Prospect qualification is vitally important to ensure that your resources are only employed where you have a chance of success. These tools are designed to help you make preliminary decisions to qualify your opportunities.

If you won't win, don't waste your time bidding. In today's market this is more important than ever.

We have two tools to help you with your bid prospecting:

• Bid/no-bid tool - this tool will help you apply some basic principals to help you focus on only bids you will win.
• Probability engine - this is an interactive prospecting engine to help you accurately assess the probabily of success throughout an opportunity lifecyle.

Bid/No bid tool

This tool allows you to make some preliminary decisions about whether it is worth spending time and effort responding to an opportunity. Although it is always tempting to go after everything, unless you can commit time and effort to writing a high quality, customer focussed proposal, you stand only a small chance of winning.

Probability engine

Each time you use the bid qualification engine ensure that you name and save the spreadsheet locally. Keep a version for each opportunity and throughout the bidding process re-visit the tool to re-qualify the opportunity - as you get more information and knowledge about the opportunity then check that it is still a viable opportunity - or alternatively that you are applying enough resources to ensure success.

There are fourteen key questions that you need to evaluate, each of which can be given a customised weighting based on the importance of your particular situation.