You're staring at a tender. £2M/year, five years, NHS trust. Looks good on paper. The deadline is six weeks out and your team can probably handle it.
So you start writing. Three weeks later, you're 40 pages deep and someone asks: "Did we check how many incumbents are bidding?"
Three. Plus two others you hadn't heard of.
Now you're in a bidding war with a 15% markup, defending against suppliers who've held the contract for a decade. The win probability was never better than 30%. You just burned three weeks of capacity you didn't have to spare.
This is the bid/no-bid problem. Procurement teams chase revenue signals instead of win signals, and it costs them time, money, and morale.
