The Hurdles: the requirements that decide your bid
A hundred-page solicitation contains hundreds of requirements. Two or three of them decide whether you should be in this at all — a clearance you don't hold, a past-performance threshold you can't meet, a staffing condition that doesn't survive contact with your bench. Verdict finds those and puts them in front of you first, quoted from the solicitation, with an honest read on whether you clear each one.
The requirement that kills a bid is rarely the one you were watching
Capture teams don't lose pursuits because they misread the technical approach. They lose them because a mandatory condition was sitting in an attachment nobody opened until week three — and by then the team has spent forty hours on a proposal that was never eligible.The hard part isn't finding requirements. It's knowing which ones are load-bearing. A solicitation gives you no help there: the clause that disqualifies you and the clause about font size are formatted identically.
Three, not two hundred
There are good tools that extract every "shall" statement in a solicitation and hand you a spreadsheet with two hundred rows. You will need one of those. You will need it after you've decided to bid, because that spreadsheet is the blueprint for the proposal.Verdict runs before that. It answers a smaller question — is this worth the week? — and a smaller question needs a shorter answer. Up to three requirements, most decisive first. If you're reading a list of two hundred to decide whether to pursue, you haven't been given a decision; you've been given homework.Verdict doesn't build your compliance matrix. It tells you whether to build one.
How Verdict decides what's decisive
An honest read, or none at all
Each hurdle comes with an assessment of whether you clear it — grounded in the evidence package you published, not in a guess about your company.When your documents don't settle it, Verdict says so. You get told the question is open and what would close it, rather than a confident answer built on nothing. That happens more often than vendors like to admit, and it's the difference between a tool you can take into a bid review and one you have to caveat.
What it looks like
Three hurdles from a solicitation we wrote to demonstrate this — a synthetic package, so every quote is checkable against a document we can hand you.
Bring a solicitation you're unsure about
We'll run it and show you the three requirements that decide it. You check every quote against the source yourself.