# RFP deals in Pipedrive: score the bid before you write a word

https://salesbond.app/blog/rfp-bid-no-bid-pipedrive/
Published: 2026-10-05 · Updated: 2026-10-26

Before you respond to an RFP, make the bid/no-bid call: score fit, relationship, competition, delivery and profit from 1 to 3, set a minimum total, and record the score and the decision on the deal. Three Pipedrive custom fields hold all of it (a single-option decision, a number and a date), and that is enough to stop a “maybe” from turning into three evenings of unpaid writing.

## An RFP is a deal with someone else’s clock on it

Tuesday morning. A procurement portal emails a 42-page PDF from a company nobody on the team has ever spoken to. Questions are due Friday. The response is due in twelve days. The rep who spotted it has nine other open deals, two of them closing this month, and the RFP wants pricing in a format the team has never used, references from a sector it has barely touched, and a signed compliance matrix.

Nothing about that deal behaves like the deals already in the pipeline. The buyer set the dates. The buyer set the format. There is no discovery call to run, because the questions are the discovery, and the answers go to every bidder at once. And “let’s have a look” never costs just the half hour of reading. It costs the writing that follows, which on a team of four comes out of evenings or out of the the other nine deals.

That is why we treat an RFP as a different type of deal with one extra gate in front of it. Not a different sales process. One gate, one decision, written down.

It is not a pilot either. A [proof-of-concept deal](https://salesbond.app/blog/proof-of-concept-pilot-deals-pipedrive/) is one buyer testing you; a tender is a buyer comparing you with everyone who answered, mostly on paper. The live version of that comparison, three vendors in front of one buyer, is a [sales bake-off](https://salesbond.app/blog/competitive-bake-off-pipedrive/).

## The bid/no-bid gate: five scores, one minimum, 48 hours

The gate is a scorecard the rep fills in from the RFP and from what the team already knows. Five criteria, each 1 to 3, added up. Pipedrive’s own RFP guide makes go/no-go the first step: strategic fit, resource availability, technical capability, your relationship with the prospect and profitability, each rated 1 to 5 against a minimum threshold ( [Pipedrive: RFP response](https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/rfp-response)). Responsive runs a similar list with alignment, capability, profitability, history and competition, and suggests bidding when a true/false checklist clears 80 percent or more ( [Responsive: bid/no-bid](https://www.responsive.io/blog/bid-no-bid)). Both are written for proposal teams. Ours is written for the seller who also carries the rest of the pipeline, so one criterion is about the buyer relationship and one is about whether we can deliver with the people we have.

![Bid/no-bid scorecard: five criteria scored 1 to 3, total 11, with Bid decision, Bid score and Bid decided on fields](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/rfp-bid-no-bid-pipedrive-2.png)

| Criterion | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Fit | They are asking for something we would have to build or subcontract | We cover most of it, with a gap we would have to explain | This is what we sell, as we sell it |
| Relationship | First contact is this document | We have met them, or they came through a referral | We talked to them before the RFP was written |
| Competition | Open tender, incumbent in place | Open tender, no incumbent, or a short list we are on | Invited list of two or three, and we know who |
| Delivery | We would need to hire or delay other work | Tight but possible with the current team | Standard delivery for us |
| Profit | The signalled budget is under our floor | Margin is thin or unclear | Normal margin at their budget |

Our minimum is 11 out of 15, and no criterion may sit at 1. A single 1 means a known reason to lose, and the other four scores do not cancel it. That is a position, not a law of nature; the point is that the threshold exists before the document arrives, so the argument happens about the scores and not about the deal.

In Pipedrive the gate lives in three custom fields on the deal: **Bid decision** as a Single option field with Bid, No bid and Pending; **Bid score** as a Numerical field; **Bid decided on** as a Date field. All three types are standard custom field types for deals ( [Pipedrive: custom field types](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/what-types-of-custom-fields-are-there)). The rep scores, the manager confirms, and the decision is set within 48 hours of the RFP landing. A deal that is still Pending after 48 hours is a no-bid. Not because the RFP is bad, but because a team that cannot find two days to decide will not find twelve to write.

One thing the gate is not: qualification. [BANT](https://salesbond.app/blog/bant-sales-pipedrive/) asks whether a buyer has budget, authority, need and a timeline. An RFP has all four printed on page one. The gate asks a different question, which is whether this buyer, this competition and this scope are worth our hours.

## A separate pipeline, or a “Deal type” field?

Pipedrive’s guide suggests a dedicated RFP pipeline with stages along the lines of RFP received, Under review, Drafting response, Response submitted, Follow-up and Awarded/lost ( [Pipedrive: RFP response](https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/rfp-response)). The version we run is close: Received, Decision, Drafting, Submitted, Q&A / shortlist, Awarded. The Decision stage is where the three gate fields get filled, and nothing moves to Drafting with Bid decision empty or Pending.

Whether that deserves its own pipeline depends on volume. If RFPs arrive a few times a year, keep them in the main pipeline and add a Single option field called **Deal type** with the options Standard and RFP. The gate fields still apply, and the Decision step happens in whatever your first stage is. If RFPs come in every month give them their own pipeline, because the stages of a normal deal (a demo, a proposal you wrote on your own terms) do not exist in a tender, and a deal that skips half the stages makes every stage report lie. The trade-offs of running more than one pipeline, and the mistakes we see teams make with them, are in [when a small team should split pipelines in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-multiple-pipelines/).

Either way, keep the Deal type field. The separate win rate in a minute depends on it, and a field survives a pipeline reshuffle. For subcontractors who live on bids, the whole pipeline is built this way; see our [CRM for construction](https://salesbond.app/blog/crm-for-construction-bid-pipeline-subcontractors-pipedrive/) bid pipeline, from invitation to award.

Awarded is not the end. After the award letter comes the contract, security questionnaire and procurement back-and-forth, which is its own stage with its own problems; that part is covered in [deals stuck in legal and procurement](https://salesbond.app/blog/deals-stuck-in-legal-procurement-pipedrive/), so we stop at the award here.

## Dates, owners and the Friday filter

Two Date fields carry the clock: **Questions due** and **Submission due**. Two separate fields rather than one Date Range field, for a practical reason: a deal card can show up to seven fields, and Date Range is one of the types that cannot be displayed on the card ( [Pipedrive: deal card customization](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/deal-card-customization-sorting)). Put Submission due and Bid decision on the card for the RFP pipeline, and a glance at the board tells you what is due and what is still undecided. Card customization is set per user and per pipeline, so each person on the team does it once.

Sorting is the one place Pipedrive does not help as much as we would like. The pipeline view sorts by expected close date, deal value, activity and a few other criteria, but a custom Date field is not on the list (same source). We live with that: the deadline sits on the card, and the filter does the rest.

The filter is the Friday ritual. One saved filter, shared with the team: Bid decision is Bid, and Submission due is before a date you pick. Date conditions take operators such as “is before” ( [Pipedrive: quick filters](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/quick-filters)), and advanced filters combine conditions with ALL and ANY groups and can be shared or kept private ( [Pipedrive: advanced filtering](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/filtering)). We set that date to the Friday after next and move it on each week. It is the one manual step in the setup. Whoever runs the pipeline meeting opens that filter first. If a deal is on it and the draft has no activity scheduled on it, that is the meeting’s first item.

Who does the work also goes on the deal. Two User-type fields, **Writer** and **Reviewer**, name a Pipedrive user each; then three activities with due dates: “Questions sent” before Questions due, “Draft review” two working days before Submission due, “Submit” on the day. Pipedrive’s guide recommends reminders for exactly those dates, bidder conferences, Q&A deadlines and final submission ( [Pipedrive: RFP response](https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/rfp-response)). The review activity belongs to the Reviewer, not the Writer. A writer reviewing their own 30 pages at 11 pm the night before is how a compliance matrix ends up with a blank row.

## The decision log

Every RFP deal ends with a note, and the note has a shape. Not a form, just the same few lines each time, so that in a year somebody can read ten of them in a row.

At No bid, before the deal is marked lost:

> Score 9 (Fit 3, Relationship 1, Competition 1, Delivery 2, Profit 2). No bid: incumbent in place, first contact was the portal. Decided by Anna and Tom, 7 Oct.

At Lost, after a submitted response:

> Score 12. Lost to [name, if the issuer tells you]. Price: ours was above theirs [or: unknown]. What we’d change: the reference section, they asked for three from the public sector and we had one.

Then the deal is marked lost with a lost reason. We use two reasons for RFP deals, “No bid” and “Lost tender”, and never file a no-bid under “Price” or “Competitor”, because a no-bid is our decision and a lost tender is theirs. How to set the reason list up so that reps actually pick from it, and why free text there is useless, is in [lost reasons in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-lost-reasons/).

The score in the note is teh part that pays off. The note is where you find out later whether your 11 was the right number.

## RFP win rate on its own line

A team that bids on tenders and sells normally has two win rates, and the average of them is not a number anyone should quote. In our experience the tender rate is often the lower one, because every tender has several bidders by design, and when it is folded into the overall rate it drags the team’s number down for reasons that have nothing to do with how the team sells.

So filter by Deal type equals RFP, won and lost, and count that on its own. The formula and the periods are in [sales win rate in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-win-rate-pipedrive/) and we will not repeat them; the one addition for RFPs is to leave no-bids out of the denominator. A no-bid is not a lost deal, it is a deal you decided not to play, and counting it as a loss punishes the gate for working.

After eight or ten closed RFP deals, look at the gate scores. Put won and lost side by side. If the won ones cluster at 12 and above and the lost ones at 11, the minimum moves to 12. If a criterion scored 3 on every lost deal, it is not predicting anything and needs a harder definition. On a sample that small this is a direction, not a finding, and we say so out loud when we change the threshold. The fuller method for reading won and lost deals together is in [win/loss analysis for a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/win-loss-analysis-small-team-pipedrive/).

A disclosure, since we are talking about checking deals: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Deal Health checks every deal in the connected CRM against the enabled rules, more than 20 of them across six categories. Once at least three rules apply to a deal, it gets a health score from 0 to 100, and each violation comes with a recommended action. It does not make the bid decision; no rule can read a tender. What it shows is which deals break the rules you switched on, RFP deals in Drafting included. Curious what it finds in yours? [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).

## Saying no is a result

The hardest part of the gate is the Tuesday after. The buyer’s procurement contact asks whether you will be submitting, and a rep who scored the deal at 9 feels the pull to say “we’re working on it”. We think a prompt, plain no is better for the relationship than a thin response or a missed deadline, and better for the team than twelve days spent on a deal the scorecard already closed. A buyer who gets a clear decline this week remembers a company that knows what its doing. A buyer who gets a weak proposal remembers the weak proposal.

The reply is one sentence, and we keep it in the deal note so the next person does not have to write it from scratch: “Thank you for including us; after reviewing the requirements we won’t be submitting a response this time, as the scope sits outside what we deliver well, and we’d be glad to be considered for future work that is closer to our core.” Send it, log the activity, mark the deal lost with the reason No bid, and move on to the nine deals that were already yours.