Sales bid qualification

Bid Qualification

Decides whether this opportunity is worth a proposal, and records why.

Bid selectivity is one of the few levers with a measured effect on win rate: firms that qualify before proposing win around 56% of what they bid, against roughly 45% for firms that bid on everything. Saying no is a performance improvement, not lost revenue.

Read First

1. The brief: workspace/sales/opportunities/{opportunity}/!_discovery.md.
2. workspace/firm/services/{service}.md — fit and anti-fit criteria.
3. workspace/marketing/icp/{icp}.md — anti_fit_criteria.
4. Recent outcome.md files in workspace/sales/opportunities/*/ — what the firm has actually been losing, and to whom.

When to Use

• A discovery brief exists and someone wants a proposal.
• An RFP arrived and the firm must decide whether to answer.
• More requests are open than the firm can serve well.
• Before sales-proposal — the Proposal Gate requires a decision here.

Core Rules

1. Decide against written criteria in the service and ICP files, not against how much the team wants the work.
2. A thin brief is not a bid decision. If brief_quality: thin, return pending with the questions that would resolve it. Do not qualify on guesswork.
3. Every decision carries a reason that names the criteria that drove it.
4. no_bid is a successful outcome of this skill. If the firm has never recorded a no_bid, the qualification step is decorative — say so.
5. Do not soften an anti-fit signal because the deal is large. Large bad-fit engagements are the expensive kind.

Decision

Write into !_discovery.md frontmatter:

bid_decision	Meaning
bid	Propose. Fit is clear and the process is understood well enough.
conditional	Propose only after a named condition is met. State the condition.
no_bid	Decline, with a reason recorded.
pending	Not decidable yet — brief too thin.

Also set qualified: {date} and, for conditional, bid_condition: {one line}.

Then append the reasoning to the brief body under ## Qualification:

## Qualification

Decision: `conditional`
Condition: Economic buyer joins the next call before we invest proposal time.

Fit met: mid-market manufacturer, platform migration is our core service,
champion has budget authority for pilots.
Anti-fit triggered: no economic buyer contact yet (ICP anti-fit: "buying process
runs entirely through a technical champion").
Reasoning: The work is a good fit and the champion is credible, but every deal we
lost this year had the same gap. The condition is cheap to test and cuts the risk.

Scoring

Score five dimensions. Keep it qualitative — a numeric score implies precision this data does not have.

Dimension	Strong	Weak
Problem fit	Maps to a service the firm sells and has done before	Adjacent, or would need new capability
Buyer access	Economic buyer reachable or already met	Champion only, no path upward
Budget reality	Stated, or a range hinted credibly	unknown with no way to test it
Timeline reality	Dated, with a consequence for slipping	No timeline, or "as soon as possible"
Capacity	Firm can staff it in the window	Would need to displace committed work

Then apply the overrides below, which beat any amount of enthusiasm on the five dimensions.

Hard No-Bid Signals

Recommend no_bid when any of these holds, and state which one:

• An explicit anti-fit criterion in the service or ICP file is triggered and cannot be worked around.
• The firm cannot staff the work in the stated window without breaking a commitment to an existing client.
• Price is the only stated evaluation criterion and the firm does not compete on price.
• The buyer wants free scoping work — a detailed plan with no engagement.
• An incumbent vendor is in place, the buyer will not say why they are looking, and there is no access beyond the champion. This is often a compliance bid used to justify a renewal already decided.
• The RFP arrived late, the deadline does not allow real work, and the firm has no prior relationship.
• Compliance, legal, or reputational conflict.

The last three are cheap to miss and expensive to discover after the work is done. A firm answering 10 to 20 percent fewer RFPs, chosen deliberately, usually wins more of them.

Workflow

1. Read the brief and the criteria files.
2. If brief_quality: thin, stop, set pending, return the questions.
3. Score the five dimensions from recorded facts. An unknown in the brief is a weak score, never a neutral one.
4. Check the hard no-bid signals.
5. Decide, and write bid_decision, qualified, and the ## Qualification section. For conditional, state the condition as a testable event.
6. Set the next action: proposal, the condition to close, or the decline message.
7. On no_bid, offer to draft a short, respectful decline. A clean no protects the referral channel, which produces far more work than outbound does.

Feeding The Loop

When a no_bid reason repeats — the same anti-fit pattern three times — add it to the ICP's anti_fit_criteria so the next qualification is faster and the pattern is captured where content and prospecting skills also read it.

If the firm is measuring with workspace/pdca/, proposals declined for poor fit is a higher_is_better leading metric. It is not a failure count.

Testing Requirements

1. Qualify a thin brief; confirm pending and returned questions.
2. Qualify a brief that triggers a documented anti-fit criterion; confirm no_bid with the criterion named.
3. Qualify a good-fit brief with no economic buyer contact; confirm conditional with a testable condition.
4. Confirm sales-proposal refuses to run while bid_decision is pending or no_bid.

Related Skills

Skill	When
sales-discovery-brief	Produces the brief this skill scores
sales-proposal	After bid or conditional
sales-outcome-log	Records the result, including a declined bid
marketing-icp	Update anti_fit_criteria when a no-bid reason repeats