Bid / no-bid scorecard
Score an opportunity on fit, mandatories, competition, timing, and price to reach a decision you can defend, and a record of why you made it.
Score each factor from 0 (no chance) to 5 (as good as it gets).
How closely the scope matches work you have already delivered.
Whether you can evidence every pass-or-fail requirement today.
Whether you hold references at the scale and recency the buyer asks for.
Your standing against the likely field, including any incumbent.
Whether there is time to write a considered response, not a rushed one.
Whether you can price to win and still deliver at an acceptable margin.
What the win opens up beyond this contract: a buyer, a vehicle, a reference.
Recommendation
Qualify further before committing
Weighted score 60 out of 100
Worth pursuing only if the weak areas can be closed before the deadline, usually through a partner, a named resource, or a question that clarifies the requirement.
The weightings encode one reasonable view of what decides a bid. Adjust them to your own win history rather than treating the output as an answer. The value is in the conversation the scoring forces, and in the record it leaves.
Most teams lose more money on bids they should not have written than on bids they wrote badly. A scorecard will not make the decision for you, but it makes the reasoning explicit, gets a team to disagree about the right things, and leaves a record you can check against the outcome later.
Mandatories are not a factor, they are a gate
No weighting saves a bid that cannot clear a pass or fail.
A requirement you cannot evidence ends the bid before anything is scored. That is why a low mandatory score overrides the total here rather than being averaged into it. A team that talks itself past a missing certification, an unavailable clearance, or a past performance threshold it cannot meet is not making an optimistic decision, it is making a void one.
The productive response to a mandatory gap is a partner who fills it, not a paragraph explaining why it should not matter. Where neither is available, the decision is made.
Capture time is the factor teams discount
A late start is the most common reason a winnable bid is lost.
Opportunities found on the day the solicitation drops are structurally harder to win than ones that were tracked for months, because the competitors who were tracking it have already talked to the buyer, shaped their approach, and assembled their team. The document you are both reading is the same. The preparation is not.
Score this honestly. A strong fit with two weeks to write is often a worse bet than a moderate fit you have been positioning for since the forecast appeared.
Keep the record, then check it
The scorecard is worth more on the second pass.
Save the scores and the reasoning with the opportunity, then revisit them after the result. Over a year the pattern shows you which factors actually predicted your wins, and the weightings can be adjusted to your own history rather than to a general view of what should matter.
It also stops the same weak-fit opportunity being reopened every cycle. When a similar notice appears next year, the record of why it was passed is more useful than another round of the same discussion.
- Score before the team gets attached to the bid
- Record the reasoning, not just the number
- Revisit after the result
- Re-weight from your own win history
What a score should trigger
Three outcomes, not two.
A strong score means commit the proposal time and record the assumptions behind it. A weak score means pass and write down why. The middle band is the one worth taking seriously: it means the bid is winnable only if something specific changes, such as a teaming partner, a named resource, or an answer to a clarifying question.
Give that middle band an owner and a date. An opportunity that sits in it until the deadline forces a decision has effectively been decided by drift, which is the outcome the scorecard exists to prevent.
Stop tracking this by hand
Captivaq watches procurement sources against your capabilities and keeps the dates, documents, and decisions for each opportunity in one place.
Build a matching profileRelated resources
Evaluation score simulator
Test whether the competitive position is actually winnable.
Writing a winning bid
What the proposal effort involves once you commit to it.
Proposal compliance matrix
Turn the solicitation into a map of every requirement.
Past performance and CPARS
Whether your delivery record supports the bid.
Questions people ask
What should a bid / no-bid decision be based on?
Capability fit, whether every mandatory requirement can be evidenced, past performance at the right scale, the competitive field, the time remaining to prepare, price competitiveness, and what the win opens up beyond the contract itself.
What is a good bid / no-bid score?
Less important than consistency. Pick a threshold, apply it for a year, and compare the scores against your actual results. The weightings that predicted your wins are the ones to keep.
Should you ever bid a low-scoring opportunity?
Occasionally, and deliberately: to enter a target account, to learn how a buyer evaluates, or to support a partner. What matters is that it is a decision with a stated reason rather than an accident of not having decided.
How much does a proposal cost to write?
For a small team, a considered response to a substantial solicitation is commonly several hundred hours across capture, writing, pricing, and review. That is the number a no-bid decision is protecting.