Make go/no-go calls on RFPs that you can defend

A go/no-go decision on an RFP holds up when you make it three times, each time based on the evidence you have then: whether to pursue before the tender is out, whether to bid once you've read the pack, and whether to continue at a dated checkpoint. Read the contract terms before the go, not after it, and record a reason for every no-bid, because the win/loss review APMP places at contract close-out has no step for the bids you declined. In practice that gives six stages: a pursue decision, a bid decision on the pack, a reading of the terms, a case put to a named decider, a checkpoint that can still stop the bid, and a log you compare with outcomes.

Who decides and what to have ready

The bid manager or head of bids usually does the work, preparing go/no-go calls for several opportunities at once. The decision itself sits with whoever your governance gives the authority to commit the team's time and the business's risk. That may be you or a director above you. Either way, the decisions go faster and hold up better when the inputs exist before a pack arrives.

Have these ready:

• Pipeline notices and forward plans from the buyers you target.
• Past awards for those buyers: who won, on what scope, and when each contract ends.
• A capacity calendar showing which writers and subject matter experts are committed, and when.
• Contract red lines agreed in advance with legal and commercial, so you can judge a term against them rather than escalating it from scratch.
• A decision log with one row per decision, set up before you need the first entry.

The profession's code of practice doesn't set the method for you. PAS 360:2023, BSI's code of practice for bid and proposal management, covers good working practice, roles and responsibilities. It states that it isn't intended to recommend proprietary methodologies, processes, or techniques, so the gates, criteria, and scoring sheet are your team's design. Build them to fit how the rest of your bid management process already runs, so the go/no-go becomes the front door to it rather than a separate ritual.

Decide whether to pursue before the tender is out

Make the first call before the tender is published. At that point, capture effort can still change your chances, and a no costs nothing but a conversation. APMP's Winning Business Ecosystem places the bid/no-bid decision in the pre-bid, capture stage, under qualifying opportunities, ahead of any review of the RFP itself. It rests the decision on return on investment, win probability and risk.

The same framework puts opportunity identification before the decision: assess the competitive landscape and the client's history, identify incumbents, and analyse past awards. Gather those first. They are the evidence the pursue decision runs on, and most of it is either public or already in your own account history. A pursue decision commits capture effort, such as meetings, market engagement and early solution thinking. It doesn't commit the bid team to writing a response.

For UK central-government buyers, published pipelines help. The UK's Sourcing Playbook tells departments that pipelines let suppliers forecast the investment decisions they need to take ahead of demand. That is the pursue decision by another name, and a pipeline entry gives you a date to make it by.

Sometimes a tender arrives that nobody saw coming. You then have no pursue decision to build on, and the bid decision has to carry the whole weight. Log that as well.

Against the stages of a tender from the supplier's side, this decision sits before publication. The next one sits after it.

Make the bid decision once the pack is read

Make the full bid decision once you've read the pack, using four tests in a fixed order. The first can end the decision before the other three cost anyone time. These four are your RFP go/no-go criteria. Anything you add should earn its place in the record.

Fit to the pass/fail requirements

Check every pass/fail requirement before anything else. An accreditation you lack, a turnover threshold you miss or an insurance level you can't reach before the deadline ends the decision, and no score on the quality questions brings it back. Where a gap can be closed in time, name who closes it and by when. If nobody can, treat it as a fail.

The field you will face

Past awards tell you who you're likely to face. Country data tells you how thin fields tend to be. The European Commission's Single Market Scoreboard measures the share of contracts awarded with only one bid, excluding framework agreements and direct awards. It rates 10% or below as green and above 20% as red. In its 2024 figures, the EU average was 28% and the Netherlands 24%. The average is set by a typical mid-ranking country, not taken across all member states. Read the figure for your buyer's country as context, and rely on past awards for this buyer to tell you about this contract.

Cost to bid against chance of winning

Size the cost in named people's days, not as a general sense of effort. Before any response plan exists, list the writers, subject matter experts, reviewers and approvers the pack calls for, and estimate each person's days against the deadline. Then set that cost against a chance of winning you could defend to the decider from the evidence above: your fit, what you know of the buyer, and the field. A bid that would tie up most of your senior writers for a month needs a stronger case than one a single writer can carry.

Writers and experts free in the window

APMP places engaging proposal, capture and subject matter experts in the pre-bid stage, alongside the decision rather than after it. So confirm each expert's days before the go, with the expert and, where their time is contested, with their line manager. A go that only assumes an expert's time will fail at the first draft, and securing that time is far easier before you've committed than after.

Read the contract terms that turn a go into a no-go

Read the liability, deduction and pricing terms before the go, because any one of them can turn a winnable bid into a contract you shouldn't want to win. In UK central government, you have a benchmark to read them against. The Risk Allocation and Pricing Approaches guidance note, part of the Sourcing Playbook guidance that central departments are expected to follow, tells buyers how to allocate risk. It places no duty on you. It does show which terms in a central-government pack sit outside what buyers have been told to ask for. Those are the terms to query through a clarification question before you decide. Outside UK central government, the same three terms deserve the same reading, judged against the red lines your business agreed in advance.

Liability caps

The guidance says suppliers shouldn't be asked to take on unlimited liabilities, apart from a short agreed list of exceptions: supplier tax payments, supplier employee claims, third-party IP claims, TUPE transfer liabilities and ICO fines. In a central-government pack, an uncapped liability beyond that list is a point to query, not a norm to accept. If the answer leaves it uncapped and that breaches your red line, the decision is a no-go on a failed criterion.

Service credits and deductions

The same note says deductions, whether service credits or liquidated damages, should be capped at contract profit, not linked to revenue and free of ratchet mechanisms. Read how the pack calculates them. A regime tied to revenue, or one that steps up with repeated failures, can take more than the contract earns.

Firm or indexed pricing

Check who carries inflation. The note says escalation factors transfer all inflation risk to the supplier, while indexation places it on the buyer. On a multi-year contract, that difference belongs in your cost and margin case at the go, before it surfaces in year two.

Put the case to the decider and say no to sales on the evidence

Name the decider before the pack lands and give them a one-page case of criterion results. That way the decision rests on evidence, and a no-bid reaches sales as a failed test rather than an opinion. The case needs only a few elements: each criterion with its result, the cost in named people's days, the chance of winning and what it rests on, the terms read and any open queries, and your recommendation.

Naming the decider early matters because the decision has to bind. APMP includes gaining leadership buy-in in its bid/no-bid step, before formal pursuit begins. BSI describes the governance in PAS 360 as reducing the risk of winning a contract that is undeliverable in practice or needs more resources than were budgeted. A named decider and a written case are that governance at its smallest. They also protect you, since you answer for the quality of every response you sign off, including the ones the business pushed through.

When the answer is no, tell the sales lead which criterion failed and what evidence it failed on. That might be uncapped liability, an expert who isn't free, or a pass/fail requirement you can't meet. Then say what would reopen the decision, such as a clarification answer that caps the liability or an expert released by their manager. The conversation then becomes a short list of things sales can try to change, rather than a dispute about whether the bid team wants the work. If sales changes one of them, run the same case again and let the same decider decide.

In SEQUESTO: your team asks James, part of SEQUESTO aOS, for a bid or no-bid recommendation with its reasons, drawn from the tender pack and your organisation's own information. The bid manager owns the decision, and SEQUESTO keeps the reasoning on record for review.

Hold a checkpoint that can still stop the bid

Date a checkpoint in advance that can still stop the bid after the decision to go, so that stopping is a decision rather than a collapse. Place it after the clarification answers are back, and the first drafts exist. That is the first point at which you know materially more than you did at the go.

Stop the bid if any of these is true:

• Clarification answers have changed the scope beyond what you costed.
• An expert the bid depends on has been withdrawn, and nobody can replace them in time.
• A contract term you queried is still unacceptable after the buyer's answer.

Buyers expect this to happen. UK central-government guidance to its own buyers notes, in the same Risk Allocation note, that suppliers will not bid or will withdraw where the balance of risk and reward is too great. Stopping on a recorded trigger is a normal commercial decision. It is not a failure of nerve.

The same decider takes the checkpoint, on the same one-page case updated with what has changed. If the answer is stop, tell the buyer's named contact promptly. A checkpoint only works if the timeline leaves room for it. One squeezed between final review and submission can no longer stop anything.

In SEQUESTO: James reads your organisation's governance process alongside the tender and inserts the resource review gates it sets as milestones in the tender timeline, with time and a named reviewer allocated.

Record every decision, no-bids included, and compare outcomes

Log every decision at every gate, whether pursue, bid or checkpoint and whether go or no-go, with its criterion results, its decider and its reason. APMP files win/loss analysis under contract close-out: if you win, analyse success factors; if you aren't selected, review the feedback and identify gaps. It lists no equivalent step for no-bids. So the reason behind a no-bid is never tested against what happened unless you wrote it down when you decided.

Log these fields for each decision:

• Opportunity, buyer and country.
• Gate and date.
• The result for each criterion.
• Estimated cost in named people's days.
• The decider.
• The decision, with its reason in one sentence.
• What would have changed the decision.
• The outcome, filled in later: won, lost, or for a no-bid, who was awarded the contract.

Then review the log on a fixed cycle, set once and kept. Compare the criteria results across wins, losses and no-bids. A criterion that reads the same in wins and losses predicts nothing, so drop it or redefine it. For no-bids, the published award notice tells you who won the work you declined, and whether a competitor you'd expected was there at all.

BSI states that the purpose of standardising bid work is greater consistency, rigour, timeliness and quality, and in turn higher win rates. That is a stated purpose, not a measured result. Your own log is how you find out whether it holds for your team, and which of your criteria are doing the work.

Go/no-go checklist to copy

Use one tick per stage, copied into your tracker for each opportunity:

• The pursue decision and its reason are logged before the tender is published, or the log records that the tender arrived unannounced.
• Every pass/fail requirement is met, or has a named owner who closes the gap before the deadline.
• The writers and subject matter experts the bid needs are named and have confirmed their days in the window.
• The liability, deduction and pricing terms have been read, and each outlier has been queried or accepted by the person who owns that risk.
• The decider was named before the pack arrived, and the case they saw is filed.
• The checkpoint is dated after the clarification answers and first drafts are due.
• The criterion results, the decider and the reason are logged at every gate, no-bids included.

Start with the next opportunity in your pipeline. Log a pursue decision on it this week, and put the checkpoint in the plan before anyone starts writing.