The first question before a bid is what it goes for.
Everything needed to answer that is in the federal award record, and almost nobody arranges it. The platforms that do charge more for pricing intelligence than most small suppliers pay for everything else put together.
the shape of the distribution, not a point on it
A range, not a number
For every code and class of thing with five awards behind it, the last five years are laid out as a distribution: the tenth percentile, the quartiles, the median, the ninetieth, the smallest and the largest. Once across the country, and again for every buying office with its own history.
An average would be useless here. One ceiling award of forty million sitting among two hundred deliveries of sixty thousand gives an average nobody has ever been paid. The middle half is where the work actually lands, and that is what the band draws.
- The median, the middle half, and the full spread
- The same code at your office read against the whole country
- The awards behind the band, so the number can be checked
- Five years, because a price from 2014 is not a price
The four things that decide whether the number is reachable
A price on its own is a trap. Beside every band sit the four figures that say whether you can win at it.
How often it is competed. A market that is mostly sole source is not a market you price into, it is one you have to get qualified for first.
How often only one supplier answered. This is the opening. A buying office used to a single quote usually wants a second one, and a high single-offer rate on a code you can actually do is the shortest route to a first award anywhere in the federal record.
Whether it is firm fixed price. Cost plus means your accounting has to stand up to audit before your number matters at all.
How much one supplier already holds. Sixty per cent of the money in one company is an incumbent to displace, which is a different job from winning an open competition, and price alone will not do it.
The same thing costs different money in different places
The same code at two offices is two markets. One has three suppliers who know the requirement and bid it hard; the other has one incumbent and a specification written around them. The medians can differ by a factor of ten.
Every office band carries the national band beside it and says the difference as a percentage. A median well above the country is either a harder requirement than the code suggests or a market with less competition in it, and both are worth knowing before you write a number down.
- Every office that buys the same class, ranked by how much they buy
- The difference against the national median, stated plainly
- The direction of travel against two years ago
- Typical contract length, so you can price the whole thing
Space Coast, Florida. Rings: 25 and 50 miles.
Where a figure is missing, it says so
The award record does not always carry the number of offers, the extent of competition or the contract type. Where the field is empty this says "not stated" rather than reporting zero, because a zero you cannot tell from a blank is worse than no number at all. A band never rests on fewer than five awards, and a band built from a very large set says that it is an even sample rather than pretending to have read every row.
Where it is in the app
Pricing, under Intelligence in the menu. Intelligence is the part of LastAwarded that finds the market, one of the eight parts.
Related
- ForecastWhat the same office is likely to buy next.
- Award historyEvery award behind every band.
- Contracting peopleWho to ask when the band does not explain itself.
See who was last awarded in your NAICS
Every code, every buying office, every vendor and every recompete, organized from the federal record and read nightly. Open it with a plan.