BID OR NO BID
Deciding what not to bid
For some businesses the constraint is not throughput. It is choosing correctly, because every pursuit costs more than a week.
01
When the wrong pursuit is expensive
If you bid at volume, a poor decision costs a few days. If you commit design, planning and technical resource before anything reaches the ground, it costs a great deal more — and it is committed months before you know the answer.
“A key thing for the business is selectivity… we’ve got to make sure that it’s the right thing that we bid on and there’s a rationale.” — Development director, property developer
The word doing the work there is rationale. Most bid/no-bid decisions are made on instinct and defended afterwards. That holds until it does not, and it is hard to improve something nobody wrote down.
02
What the decision actually turns on
Two questions, and neither is answered by reading the summary document.
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Can we win this?
What is the client actually asking for, is any of it outside what you do, and is there a requirement buried in the pack that changes the shape of the job?
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Do we have the evidence?
Not whether the work is deliverable — whether you can demonstrate it to somebody scoring your answer. A strong capability with no evidence behind it scores like a weak one.
“Answering the question and interpreting the client’s touch point… what are the hot topics you need to respond to.” — Development director, property developer
03
The practical problem
You have to read the pack to decide, and reading the pack is the expensive part. So the decision gets made on a skim, or it gets made by committing the team and finding out.
04
What the platform does about it
It reads the pack against your capability and your evidence, quickly enough that you can decide before committing anyone. Two outputs.
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What is being asked
The requirements, including the ones qualified elsewhere in the documents and easy to miss on a first read.
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Where you are strong, and where you are thin
Which parts of the response you can evidence from work already done, and which would need something you do not have.
The second one is what changes the decision. A pursuit you cannot evidence is not one you should be spending on, and knowing that in week one rather than week five is the whole value.
05
What it does not do
It does not decide. Commercial viability, relationship, risk appetite and strategic fit are yours, and we do not model any of them. It tells you what is in the pack and what you can prove. You decide whether to chase it.
06
What changes
A managed connectivity provider went in with a stated goal: build stronger discipline around which bids to pursue, so effort goes into the strongest contenders. What they reported afterwards was sharper bid selection — time freed to think about which bids to chase, not only how to answer them.
That is a selectivity objective, and it is a different reason to buy from the throughput one.
Bring a past tender → — ideally one you decided not to chase. Those are usually more revealing than the ones you won.
Start with one conversation
Bring a live bid, or a tender you have already submitted. Thirty minutes, no preparation needed.