Foundations of Capture Management
The Foundations of Capture Management course provides practical knowledge and tools you can immediately apply to improve your Government contract win probability (Pwin).
The capture planning process begins after opportunity qualification and continues beyond proposal submission, positioning you to win before the Government even releases a Request for Proposal (RFP). Without proper capture planning, winning proposals becomes a matter of luck rather than strategy — and hope is not a sound business approach.
This self-paced course teaches proven techniques for customer engagement, intelligence gathering, win strategy development, competitive analysis, teaming, solution development, and more. You’ll work through real-world case studies and examples, practicing how to develop the key elements of a capture plan using templates provided with the course, while learning to brainstorm and refine effective win strategies.
Foundations of Capture Management
Original price was: $1,195.00.$777.00Current price is: $777.00.
This interactive course is structured with 50 percent lecture, 40 percent exercises, and 10 percent discussion, providing you with practical, hands-on experience to develop real skills that increase your Government contract win probability (Pwin).
The experts who designed this course are highly experienced, currently practicing proposal professionals with years of success in Government acquisition and training. Through the course materials, they share valuable insights, address common challenges faced by capture professionals, and offer strategies based on the most current industry realities. You can learn more about our instructors on our About page.
Course Curriculum
Learning Objectives
Upon course completion, the participants will have learned and be able to put into practice:
- Understanding where capture fits in the business development lifecycle.
- Identifying six types of decision makers and developing relationships with the customer.
- Preparing customer profile and contact plan.
- Collecting the opportunity intelligence in ethical ways and analyzing it for applicability to the capture effort.
- Developing a capture plan.
- Developing a win strategy and compelling win themes.
- Identifying top competitors and performing competitive analysis.
- Identifying and vetting potential teammates.
- Postulating the requirements before RFP issuance.
- Developing Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and solution sets for proposal sections.
- Staging capture materials for proposal.
- Preparing a proposal plan and capture schedule.
- Organizing the capture team.
Day 1 Highlights
Module 1: Introduction
- Introductions and learning objectives.
- Introduction to capture and overview of the capture process to offer you a big-picture perspective.
- Overview of the class project.
Module 2: Customer Engagement
- How to create relationships and customer contact plans with your Government customers.
- Four key tasks for interfacing and building relationships with Government customers.
- Understanding how your customer buys and using information to gain an edge.
- How to identify six key types of Government buyers and buying influences and what they want.
- Customer contact plan for marketing, information gathering, and influencing.
- Rules of interfacing with Government personnel that you don’t want to break.
- 20 questions for gathering information from the customer during a visit.
Exercise: Identify customers and their key goals from business development inputs. Create a customer profile and draft contact plan.
Module 3: How to gather actionable intelligence – since the best-informed wins
- Ethics of intelligence gathering and how to avoid legal repercussions that may cost you your business.
- How to collect intelligence during Government site visits, proposal conferences, and industry days.
- The most useful capture research databases and other online resources.
- How to analyze opportunity history.
- Purposes and key components of a capture plan.
- How to develop a capture plan.
Exercise: Development of a draft capture plan.
Module 4: How to develop a great win strategy and win themes to prepare you to finish on top
- Definition of a win strategy.
- How to develop a viable win strategy.
- How to devise top-level actions that create a winning offer.
- How win strategy is related to win themes.
- Three types of win themes.
- How to develop powerful proposal-level and section-level win themes that drive strategy.
Exercise: Identify win strategies and action items.
Day 2 Highlights
Module 5: How to analyze your competition
- Techniques for identifying competitors and their likely strategies.
- What information to collect on your competitors.
- Where to find information on your competitors ethically.
- Relationship between competitive analysis, teaming, and other aspects of capture.
Exercise: Identify top competitors and perform competitive analysis. Update capture plan.
Module 6: Teaming
- How to choose and engage the right companies to create a team that compels the customer to select you
- How to decide when it is beneficial to team and when it is not.
- Teaming strategies pros and cons.
- How to decide between priming, subcontracting, joint venture, or a contractor teaming agreement (CTA).
- How to allocate scope between teammates.
- Where to find teammates.
- How to select and vet teammates that will contribute to your win.
Exercise: Identify potential teammates and update capture plan.
Module 7: How to develop the solution pre- and post– draft RFP that will wow your customer
- Overview of solution development.
- Typical problems with solution development.
- How to postulate the requirements.
- Concept of Operations (CONOPS) development techniques.
- Developing solution sets for proposal sections.
- Staging capture materials for proposal use.
- Preparing a proposal plan.
Exercise: Develop a solution for a proposal segment and document in a capture plan.
Module 8: How to manage your capture effort effectively while conserving your resources
- Sequence of capture steps and decision gates, and how they line up to the Government acquisition process.
- How to develop an effective capture schedule that conserves your resources but enables you to prepare well.
- How to organize your capture team.
Exercise: Develop a capture schedule.