The Bidding Matrix

The factory analogy

Imagine your business is a factory. At the front of the factory, raw material comes in — requests for quotes. In the middle, your quoting department assembles them into bids. At the back of the factory, some of those bids become jobs you won.

Now look at the ratio. If you're like most sellers in this industry, you're pumping hundreds of RFQs in the front end and getting a tiny trickle of wins out the back. The rest is waste. Quotes that never turned into anything. Quotes the customer used as leverage against someone else. Quotes the customer never even read.

Every one of those wasted quotes cost you something: your time, your estimator's time, your dispatcher's patience, your focus. And in return — nothing.

The bidding matrix is a tool for fixing the factory. It's how you decide, up front, which RFQs deserve your full attention, which ones get a quick number, and which ones you politely pass on entirely. It's the discipline of only quoting where you'll win.

Industry terms this page covers

Why the average seller quotes too much

The default behavior is: customer asks, seller quotes. Every time. Unconditionally.

The reasoning is usually some version of:

• "If I don't quote, I definitely lose."
• "You never know — this one might turn into something."
• "Sales manager measures me on quote volume."

All three are traps. Here's the reality:

• If the customer already picked their winner before asking you for a quote, you didn't lose when you didn't quote — you just didn't waste time losing.
• "You never know" is how sellers talk themselves into a career of Quote & Hope. Most of the time, you actually do know — you just don't want to admit it.
• Quote volume as a metric is a bad metric if it isn't tied to win rate. Ten real quotes with a 50% close rate beats fifty quotes with a 5% close rate every day.

The bidding matrix is how you earn the right to say "I'd rather not quote that one." Not from laziness — from focus.

The core question

The bidding matrix runs on one question you ask yourself (and eventually the customer) about every RFQ:

"Do I have a real chance of winning this?"

Not "could I theoretically win it if everything broke right?" — every quote has that. I mean: given what I know about this customer, this job, this incumbent supplier, and this moment — is there a live path to me getting the work?

If the answer is yes, quote it hard. Put your best number and your best story on it. If the answer is no, don't quote it — or quote it at a price that's worth it to you if you miraculously win. If the answer is "I don't know," your job isn't to quote. Your job is to find out before you quote.

That last one is the big unlock. Most sellers skip the "find out" step because they're scared the customer will say "just send me the number." So they send the number. And then they wonder why nothing came of it.

Asking the customer to help you sort

Here's the conversation that changes your bidding life. You say it warmly, straight, no edge:

"Hey — I want to be respectful of your time and mine. You send me a lot of RFQs and I quote all of them, but honestly, on some of these I don't think I've ever had a real shot. Can we do this: only ask me for quotes on the ones where I've actually got a chance at the work? I'll turn those around faster and put my best number on them. The ones I'm never going to win — let's just not bother."

What happens next is remarkable. Most customers will tell you which ones you have a shot at and which you don't. They'll even start sorting their own pile for you. Why? Because you just offered them something most sellers never do: honesty and focus. You respected both of your time.

Some customers won't. That's information too. If they insist on you quoting everything with no pathway to winning, you've learned they view you as a pricing tool, not a supplier. Respond accordingly — which might mean walking away from the account entirely.

The forklift principle

Here's how I think about where to spend my hours.

If I walked into a warehouse and saw a guy moving boxes one at a time by hand, and a forklift sitting unused in the corner, I'd ask him why. "Oh, that's my forklift. I just like moving boxes."

That's what sellers do when they treat every RFQ the same. They hand-carry every box — every quote, every follow-up, every call — instead of loading the forklift with the 20% of opportunities that are worth 80% of the revenue.

So one cut of the bidding matrix is by size and value:

• Which of my RFQs, if I won them, would meaningfully move my year?
• Which ones are small jobs that eat the same amount of quoting time but produce a fraction of the return?

You cannot run the forklift and hand-carry boxes at the same time. The sellers who win big books are the ones who say no to the small jobs from the wrong customers, and yes — with everything they've got — to the big jobs with the right ones.

The three levels of negotiation

There's another cut to the matrix that matters. Once you are quoting something, sellers fall into one of three levels — and most never climb past level 1.

Level 1 — "What price do I need to be at?" The seller just wants the number they need to win. No negotiation. No context. Market price or $1 under it. This is the quote-and-hope bucket.

Level 2 — "What price do I need to be at so I can negotiate?" Slightly better. The seller is at least trying to find out the bogey so they can go ask their boss for room to negotiate. They're still reactive — the customer is still driving — but they're thinking about the conversation beyond the first number.

Level 3 — "What will make you actually switch?" This is where the real sellers live. Instead of playing the price game at all, they're asking the customer: "If you did switch to us, what would it actually take? What's the thing that breaks the tie?" Now you're not quoting — you're negotiating terms of a partnership. Price is one of many variables.

The bidding matrix tells you whether to quote. The three-level model tells you how hard to quote when you do. Level 3 is where the good opportunities deserve your time.

What goes on the cereal box

Another frame I use: think about a box of cereal. The front of the box tells you the features — "fortified with vitamins and minerals, part of a balanced breakfast." Features sell the box.

In sales, most sellers lead with features too. "We've got four plants, 24/7 dispatch, QC certified mixes." That's the top of the box. That's the above-the-line stuff.

But what actually makes customers decide is the below-the-line stuff. The relationship. The trust. The feeling that "these people will take care of me when the job goes sideways." That's not on the box. That's what you build in person, in conversations, over time.

Here's the connection to the matrix: quoting is a front-of-the-box activity. If you've only ever sold the front of the box to a customer, your quote is competing on features and price — and someone else always has a cheaper box. If you've sold the back of the box — the trust, the below-the-line — your quote is competing on relationship, and that's a fight you can win.

So before you decide how hard to quote an RFQ, ask yourself: what's this customer buying — the top of the box or the bottom? If it's the top, you're probably a quote-and-hope. If it's the bottom, you're in range.

Running the matrix on your book

Sit down with your account list. Go one by one. For each active RFQ or frequent-quoting customer, tag them:

Most sellers never sort their book this way and end up quoting proportionally across all four tags. That's the waste at the front of the factory. The fix isn't to quote better. The fix is to quote less — but of the right ones.

Common traps

• "I'll quote it just in case." This is how you drown. Every "just in case" quote is hours stolen from a real opportunity.
• "My boss wants quote volume." Have the conversation. Close rate and revenue-per-quote are better metrics. If your manager won't budge — quietly triage anyway and let the results speak.
• "I don't want to lose the relationship by declining a quote." You won't. A warm, honest "let's save your time and mine — I'll focus on the ones I can win" strengthens real relationships. It only threatens fake ones.
• Confusing activity for progress. Quoting is activity. Winning is progress. A full quote pipeline with a 5% close rate is a treadmill.

Homework — sort the factory

This week:

1. Pull your last 30 days of quotes. Tag each one with the four-tag matrix above (Win path / Maybe / Leverage pile / Wrong customer).
2. Count how many hours you spent in each tag. Be honest.
3. Identify one customer who's been stuffing your pipeline with leverage-pile RFQs. Draft the sort-it-out conversation (the script above) and run it this week.
4. For your three biggest live opportunities — confirm they're Level 3 conversations, not Level 1 price-hunts. If they're Level 1, figure out what it'd take to move them up.

Report back: how many hours did you free up? What did the customer who got the "let's sort it out" conversation actually say?

Where to go next

• Partnership Progression — the bucket model the matrix feeds into
• Classify as today — the snapshot discipline behind the matrix: classify customers by today's reality, not last year's
• The Last Look conversation — what a Level 3 negotiation actually sounds like
• Information Pull vs. Push — the questioning skill that lets you sort the factory without guessing
• 3 Buckets of Questions — bucket 3 is what powers the Level 3 negotiation

Source: drawn from 127 moments across the live-coaching corpus — including the factory analogy, the forklift principle, the three levels of negotiation, and the cereal-box top-line/bottom-line framing. Voice preserved.