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okay so let's talk about the um when I talk about increasing the P win right a big part of it is how healthy is your pipeline to begin with sometimes when we think about P when and improving a p win we go all the way to the end of the proposal and you know that stage go what can we do now no go all the way to the beginning of the life cycle and say what can we do to make sure that our pipeline is strong so the first thing I want to do is just make sure we're all on the same page of what's the point of a pipeline right so um a pipeline obviously has opportunities and it's tracking our opportunities that go through we're not trying to track every opportunity that's on gov win or in a Navy forecast we're trying to find the ones that fit us and put it in but pipelines the point of a pipeline is to help you obviously as a business developer follow that opportunity along and do stuff with it but the think about who else uses the pipeline leaders of your company use it your financial people CFO whoever they use that for financial planning do we want to move into a new office um you know are we going to hire a bunch of people whatever the decisions they're making you have writers and graphic folks if they see opportunities that are coming through then they'll have a heads up on uh this need for their services for them to be able to write proposals or graphic people might look in and go oh you're going after an opportunity in this space okay let me start really early beginning to think about what's coming down instead of at the last minute I need a graphic by five o'clock today right so if you have a good Pipeline and it's a reliable pipeline meaning what's in it will get to the end to the proposal writing stage if it's reliable then these people can begin to make decisions early on about it including people like Service delivery the folks who are going to have to execute on that contract they can start getting their heads wrapped around the opportunities you have coming through a pipeline and how are they going to deliver on those promises that you're putting into the proposal or you're talking to the customer when you're doing solutioning and the last one is Talent acquisition right you have HR and recruiting who need to spend you know weeks months sometimes finding some of the best people to work on your contract that well they need a heads up but what they need again is reliability they need to be able to look in the pipeline and say okay I see an opportunity it's past pursue and it's coming forward we rarely have something this far that gets abandoned right so I can count on it and I can start doing Talent acquisition activities that I do without worrying about that effort going to not for uh it being pushed away so if you understand the point of the sales pipeline do me a favor just put pipeline value into the chat let me know you're tracking on that pipeline value and I'm going to move on to um talking about and the ideal pipeline I describe it in three ways when you look at a pipeline and I just in and you're trying to fill it with the right opportunities there's three ways you can look at um the opportunities to decide if it's being filled to its fullest and I'll say what they are and then I'll expand on it um the first way is you can look at the dollar value do we have enough money dollar value contract value in that pipeline the second way you can look at it time focused do we have enough opportunities in there to cover what is coming down the pike in the next three to six months coming down in the next year coming down in the next two to five years right so looking out over the the next five years and do we have opportunities at different stages um that's the second way and the Third Way is role based there's three paths to federal revenue Prime Contracting some are subbing under a small and subbing under a large are we going down those three paths does our pipeline have something in each one of those and so let me expand a little bit on these um and actually I'll start with the role since I pretty much already said it when you think about the role uh you're playing in an opportunity you're either a sub or you're a prime that's all you are right that's all I am and um and but there's three roles that you can have you can be a sub under a large business you can be a sub under a small business and you can be a prime contractor and what I say is if you're doing let's say two or three million already then you should begin to look at having uh opportunities in your pipeline that cover down on all three of those paths so that's one thing you should look at right is is to see if your pipeline has it let me just show this one graphic here so this is what I'm talking about in your pipeline you should make sure and and I'm not going too far into this and if you want the graphics just let me know and I'll send it to you um but you want to make sure you have opportunities that are ones where you are the subcontractor under a small business once were you a prime contractor with an agency and once where you are a subcontractor under a large when you do that you've got a well-balanced pipeline the two other ways that I talked about um are dollar value and so in this particular case when you think about your your goals that are out there right I have a a one million or five million dollar goal for 2023 and then over the next five years I want to reach 25 million dollars in Revenue something like that right so I each year I'm breaking it down well so you want to look at your pipeline and say does the does the um the total contract value of the opportunities in my pipeline does it lead to us being able to get all of this and I'll show you a graphic about that in a minute as we go through the training the second thing is um the number of opportunities that you're going to be proposing on it so an example is if you look at um uh the 25 win rate if you submit four proposals you're going to win one and so if I'm trying to make one million I can't submit a a single four million dollar opportunity and consider that 25 I had to submit four opportunities that add up to at least a million each right and then you can you can vary that different ways but you want to make sure you're giving yourself at least one out of four chances of winning if you have a slam dunk opportunity in there and so that's just proposals are we submitting enough proposals do we have enough opportunities at the proposal phase and again I'll show that phase in a minute um and then you can do the same thing a dollar value you just look at all the stages of your sales life cycle say you're in unqualified qualified pursue bid and proposal right these five stages uh you want to have enough contract value in each stage that you can hit your overall goal at the end and and again I'll show you a graphic in a second um but each stage you want to look at that and say what what is that number and the percentage of total contract value at each stage is different and so you want to know these things I've done training about how you can do it so here I'm just putting it into your head that are you looking at Contract value per stage and then the last one is time Focus I mentioned this already right but you could think about this year for 2023 over the next three to six months uh or the fiscal year right we're already um we're almost done with the second quarter so there's what six seven months left in the in the year the government's year right so that would be one way of looking at your pipeline because do we have enough opportunities in there that we're responding to a sufficient amount next year is coming out fiscal year 2024 and then so on and so on are we looking farther out um at opportunities that are in our Target agency and that are slam dunk opportunities one of the things you got to be careful for is don't spend a lot of time trying to look three to five years out hey I'm I'm doing all this research yeah that's great but 80 of your time should be on the next six months right yes you should be tracking on opportunities that are dropping in four or five years but you shouldn't be spending a lot of time on that um and so you know as you think about this one of the goals that I give people is you should be writing four proposals a uh a month and these four proposals are spread out over time but if they follow those three roles uh one prime uh one sub or three Subs under large or prime doesn't matter um if you follow that you'll be able to hit these kind of numbers so anyways when you look at your pipeline you're trying to decide do we have an ideal amount in my pipeline uh then this is what you want to do you want to look at it from the dollar value standpoint you want to look at it from the time focused standpoint and you want to look at it from the role-based the primer so based position so if you look at those three and you analyze your pipeline to make sure there's good opportunities in there then you can see predictable results at the end because you're doing the right things at this point it increases your P win do me a favor put ideal pipeline into the chat if you understand that part of getting a good P winner increasing your P win is having a strong pipeline an ideal pipeline so put that ideal pipeline into the chat and I want to share another graph here um so I talked about you know opportunities that you have and and how many you should have in there here's a graphic I used and there's a whole nother training and if we're lucky guess I'll you'll find it and throw it in there for us um but in this training there's a uh when I talk about how you can build up your pipeline going forward right um and so right here and I described this a little bit before but think about over here on the right hand side for just one second of these arrows I want five million in new rev new Revenue right that's my goal for 2023. and so as I back up from that I realize that my total contract value needs to be 25 million and the reason I say that is I'm just using uh you know Professional Services I.T Services typically have a five-year contract so if I want to get a single year five million dollar bump then I need to win 25 million dollars in contract value spread over five years hopefully that makes sense there um and so as I'm coming back though now I'm in The Proposal value and right here it says four times the total contract value what I'm saying right here when I say four times the total contract value is that I expect to win 25 of my proposal value right your number could be higher but 25 is great too by the way but if you submit um if you have a 25 win rate then you submit a hundred million dollars in proposal value to be able to get 25 million um and it's the same thing going back right I just went back one stage further in the in the pipeline stages where I just said I'm winning 25 of whatever hits bid that's the stage before the RFP even drops that number should actually higher right my previous company that was at least 50 percent um that it was moving forward so um you know that's what you get when you put in a slam dunk opportunities opportunities that are really good for what you have but if you notice this first box what I'm trying to share here is that um uh this chances of moving an opportunity from one stage to the next and so if I have an opportunity and it's in a qualified State and what that means is that um it's it's our core competency or Target agency pretty much right now I'm gonna call now now that it's qualified as a good opportunity I'm gonna start doing my homework right is the budgeting really there will the program office talk to us do they do they love the incumbent whatever it is but when I look at that I'm going to say whatever I have in qualified has a 33 three percent chance of moving forward what that means is one out of three opportunities in qualified I'm gonna do some homework on and get rid of two out of three of them and only one will move forward to pursue and so that that one opportunity has now moved from qualified to pursue and what I say with the fifty percent in pursue is that one out of two will move forward and um I don't want to get too far into this thing because there's a whole nother training but what I wanted to point out with this is that when you have a strong pipeline the reason it can move forward is because you're asking the right questions and if you truly are losing two out of three qualified opportunities as they move forward in the States you you abandon them and you say we're not going after it then that means you're actually looking at it and you're actually doing what's needed to get a strong P win out there you're really analyzing your opportunities to decide is that not a win it is a win for us and what you want is by the time you're moving into that pursue stage when you really started to do capture six 12 months before an opportunity you know just loose numbers there six to 12 months before an opportunity if you're doing capture you can start digging into those um opportunities with the customer you can begin to gather a lot more information you're shaping um that opportunity with them and you're doing uh activities that are in the winning proposal score that I describe by doing this you'll increase your um past perform I mean your P win so let's let me flip over to my slide and I might share this one too I'm going to share my screen here really quick I usually don't share slides but I always have slides in the notes to to guide me um okay so uh I'm gonna be talking on this feel free to read it if you want but I wanted to use this as a guide for me about um increasing your P win right so one of the things that I don't like about P wins is that they're um dangerous to sales success because people just guess there's no calculation on the P win um you know somebody says what's the P1 ah 80 really what a p win is is a probability of winning so if we were literal to that term probability of winning then our probability of winning will be based on the number of qualified bids submitted to the government by our competitors and us so if there's 10 bids then the highest we can be is 10 P win right um the other reason I don't like it especially is the second bullet it's not helpful to leadership or capture if uh if there is no structure or strong criteria around it um saying how did you come up with the p win are the P wins come do you come up with a P1 the same way for each person throughout the company and and so I get that the term P win is just here and it's stuck but I would really like you to think about winning proposal score because if you follow what I call a winning proposal score and I'll break it down a little bit in a minute but if you follow a winning proposal score these activities will lead to Old School P win numbers going up it's impossible for the P win not to increase what a winning proposal score and I excuse me and I I coined this term a winning proposal score as a way to tie it to uh how I teach people capture here's exactly what you do and how you do it to increase the P win or increase your P winning proposal scores through activity through tasks and so um there's some stuff in here I talk about how uh it's a 100 point scale the winning proposal scale so you should have 100 points and you're trying to get to that at some point you're never going to really be able to get to 100 points and that's okay as long as you just keep getting higher and higher um but it's calculated uh the score is calculated based off of the numbers of these categories you see on the right and I'll talk about them each in a second but I want to give you an example of what I mean by uh the score in any one of them and so here's one with past performance where I'm using it as an example if you have no uh experience with tasks or the agency then you get zero points so for for past performance in a winning proposal score right that category you would get zero points um if you have some experience with some task areas anywhere out there then you get three points it's like okay you're in the game it's kind of like you're annieing into a poker game if you have solid experience with some of the task areas if there's seven tasks areas of four of them you've got really strong experience in other customers then you get you could give yourself six points because you can tell that story it's good um and then moving to the nine points if you have solid experience with most task areas so I said seven task areas now we're looking at six or seven of them you got solid experience that kind of experience but really good experience tied to each one at whatever customer I don't care where the customers at the moment here we're just talking about your experience then that's good you get nine points now based on the past performance now as you move forward this gets way more important for the the determination the government makes when they're uh they have the evaluation criteria but if you have one exact um in the agency and two relatable experiences then you get 12 points what that means is if you have an experience if FAA is the customer and you have an exact um basically duplicate of the task area experience within FAA then you give yourself 12 points um and you can cover down with two other past performances on basically the opportunity tasks right or the Opportunity requirements if you cover down on that you give you 12 points and you max out the points get 12 points if you have three exact uh past performances within any one of the federal agencies and with this agency if you can sit there and say look Department of Navy right we did it in navsup we did it in that fact and now we're trying to get into nav war or something if you can bring Just 4 past performances you give yourself 12 15 points As you move forward one thing to keep in mind about increasing your P win through increasing your proposal scores say you don't have all three as the prime well part of your capture is to go in and ask the government to let you use one of your subcontractors past performances when the eval criteria comes out if you can get them to put that into the RFP when it drops now you only have two but your your teaming partner has a third you can give yourself 15 points by finding the right teaming partner and and and building up that past performance and so hopefully that made sense as it moved forward there if it did put WPS into the chat so I know that you're tracking on what I'm trying to show and then over on the right hand side I just wanted to show you the categories when you focus on these categories you will obviously strengthen your winning proposal score but you will be able to increase the P win so agency understanding I got four minutes I want to share this agency understanding this is complete slightly separate than the program office or the requirement it's do you have a high level understanding of what the Navy does or what FAA does right great and then below that maybe you're doing an opportunity with if I say agency understanding let's call that nav War over in the Navy so Naval uh information Warfare systems command nav War that's an agency understanding I understand what they're trying to do and then coming down customer understanding is understanding who's the customer for this requirement and in my scenario let's say it's peo digital who works you know closely tied under with uh nav War so peo digital is the program office that they're the customer and how well do I understand them and I have this same six uh step breakdown for each one of these first I want to understand the agency's mission what are they trying to do and then the customer's Mission and so I can align them together and then as I come down further into the opportunity in the PWS do I understand the requirements that's coming out from the government and in there it's not just requirements understanding but what I break down and you can go look at the training but I say how well are you having conversations with the program office right it's not enough for you to just read some document are you having conversations are you influencing the requirements are the cus is the customer shaping requirements around the discussions you guys are having if if they are then you max out those requirement understandings that's capture by the way customer understanding requirements understanding those two are the are big meat of the 80 percent of capture right there it's really understanding the customer and the requirements by having um discussions with the government all right and then core competency alignment this is uh this is a good one one for me how close how closely to the requirements in this opportunity align to what you've determined as your company's core competency if you say your company's core competency is data security or uh well let's leave it at data security that's cool if you start going into a broader cyber security it's not as aligned but it's still security it's cyber security but if you start going into it services and software development and you start going into Professional Services right you see what I'm saying you're going farther and farther away from a core competency alignment and you can do that that's your choice but you don't get as high of a p winner at WPS or winning proposal score because you're not aligning to what you're best at your core competencies are what you're best at and that's why we have it I already talked about past performance competition is this how well do you understand the competition how well do you understand the pricing that's needed and pricing to win I hope people will talk about that write books Staffing right are you thinking about what's needed for FTE count so you're thinking about Key Personnel are you already um uh idea identifying the people who will take the lead on here maybe you got people on current projects that you move over right um so thinking about that and then teaming Partners is the the other one that goes huge into how well are you going to win this is do you have the right team like I said who can strengthen your winning proposal score increase your P win and strengthen your um chance of winning the opportunity okay so in this training I shared what the purpose of a pipeline is what an ideal pipeline looks like and then how many opportunities should be in your pipelar how you should look at those opportunities the one task I want you to go do is determine if your pipeline has at least one opportunity from each of those three roles I mentioned sub under a small Prime sub under a large right look at your pipeline and determine if it has that it's okay but does it but at least it gives you action items to say let me fill it back in do me a favor let us know if you found the training valuable if you did put thanks into the chat if you'd like to be part of our BD accelerator Workshop that starts on Monday go ahead and send me a message in LinkedIn this Workshop is for companies that are doing about a million or two million dollars in revenue and want help going to the next level remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a process I'll see you in the next training