Find out where your responses actually lose.
Pursuits, submissions and outcomes recorded against the decisions that produced them — so win and loss patterns can be read by buyer type, contract vehicle and evaluation criterion, and the outcomes nobody ever explained are counted as exactly that.
- Produces
- Pipeline, outcome and pattern reporting
- Built from
- Your own decisions and results
- Counts separately
- Outcomes with no debrief
“We lose on price” is the most expensive assumption in proposal work.
Ask a bid team why it loses and you will get an answer within two seconds. Ask for the evidence and you will get a story about the last loss, which is the one everybody remembers rather than the one that is representative.
The data to answer it properly exists, but only if somebody kept it: which pursuits were qualified, which were declined and why, what was submitted, what came back, and — where a debrief was given — which criterion actually decided it. In most organizations the qualification decision is not recorded, so there is nothing to join the outcome to.
And an analytics page that hides its gaps is worse than no analytics page. Half the losses in public procurement come with no debrief at all; distributing those across the reasons that are known makes a tidier chart and a false one.
- Improvement aimed at the wrong thingCutting price when the losses were decided on technical approach is a margin sacrifice that changes nothing.
- No answer to “should we bid these?”Without outcomes by buyer type and incumbency, the pursuit strategy is whoever argued best in the meeting.
- Nothing to hold a threshold againstA bid threshold set by feel cannot be moved by evidence, because there is no evidence.
From a recorded decision to a pattern you can act on.
Every step is joining something to something else. The reporting is only as good as the decisions and outcomes that were captured on the way.
Capture the decision
Qualification decisions, their reasoning and their conditions are stored against the opportunity when they are made.
A decision record that an outcome can later be joined to.
Record the submission
What was submitted, when, by whom, against which requirements and under which brand template.
A submission with its content and its schedule attached, not just a date in a spreadsheet.
Record the outcome
Award, loss, cancellation or no decision — with evaluator scores and debrief text where they were given.
An outcome joined to the pursuit, and an explicit unknown where no reason was ever supplied.
Group by things you can change
Buyer type, category, contract vehicle, incumbency, response duration and evaluation criterion.
Comparisons between segments where a different decision was actually available.
Take it back to the thresholds
Patterns are read against the match weights and bid threshold that produced the pursuits.
A weighting or threshold change with a reason recorded, rather than a preference.
Six months of one pipeline, including the part nobody can explain.
Twenty-four submissions and seven awards, the criteria that decided the seventeen losses, and four outcomes with no debrief — shown as their own category, because that is what they are.
Twenty-four submissions, seven awards, and four outcomes nobody explained
61
Of 412 matched above threshold
24
Six months
4 more than the prior half
7
Two of them displacements
19
Shortest 9, longest 41
3 days shorter
From debriefs and evaluator scoresheets. The last bar is the honest one: four outcomes have no recorded reason at all.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Technical approach scored below the leader | 5 |
| Price | 4 |
| Past performance relevance | 2 |
| Management approach | 1 |
| Non-responsive — a mandatory item missed | 1 |
| No debrief received | 4 |
Awards are recorded on the month the decision was published, not the month of submission.
| Period | Submitted | Awarded |
|---|---|---|
| Feb | 3 | 1 |
| Mar | 5 | 1 |
| Apr | 4 | 0 |
| May | 6 | 2 |
| Jun | 3 | 2 |
| Jul | 3 | 1 |
Raised the bid threshold on pursuits with an entrenched incumbent
Three of the five technical-approach losses were displacement bids against an incumbent holding the scope through two option years.
Moved the pricing review two weeks earlier
Every price loss was submitted in the final three days, when the pricing narrative had no time left to answer the technical volume.
Made the compliance check a gate rather than a step
One non-responsive submission is one too many, and it was a mandatory form.
An outcome is recorded against the response project it belongs to: the award decision, the date, the evaluator scores where they were published, and the debrief text where one was given.
What happens when there is no debrief
It is counted as unexplained and shown as its own category, in every chart, forever. The alternative — distributing four unknown losses across the reasons that are known — makes a tidier chart and a false one, and it is exactly the kind of quiet estimate that turns an analytics page into a story.
Every number here belongs to the fixture company whose pipeline it is. None of it is a claim about what using this product does to anybody’s win rate.
Nothing above is a live query or another customer’s pipeline. Every record in it was written for this page, and no buying organization named in it is real.
What makes the reporting trustworthy.
The charts are the easy part. These are the properties that decide whether the numbers can be argued with.
Outcomes joined to decisions
A result is attached to the qualification decision that produced the pursuit, so the reasoning can be read against what happened.
Losses by evaluation criterion
Where a debrief or a published scoresheet exists, the deciding criterion is recorded — which is the only version of “why we lose” worth having.
Unknowns counted as unknown
Outcomes with no debrief appear as their own category in every view. They are never distributed across the reasons that are known.
Segments you can act on
Buyer type, category, vehicle, incumbency and response duration — dimensions where a different decision was actually available.
Cycle time, end to end
From match to decision, decision to submission, submission to award — so the part of the process that is slow is identified rather than assumed.
Every chart has a table
The design system requires it: each chart carries the same data as a table for screen readers, and two series are distinguished by dash pattern as well as colour.
Questions this is for.
Three teams with a decision to make and no evidence to make it on.
A team about to cut price
- Believes it is losing on cost and is considering a margin change across the board.
- Losses grouped by deciding criterion, with the unexplained ones shown separately.
- The pricing conversation starts from what the debriefs actually said rather than from the last painful loss.
A firm setting next year’s pursuit strategy
- Needs to decide which buyer types and categories to concentrate on with a fixed proposal capacity.
- Win rate and cycle time by segment, joined to the qualification decisions that started each pursuit.
- Capacity is pointed at the segments where this firm actually converts, with the working shown.
A capture lead defending a threshold
- Wants to stop bidding displacement opportunities below a score and needs more than an opinion.
- Outcomes for displacement pursuits against incumbency and score band.
- A threshold change made against evidence, and recorded so next year can argue with it.
Basic reporting everywhere, advanced analytics at Business.
Pipeline and outcome tracking are part of every plan, because a product that recorded decisions but hid the results would be keeping the useful half. Advanced analytics — the segmented views and the cross-dimension patterns — arrive with Business.
- Every plan records pursuits, submissions and outcomes with their decisions attached.
- Business and above include advanced analytics.
- Business and above also add the API, if the numbers need to live in a warehouse beside everything else.
- Agency keeps the reporting separable per client profile, so one client’s results are not mixed into another’s.
Plan names and allowances are mirrored from the billing catalog. Amounts are on the pricing page, which reads them from Stripe rather than from a number typed into a marketing page.
What people ask about analytics.
Where does the outcome data come from?
From your own pursuits: the qualification decision, the submission, and the award decision when it is published or reported. Where a debrief or an evaluator scoresheet is available, the deciding criterion is recorded with it. Nothing is imported from other customers.
What happens when there is no debrief?
It is counted as unexplained and shown as its own category, permanently. Spreading unknown losses across the known reasons produces a chart that looks complete and is not, which is the specific way an analytics page becomes a story.
Can we compare ourselves against other companies?
No. There is no benchmark, no industry average and no percentile, because publishing one would mean using other organizations’ results — and their data serves them, not a chart on somebody else’s dashboard.
Can we get the data out?
Yes, through the API on the plans that include it. The same objects the interface reads are available to a warehouse or a reporting tool, scoped to your organization by the key you called with.
How long before it says anything useful?
As long as it takes your team to run enough pursuits for a pattern to exist, which is a function of your volume rather than of the product. What it can do from the first week is show what is missing: the pursuits with no recorded decision, and the outcomes with no reason.
Load last year and see whether you were right.
Record the pursuits and outcomes you already have, group the losses by what decided them, and find out whether the story your team tells about why it loses survives the data.