RFP bid no bid decisions made easy [2025 playbook]

Smart bid decisions are vital for proposal professionals. However, a heavy proposal team workload and volume can be stressful. Teams often feel pressured to chase every chance that comes their way, which wastes resources and leads to fewer wins.

You can boost your win rates right away by making smarter bid choices. The quickest path to better results isn’t picking deals you might win - it’s letting go of the ones you’ll likely lose. Your RFP evaluation should look at key aspects like profitability, capability, past performance, and potential risks before you put in the work. This is where strategic bidding, opportunity assessment, and competitive analysis come into play.

This piece lays out a step-by-step way to analyze bid/no-bid factors and bid selection criteria. You’ll learn to build a decision framework that matches your organization’s strengths and long-term strategy. The structured process we share will cut down your stress and give your proposal outcomes a substantial boost.

Understanding the bid/no-bid process

The bid/no-bid process acts as a gatekeeper between your resources and potential chances. Smart companies don’t chase every issue for a bid that lands on their desk. They use a well-laid-out decision matrix to pick the right opportunities when bidding for projects.

What is a bid/no-bid decision?

A bid/no-bid decision (some call it a go/no-go analysis) represents a logical process companies use to decide whether they should submit an RFP response or a no-bid letter when they receive an RFP or invitation for bids. This crucial checkpoint weighs possible benefits against bid preparation costs and delivery risks.

Companies often rely on gut feelings for these decisions. This approach leads them to chase unsuitable projects. Research shows that pursuing mismatched RFPs results in wasted resources, lower win rates. The proposal management teams end up stressed unnecessarily.

The decision process looks at both internal elements (available resources, expertise, current workload) and external factors (market conditions, competition, client relationships). This helps assess if an opportunity matches strategic goals and client alignment.

The role of RFP go or no-go analysis

RFP go or no-go analysis, also referred to as bid decision making, offers a complete framework to assess if opportunities are viable. This practical approach looks at several key elements:

• Opportunity alignment with your business strategy and goals
• Resource capacity to deliver the project effectively
• Competitive landscape and your position within it (this is where competitive analysis matters)
• Risk assessment including financial, operational, and strategic factors

Businesses use various decision tools, from simple checklists to detailed bid matrix scoring models. These tools help calculate subjective assessments objectively. This ensures consistent decisions across different opportunities.

Benefits of a bid or no-bid decision

A formal bid/no-bid process brings many advantages to your organization. Your focus efforts should be on winnable opportunities to improve win rates. Better bidding strategy leads to an immediate improvement in win rate. This also cuts down your yearly proposal timeline and development costs.

On top of that, a structured process:

• Optimizes resource allocation toward promising opportunities
• Reduces proposal management team burnout by cutting out work on low-potential RFPs
• Boosts strategic alignment by matching pursued opportunities with business goals
• Provides evidence-based insights to improve future decisions

The bid/no-bid process serves as a vital filter. It turns random bidding for projects into a calculated effort that focuses on opportunities worth the competitive challenge.

Step-by-step RFP evaluation process

Your organization’s win rate will improve substantially with a well-planned RFP evaluation approach that saves resources. Your team needs a well-laid-out process to spot the most promising chances worth going after.

Original opportunity qualification

The arrival of an RFP should trigger a full picture to see how it lines up with your capabilities and goals. You should gather and review all RFP documentation to understand the scope, project requirements, and evaluation criteria. A bid-no-bid checklist helps address basic questions: Do you meet mandatory requirements? Can you deliver results? Does this chance match your long-term strategy?

Rate each opportunity against set bid criteria on a simple scale (1-5) based on factors like fit, financial health, and market position. The core team—proposal managers, technical experts, and business development leaders—should come together to refine this assessment through shared review.

Pre-bid research and intelligence gathering

Winning bids start with detailed pre-bid activities that build a strong foundation. You should set up automated alerts from tender portals to track upcoming contracts and create systems to monitor renewal dates of target customers and competitors. You can make use of market research tools to gather practical intelligence about bidding for projects, contract awards, and pricing strategies.

Meeting potential customers before tender release helps understand their needs and challenges better. Your team should document all customer interactions, including decision-maker priorities, pain points, goals, budget limits, and technical project requirements.

Using a bid or no-bid checklist template

A true/false checklist works better than complex scoring systems to evaluate opportunities. Your bid no bid checklist should include:

• Relationship strength with decision-makers
• Technical requirements alignment
• Resource availability
• Financial viability and profitability
• Competitive positioning

The best results come from limiting your checklist to 20 statements maximum, where “true” represents the ideal answer. A strong position to bid exists when more than 80% of statements are true. This method forces objective decisions about qualification requirements, you either have a good relationship with the decision-maker or you don’t; you can either agree to legal terms or you can’t.

Building your own bid/no-bid tool

A custom bid/no-bid tool enables organizations to make analytical decisions rather than rely on gut feelings that often lead to pursuing unsuitable opportunities. So you’ll establish a consistent capability assessment framework to improve your win rate over time.

Factors for choosing projects

The best bid/no-bid tools use bid selection criteria that match your organization’s needs and industry context. Research shows construction contractors look at factors like job start time, capital requirements, and qualified human resource availability as key decision points. Your criteria should include:

• Organizational capabilities and resources
• Customer relationship strength
• Project-specific characteristics
• Market conditions
• Financial viability and profitability analysis

This is not a fixed set of factors, they change based on industries and market conditions. Complex bids in international markets or high-risk sectors need a multistage evaluation sequence rather than a single decision step.

Organizing internal vs external factors

Your organizational capabilities and resources fall under internal factors, while market and project conditions are external factors. Studies show both categories substantially affect bidding strategy. The criteria work best when categorized into clear groups such as:

• Internal: Financial capacity, technical expertise, resource availability
• External: Competitive landscape, client payment history, contract terms

Creating a scoring system or matrix

A well-designed scoring system turns subjective evaluations into objective measurements. 

Options include:

• True/false checklists for simple qualification requirements
• Weighted scoring structures (1-5 scale) based on criteria importance
• Pass/fail screening against compliance requirements

Most organizations use a minimum threshold score of 80% positive responses to make a “bid” decision. Many use go/no go decision matrix excel formats to simplify the process and base their bidding strategy on past historical bid data.

Examples of bid/no-bid decision tools

Real-world bid/no-bid tools include:

• AI-powered evaluation systems like SiftHub that offer a detailed breakdown of your organization’s viability for a specific RFP. It takes into account factors such as how do your product’s capabilities align with the project requirements and then gives you a score which makes arriving at a bid no-bid decision easier. 
• Decision trees with binary yes/no questions and disqualifying criteria
• Weighted matrices where factors get importance scores from 0-10
• Multi-tiered evaluation sheets that look at both your point of view and competitors’ positions

Some tools have specialized sections for different categories with detailed scoring descriptions. These well-laid-out approaches eliminate subjectivity from bidding for projects and guide teams on how to bid a project effectively.

Who should make the final decision?

Good bid/no-bid decisions need input from stakeholders all across your organization. Tools and frameworks add structure, but people who take part end up determining which opportunities to chase.

Working with sales, delivery, and legal teams

Teams working together really help evaluate opportunities and cut down bias in the bid/no-bid process. Each team adds its own expertise to make better decisions:

• Sales representatives share client insights and competitive analysis that help predict partnership success
• Delivery teams give a realistic picture of capabilities and available resources
• Business development does background research and reviews the company's capabilities
• Subject matter experts spot potential risks and solution complications
• Legal personnel check contractual conditions and possible liabilities, helping clarify no-bid contract meaning or no-bid meaning when applicable

This shared approach creates a detailed evaluation and helps make smart choices that boost your organization’s success. As one expert notes, “When all is said and done, teaming results in a better product.”

Getting executive review

Simple opportunities might only need standard reviews, but complex bids need higher management attention. You should get executives involved for:

• Strategic clients or markets
• Projects with major revenue potential
• Opportunities that carry unusual risks
• Bids that need substantial resources

These high-stakes decisions need gate reviews with Board-level decision-making. Risk assessment becomes crucial here to make sure senior leaders understand what’s at stake before they commit.

Learning from past decisions

Point-in-time decisions matter, but you should also document your historical bid data well. Note down not just what you decided, but why you made those choices. This builds a great database that helps you improve continuously.

Looking at your decisions next to win/loss data and project results shows patterns that make future bid/no-bid analysis better. Learning from this data helps teams avoid old mistakes and stick to what works.

Schedule debriefs after each project to capture lessons and keep everyone accountable. Change your approach based on team expertise and project complexity to delegate tasks better in your bid preparation process.

Include a no-bid response example and templates like a letter declining to bid on a project to streamline documentation and reinforce your strategic bidding decisions.

Simplify the bid/no-bid decision with AI

Manually evaluating the bid no bid process can be exhausting. Evaluating if your solution fits the prospect’s needs while also comparing how you are better than your competitors takes a large chunk of your time. 

Imagine if AI could do this for you? SiftHub’s AI Teammate helps you get a first-level opinion on whether you should proceed with an RFP or not. It evaluates a given RFP on different criteria, like whether your product aligns with the prospect's requirements, your organization’s previous projects, commercials, competitor landscape, and more. 

It scores each category on a scale of 5 and provides you with a weighted score that tells you where you stand and whether or not you should proceed with your bid. It also creates a risk/challenge matrix so you can align your RFP management process to it. 

Sounds too good to be true? See it in action for yourself today. Book a demo.