what's your win probability?

Many businesses operate in the world of writing competitive proposals to win their work.   Facing multiple competitors and an involved customer proposal process, proposals can be expensive and uncertain in outcome.  One way to justify that investment is to consider win probabilities.   If there are three bidders on an opportunity, ask your team “what's our win probability?”   If the answer comes back around 30% or 1/3, that’s a red flag.  There are two things wrong with the 1/N answer.  First, it suggests a more detailed competitive assessment is needed.    Competitive assessments look at driving factors or evaluation criteria such as features, price, risk, past performance and customer relationship.   When the factors are graded and tallied for each competitor, including yourself, the answer is rarely a nice even 1/N.    Don’t you want to know where you really stand before making that proposal investment?  The second issue is that a win probability of 1/N suggests your offering is just average.    You are even with the competition with the same chance of winning as they have.   Don’t you want to believe you have an edge, a discriminator, something that makes your offering better than average before making the investment?    The more competitors there are, the more valid this viewpoint becomes.    For example, you may well decide to bid as the underdog in a two-way race.  But if it’s a 10-way competition, would you bid with a 10% win probability?  I wouldn’t.  I'd ask the team to go back and figure out how to improve our offering to position us better than 1/N.    Now all the above applies to industries where major pursuits and proposals are required.  If you’re in a business where quotations are generated every day, or the quote is the price tag at the counter, that’s a different ballgame (winning market share) and subject for a future blog.