Advance Capture Management

Course Curriculum

Upon course completion, the participants will have learned and be able to put into practice:

• Understanding how advanced capture techniques offer an edge in a competition.
• ​Building strong and lasting relationships with Government customers.
• ​Shaping opportunities and requirements.
• ​Gathering intelligence like a professional analyst, and distilling it to drive capture strategy and proposal development.
• ​Facilitating win strategy development sessions.
• ​Developing a solid value proposition.
• ​Turning advanced win strategies into action.
• ​Unseating incumbents and defending one’s position as an incumbent.
• ​Using seven most useful competitive analysis techniques.
• ​Understanding Price to Win and competitive analysis for Multiple Award contracts.
• ​Facilitating Black Hat sessions that produce actionable intelligence.
• ​Applying strategic principles to teaming.
• ​Navigating the small business subcontracting rules to benefit from the socioeconomic programs and avoid hidden trouble.
• ​Negotiating binding teaming agreement to protect bidder s’ interests.
• ​Developing an executive summary, management, technical, risk, price strategy, past performance, resumes, staffing, and other approaches.
• ​Pre-staging of capture materials for proposal development.
• ​Focusing the capture effort and measuring its effectiveness.

Day 1 Highlights

Module 1: Introduction

• Introductions and learning objectives.
  Recap: overview of the capture process for an advanced big-picture perspective.

Module 2: Creating Lasting Customer Relationships

• How to create strong and lasting relationships with Government customers.
• ​Advanced techniques for building an effective rapport with Government customers
• ​Techniques for finding connections and engaging the Government customer before and after the communication channels close.
• ​Mind set for achieving the most results with Government customers.
• ​How to influence the RFP and shape customer requirements.
• ​Organizing key information about the customer and measuring customer relationship.
• ​Engaging decision-makers with a high level of influence.
• ​Legal aspects of customer relationship building or how to keep yourself and your company out of trouble.
  Case Study: Determine correct and incorrect courses of action as applicable to a real-life scenario.

Module 3: Gathering Intelligence Like a Pro, Focusing Time and Effort on Information

• Needed to Win
• Differences between data, information, knowledge, and actionable intelligence.
• ​Sources of information and degrees of their reliability.
• ​Where to find the right information on the web, and how to search for data like a professional analyst.
• ​How to harvest valuable intelligence from customer artifacts.
• ​How to distill information from open sources.
• ​How to analyze the data to make the right capture-related conclusions.
• ​Validating and testing data.
• ​A system for documenting intelligence that’s most useful for the proposal team.
  Exercise: Research and analyze an opportunity based on the information provided.

Module 4: Developing a Win Strategy that Packs a Punch

• Mastery in facilitating win strategy development sessions.
• ​Finer points of the win strategy development process.
• ​Key components of a strategy.
• ​Developing a value proposition.
• ​How to test quality of the win strategy.
• ​Types of successful win strategies.
• ​Effective use of ghosting.
• ​Strategy for unseating incumbents and defending one’s position as an incumbent.
• ​Taking your win strategies to the next level.
• ​Win strategy white paper and its mapping to the action items and solution development.
• ​Developing and tracking strategic action plans.
  Exercise: Conduct a win strategy development session simulation.

Day 2 Highlights

Module 5: Advanced Competitive Analysis to Exploit Competition’s Shortfalls and Neutralize their Strengths

• Seven most used competitive analysis techniques and their practical application.
• ​Applying intelligence gathering techniques to competitive analysis.
• ​Competitive analysis for IDIQs with multiple bidders.
• ​Introduction to Price to Win analysis.
• ​A practical approach to conducting a Black Hat session that produces actionable intelligence.
• ​Turning competitive intelligence into strategic decisions and actions.
  Case Study: Application of competitive analysis tools.

Module 6: Teaming Strategies

• Strategic considerations that go into forming a team.
• ​When it is best to move forward with a teaming arrangement and when to wait.
• ​How to avoid diluting the scope and dealing with the risk of having too many teammates.
• ​How to choose between exclusive and non-exclusive teaming.
• ​Effective teaming techniques and precautions for teaming with competitors.
• ​Small business subcontracting.
• ​Understanding size rules and potential disqualifiers from bidding.
• ​Elements of a binding teaming agreement to protect bidder’s interests.
• ​How to negotiate for success and follow the Government contracting and subcontracting negotiating template.
• ​Negotiation tactics and appropriate responses.
  Exercise: Compare strategic teaming scenarios and determine the most appropriate paths of action.

Module 7: Solution Development

• Executive summary.
• ​Management solution.
• ​Risk management approach development.
• ​Technical approach development.
• ​Developing a price strategy.
• ​Advance preparation of past performance, resumes, staffing, and other solutions.
• ​Pre-staging of proposal materials.
• Exercise: Prepare risk matrix. Walk through the solution development checklists.
• Module 8: Capture Process Management
• Conducting gate reviews focused on results and measurements.
• ​Metrics for capture effectiveness.
  Discussion: Technique applicability to participants’ organizations.

Module 9: Summary

• Additional resources and bibliography.
• ​Summary.
• ​Recap.