The Monday-morning RFP triage standup
15 minutes, four questions, one decision. The weekly ritual that replaces inbox scraping and stops bid/no-bid from happening by drift.
A small ritual that replaces a recurring problem: the Monday-morning RFP triage standup. Fifteen minutes, four questions, one decision per inbound bid. Run weekly. Do not skip.
The problem the ritual fixes: bid/no-bid by drift. Without a structured weekly review, RFPs accumulate in the proposal manager’s inbox or shared queue. By the time anyone looks closely, the deadline is two weeks out, the team is committed by inertia, and the decision to bid was never actually made — it just happened.
The four questions
Run them in order, for every RFP that arrived in the last week.
One: should we be in this? A 60-second strategic-fit check. Does this buyer move the business forward? Are we credible? Is the work in our actual delivery wheelhouse? If three thumbs are down, the answer is no-bid and you stop. Move on. Do not invest more minutes.
Two: can we win this? Probability-of-win pass. Incumbent in place? Existing relationship? Past performance match? Pricing position? If the win-probability honest read is below 25%, the answer is usually no-bid. We covered the bid/no-bid scoring rubric in the draft post earlier in the year — the standup is where it gets used, not where it gets debated.
Three: who’s leading? If the answer to one and two is yes, name the capture lead. Not “we’ll figure it out.” A name, on the spot. The capture lead owns Stage 3 of the eight-stage RFP pipeline and the standup is where that ownership gets assigned.
Four: what’s the deadline buffer? Calendar the submit date minus four working days. That’s the gold-team review. Walk back further to set the SME-asks-due date. If the deadline buffer is already negative — the deadline is too soon to run the playbook — the bid/no-bid answer is “no unless we waive parts of the playbook deliberately.” That’s a different decision than “yes by default.”
Who’s in the room
Five people, max. The proposal manager, the head of sales (or the GM), a senior solutions person, the capture leads who have open bids, and an ops person to take notes. More than five turns the standup into a status meeting and the 15-minute cap breaks.
VisibleThread’s research on government proposal writing makes the same point about rushing into writing without understanding the requirements: the failure begins at intake. The standup is the ritual that forces understanding to happen before writing begins.
The output of a standup is one row per bid in a shared list with the four answers and the date. That’s it. No deck, no formal minutes. The decision is the artifact.
The ritual feels small. The compounding is large. A team that runs the standup for a quarter typically writes half as many bids as it did before, wins more of them, and stops resenting Friday afternoons.