The instinct to bid for everything is understandable, and it quietly damages most suppliers. Every weak bid consumes time you could spend strengthening a winnable one, and a low win rate hurts morale and your track record. A quick, honest bid/no-bid decision is one of the highest-leverage habits a bid team can build.
Start with the mandatory gates
Some requirements are pass/fail: minimum turnover, specific accreditations, insurance levels, mandatory certifications or a registration deadline. If you can't meet one, it's an automatic no-bid, no matter how attractive the contract. Check these first so you never sink effort into a bid you can't legally win.
Then score the fit
- Strategic fit: is this the kind of work you want more of?
- Capability: can you genuinely deliver the requirement, with evidence to prove it?
- Competitiveness: do you have a credible edge on price or quality versus likely bidders?
- Capacity: do you have the people to both write a strong bid and deliver if you win?
Make it a number
Weight those factors and score each opportunity, then set a threshold below which you don't bid. The discipline matters more than the exact maths: a consistent, honest score stops the loudest opportunity in the room from crowding out the best one. Our free bid/no-bid tool does exactly this, with a mandatory-requirement gate built in.
FastTender goes further, scoring every incoming tender against your company automatically with a pursue, watch or pass recommendation, so the decision starts before you even open the documents.
Frequently asked questions
What is a bid/no-bid decision?+
It's the structured choice of whether to pursue a tender, made by weighing how well it fits your business against the effort and the odds of winning, before you commit bid resource.
Why say no to a tender?+
Because bid effort is finite. Declining poorly-fitting tenders protects your win rate and frees your team to write stronger responses for the opportunities you can genuinely win.