Most firms decide whether to chase an RFP in about ten minutes — a skim of the scope, a glance at the deadline, a gut call in the hallway. Then they spend 40 to 100 hours finding out whether that call was right. A proposal costs $12,000 to $15,000 of senior time to produce, and the average firm wins roughly a quarter of the ones it submits. Which makes Go/No-Go the highest-leverage decision in business development — made, at most firms, with the least information of any decision in the pursuit.
Before committing a principal's week, you'd want to know three things. Who else is bidding? Usually a shrug. What are our actual odds? Gut feel, dressed up. Will the fee even cover our hours? Someone finds out during fee proposal week — after the 40 hours are spent.
ArchFP's Go/No-Go evaluation now answers all three, on the same screen where you make the call.
Run an evaluation and a Competitive Landscape card shows the likely shape of the field: roughly how many bidders to expect, whether an incumbent is present, and the specific competitors most likely to show up — each rated by threat level. And every line carries a source badge: web research, your firm's history, or inferred from the RFP text — so you always know what's grounded versus read-between-the-lines. We name a specific firm only when we can back it up. When we can't, you get profiles and counts, never an invented name.
Your own record is the most trusted input. Prior losses to this client, bids where you lost to an incumbent, the patterns in your captured win/loss outcomes — the system reads them first, before it reads the web.
Beside the GO / CONDITIONAL / NO-GO verdict sits a win-likelihood band — something like MODERATE (est. 35–50%), with a one-line reason in plain language. A band, deliberately, not a decimal: a pre-bid estimate with false precision is worse than none. And when your firm has only a thin track record on comparable work, the band widens and says so — low confidence, limited firm history — instead of pretending to a certainty it doesn't have.
Winning can still lose money. The Fee & Margin panel runs the pursuit economics before you write a word: project value from the RFP, a suggested fee keyed to your own fee schedule by project type, an effort-based estimate of your internal cost, and the resulting margin — banded green, amber, red. Edit any number and it recomputes live. If the maths says a win would barely cover your hours, better to know on day zero.
Here's the design rule underneath all three: they inform the verdict, they never override it. The win band can't silently flip a GO to a NO-GO; the margin panel doesn't veto a strategic pursuit. You might chase a low-odds, thin-margin project because it opens a sector you want — that's judgment, and it stays yours. A black box that overrules the principal is a tool the principal stops opening.
The cheapest proposal your firm will ever produce is the one it doesn't write. Every pursuit you decline because the field was stacked, or the margin wasn't there, hands its 40 hours to a pursuit you can actually win. Most firms try to raise their win rate by writing better proposals. The faster lever is subtraction — and subtraction needs information at the moment of the decision, not a post-mortem after the loss.
If you'd like to see the competitive landscape, the odds, and the margin on a real RFP your firm is weighing right now, book a 15-minute demo and bring one.