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and today I want to keep it at a high level just reminding those of us who are experienced right I have 20 plus years of experience reminding us how the sales Cycle Works and how it could work better together and for those of you who are newer to the federal Market just give you an understanding of how a sale starts from when you hear about it or even before you hear about it and I'll talk about that in a minute and how it goes all the way to Award right so this sales life cycle I mentioned earlier that the federal sales life cycle has three uh parts to it let's say the first part is business development business development which is about understanding an agency right I say knowing it better than anybody else in the agency knows because you're taking so much energy and time to learn about that agency so understanding an agency building relationships within that agency both with government personnel as well as teammates who are already in there and then finally business development is about identifying opportunities your company can pursue so that's Business Development right after that is capture management capture management is about shaping a single opportunity's technical approach or technical requirements and the acquisition approach that the government's going to take on a particular opportunity so capture is all about One opportunity you might do a hundred different captures but they're all capture activities all about One opportunity where business development is all about a customer if you will and then proposal management is really just take in what capture is doing to the next level and it's about writing winning proposals all things aside that's all we want out of proposal management is that we have a winning proposal the government looks at and if they don't award us a contract they feel bad because they're like wow this is such a great proposal that's the purpose of proposal management this is the govcon chambers site but if you come down here I've got this image and I had it somewhere else I just didn't get it in a place where I could click but this is perfect because it's a video if you go to the govconchamber.com site you can find this video where I talk about understanding the federal sales process I touch on what I'm going to touch on today from a different angle but the thing I want you to pay attention to is this Arrow across the bottom right this is business development it's developing those relationships understanding the agency finding opportunities influencing the strategies about their long-range thinking and I'll talk about that in a minute but when you do business development correctly it should be generating opportunities that your company can pursue this is leads of opportunities you can pursue and then from that point forward however you do this in your company right some companies are big enough they have multiple hats I mean multiple people uh wearing all these or doing all these roles and sometimes in a small business it's one person in the Air Force responsible for business development capture management and a portion of proposal writing but capture comes out of identifying opportunities and you see an opportunity you want to win and you pursue it you dive into it deeper and from those capture efforts a portion of those will then be pushed into the proposal phase where we're writing a proposal all of that leading to contract Awards these don't happen in silos that's just that's the Porsche I just want to share with you right is this activity doesn't happen in silos Business Development capture management and proposal management they happen together I want to use a quick story just to give you an analogy of how these guys could work together these three silos or three parts of the federal sales in software development I spent 20 years in the I.T space including in um software development network engineering et cetera but there's something called devops now it's called devsecops pretty soon it'll be called SEC devops because we like changing things um but devops the whole purpose of development and operations was to bring together these two silos that operated as silos to bring them together for the purpose of the agency or the business to be able to accomplish what they needed to accomplish to teach these two units that it wasn't about operations and it wasn't about development it was about the organizational's mission and could they accomplish it and so um the the way that it used to be is development application developers people who develop software they would develop software and we would say they would throw it over the wall when they said it was done they throw it on the wall looked good to them they threw it over the wall into the operation side and the operation side is the people who take that application and they put it on servers and they make it available to the users and almost always it would break right right and then the fighting would begin you know the operations would blame development say hey your code's no good and developments say no you guys don't know how to deploy software blah blah blah blah right they fight and the whole point of devops is they brought it together and said you know what why don't we get rid of the wall and work together the operation people the people who know their risk of deploying software can come early in the process of development and just give guidance they can't tell developers what to do but they can provide a little feedback along the way saying you know what that thing you're doing it's going to cause problems here because we had to deploy this other thing that you're not aware of and development is going to go ah I didn't know that and they can make changes based on what they know and then development instead of just throwing something over the wall they hand the application to the Ops people who are deploying it and and they stay with them and they don't consider their job done until the users are happy everybody is now focused on the users instead of development and deployment devops in a nutshell right and so when you think about Business Development capture and proposal writing and I don't know how to give it an acronym that sounds cool um but when you think about that it's the same thing sometimes we had these silos where business developments out there and they're having fun at conferences meeting agency buyers they're identifying some opportunities they're throwing them into the pipeline the top of the pipeline whoa we got a full pipeline at the top right the capture Management's like well what is this I mean did you even qualify did you look at it what do you how am I supposed to chase this down who do we know who the buyers are specifically for this opportunity yeah well good luck with it it was good you know and then capture is doing whatever they do and they kind of throw it forward to the proposal people when the RFP is dropping or maybe a little sooner and proposal looks at it says well what are the challenges of the customer what are the objectives what what are they trying to accomplish you know I see all these shallow statements but how am I going to create a win theme or how am I going to create a winning proposal if I don't know the customer better around this opportunity capture or hey Business Development if I don't understand the broader agency direction that they're trying to go and so this idea of Business Development capturing proposals is to get us to work more together proposal you could think of them like Ops or operations within devops they're the ones who are basically deploying this to the user and deploying it in their cases writing a proposal and giving it to the customer who will evaluate it and the customer is either going to say it works or it doesn't and if it works it's a winning proposal if it doesn't work it's not a winning proposal but that's not all on the proposal manager right they need information from capture to have shaped the opportunity to have made sure that there's not requirements in the proposal or the RFP that the proposal writers are not going to be able to write strongly to they're going to need to understand the agency better and so Ops or proposal writing right proposal management they can get engaged a lot earlier they can start talking about hey do you really understand what we can write well to what we have strong past performance on of the three parts of federal sales life cycle proposal managers in my opinion know more about what the company can and cannot do than to capture people or the business development people because primarily the capture and Business Development people are outward facing they're looking at the customer they're going into the customer business development in particular really trying to understand that customer much more deeply and so they spend less time understanding their own company rightfully so because they're trying to understand let's say the Air Force so much more and the proposal managers they're the proposal writers management team they're writing the proposals they know what we can do and what we cannot do and so this idea of working together you want to be able to get these three groups and now some of us right it's the same person in my last company I was part of all of them until we started getting bigger and then we had a couple of other people but it was still relatively small team for us five five six people who were primary um sales people if you will and then a bunch of other people are like program managing who got involved as you get bigger it's it's easier I think because people start having different hats but what I'm recommending you do is Think Like devops have your proposal managers come and occasionally once a week have conversations with the capture and Business Development people explaining some of the strengths that they're seeing about the company hey you know what this is a win theme we can do this is I know we say cloud is our core competency but you know what we do more than anything else is cloud migration so if you can find some of that work business developers that would be great and not just on Sam or gov win but I mean going in and having conversations so we'll come to that in a second anyway so if this is making sense this idea that like devops you want to get them working together just put BD devops in the chat if you feel like typing in there BD devops and it lets me know that you're seeing Business Development the sales life cycle in a devops way getting these teams to work together um the the one the other ways you can work together is think about the activities that happen during each stage and so I wanted to take a quick stab I said business developers have three main activities the first one is to get to know an agency better right their job is to research and understand that agency better the second thing that business developers are doing within an agency and with companies that support that agency are there they're starting and building relationships the third thing that they're doing is identifying opportunities so let's come back to research that first one for a second and how research can benefit capture managers and or capture management and proposal management right so as a business developer is doing research you don't want to just do it for yourself you want to do it for the company you want to make sure everybody is is getting the benefits of what you're doing not everybody has to know as much as you do about an agency but getting the best of it so one of the things you might research and find are just strategic documents I'm working with a customer right now a couple of customers that are in the data space all right so the data security data management data architecture and we have collected um a lot of data strategies some of them are just sitting out on the internet some of them you have to work harder to find you know having calls and asking somebody if they have the data strategy but that data strategy allows us to see what the leaders and data are thinking within an agency and the challenges that they're writing down uh the direction they're trying to go some of the projects they did last year and some of the projects they envisioned over the next few years right this information is really helpful to a capture manager as they're going back in on a particular data opportunity let's say and having conversations with a customer trying to understand better how our company can support that agency but also trying to shape the the way that they're thinking maybe they're thinking one tool and we wanted to think a different tool or maybe they're thinking something is complex but our approach is less you know makes it easy basically having the conversations with the customer to be able to understand that will help us prepare for the proposal well if the business development Activity The Reason research activity is passing that to capture managers they're able to prepare for meetings better and have stronger sales questions these questions that are designed to elicit conversation and dialogue between the government buyer we're not just there to say when's an opportunity coming out what's the due date things like that but we really want to understand what are you trying to do I notice in your strategic plan you were talking about this can we pull a couple of threads on that and talk about it and so that information is really helpful to them it's also helpful to the proposal management side when we're writing proposals because one of the biggest things proposals need to communicate is this understanding of the customer people don't care what you know until they know that you care in a proposal the buyer doesn't care what you propose until they know that you care enough about them to truly understand their mission to truly understand their challenges and where they're trying to go right and you can get some of that out of the RFP out of the PWS Etc you can get some of it from what's written in there but so can every one of your competitors but if you're business developers and then your capture managers are actually having the conversation not just sitting back in the office but actually having conversations with a customer you'll be able to infuse some of that information you're learning into the proposal which makes it so much stronger because the proposal will open with uh giving the buyer a feeling of man these people get us like are are they an incumbent have they been here they get us they understand what we're trying to do now I'm open to hearing your recommendations and your Solutions Etc um so that's one thing right research and how it moves all the way forward the by the way uh as a proposal manager is thinking more and more about the best proposals we can write in our company they can be communicating all the way to the business development folks for sure if not to capture folks and again I recognize some of us it's the same person with all three roles but communicating early on saying hey this is the kind of information if you could get this I can write a really good proposal because it it lets me tell a story a narrative um it lets me make my proposals persuasive which I think is a requirement for a winning proposal so the second thing I said business developers do that feed all the way through true is they start and build relationships if you think about in data at an agency there's a chief data officer but then there are also key strategic roles underneath the chief data officer that are important to that agency these are named roles within the federal government every agency must have these name roles and then there's these subordinate kind of Quasi roles and I don't know if I'm using quasi the right way but they're called Data stewards and so if I'm a data company and I'm trying to go after data opportunities or I'm trying to find and develop data opportunities then I want to find these people right so I can be reaching out and identifying um who the data Chief data officer is and who some of these people are and get in and just have quick intro calls to be able to say hey I was looking at the Strategic plan how's that aligned to your data because I see you're the steward of this data the business developer is not selling anything they're just building this relationship by understanding um the customer and as it moves forward to capture in particular now um the capture manager when they've got questions about a specific opportunity the relationships have already been established through business development that they're able to go back they they've already have been having these conversations compared to hey this RFP is coming out in three months and I want to ask all these questions well if you haven't taken the time to build a relationship then the person the buyer for example is still a little hesitant but if the relationship has been built and it's strong then they're willing to talk with you because the government can talk to Industry that's the whole point of market research that's the whole point of a well-run acquisition life cycle on the government side is they actually take the time to engage the sellers and get their feedback before they make a huge investment in something so as it moves forward capture managers because those relationships are in place are able to pass so much more information to the proposal management effort of the sales life cycle all right and so just moving along that thread right when you have these relationships this is how you can begin to find out about opportunities think about an agency that you might want to get into Air Force let's just stick with that right the Air Force has opportunities where would you learn about them sam.gov give yourself five points if you said sam.gov you know give yourself another five points if you said one of these tools that are out there like um gov win or gov tribe or whoever you know you would find out if you're on a contract vehicle like Oasis or something you would find it in that vehicle however they're spitting it out to the contract holders at some point you're saturated and you're only hearing about opportunities that the uh your competition knows about what you want to do through business development is to get in and identify opportunities earlier we talk about shifting left in the sales life cycle right if you think about the sales life cycle you've got a Ward and from the award you've got RFP dropped and submittal for the proposal and then you got RFI and market research and then you got before that like and so you can even think about the forecast I was just sharing a forecast for somebody actually we have a whole directory out there and I was sharing this forecast saying um that we have 2023 2024 2025 opportunities that are solid opportunities in this agency our customer wants to get into and so those are going into the pipeline and you manage the time um ing to like how far it is out there but now I've shifted way less left I'm able to have six months to do capture I'm able to have 12 or 24 months to do capture and there's whole other ways you can do this by the way my favorite way to find Opportunities if you don't know is fpds go into fpds find contracts that were awarded three four or five years ago and go after those because there you can see how much how much did they spend on what right it's it's a pretty good way to find opportunities that might fit for your company by the way let me take a quick uh break here and show you one thing um no this one I just want to let you know that uh today we drop these out and these will be helpful to what I was just saying but these three directories on the govconchamber.com website and the one I was just mentioning is this one in the middle it's the long range acquisition forecast and this is one that has over 100 different forecasts for agencies out there and when you go in and find um and when you're looking for opportunities right that's a great way to find Opportunities it's in the forecast but the the um the way that gives you the most information is when you're in with let's use that cheap data officer as an example when you're in with your target buyers having conversations understanding pretty soon you start hearing about opportunities and you hear about it before the formal RFI is dropping out there you can influence the whole Direction that's going um I also like to say if you've ever seen another slide I've done where I talk about how the government buys it begins with a light bulb an idea somebody has an idea well business development is all about generating that idea not just being there to hear it about the idea once it happens but getting in there and saying hey our company does like I have a customer has three new products or they've had them for a while and they're pushing them out into the federal space but all three products they could go and start talking with the government buyer and put the idea in their head which now they're at the very beginning of the entire life cycle and so finding these opportunities out early on just bringing it back to how do these three parts of federal sales work Business Development capture management proposal management if you're able to find out about opportunities early on it makes it so much easier for capture managers not nights and weekends but just on a normal course of the day to look at an opportunity and truly qualify it and then bring in the proposal manager's first short meeting 15 minutes on an opportunity or something and say look look at this this is why we think it's good not heavy capture management administrative tasks but just looking in there and saying hey this opportunity I said we like cloud and you had told me proposal managers that we have a lot of good strong past performance on cloud migration well you know here's this opportunity we think that fits what do you think and with a proposal manager whose experience they can look at that and pretty quickly give you forget about the shell statements they can look at it pretty quickly and go yeah this looks good for our company why don't you go explore this this and this that would be super helpful now you're doing devops right now you're getting the business developers capture managers and proposal managers all working together uh to write it I said this once before in a training I did where I where I believe that proposal managers disproportionately and unfairly get blamed from when an opportunity is lost I'm like no no no no it's everybody's fault if you win and it's everybody's fault if you lose I use the analogy of volleyball if you know anything about volleyball volleyball has a certain amount of points which I always forget but volleyball has 21 points to win the game and when people are uh inexperienced and uh unfair and their their minds are a little not paying attention to the reality they blame the person who lost the last point he lost us the game and I'm always there to say no those first 20 points are what lost us the game this just ended the game but the game was lost when you were losing points or the game was won while you're winning the points and so um when you get a team to work together proposal management capture management Business Development when you work together you truly are going to be working together to bring opportunities um over the win line and you're going to start having way more wins because you stop doing things like a fire or reactionary and this whole thing I talked about today it's a proactive approach to sales so just think about bringing your teams together in there okay so in this lesson we talked about the three parts of federal sales just a reminder again business development is about understanding the agency building relationships and finding opportunities capture management is about shaping a single opportunity's technical requirements and acquisition approach proposal management is about writing a winning proposal that's it right and so here's my tip for you as you go away I try to take tips give you tips for each one of the trainings and today it's a tip for your entire company or as many of the people as you can teach your staff including those people who are billable working with a customer teach them how the sales Cycle Works that video I had on the govcon chamber it's a great one just to send them if you can't have a meeting send them that video go ahead and use any of the material that I have and I've used with you billable people don't have to sell but they do need to know how you make money and we experience people we need to remind ourselves how the company makes money what's the life cycle like so each of us can help in our own way and and the reason I say include those billable people is because you want to make sure that they're aware of how the company makes money and if they can help they will help if you found today's training valuable do me a favor consider becoming a sustaining member of the govcon Chamber of Commerce remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a process I'll see you in the next training