In Conversation with Mitsuhiro Seto: To Bid or Not to Bid

Introduction

A team wins a contract at a number it knew was thin, and eighteen months later the account is unprofitable, the two best engineers have left, and the customer is anchored on that price for the renewal. None of that shows up in the win rate celebrated on the day of award.

Mitsuhiro Seto is Senior Director, Global RFx Proposal Advisory at SAP Asia Pacific, and a member of the APMP International Board of Directors. He joined us on our podcast, To Bid or Not to Bid, Chapter 01, and we put the question to him plainly: when a competitor comes in far below you and the buyer is fixated on the headline number, is holding your price good practice or just an expensive principle? His answer took a while to reach the price, because in his account the price is rarely where the problem starts.

Nobody Sets Out to Run Bids

Seto came into the work sideways. His first role was a dual one, technical account manager on enterprise technology projects alongside business development, and he kept being pulled into the complicated pursuits, the competitive bids, the solution design, the pricing arguments.

"Most people don't set out to become proposal or capture professionals," he told us. They arrive from sales, engineering, finance or project delivery, and then find that bid activity sits at the intersection of all four. The Association of Proposal Management Professionals, or APMP, calls the resulting profile a generalist with T-shaped depth, broad enough to hold a conversation about pricing, solutioning and compliance in one meeting, and deep enough in one of them to be the person the room defers to.

The Bid Is Mostly Decided Before the RFP Lands

His first lesson is one most organizations know and few act on. "Successful proposals start long before the RFP arrives."

Most teams put their energy into the writing, which is the last and most visible stretch of the work. Seto points upstream instead, to account planning, opportunity assessment, capture planning and customer engagement. Pricing strategy, in his view, should be taking shape during capture rather than in the 48 hours before submission.

On what a compliant response buys you: "Compliance gets us considered. Value gets us selected." On how teams survive crunch weeks: "Discipline scales; heroics don't."

Price to Win Does Not Mean Match the Lowest Number

This is where he took issue with the premise of our question. Price to win, as APMP uses the term, is not an instruction to meet a competitor's figure. It is the work of understanding what the customer will pay for the value delivered, and what a rival can realistically sustain across the life of the contract.

"A competitor's low price is data, not a target to blindly chase."

The inputs he named are the customer's value drivers, the competitive position, your differentiators, an honest probability of winning, and the margin the business can carry. Where buyers fixate on initial capital outlay, he accepts that discipline can feel like a disadvantage, but his view is that matching a drastic undercut without changing the value proposition is a race to the bottom, and that the workable alternative is competing on risk mitigation and total cost of ownership.

"Discipline isn't inflexibility."

If the only route to a win is giving up more margin than the business can absorb, he argues, the useful question stops being what to price and becomes whether to be in the pursuit at all.

What the Discount Costs, in Order

Asked what a company actually loses when it drops its price to win, Seto described a sequence he sees repeat.

• Margin takes the first and most visible hit.
• Quality goes next, as corners get cut on materials, testing or review cycles to claw some of it back.
• People follow, because the best staff get moved to better-margin work and the underpriced project inherits whoever is left.
• Delivery slips, since nobody built contingency into that number.
• Reputation suffers when a project limps to completion, which damages the account more than a polite loss would have.
• Pricing precedent is the one he says teams forget, because the customer now anchors on that figure at renewal and margin becomes very hard to recover.

"A cheap win can become an expensive mistake."

\ The Bad Win Nobody Puts in the Review

The second-order costs are where he gets specific. There is the opportunity cost of the good deal nobody pursued because the team was consumed by the bad one, and attrition, because strong people leave organizations that keep assigning them chaos projects. There is the relationship damage of an unhappy delivery, which he rates as worse for the account than losing the bid would have been, and internal trust, where delivery teams stop believing what sales and the proposal team commit to.

"Many organizations discover that their most painful projects were opportunities they should never have pursued."

He has seen the version where everybody knew the price was too low and the company bid anyway, usually for a strategic account, a market entry or a reference customer. He does not treat that as automatically wrong. What matters to him is whether leadership accepted the risk consciously and with full visibility, rather than making an emotional decision and hoping to recover it through change orders later.

Who Gets to Say No

We asked whose call it should be when the winning price and the right price are different numbers. Seto reframed it as governance rather than authority. Sales will advocate for the win and finance will guard the margin, and both are doing their jobs correctly. The proposal team's contribution is evidence: competitive insight, customer intelligence, risk analysis, and a clear read on whether the price and the proposed solution tell the same story. Accountability belongs with whoever owns the profit and loss that will absorb the consequences, which usually means senior management, and the process should make it hard for any one voice to override the others unchallenged.

He traces the root of it to measurement. Win rate is reported weekly and profitability shows up years later, so an organization that ties compensation purely to bookings will drift toward winning over earning. That makes it a governance problem rather than a pricing problem, and the fix is to define a win as a win at a price and scope you can deliver.

The Signals That Say Walk Away

His bid or no-bid gate is a short set of questions. Can we win, can we deliver, can we make money, does this fit our strategy, do we have a competitive advantage, and is the customer relationship strong enough to matter.

The warning signs he named: low probability of winning, a customer nobody in the business knows, missing capabilities, insufficient resource, unrealistic timelines, contractual risk you would refuse elsewhere, discounts that destroy profitability, a well-positioned incumbent, and a buyer who treats suppliers as a commodity. One is a conversation, and several together deserve reconsideration.

He added a condition that gets left out of most no-bid advice. Walking away depends on pipeline health, because a company can only decline a bad deal comfortably when it has other things to chase.

"No-bid is a decision, not a failure. The teams that win well are the teams that say no well."

The Proposal Team's Seat at the Pricing Table

His position is influence without ownership. Finance owns the cost model and sales owns the customer relationship, while the bid manager is often the last person who sees the whole picture, technical and commercial and narrative together, before submission. That earns them standing to say the price does not match the solution being proposed, or that the cost model cannot be credibly justified in the written response.

Does that team feel pressure to bring the number down? "Absolutely and constantly." They sit between sales ambition and business reality, and they are frequently measured on win rate themselves. A healthy culture rewards profitable wins over volume, and gives people the safety to flag a bad price or a bad scope without being labeled difficult.

So if you lose because your price was higher, is that a bad result?

"A disciplined loss can be healthier than an undisciplined win."

He attaches a condition. It still warrants a proper win and loss review, because there is a real difference between a customer who only ever wanted the cheapest commodity provider and a customer you simply failed to convince.

What Technology Changes, and What It Does Not

He is positive on the gains. Compliance matrices, first drafts and content reuse are faster than they were, historical win and loss data makes price-to-win modeling better informed, and collaboration tools have taken some of the chaos out of the final two days.

His caution is more interesting than his optimism. Faster drafting raises the risk of skipping the upstream work, because a team that knows it can turn a response around quickly is tempted to skip the qualification and pricing discipline that decide the outcome. Technology speeds up execution, and it does not make the bid or no-bid judgment for you.

What Makes a Project Worth Winning

Given one change to how companies make these decisions, he would change the scoreboard. Most organizations still lead with win rate, when the more honest set is profitability, customer outcomes, strategic value and delivery success.

A project is worth winning, he says, when the price, the scope and the relationship all point in the same direction: profitable enough to invest in delivering it well, scoped clearly enough that the team is not guessing, and valuable enough to the customer that it is still a good story a year after go-live. Signing is the easy part, and the real measure arrives when the customer renews or agrees to be a reference.

"Winning the right business is always better than winning any business."

FAQs