A fit score is only useful if you can argue with it.
Matching compares an opportunity against what your company can actually prove — capabilities, past performance, the vehicles you hold, your eligibility and your capacity — and shows the comparison line by line. The number is a summary of the argument, not a substitute for it.
- Produces
- A score out of 100, with six named parts
- Compares against
- Your capability profile, per company
- Shows
- What was asked, what you can prove, what it cost
Nobody trusts a relevance score, and they are right not to.
Every product in this category puts a number on an opportunity. Almost none of them will say what the number is made of, which leaves a bid team with a choice between believing it and ignoring it. Most experienced teams ignore it, and go back to reading titles.
The problem is not that scoring is hard. It is that fit is genuinely multi-dimensional: an opportunity can be a perfect technical match and impossible to bid because a certification lapses mid-performance, or an unexciting fit that you win because you hold the vehicle and nobody else in the region does. A single number flattens all of that, and the part it flattens is the part somebody has to make a decision about.
The second problem is whose fit. An organization with two practices is two different bidders, and one opportunity is a strong match for one and noise for the other. A single company-wide score is wrong for both of them.
- A score nobody readsAn unexplained number gets ignored within a week, and the feed goes back to being sorted by date.
- Good opportunities buriedA strong fit ranked low by one hidden factor is invisible, and nobody knows to look for it.
- Wasted qualificationTime spent qualifying an opportunity that a visible gap would have ruled out in ten seconds.
From a capability profile to a ranked queue that explains itself.
The profile is the input people underestimate: matching is only as good as what your company has actually written down about itself.
Describe the company once
Services, differentiators, certifications, vehicles held, set-aside status, geography and delivery capacity.
A capability profile that is a real record, editable and versioned, rather than a keyword list.
Read what the opportunity asks for
Scope, mandatory requirements, evaluation criteria, eligibility and vehicle rules are taken from the solicitation itself.
A structured list of demands to compare against, with each one citing where it was found.
Compare, factor by factor
Six factors are scored independently — capability overlap, past performance, contract vehicle, eligibility, geography and capacity.
Six contributions, each with the points it earned, the points it was worth and the reason.
Rank against your threshold
The total is compared with the threshold you set for that profile; nothing is discarded, low scores simply sort lower.
A queue in the order a person should read it, with alerts on the ones that clear the line.
Show what would move it
The same model run backwards: which single change would recover the most points, and how many.
A shortlist of actions — a partner, a registration, a certification — with the points each is worth.
What was asked, what this company can prove, and what the gap cost.
One opportunity, scored 74 of 100. The bar is the six contributions; the ledger under it is the comparison in words; the last block is the arithmetic run backwards, showing which change would recover the most.
Bridge inspection and load rating services, three districts
74/ 100
Review, with a gap- Inspection programme run to the national bridge standardTwelve programmes across four states, each with the standard named in the award record.verdict: Proven
- Team lead holding a professional engineer licence in this stateLicensed leads in three states. Not this one, and reciprocity takes longer than the response window.verdict: Gap
- Unmanned aerial inspection for fracture-critical membersA named capability with two prior awards using it, one on a fracture-critical structure.verdict: Proven
- Emergency response on site within twenty-four hours, statewideTwo offices inside the state; the western third is a six-hour drive from the nearer one.verdict: Partial
- Award through the statewide term contract, or a direct bidThe term contract is not held. A direct bid is permitted and scores lower for it.verdict: Partial
Name a licensed lead engineer, or a partner who holds the licence+5
Capability overlap recovers most of what the personnel gap costs. It does not recover all of it, because the requirement names the lead rather than the firm.
Register on the statewide term contract before the response date+9
Contract vehicle is the largest single gap on this opportunity, and it is the only one that can be closed by paperwork rather than by hiring.
Add a western-region subcontractor for emergency response+3
Closes the geography exposure inside the scope requirement rather than the geography factor, which is already full.
These are the same six factors run in reverse, not a separate model. A recommendation that cannot be traced back to the score it is trying to move is a suggestion.
A score is per capability profile. An organization bidding through two practices scores the same opportunity twice, because the two answers are genuinely different.
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 the score is made of, and what it refuses to do.
Six factors, one threshold per profile, and no hidden weighting anybody has to take on trust.
Six named contributions
Capability overlap, past performance, contract vehicle, eligibility, geography and capacity. Each carries the points available and the points earned.
Reasons in words
Every contribution has a sentence explaining it — including the ones that cost points, which are the sentences people actually read.
Multiple capability profiles
A profile per practice, subsidiary or client, each with its own weighting and threshold, so one opportunity can be a strong match for one and irrelevant to another.
Thresholds you set
The line where an opportunity becomes an alert is yours. The product has no opinion about the right number, and nothing below the line is deleted.
What-if analysis
The same six factors run in reverse to show the change that would recover the most points, so a low score can be an action rather than a dead end.
Profiles that stay current
Certifications with expiry dates, vehicles with end dates and capacity that reflects live commitments — a profile that ages silently produces scores that are quietly wrong.
Where an explained score changes the decision.
Three situations in which the reasons matter more than the ranking.
A firm with two practice areas
- Cybersecurity and infrastructure work draw on different people, different past performance and different vehicles.
- Two capability profiles with their own weights and thresholds; every opportunity is scored against both.
- Each practice sees its own queue, and an opportunity that suits neither stops arriving in both.
A growing company deciding what to fix
- Loses points repeatedly on the same factor and has no evidence for which gap is worth closing first.
- The what-if analysis across a quarter of scored opportunities, aggregated by factor.
- The registration or partnership that would unlock the most pipeline is identified by arithmetic rather than by argument.
A bid team with more opportunities than capacity
- Forty matched opportunities a month and room to respond to six of them.
- A high threshold, contributions read in the queue, and capacity weighted so a busy month scores differently from a quiet one.
- The six chosen are the six with the best case, and the case is written down where the next reviewer can see it.
Matching is on every plan. Profiles and volume are what step.
Every plan scores what it discovers and shows the contributions behind the score. The ladder is about how many capability profiles you can keep and how many matches a month the plan covers.
- Starter includes matching with one company profile.
- Professional and Business raise the number of company profiles and the monthly match allowance.
- Agency makes company profiles unlimited under a fair-use ceiling, for a firm scoring on behalf of many clients.
- Thresholds, weights and what-if analysis are part of matching on every plan — they are not an upsell.
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 matching.
What exactly goes into the score?
Six factors: capability overlap against your profile, relevance of past performance, whether you hold a permitted contract vehicle, eligibility including set-aside status, geography against the delivery requirement, and current capacity. Each is scored out of its own maximum, the maxima total one hundred, and every one is displayed with the reason it scored what it scored.
Can we change the weighting?
Yes, per capability profile. A firm that wins on vehicles and one that wins on technical depth should not be using the same weights, and the profile is where that is expressed.
Does a low score mean we never see the opportunity?
No. Nothing is discarded — a low score sorts lower in the queue. The threshold decides what triggers an alert, not what exists.
Is our capability profile used to train anything?
No. Your profile, your past performance library and your documents serve your organization only, and are not training data for a shared model.
How does it know what our past performance is relevant to?
From your past performance library: what the work was, for whom, at what size, in which category, and when. Relevance is scored against those recorded facts rather than inferred from the name of a project, which is why keeping the library current is the highest-leverage thing a team does here.
Score last quarter’s pipeline and see whether you agree.
Describe your company once, run it against opportunities you have already decided about, and read the contributions on the ones where the score and your judgement disagree.