Why qualification slips
Qualification is skipped for a reason that feels rational at the time: the deadline is close, the client is known, and reviewing properly costs half a day the team does not have. The cost lands later, as eighty to three hundred staff hours spent on a submission that never scored. A short structured pass is affordable precisely because it is short.
The cheapest proposal is the one you correctly decided not to write.
Six questions, in this order
Stop at the first firm no. The order is deliberate — eligibility is cheap to check and disqualifies fastest.
- Are we eligible at all — registration, turnover, certifications, local presence?
- Can we meet every mandatory requirement, or is one of them a hard stop?
- Do we have three references the committee would accept, not three we like?
- Who is the incumbent, and what would have to be true for the client to change?
- Can we staff it with named people who are actually available on those dates?
- At the likely price, is the work worth winning?
Record the decision, including the no
A no-bid with a written reason is an asset: it tells you next quarter whether you were right, and it stops the same tender being re-argued from scratch when it reissues. A no-bid nobody recorded is indistinguishable from a tender the team simply missed.