What does a pursuit actually cost?
Count the hours, not the fee you did not win. A mid-size professional services pursuit is a week of a bid lead, two or three specialists pulled off live work, a pricing pass, and a partner review. Forty hours is a conservative floor. Graphics, legal, and a modeller sit on top when they sit on top.
Those hours are gone whether you win or lose. If the work did not fit, they are gone twice: once in the response, and again in the delivery you will resent. Win rate does not show that. A pipeline review that counts live pursuits as health does not show that. A spreadsheet that only tracks submissions does not show that.
The cost-of-pursuit calculator puts a number on it. Defaults are published so the figure is citable: bid lead 20 hours at $180, specialists 16 hours at $220, partner 4 hours at $350, external $0. That is 40 hours and $8,520. Change the inputs to your rates. Do not change them to make the number smaller than you felt.
A floor is not a ceiling. Defence volumes, multi-state facilities, and consortium responses run well above forty hours. Advisory panel refreshes can too, once you count the principals. The calculator is a floor you can defend in a partner meeting. It is not a claim about your last bid unless you typed your last bid into it.
Why does win rate lie?
Because it hides the denominator you actually paid. A firm that bids twenty and wins four is at 20 percent. A firm that bids eight and wins four is at 50 percent. The second firm has the same wins and sixteen fewer pursuits. If each extra pursuit cost $8,520, the first firm spent about $136,000 to look busy.
Win rate also rewards the wrong behaviour. Volume is easy to add. A thin submission still counts as a bid. A zombie that should have died in week one still counts as a bid. The scoreboard gets healthier as the gate gets weaker. That is not a metric. That is a habit with a percentage attached.
Published Australian win-rate benchmarks will sit in this guide when we have survey data, not before. Invented averages help no one and get cited anyway. Until then, use your own last twelve months: pursuits started, hours, wins. Cost per win will tell you more than anyone else’s percentage.
What is cost per win?
Total pursuit cost in a period, divided by wins in that period. Not fee won. Not pipeline. The amount you spent to obtain each yes, including the nos. Cost per win takes the metric in full. The idea is short enough to use now.
If you spent $170,000 pursuing twenty tenders and won four, cost per win is $42,500. If you spent $68,000 pursuing eight and won four, cost per win is $17,000. Same wins. Different firm. Qualification is how you move from the first number toward the second without pretending the market got easier.
Cost per win still lies if you only count the bid team. Principals off the clock, delivery leads in review, a lawyer on the indemnity: those are pursuit costs. Leave them out and you will keep bidding work that looks cheap to chase and expensive to win.
What does it cost a consultancy in billable hours?
The same hours, against a timesheet that would otherwise have billed. A principal at 90 percent utilisation does not have a spare week. The pursuit competes with the revenue that funds it. That is why advisory RFPs are not “just a proposal.” They are a utilisation event.
The utilisation trap takes it in full. The short version: if the people who would deliver the work are the people writing the response, every poor-fit pursuit is a client you already have, delayed. selrob’s consultants and advisory page is that sentence as a product. This guide is the arithmetic underneath it.
Fixed-fee pursuits make it worse. You cannot recover the week. You can only decide not to spend it. That decision belongs in week one, with the working shown, not in week four when the draft exists and sunk cost has a voice in the room.
What is a 20 percent cut in poor-fit pursuits worth?
Hours and dollars returned to live work. The qualification ROI page publishes the model. Defaults: 20 pursuits a year, 40 percent poor-fit, 40 hours and $8,520 each, a 20 percent cut in the poor-fit share. That avoids 1.6 pursuits, returns 64 hours, and about $13,600. Stopping all poor-fit work is a larger number. Neither figure is a client result.
The 40 hours is the same floor as the cost-of-pursuit calculator. It is the number behind “40+ hours saved on every tender you don’t chase” on the home page. It is a default you can replace with your diary. It is not a promise about your next quarter.
Twenty percent is conservative on purpose. Firms that install a real gate often cut more, because the first noes are the obvious ones: missing mandatories, uncapped liability, a roster that was never free. The model does not require you to become ruthless. It requires you to stop paying for the ones you already knew.
How many tenders should a firm under 50 bid?
As many as the three axes pass, and as few as the roster can write without emptying the timesheet. There is no magic number. How many tenders should a firm under 50 bid is the capacity planning. If you cannot name who writes and who delivers, you already have too many live.
A firm of thirty that bids two a month is not disciplined by default. It may be bidding two that fail the gate, every month. Volume is not the test. Fit is the test. The economics only tell you what the unfit ones cost.
If the weekly gate is twenty minutes and you need an hour because twelve inbounds arrived, that is a discovery problem or a saying-yes problem. It is not a reason to skip the gate. Skipping the gate is how twelve becomes twelve drafts.
What should you do with the number?
Put it on the gate. A no-bid that cannot show what it returned will lose to a yes that cannot show what it costs. Partners argue in fees and relationships. Hours and dollars on one page change the argument. The bid/no-bid decision guide is the call. This guide is why the call is worth making in week one.
Do not wait for a perfect timesheet export. Last five pursuits, honest hours, your rates, wins. Cost per win falls out. If you cannot reconstruct last quarter, you will not reconstruct next quarter either. Start this inbound.
selrob does not replace this arithmetic. It makes the gate cheap enough to run on every pack, so the arithmetic is not optional. The method works with a calculator and a named slot. The software exists because the slot is the thing teams skip.