Win/Loss Analysis

Win/Loss Analysis – Performance reporting

Why is it important?

While there are many variables that can influence the outcome of a bid decision, measuring the return on your bidding investment can help you build a better picture of your bidding process including your qualification criteria. Make sure you record the outcome of bidding efforts.

The aggregated win/loss outcomes will give you a full picture of how you are tracking, whether you are improving your win rate, or if there are gaps or opportunities in your capture process or resource allocation.

Performance reporting objectives

To identify systematic factors that are driving bid success and failure
To measure the alignment of the organisation’s solutions and bid processes against customer requirements and decision making criteria
Improve alignment across sales, bid, solutions and delivery teams by providing an objective view of market.

Win/loss analysis is essential for any organisation that wants to better understand their competitive position in the market, and optimise their bid strategy to improve their solution offerings, service delivery model, pricing and teaming approach.

Data capture and reporting

A closed loop process strongly correlates with higher short-listing rates and probability of bid success.

Whether you’re providing reporting and analysis for your entire organisation or functional areas of the business, there are benefits of establishing and maintaining a metrics program to track your win/loss outcomes and reasons why, so that you can use this as a continuous improvement and business intelligence tool.

After a debrief the following key steps should be revisited:

Update the content library (new or amended content; star rating if scored favourably)
Capture plan needs to loop from lessons learned
Revisit qualification criteria, bid/no bid and risk assessment – is your win/loss ratio improving or declining?

TIP: By having your bid/no bid decisions and win/loss outcomes data visible, you can balance the subjectivity of your bid/no bid decision (and at this stage go back and compare your initial bidding assumptions) against actual outcomes. This important step can help you to realign, and reassess factors relating to your bid/no bid decision criteria based on new insights from the process, and the buying criteria of your customers against the time and resources you invested in pursuing the opportunity.

Together with feedback given at debriefs and lessons learned, you can balance the subjectivity of your bid/no bid decision against the decision that was ultimately made by the evaluation panel and the insights you’ve gained from the process (including knowledge of the buyer and the chosen solution/supplier), against the time and resources you have invested in pursuing the opportunity.

We’ve designed the Bidhive dashboard to be a very simple, visualised summary of your bid data to provide quick insight into multiple areas of your business across key metrics like contract value, win/loss ratio; and capture ratio. Filtering this information can help you drill down into business lines, people and customers as well.

By creating a closed loop learning cycle and also incorporating debrief and lessons learned data you can discover the relational factors behind your organisation’s wins and losses which is not only beneficial for opportunity qualification and bid strategy, but also for continuous improvement of the operational and contract delivery side of the business to ensure you can continue to win but also retain business.

Within Bidhive, organisations can update the status and decision outcomes and record it on the system for others to see. Comments can also be made to support results where external influences came into play. This is important to capture when the outcome alone does not give the full story.

For example, a ‘lost bid’ may not reflect the quality of the submission, but could be the result of a change in policy direction, or a decision to ‘bid’ internally against the recommendation of the No Bid recommendation. This insight should be circled back into the process.

The Bid Lifecycle

by Nyree McKenzie | September 10, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Bidding is a craft, but a repeatable process that needs to be shared – especially as the future of work continues to automate, and supply chain ecosystems become more digitized and connected. If you’re a bid manager, or are involved in evaluating opportunities and participate in the proposal or submission deliverables as a subject-matter expert, project lead, estimator, strategist or business owner – learning about the bid lifecycle and bidding best practice is relevant to you.

Bid Opportunity Management

by Nyree McKenzie | September 9, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Having full visibility across your opportunity pipeline helps your organisation to selectively bid, and provide transparency into past Bid/No bid decisions; and ultimately whether the opportunity was won or lost, and why.

The Capture Process

by Nyree McKenzie | September 8, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

The Capture Process - Preparing to bid Why is it important? Comprehensive planning and preparation is a feature of all successful bids and should be undertaken long before the formal request document or invitation (RFx) is issued. Proactively capturing capture...

Bid / No Bid Decision

by Nyree McKenzie | September 7, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Bid/No Bid Decision - Qualifying an opportunity Why is it important? Bid qualification is the front door to opportunities and having a bid/no bid decision process results in routing deals to the right experts to ensure your organisation optimises time and resources to...

Planning your Bid Response

by Nyree McKenzie | September 6, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Developing a bid response is very time consuming and usually high pressure work that involves large amounts of documentation and numerous content contributors. Timeframes are being increasingly compressed while documentation has become increasingly complex.

Kick Off Meeting

by Nyree McKenzie | September 5, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

The Kick Off Meeting sets the bid on the path to success and is the critical meeting or workshop that brings your subject matter, technical and bid writing experts together to get them on board with the bid management and proposal process.

Lessons Learned and Debrief

by Nyree McKenzie | September 4, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Lessons Learned & Debrief - Committing to continuous improvement Why is it important? As soon as you start tracking and measuring your bid and contract delivery performance, you can better identify areas where you can improve. When the bidding phase ends, your...

Post-bid Presentations, Clarification & Negotiation

by Nyree McKenzie | July 8, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Any presentation, clarification or contract negotiation activities should be a lot like your written submission: well-prepared, clear, relevant and focused on your customer’s needs. The post-tender presentation and clarification period is your time to leave a good impression with the buyer, and clearly reinforce your ‘value for money’ proposition. Most evaluation committees are acutely aware that a bid team has prepared the response, so they now want to meet the service delivery team, obtain additional information (or see a product demonstration), and be sure that they feel comfortable working with you.

Proposal Development

by Nyree McKenzie | July 4, 2021 | Lesson | 0 Comments

Proposal Development - Making your proposal compliant, compelling and competitive Why is it important? Bidding is a very different form of sales method that relies on a competitive, arm’s length process where compliance and transparency of the process is just as...