Your Government Capture Management Process: Is It Time for an Update?

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.

If you don’t regularly review how your capture management works, you might be missing opportunities or losing bids you should have won. Ask yourself these four questions to find out if your capture management process is due for an overhaul.

1. Do You Track Your Pipeline?

Visibility into your pipeline is one of the most important parts of tracking for capture management. If you can’t track where leads come from and identify where they are in your funnel at any given moment, you can easily lose track of important steps. Follow-up calls may be made late, or you might miss a face-to-face opportunity at an agency event. You might also see where leads get hung up and delayed. Every process has choke points, but if you can identify them and shorten the delay, your capture management process will deliver better returns. If you aren’t tracking or only track basic numbers without visibility along the entire pipeline, your process needs a bit of maintenance.

2. Do You Measure Each Deal?

When you win a deal, do you also close the book? Once you have the contract, you might not feel the need to look any deeper, on why you won.  More importantly, do you understand why you lost a deal so you won’t make the same mistakes more than one?  It is a vital process at the end of each award to measure and track a permanent history of why you win and why you lose.  Make certain you find a software solution that allows you to manage both.

3. Is Your Pipeline Software Integrated With Management?

The software you use to track your pipeline should integrate seamlessly with other management functions. Must have integrations include:

1. Executive Management to provide Division managers the ability to manage:
   1. sales teams activity
   2. the pipeline growth
   3. overall profitability
   4. and much more
2. Contracts Management to provide direct integration with sales to manage:
   1. NDA creation and execution
   2. Teaming Agreement (TA) creation and execution
   3. Sub-Contracting Agreement (SubK) creation and execution
3. Finance Management to provide direct integration with sales to manage:
   1. Budget creation automation
   2. Pre-B&P budget requests and approvals
   3. B&P budget requests and approvals
4. HR/Recruiting Management to provide direct integration with sales and Program Management to manage:
   1. Requesting resumes for required personnel on any RFP
   2. Letters of Intent or Hiring letters

4. Is Your Capture Process Repeatable?

The last and possibly most important question to ask about your capture management process is about repeatability. If you have shown great results with your current process, can you do it again? This simple question is where many businesses get hung up. Any company can luck into a contract, but not every company can sign agency after agency. If your capture management process doesn’t deliver consistent results, it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to for your business.

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, your capture management process should probably be automated with better software. Improving performance in any one area helps improve your capture speed and encourages more leads to close. If you already have a good capture management process, incremental improvement is the key to consistent gains, and every process can benefit from some fine tuning.