Hit Rate/Win Rate
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Hit rate (also called win rate) is the percentage of pursued opportunities a firm wins, expressed either as a count of proposals won divided by proposals submitted, or as fee value won divided by total fee value pursued; these two calculations draw from the same data but routinely produce different numbers, and firms that conflate them are measuring different things without knowing it.
Why the calculation method determines what the number actually tells you
A firm that wins three of ten proposals has a 30% count-based hit rate. If those three wins were all small projects and the seven losses were large ones, the fee-weighted hit rate might be 12%. Both numbers are accurate; neither is the hit rate without a qualifier. Fee-weighted hit rate correlates more directly to revenue performance, which is why finance and executive leadership tend to prefer it, while BD teams often default to count-based because it's easier to track in a spreadsheet. The more consequential distinction is whether the denominator includes no-go decisions: firms that exclude abandoned pursuits from the calculation inflate their apparent win rate by hiding the misses that never made it to submission.
Where hit rate shows up in pursuit decisions
Go/no-go analysis is the most direct application: a firm with a 20% count-based hit rate submitting 40 proposals per year is absorbing 32 losses annually, and the question is whether the four to eight wins justify that burn rate on staff time and proposal budget. Some firms set floor thresholds by market sector, requiring a projected win probability above 35% before committing pursuit resources. Hit rate by client type, project delivery method (design-build versus design-bid-build), or geographic market often reveals where a firm is actually competitive versus where it is filling a competitive field as a courtesy submitter. Debrief data is the only reliable way to close the loop between projected win probability at go/no-go and the actual result.
The tracking gap that corrupts the metric over time
Hit rate is only as accurate as the pursuit tracking behind it. Firms that log RFP responses but not RFQ submissions, or that close out won projects in the CRM while letting losses go unrecorded, end up with a numerator and denominator that don't reflect the same universe of opportunities. Shortlist conversion rate (proposals that reached interview divided by proposals submitted) is a separate and often more useful diagnostic metric because it isolates where in the funnel the firm is losing: before the shortlist, or on the shortlist. Kantiv surfaces historical pursuit outcomes alongside project and client data during active pursuits, so teams can assess win patterns against a specific client or procurement type before committing to a submission.
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