What is a reasonable win rate?

It depends so heavily on what you bid that the number alone is meaningless. What is useful is the trend, and the split: your rate where you knew the office against where you did not, and where you had relevant past performance against where you stretched. Those two comparisons will tell you more than any benchmark.

Should I bid a first federal job at a loss to get past performance?

Rarely, and never as a strategy. A price you cannot perform at produces a contract you deliver badly, and bad past performance is worse than none. If the goal is a first reference, aim at a small, simple, fixed-price buy you can deliver cleanly, not at a large one you can only win by underpricing.

Who should make the decision?

Somebody who is not the person who found the opportunity. Enthusiasm is the main failure mode here, and the cheapest control is that the person who brings it in is not the person who approves it.

How do I say no without burning the customer?

Tell them, briefly and early, that you are not bidding this one and why, and say what you would bid. Contracting officers notice a firm that does not waste their evaluation time, and a no-bid note with a reason is a better introduction than a weak proposal.

Is a low price enough when the evaluation says best value?

No, and this is the most common misreading in the whole module. Best value means they may pay more for a better proposal, and section M says how much more. Winning on price in a tradeoff evaluation means being cheapest among proposals that scored comparably, which is a different exercise from being cheapest.

Course, module 9 of 16

Bid or no bid

Proposals cost real money and the currency is your best people's time. A firm that bids everything wins less than a firm that bids a third as often and prepares properly.

the filter nobody else offers is the last one

By the end of this module you will be able to

Disqualify a bad opportunity in ten minutes rather than in three weeks
Score the ones that survive, on criteria you wrote down before you were emotionally committed
Estimate what a bid actually costs you, in hours and in what you did not do instead
State the good reasons to bid something you expect to lose, and tell them from the bad ones
Build a record of your own decisions that makes next year's decisions better

The disqualifiers: check these first, in ten minutes

Any one of these ends it. Check them before anybody reads section C.

Set-aside you do not qualify for. Including size under that specific NAICS code, not your usual one.
A certification you do not hold. 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, and increasingly a cybersecurity assessment level for defence work.
Registration not active. In SAM, under the right code, with reps and certs current.
A mandatory requirement you cannot meet. A quality standard, a facility clearance, a licence, a place of performance.
A deadline you cannot make properly. Not "cannot make at all": cannot make while doing it well.
Work you cannot finance. Federal payment terms plus your own supply chain can mean months of outlay before the first invoice is paid.
A limitation on subcontracting you cannot satisfy. If the only way you can perform is by passing most of it to a firm that is not similarly situated, this is not your bid.

Keep reading

The rest of this module opens with your name and email

All sixteen modules open on this device for about six months. No card and no password.

Still to come in this module

Then score it
What to score
What a bid actually costs
The good reasons to bid something you expect to lose
Win rate, and why most firms do not know theirs
Questions at this stage