Recording Bid Outcomes
Capture what actually happened on each pursuit — outcome, values, competitors, and lessons — to sharpen future predictions
Recording Bid Outcomes
The bid decision framework only improves if it learns what actually happened. Recording outcomes closes the loop: it turns each pursuit into training data for win probability and populates the Performance Dashboard.
The five outcomes
Record one of five outcomes from the opportunity workspace:
| Outcome | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Awarded | You submitted and won |
| Lost | You submitted and another vendor won |
| Declined | You decided not to bid |
| Withdrawn | You started but pulled out before submission |
| No Response | The process ended without a decision you can act on (cancelled, no award announced) |
Note
Record declined and withdrawn pursuits too. They don't count toward your win rate (only awarded vs. lost submissions do), but they matter for measuring decision quality and effort spent.
What the form captures
The outcome form adapts to the outcome you choose:
Always available
- Outcome date
- Actual hours spent — powers the hours-per-win efficiency metrics
- Our proposed value — what you bid; enables value-based comparisons in win probability
- Known competitors — add the companies you know were in the running
- Debrief notes — free-form observations from the debrief
- Lessons learned — what you would do differently
- Was the recommendation correct? — whether Cothon's bid/no-bid advice held up; this feeds the decision-accuracy metric
When you won (Awarded)
- Final contract value — the awarded amount
- Success factors — what won it, with quick-pick suggestions (pricing, relationships, technical strength, and so on)
When you lost
- Winning vendor name and winning value — who beat you, and at what price
- Failure factors — why you lost, also with quick-pick suggestions
You can reopen and update a recorded outcome later — for example when the final contract value becomes public.
Why each field pays off
- Outcomes drive your overall, similar-value, and department win rates — the backbone of win probability.
- Proposed and winning values show you your pricing gap on losses over time.
- Known competitors builds a private record of who you actually face, complementing competitive intelligence.
- Success factors on wins resurface later: when a similar opportunity appears, its win probability card lists your comparable wins with the factors that won them.
- Hours spent turns the Performance Dashboard's effort metrics (total hours, hours per win) from guesses into measurements.
- "Was the recommendation correct?" is how you audit the model itself.
Tip
Make recording the outcome part of your debrief ritual — do it in the meeting, while values, competitors, and reasons are still fresh. A two-minute entry per bid is enough to keep every downstream metric honest.
Good debrief practice
- Request a debrief from the buyer on lost federal bids — evaluator feedback is the highest-quality failure factor you can record.
- Separate price from proposal quality in failure factors; the fix for each is different.
- Be specific in lessons learned — "start security clearance paperwork two weeks earlier" beats "start earlier".
- Record promptly — outcomes recorded months later tend to lose the values and competitor details that make the data useful.
Where the data shows up
- Win Probability — every recorded submitted outcome refines your baselines; after 3 recorded submissions your real win rate replaces the market baseline.
- Performance Dashboard — win rate, value won, outcome distribution, decision accuracy, and industry breakdowns all come from recorded outcomes.
- Lessons Learned — debrief insights feed your organization's lessons-learned knowledge base.
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