Losing a bid and hearing nothing is the worst outcome, because it leaves you guessing. A debrief replaces the guessing with what the buyer is able to tell you about your own submission.
A debrief is a post-competition discussion offered by many public buyers. The usual way to get one is simple: ask, in writing, through the contact named in the solicitation, and ask promptly while the process is still fresh. The notice or the result letter often explains how requests are handled.
Know the limits before you go in. A buyer can generally explain how your bid was assessed against the published criteria and where it fell short. A buyer generally cannot hand over another bidder's submission, reveal confidential information about competitors, or reopen the decision in that conversation. A debrief is for learning, not for relitigating the result.
Ask questions that produce usable answers. Which criteria scored weakest? Where was the response unclear, unsupported or incomplete? Did anything mandatory cause concern? Write the answers down, attributed to criteria, not to impressions.
A loss you debrief is tuition. A loss you do not debrief is just a loss.
Then do the part most teams skip: feed the findings into the next bid as a checklist. KSPACE TECHNOLOGIES builds those lessons into its own bid reviews and into the solutions work it does with partners, so the same weakness does not travel from one submission to the next.
Takeaway: request the debrief, ask criterion by criterion, record what you hear, and turn it into a written fix list before the next notice closes.