The fastest way to raise your win rate is often to bid less. Every tender you chase without a real chance of winning is time taken from one you could win. A bid/no-bid decision, called a go/no-go decision in many bid teams, is the discipline that keeps that from happening.
Short answer: A bid/no-bid decision is a quick, honest scoring of each tender before you commit, on a few factors: how well it fits what you do, your chance of winning, what it is worth and what it costs you to bid. Below we turn that into a weighted scoring model with a clear threshold for saying no, and add the number most guides leave out: how many competitors you should actually expect.
Why it matters
Bid teams are usually short on time, not on tenders. Without a filter, the loudest or nearest deadline wins your attention rather than the best opportunity. A simple framework moves that choice from gut feel to a repeatable check, which is what lets a small team punch above its weight. Whether a tool to support that filter pays for itself is a separate calculation, which we work through in our ROI view of tender software.
The five criteria and how to weight them
Five criteria cover most cases. Score each from zero to five, where five is always the most favourable value for you. That holds for cost to bid as well: five points means a light lift, not a heavy one. The weighting below is our own editorial proposal, not an industry standard. Treat it as a starting point to adapt, because an engineering firm with long lead times will weigh cost to bid quite differently from a consultancy with people on the bench.
| Criterion | Weight | What you are scoring |
|---|---|---|
| Fit | 30 per cent | Does the tender match your core offering, or would you have to stretch? |
| Win probability | 25 per cent | Do you clearly meet the selection criteria, how many rivals are likely, and is there an incumbent? |
| Value | 20 per cent | Is the contract worth the effort, including extensions and follow-on work? |
| Cost to bid | 15 per cent | How many hours and which key people does the bid tie up? |
| Strategic reason | 10 per cent | Does it open a new buyer, a reference or a market? |
Working the model through
Multiply each score by its weight and add the results. The maximum is 5.0. As a threshold we set 3.0: below that the answer is no, between 3.0 and 3.5 you are in a grey zone where a second person should weigh in, and above it you go. That threshold is a proposal rather than a law, and it does not replace knock-out criteria. A selection requirement you cannot meet is a no whatever the score says.
An example. A tender fits you well (fit 4), you expect strong competition (win probability 2), the contract is large (value 5), the bid would tie up half your team for three weeks (cost to bid 2), and the buyer would be a useful reference (strategic reason 3). That gives 1.20 plus 0.50 plus 1.00 plus 0.30 plus 0.30, or 3.30. Grey zone, and that is precisely the point: a large contract value on its own does not carry the decision.
Now change one assumption. You look up the buyer’s previous awards and find that this type of work routinely attracts only two offers. Win probability moves from 2 to 4, and the total jumps to 3.80. A maybe becomes a clear yes, without anything about your bid having changed. Asking what the competitive field looks like is therefore the question in the model that returns the most for the effort it takes.
Base rates: how many rivals to expect
Most scoring sheets treat win probability as a hunch. Germany records this centrally in official statistics, and the figures are worth knowing even if you bid elsewhere. The German procurement statistics report for 2023, published by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in August 2025, records how many offers each procedure actually attracted.
For awards above the EU thresholds, more than 65 per cent of procedures drew at least two offers, and a good 33 per cent drew four or more. A good third of awards, on the other hand, attracted only a single offer. At municipal level the field is a little fuller: around 25 per cent of awards had just one offer, a good 72 per cent had two or more, and close to 38 per cent had four or more.
What matters here is not the average but the spread. A third of above-threshold procedures drew a single offer, while another third were fought out between four bidders or more. It would be a mistake to read the thin end as a list of easy wins, and the report says as much: a lone offer can reflect a supplier market that is very narrow for that particular subject matter, or a genuinely competitive procedure that only one bidder entered. A thin field can therefore be a specialist market you cannot serve rather than an opening nobody noticed, which makes it a question of fit as much as of win probability. In the worked example above, the thin field reads as an opening precisely because fit is already scored 4. At a low fit score the same finding would be closer to a warning. Nor do the thin fields sit where you might guess: above the thresholds the single-offer share is lowest at municipal level and higher at every other kind of contracting authority, federal ones included. What the spread does justify is establishing the likely field before you commit, instead of pricing in an average that hardly any single procedure actually looks like.
Two caveats belong with the figure, because it is easy to misread. First, this is a count of offers received, not a win rate. That a third of procedures drew one offer does not mean you win one in three. Second, these values apply only above the EU thresholds, which the European Commission resets every two years. Below the thresholds, reporting the number of offers is optional for the reporting bodies while above them it is mandatory, which is why the report itself qualifies how much weight the below-threshold data can carry. The two ranges must not be added together. The Federal Statistical Office maintains the ongoing series in its procurement statistics, which now extends to reporting year 2024 and shows much the same distribution. The figures quoted here are the report’s, for reporting year 2023, retrieved on 11 August 2026.
Red flags that argue for a no-go
Some signs point to no on their own, whatever the score: requirements you cannot meet, an entrenched incumbent with no opening, a deadline too short to do justice to, or terms that would lose you money if you won. Recognising these early is not defeatism, it is how you protect the time for the tenders you can win. The procedure type colours the decision too, since an open procedure, a negotiated procedure and a competitive dialogue make very different demands on your capacity. Tenderplaybook explains the individual procurement procedures in detail.
Write down the reason for every no. After twenty decisions you will see which criterion is actually driving your declines, and you can correct the weighting with your own data instead of our estimate. Which parts of this work can sensibly be automated, and which cannot, we have looked at separately. If you want to base the shortlisting step on a tool, our neutral comparison of two tender platforms is a place to start.
FAQ
Is a go/no-go decision the same as bid/no-bid?
In a procurement context, yes. Both terms describe the same structured check on whether a specific tender is worth pursuing. Bid/no-bid is the phrase used in bid management, while go/no-go is more common in German and Nordic teams. Note only that go/no-go is also used in project and product management for stage gates, which has nothing to do with the bidding decision.
What is a bid/no-bid decision?
A short, structured judgement on whether a specific tender is worth pursuing. It happens before resources are committed and rests on a few consistent criteria, so that decisions stay comparable with one another.
Which criteria matter most?
Fit and win probability usually decide it, weighed against value and the cost to bid. In our proposal those two carry 55 per cent of the weighting between them, because a poor fit cannot be offset by any contract value, however large.
At what score should you decline?
In our model, below 3.0 out of 5.0, with a grey zone up to 3.5. That threshold is an editorially chosen starting value, not an industry benchmark. Recalibrate it once you have thirty to fifty of your own decisions on record and can see where your actual wins fell.
Should you ever bid against the odds?
Sometimes, for a clear strategic reason such as entering a new market, as long as you go in with eyes open. That is what the strategic reason criterion is for, and it is deliberately weighted at only ten per cent: it should be able to justify an exception without becoming the rule.