The capture managers dilemma is a tight budget and tough competition.
How do you deal with that?
There are several different ways to help the situation.
First is, work on your professional skills, upskilling yourself.
How does that help? You could do a lot of things to capture an opportunity, but the Pareto principle applies. Twenty percent of your actions are going to yield eighty percent of your results. Knowing what those twenty percent of actions are is where you need your experience and skills.
Taking classes and training is the key. We can help, OST Global Solutions Bid & Proposal Academy, check out our classes. The more tools you have in your toolset, the better.
Second, figure out what can you do in your organization to increase your win probability, your Pwin. What improves Pwin is doing many things right. You need to figure out what to do better each time to give you that incremental improvement. For example:
- Do you select the opportunities the right way?
- Do to find good opportunities?
- Do you know about them in time?
- Do you do your opportunity qualifications correctly?
- How do you make your decisions?
- How do you prioritize which opportunity you’re going to focus on?
- What are you going to do to win?
Getting that part figured out improves your Pwin. Then, are you disciplined about running your win strategy development sessions? Are you doing that for every opportunity? Are you doing it early enough? Are you being thorough? That is also going to improve your Pwin. It goes on and on. Each best practice that you implement helps you beat that tough competition.
Are you getting in front of your customers? Talking to the customers is tough if you’re not already at that agency working with them. How do you get them to meet with you? A lot of them don’t want to and won’t.
In the absence of information, how else are you getting information on the customers’ hot buttons? Are you talking to people who work with that customer? Is your recruitment engine working on who you’re going to be bidding on the opportunity? Who is going to be giving you that information? You need to find alternative ways to find the insider truth about the customer that you really need to have for you to write proposals that resonate with this customer.
As to pricing, are you doing the competitive labor rate analysis? Are you running Black Hat and Price to Win analyses for your larger opportunities?
That’s another area that you want to master for you to prevail over the competition.
As you can see, there are many different things you could do. And a lot of it just takes a lot more rigor and tenacity.
You can do it!
OST Global Solutions is a professional business development consulting firm. We provide capture and proposal teams to develop winning proposals. Or we can provide consultants on a case-by-case basis to fill gaps on your business development team, including running your color team reviews. Our services consist of capture management, proposal management, orals coaching, proposal writing, graphics support, editing, desktop publishing, and cost volume development.
Reach out to us to discuss how we can help you develop a winning proposal.
service@ostglobalsolutions.com
Upcoming Bid & Proposal Academy Classes
Writing Persuasive Government Proposals
OST Global Solutions 7361 Calhoun Place, Suite 560, Rockville, MD, United StatesThis proposal writing course shows how to develop compliant and highly persuasive proposal sections in half the time, to increase your government proposals' win probability. Learn to outline within the proposal sections for compliance and responsiveness, brainstorm as a group and individually to develop proposal section content, infuse proper structure and flow into your sections, and implement the correct writing process. Learn proposal persuasion techniques.
Foundations of Federal Business Development
OST Global Solutions 7361 Calhoun Place, Suite 560, Rockville, MD, United StatesThis Government Business Development training offers essential skills in professional business development for government contractors selling services and solutions to the Federal Government. The two-day course begins with an overview of the Federal business development (BD) process and what it takes to succeed in the profession. It proceeds to the basics of U.S. Government business.
Foundations of Capture Management
OST Global Solutions 7361 Calhoun Place, Suite 560, Rockville, MD, United StatesThe course uses a real bid opportunity to practice all the capture steps in hands-on exercises using typical tools available to business developers and capture managers. Participants practice developing key elements of a capture plan using a capture plan template provided with the course, and brainstorm on win strategy using a case study.