must be heard first: the estimator for price realism, operations for delivery capacity, and whoever signs for legal and insurance questions.
Then fix the timing. A good rhythm uses two checkpoints:
- First look, within a day or two of the notice: a quick screen against the gates and the fit question. Most opportunities should end here, with a short reason recorded.
- Full decision, before real writing starts: the scored criteria, the open unknowns and their owners, the calendar worked back from the due date, and a clear bid or pass from the decision owner.
- Re-check when the bid changes: a major addendum, a moved deadline or a new mandatory requirement reopens the decision. Treat it as a fresh look, not an inconvenience.
Signals that tell you to walk away
Some patterns show up again and again in pursuits that should have been passed. None of them is a rule on its own, but two or more together deserve a hard conversation.
- The specification reads as if it was written around one product or one incumbent, and the question period is too short to challenge it.
- The scope is vague, the evaluation criteria are vaguer, and price carries most of the weight anyway.
- You would need to hire, rent or subcontract most of the work, and you have not yet talked to those partners.
- The due date leaves no room for questions, signatures, notarization or physical delivery.
- Nobody on the team can say why this buyer would choose you over the firm it chose last time.
Record the reason, every time
The quiet benefit of a written decision is the history it builds. After a year of recorded reasons, you can see which buyers you keep passing on and why, which criteria actually predicted your wins, and which kinds of work drain the team without paying back.
Keep the record simple: the decision, the owner, the date, the scores, and one or two sentences of reasoning. When the award is published, add the outcome and the winning price if it is public. That loop turns gut feel into judgment you can teach.
What this means for your team
Agree on the criteria this month, before the next exciting notice arrives. Name the decision owner for each line of business. Put the first look and the full decision on the calendar as real events, and write the reason down either way.
BotBid is built around this habit. Its Radar shows a fit score with the reasons behind every point, keeps unknown requirements visible instead of guessing, and records a Bid, Maybe or Pass decision with your reason so the history builds itself. The decision always stays with a person on your team.
Common questions
How many opportunities should we pass on?
There is no right ratio. Track your own decisions and outcomes for a few quarters and let that history show where your effort pays back.
Should the owner always make the final call?
Not necessarily. The decision owner should be the person accountable for the result of that line of work. In a small firm that is often the owner; in a larger one it is usually a capture or business line lead.
What if we pass and regret it?
Record the reason and check it against the award result. A pass that looks wrong in hindsight is useful data, and far cheaper than a pursuit that was never winnable.