The Saturday review of outgoing pursuits

We run a 15-minute Saturday review of every active proposal pursuit. Three questions, in order. We have been doing it for most of a year. It is the cheapest pipeline discipline we maintain.

The setup

Saturday morning, one person at a laptop, the active-pursuits list open. The list shows each pursuit with its current stage, the days-to-deadline, the assigned owner, and the last-updated timestamp. We use a spreadsheet; any tracker works.

The three questions run per pursuit. Most pursuits get three thumbs-up in 10 seconds. The interesting ones are the ones that do not.

Question 1 — Kill it?

Read the pursuit’s current bid/no-bid score. Has anything changed in the last week that moves the score? Has new information come in that makes the probability-of-win worse? Has a key SME become unavailable? Has the buyer posted an amendment that shifts the scope out of your sweet spot?

If yes — the pursuit should probably die today. Killing a pursuit on Saturday is much cheaper than killing it on Thursday. Thursday kills cost a week of SME time and a partially-drafted response. Saturday kills cost a conversation and a pipeline update.

We kill roughly one pursuit per month at this stage. The pursuits that survive the Saturday kill-check have earned their seats.

Question 2 — Push it?

For pursuits that survive Q1, read the days-to-deadline. Is the current trajectory going to hit the deadline at the quality bar? Or is the pursuit drifting — SME responses are late, the draft is behind, compliance matrix gaps are accumulating?

If the trajectory is drifting, the answer is “push” — escalate. Either escalate to the SME chain to unblock, or escalate the deadline concern to the sales lead and ask whether to request an extension from the buyer (some RFPs permit this, many do not). Or reallocate capacity from a lower-priority pursuit.

The key is that the escalation happens on Saturday, not on Wednesday. Saturday escalations buy four business days. Wednesday escalations buy one.

Question 3 — Staff it up?

For pursuits that survive Q1 and Q2: is the assigned team sufficient for the scope? The first two questions are about whether the pursuit is healthy. This one is about whether it is staffed.

Staffing-up looks like pulling an additional SME, routing a proposal writer to support the PM, or adding a reviewer to the color-team roster. These additions are cheap on Saturday (people available, work not done) and expensive on Thursday (people committed, work done poorly). About one pursuit in five gets a staffing action.

The shape of the output

The Saturday review produces three short lists posted to the team channel Sunday morning:

Killed this week: [pursuit name, reason]
Escalating: [pursuit name, what needs to unblock]
Staffing up: [pursuit name, who’s being added]

Nothing else. No retrospective commentary. No meeting. The lists are action-ready on Monday.

Why it works

Three reasons. It is fast enough to happen — rituals that take an hour get skipped; 15 minutes survives. It is on Saturday, not Monday — Monday reviews are reactive, Saturday reviews shape the week that will happen. And it produces actions, not status — weekly actions unblock; weekly status accumulates.

What it does not replace

It does not replace the 20-minute Saturday retro on completed pursuits — that is a different ritual aimed at learning. It does not replace the formal bid/no-bid process for new opportunities; see bid/no-bid framework. And it does not fix SME bottlenecks — it surfaces them.

Takeaway

Fifteen minutes, three questions, one person. Kill it, push it, staff it up. The cheapest pipeline discipline we have found, and the one that has saved more Thursdays than any other ritual we run. For a related ritual aimed at learning rather than pipeline management, see Saturday backlog triage.

Unbylined posts come from the PursuitAgent team collectively.