Free tool

Bid or no bid?

A serious tender response costs a small business 20 to 80 hours of senior time. Bidding for the wrong contracts is the most expensive habit in public sector sales — and the cheapest one to fix. Score the opportunity before you commit anything.

Pre-filled with a worked example — grounds maintenance, 3 years. Score your own opportunity over the top.

0 / 105

No bid

Score the ten questions below.

Automatic no-bid overrides

Any one of these means don't bid, whatever the score says.

We cannot meet a condition of participation — not "probably could by then". If a buyer requires an accreditation or insurance level at submission and you don't have it, your bid is rejected before anyone reads a word of it.

The price we'd need to win is a price we'd regret. Public contracts are long and hard to renegotiate, and since the Procurement Act 2023 poor performance can be published.

We found this with under a week to go and have never met the buyer. Late-discovered tenders are almost always won by someone who has been talking to them for months.

What to do with a no

Write to the buyer, tell them you're not bidding this time and why, and ask to be told about the next opportunity. Buyers notice suppliers who decline professionally, and pipeline notices exist precisely so you can see the next one coming. A supplier that bids for half as many contracts and wins one in three has doubled its revenue and halved its cost.

The toolkit

The rest of the method

This scorecard is one page out of the toolkit it came from. Published UK rates for a bid consultant's first session run from £950 for a review to £15,000 for a full bid sprint.

The scoring decoder — how evaluators apply the 0–5 scale, and the five things that move a 2 to a 4
Eighteen response frameworks — the questions that recur in nearly every tender
The Social Value Answer Framework — all eight PPN 002 outcomes
Twelve editable policy templates and a six-sheet bid workbook

See what's inside — £99