Does your RFP win rate tell you enough?

Your RFP win rate, the bids you won out of the bids you answered, stays the key figure your team reports. To see how much of that rate comes from where you bid rather than how well, you can add a further view: set each bid against how many bidders its tender drew. In EU award data, most tenders draw few bidders: the World Bank's study for the European Commission, European Union: Competition in Public Procurement, found that between 2018 and 2023 the median lot drew just two bids. That field size gives each bid a chance baseline, and the gap between your rate and the baseline shows where the team beats the rest of the field and which bids are worth entering. The stages below follow the order of work in your wider RFP response process: calculate the rate, split it by segment, set each segment's baseline from the field size, choose bids based on your edge over it, and report the result.

What you need before you start

This is for the head of bids or bid manager who reports a win rate upward and decides which tenders the team staffs. The one input you need is a bid register with a row for every lot you bid, owned by one person who updates it after every award rather than when the quarterly report is due. If you report the figure, either own the register yourself or name the person who does.

Each row carries these fields:

• Outcome: won, lost, declined, pending, or cancelled.
• Bids received: how many bids the lot drew, where you can find out.
• Award weighting: price only, or the price and quality (and social value where relevant) split.
• Contract value.
• Type of contract: works, services or supplies, or product line.
• Incumbency: whether you hold the current contract or are bidding as new business.
• Country: the buyer's country.
• Award date.
• Contract start date.

Five of these fields matter because they change the odds, and the two dates support pipeline management and forecasting that teams also run from the register. Contract type, value, incumbency, country, and award weighting each shift either the size of the field or your chance against it, as the sections that follow show. Leave one out, and you'll have a blended figure you can't explain when it moves.

If your register only goes back a year, start with that and backfill older lots from award notices and debrief notes where you have them. A short, complete register beats a long one with gaps in the bidder count.

Calculate win rate on bids submitted

Divide the lots you won by the lots you bid that have reached an award decision, then multiply by 100. That's the whole formula, and it matches the measure the World Bank study uses: it defines a supplier's success rate as the share of its submitted bids that result in a contract award. Using the same definition lets your register sit beside public award data without translation.

Win rate = lots won ÷ lots bid and decided × 100

Count per lot, not per tender pack. A buyer awards each lot on its own, and the bidder counts you'll need for the baseline are per lot too. When you bid several lots of one tender, each lot is a separate bid, won or lost on its own. Rolling them into one line hides the lots you lost and leaves the baseline with nothing to match against. Where a tender has a single lot, the tender and the lot are the same row.

Hold the definition steady once you've set it. Before you settle it, agree the report's format with the people who receive it, so the measures don't change later because leadership wanted different ones. A rate that changes its counting rules between quarters can't show a trend, and the trend is what you'll report in the end.

Split the rate by the segments that change the odds

Break your rate into segments before you judge it, because one blended figure averages bids with little in common. Three splits matter most: incumbency, contract size and country. Type of contract matters as well, and its figures sit with the baselines in the next section.

Incumbent and new business

Report re-bids and new bids as separate rates. Across the EU27 between 2019 and 2023, incumbents took 70% of awarded value and first-time winners took 30%, according to the World Bank study. New entrants made up 36% of winners in 2023. Those are shares of value and of winners, not win rates, but they point the same way: holding the contract carries weight. A blended rate rises or falls with how many of your contracts came up for renewal that year, and that tells leadership nothing about how well the team bid.

Contract size

Band your bids by value, because larger contracts draw bigger fields. In the same data, contracts over €20 million averaged more than 9.2 bids with a median of 3. Contracts over €3 million averaged 5.1, and those under €300,000 averaged 4.9, with a median of 2. The gap between the average and median in the top band suggests a few crowded competitions are pulling the average up. A team that moves into larger contracts can see its rate fall while it bids just as well, and it should be able to show that.

Country and market

Compare rates only between similar markets. Average bidder numbers ranged from 2 to 16 across EU countries, with medians from 1 to 8; Ireland averaged 16 and Poland 2. The study warns that contract types and volumes differ between countries, so not all of that spread is competition. Outside the EU27, the UK averaged 8.4 bids per award and Norway 5.7 over 2018 to 2023, both with a median of 4. Most UK notices stopped appearing on Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), the EU's notice portal, after 2020, so the UK figure leans on earlier years. If you bid in several countries, give each its own segment.

Set each segment's baseline from the number of bidders

Give each bid a chance baseline of one divided by the number of bids its lot received: the share of wins you'd expect if every bidder had the same odds. A lot that drew two bids gives a baseline of 50%; one that drew four gives 25%. Nobody bids expecting equal odds, and that's the point. The baseline is a reference, and the gap between it and your results is what the team's bidding adds.

For a segment, add up 1 ÷ bids received across every bid in it, using your own register. The total is the segment's expected wins at chance. Divide it by the number of bids for the baseline rate, then set your actual wins and rate beside it. Your edge is your win rate minus that baseline, in percentage points. Nearly 67% of EU awards drew three or fewer bids, so baselines of a third or higher are common, and a rate that looks respectable on its own can still sit below them.

Where the bidder count comes from

Take the count for each lot from your own records first. For a lot published on TED, the contract award notice records how many bids were received, and the World Bank study draws on award data like this. A debrief is the other source: ask the buyer how many bids it received, and record the answer even when the rest of the feedback is thin.

Where a public lot's count is missing, fall back on the EU median for its type of contract over 2018 to 2023: 3 for services, 4 for works and 2 for supplies. Use medians, not averages. Average bids rose from 5.5 to 6 for services and from 4.7 to 5.3 for works, and stayed at 4.1 for supplies, each well above its median.

A private RFP often publishes no count at all. Ask at debrief, and if the buyer won't say, leave that bid out of the baseline and the edge rather than guess. A smaller, honest baseline is worth more than a complete one built on estimates.

Worked example: Is a 30% win rate good?

Take a 30% win rate and test it against the typical lot in each contract type. This illustration is built on EU medians, not a real team's figures.

So 30% is a weak result in a segment of typical supply lots, roughly average in services and a real edge in works. With your own counts, the arithmetic is the same, bid by bid. Every lot against one rival adds half a win to expected wins, and every lot against three rivals adds a quarter. A segment where actual wins clear that sum is one where the team beats the field.

Raise your win rate by bidding where your edge is largest

Rank the opportunities in front of you by your edge in their segment and by how each tender weights price, then staff the bids at the top. You already weigh how many bids the team can staff and what each one costs against its chance of winning. The edge figures from your register turn that judgement into numbers you can defend in a bid/no-bid meeting.

A win rate moves in two ways. The team can beat the field more often, which raises the edge. Or it can move into segments with smaller fields, which raises the rate while the edge stays the same. A team that shifts from works lots to supplies lots can report a better rate while bidding no better. Leadership needs to see which of the two happened, which is why the report in the next section carries the edge beside the rate.

Award weighting matters most for new business. The World Bank study found that lowest price as the only award criterion generally reduced opportunities for new entrants, with a smaller effect on larger contracts. A new-business bid on a price-only award, in a segment where your edge is already negative, is the first one to drop.

To rank a pipeline:

1. Find each opportunity's segment in your register and read off its edge.
2. Estimate its chance as one over the expected field size, plus that edge.
3. Mark any new-business bid where price is the only award criterion.
4. Set each estimated chance against the bid's cost in people and time.
5. Commit to bids in that order until the team's capacity runs out.

Feed the ranking into your go/no-go decision rather than replacing it, because edge says nothing about strategic value or a relationship worth building. Choosing better bids is half the job. The other half is understanding why competent bids still lose once you've entered.

In SEQUESTO: when you direct him to, through a workflow set up for it or by asking him, James in SEQUESTO aOS assesses an opportunity and gives a bid-or-no-bid recommendation with reasons, drawn from the tender documents and your organisation's own information. You make the decision, and SEQUESTO documents the reasoning for review.

Report win rate as edge, segment by segment

After each award, report three figures for every segment: the win rate, its chance baseline and the edge between them. Compare them with your own earlier figures rather than with an outside average.

TED award notices can't produce an independent industry average. The World Bank study notes that TED holds no structured information on non-winning bidders, and it could calculate supplier success rates only for the nine countries that supplied national datasets. An average quoted to you can't be checked against the field your team actually bids in.

Even a sound average would hide how much results differ. In Estonia's national data for 2020 to 2024, 48% of businesses that bid for at least one public contract were never awarded one, so results spread widely between suppliers. Your own trend, segment by segment, is the benchmark for whether the team is improving.

Where a segment's edge stays low across several awards, look at how those responses are planned before anyone drafts, and bring the next quarter's figures back to the same table.

Win rate checklist

Run through this before you report the figure or rank the next pipeline.

• Your win rate divides lots won by lots bid that reached an award decision.
• Each lot counts as its own bid, never rolled up by tender pack.
• Re-bids and new bids are reported as separate rates.
• Bids are also split by contract-size band, contract type, and country.
• Every bid in the register records the number of bids its lot received, or is marked as left out of the baseline.
• Each segment's baseline is the sum of 1 ÷ bids received over its bids, using the EU median for the contract type only when a public lot's count is missing.
• Each segment's edge is its win rate minus its baseline, in percentage points.
• Open opportunities are ranked by segment edge and award weighting before the bid/no-bid decision.
• New-business bids on price-only awards are flagged.
• The report shows rate, baseline and edge for each segment after every award, set against your own earlier figures.