Strategic Fit
Declare your strategic priorities and see how well each opportunity aligns with where you want the business to go
Strategic Fit
Not every winnable contract is worth winning. Strategic fit measures how well an opportunity aligns with the direction you have set for your business — the industries, buyers, regions, and contract sizes you actually want more of.
Setting your strategic priorities
Configure priorities in Settings → Bid Strategy & Priorities:
- Target industries — the industries you want to grow in, each with a priority weight so you can rank a primary focus above secondary ones.
- Target agencies — departments and agencies you want as clients, also weighted. Highly weighted agencies are treated as strategic accounts.
- Contract value preferences — your minimum, ideal, and maximum contract values. Opportunities near your ideal score best; ones far outside your range score poorly.
- Target regions — the provinces or regions you serve or want to enter, weighted.
- Growth areas — capability areas you are investing in; matching opportunities get a fit bonus.
- Revenue targets — quarterly revenue goals, used to assess an opportunity's pipeline contribution.
- Relationship preferences — flags for avoid incumbents (down-rank opportunities with an entrenched incumbent) and prefer new relationships (up-rank first-time buyers).
Tip
Weights matter more than lists. Two companies can both target "IT services" and "Ottawa" — the one that weights federal security work at maximum priority will see meaningfully different fit scores.
How the fit score works
When a bid decision is calculated, Cothon scores the opportunity 0–100 on each alignment factor:
| Factor | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Industry | Does the opportunity's industry match a target industry, and at what weight? |
| Agency | Is the buyer one of your target agencies? Strategic accounts score highest |
| Value | How close is the contract value to your ideal, and is it inside your min–max range? |
| Geographic | Does the delivery region match a target region? |
| Pipeline | How much would this contract contribute toward your revenue targets? |
| Growth areas | Does the work advance a declared growth area? |
These combine into an overall strategic fit score with an alignment level: excellent (≥ 75), good (≥ 50), partial (≥ 25), or limited.
The multiplier — how fit changes the decision
Strategic fit does not add points to the composite decision score; it multiplies it:
| Fit score | Base multiplier |
|---|---|
| ≥ 80 | 1.10× |
| 70–79 | 1.05× |
| 50–69 | 1.00× |
| 30–49 | 0.95× |
| < 30 | 0.90× |
Growth-area matches add a small bonus, and strategic-account opportunities add another. The final multiplier is capped between 0.85× and 1.15×.
Note
The multiplier is deliberately modest. Strategic fit tilts borderline decisions — it will not turn a fundamentally weak bid into a Strong Bid, or bury an excellent one.
Reading the strategic fit card
On the opportunity page, the card shows the overall fit score and alignment level, plus a bar per factor — industry, agency, value, geographic, pipeline, and growth areas. Click a factor to expand its reasoning: which target it matched (or didn't), and at what weight. Growth-area opportunities and strategic factors are called out explicitly, along with any concerns (for example, "Industry not in strategic targets").
Keeping priorities current
Strategic priorities describe intent, and intent changes:
- Review quarterly alongside your business planning; adjust weights as focus shifts.
- Update after wins — once you've broken into a target agency, you may want to redistribute weights toward the next one.
- Watch the concerns list — repeated "not in strategic targets" flags on bids you genuinely want are a sign your declared priorities lag your real ones.
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