Watch the Tape: Six Questions to Evaluate Your BD Wins and Losses
Football coaches do not judge a season by one game. They watch the tapes every week and look for what repeats. A single loss says the other team played better that day. Losing five games in a row says something about your strategy, or lack of it.
Many AEC firms debrief pursuits one at a time. The team meets after a loss, gets feedback from the client, files that information away, and moves on to the next RFP. Each debrief makes sense on its own, but together they do not add up, because the pattern that costs you work lives across pursuits and not inside any one of them. The fix belongs in your systems.
Next time, set a quarterly review of the pursuits you chased, won, lost, or passed on, and measure the quarter against your goals. See if your stuck to your go/no-go process. Use these six principles as a guide for chasing work every time.
- Make sure the work you chased matches the work you said you wanted. A go/no-go works when it is a quick test against the firm’s strategic business goals rather than a two-page checklist, and the first question on that test is whether a project meets the market goals the partners defined. Pull the quarter’s pursuit list and sort it by sector, project type, and client type. Then compare that list to your plan. Many firms find that a meaningful share of their effort went to work outside the plan, and a win in the wrong sector still pulls the firm off course.
- Separate the wins that came from clients who already knew you. Repeat work is a strength, but it can also be a liability. A firm with repeat work from the same client can stay busy for years while its pipeline of new clients runs dry. The win rate that matters most is the one for new clients only, calculated without repeat work and without projects for which you were already prequalified. That number tells you whether your reputation is reaching people who have never hired you. If the gap between your overall win rate and your new-client win rate is wide, your marketing is working for people who already trust you but is not yet working for those who don’t.
- Record the reasons for each loss. Losing before the shortlist and losing at the interview are different problems, so track proposal hit rate and interview win rate separately. A firm that rarely makes the shortlist has a fit or reputation question to answer. A firm that makes the shortlist and loses the room has a message question to answer, because the team that won often had less experience and a clearer point of view. Rolling both stages into one number hides which one problem needs the most attention. At the end of the quarter, count the issues that caused you to lose, not just the losses.
- Put a cost on every pursuit. Every pursuit means of hours of time from your best people. Cost of client acquisition and marketing spend against budget are the indicators many firms track least, and they are the ones that show whether a win earned its effort. A project that consumed the studio for weeks may cost more than it will ever return in fee. Estimate the hours behind each pursuit, including principal time, and compare that number to the fee for the projects you won. Over a quarter, that comparison shows you which types of projects are worth the effort to win and which ones cost more to chase than they earn.
- Count the times that you didn’t stick to your process. A long, complicated go/no-go form invites people to ignore it, even when a policy exists. At the end of the quarter, check how many pursuits went through the proper review and how many times you skipped it. Add a column to your pursuit list to evaluate whether or not you instituted a formal go/no-go process, because those pursuits probably cost you the most money and time.
- Use your findings to make better decisions in the future. A review that produces no decision is a recap. End every quarterly review with a short list of changes, such as adjusting a go/no-go question, dropping a sector, naming a champion for a sector that is most challenging, or resetting your budget. Develop a process for making people accountable to implement these changes. An annual evaluation of the whole system, with quarterly course corrections along the way, keeps the review honest and keeps your team focused.
Firms that win consistently know what they are choosing to chase, and they check the results against that choice on a schedule. That is the tape worth watching.
Keep building influence!
