Take a look at the habits of successful leaders in your industry or your company’s area of expertise. By cultivating these same habits or by looking for them in your employees and consultants, you can identify employees most likely to lead your business through a successful capture management strategy.
Everyday, regular tasks become habits because they are recognizably and predictably essential for success, and you should always stock up your company’s cupboard with everything you need to improve your capture success rate.
1. Open and Honest Communication
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: Communication is key. Failure in communication leads to missed opportunities, uncontrolled costs and businesses that don’t meet the demands of a changing market. A big part of successful communication starts with honesty. Your capture executive should honestly assess every opportunity and be open about the probability of a win (PWin).
2. Keep Your Data Current
Every time a great capture executive learns about a new government prospect, they make contact with the potential client. Maybe they reach out regarding something already on the schedule or offer a piece of information that might be helpful. Every time they learn something new or important to the capture, they enter it into the CaptureExec Pipeline software or another pipeline management tool. By doing so, they keep their data current. By keeping the information flow updated, the best capture executives accomplish several goals:
- They allow for the possibility that someone else might need to complete the capture.
- They improve repeatability by providing all the capture management information in a central location.
- They make it easier to scale capture management processes by being organized and on schedule.
3. Establish a Well-Rounded Ground Truth
Reading RFPs only provides part of the picture for any government prospect. Only by arranging regular meetings and asking questions can you gain direct experience with customer wants and needs. More meetings with different people mean more opportunity to ask those questions and add detail to the picture. The best capture executives have a 3-D view of the opportunity before making any decisions about pursuit.
4. Loop in the Team and the Competition
During the review process, you need to have a complete understanding of what your company can offer and what the competition can offer. Capture executives that deliver high success rates schedule regular meetings with the team and with competitors. After all, one of the best sources of information about a contract with a government agency is a company that has worked with that agency.
Current and former contractors or associates can offer unique insights about how and when to pursue a prospect. Keeping your team updated helps every member work toward the same goal, without wasting time or duplicating effort.
5. Implement Tight Budget Controls
It can be easy to rack up a big bill when tracking opportunities and networking with different government agencies. Travel costs, consultants, software, man hours and other incidental expenses can drive up the price of every deal. Good capture executives take control of costs and only spend money where it makes the most sense for shaping the opportunity.
Final Thought
Expert capture executives can add value to your process and increase your ability to land the contract. If you can implement these same habits in your entire capture team, you can help turn every employee into a highly effective member of a team that delivers results.
