Building a Go/No-Go grid your committee will accept
Your team can already spot a bid that is lost before it starts. The judgement is there. What is missing is a way to show it to someone who was not in the room.
Your criteria already exist
The Go/No-Go grid usually gets sold as a cure for gut-feel decisions. In a team that has been running for a few years, that is a fairly inaccurate description of what happens. The criteria are there: whether the client can pay, whether a sponsor has been identified, whether the deadline is survivable, the gap between the specification and what you actually deliver. They get applied, and usually applied well.
The problem sits elsewhere. Two people apply the same criteria at different thresholds. A bid arbitrated on a Tuesday is not arbitrated like the one that lands on Thursday, because the team's workload changed in between. And when sales leadership asks six months later why a given tender was dropped, the answer is one sentence that nobody can back up.
That last situation is the expensive one. A bid function that cannot defend its calls ends up having them made for it.
Start from your criteria, not a template you found online
A grid lifted from a white paper scores what its author thought mattered. So the first step is to recover the criteria your committee already uses, including the ones nobody has ever written down.
The fastest way: take the last three bids you declined and the last three you committed to, and ask each participant what tipped the balance. Allow an hour. The real criteria come out quickly, and they rarely look like the ones you would have listed in the abstract.
- Access to the decision-maker: an identified sponsor, or a blind submission?
- Gap to the specification: what the requirements demand against what you actually deliver today.
- Cost to produce: the expert time the response will consume, estimated before you say yes.
- Incumbency: sitting supplier, existing relationship, or a cold entry.
- Available reuse: what your knowledge base already covers on this type of bid.
- Calendar: the submission date against your contributors' real availability, holidays included.
Weight the criteria, then set the threshold before you see the bid
An unweighted grid treats access to the decision-maker like questionnaire length. Give each criterion a weight, and do it with other people in the room. Disagreement about the weights is exactly the conversation the team has never had, and it is worth the meeting.
Then set the Go threshold before you look at the next bid. A threshold decided while staring at an opportunity you want to take stops being a threshold and becomes a justification.
Keep the breakdown, not just the score
A single overall score cannot be defended in committee. What can be defended is the breakdown: this criterion scored this way, for this reason, based on this passage of the tender pack.
The breakdown is also what lets you revise the grid. A criterion that consistently scores badly on bids you go on to win is a criterion to reweight. You will only see that if you kept something more than a final score.
That is the principle behind AIRFP's Go/No-Go matrix. Requirements are broken down as soon as the pack arrives, your criteria are carried into the grid, and the output gives the score criterion by criterion with the document extracts it rests on. The committee decides.
A Go/No-Go grid does not replace your judgement. It applies that judgement consistently from bid to bid, and it lets you show your working when someone asks.