Why your Pwin is an illusion

The capture manager covered the summary with confidence. Past performance: good. Technical approach: solid. Competitive intel: documented. Customer touchpoints: logged and color-coded in Deltek.

"We're in great shape. The customer loves us and our solution. Limited competition! PWin around 75% - let's move it forward!"

Six months later, they lost to a competitor who wasn't even mentioned in that review.

Sound familiar? This scenario plays out weekly around the Beltway—and the root cause isn't what most executives think.

The Real Problem

Here's what's really happening in those "successful" gate reviews: Teams are confusing activity with actual intelligence, and pleasantries with real relationships.

According to Unanet's 2024 GAUGE Report, 69% of contractors say winning new business is their top challenge. Despite increased business development investment and countless "customer intimacy" initiatives, win rates remain stubbornly flat. Why? Most organizations are measuring the wrong things entirely.

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Consider what passes for "customer intelligence" in most gate reviews:

"The program manager said they're excited about our approach" - yeah, at industry day with 50 other contractors. "We have great relationships across the customer base" - people return your calls. "Our COR loves working with us," but has zero influence on procurement.

That's not intelligence. That's expensive networking.

The Relationship Delusion

Most government contractor executives often confuse social and business relationships. Here's the difference that actually determines who wins:

Social relationship: The deputy director greets you warmly at the holiday party and asks about your kids.

Business partnership: The deputy director calls you personally to discuss a capability gap before the requirement hits print—because solving their mission challenges helps advance both your objectives.

One feels good. The other wins contracts.

While you're logging "positive customer interactions," your competitors are building actual partnerships where government stakeholders share budget realities before they become public, evaluation priorities that won't appear in the RFP, internal politics affecting procurement timelines, and mission drivers that reshape technical requirements.

The Recompete That Went Wrong

I watched a large systems integrator lose a major recompete they'd held for nearly a decade. Their gate review showed green across every metric: 127 customer meetings, 12 industry events, "strong relationships" with 23 stakeholders. PWin: 80%.

What did they miss? A new SES-level official was quietly reshaping evaluation criteria to address a capability gap that the incumbent had never known existed.

Their competitor had built a real relationship with this official, understood her priorities, and positioned accordingly. The incumbent remained connected to officials who were no longer decision makers.

They lost because they measured activity, not influence.

What You Should Be Measuring Instead

While you're debating PWin percentages, leading firms are implementing measurement approaches that track what actually matters:

Are customers sharing challenges with you that they won't discuss with competitors? Do your relationships include actual decision-makers and influencers? Are you hearing symptoms or root causes? Are customers requesting your input before the requirements are finalized?

Organizations that systematically measure relationship quality—not contact quantity—report significant win rate improvements within 18 months. They're also identifying relationship gaps and taking action to address them, rather than relying solely on their existing contacts.

Three Questions to ask Your Team

At your next pursuit review, bypass the activity reports and ask these three questions:

First: "What has this customer shared with us about this opportunity that they probably haven't told our competitors?" If the answer is "standard RFI responses," you don't have the relationship you think you do.

Second: "Which specific stakeholders on this opportunity would advocate for our solution in internal meetings where we're not present?" Name names—this is where contracts are really won or lost.

Third: "When did this customer last proactively contact us about a challenge or need?" If they only engage when you initiate, the relationship is one-sided.

If your team struggles to answer these specifically, your PWin isn't 75%. It's unknown.

The Competitive Reality You're Missing

Here's what really bothers me: while your team celebrates "good relationships," your most innovative competitors are systematically building relationships that allow them to shape the opportunity.

They often know which pursuits they can win before the RFP drops. More concerning? They're doing this at scale, creating sustainable advantages while you debate whether that program manager "really likes" your solution.

The Binary Truth About PWin

Let's end where we started—with that confident gate review and its 75% PWin.

Here's what that number actually represents: a guess based on incomplete information, social dynamics that aren't real relationships, and activity metrics every competitor can match.

PWin is binary: 100% or 0%. Win or lose.

Until you measure relationship quality—not contact quantity—you're making multi-million-dollar decisions based on hope rather than intelligence.

And in today's GovCon market, hope is expensive.

The firms that figure this out first will own their markets. The rest will continue to wonder why their "sure thing" pursuits keep going to competitors they never saw coming.

Nic Coppings is Senior Partner at Hi-Q Group, where he's helped hundreds of government contractors turn their customer relationships into competitive advantages. Over 20 years of working with thousands of growth professionals, he's seen technically superior teams lose winnable pursuits because they mistake relationship activity for relationship influence. He works with companies across the federal market to enhance their approaches to building, measuring, and leveraging customer relationships, thereby increasing win rates.