This module covers how to find opportunities in the federal market and find out more about them to decide whether you want to spend your valuable time and money on specific pursuits. Introduction to federal market. The cycle of business development. Ways to select the perfect customers for your portfolio of offerings and find the names and telephone numbers for your perfect contacts. Market research techniques. Six proven avenues to uncover opportunities ahead of the RFP release. Techniques for qualifying the opportunities correctly to determine the best fit for the business to avoid wasting time and money. Techniques for reviewing opportunities over their lifecycle to know when to stop or when to spend more to get you in a better position to win. How to create opportunities that weren't there before and how to shape existing opportunities. How to create an opportunity pipeline to grow your business consistently.

This module explains what capture is, covers its importance, and provides an overview of OST's Six Key Aspects of Capture.

This module covers how to create strong and lasting relationships with your government customers to learn about their true care-abouts, worries, challenges, mission drivers, and buying criteria and to get them to want to choose you. With whom to build the relationship beyond the contracting officer. How to approach government personnel, and how to continue working with them until the door shuts and the RFP comes out (and even after the door shuts). How to gain comprehensive understanding of what keeps the customer up at night, and what influences their buying process. How to leverage this relationship to influence the requirements without getting into a conflict of interest. Identifying key types of buyers and buying influences. Rules of marketing to the government. Gathering all the needed information ? and posing all the right questions. Documenting information and drawing accurate and compelling conclusions that can be captured in the proposal so that it sways and persuades. Influencing the RFP/customer requirements. Creating the "key decision-makers map" in the opportunity lifecycle to shape the win strategy. Developing the Customer Contact Plan for Marketing, Information Gathering, and Influencing. Techniques for creating, building, and measuring customer relationships, and for maintaining continuous dialogue.

This module covers what intelligence is necessary to win, and how to ethically gather comprehensive intelligence. Includes most useful capture research databases and other paid and free online resources. How to correlate government budget with the opportunities. Guide to collecting intelligence during project execution onsite, site visits, proposal conferences, and industry days. What is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and how you can use it to your advantage. How to distill and analyze information from customer presentations and reports, information from end users, opportunity background and history, and research. Best ways to document intelligence so that it is useful for the proposal team.

This module covers how to develop a comprehensive plan to win and how to develop compelling draft win themes. How to craft the best value story. How to run a "strategic" capture effort so that you are not just filling out the slides and following the steps ? to get you to increase your probability of winning in the most efficient and effective way. How to prepare an actionable Capture Plan that helps you position to win. How to conduct effective win strategy workshop and prepare white papers. How to test your win strategy. How to win as an incumbent and how to beat an incumbent. How to transform your win strategy into a list of cohesive action items. Strategic Action Plans to keep the capture efforts focused.

This module covers how to identify the biggest competitors and their likely strategies. How to analyze competition to exploit their shortfalls to your advantage, outdo them through strategic actions, and exploit their flaws in the proposal. How to prepare and facilitate a Black Hat session that doesn?t cost tens of thousands of dollars but produces effective results.

This module covers how to choose and engage the right companies to create a team that will compel the customer to select you. How to develop a teaming strategy, identify the right partners and subcontractors that AUGMENT your areas of expertise, add discriminators, and don?t overly dilute your scope. How to decide when to sign an exclusive agreement, and when a non-exclusive deal is OK. How to decide whether to move forward with a teaming arrangement before someone else ties up a great teammate, and how not to commit prematurely. Why teaming is important, what to look for in teaming partners, where to find teammates, and what teaming strategies to choose such as prime, subcontractor, joint venture, and other avenues. Teammate vetting checklist. How to negotiate beneficial teaming or subcontracting arrangements that contribute to your win.

This module provides extensive instructions and checklists for building your management and technical solutions, risk analysis, and price to win. Action items necessary to put together final solutions and stage the materials for low-stress proposal effort.

This module covers all the key components for effective capture management. It provides Capture Team composition, with roles and responsibilities. The correct sequence of capture steps, and how all the capture steps line up to the customer acquisition process. Tips and tricks for effective capture schedule development. Capture gates, reviews, and metrics. Tips for effective handover from the capture to proposal manager.

Six-step proposal process used to reach OST?s win rate of 94% for single-award contracts and 99% for multiple-award contracts.

Ins and outs of reading and analyzing a government-issued RFP to understand "compliance", ask the right questions from the customer in a timely manner, and structure your proposal response correctly.

A streamlined process to decide quickly whether a contract is a good target for your company.

Guidelines for building a proposal schedule along with detailed examples and tables.

Nine key steps to successfully orchestrating the proposal upfront to integrate the effort and prevent problems downstream.

Detailed instructions for proposal planning including three methods for developing an accurate proposal budget, and approach to shredding the RFP and issuing assignments.

Workshop on developing a compliant annotated outline that enables rapid development of the document by giving a play-by-play directive useful for a single writer or a team. Includes instructions on how to allocate pages correctly and deal effectively with page-limited responses, proper proposal flow, and section structure. This also includes OST's unique 7 'Ws' methodology for creating proposal work packages that help integrate and rapid-develop text and arrive at the first draft that's better than most red team drafts.

Speedwriting techniques for developing compelling proposal sections, and editing automation methods for greater proposal readability.

Seven rules for creating great proposal graphics, four steps in conceptualizing graphics, the art of developing killer action captions, Picasso method for inspiration, and four methods of conceptualizing graphics.

Detailed instructions on how to run reviews, including pink, red, and gold teams, when to hold these, and what are each review?s goals. Includes review forms and instructions.

How to avoid ten common but deadly proposal mistakes.

Background information contextualizing the project personnel's capture efforts. Includes the cycle of business development and where project personnel's efforts fit into this cycle, the steps for opportunity identification, and an overview of OST's Six Key Aspects of Capture. This provides an overall picture of what capture is, and how it is the most important step in bringing in revenue WITHOUT having to write a proposal, or by raising your chances of winning a competitive proposal between 60% and 80%.

Three goals to attain when working with the customer during capture. Detailed instructions for creating understanding the customer and building a strategy that focuses on customer needs. Includes five categories of customer, procurement basics, 20 questions to ask the customer about the opportunity, techniques for building an effective relationship, and how to interface effectively with the business development team.

Guide to collecting intelligence during project execution onsite, site visits, proposal conferences, and industry days. Also includes instructions for how to distill information from customer presentations and reports, information from end users, the opportunity background and history, and research. Provides rules on how to gather information ethically to keep the company out of trouble.

Understanding the components of a solid win strategy, and how project personnel can help contribute to developing a solid win strategy. Includes ways to test your win strategy, how to win as an incumbent or how to beat an incumbent, how win themes can figure into your win strategy sessions, and how to change your win strategy into a list of cohesive action items. OST's templates for Strategic Action Plans give you a starting point to assigning meaningful tasks and keeping your capture efforts focused.

Multiple avenues for the project personnel to identify competitors, gather competitive intelligence, and decide what their strengths and weaknesses are to shape the bid. It also addresses the types of action items project personnel could undertake to stay ahead of the competition.

Detailed explanation project personnel can use for advising the business development team on when you should team, and what are the possible candidates apparent from the project personnel's vantage point. It spells out why teaming is important, what you should look for in teaming partners, where you can find teammates, and what teaming strategies they should be aware of when building a winning team such as prime, subcontractor, joint venture, and other avenues. Also included is the overview of the type of paperwork required for successful teaming.

Extensive instructions for building your management and technical solutions, risk analysis, and price to win. The framework guides you through all the action items necessary to put together final solutions and stage all the materials for low-stress proposal effort.

Why reviews are necessary, overview of the proposal process, types of reviews, and where reviews fit in the proposal process.

Ins and outs of reading and analyzing a government-issued RFP to understand "compliance," ask the right questions from the customer in a timely manner, and structure your proposal response correctly.

Detailed expectations from each type of review (including pink and red teams).

Hands-on exercises to practice reviewing sections for compliance, completeness, win themes and messaging, and other aspects.

How to provide constructive and actionable feedback, and help authors make the document better quickly.

Overview of how to avoid top 10 reviewer mistakes.

Comprehensive methodology for developing killer win themes and proposal messaging.

A half-day workshop on writing persuasive executive summaries using OST's six-part formula.

A module with latest approaches to writing management sections. Includes a comprehensive checklist for developing and presenting a management solution.

A module with latest approaches to writing technical sections. Includes a checklist for developing and presenting a technical solution.

How to avoid costly mistakes in writing risk sections and how to present risks in your proposals to get maximum evaluation points.

How to avoid five cardinal past performance mistakes. Includes process for developing competitive past performances, checklist, and templates.

How to write resumes on par with the best consulting companies and systems integrators. Includes process, templates, and glossary.

Top 10 orals mistakes and techniques to avoid them, and effective approach for developing and presenting winning orals.

How to plan for the final production and assemble your finished proposal in a professional way, including checklists, guidelines, and templates.

Instructions for participating in a productive government debrief to collect lessons learned and position yourself for winning future proposals.

Approaches for successfully managing proposal, from data calls to status meetings and proposal wall.