The reason you lose recompetes and it's not capture's fault

The gate review is going exactly as expected. Your capture manager clicks through the slides with practiced confidence. Past performance: strong. Customer relationships: solid. Technical approach: compelling. Win probability: 85%.

"Any questions?"

Silence. A few nods. "Great. We're moving forward with capture."

But here's the uncomfortable question nobody asks in that room: Why do your gate reviews consistently show 70-85% win probabilities when your actual win rate hovers around 30%?

Half the "facts" in your decision matrix are actually assumptions presented as customer intelligence.

• Customer satisfaction? "They love us." (Translation: No recent complaints.)
• Decision-maker analysis? "Sarah's still the key influencer." (Translation: She was two years ago when we last asked.)
• Competitive threats? "The usual, but they love us, so nothing to worry about!" (Translation: no one asked.)

Looks great. The customer relationship is solid, and performance has been good -- we've got this one. But you just approved a recompete strategy built on hope, not intelligence.

And that 85% PWin? It's about as reliable as a weather forecast six months out.

Sound familiar?

The Comfortable Fiction We Tell Ourselves

Most government contracting teams consistently overestimate the strength of their customer relationships and their ability to gather meaningful intelligence.

Just because the contracting officer’s representative is friendly doesn't mean they trust you. Just because your team takes notes doesn't mean they know how to uncover what really matters.

Here's the truth: Your delivery team is embedded with this customer. For years, they have sat through program reviews, technical exchanges, informal check-ins, and water cooler discussions. They built rapport. They solved problems. They kept the customer happy.

Yet the review slides still contained the following assumptions disguised as facts:

• Customer satisfaction: High (based on positive feedback)
• Decision-maker influence: Sarah remains the key stakeholder
• Competitive landscape: No serious threats identified

Wait. That's not capture's problem – It's a delivery problem.

The Uncomfortable Truth About "Good Relationships"

Most executives make the same mistake: they confuse access with intelligence.

Your program manager gets invited to meetings. The COR responds to emails quickly. Subject matter expert discussions are collaborative. Everyone's professional and friendly, so it must be a good relationship.

But the customer isn't pulling your PM aside and saying, "Hey, we're probably going to restructure this whole thing next year."

Those insights require winning relationships, with different conversations, questions, and engagement skills. But it's easier to assume the relationship is solid than to admit we don't know what the customer is thinking.

What Gets Reported vs. What Matters

Check your last few gate review packages. I'll bet the customer intelligence section sounds like this:

"Customer feedback remains positive." "No performance issues reported." "Strong working relationship with customer team."

That's not intelligence. That's the absence of bad news.

Meanwhile, the information that shapes recompete outcomes never makes it into the gate review. Your delivery team sees them every day. They just don't recognize them as intelligence because no one's taught them what to look for.

In most cases, it's not that your team isn't engaging. It's that they're not equipped with the skills or situational awareness to engage in a way that moves the needle.

The Real Problem Isn't in Capture

By the time you're sitting in a gate review, the assumptions are already baked in. But where did those assessments come from?

Usually, it's the gut feeling of whoever's been closest to the customer. The program manager thinks everything's fine because meetings are friendly. The technical lead assumes satisfaction because there are no complaints.

At that point, everyone defaults to the comfortable assumptions:

"The customer loves us." "We don't see any serious competition." "Our performance speaks for itself."

But those assumptions don't win recompetes. Intelligence does.

Here's the truth: You can't win the recompete if you're not winning the relationship during performance. And you can't drive on-contract growth if your frontline teams don't know how to ask the right questions, read between the lines, or share that intel in a way that supports growth.

Intelligence isn't just collecting data—it starts with developing trust with the right stakeholders and then asking the right questions at the right time.

The Skill Gap Nobody Talks About

Your delivery team can manage scope, solve technical problems, and keep customers satisfied.

But they've never been taught how to gather intelligence. How to build winning relationships. How to recognize when small talk contains highly valuable intelligence.

That's the challenge: You're putting people on the frontlines, expecting them to contribute to growth in the absence of any growth or human intelligence( HI-Q) skills.

Improved Review Decisions

Start challenging assumptions by asking. WHO did you get this intelligence from, and then follow up with WHO did you validate it with?

Your delivery team is your best intelligence asset. They're trusted. They're onsite every day.

But if they don't know how to leverage that access, your gate reviews will keep feeling great, your Pwin calculations will keep looking optimistic, and you will continue approving win strategies built on hope rather than intelligence.

Until you stop accepting "the customer loves us" as fact, you'll keep watching those 80%+ PWins turn into painful losses.

Keep assuming you're doing fine. Keep building strategies on the assumption that the customer loves you, and reality will continue to find you on award day—and it won't be kind.

Nic Coppings, Senior Partner at Hi-Q Group,  has spent over 20 years discovering why technically brilliant teams keep losing. The answer isn't technical capability—it's Human Intelligence Quotient. While your team makes assumptions, your competitors are building Winning Relationships^® that unlock game-changing customer intelligence. In markets where relationships drive 82% of contract awards, technical superiority means nothing if customers don't feel understood enough to share their real problems. Hi-Q Group's training programs transform customer engagement and drive growth. Learn how Hi-Q Group can transform your organization. Schedule a time to chat here. Because when customers feel truly heard, they share the intel that wins billion-dollar contracts.