Let me tell you a story about a bid/no bid process and how we repeatedly broke it.
Back in 2012, I was a proposal team of one, sitting in a meeting about adopting a new opportunity qualification process. I was a big fan. It brought structure to all sales stages, not just the bid/no bid review. We were all writing our ideas for opportunity assessment criteria on a whiteboard.
“The only qualification we actually use is this,” I said as I drew a large pound sign all over everyone else’s contributions. (US readers – that’s £ (UK Sterling) not #.)
Before this our system was…well, let’s say informal. Sales got overexcited, I waved red flags, and sometimes they listened. As systems go it was simple, fast, and stressfully unreliable. But it worked… sort of.
When hope is the strategy
But it broke for high value contracts. The more money, the more the risk didn’t seem to matter. Suddenly, decision makers would trot out phrases such as “you’ve got to be in it to win it” and “it will be a nice problem to have”. These are justifications of hope. They are not good reasons to commit resources to a pursuit.
That’s why I was happy to adopt a methodology (despite a mnemonic we couldn’t remember!) for systematic qualification of opportunities. But, as we crowd-sourced decision criteria, we’d missed two crucial factors:
Weighting contract value.
Accounting for the cost of pursuit.
Hence my badly drawn £. Our real qualification framework was Jerry Maguire’s “SHOW ME THE MONEY!” Our detailed opportunity assessment would always be overruled by hope, ambition, and FOMO.
Many qualification processes are broken
I know I’m not alone. Many organisations have no process or one that doesn’t work:
83% of teams have a go/no-go process1 but we’re responding to more RFPs.
30% of organisations don’t have an effective qualification process.2
64% say their qualification process is ineffective at helping them win.2
43% say “implementing processes to better qualify opportunities” is a top priority3, suggesting they’re not doing it well today.
Focus on winnable work
Bad bid decisions can be costly. Yes, we want to pursue big ticket contracts we can win but chasing the wrong opportunities wastes resources, dilutes effort, demoralises the bid team, and is a fast track to burning out people. It’s also expensive to invest in projects we’ll ultimately lose.
Remember: in bids, first is first and second is last. Trust your process and be the first to walk away from the wrong opportunity.
12025 RFP Response Trends & Benchmarks Report
2Active Qualification by Strategic Proposals
32025 State of Strategic Response Management Report
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