Win rate tells you how often your organization wins the pursuits that have been decided. It is a record of past outcomes. It is not a forecast for any bid you are working on now.
The definition
Win rate is the number of proposals won divided by the number of proposals decided. A proposal is decided when its outcome is recorded as won or lost. See Win/loss tracking for how to record an outcome.
Everything else is left out of both numbers:
- Proposals still in draft, in review, approved or submitted without an outcome.
- Proposals whose outcome is recorded as Cancelled, Pending or No Bid.
So a cancelled solicitation neither helps nor hurts your win rate. Nor does a proposal still waiting on an award.
Example: you won 3 proposals and lost 2. Win rate is 3 divided by 5, which is 60%, with the caption "3 won / 5 decided".
The Dashboard and the Team page compute win rate from this definition:
- On the Dashboard, "Win rate (this year)" counts outcomes recorded in the current calendar year, in UTC. A proposal counts in the year of its outcome date. When no outcome date was saved, it counts in the year the proposal was last updated.
- On the Team page, Team Win Rate counts every decided proposal in your organization, labeled "All time".
The Proposal Pipeline board shows "Win rate (all time)" from the same counts as the Team page, without the caption.
When it shows nothing
Until at least one proposal is decided, there is no win rate. The figure shows a dash instead of a percentage, and the caption reads "0 won / 0 decided".
A dash is not 0%. It means nothing has been decided yet, so there is nothing to divide. Once you record your first won or lost outcome, a percentage appears.
A win rate of 0% means every decided proposal was lost. A win rate of 100% means every decided proposal was won. Neither says much until the sample grows, as the next section explains.
Small samples
When fewer than five proposals are decided, the percentage comes with the note "too few decided pursuits to be predictive".
With so few outcomes, one more win or loss moves the figure a long way. Two wins out of three reads as 67%, and one more loss would make it 50%. Treat the figure as a count of what happened, not as a rate you can plan on. The note disappears at five decided proposals.
The note appears on the Dashboard and the Team page.
What win rate does not tell you
Win rate does not predict whether you will win a particular bid. It describes all of your decided pursuits together, and every bid differs in buyer, competition and fit. Propivix does not turn a return-on-investment estimate into a chance of winning.
To weigh a single bid, use the go/no-go analysis, described in Go/No-Go decisions.
Win rate also says nothing about why you won or lost. For that, record debrief notes and lessons learned with each outcome, as described in Win/loss tracking.