Why a scorecard beats a gut call
Every proposal costs real hours from your most expensive people. A firm that chases everything ends up with thin proposals and a low hit rate. A firm that decides on instinct tends to repeat the same blind spots, usually overrating relationships it hopes it has.
A scorecard does not make the decision for you. It makes the reasoning visible, so two principals can disagree about a specific criterion instead of about the whole pursuit, and so you can check the call afterward against what happened.
Start with knockout checks
Some conditions end the discussion before any scoring. Check them first so nobody spends an hour scoring a pursuit the firm cannot legally or practically take.
- Licensing and registration: do you hold the required registrations in that state and discipline, or can a teaming partner cover them?
- Insurance and contract terms: can you meet the required coverage limits, indemnity language, and payment terms?
- Conflicts of interest: are you working for a party whose interests run against this client on a related matter?
- Submission requirements: can you meet the deadline, the page limit, and every mandatory form without cutting corners?
- Capacity: will the key people named in the proposal actually be free when the work starts?
Pick weighted criteria and score them 1 to 5
Keep the list short, five to seven criteria, and set the weights before you look at a specific RFP so the scoring cannot be bent to fit a pursuit someone already wants. Weights add to 100. Each criterion gets a score from 1 (weak) to 5 (strong), with a one-line reason written next to it.
On qualifications-based selection (QBS) work, such as federal architect-engineer contracts under FAR Subpart 36.6, price is not among the selection criteria and is negotiated with the top-ranked firm, so weight relevant experience and named staff more heavily than you would on a price-driven bid.
- Client relationship: have you worked for them, and do you know the decision makers and what they care about?
- Relevant experience: do you have recent, similar projects you can present with references?
- Competitive position: is there an incumbent, and do you know who else is bidding?
- Staff availability: are the right project manager and key staff free and credible for this work?
- Fee and profit potential: can the work be done profitably at the fee the client is likely to accept?
- Scope clarity: is the scope defined well enough to price and staff without guessing?
Worked example
A firm scores an RFP for a municipal facility design. Weighted points are weight times score, out of a possible 500 (100 weight times a top score of 5).
- Client relationship, weight 20, score 3: 60 points
- Relevant experience, weight 20, score 5: 100 points
- Competitive position, weight 15, score 2 (strong incumbent): 30 points
- Staff availability, weight 15, score 4: 60 points
- Fee and profit potential, weight 15, score 3: 45 points
- Scope clarity, weight 15, score 4: 60 points
- Total: 60 + 100 + 30 + 60 + 45 + 60 = 355 of 500, or 71 percent
- Against a firm threshold of 70 percent to go, this is a narrow go. The weakest line is the incumbent, so the go decision should come with a plan for that: a pre-proposal meeting, a teaming partner, or a differentiated approach.
Put a cost on the pursuit
Estimate the hours the proposal will take and cost them at direct labor cost, not billing rates. In the example, 20 principal hours at $90 per hour is $1,800, and 80 staff hours at $55 per hour is $4,400, so the pursuit costs $6,200 in labor before any printing or travel.
Then ask whether the expected return justifies it. If the fee is $180,000 and your own records show you win about one in four similar pursuits, a $6,200 pursuit is a reasonable bet. If your records show you rarely win against this incumbent, the same $6,200 is better spent elsewhere. Use your own hit rate by client type, not a rule of thumb.
Record the decision and check it later
Save the scorecard with the pursuit, including the go or no-go, who decided, and the reasons. After the award, compare the scores with the outcome. If pursuits scoring in the 70s keep losing, raise the threshold or reweight the criterion that misled you. A scorecard that is never checked against results is just a form.
Where Hubity fits
Hubity keeps pursuits in a pipeline next to the firm's past proposals and RFP responses, and answers questions such as "what similar work have we done for this client" from the firm's own documents, with the sources it used.