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hey good morning to those of you out there in the west coast good afternoon to those of you here on the East Coast uh appreciate everybody signing into the chat saying hi to each other Etc um we're GNA get started today's training about how to build a strong pipeline right a a two billion dollar pipeline um and don't worry I'm going to have smaller size pipelines to show as an example as well okay let's get started in the official training um one of the reasons I wanted to do this training is because I run into people who were uh Missing the revenue goal frankly right they set a revenue goal and they miss it I've talked to people who were like hey you know next year like even like you can use this as an example in 2024 we're gonna get this done next thing you know it's April May and June and they're like what is going on with my plans right have you ever felt that way where you set the goals and you're not hitting it or your company's not hitting the revenue goals you want um reactive and proactiveness is something that you really want to make a choice and choose proactiveness around your business development it's sales AC activities right business development and capture shouldn't just be I hear about an opportunity I write a proposal there's this whole activity in the middle of understanding the customer and in shaping opportunities Etc you can't do that without a really robust and strong pipeline um and when you have that you'll start winning more right and so for a lot of us we feel like we have a good company we have a good product the services we sell maybe even the past performances we have are good um but we're not winning more contracts we've won a couple but we haven't taken it to the next level well having a pipeline is one of the critical path elements to having success in the federal market and we're going to dive down and talk about that so today I don't know if you're looking at my screen or whether you're just listening for the moment but we're going to cover down on six main things and I am going to move at a fire hose Pace because this is a 30 minute training I try to put a lot in so you have something really tactical moving forward but I want to talk about the why and the what of a pipeline why you should have it what what really are we talking about uh that pipeline what's it look like um I want to make sure before I dive into showing you Pipeline and some numbers I want you to to consider using for your own company um I want you to understand how I look at the federal sales life cycle right it's pretty standard right but I might use a little different words a little shape so I want to make sure we're looking at that and then in the end I'm going to give you there's two slides I want to uh give you and I'm hoping I'm going to have enough time to talk about it but either way you can take a snapshot of the screen uh one is what's the next steps how can you take the training you're going to get today and move it into your company and the second thing is uh where can you find opportun to begin to put into your federal uh your sales pipeline I get people ask me this all the time where can I find um opportunities and they're all over but it'll be really clear as you go forward and I'll do all sorts of new training and I've done lots of past training on how you find those opportunities if you don't know who I am my name is Neil mcdonal I'm the president of the gucon Chamber of Commerce and I want to welcome you to my federal sales training where I provide tips for success in the federal Market I spent 20 years as a small business owner in the federal Market market and since 2018 I've been teaching people like you that Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process when we follow a process A to Z we're going to have repeatable predictable results that's what I want for you um as we move forward I wanted to thank our sustaining members we're self-funded we are not in any way affiliated with the government and um so sustaining members like Keith Swanson longtime listener and longtime sustaining member which we really appreciate but we appreciate all of our sustaining members uh if you see Keith in the training today make sure you give him a thumbs up or maybe just tag him with Keith Swanson um for the rest of us if you haven't done this already engage I teach but you're here to also Network it's a great opportunity to network with others in your industry so put your company name in let us know who you are help buyers remember who you are because buyers come into my training um help buyers remember who you are and others who are here today know who you are and put your core competency two or three words not a long paragraph if it's a long paragraph I won't remember it and I one of your biggest fans and so if I don't take the time to remember it it's because it's too hard well there's a good chance other people won't but if you just make it easy for me like Workforce Development or things like that right makes it really easy for me to begin to remember who you are and go oh Keith this boom right um and then I already mentioned engaging in the community uh reach out right don't just Spam people but if you see a natural connection build a natural relationship that's a really important value of this whole uh environment and right now we're going to have easily over 100 people live today so this it's a good thing for you by the way if you're not live uh come in connect with people who say they're open to connection if people are putting into the chat I'm open to connecting right if you're on YouTube and you come over later you can connect on LinkedIn this is where we can engage I put up some other trainings we got going on this week we've got um relationship building basically tomorrow I I call it a federal sales is like fishing you got to hook them and then reel them in and let them go and come back relationship building is that same thing you can't just go for the sale can't just try to get them on the boat you got to kind of work it um on Wednesday we're going to be talking about the top ways to find these Federal buyers that are out there people struggle often and maybe you struggle as well on how do you get in the door how do you find the the doors to knock on and then how do you knock on the door and get in I'll cover down on that on Wednesday on Thursday I'm going to talk about some proposal mistakes and Friday Friday I'm going to try something um even more Niche down is how to be a preferred Federal Market it government contractor so I'm going to give tips on you know there's 10,000 it firms how do you rise yourself above that uh noise so that you're standing out from your competitors okay I'm doing really good on time but I know I'm speaking fast you can watch it on the replay at half speed so let's start off with why you must have a reliable pipeline uh if you want to have success in the federal government space right one of the advantages is you have predictable Revenue remember I said process gives you repeatable predictable Revenue well a pipeline gives you absolute predictable Revenue because when you look at your pipeline leadership and um others who manage the money side of the business can look in and predict when uh you're going to be receiving Revenue when you're going to have wins and and when you're going to have Revenue coming in the company not just this year but five years out if you're winning fiveyear contracts second thing is you're able to forecast out on opportunities when you look at um a pipeline it's well populated you're able to sit there and begin to plan your activities around that the way you beat your competitors is capture you don't beat your competitors in a proposal yes I highly valuable value proposals well written proposals but you need to do capture and give proposal writers the ammunition they need to write the best proposal right and you can do that when you have opportunities sitting in there the other thing about a good pipeline is you have this diversity of opportunities um maybe within a particular agency or spread across agency so you're in Air Force and and um Navy as an example and so you're spreading it that way if they have changing dates Etc uh you're able to handle it I already talked about competitive Advantage um the other thing is you're able to uh adapt to the shifting right wrist that happens I've run into this a lot with customers just with anybody in the industry is they've got stuff in their Pipeline and the government shifts it to the right oh that RFP J date it's going to drop in June no it's August it's uh November it's next year and when you have a a wellp populated pipeline you're G to be able to manage that it won't be a big deal that the government shifts it your company you won't hear all these complaints about it you'll just say oh no we expect that don't worry about it we have enough in our pipeline to cover down on that um and then I wrote you're able to build stronger teams because you have a pipeline that's populated out and when I say a$2 billion doll Pipeline and we'll come to the numbers in a minute but when I say that what I really mean is you've populated a pipeline out 12 months fully and then into the 24 months but most importantly the next 12 months you've got it populated well when you populate that early you have time to pick the best team team members to come on right you're not uh Johnny come lately where you just take anybody's there and they can kind of do it you're actually able to evaluate what do you need for a strong team and then try to recruit those other companies to be part of your team so this all leads to a proactive approach not reactive approach to sales so um when you think about what's in a pipeline and what a reliable pipeline has it fundamentally comes down to having slam dunk opportunities and enough slam dunk opportunities in your pipeline a slam dunk opportunity is one that nobody in your company has to w whether it's good for you everybody looks and goes wow that was written for us right and I don't mean wired I just mean you look at it and go that work is what we do best that's perfect that's a slam dunk opportunity I have a whole training I mean several trainings on Slam Dunk so go figure that out um some other reason or some other things about what's what a reliable pipeline looks like um you have opportunities for all three revenue streams let me pause for one second today's training really is for companies that are more advanced two three 4 million plus right I'm into the 20 and $50 million range right you can learn a ton if you're below that level for sure right you learn this and then you figure out how do you work with your teaming partners and Prime teaming Partners but when you're at a certain level you can go in all three revenue streams and so that's subcontracting under Smalls subcontracting under larges and Prime Contracting and so a good reliable pipeline has opportunities for all three of those streams you have opportunities this year that you're working on in the next three to 12 months in the uh the following year so the 24mon window and then 36 months out and Beyond right this idea you're not working heavily on it but you understand that there's an opportunity that's aund million opportunity I'm going after it again it just was awarded two years ago I'm putting in my pipeline so I know it's there you should have rfps or uh opportunities in your pipeline where when you look at the expected RFP date there's four opportunities minimum dropping every single month that way you're participating one way or another on four opportunities they don't all have to be prime contracts right you could sub for one or two or three even right sometimes if you have to you could sub for four but you need four opportunities in there when you're at a certain stage if you're below again two million the numbers I say are a little tough but if you're above two million you've got people working at least one person working on sales they can handle what I'm telling you um so having rfps in there every month allows some to slip and move and it's no big deal you can still get proposals out the door um when you have a sufficient Siz pipeline you're able to over under promise to leadership about how much money they're going to see in the revenue and the sales and over deliver what we mean by that is the and and you'll see in a minute how I do this but when you put enough opportunities in the pipeline you you say hey we're gonna we're going to try to bring in $3 million new Topline revenue and your activity though if it all pans out you'll bring well more than that 3 million so you don't want to barely aim for 3 million you want to aim for 10 or 20 million and hit the 3 million Target and I'll talk about that in a second one thing I really wanted to point out contract vehicles have nothing to do with Revenue nothing nothing nothing nothing feel free to argue with me um I see people put them in the pipeline and spend so much energy working to drive something forward there's this one that I watched many companies go after called ec2 and it was a billion multi-billion dollar cyber contract and as far as I understand it just got canceled they like asked for it we're not going to do it and people spent a lot of time on this but it's just a vehicle it's not a task order it's not a contract it's not money coming in it's the chance to go after money yes you need to go after it just like you would go after an ISO certification or cmmi or JB but when you're thinking about your sales pipeline your sales pipeline only contains things that have money right of course you want to get Contract Vehicles you absolutely want to get them but that's not your pipeline your pipeline is things that lead to money um so this just very simple way of describing the pipeline there okay I'm cruising along in a fact Fast Pace because I I got a lot of good stuff but I want to make sure I at least share it so here on this slide what I what I'm trying to share in preparation of the next slide is this understanding of the seven stages that I use for uh federal sales pipelines that I use right so these stages when an opportunity you find one it comes in at stage one and it's an a an unqualified you might call it a lead people call it identifi whatever you want I just call it unqualified because I haven't qualified it yet seemed like a good word right it's either unqualified or two it's qualified right and when that's qualified I don't want to get into the criteria I do whole trainings on the criteria for each stage and how do you know when to move it forward but the big thing to keep in mind is and I know I might talk a little uh below where some of you are at for a second but stage two when you go from qualified to pursue when you're really starting to dive into the capture activity right qualified is where you're learning about an opportunity and factual type stuff and pursue is when you try to start shaping and having conversations well so when you go from one stage to another we call this gate gate review whatever you want to call it what I wanted you to pay attention to though is one out of every two opportunities that are in the qualified stage move forward to pursue so if you had two opportunities only one's moving forward if you have 10 opportunities that are qualified opportunities only five are moving forward as you move forward you can see and I'm going to use this today in today's training um same thing if you have things uh opportunities and pursue four out of five of them move to bid because it's really hard to go from qualify to pursue but once you start getting into capture it should be much easier to go from pursue to bid um you tend to abandon opportunities less because you've already resourced the facts you know you want it now you're trying to shape it and so what I say is if you have 10 opportunities eight out of the 10 per opportunities that are in the pursue stage move forward to the bid stage and you can see at each stage is the same thing gate four right here is when you've written a proposal and Leadership has to decide send or don't send right there's that final go no go to hitting an email or whatever right and that's gate four and and what I say is when you send proposals out one out of four of them will win these numbers are important to understand as it relates to the pipeline and the2 billion dollar I talked about for today's training um each one of them have a a ratio or percentage or likelihood of of succeeding in the next step the important thing about numbers is if you don't have data use mine mine are the absolute best ones until you have your own data then use your own right M are guidelines because there is no number that anybody could give you that's factual until you start writing proposals um where I have gate one where it says one out of two for me it was like nine out of 10 went from qualified to pursue because we were very good at looking at opportunities and finding opportunities that were in our space and we knew how to um qualify them right here so that we got rid of all sorts of stuff fast that that was junk right and so if you're not good at that then you're at one at two so you're at a 50% ratio as was at a 90% ratio moving forward as you have data you'll be able to change those numbers so let's dive into some numbers really and I'm just tracking on my time here this slide you can take a screenshot at the end um by the way if you'd like a copy of the slides that I have I think I'll be okay handing out these slides because there's so much data on it um so just put into the chat slide handouts please uh let me know you want that and remember the please part because we work hard at this um I'll be happy to send it to so this is a sheet that I just want to use as a way to go through what I just said so starting in the bottom left where you see qualified value remember seven stages right so qualify pursue bid proposal sales and revenue but the part we're paying attention to is qualify bid pursue right you see here's my ratio and then you see right next to it's a percentage right I just said if it's one out of two it's it's 50% it's 80% for four out of five so these are the same as that I just showed you on the on the stages moving forward um the one assumption that I want to make is today I'm talking to Professional Services companies I'm talking to companies where our Norm is we get a contract that has a base plus four years so fiveyear contracts five year or $5 million contract that' be a million dollars for the first year and a million dollar for each year after generally that's how it works for fiveyear um contracts right one assumption that I want you to pay attention to in the yellow up here is no win and you'll see what I mean by win in a second no win can count for more than 25% of your Revenue goal so let me get started and be able to talk about that so over on the far right I'll start in example four and I'll work my way into to the 20 billion or $2 billion pipeline so on example four you see that I put $1 million is by Revenue goal that when I say no win can count for 25% more than 25% of the revenue goal what I'm saying is no win can count for more than 250,000 on this the reason I do this is to be hyper conservative if my Revenue goal and really my sales goal is five million I don't run to write one proposal for five million and hope I win it right or I don't want to write four proposals and hope uh that are five million each and hope I win one of them the chances of that happening are wrong it's not likely right and so you want to be conservative in your plan and you're forecasting out and so my way of doing that is saying um because we know that we have this assumption that you only count 25% of your Revenue goal for a win like when you're trying to plan out your numbers I know now that I need to win four proposals that would come in at $250,000 a year times five which is 1.25 or 1 million two and a half uh 1,250,000 is 5 million right and so I need four wins you following that and so if my proposal value is one out of four I win that means I need to submit 16 opportunities to the government in the next 12 months or you know whatever period I need to submit 16 opportunity or 16 proposals and those 16 proposal values need to be at at least $20 million and not one of them can count for more than uh $250,000 right so if it's a a $10 million contract that's great send it but the max it can count for is one uh 1,250,000 right so it just means you have to write more um this is a way to keep a conservative as you drive forward so now as you move forward and you just understand the numbers you see the pattern go up right so if the bid value if if um one out of every two opportunities I have in a bid stage moves forward a proposal and I'm going to write a proposal for it then I need to double the numbers uh so 16 opportunities becomes 32 and the um 20 million becomes 40 million same thing I'm not going to walk you through the numbers all the way up you can see them the thing I want to point out is the way I'm using my example at the moment it shows you many opportunities in each stage the one thing I just don't have time to teach you today is that it's a balance of all the stages so let's say I had um uh already I had eight opportunities in The Proposal stage meaning my proposal team knows that the RFP is dropping today or tomorrow you know moved forward we're writing them well now I can count on eight of those that means the other eight need to come uh backwards and so if I say that 16 Ops here I have eight already in there then every number going back can be cut in half so for example if I have eight opportunities in The Proposal value then I would only need 16 opportunities in bid um so there's this balance in here when I work with customer customers um we just have calculated field so it automatically tells you exactly uh what the value of your pipeline is so that if you know that you're trying to get to a million dollars and $5 million sales goal when you put calculated fields in whatever pipeline tool you use when you put calculated fields in you can have a dashboard that any given point tells you how much revenue is coming in how much top level uh top line revenue is coming in so this stuff seems maybe a little complicated because we're trying to do it in our head you don't have to do it your head I have a whole spreadsheet that just works it um or the CRM tools I use um so let's just use this next example and I'll go a little faster because so I watch my time right so here's $5 million Revenue goal I went from 1 million to5 million so on the $5 million uh Revenue goal when I think about what is 25% of the revenue because no win no sale can count for more than 25% of the win if I'm being conservative um so that's one 1,250,000 right so I'm saying to myself no matter what happens I'm only counting in my pipeline 1,250,000 for each opportunity so I need to build the value up this is why I want a bigger value I definitely being conservative but I always hit my mark right when you under plan you're going to under deliver when you under promise you're G to over deliver all right so you can see the math here right so uh just going back to um 25 million doll sales right then I need four times that in my proposal value I need 100 million and backing it up I need two times that in the bid value 200 million because remember it's one out of two everything that's in bid one out of every two will move forward so I need twice as much in the bid that I will need in The Proposal value um and then same thing backing it up right so if I had nothing else at all I had nothing further in my PO pipeline right nothing in pursue bid or proposal then I would need $500 million or 80 opportunities in the pipeline this is why we do capture for many people they just have a lot of stuff in their pipeline but if you do capture and you truly begin to understand your opportunity and whether you can win it and you understand the the details of capture right and I have a lot of training you go watch it's free um that layout uh capture and how do you do capture activity but the point is if the more stuff you have further in the pipeline and truly you've moved it through the sales cycle the less you need at the early stage and so at some point let's say if you had 32 opportunities in the bid stage then that's all you have to juggle and if your goal is $5 million in Topline Revenue that means you've got at least two or three people in your company doing sales if you're trying to get $5 million in Topline revenue and you don't have a few people in your company then your priorities are kind of a little staggered there you you're not giving your company the resources that are that are needed all right let's look um just as we move move forward so this one gets a little easier right you can see I just went to $10 million goal I'm backing it up the same way I'm just doubling the numbers and if I go to my$ two billion doll one so here in example number one right I need two billion in my pipeline if I haven't done anything else um if I want to make $20 million in Topline Revenue so if I'm trying to make a $100 million in sales over a fiveyear period right so it's giving me $20 million additional Revenue every year then I need to sit there and write for $400 million in value with a minimum of 16 opportunities going out the door and no opportunity can count for more than $5 million so coming back to that example right no win can count for more than 25% and in this case 25% of 20 million is five million so that means I need 16 proposals written at at least five million a piece going out the door to ensure that I'm going to be able to hit my goals and then coming back from there it's just the matter of um rolling those numbers up so when you look at your pipeline you need to look at these and go have I established anything for example have I established the stages have I established whatever percentage we think in our company that an opportunity moves from this stage to this stage if you think an opportunity is coming into the pipeline and they all move forward it's a little unrealistic right so you want to put realistic numbers in you can use mine until you have your own data okay cruising pretty fast here's some steps and you can take a screenshot by the way just put uh I can't remember what I said but handout please in the chat or or pipeline handout in the chat please um if you put that in there you'll be be able to get this but here are eight steps to be able to just move forward from today to look at your pipeline right first thing is make sure you know what your company slam dunk opportunity is second thing is pick a revenue goal it doesn't matter what it is make it reasonable right if you were a $3 million company last year a million dollars is reasonable um when you start going higher than uh a million dollar it's doable but you know you're getting past the conservative stage same thing if you're a $40 million company right set your Revenue goal make that understood so every number after that becomes clear um I already talked about writing down the stages and understanding the stages that are there but then look at your pipeline look in there and go are these opportunities truly slam dunk opportunities first second what stage should they be in on our Pipeline and get rid of number five get rid of anything that's not a slam dunk don't have things in your pipeline that really aren't going to have a chance to come to the proposal stage um and then uh look at that number six and number seven decide based on that first few steps that first few exercises how much more do we need in our Pipeline and then just knock it out right okay so here I don't have time too much to talk about it but where you can find Opportunities I tried to put them in this level of uh progressiveness but the uh and you can see them all right just for anybody's list to the podcast it's USA spending it's fpds it's long range acquisition forecast and Sam these ones are awesome the next ones are um Advanced planning brief to Industry number six is the all-time best out of all of these 12 and that's having a conversation getting inside the wire inside the office the program office and having conversations looking at their wall and seeing their 10-year strategy and asking them questions about it um seven eight nine these are typical ones like the Contracting acquisition folks small business professionals and Industry Partners talk to them get on contract Vehicles as even an unnamed person somebody one of my customers just got on a contract vehicle and they're just in the portal and they're getting the opportunities now now you can hear about opportunities and then deltac is a great place as a source right as a tool and same thing with Pac they're awesome I know they're called Apex now here's what I want you to remember from today's training um first thing is pipelines will make your Revenue predictable so if you take a few days it doesn't have to be weeks if you take a few days and look at your pipeline and begin to refine it you're going to have predictable revenue for 2024 for um it's important to remember that sales is a numbers game everything is a numbers game in sales the Outreach you do the number of phone calls you doing a day your pipeline the number of opportunities you have at pursue or bid this is a numbers game and you need to know your numbers um and then the last one is I I mentioned this already but if you'd like a copy of this deck so you can go back and uh watch the replay maybe and then see my numbers just put pipeline handout please into the chat uh if you'd like H help at all with your pipeline certainly able to help companies over 2 million right where you really have a a progress on there or if you'd like to find out how we can work with you and support your success in the federal Market just go check out gocon chamber.com you can learn a lot there um just sticking to ending on time one of the things I want you to remember because it's vital Government Contracting it's not a secret it's just a process part of the process is showing back up I'll see you in the next training