What Past Award Data Tells You Before You Bid

Published award results are the closest thing to a reserve price a public buyer will ever give you, and they are free. Most bidders never look at them, then price against a guess about competition.

What award data contains

When a public tender is awarded, the result is generally published: who won, at what value, against what estimate, and often how many bidders participated.

From a series of those, four things become visible:

The discount to estimate this buyer accepts. If a department has awarded consistently at a certain discount to its published estimates, that is the band a winning bid sits in.

How many bidders turn up. Two bidders and eleven bidders are different markets, and they justify different pricing.

Who wins repeatedly. The firms that win a buyer's work regularly are your actual competition, not the market in general.

Whether estimates are realistic. A buyer whose awards cluster near the estimate is estimating well. One whose awards land far below is estimating high, and the published estimate is a poor guide to what the work is worth.

Browse published awards and buying organisations.

Using the discount band

The single most useful number: for this buyer, in this category, at this value band, what discount to estimate has won recently?

That gives you a target price to compare against your cost-plus-margin price. Three outcomes, and each has an action:

• Your price is inside the band. Bid.
• Your price is above the band but you can explain why, for example you priced risk others did not. Decide deliberately whether to carry that risk unpriced. Usually the answer is no.
• Your price is well above the band. This buyer's work is not economic for you at your cost base. That is worth knowing early rather than after six losses.

See how to price a government tender.

Bidder count changes strategy

A tender that historically attracts a large field is a price contest, and the realistic question is whether your cost base wins it.

A tender that attracts two or three bidders is a different exercise. There may be a reason few bid: a difficult site, an onerous condition, a specification only some can meet. If you can meet it, thin competition is an opportunity. If you cannot see why the field is thin, find out before assuming it is luck. See only one bid received.

Repeat winners

Where the same firm wins a buyer's work repeatedly, understand why before deciding it is unwinnable. Legitimate reasons are common: they are local and their mobilisation cost is lower, they hold plant suited to the work, they have the registration class and the experience record, or they have simply priced sharply.

If the advantage is structural and you cannot match it, put your effort into buyers where you are competitive. If it is a price position you can match, you have a target.

What award data does not tell you

Being honest about the limits:

Estimates are not always comparable. Departments estimate differently, and a discount to a conservative estimate means something different from a discount to an aggressive one.

Scope varies. Two contracts of similar value may involve very different work.

Award value is not final value. Variations change it, and published award data usually reflects the award, not the final bill.

Treat it as a strong prior, not as a rule.

Building the habit

Before pricing any tender, spend ten minutes on: this buyer's last several awards in this category, the discount band, and the typical bidder count. Ten minutes.

Over a year, that habit tells you which buyers are economic for you, which categories you are structurally competitive in, and where your cost base needs work. That is a strategy, arrived at from data rather than from impressions.

Avsar keeps published award history against each buyer and category and shows it alongside the tender you are considering. See the intelligence module and awards.