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hello and welcome to today's webinar on capture and opportunity management i'm mallory price and i will monitor today's session with me is brad douglas president and ceo of shipley associates david bull senior vice president of business winning and mark wigginton regional vice president of business development if you have any questions during the webinar please type them into the questions tab on your control panel we will answer as many as we can brad the time is yours okay mallory thank you and david and mark thanks for uh joining us today um we're staying with our webinar theme for the rest of this year it kind of goes along with the back to school but motto or theme if you will and talking about some of the back to basics as far as business development and uh how we can compete for and win more business so today's topic we won't spend a lot of time introducing ourselves and you could go see who we are if you like but we wanted to talk about the basic the foundational principles and ideas and best practices around what's known as capture management we we often also use the term opportunity management what can we do as sales executives as capture managers to continue to get better at advancing opportunities and qualifying opportunities to actually win more of the right kind of business so we're going to focus on these these points here uh today for this next 45 minutes to an hour uh we're going to talk a little bit about what we mean by capture management what's the goal our goal obviously is to improve our our p win p win stands for probability of winning we'll go over a baseline approach and process the methodology if you will on what the best companies are doing as far as capture management we'll talk a little bit more about what's involved in that process we're actually going to you know the old term swot strength weakness opportunity and threat we're going to point out where that fits into the the whole idea of capture management david's going to spend some time talking specifically about an opportunity or a capture plan why it's important what it involves what should it contain uh what's what's the goal of having an actual capture or opportunity plan and then we'll talk about executing the plan now some of you when you registered when you register for a shipley webinar you're given the opportunity to ask questions in advance so some of you did that and we have a list of questions here that some of you when you registered asked and we are going to rather than just pull those up on the screen and answer them one at a time we're going to try to weave the answers and the questions into the webinar itself so thanks for doing that in advance because it actually helps us shape the content of the discussion and so we will identify these questions and address them as we go and mallory is keeping an eye on the chat bar and you know your discussion window there so if you do have questions if we say something you want clarified please chat it in there and if we can't address it during the actual webinar we'll try to get back with you afterwards and provide you more information so this webinar is being recorded we will post it on our website we will also post um copies of the screenshots that you see here so if you wanted to refer back to them they will be available on on shipleywins.com just some basic vocabulary for just a few minutes just to make sure we understand what we're meaning by certain words capture may not be a familiar term to all of us uh in this session so what we mean by capture as a verb is implementing winning strategies by trying to influence the customer to prefer prefer our organization or services or solution that's what we mean so capture is is an active effort to go win an opportunity to try to shape the opportunity influence the customer in a positive ethical way and try and win the business capture planning is the process of of preparing to do that put taking these winning strategies and actually putting them into an actionable plan something we can actually go to work on what we mean by capture or opportunity strategy then is the plan and actions to win a specific deal so we've identified an opportunity we're in the process of qualifying the opportunity what now are the strategies and the tactics to go make sure we capture that and win that deal again the capture plan it's a it's actually we say here a written plan by written plan i mean it's documented it could be documented online in your crm system uh as part of your pipeline and your pursuit pipeline it could be documented in a series of microsoft office tools and templates that feed together and link together but it's a documented action-oriented plan summarizing how we're going to to go after business and then the capture manager opportunity manager we're going to use this term kind of interchangeable today for the sake of this webinar this is the person or maybe the small team but usually a designated person who's responsible for pursuing this opportunity that has been identified and they the capture opportunity manager as you'll hear from mark wigginton today often is also quite involved in the actual qualification process of an opportunity so that's that's some basic terminology um and we'll we'll go through that and we'll mention those terms again if we again if we use a term you're not familiar with feel free to to uh chat it in the discussion bar and we'll go through that so one of you actually submitted um a question what do you think the mission of business development and capture is and actually we've got a slide coming up on that very mission it's really to advance the sale and win the business i mean that's the basic underlying mission is uh is to win business for our companies if we look at this now some of you probably joined us for a webinar we did last month where we went through the basics of a business development life cycle and here you see a summary of that life cycle with the various phases i know a lot of your organizations have your own model or your own life cycle if you will but really where capture fits in and this was actually one of the questions submitted to us in advance so thank you for that um someone had asked when setting up a business development approach what step is capture management well here it is so capture is you know that activity the strategy the planning that takes place after we've spent time defining our market positioning ourselves to compete in that market and then we start to qualify and assess opportunities and develop a capture plan so it precedes the proposal activity but it comes after our long-term positioning and market research market analysis uh so the follow-up okay thanks mallory so a follow-up question to the one submitted was what's maybe the difference of a bd guy versus a capture guy a business development usually in a larger organization is is not focused specifically on a specific opportunity it's the business development activities of that company or that business unit where a capture manager is laser focused on a specific opportunity that's the difference between a business development person or professional and a capture manager capture manager is laser focused on an opportunity so back to that question that was submitted a few minutes ago what's the overall mission and goal of capture this is it you know we want to go with with a customer with an opportunity smaller large company we have to move an advance from often an unknown position where we're just now discovering an opportunity or a new market or something like that we want to advance to a known position and become known in the market or to the customers we want to start researching competitors then of course we want to move to an improved position how what can we do to improve our chance of winning the business so we need to try and again always ethical aboveboard way what influence can we have on the customer and the opportunity how can we help shape that opportunity so that we then become here favored we want to be going into a competition for work we would like to go in as a favored bidder so how do we position ourselves to bid and when when in a favored position this is where the capture manager comes in it's the capture manager that should be driving this goal this mission this objective to move from a maybe a lesser known lesser favored opportunity to a more favored position now we talked about the idea of and i know again this is back to basics for some of you but the idea of the p went the probability of winning some companies go so far as to actually calculate them and they put a factor on it it could be a percentage it could be a number it could be some type of color you know we have a 70 p win at this point in the deal so uh make it your own but this idea of a probability of winning really has a few components to it you start at the base of course with the customer how well do we know the customer and how well do they know us that's the foundation of the p win the customer do they know us do we know them next piece of the probability of winning is assess the competitors do we know who's competing do we know their strengths and weaknesses and gaps do we know their history with this customer and what is our competitive position as it relates to our competitors the next step in probability of when calculation and determination is a focus on ourselves our capabilities so you see these c's you know the four c's customer competitor capabilities what are our capabilities how can we discriminate is there something we do better faster or cheaper than the competitors and another critical part of p win is the cost we have to understand the cost possibly the price to win window what's it going to take to win and can we actually justify a business decision going after this opportunity so our value proposition as it relates to the cost and the roa for the roi for the customer it all goes into calculating the p width the probability of winning so that's that again it i know it's basic for some but to the extent that we go through trying to compete and we ignore any one of these plateaus on this pyramid so to speak or you know we we skip over and say it's not important on this deal to understand our competitors you know we put ourselves at risk and we run the risk of competing for work that we might not want we shouldn't pursue or we have a low chance of winning so this is all part of capture is the capture manager should always have an eye toward the p win the probability of winning so there's a lot that goes into capture and again we're talking high level in this webinar but a capture manager has to have a certain drive or or desire to collect data you know and not not he or she personally but we need a team to research data and and collect that information and then take that data from raw data and do an analysis what is the data telling us why is this customer buying the way they are why what is their buying pattern and then customer contact and relationship building and mark's going to talk more about that in just a little bit and so that is very important for a capture manager persuasion and sales things are heating up things are getting very very competitive in so many of our markets it's much easier today to replicate some of our solutions than it used to be we used to be able to be unique for 10 years and now that life cycle is shrunk to one or two and then you get copycats and people who make claims they can do the same thing you can do so we have to be more persuasive in our work with our clients with our customers and then the capture manager has to be somewhat involved in solutioning i as a capture manager i have to know what our baseline solution is sooner as opposed to later so i can have good discussions with the customer and ask smart questions and then of course a good capture manager is a strategic thinker someone that can think strategically so if we were to break capture down into the most simplified form and just say you know what is it abcd this is it all right we need to do a competitor analysis customer analysis we need to develop some type of capture or pursuit strategy and then we need to develop an actionable plan this is where companies fall short this is where a lot of us fall short is we put together a pretty good strategy and then we don't follow through very well at actually assigning tasks to to people and holding them accountable we'll talk more about that later i'm going to click through this really quick because it's a lot of information you know a lot of a lot of steps if you will but there is some method to the madness of capture management and opportunity management and so here's a basic methodology approach that we subscribe to and that we've seen be successful out in the market uh in many of your organizations so and it kind of aligns with the the uh p win you know the probability of win but the first thing we really want to do is assess the customer so identify and qualify the opportunity find out who the decision makers are and and what is going to be the buying process the evaluation process in the in in doing this what are the customer hot buttons issues and requirements next there's this competitive assessment this competition assessment we talked about who are they what are their probable solutions and costs do they have gaps or weaknesses we might be able to expose during the pursuit the company again the third c in in the p win have we done a bitter comparison are we are we do we know where we stand competitively have we identified strengths and weaknesses teaming strategies come in here do we need to team on on this deal and then win strategy development tactics to address the swot what are the features and benefits we're really going to hone in on and really important are the discriminators what sets us apart and from that can we create a strong value proposition this is what our proposal teams or proposal writer or people doing the proposal beg for give us a value proposition at the capture phase that we can write against we can't create win messages and customer focuses met focused messages if we don't have that value proposition and then action planning of course and then again we'll talk more about this but if you wanted kind of a road map to what is what are the basic elements of capture management capture planning here it is you know these this is the high level framework that we all ought to be looking at now one of the questions submitted let me find it here in advance was someone made the comment and question capture processes seem to be designed for large companies with significant staff what essentials should small companies use mark if you don't mind would you mind just commenting on that question so if if you're not a large company with the large staff and you see this this approach to capture it seems a little overwhelming are there certain things that the small company just needs to make sure they don't forget about yeah thanks brad i appreciate that um you know and this is something that i deal with a lot with my clients is that you know they they they look at this model and look at some of the really large companies and go how are we going to do that but the bottom line here is what this all is about is understanding the competitive environment and whether you know you're a small business and the leader in that business is the person who has the customer intimacy who's you know kind of sitting eyeball to eyeball with your customer um it's important to have somebody that's actually out there talking to the customer and not just shooting blind so that you can get to that value proposition building rapport is a is a critical piece of this done if you have a sales force again outside sales people that are out there talking to clients it's critically important to make sure that you're doing that and even if you're in a non-profit and you're trying to go through the process of looking at grant opportunities people folks buy from folks you know that's kind of the bottom line so finding a way to to make sure you get eyeball the eyeball to understand your customer understanding if possible who's involved in the competition even as a small business as little you know whatever you can get and really understanding be honest about your own strengths and weaknesses are as as important in a small business as they are in a big business and they're the key elements that lead to the value proposition thanks mark and yeah i would echo that that you know small companies um sometimes the capture manager in smaller organizations is the leadership team and they're the ones out drumming up business building relationships and so you know you just have to make make this fit within your organization shrink it down tailor and adapt it in to your situation thanks mark for that but again this this bottom part of failing to develop an action plan and execute on it i can't stress this enough a large or small company sales people are really really good at doing what they do capture managers are usually really really good at doing what they do all of this front end work but beyond that we all need to get a little better at executing executing an actual strategy for winning the business so some of you might wonder well who should i be interfacing with if i'm a capture manager or if i have a sales person in my organization who should they be interfacing with well it's a lot of people yeah we have to be interfacing with the solution architects you know who's developing the solution the customer of course subject matter experts cost people have to be involved leadership team it's our job as capture managers to keep the leadership team informed on how it's going as it relates to maybe that fee win um so um a question that came in is someone asked you know is understanding our capabilities it seems like in this model we're showing here comes late in the process actually you know on on these visuals it might look like it's coming in late we should know our capabilities going in early as a capture manager i mean we should know when we first having start having dialogue or discussion or interaction with the customer or prospective customer we have to know what our baseline capabilities are before we start otherwise we don't even know what questions to be asking or what to be looking for so if i came across like understanding our solution comes late in the process of capture let me correct that and say no we need to understand our our baseline solutions very early and then as we advance the opportunity we need to understand how can we tailor those solutions customize that solution or make that service applicable to to the customer the other another question came in mallory actually is really good writing these out for me so i can respond to why is the customer's buying process important to know why is the customer's buying process important to know it's important to know so that we know who we should be focusing discussions with how long it's going to take who might need to be on our engagement team you know [Music] we need to understand what their approach to source selection or buying is just so that we can align the way we sell our services to the way they're going to buy and again i'm not going to dwell on this a lot because um we you know this this is a webinar not a training class and you can go back and look at this and print it off if you'd like but here what we've done is we've someone might be asking here in the on the webinar you know if we had a job description what should a capture manager be doing well here's some primary responsibilities that we believe opportunity managers generally take on you know they need to be able to prioritize customer hot buttons for example they need to be able to explicitly say why us why should the customer be buying from us this is so important if we're in an organization where the capture manager activities lead into a proposal these activities become just critical to the proposal team we have to know these hot buttons and we have to know these discriminators so that we can write an effective proposal you'll notice here also we talk about a good capture manager creates a draft executive summary this is best practice it's not common practice but it's best practice that the sales person the sales lead the capture lead should be the one at least crafting a notional executive summary that can guide the win strategy development so that's why we believe that is a primary responsibility of the capture manager and then we list out here some secondary responsibilities or some support responsibility and then of course we talked about research um the capture manager has to leverage any resources you have in in your own organizations for researching these opportunities and it can be subscription services consulting firms associations professional groups uh industry and customer websites that are just huge sources so there there has to be a part of our job as capture managers that focuses on the research and then one of your questions when you registered was very specific about this you know are there certain milestones during the pursuit of an opportunity where we ought to be have kind of a jumping off point mark will talk more about that a little bit but we call these decision gates across the life cycle and we've talked about this in some other webinars but there's some critical points during a pursuit that we need to be aware of for example early on someone needs to decide do we need to mount some kind of marketing campaign uh in a certain market and start identifying qualifying opportunities once we've done that then there's this interest gate this gate number one where we've got to verify that yes we've got an interest in this specific opportunity then there's a pursuit gate are we actually going to put resources toward this opportunity and initiate a capture plan preliminary bid gate the validation bid gate and then finally we're going to submit a proposal are we actually going to bid on this opportunity so these are just these are some decision gates that you as a company ought to be thinking about along the way to give you really the rationale and the business case for going forward on an opportunity let's see i'm going to pause here there's a question can you discuss the timing of the teaming strategy relative to the action plan and rfp drop seems like the teaming strategy comes in and out of the process and that you're exactly right i mean if we've done our good capture work early and we have a feel for what the opportunity is that's going to come out from our customer we should be thinking teammates very early in the process if we don't think we can do it all and then once we get a draft if we get a draft rfp or a final rfp and we really go through the requirements we build a compliance matrix and capability matrix that that will help us solidify and identify where we have solution gaps and where we might need teaming partners so your question is a good one and your point is a good one yes the teaming strategies come in and out of the capture process you know we're constantly have to be looking at that and considering teaming as part of our capture plan okay a very critical role in the capture planning process for capture manager is this idea of qualifying opportunities and i've asked mark if he would discuss the points here around how do we get better at making sure we're bidding on the right opportunities and we call this opportunity qualification so mark if you'll take the lead on this that'd be great great thanks brad before i start on that i want to go back to a couple of things that you mentioned before and you had talked about in the graph that you talked about with the value proposition kind of as the outflow of all the different elements of the four c's just want to come back and reiterate that whether you're in a large business or a small business quite often the person that's face to face with the customer is the only person on the capture team or proposal team that uh has the voice of the customer ringing in their ears and and that's what makes it so important to be able to bring this information back into the team to have it documented to have a written plan to have action plans because many of the people who are going to be writing the proposal have not really you know had that opportunity to to interface with the customer as they go forward brad one of the charts you did a second ago referred back to the decision gates and it also talked about that go no go process where do you do this and the graphic on this chart is an expansion of that you can see on the right side of the graphic you know you can see this flowchart that says does it fit in our plan are we the incumbents um it's a yes no decision tree and all along the way it's important to be honest with yourself about whether you have an opportunity to win what is your your possible european win what is your probability of win and do you have an ability to improve that and if you get to a place where you say no there's no way we can do this the smart thing to do is to determine whether you need to proceed on or whether you need to reallocate those resources someplace else the other thing i want to mention on this chart is in the list of qualification tools for me the last thing on this list which is the bitter comparison matrix is the single most important tool i think this is the key to capture and basically this is a matrix tool and we can probably talk about that in another seminar go into detail but it's a matrix tool that allows you to first identify what's most important your customer what are the most important requirements and then to honestly assess at this moment in time how well do you deliver against those and how well do you think your competition can deliver against those and by by integrating the customer company and competition together you get a really good snapshot at a moment in time of what your strengths and weaknesses are and that really works to help you develop your strategies so you can move forward to the next chart i love this chart because this is such an important element again of of of what we need to do to be effective and and what most salespeople do and still today even when people call shipley most of the people are on the right side the part that says everyone else and they spend most of their time you know if they're in the government sector you know it could well be that they wait until they see something in government or they see something in in fed biz ops if you're in the private sector somebody may call in the lead and you kind of work it there and most people spend their time just going through that proposal process but what we found in studies is that the the most effective people are really understanding their customer they're taking the time to clearly qualify to ask good questions to listen to what the customer needs to explore and research what the customer needs so they can advance the sales and the the result is that we really see the amount of time you spend up front learning about your customer results in a higher cost a higher capture ratio if you want to say it results in more revenue being brought in the deals are bigger because you're spending more time listening to them and uncover what they need instead of just responding instantly to what they're after so go to the next chart um how do you do that there are really three things that you have to do to engage the customer and again i just talked about research and brad talked about research earlier as well and and it could be as simple as google you know doing a google search using google alerts it could be something more advanced it could be understanding the opportunity uh briefings do going to industry meetings where you're able to hear in a kind of non-threatening customer environment where they're you know just kind of talking about their business or talking about their strategic plans but the most important thing is when you're eyeball to eyeball with the customer and you have the opportunity to talk to them ask quality questions and quality questions is something that's been really important to me for all the different phases of my professional career making sure that we ask questions that are open-ended you know maybe they start with what they start with how you know they help us determine what the customer really wants whether they have pain whether they're trying to move something forward whether you know they have internal biases about um you know if they want something very conservative or something out what is the schedule what is it fun how is it funded and it's just really really important to be able to not guess next chart please and that takes us directly into how do you do that and that's really talking letting your customer talk asking these quality questions is is is the key to this and and i learned early in my sales career to look at this as a sales spotlight and this graphic kind of really illustrates the sales spotlight whoever's in the sales spotlight it's just like when you're on a play or you're you know you're going to a musical concert whoever's in the spotlight is the star and our job is to ask questions and then shut up so that our customer can talk and our job is to make sure that we keep our customer in the sales spotlight if we give our customer the opportunity to talk about themselves they're going to tell us what their strengths and weaknesses are what their goals are because it's critical to them it's important to them and it's it's top of mind for them so as quality questions step back and listen let them answer i often talk about multi-level questions and if there are folks on this call who've seen me present before or who worked with me before you know my favorite question is the question what else and i ask a question i get the answer i reflect back and i say what else and by asking the question what else you really get the person to think and they go down to another level in answering the questions so the key to all that is to really asking the questions and getting the information is to make sure that we really identify the discriminators and discriminators can be positive things and they can be negative things and brad when he talked about this talking about going back to the old swot analysis where we identify strength weaknesses opportunities and threats again the keys here as you can see on the graphic there are some positive discriminators and there's some potential things we can exploit and there's some real issues and if you want to really think about this if you think about on the top left corner where we talk about our strengths when we're developing our customer our when we've identified strengths for the customer and we're identifying our contact we want to really emphasize these strengths if we go through the process of identifying weaknesses or things that could be negative we really want to find a way to mitigate those weaknesses that could be back to that question about teaming and where do you start to communicate about teaming you know could be that you've identified early on that you have a significant weakness when you start to look at your competition you look at threats and you get that's the strengths that the competitors have and you've got to find a way to neutralize those those strengths whether that's through teaming whether it's through you know educating your customer going through that process and then offer finally there's an opportunity when you see a competitive weakness and that's where we do things like ghosts or raise the specter of that weakness in how we communicate things to our customers to really make sure that um you know we're not poking our competition in the eye but we're we're giving seeds of thought for the the competition as well um but the key of all of this is to really identify the the discriminators and really help our customers identify the discriminators and uh if you look at this final uh present graphic in my section here i just want to take a minute to talk through this process because this this venn diagram is critical and if you can get to a place where you really understand how to deal with this it's going to give you those one or two things that you need to be able to win more business so if you look at the kind of the ghosted outer circle that says context that's the overall picture of what's going on in this in a specific uh opportunity and then as you look at these other elements here you see again the three c's on the left you see the competitors capabilities on the right you see what the customer needs and on the bottom you see our capabilities the key is where do the do the venn diagrams overlap to bring us the greatest opportunities that we have first off if the customer needs it and we don't have it that's a killer you know that's a key weakness and we've got to figure out how to how to mitigate that weakness as we go through if the if we have it and maybe even the competitor has it but it's not important to the customer well it's irrelevant if they don't care that it's blue that's irrelevant somebody else might care about that if we're in a place in the center there where it says maybe we may be in a place where all three elements overlap and there could be a message that we could develop there perhaps we can talk to the customer about how you know yeah you have a need our competitor can do that and this is how we can do it so you have the potential to build a discriminator but the real sweet spot is the corner over there whoop the corner over there where you're really talking about the key elements it's something that you understand that your customer needs that you have the ability to support that your competitor doesn't have that's limited there might be one there might be two in the whole process but when you can uncover those opportunities and really identify those by doing all the homework that brad talked about earlier you know listening to your customer doing the research doing all the key elements that's that's the golden ticket if we can get to that sweet spot that gives us what we need to be able to increase the value of our sale to the customer which potentially means increase the value the value of the sale to our company so brad that's that's my section i appreciate the time that's great mark thank you and and uh just a couple of comments i can't agree with you more about uh the importance of asking uh and asking good questions and listening i mean it's just it's i think it's just human nature to want to spew forth and tell the customer all the great things about us and our company uh instead of really getting on their side of the table and talking through things so thanks for that and then the other key point this that you get here the the discriminators um let me address one question and david then i'm going to ask you if you'd spend some time uh talking about the basics of a capture plan what is a capture plan what does it do there's a question that came in about smees and and just kind of a caution to all of us i think that sometimes the use of the word expert can be risky in our companies if we're calling uh people subject matter experts that might oversell their their true uh true expertise if you will and so this person said maybe we ought to just call them technical a technical let's see subject specialist that's probably a safer term than expert so thanks for that comment and then someone asked about price to win as it relates to the capture manager here are my thoughts on that i believe the capture manager owns the responsibility to do price to win analysis and comparisons and and drive the process but i believe it's more than one person that owns the whole price to win approach method and decisions it has to it's something beyond just a single person but yes i think the capture manager owns the responsibility but there are others involved in developing an actual price to win uh approach and target if you will that includes the costing people it includes senior leadership because that's when we really formulate is there a business case for for following up on this opportunity all right well david i'm gonna i'm gonna turn the screen over to you and let you talk a little bit uh with the group about the the capture plan all right brad thank you so much folks i'm going to do like mark and i'm going to preface this we've all all on this call have worked on a lot of proposal opportunities and one of the thoughts that enters our minds early is what kind of information do we have and what kind of information are we lacking and i'm going to go on record as saying that in my world capture management capture planning and capture tools are the most important aspect of business development there is out there what you do know and what you don't know directly impact your chances of winning or your chances of not winning that p win that brad discussed so um it's very very important that we actually put this practice you know message into uh into play and so it's my opportunity here to talk about what it is which is an actual capture plan you know brad brought up a really good point early you know a lot of it we we used to think of it as a powerpoint presentation it's 30 slides or a word document but folks it can be a lot of things i mean we now have software tools like crm we have salesforce we have powerpoint we have word but the bottom line is it has to be a plan it has to be a document it has to be a message that resides within the business development opportunity that says here where here's where we are because what it does is if we don't we see we have fuzzy concepts you know the the sales person or perhaps in a bigger organization the capture person or you know someone else may individually have this or they may not and so consequently what we need to know will be driven by what the capture plan captures so with those four c's we start to understand who the the competitors are you know we clearly have graphs up on the wall that may have all kinds of information of what their core competencies are what their solution are who their teaming partners are what kind of pricing plans they put in and how aggressively or non-aggressively they go you know we have clear understanding of the customer's needs and what the customer's asking for and so the point here folks is whether it's shared with us in a software package whether it's out on our sharepoint site if we're doing all this electronically or whether it's documents on the wall it is an actual plan that clearly identifies clearly i tic articulates and clearly sets the stage for that message that ultimately will be given off to the proposal team so that they can act upon the findings and articulate the discriminators that mark just talked about talk about our strengths and weaknesses and how to elevate and posture our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses so you know the plan in itself becomes so critical to have so you know like brad says we all we're all good about gathering the information uh it has to become actionable and it has to be part of a plan and then of course we put a stake in the ground and says here where we are but another key thing folks is don't ever ever ever let it become stale um one of the things about one of the questions is when do you start your you know your capture plan and the simple answer to that as early as possible as soon as your senior management or as soon as you know as a business development person that an opportunity is eminent and the very realization is is that you'll go after it it's never too early we always know when it was too late but it's never too early to start a capture plan now the word of caution there though is when we begin to think about a capture plan usually there's a little bit of cost of money in there somebody might have to travel somebody might give up other opportunities to be focusing on this so just be careful that now by clearly declaring that we are going to focus on a specific opportunity and create a capture plan to that specific opportunity now in fact their money will be spent and so sometimes that's a difficult decision that needs some justification at the senior management level because you know it's still uncertain whether that opportunity will actually hit and we all know of situations where we put a lot of effort into an opportunity that never came to fruition so sometimes it's tough but back a second brad but again you want to populate and you want to validate we've talked about validate you know just to briefly now started talking about updating you know typically at a kickoff you have a capture plan that articulates all the things that we've talked about but usually after a kickoff you know you're talking to your teammates that you've brought on board you have an industry day that is typically after the release of an rfp where you know the the company the the excuse me the customer will give you one final set of expectations and again sometimes questions and answers that other competitors ask will give you intelligence so make sure that you are updating that and the last step that we've all agreed to is is make sure it's action one can be implemented next slide brad i think the um i think the the the strategic benefits of the capture plan that i've seen is when you start to you know mark indicated the bidder's comparison matrix and we'll talk about that here in the next slide but you know what that does is that begins to if you're honest with yourself and if you take a good hard look at what your core capacities and capabilities are you're going to see gaps and and where you might be weak or where you might need help and you know one of the things that a capture plan will help you do is it'll help you identify your weaknesses and it may be like mark's slide showed you it may be it may be wise to no bid and okay but that may not be the end of it at that point in time you may have an opportunity to strengthen your position by adding teammates adding people or you know figuring out a different solution other than the initial one you thought about but the point is is you know you're you're you're looking at in consensus internally and with teaming partners as to what your strengths and weaknesses are from this document you're beginning to shape you know where you play and where you might need help you've identified the gaps and now you know what you have to do to to fill those gaps and you know folks this is a hard hard concept to understand and we at shipley work so hard to discuss this with senior leadership of the clients we want to help but the money spent in a capture phase usually is is is arguably some of the best money spent because it allows you you're still in an opportunity in a time where you can talk to the end customer and say hey what do you think of this solution that we're going to propose what do you think of this team you know in the past this hasn't worked this is where we're going and so you actually have a chance to as brad started way off maybe influence the the solution you have a chance to usually respond to a draft but the point is is the pressure hasn't mounted yet and you really have a chance right now during this phase to learn and understand and to adapt to the conditions when the rfp hits a lot of that goes away and so if we have spent money and we've come up with a draft and we've gotten to maybe a pink team and a red team based on our capture intelligence and our cat capture plan um you know material then now our solution has the opportunity to dramatically increase in both its specificity to the needs of the customer one of the four c's and the quality of the the document improves as to you know how our solution with its discriminators so this money up front reduces all that scrambling at the end where now we're in a proposal phase and we're just throwing every huge you know item and and person that we can and we just recklessly throw money where we spent you know very very uh specifically at the front and limited now at the back end if we don't have a good capture plan we'll do whatever it takes because we we seemed like we've committed we just have to get it out the door and so it's like oh my goodness so anyway it's a very powerful tool to have up front and it will positively affect your cash flow in the middle of this diagram is the bidder's comparison matrix brad it's the yellow box there and folks that's i agree with mark it's the key fundamental underpinning of all capture plan because it forces us to identify all four c's of the uh of the capture plant and if you go back to the left you're looking at your internal assessment you know how well is your solution or how well are your core capabilities aligning to what the customer needs how well do you posture yourself against the competition and you know we hate it when we go to a debrief at the end and we said boy we didn't even know these people were competing and yet they want so you know it we had demands that we know the competition and it demands that we have that relationship you see that box that says customer overview folks that's you know that's the ask ask ask well who are you asking you're asking the customer you're asking your teammates about the customer you're understanding what their capabilities and needs are and if you have them it's all documented in just one specific tool called a bidder's comparison matrix and out of that depending upon your strengths and weaknesses and or the customers or your your your um competitors strengths and weaknesses comes all your strategies every strategy that you could possibly think of comes from one of those four statements and then you know again because of it it has macros and equations built in it that will give you quantitative scores of where you stand now you know a strategic position and what you have to do to perhaps elevate you above your competition and it gives you very actionable plans we maybe not are as strong in this area what are we going to do to get there and we come up with plans to get there we have strengths in these areas what are we going to do to make sure that we quantify and don't don't just throw out you know you know best in class world class best of breed unsubstantiated claims the capture plan will help you gather that intelligence and be able to prove and validate your solution and then you come up with a schedule that fits you know prior to the proposal probably is where most of the capture plan is done and built but like we said it's a living document it lives clear up until submission and so there will be times during the actual proposal that through industry day or documents like i said that you see from the customer giving back to you amendments or answers to questions there's always room to grow your capture plan so this next slider does like the who what where why when the the what is just a plan and it can be a wide variety of sources it truly is usually laid out at the um at the uh kickoff but it you know it is a plan that can be you know you know based on documents can be based on a powerpoint presentation that you formally prepare to your audience at the kickoff can be residing in your um sales force but you just have to identify what it is and where it is when is typically the overarching capture plan is made available at your kickoff because everybody's interested in what exactly has been gathered intelligence wise up to that point how uh it can be verbalized in a formal kickoff it can be put up on the walls it can be shared in your sharepoint and there's a file that says capture plan or it can be articulated you know in in conversations with the with the what do we call them brad technical specialists they begin to write and and so you know whoever it uh we need to and then who uh typically it's a capture person or a program manager or the account manager but uh we all have to own it at the end because we have to take that message and put it into the proposal that's it for me brad great thank you thank you david and very good tips on why a plan why it's important what is involved in it you know so if i were trying to start from scratch like one of the questions that came in in advance of the webinar you know and try to build a capture approach and methodology i'm going to back up a little bit just here you know i would build whether it's in your salesforce.com your crm like david said you can do this in sharepoint by creating little entry fields you can create it in a word template you know with a link to excel spreadsheets that do your scheduling but these are the elements you know i would just i would have a section where the capture person the sales person can give me an overview of the description of the opportunity overview the customer the competitor assessment what do we know what don't we know leave it blank if we don't know anything fill it in later our internal capability so i would make a heading or a placeholder something for each one of these elements that's where i would start if i were starting to build some kind of capture methodology so we're about to wrap up but there's there is a book i really really like and i actually refer to it often because i mentioned a weakness a common weakness many of us have is actual actually executing a plan and there's a book put out the four disciplines of execution by chris mcchesney and some other authors and they boil down execution of a plan or a project plan to four key disciplines and i know this sounds simple but if we can just do this better it's focused on what's important you know and in our case when we're in business development and capture management it's the customer and the opportunity don't get distracted by other internal projects you know stay focused in fact that was one of your questions in advance how do we stay focused well it's accept the responsibility for the opportunity and don't let other things get piled on you to distract you their point two their second discipline is act on leading measures of success well we've given you a few of those today you know the the seas you know the customer the competitor the capabilities and the cost those become the p win leading measures we should be tracking as capture managers how well are we doing the third discipline they mention in this book is keep a compelling scorecard well that's the david said it you keep your capture plan evergreen you know it's iterative you always are adding to it and changing it and updating it their fourth uh discipline establish accountability if we don't have accountability timeline people david said who what when how if we don't have that associated with our plan and a schedule is kind of meaningless so those are the four disciplines of execution that i really really like and as i said i refer back to that that book often so again we want to thank you for uh participating there are still there's a couple minutes so um mallory's shown me a couple of questions that have come in um in some cases certain customers engagement with them becomes difficult especially i think we're talking about government customers how can we drive the p win in other ways other than having conversation that is so valid and it's not just valid in the government it's it's working its way into business to business i recently saw a an rfp from a business to another business and there was a collusion clause in there that once the rfp is out and released there is no collusion with anybody from that company regarding that pursuit so uh we have to find other ways to get engaged with the client and and that can be bidders conferences industry day professional associations uh linkedin social media be careful with that again if they say no interaction don't go jumping on linkedin and violate that through social media that is a caution too so it's harder in a government contractor situation where the customer shuts down and doesn't allow dialogue but the point is we have to try to find other ways um uh i'm going to defer this next question when a company does not have adequate proposal staff any suggestions on how i would justify using consultants that becomes an internal business decision and an investment decision so i'm going to defer that question but let me summarize what we've covered today effective capture of management it will improve our p win if we have the discipline we have to determine an approach depending on the nature of our organization the size and we have to stick to it you know constantly changing our capture approach is so frustrating to others in the company so determine an approach stick with it make it work evolve it involve the right team members get people involved don't operate in a vacuum or a silo that's so frustrating when the capture management function is over in this building and the proposal teams over in that building and they never interact you know this idea of siloing functions is is obsolete we've got to interact with the right team members establish a plan and a template and and kind of a thank you for joining the webinar email we're going to be offering you up a chance to download a very simple powerpoint capture template if you would like we'll put it out there for you it's 8 or 10 or 12 slides that can become a template for a capture plan if you will and then execute on the plan and hold people accountable that's that's a summary and again we thank you for spending this hour with us thank you for your questions in advance and during the webinar if there's anything we can do to help you along the way please let us know mallory thanks for uh navigating and uh taking care of of this webinar david mark thanks for your input and your expertise appreciate it very much here's our contact information any of us would be happy to answer questions or address your needs going forward if you'd like so have a great day rest of the day and thanks for your time today take care