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Are Your Proposals Hitting the Mark? How to Calculate and Improve Your Success Ratio

Posted on by Alan Thompson
13
Apr

Flying Blind: Do You Know Your Proposal Win Rate?

You and your team pour hours, days, sometimes weeks into crafting detailed proposals. You hit submit, cross your fingers, and wait. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But do you actually know how often you’re successful?

When I ask clients, ‘What’s your win rate?’, I often get answers based on gut feelings or recent memory – “We win a fair few,” or “We lost a big one last month.” Relying on anecdotes isn’t a strategy; it’s flying blind, hoping for the best without truly understanding your performance.

Why Guessing Your Success Isn’t Good Enough

Operating without a clear understanding of your proposal success rate has significant drawbacks. You can’t:

  • Identify trends: Are you getting better or worse over time? Are you more successful with certain types of clients or projects?
  • Diagnose problems: If your win rate dips, you won’t know where to look. Is it pricing, technical solution, proposal quality, or choosing the wrong bids? See how to improve the Bid-No Bid process
  • Justify resources: How can you argue for more proposal support or training if you can’t demonstrate the current return (or lack thereof) on investment?
  • Make informed strategic decisions: Without data, decisions about which markets to pursue or which services to emphasize are based on guesswork, not evidence.
  • Measure improvement: How do you know if changes you implement – like focusing on customer-centric writing – are actually making a difference?

Ignoring your success ratio is like driving without a speedometer or fuel gauge – you’re moving, but you don’t know how fast or how close you are to running on empty.

Measuring What Matters: Calculating and Using Your Success Ratio

The solution is straightforward: start calculating and tracking your Success Ratio (often called Win Rate). This metric provides a vital baseline for understanding your performance. Here’s how to get started:

  1. Define Your Calculation: The most common ways to calculate Success Ratio are:

    • By Count: (Number of Bids Won) / (Total Number of Bids Submitted) in a given period. This tells you the frequency of wins.
    • By Value: (Total Value of Bids Won) / (Total Value of Bids Submitted) in a given period. This tells you the financial impact of your wins relative to the opportunities pursued.

    Something I strongly recommend is tracking both. A high win rate by count on low-value deals might not be as desirable as a lower win rate by count on high-value strategic deals.

  2. Establish Your Tracking System: You don’t need fancy software initially. Add columns to your RFP Schedule or Bid-No Bid Log to capture:

    • Bid Outcome (Won, Lost, Declined/No Bid)
    • Date of Outcome Notification
    • Value of Bid (if Won)
    • Total Value Bid

  3. Calculate Regularly: Don’t just calculate this once. Track it monthly, quarterly, and annually to identify trends.

  4. Segment Your Data: Don’t stop at the overall ratio. Analyze your success based on:

    • Client Type (New vs. Existing, Industry Sector)
    • Service/Product Line
    • Deal Size (Small, Medium, Large)
    • Proposal Lead/Manager

    This segmentation helps pinpoint areas of strength and weakness.

  5. Analyze and Act: Use the data. If your win rate is low in a certain sector, why? If it’s high for existing clients, how can you replicate that success with new prospects? Use the insights to refine your Bid-No Bid criteria, improve proposal content, adjust pricing strategies, or identify training needs.

Performance tracking templates, often included in comprehensive resources like the Proposal Templates suite from Klariti, provide a solid structure for capturing this data consistently. Good procurement practices involve not just bidding, but also measuring the results of those bids.

Next Steps: Organizing the Proposal Effort

Understanding your Success Ratio tells you how effective your overall proposal efforts are. It’s a critical lagging indicator. But to improve that ratio, you need efficient leading processes.

How do you actually manage the complex task of putting together a high-quality proposal on time, involving multiple team members and tight deadlines?

In our next article, we’ll examine the Proposal Development Schedule, a tool designed to bring order and clarity to the often-chaotic process of creating the proposal itself.

Alan Thompson