You're scanning your daily tender alerts. There are 30 contracts. You have time to properly read maybe six. How do you decide which six? If you're doing this manually, you're using a mix of title-scanning, gut feel, and probably some confirmation bias towards sectors you know. That's fine — but it's slow, and it means you'll sometimes miss the best opportunity in the list.
RevnIQ's fit score is an attempt to solve this specific problem. Every tender gets a score from 0 to 100 based on how closely the contract's requirements match your stated capabilities. Here's what the score actually measures — and what to do with it.
What the Score Measures
The fit score evaluates alignment across three dimensions: the contract requirements vs your capability description, the sector of the contract vs your stated sector focus, and the contract scale vs the scale of work you typically deliver. It's built on the same semantic matching that drives our tender discovery — the score isn't a keyword count, it's a measure of how semantically similar the contract's full specification is to your business profile.
Critically, it uses the full specification text, not just the title. A contract titled 'Programme Delivery Support' might get a low fit score for a project management consultancy if the specification reveals it's primarily about IT infrastructure. The title looks relevant. The score reflects what the spec actually requires.
What Each Score Band Means in Practice
80–100: Written for you
A score in the 80s or 90s means the contract's requirements align very closely with your stated capabilities across multiple dimensions — sector, service type, scale, and technical requirements. These are the contracts you should prioritise. In a week of monitoring, you might see two or three. Read the full specification before deciding whether to bid, but if the score is above 80, the answer is probably yes.
60–79: Strong match
The 60–79 band means high alignment with most of your profile. There may be one dimension that doesn't perfectly align — perhaps the contract is in a sector you work in but haven't listed as a primary focus, or it's slightly larger than your typical contract size. Worth reading in full. Usually worth a bid-no-bid conversation.
40–59: Partial match
The 40–59 band is where it gets interesting. There's genuine alignment with part of your profile, but not all of it. Maybe the service type matches perfectly but the sector is new for you. Maybe the scale is right but the requirements include some elements outside your core offer. Worth reading — you might decide to bid, you might decide to pass, but it deserves more than a glance at the title.
20–39: Low match
A score in the 20s or 30s means the contract has some surface-level relevance — maybe a term from your profile appears in the title — but the requirements don't align well with your capabilities. These will occasionally be worth a look if you're actively expanding into new areas. Most of the time, move on.
Below 20: Pass
These contracts matched your monitoring profile at some level but aren't a genuine fit. The score is telling you that reviewing the specification in detail would be a poor use of your time.
Why a Mid-Range Score Can Be Worth Reading
Don't dismiss the 40–59 band reflexively. Sometimes a partial match represents a genuine strategic opportunity — a sector you're trying to break into, a buyer you want to develop a relationship with, or a contract that's smaller than usual but is a stepping stone. The score doesn't know your business development strategy. You do. A mid-range score is a prompt to think, not an automatic pass.
Worth Considering
Your highest-scoring contracts in a competitive market may be the ones everyone else in your sector is also scoring highly on. A strong mid-range score in a less competitive area can sometimes be a better opportunity than a 90+ where you'll be competing against ten well-established suppliers.
What the Score Doesn't Do
The fit score assesses how well you're matched to the contract. It doesn't assess your chances of winning. Those are different questions.
- •The score doesn't know how many other suppliers will bid
- •It doesn't know your relationship history with the buyer
- •It doesn't know whether your pricing will be competitive
- •It doesn't account for the buyer's unstated preferences or existing supplier relationships
- •It doesn't reflect your current capacity — a perfect match is worthless if you can't resource it
Use the fit score for prioritisation — deciding which contracts to read carefully and which to skip. Use your own commercial judgement for bid-no-bid decisions. The two things work together, but the score is an input to that decision, not the decision itself.
The time saving is real. If you review 30 contracts a day without scoring, you're spending time on contracts that are never going to be relevant. With a score, you read the 80+ first, scan the 60–79 band, glance at the 40–59s, and spend your analytical energy where it's most likely to lead somewhere.