Let's do the math that nobody in GovCon wants to do.
A typical small-to-mid-size government contractor on 2 to 3 IDIQ vehicles — plus agency-direct pursuits, SAM.gov alerts, and sources sought notices — sees roughly 50 new solicitations, task orders, and RFIs per month. Each one lands in somebody's inbox and requires a human to open the PDFs, read through the PWS, scan the Section L and M language, pull the key dates, identify the set-aside and NAICS, and make a triage recommendation to leadership.
The time each one takes is all over the map. A short sources sought notice on a familiar vehicle gets an experienced analyst's attention for 10 or 15 minutes before it's triaged out. A 200-page DHA or SEA 05 task order — especially one you're leaning toward pursuing — consumes 8 to 10+ hours once you factor in note-taking, cross-referencing attachments, and briefing the pipeline meeting. Most of the inbox falls somewhere between those poles.
When we've sat down with BD leaders and actually worked the distribution — roughly 60% fast reads at 10–15 minutes, 30% medium reads at 45–60 minutes, and 10% deep reads at 4–10+ hours — the weighted average lands at about 45 minutes per opportunity. That's the honest blended number. It's the one we use in the calculator below, and it's the one we'd defend in front of a skeptical CFO.
Fifty opportunities per month × 45 minutes each = 37.5 hours per month of analyst time spent on first-pass review alone. That's nearly a full week of work every month, or roughly a quarter of one full-time employee doing nothing but reading solicitations.
What that costs in dollars
A senior BD analyst or capture manager in the Washington, DC metro area runs roughly $90 per hour fully burdened — salary, benefits, G&A, and overhead. At 37.5 hours of reading per month, that's $3,375 per month, or $40,500 per year in labor cost spent on the first-pass review.
Now apply the industry-standard pursuit rate. Well-run BD teams pursue 20 to 30 percent of the opportunities they evaluate. Seventy to eighty percent of those 37.5 hours every month produce a "no-go" decision. Your team is burning more than 28 hours a month — and roughly $30,000 a year — reading documents for opportunities you'll never bid on.
And that's only the direct labor line. The real cost is opportunity cost. Those 37.5 hours per month could be spent on capture activities for the opportunities you are pursuing — customer meetings, teaming calls, competitive intelligence, proposal planning, price-to-win analysis. The firms that win consistently aren't the ones with bigger BD teams. They're the ones whose BD teams spend more time on the 20 percent that matters and less time on the 80 percent that doesn't.
Run your own numbers
Your team size, pipeline volume, and labor rate are probably different from the averages above. The calculator below uses the same math as our homepage — adjust the two inputs and see what your numbers look like.
Why teams don't fix this
Most BD leaders know their triage process is inefficient. They don't fix it for three reasons.
Fear of missing a good opportunity. The worry is that a faster triage process means a sloppier one — that you'll decline something you should have pursued because you didn't read it carefully enough. This is valid if "faster" means "less information." It's not valid if "faster" means "same information, extracted more consistently."
No standardized process. Many teams don't have a formal triage template. Each analyst reads each solicitation their own way, writes their own summary format, and presents it differently to leadership. Without a standard output, there's no way to speed up the process — only each individual's habits.
The status quo is invisible. Reading RFPs feels like productive work. The BD team is busy all week. But busy isn't the same as effective. If you actually tracked how many hours your team spent on opportunities that resulted in no-go decisions versus opportunities that resulted in proposals, the ratio would be uncomfortable.
The fix
The solution isn't to stop evaluating opportunities. It's to compress the evaluation time for each one from tens of minutes to seconds. A structured Opportunity Snapshot extracts the 20+ data points your team needs for a go/no-go decision — scope, set-aside, NAICS, key dates, key personnel, evaluation criteria, incumbent, ceiling, and more — into a consistent 3-page brief you can scan in 2 minutes instead of reading for 45.
That turns 37.5 hours per month of reading time into roughly 2.5 hours of scanning time plus a single pipeline standup. The other 35 hours go back to your team for capture, teaming, and proposal work on the 20 percent of opportunities that actually matter.
And once the triage is done and you've decided to pursue, the same snapshot becomes the foundation for everything downstream — a Key Personnel Recruiting Brief with ready-to-post job descriptions and boolean search strings for every required position, a Competitive Landscape showing which companies are qualified to compete on your set-aside and vehicle, and a Proposal Kickoff Accelerator with a compliance matrix, kickoff deck, and questions for the government.
RFP Snapshot generates that structured triage output from any federal solicitation in under 3 minutes. Start with 3 free snapshots and see what your team's 37.5 hours are actually worth.