The cheapest proposal is the one you decided not to write.
Go/No-Go reads the qualification requirements out of the solicitation, checks them against what your organization can evidence, scores them the way your team weights them, and records the decision with the reasoning — including the decisions that came out No.
- Produces
- A recorded decision, with reasoning
- Checks
- Mandatory requirements against your evidence
- Threshold
- Yours, per company profile
Most bid decisions are made in a meeting and never written down.
A qualification decision is the most expensive judgement a bid team makes, and in most organizations it survives as a line in a spreadsheet and a memory of a conversation. Six months later, when the debrief arrives, nobody can reconstruct what was known at the time or which risk was accepted deliberately.
The decision is also made under pressure, from partial information: somebody skims a ninety-page solicitation for the mandatory items, somebody else half-remembers whether the certification is current, and the incumbent question is answered by whoever happens to know the account. The gates that would have settled it are all in the document, but reading them properly costs a day the window does not have.
And a culture that only records the pursuits it decided to run learns nothing from the ones it declined. The No-bids are where the pattern is — the requirement you keep failing, the buyer type you never qualify for, the certification worth acquiring.
- Six weeks spent on a bid you could not winA mandatory requirement nobody checked is not a lost bid, it is a submission that should never have been started.
- Reasoning that evaporatesWhen the outcome lands, the argument that produced the decision is gone, so nothing can be compared with anything.
- The same argument, every timeWithout a recorded threshold, every pursuit is re-litigated from first principles by whoever is loudest.
From a solicitation to a decision somebody signed.
Five steps, ending in a record rather than a verdict — the reasoning, the conditions and the alternative are the parts that are worth anything later.
Pull the gates out of the document
Mandatory requirements, certifications, eligibility rules, key personnel and submission mechanics are extracted with their citations.
A gate list taken from the solicitation rather than from memory, each item citing its page.
Check each gate against evidence
Certifications, references, vehicles, resource availability and the award register are checked, and a gate with nothing behind it is reported as not found.
A verdict per gate with the evidence that produced it, including the honest unknowns.
Weight the gates the way you weight them
Each gate carries the weight your organization gives it, and the total is compared with the bid threshold set for that profile.
A qualification score against a line that was agreed in advance rather than in the meeting.
Record the decision and the argument
Bid, no-bid or bid-with-conditions, the reasoning behind it, the conditions attached and who decided.
A decision stored against the opportunity, with an author and a date.
Re-open when the facts change
An amendment touching a gate re-opens the decision and notifies whoever made it.
A decision that stays connected to the document it was made about.
A decision that came out No, and what was recorded instead.
Six gates, weighted, scoring 51 against a threshold of 60. Two gates fail on things that cannot be fixed inside the window. The record carries the reasoning, the alternative the team chose, and what happens to the opportunity afterwards.
Enterprise resource planning replacement, five-year term
The threshold is yours, per company profile. This one is set where this team has learned it stops winning; the product does not have an opinion about the number.
- Mandatory experienceverdict: Fail
Three comparable municipal implementations required as prime. You can evidence one.
What was checked
Past performance library, filtered to municipal buyers and to implementations rather than support engagements: one award, 2023, a city a third of this size.
- Financial capacityverdict: Pass
Bonding and audited statements meet the stated thresholds with room to spare.
What was checked
Company profile — bonding capacity and the two most recent audited years on file.
- Mandatory certificationsverdict: Pass
Both required certifications are current through the period of performance.
What was checked
Certification register; expiry dates compared against the stated start date.
- Staffing the named rolesverdict: Partial
Four key roles must be named at submission. Two are available; one is committed elsewhere until the quarter after award.
What was checked
Resource plan across open pursuits and delivery commitments, as at the decision date.
- Incumbent positionverdict: Fail
The incumbent implemented the system being replaced and wrote the integration inventory the scope refers to.
What was checked
Award register, plus the scope document citing an inventory the incumbent authored.
- Schedule feasibilityverdict: Partial
Thirty-one days to submission. Comparable responses have taken this team longer.
What was checked
Elapsed time from kickoff to submission on the last six responses over this size.
Two gates fail on things that cannot be fixed inside thirty-one days: the prime experience requirement is written for a firm with three municipal implementations, and the incumbent authored the inventory the scope is built on. Bidding to lose here costs a technical volume and the two people who would otherwise be on the pursuit closing the same week.
Approach the two firms that meet the experience requirement and offer the integration scope as a subcontractor, which the solicitation permits without prior approval.
Add municipal implementations to the eighteen-month capture plan, because this requirement will be in the next one too.
- The opportunity stays in the pipeline with the decision attached — it is not deleted, and it is not silently hidden.
- An amendment to the experience requirement re-opens the decision and notifies whoever recorded it.
- The teaming path is recorded as its own pursuit, so the outcome lands against the decision that chose it.
The threshold is the organization’s own, set where this team has learned it stops winning. The product does not have an opinion about the number.
Nothing above is a live query or another customer’s pipeline. Every record in it was written for this page, and no buying organization named in it is real.
What turns a judgement call into a record.
The mechanics that make a qualification decision reviewable six months after everyone has forgotten it.
Gates extracted with citations
Every gate names the page of the solicitation it came from, so a disputed requirement is settled by opening the document rather than by arguing.
Unknowns reported as unknown
A check with nothing behind it is recorded as not found, never as a pass. Absence of a finding is not a finding.
Weights and a threshold you own
Gates are weighted per company profile and compared with a bid threshold you set in advance, which is what stops the line moving to fit the pursuit somebody wants.
Conditions as first-class content
Bid-with-conditions is the common answer, and each condition is stored as a commitment with an owner rather than as a caveat in a paragraph.
Alternatives recorded
Teaming, subcontracting or declining are recorded as the chosen path, so a No-bid can still be the start of something.
Decisions that answer to outcomes
Every decision keeps its reasoning, so when the award is published the argument can be read against what actually happened.
Where the decision is the whole game.
Three teams for whom qualification is the constraint, not drafting.
A team with more pipeline than people
- Can respond to a fraction of what it qualifies for, and every yes is a no somewhere else.
- A weighted gate list with capacity as a real factor, and a threshold agreed before the quarter starts.
- Pursuit choices are made against a rule the team set, rather than by whichever opportunity arrived most recently.
A firm that keeps losing to incumbents
- Bids displacement after displacement without a way to tell which ones are winnable.
- Incumbent position as a weighted gate, with the award history and option record attached to it.
- Displacement bids become a deliberate choice with a stated argument, instead of the default.
A regulated bidder
- Certifications, clearances and registrations expire, and a lapse discovered late is a disqualified submission.
- Certification gates checked against expiry dates relative to the period of performance, not to today.
- Eligibility problems surface during qualification rather than in a compliance review the week of submission.
Qualification is on every plan. Approvals are a Business feature.
Reading the gates, scoring them and recording the decision with its reasoning are part of every plan, because a product that let you record decisions only above a certain price would be selling the wrong thing. Formal approval workflow — gates that must be signed before a project can proceed — arrives with Business.
- Every plan includes gate extraction, weighting, thresholds and recorded decisions.
- Business and above add approval workflow, so a decision can require a signature before work continues.
- Business and above also add advanced permissions, for organizations where who may decide is itself a policy.
- Active response projects — what you can run at once after deciding yes — is the allowance that scales with each plan.
Plan names and allowances are mirrored from the billing catalog. Amounts are on the pricing page, which reads them from Stripe rather than from a number typed into a marketing page.
What people ask about Go/No-Go.
Does it make the decision for us?
No. It reads the gates, checks what can be checked, scores them against your own weights and threshold, and shows the result. A person records the decision, and the reasoning they type is the part with the long-term value.
Where do the gates come from?
From the solicitation package: mandatory requirements, certifications, eligibility rules, key personnel requirements and submission mechanics, each citing the page it was extracted from. Gates of your own — a minimum contract value, a buyer type you avoid — can be added to every qualification.
What happens to an opportunity we decline?
It stays in the pipeline with the decision attached. It is not deleted and not hidden, and if an amendment changes something a gate depended on, the decision re-opens and whoever made it is notified.
Can we require sign-off before a pursuit starts?
Approval workflow is a Business-plan feature: a decision can be made to require a named role’s approval before the response project proceeds. On lower plans the decision is recorded with its author, which is most of the value and none of the ceremony.
How does this help six months later?
Because the argument survives. When the award is published, the decision, its reasoning and its conditions are still attached to the opportunity, so a debrief can be read against what the team believed at the time — which is the only way a qualification process gets better.
Qualify one live solicitation properly.
Take an open opportunity, let the gates be pulled out of the document, and see whether the score and your instinct agree — then record the decision either way.