Bidding Basics
How to read a solicitation in 20 minutes
August 2026
Scope, evaluation criteria, submission instructions — the three sections that decide whether a bid is worth your time.
A solicitation can run 300 pages, but a bid/no-bid decision only needs three of them. Learn where they live and you can triage a stack of opportunities in an afternoon instead of a week.
Scope of work: can you actually deliver it?
Read the statement of work looking for the deliverables, the performance period, and the required past experience. If the agency wants three similar contracts of comparable size and you have one, you are writing a proposal that cannot score well.
Evaluation criteria: how they will score you
This section tells you where the points are. If technical approach carries twice the weight of price, the cheapest bid loses. Build your outline directly from the evaluation factors so every point available has a paragraph aimed at it.
Submission instructions: how bids get thrown out
Page limits, font sizes, file naming, portal deadlines, required forms. These are pass/fail. A compliant average proposal beats a brilliant non-compliant one every single time, because the brilliant one never gets read.
Then decide, in writing
Write one sentence on why you can win and one on what would make you lose. If the second sentence is stronger, pass and spend the week on the next opportunity.
Takeaways
- Triage with scope, evaluation criteria, and submission instructions only
- Outline the proposal against the scoring factors
- Treat formatting and forms as pass/fail compliance
- Record the bid/no-bid reasoning so you can audit it later
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