Second only to projecting sales, your capture management tool of choice is a key indicator of your capture management team’s performance and is also what keeps accumulated data about each prospect in one place. Its active monitoring begins the day your Capture Executive (also known as a Capture Manager or Capture Executive Manager) starts work. At that moment you with understand that your capture management team will change over time, and thus you may be faced with extreme difficulties when your Capture Executive leaves for other opportunities.
The Importance of Your Capture Executive
Most experienced Capture Executive Managers gather the following types of data throughout the capture managment:
- Answers to any and all questions they ask the Government
- Information collected from competitors and teammates
- Industry day topics and data
- Information from countless emails, phone calls, meetings and gatherings
During all this time, they keep most all their questions, answers, information they gather in their head, on their mobile phones, or in emails and personal documents they store on their computers. Very little ever gets put in a place where the next Capture Manager can easily access and bring themselves up to speed on the status of the capture management process. So, the time to develop a succession plan is long before they leave.
How Can You Prepare for Your Capture Manager Leaving?
There are many ways to anticipate a vacancy that could save you from business intelligence gaps:
- Performance agreements based on the firm’s strategic goals
- Weekly team meetings to discuss contacts and intelligence gathered during the week
- Maintaining reference contacts through support and general contact follow-up
- Documenting all activities in your CRM to retain information gathered.
But, as your company grows, it becomes impossible for a manager to retain all of the information that their Capture Executives’ have gathered for all of their potential opportunities. The only real solution is to have a capture management system that retains that information for you – including all management tools that measure and ensure that your capture management team is updating the system on a regular basis with the information required.
Benefits of a Capture Management System
By actively managing these activities, you avoid the all too common situtation of your Capture Manager giving notice, and your only option is to meet with that person and discuss every single client — whether existing, active deals, qualified potential, potential, and yes, even fails.
Without a consistent emphasis on the importance of the capture management process, your Capture Executive Manager might walk out the door with all the information your firm has used to project sales and profit to your company in their head. If you don’t have a capture management system in place now, re-read the prior post, create a strategy team to identify objectives and information needed from your sales team to project sales, roll out the strategy to your team, and immediately begin measuring and monitoring without fail; just be sure that your system meets your needs and collects all the information you want to keep.
Once Your Capture Executive Manager Leaves
Regardless of your current business capture management process, the first step when your capture executive manager leaves — if not before—is to contact each client to provide updated contact information and assurances of a seamless transition.
Whether you use a spreadsheet tool or a specific capture management software to monitor progress and collect information, the critical point is to do it. Without a process in place to anticipate the loss of a valuable Capture Executive’s knowledge, your forecast will become vulnerable. Businesses that manage a formal capture documentation process that anticipates intelligence gaps are successful, and businesses that gather the right information are even more successful.
