Decision Scoring
How Cothon combines capability, competitive position, effort, and risk into a single bid recommendation
Decision Scoring
When you calculate a bid decision on an opportunity, Cothon produces a composite score from 0 to 100 and maps it to one of four recommendations. This page explains what goes into the score and how to read the result.
The four scoring components
The composite score is a weighted blend of four component scores, each rated 0–100:
| Component | Default weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Capability match | 35% | How well your company profile covers the extracted requirements — fully met, partially met, and gaps |
| Competitive position | 25% | Your standing in this market: industry alignment and how you compare against similar historical awards |
| Effort vs. opportunity | 20% | Estimated proposal effort (hours and cost) against the contract's value — a return-on-effort check |
| Risk assessment | 20% | Flagged terms, capability gap severity, and timeline pressure |
The weights are defaults. You can adjust each one between 10 and 70 in Scoring Settings; the four weights always sum to 100.
Note
Capability match relies on a completed bid analysis of the RFP and a maintained company profile. Without them, the score has little to work with.
The strategic fit multiplier
Strategic fit is not a fifth additive component. Instead, it acts as a multiplier on the composite score, ranging from 0.85× to 1.15×:
- High strategic fit (score ≥ 80) boosts the composite by up to 10%, with small additional bonuses for growth-area matches and strategic accounts.
- Low strategic fit (score < 30) reduces it by up to 15%.
- Neutral fit (around 50–69) leaves the score essentially unchanged.
This means an opportunity you are highly capable of winning still scores lower if it does nothing for your strategy — and a strategically important pursuit gets a measured push.
From score to recommendation
| Recommendation | Default threshold |
|---|---|
| Strong Bid | Composite ≥ 75 |
| Consider Bid | Composite ≥ 60 |
| Conditional Bid | Composite ≥ 45 |
| No Bid | Below 45 |
All three thresholds are adjustable in Scoring Settings.
Hard gates
Two safeguards can force a No Bid regardless of the composite score:
- Require all critical requirements met (on by default) — if the bid analysis found mandatory requirements your profile cannot meet, the decision is forced to No Bid. If you turn the toggle off, you can instead allow up to a configurable number of critical gaps.
- Minimum timeline buffer — the risk component penalizes opportunities closing with less preparation time than your configured buffer.
Warning
A forced No Bid from the critical-requirements gate is intentional: mandatory criteria in government RFPs are pass/fail. Fix the gap (or verify your profile is up to date) rather than overriding casually.
Reading the decision card
On the opportunity page, the bid decision card shows:
- The composite score and recommendation — Strong Bid, Consider Bid, Conditional Bid, or No Bid, each with a short interpretation.
- Score breakdown — the four component scores with supporting detail: requirements fully met vs. total, industry match type and similar awards found, estimated hours, cost and ROI ratio, and flagged terms with critical gap counts.
- Strengths — factors working in your favour, such as strong differentiators (rare capabilities competitors likely lack) or an established agency relationship.
- Risk factors — factors working against you, such as differentiator gaps, tight margins, or a limited agency relationship.
- Conditions to address — for conditional recommendations, the specific items to resolve before committing.
Where enough pricing history exists for similar contracts, the decision also incorporates pricing signals (historical winning prices and margin health) into the strengths and risk factors.
Overriding the recommendation
The score is advice, not a verdict. You can record a manual override with a reason — for example, bidding on a low-scoring opportunity to establish a new client relationship. Overridden decisions are labelled as such wherever the decision is displayed, and the reason is preserved.
Tip
When you override, record the outcome later and note whether the original recommendation turned out to be correct. This feeds the decision-accuracy metric on the Performance Dashboard.
Decision scoring vs. win probability
The composite score answers "is this a good bid for us?" — a blend of winnability, effort, risk, and strategy. Win probability answers a narrower question — "how likely are we to win?" — and is calculated separately from your recorded bid history. Read them together: a Strong Bid with low win probability usually signals a crowded field, while a Consider Bid with high win probability may deserve a second look.
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