Why We Won’t Slice Our Fee for a Slice of Your Win

“Can you reduce your prices and take a cut of the win instead?”

It’s a question that comes up from time to time when discussing payment terms with clients. On the face of it, it sounds reasonable: we reduce our fee for the proposal management and bid writing work and, if the contract is awarded to our client, they will make up the difference with an additional bonus on top. Sometimes it’s framed as a partnership. Sometimes it’s framed as a test of confidence: if we believe in our own work, why would we mind being paid only when it wins?

We understand the appeal. For a client, it reduces costs for a proposal with no guaranteed outcome and, in theory, provides a greater motivation for us to work harder for a win. For the business, a win would mean higher overall revenue. It sounds attractive. But having reluctantly agreed to a reduced rate linked to a win bonus on a previous occasion, we were disappointed that the client was then excluded from the competition for a non-compliance on their behalf that was completely invisible to us. This cost us a substantial amount in terms of lost revenue. Once bitten, twice shy.

On the motivation point, we already have it, just not in the form of a financial bet on a single outcome. Our ‘skin in the game’ is our reputation, repeat business, and referrals, all of which depend on us doing the best possible job on every bid, win or lose. A win bonus doesn’t add to that motivation. It simply asks us to absorb financial risk for factors that have nothing to do with the quality of our work.

A great proposal is necessary, but it is not sufficient

Salentis is hired to provide expert bid writing and proposal management. We work with clients to develop complete, compliant, compelling and evaluator-focused technical responses. But high-scoring technical responses only go so far. There are several other factors that sit entirely outside our remit:

• The quality of the technical solution
• Pricing strategy, and whether the commercial offer is competitive against the customer’s budget and the wider market
• Commercial decisions, including margin, risk appetite, and the contractual conditions our client is, or isn’t, prepared to accept. Or a late ‘no-bid’ decision, even when entirely justifiable
• Competitor positioning, and how our client’s solution and reputation compare with whoever else is bidding
• The existing relationship between our client and their customer
• Experience, certifications, and the eligibility or qualification criteria the customer has set as a baseline for who is even allowed to compete

A successful pursuit depends on all these factors. None of them sit within Salentis’ control or influence, however well the technical aspects are written.

The evidence against win bonuses

This isn’t just our own experience talking:

Loopio’s 2026 RFP Response Trends and Benchmarks Report, compiled with the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) from more than 1,500 organisations worldwide, found that price and competitive pressure have been the leading causes of lost bids every year since 2021. Only 13% of teams pointed to proposal quality as the reason they lost. The overwhelming majority of losses happen for reasons that have nothing to do with how well the submission itself was written.

In this next example, a bid was eliminated before a word of the proposal was read. US government contracting consultancy Richard Wagner & Company described a prospective client who had previously paid a competitor a significant sum to write a technical proposal, only for it to be eliminated at the price evaluation stage before anyone had read a word of it.

We have worked on a bid where there were multiple submissions from serious contenders, but the buyer decided after the submission date to delay changes to the existing contract, meaning that not one submission was read. This was at great cost to all of the organisations that spent months and hundreds of thousands of pounds developing their responses. If we’d agreed lower rates and a win bonus, we would have been significantly out of pocket.

Why we charge for the work we do

For these reasons, Salentis charges for the professional services we actually provide: the expertise, time, and resource applied to developing a compelling, well-structured, and compliant submission. Our fees reflect the value of that work, not the outcome of a process that is largely beyond our ability to influence.

This isn’t us being precious about money. Several professions take the same position for the same reason. Grant writers, for example, generally avoid contingency or success-fee arrangements tied to whether a grant is awarded. The Grant Professionals Association’s code of ethics explicitly discourages members from accepting commission or percentage-based compensation linked to a funding decision, on the simple basis that the writer has no control over who gets funded. US federal grant rules go further still: contingency-style payments to consultants are treated as an unallowable cost unless explicitly pre-approved in advance. Other professions, where independent judgement matters, including engineering and accountancy, have historically treated contingency fees with similar caution, precisely because tying pay to an outcome the practitioner doesn’t control creates pressure that has nothing to do with doing the work well.

We do the work to the best of our ability every single time, because our reputation depends on it, not because a bonus is riding on the result.

Where we can genuinely help with cost

None of this means we are inflexible on price. We regularly work with clients to bring costs down in ways that don’t distort our incentives. Our managed red team review service is one example of where clients have benefited from our experience: an independent, expert quality check at a lower cost than a full proposal management engagement.

Our rates reflect the experience and skill of the people doing the work, and that inevitably costs more than hiring a generalist. You can always find a cheaper writer or bid manager, but that’s a false economy on a bid where coming second counts for nothing. We keep our margins as tight as we reasonably can, because we are conscious that the headline cost of expert support can come as a surprise.

If budget is a real constraint, it may be a good time to look at your bid selection process. Reserve your B&P (bid and proposal) budget for the opportunities where you have a genuinely better-than-average chance of winning and consider a structured ‘no bid’ decision on the rest. That single choice will do more for your win rate and your budget than any fee arrangement we could offer – as I highlight in this blog.

In summary

• A win bonus ties our fee to outcomes, like pricing, competitor positioning, and contract terms, that sit entirely outside a bid writer’s control
• Industry data backs this up: research from Loopio and APMP found price and competition, not proposal quality, are now the leading causes of lost bids
• Deferred fees expose us to risk created by decisions we don’t make, including no-bid calls and non-compliance in areas outside our scope
• We charge for the expertise we provide, in line with how other professions without control over the final decision price their work
• We are always happy to discuss genuine ways to manage cost, including reviewing your bid and no-bid criteria so your budget goes where it has the best chance of paying off

If you’d like to talk through your bid/no-bid process or simply want a second opinion on whether a bid is worth pursuing, get in touch.

Article published: June 2026

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