Why do we keep losing bids we thought we'd win?

The evaluation section tells you what the buyer will actually reward and how many points each part carries. Read it before the scope. Then allocate your response effort in roughly the same proportions as the points.

If technical approach and experience together carry 70 percent, then 70 percent of your hours belong there, and a price cut that costs you margin buys you very little.

Evaluators score what is written on the page against stated criteria, and the state documents its selection reasoning in a procurement summary. They are not permitted to award points for what they assume you can do, or for what your competitor told them at a conference.

The most common self-inflicted loss is a strong firm describing capability in general terms while a weaker firm describes three specific comparable projects with names, dates, dollar values, and contactable references. The second response scores higher, and it should.

Stop guessing. Request the award information and, where available, a debrief. For state services awards not going to the low bidder, the low bidder receives advance notice, and a bidder who submitted a bid may request the reasons the proposed awardee was selected. Post-award records are frequently obtainable as well.

Two or three real debriefs will tell you more about your win rate than a year of internal theorizing, and they usually point at the same one or two categories every time.

Losing scored categories repeatedly is an evidence problem with a specific fix: build the reference library, get the certifications, name the staff, capture the metrics from completed projects while people still remember them.

It is also a qualification problem. Some of these losses should never have been bids. Raising your bid/no-bid threshold usually improves the win rate faster than improving the writing.