Foundations of Capture Management

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.

Course 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.

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.

Module 9: Summary and recap.