Bid Strategy
Definition
The high-level plan for how the vendor will win a specific RFP — covering pricing posture, partner involvement, win themes, ghost-of-the-competitor positioning, and which questions to push back on.
The decisions that belong up front
Whether you are bidding to win or to stay visible, how aggressive the price will be, which partners are involved, which two or three themes will run throughout, which requirements you will formally challenge, and what you will decline to answer. Each of these constrains the writing, which is why making them afterwards produces an incoherent document.
Strategy includes deciding not to bid
The most valuable output of a bid strategy is sometimes a no. A team with a real strategy process declines the deals it cannot win and puts the recovered capacity into the ones it can. A team without one bids everything at uniform, mediocre effort and calls the resulting win rate a market condition.
Name the competitor you are bidding against
A strategy written without a specific rival in mind defaults to describing your product. Naming them — even as an assumption — forces the positioning to become comparative.
Related terms
Further reading
- Bid or No-Bid: The 5-Minute RFP Qualification Checklist
- The AE's Guide to RFPs: Decide Before Your SE Starts
See how this works on a real deal
WinIQ turns RFPs, competitor data and account research into deal-specific output your SEs can defend.
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