Twenty Bids, 10% Win Rate: Reading Your Own Tender History

A single loss, you know what to do with: we devoted an entire article to the three questions to ask the data after a lost tender.

But a loss is an event. Twenty losses are a map. And that is where almost everyone drops off: each lost file gets closed one at a time, the series never adds up, and the firm replays the same season the following year, in the same places, at the same prices, for the same results.

Article updated on July 22, 2026. Two methodology adjustments changed some figures: de-duplication of SEAO corpus exports (which lowers some totals) and the reclassification of mandated purchases as tenders rather than sole-source contracts. The figure-by-figure detail is in our methodology note.

The figure that justifies this article fits in one sentence: 144 firms submitted 20 bids or more from 2022 to 2025 while winning 10% of the time or less. Twenty files assembled, priced, submitted, and a series nobody read. None of those firms decided to be there. They arrived one bid at a time.

The file you are the only one not reading

Start with the uncomfortable fact: a good part of your bid history is public.

For tenders whose opening results do publish prices, SEAO makes accessible the names of the tenderers whose bid was opened and the amount disclosed, subject to the verifications provided for. Where the process leads to a contract, publication of its conclusion identifies the selected business. That data can serve to reconstruct a history, but its indefinite retention is not guaranteed: in municipal matters, the law imposes a minimum of three years from publication of the total amount of the expenditure, not permanence.

A methodical competitor can therefore reconstruct part of your submissions, your gaps and your habits. We showed how to do that reading on an opponent in our article on analyzing the competition.

Turn the tool on yourself. You hold a decisive advantage over any outside observer: you already know where you bid. All you are missing is what became of each of those notices, and that is what SEAO publishes.

The mechanics are covered in our guide to SEAO advanced search, and how to read each results page in our article on tender award results. What follows assumes the series is out: your submissions over the last three years, each with the buyer, your price, the winning price where published, the winner's name and the award method.

Question 1. What is your success rate, without indulgence?

The first figure in the series is the simplest: contracts won divided by bids submitted.

What you need to know before judging yours: winning is the norm, not the exception. Of 54,300 firms that bid on SEAO from 2022 to 2025, 45,000 won at least one contract. The large majority of bidders eventually wins something. We published detailed benchmarks in our article on tender win rates.

What your rate tells you therefore depends on its zone. A respectable rate confirms your place and moves the question toward growth. A weak rate over a handful of submissions says almost nothing: the sample is too small. But a rate of 10% or less over twenty submissions and more is not bad luck, it is a position in the market, and its cause is readable in the rest of the series.

Question 2. Do your gaps tell a trajectory?

For every loss whose opening prices are published, compute your gap to the winning price. Then read the series, not the points.

The market's reference points, to situate your own: when the lowest price wins, the median gap to the best losing price reaches 10.6%, and 30.4% of files are decided by less than 5%. One file in four is decided by 3.8% or less. The detail is in our price gap analysis.

Reading in series changes everything compared to reading file by file. Losing once by 3% is an anecdote. Losing eight times in a row by 2 to 6% is first-order information: your cost structure is in the race, and the market confirms it at every opening. Conversely, gaps that stretch year after year while the same winners tighten their grip describe a market closing itself, and no single file would have shown you that.

Above all, beware the reflex conclusion. A series of small gaps is not an instruction to cut your prices: it is proof that you lose narrowly, which is very different. What you do with it depends on your margins, not on a median.

Question 3. Do the same names keep showing up across from you?

Sort your losses by winner's name. It is the most telling column in the whole series.

If the same name beats you three times in the same market, you are no longer facing a competitor, you are facing a position. Our incumbent supplier analysis measures how solid those positions are: when the incumbent comes back to defend a contract, they keep it about 37% of the time in civil engineering, but close to 70% of the time in construction materials. Losing to a recurring-goods incumbent and losing to a project incumbent are not the same defeat, and the series tells you which one you are living.

And if the names beating you change every time, that is different information, just as useful: the market is open, nobody holds it, and your problem lies elsewhere, probably in question 2.

The background reference, measured across all of SEAO: among winning firms, the top 1% of most frequent winners take 28% of contracts and 60% of the dollars. Held markets exist. The series tells you whether you are in one.

Question 4. Which rooms are you fighting in?

Now look at where your submissions cluster: same buyers, same categories, same contract sizes?

The landscape is less uniform than people assume. Over the period observed, 30.7% of notices drew a single bid: close to a third of these competitive processes pit no one against anyone. The proportion varies enormously by market type, from about 40.8% in goods to 17.8% in construction work. We mapped those empty rooms in our analysis of single-bidder tenders.

The question the series asks is this: do your submissions cluster in highly contested notices while comparable markets attract fewer offers? Such a configuration can signal a targeting or scheduling issue. It does not, on its own, allow you to conclude that price or your file are not at play, nor to prescribe staying in a market or leaving it. Price, compliance, the quality of the offer, capacity and prior contractual relationships remain hypotheses the series can neither confirm nor rule out.

Question 5. What has the series cost you?

Last column, the only one SEAO cannot fill in for you: the preparation cost of each submission.

You alone know the hours spent per file. Multiply them by the series, and the reading changes nature: a success rate of 10% or less no longer just says "I lose often", it says "here is what losing has cost me over three years". A firm that submits without reading its series is financing everyone else's competition: it supplies the bidder count that legitimizes the process, and pays for it in hours.

That calculation is not a reason to give up. It is the denominator that was missing from every one of your bid decisions: aim for less crowded rooms, reserve the heavy files for notices where the series shows a real chance, or carry on exactly as before, but knowingly.

What the series does not say

The limits, as always, before the conclusions.

Your series contains only the notices for which an amount was made public at opening. That filter creates a risk of overrepresenting processes where price is directly observable, often but not exclusively lowest-price processes, since several quality procedures disclose only the names at opening. The bias is not uniform: in municipal matters, some procedures with an overall evaluation do disclose prices, while procedures with deferred knowledge of price do not disclose them at that stage. Its magnitude, in your case, is measured by comparing your sample with the full set of relevant notices. It is not deduced.

Nor does your series generally explain losses in processes where quality is evaluated: the standard results reproduce neither the detailed scores nor the specific grounds for a finding of non-compliance.

But that information is not necessarily out of reach, and that is the nuance almost nobody makes. Under the public bodies regime, several regulations require a debrief on written request sent within 30 days of the communication of results: the body must present the results by criterion and summarize the reasons why the bid was not selected. The ground for a rejection on inadmissibility or non-compliance must in any event be communicated to the tenderer concerned. In municipal matters, separate documents may contain scores, and section 99 of the Act may signal the existence of a cheaper or better-scored bid found non-compliant. We set out these regimes in our article on tender award results.

The consequence for your series is direct: losses less than 30 days old are the only ones where that door is still open. The older ones you will only be able to read in what is published.

And the series describes the past. It sets neither your next price nor your next target. It does one thing only, but does it better than any intuition: it tells you which of the problems you have.

The four steps that turn twenty losses into an asset

In short

A loss gets digested. A series gets read. They are two different exercises, and the second is the one almost nobody does, even though a good part of the data it requires is public and free.

Twenty bids without a contract are a signal worth examining, not a diagnosis already made. Rate, gaps, names and visible competition come from the series; the preparation cost has to come from your internal data. Five columns, and your next bidding season stops being a rerun of the last one.

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Frequently asked questions

Sources

Adjudica analyses of SEAO open data, published in full in the articles cited: supplier concentration and chronic losers (432,000 bids, 2022-2025), price gaps (535,908 priced bids, 2016-2025), incumbent supplier (50,800 recompetitions, 2021-2026), single-bidder tenders (88,000 notices, 2021-2024). Observation windows differ from one analysis to the next: each is stated in the corresponding article, with its method and limits. The preparation cost of a bid is not a field published by SEAO and cannot be deduced from this series. This article advances no figure for it: any analysis of that cost rests on the firm's internal data.

Legal framework: regulations under the Act respecting contracting by public bodies (CQLR, c. C-65.1, r. 2, r. 4, r. 5 and r. 5.1) for opening arrangements, communication of grounds for rejection, and the debrief by criterion on written request within 30 days; Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies, CQLR, c. C-65.01, s. 5 (definition of "enterprise"), s. 49 (names and prices at opening), ss. 53, 58, 60 and 68 (arrangements and exceptions), ss. 63 and 64 (report with points by criterion), s. 99 (information published, cheaper or better-scored non-compliant bid, minimum three-year publication). References verified on LégisQuébec on July 18, 2026 as part of a cross-review.