Capturing and winning government contracts is a way to ensure a stable source of income for years to come. During lean economic times, government contracts can help keep the doors open, and during boom times, these contracts can fund expansion.
In today’s hyper-competitive, 24/7 global economy, automated capture solutions can help your business adopt and maintain a competitive edge by creating repeatable processes, eliminating inefficiencies, building a solid customer data bank and closely tracking sales metrics within your organization.
Identifying an appropriate candidate to manage your capture process can be a challenge. It isn’t that the capability and experience doesn’t exist, but rather the necessity that individual’s expertise must align well with your internal strategic business goals as an organization.
The first step in creating any process is ensuring repeatability. Anyone can luck into success once, but being able to keep the momentum going depends on having a tested process in place that works. Your opportunities will change every year, but your analysis of those opportunities should remain the same. Because the same questions come up for every capture, you should store key information and analysis.
When you win the pot in a poker game or trounce a friend at a game of golf, your euphoria doesn’t always lead you into deep analysis about what worked or what led to your win.
Professionals spend a lot more time analyzing every step they take along the sales cycle so they can find out where they went right. The same is true when they lose. Professional sports teams invest millions on post game analysis, practicing repetition of strategies that worked and finding ways to resolve weaknesses.
While it is fine to just enjoy the win or bemoan the loss during friendly competition, you need to pay more attention to your win/loss analysis for success, and to create a repeatable capture management sales process. Read More
If government contracts are an important source of income for your company, reviewing your capture management process is an important part of keeping it stable. Capture management is an ongoing process that starts years before you finally submit a proposal.
When a government agency issues a competitive bid opportunity, or solicitation, that agency has spent a good — if not significant — amount of time creating requirements. If you are just hearing about the deal when the Government releases the RFP, then you are already very far behind the curve and generally have a very low probability of winning.
When running a small business, there are times in which you inevitably feel like everything that needs your immediate, undivided attention, hits at once. The problem is that you are only one person, and you undoubtedly only have a finite amount of resources – and expertise – under your roof.
The capture process can be a long and arduous journey, sometimes taking years from initial lead to final sell. It is vital that you manage your team the whole way through. Because the process involves a myriad of details and shifting client needs, it is your responsibility to monitor your team’s capture process and ensure accounts are being moved through the system appropriately and efficiently.
Any capture management process requires nearly constant oversight. While the rewards are worth the investment, it can still be easy to feel overwhelmed and wonder about the effectiveness of your capture management. Generating leads is expensive enough that it can be tough to justify the cost of a good capture management process when you are first exploring the options. When you are not an active part of the capture management process, however, you may feel like things aren’t moving or that you’re not hitting that important Government sales mantra: “always be shaping.” Read More
