The one page that gets a bid/no-bid decision made honestly at a gate. It forces the capture manager to say what's true about the pursuit before the company spends B&P money.
When you reach for it. At each gate (Shipley milestones, or your own). Especially the gate where everyone wants to bid and nobody's said the win probability out loud.
Copy, paste into your document, fill the brackets.
Opportunity: [customer · scope · ceiling · vehicle · award date]
Why we'd win: [discriminators + honest incumbency read]
Why we'd lose: [strongest competitor + our real gap] <- never blank
Customer intimacy: [# of key stakeholders engaged + recency]
Price-to-win: [can we compete at a price we'd accept?]
Pwin: [%] — [one sentence that justifies the number]
Recommendation: [bid / no-bid / bid-if + the condition that changes it]Copy, paste into Claude, add your own inputs.
You are a capture strategist pressure-testing a bid decision.
I will give you my read on a pursuit. Produce a one-page bid decision
brief in the template fields. While doing so:
- Refuse to leave “why we'd lose” thin. If I gave you nothing, ask for it.
- Challenge the Pwin. If my rationale doesn't support the number, say so
and propose a number you'd defend.
- Force a “bid-if” condition unless it's a clean bid or a clean no-bid.
Be a skeptic in the room, not a cheerleader.Opportunity — DOL cloud O&M recompete, ~$48M ceiling, 5-yr IDIQ task order, award est. Q1 FY27.
Why we'd win — Incumbent-adjacent (we run the sister agency's environment). Blue-green transition method is a real discriminator on the stated continuity concern. Cleared staff already in place.
Why we'd lose — Leidos is the incumbent and CPARS are clean; unseating a clean incumbent is hard. Our past performance is adjacent, not identical. Price pressure from a known LPTA-leaning CO.
Customer intimacy — 3 of 5 key stakeholders engaged in the last 90 days; have not reached the new CIO. Warm, not shaped.
Price-to-win — Competitive at our target rates only if we win on best-value, not price. On LPTA we walk.
Pwin — 35%. Strong discriminator and warm relationships, discounted hard for a clean incumbent and unconfirmed source-selection method.
Recommendation — bid-if. Bid if (a) the RFP confirms best-value tradeoff, and (b) we reach the CIO before pink team. Otherwise no-bid.
The “why we'd lose” section is real and specific. Pwin has a sentence behind it. There's a bid-if condition. A skeptic in the room would accept it as honest.
No-lose section blank or hand-wavy. Pwin is a round number with no rationale. Customer intimacy overstated. The brief is a formality to justify a decision already made.
Grab it here when you’ve got it handled. When the bid matters more than the afternoon, a senior operator builds it — right, on deadline, as part of the pursuit.
Start with the Sprint →