The routines
A bid/no-bid checklist you can run in ten minutes
Hard stops first, then a six-dimension score. A qualification routine that ends in a defensible decision and one line in a log.
In short
- Run eight pass-or-fail hard stops before you score anything. A failed hard stop ends the decision in about three minutes.
- Then score six dimensions: capability fit, evaluation-criteria fit, price competitiveness, delivery capacity, cost of bidding, and value beyond this contract.
- Article 67 of Directive 2014/24/EU requires EU buyers to publish the relative weighting of each award criterion unless the award is on price alone. It is the most informative field in a notice.
- The European Commission's evaluation of the procurement directives, published on 14 October 2025, put average bidder effort at 11 person-days per tender over 2019 to 2024, down from 16 over 2008 to 2010.
- Log the no-bids as well as the bids. A quarter of logged decisions tells you whether your threshold is wrong or your luck was.
A bid/no-bid decision takes ten minutes if you run it in the right order. Eight pass-or-fail checks first, because plenty of notices fail one and never need scoring. Then a weighted score across six dimensions, then one line in a log.
The expensive mistake in this job is not losing a bid. It is spending three weeks on a bid that a two-minute check would have killed on day one. That happens because qualification is usually not a decision at all. Someone opens the pack, forwards a question to the technical lead, and by the time anyone asks whether you should be doing this, a fortnight of sunk effort is in the room defending itself.
Run the hard stops before you score anything
Hard stops are pass or fail. They need no judgement and no estimate, and if one fails the decision is over.
| Check | The question that ends it |
|---|---|
| Route to market | Is this open, or a call-off from a framework we never joined? |
| Registration | Are we registered, active and validated on the buyer's platform today? |
| Certifications | Do we hold every named certificate, in our own entity, valid past contract start? |
| Insurance | Are our limits at the stated levels, or can the broker raise them in time? |
| Financial standing | Do we meet the turnover figure on the accounts the buyer will actually see? |
| Geography | Can we staff the place of performance, and is this reserved for a group we are not in? |
| Deadline | Can we submit something complete and compliant in the days left, including sign-off? |
| Exclusion grounds | Is anything on the exclusion list true of us, or of a subcontractor we would name? |
Two of these are where teams guess.
Exclusion grounds are published law, not buyer preference. Article 57 of Directive 2014/24/EU makes exclusion mandatory on conviction for six categories of offence, from participation in a criminal organisation and corruption through to child labour and human trafficking, and where a final and binding decision finds you in breach of tax or social security obligations. Absent a period set by the judgment, exclusion runs up to five years from conviction, and three years from the event for the discretionary grounds in Article 57(4). You declare it on the European Single Procurement Document, the form set by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/7, and in the UK on the equivalents in Schedule 6 of the Procurement Act 2023 and Schedule 7, alongside a published debarment list.
Registration is the check people skip because they assume it is done. FAR 52.204-7 requires an offeror to be registered in SAM.gov at offer and again at award, and UK suppliers keep their details on the Central Digital Platform behind Find a Tender for procurements started on or after 24 February 2025. A lapsed registration is a hard stop you find an hour before the deadline.
Watch out
Before you fail yourself on turnover, check the requirement against the rule. Article 58(3) of Directive 2014/24/EU caps the minimum yearly turnover a buyer may demand at twice the estimated contract value, except in duly justified cases it must give reasons for. Anything above that is a clarification question, not a reason to walk away. Section 22 of the Procurement Act 2023 sets a comparable proportionality test.
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How to find out whether there is an incumbent
Almost every re-tender has one and the notice rarely says so. Start with the award notice from the previous round: search the buyer's name and the relevant CPV or NAICS code on TED for EU contracts, or on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder for UK ones. It names the winner and the value, and usually the contract dates, which also tells you whether this re-tender has arrived early. Getting more out of those notices is covered in the guide to competitor intelligence from published awards.
Where no award notice exists, try the buyer's contract register. A freedom of information request works but belongs to pipeline research, since section 10 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives a UK authority until the twentieth working day to answer. Do that months ahead instead, using the expiring contract method.
Then read for vulnerability, honestly, because this is where wishful thinking lives. The incumbent looks safe when the specification reads like their existing service and the response window sits at the legal minimum. They look exposed when the scope has been split into lots, the requirement has been visibly rewritten, the buyer held an open market engagement event, or the background section describes problems in the current service in more detail than a contented buyer would bother with. In US federal work, what CPARS records about past performance forms part of the evaluation.
An incumbent should cut your estimate of winning, not your willingness to bid. Mark down price competitiveness and evaluation-criteria fit in the rubric below, because incumbents price with knowledge you do not have and evaluators score against a service they already know. Bidding to get in front of a buyer you want is legitimate once, not for the third year running.
What the award criteria weighting tells you
Article 67(5) of Directive 2014/24/EU requires the buyer to state the relative weighting of every award criterion in the procurement documents, unless the award is made on price alone. In the UK, section 19 of the Procurement Act 2023 defines the most advantageous tender, and the buyer must publish its assessment methodology and the relative importance of each criterion.
Price at 60% or more means the contract is decided on price and quality sits close to a qualifying hurdle. Find the price scoring formula before you go further. A common one gives full marks to the lowest compliant price and scales the rest pro rata, so your score is the lowest price divided by yours, times the price weight. With price at 60 and quality at 40, being 10% dearer than the cheapest bidder costs about 5.5 points, and recovering that on a 40-point quality scale takes roughly 14 more quality percentage points than they score. Ask whether you have ever managed that against a serious competitor.
Quality at 60% or more means the written submission decides it, which is good for capability and bad for your bid budget. Check for a minimum score threshold on a single criterion, which turns that criterion into a gate you can fail while scoring well overall, and for the separate social value weighting used in UK tenders.
The scoring rubric
Score each dimension from 1 to 5, multiply by the weight, add up, then divide by five for a total out of 100.
| Dimension | Weight | Score 1 | Score 3 | Score 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability fit | 25 | We would subcontract the core scope | Most of it, not all | This exact scope, more than once |
| Evaluation-criteria fit | 20 | Criteria reward what we cannot evidence | One criterion is a real problem | Every criterion maps to evidence we hold |
| Price competitiveness | 20 | We would be dearest and we know it | Mid-market, no advantage | Our cost base beats the likely field |
| Delivery capacity | 15 | We would hire before we could start | Tight, needs one new hire | Team free on the start date |
| Cost of bidding | 10 | Over 15 person-days, four departments | 5 to 15 person-days | Under 5 days, mostly reused material |
| Strategic value | 10 | Nothing beyond this contract | A reference we could use | Opens a buyer or framework we want |
Capability fit and evaluation-criteria fit are separate lines because they are different questions. One asks whether you can do the work. The other asks whether the way this buyer measures bidders happens to favour you, and a firm that is genuinely best at the work still loses a tender that puts 30% on a criterion it cannot evidence.
Start with a bid threshold of 60, treat 45 to 60 as needing a named sponsor who owns the bid, and no-bid below 45. Those numbers are a starting point rather than a finding, and the quarterly review is how you correct them. One override: a score of 1 on capability fit or on delivery capacity is a no-bid whatever the total.
Work out what the bid will actually cost
Bid cost is the dimension people estimate worst, because they count the bid writer's time and stop. Count everyone the submission pulls in: a technical lead for method statements, an estimator for pricing, finance for accounts and turnover evidence, HR for CVs and training records, a quality or safety manager for certificates and accident statistics, legal for the terms, a director for sign-off. Then add the cost you cannot buy, which is asking a customer to act as a reference again.
Two published numbers give you an anchor. The European Commission's evaluation of the procurement directives, published in October 2025, found that average effort per tender for economic operators fell from 16 person-days over 2008 to 2010 to 11 person-days over 2019 to 2024. A UK construction survey of 179 respondents, run by MarketingWorks with the Constructing Excellence procurement theme group, put average bid cost at 0.57% of project value, which in 2014 came to roughly £60,000 for contractors and £24,000 for consultants.
Convert your own estimate into person-hours by role, apply a loaded rate, and set it next to the first year's expected margin. You are looking for the bids that cost a double-digit percentage of the margin they chase, because those need a strategic reason that survives being said out loud.
Making the call and recording it
From notice to decision in ten minutes
One person owns the call. Consultation is fine, consensus is not, because a decision everyone agreed to is a decision nobody will admit was wrong in three months.
Then write the log entry, which takes a minute: date, notice reference and portal, buyer, value, deadline, decision, weighted score, the hard stop that failed if one did, who decided, one sentence of reasoning, and a blank outcome field you fill in later from the award notice whether you bid or not.
That log is what makes next quarter faster. When the same buyer republishes you already have the read on file, and when a director asks why you never bid for something a competitor has just announced, you produce a dated line instead of a memory. It is also the only evidence you will ever have for whether 60 is the right threshold. The glossary entry on bid/no-bid frameworks covers the vocabulary if you have to explain it outside the bid team.
How to say no well
Internally, close the loop the same day with whoever spotted the tender, in one line, quoting the reason straight from the log. People stop forwarding opportunities when their finds vanish into silence, which is why the morning portal round works better when declines come back with reasons attached.
Externally it depends what you have already done. For an open procedure you never entered, there is nothing to decline. If you expressed interest on the portal, or were invited to tender or into a mini-competition under a framework agreement, decline explicitly and briefly, because a supplier who goes quiet gradually stops being invited. Keep the reason neutral and true, then ask the question worth asking: when is this requirement next due to market.
Reviewing your decisions each quarter
Run this next to your coverage audit, since both need the same award-notice data. You are looking for two error types.
The bids you should not have made. Count the ones that scored below your threshold and went ahead anyway, because a threshold everyone overrides is decoration. Then split your losses into the ones lost on execution and the ones lost on something visible in the notice before you started, such as a criteria mismatch or a price weighting you could never have won under. That second group is a qualification failure, fixed by changing the rubric rather than by writing better.
The no-bids you should not have made. This one leaves no scar tissue, which is why it needs a scheduled slot. Pull the award notices for contracts you declined, and where the winner resembles you in size and specialism and the value sat inside your range, either your bar is too high or one dimension is over-weighted. Watch for declines clustered in a single month, which is a resourcing problem wearing a qualification costume. The post-mortem routine for a missed tender works unchanged on a deliberate no-bid.
Common questions
How long should a bid/no-bid decision take?
Ten minutes for a single notice: about three on the pass-or-fail checks, two on the award criteria weighting and the incumbent, five on scoring. Anything longer is usually not a decision but the start of the bid. If a notice genuinely needs more, book a follow-up with a named owner rather than drifting into writing.
Should you tell the buyer you have decided not to bid?
Yes if you expressed interest on the portal or were invited to tender. No if you never entered an open procedure. Most e-procurement portals have a decline function with a short reason list that takes under a minute, and the same message is a natural place to ask when the requirement is next due to market.
Does the presence of an incumbent mean you should not bid?
No, but it should lower your estimate of winning rather than your enthusiasm. Look for evidence that the incumbent is exposed, such as scope split into lots, a visibly rewritten specification, an open market engagement event, or a re-tender that arrived well before the current contract was due to end. Where none of that is present, only bid if the strategic value is real and someone has said so out loud.
What does a high price weighting mean for a bid decision?
A price weighting at or above 60% means the contract will be decided on price, so the question becomes whether you can be near the lowest compliant price without losing money. Under the common formula that gives full marks to the lowest price and scales the rest pro rata, being 10% dearer than the cheapest bidder costs about 5.5 points when price carries 60, which takes roughly 14 extra quality percentage points to recover. With no credible route to being cheap, decline early.