Prioritizing Pipeline Opportunities to Save Time & Money

Do you have a large pipeline with a multitude of identified opportunities, but limited resources to move them forward? How do you then decide which of those opportunities your team should be going after as part of your business development growth activities?

Every organization, no matter how large or small, grapples with limited time and money. Your organization’s scarcities of time and Bid & Proposal (B&P) budget dictate the level of effort you can allocate to each opportunity.

One can easily apply the Pareto Principle when it comes to bid decisions: 20 percent of correctly selected opportunities will yield 80 percent of your business development success. The 2019 APMP U.S. Bid & Proposal Industry Benchmark Report shows that organizations with a rigorous gate review process (where they are selective of the opportunities they pursue) are two times more likely to have over 50 percent win rate than the organization with no documented process. Proper prioritization is mandatory to determine which opportunities are the top 20 percent and the most winnable. These are the opportunities that have the highest probability of win (Pwin) and the probability of “go” (Pgo) – the likelihood of a procurement being funded, issued, and awarded to a bidder.

The executive team needs to engage in objective analysis to prioritize opportunities and focus the Business Development and capture teams on the best ones. Some opportunities are obviously right for the company and check every box. However, there are many that are not as obvious because your team has not gathered enough information to determine Pwin and Pgo.

To determine how opportunities should be prioritized, each opportunity needs to be quickly qualified or requalified if it’s already in your pipeline but you don’t have enough information to move it forward. With that, speed is key, because there is limited time to position yourself to win an opportunity. The time is limited because capture may require you to build relationships with the customer stakeholders who are new to you and execute time-dependent strategic activities that would position you to win. These actions may include locking down the right teaming partners, hiring key personnel superstars, leasing equipment or facilities, opening a local office, and many others.

The pursue/don’t pursue decision-making process must be efficient. The first step is to qualify or requalify the most important opportunities in your pipeline, as well as the ones that are more urgent. With the qualification data at hand, you will then need to calculate the Pwin and Pgo. In the process, you must be honest about what it will take to win versus the commitment level shown to date and the level of effort that’s required to win. Some of the opportunities could be worth saving even if you are behind, as with a bit of engagement, you can regain the momentum and still win. Others may have gained so much negative velocity that you are better off cutting your losses.

To speed up this process and provide you with the data you need to make the right decisions, OST’s WinMoreBD™™will help you with opportunity qualification – and even identification, if needed.

Our WinMoreBD™™ Federal Pipeline Support Service, powered by TechnoMile’s Growth™ solution, helps you delegate time-consuming research tasks to our highly trained BD Analysts who will gather opportunity information faster, more efficiently, and effectively than most in-house BD personnel. OST uses a proprietary method to gather opportunity data, based on our tried-and-true detailed processes and procedures, along with TechnoMile’s Competitive Insights platform that provides data in one central location. This will free up your valuable Business Development and capture teams so they can focus on performing higher-level tasks that move opportunities forward and raise your Pwin. Instead of doing research, they will be free to talk to Government customers, form teams, develop and implement win strategies, and architect winning solutions. We will take care of the intelligence-gathering work to provide the important decision-making data to your executive team.

WinMoreBD™™ provides services to identify and qualify opportunities for our client’s pipelines. Our fixed-price services are effective regardless of company size.

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