Public buyers score exactly what they said they would score.
A government solicitation tells you how it will be evaluated, in what order, and in which volume each answer belongs. Almost everything that goes wrong in this market goes wrong before the writing starts — a registration that lapsed, a vehicle you do not hold, an eligibility category you cannot certify — and all of it is knowable on the day the notice publishes.
- Instruments
- RFP, RFQ, RFI, BAA
- Buyers
- Federal agencies, states, counties, districts
- Decided by
- The published evaluation factors, in their published order
The instruments a public buyer uses, and what each one is really asking.
These are not interchangeable. A sources sought notice answered like a proposal wastes a week; a task order competition answered like a full solicitation misses the window entirely.
| Form | Opportunity type | What it is | When it appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| instrument: RFP | Full and open solicitation | A negotiated procurement open to anyone qualified, with technical and price evaluated against the factors printed in the notice. | Year-round, thickening as a fiscal year approaches its close |
| instrument: RFP | Set-aside solicitation | The same procurement, restricted to firms holding a socio-economic status the buyer has named. | Follows the same rhythm, filtered to the categories you are certified in |
| instrument: RFQ | Task order competition | A priced requirement issued only to holders of an existing contract vehicle, usually against a scope already negotiated. | Continuous, with reply windows counted in days rather than weeks |
| instrument: RFI | Sources sought notice | Market research: who could do this, under what code, and would a restricted competition still draw enough bidders. | Weeks or months ahead of a solicitation, when one follows at all |
| instrument: BAA | Broad agency announcement | A standing invitation to propose against research topics, evaluated on scientific merit rather than against competing bids. | Open for a stated period, with rolling or staged submission dates inside it |
Five categories of publication, and the tier everyone drops first.
Federal notices are the easy part: one place, one format, a feed anybody can read. The money below that line is spread across thousands of publishers who have no obligation to make themselves easy to watch.
Federal contract opportunity notices
The government-wide publication of solicitations, amendments and award notices, structured enough to be read mechanically.
Structured does not mean complete: the attachment package is often where the requirement actually lives, and it is not in the notice body.
State procurement systems
Each state runs its own registration, its own category taxonomy and its own definition of what counts as a small business.
Registration is per state and expires on its own clock, so an alert can arrive for a competition you are not currently eligible to enter.
Local and special-district portals
Counties, cities, school districts, transit and water authorities, each publishing on its own site or a regional aggregator.
This is the most fragmented tier and the least competed one, which is why a manual process drops it first and a competitor who watches it wins quietly.
Vehicle and ordering portals
Task order competitions issued inside a contract vehicle, visible only to the firms already holding it.
Nothing here appears in a public feed at all. If nobody on your team logs in, the opportunity does not exist as far as your pipeline is concerned.
Award and expiration registers
Public records of who won what, for how long, and when the current period of performance runs out.
This is history rather than an opportunity, and treating an expiring contract as a scheduled recompete is how a pipeline fills with work that never gets re-competed.
The disqualifiers, almost all of which are knowable on day one.
None of these are judgements about your technical approach. They are conditions of entry, and a team that checks them on the day the notice publishes stops spending capture hours on competitions it cannot legally win.
A registration that quietly expired
Entity registrations, state vendor accounts and certification listings all renew on separate schedules, and none of them warns the capture team when one lapses.
What the platform showsRegistration status sits in the company profile and is checked against each opportunity as it arrives, so a lapse shows up as a gate rather than as a rejection letter.
Eligibility asserted, not certified
A set-aside restricts the competition to firms holding a status the buyer names. Believing you qualify and being listed as qualifying are different things, and only the second one is checked.
What the platform showsThe set-aside on the notice is matched against the categories recorded in your profile, and the mismatch is stated plainly instead of being folded into a score.
No route to buy through
A requirement may be restricted to holders of a particular vehicle or statewide term contract. Without it there is no bid to make, however well you could deliver the work.
What the platform showsRequired vehicles are extracted from the instructions and compared against the ones your organization holds, before anybody opens the technical volume.
Past performance of the wrong shape
Buyers ask for recent work of comparable size, scope and complexity. Ten small awards do not answer a requirement written for one large one, and neither does relevant work done for the wrong kind of buyer.
What the platform showsReference records carry value band, agency type and period, so the gap between what is asked and what you can evidence is visible as a list rather than as a feeling.
The instructions read after the outline is set
Page limits, volume structure, font rules and submission mechanics are prescriptive, and a response that violates them can be set aside unread regardless of its content.
What the platform showsInstructions and evaluation criteria are extracted into a requirement list with page citations, so the outline is built from the solicitation instead of from the last one you wrote.
A saved search that returns competitions you can actually enter.
The instinct is to filter on keywords. Codes, eligibility and vehicle do far more work, because they encode the conditions of entry rather than the vocabulary a contracting officer happened to use.
- NAICS + PSC / commodity codes you are registered underCodes survive rewording. A requirement described three different ways in three jurisdictions still carries the same classification.
- Unrestricted + the categories your certifications supportIncluding unrestricted matters as much as including your own categories, since a restricted-only filter hides most of the market from a firm that can bid all of it.
- Open market + the vehicles your organization holdsAnything requiring a vehicle you do not hold is not a slow bid, it is not a bid, and it should not reach a person.
- Federal, state, county, municipal, special districtKept as separate values rather than one public-sector switch, so the tiers you are deliberately ignoring are a decision somebody made and can revisit.
- A floor below which you would not staff a pursuitA floor is honest about capacity in a way a priority flag is not, and it keeps the queue readable on a Monday.
- Minimum days remaining at the moment of alertA thirty-day competition found with four days left is a decision about whether to work a weekend, and it deserves to arrive marked as one.
- States and regions where you can staff on siteOn-site requirements are the constraint most often discovered after the go decision, and they are stated in the notice.
This filter set deliberately keeps sources sought notices out of the main queue. They are worth answering, but they are a marketing task on a different clock, and mixing them into the bid queue makes both look overdue.
What goes in the envelope, beyond the writing.
Public responses are graded partly on compliance, and compliance is administrative. The volumes below fail more often for a missing signature block than for a weak technical argument.
Volumes in the prescribed structure
The instructions state which volumes exist, what goes in each, and how long each may be. Structure is not a formatting preference here; it is a scored condition.
Compliance matrix
Every requirement in the solicitation, mapped to the section of the response that answers it and the page it lands on. Some buyers ask for it; the ones that do not still benefit you.
Representations and certifications
Standard forms, signed and current, covering everything from ownership to labour standards. They are boilerplate right up until one of them is out of date.
Past performance references
Named contracts with periods, values, a customer contact and a description written to the relevance test the buyer stated rather than to your own capability story.
Price volume in the buyer’s format
Pricing usually arrives as a worksheet with a fixed schema. Answering it in your own layout is a rejection risk with no upside.
Subcontracting plan, where thresholds apply
Larger awards can require a plan with goals by category. It is a document with its own review cycle and it does not compress well.
The parts of the platform that carry this market.
Discovery across tiers, a qualification gate that runs before capture spends anything, and a document reader that turns a solicitation into a checkable list.
RFP discovery
Find published solicitations across government, public and private sources.
One pipeline across federal, state, local and district publication, so the tier that gets dropped first is watched by a listener rather than by whoever has time.
Go/No-Go analysis
Qualification requirements checked, and the decision recorded.
Eligibility, vehicle and past-performance gates run as a recorded decision, which is also the artefact a debrief conversation needs six months later.
Document intelligence
Requirements and evaluation criteria extracted, with citations.
The instructions and evaluation criteria come out of the package as a requirement list with citations, which is how the compliance matrix stops being retyped.
Recompete predictions
Contracts approaching expiry, and how likely each is to be re-bid.
Expiring periods of performance and exercised option years, read as evidence about what is likely to be competed again rather than as a calendar of certainties.
One competition, from publication to submission.
The dates below are the shape of a typical thirty-day window. What matters is the order: everything that could disqualify the bid happens before anybody is asked to write.
- stage: Standing
Profile and listeners
Codes, certifications, vehicles held, reference contracts and staffing geography are recorded once, and listeners are pointed at each tier you intend to compete in.
A profile every incoming opportunity is scored against, and a set of sources that report their own last run.
- stage: Day 0
The notice arrives
The solicitation and its attachment package are pulled together, deduplicated against anything already held, and scored against the profile.
One record carrying the notice, the attachments and the reason it surfaced.
- stage: Day 1
Gates before capture
Eligibility, vehicle, place of performance and reference fit are checked, and the bid decision is recorded with its reasoning attached.
A decision somebody can be held to, and a No that costs an hour rather than a fortnight.
- stage: Days 2–4
The solicitation becomes a matrix
Instructions and evaluation criteria are extracted with page citations, and the response outline is generated from them rather than from a previous bid.
A compliance matrix and an outline whose sections map to scored criteria.
- stage: Days 5–25
Draft, review, approve
Sections are assigned and drafted against the extracted requirements, then moved through review and approval with comments kept beside the text.
An approved draft with a version history that shows who changed what.
- stage: Days 26–30
Package and submit
Volumes are exported in the prescribed structure with the forms, matrix and pricing worksheet attached, and the submission is logged against the record.
A submitted package, and an outcome slot waiting for the award notice that will teach the next bid something.
Where to go deeper on public procurement.
Federal RFPs
Solicitations from federal agencies.
The federal tier on its own, with the fields that only exist in that market normalized onto every record.
State RFPs
State agencies and public universities.
Fifty separate registration regimes and category taxonomies, gathered into one list you can filter the same way twice.
Compliance matrix
Turning a solicitation into a checkable requirement list.
The mechanics of turning a solicitation into a checkable requirement list, which is the artefact this market is graded against.
Bid/No-Bid guide
Deciding what not to bid, and writing down why.
The decision that costs the most when it is wrong, written as gates rather than as a feeling about win probability.
Start with the gates, not with the writing.
Load your codes, certifications and vehicles, point a listener at one tier you currently watch by hand, and see how many of the week’s notices you were never eligible to answer.