Phases of sales cycle for Government

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the way that I provide my trainings is I really try to make sure there's action that you can take after every single training and so make a point of doing that go what action am I taking away from today's training on introduction to federal sales capture management right what are you taking what are you learning and what could you do what one little thing could you do that makes that training go beyond just learning and turns it into actual doing so that's my tip of the day for those of you showing up early and on time I appreciate it um some of you've been camped out in tents all night long waiting for the event I appreciate that uh I really do it it motivates me to come back and to keep working hard so thank you I joke a little bit with it but I really appreciate um those of you showing up early and on time and over and over again it drives our passion for doing this okay so let me share my screen and we're gonna get rocking and rolling okay today we're going to talk about uh Federal capture I want to give you a federal capture overview I've done a lot of training in the past on Federal Business Development sales obviously is what I teach but today I want to focus on federal capture management when you think about capture and I'm going to talk today about obviously what a capture is and go into that but when you do capture right you're going to have a lot more success in your company and this is what I want for you I want you to start seeing the success that you planned for when you took the job that you have or when you started the company that you've started if you do capture correctly a very important part of sales you're going to have the success in your company that you wanted um too often though we make a mistake and and I call it the biggest mistake here at the moment is this reactive bidding right and and I'm not talking about those of you who's who flat out have a a process or a um have made a decision to just bid bid bid not to capture I don't mean that I mean those of us who think we're doing sales and we're just putting something in the pipeline and then responding to an RFP or or putting a bid response right that's reactive bidding and that's basically not doing any capture at all not sales at all that's transactional activity and um and so when you don't do capture you're just bidding in the blind you're bidding with no knowledge capture is about having that knowledge which we'll talk about so in today's training I'm going to answer three main questions that are important when you're looking at capture first is what is capture the second are what are the key parts of capture what are you doing in capture right and then the third one I want to tackle are um how your capture management activities can really help proposal writing and to make your proposals stronger make them winning proposals so that's what we're going to cover today if that sounds good put capture rocks into the chat if you're watching the replay put it in the comments but come along by putting something in the comments there and let me know you're there okay so if you're not familiar with me my name is Neil McDonald I'm the president of the govcon Chamber of Commerce I want to welcome you to my federal daily sales training where I provide tips for success in the federal Market I spend 20 years as a small business owner in the federal market and since 2018 I've been teaching people like you the Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process when you follow a process A to Z you're going to have predictable repeatable results and that's what I want for you and do me a favor put your company name and your core competency two or three keywords into the chat let fires others in the community let me know who you are let us remember who you are by seeing it over and over and over again and then also if you're open to connecting on LinkedIn this is a connection platform if you're out on YouTube or somewhere else come on into LinkedIn and join it because here is where you can have dialogue out there it's really me to you but when you come into LinkedIn all of us are able to communicate back and forth so let us know if you're open to connecting on LinkedIn so other people can reach out to you finally I just want to say thank you to the sustaining members of the govcon Chamber of Commerce without you none of this would be possible the directories would put out the information we shared the training that we provide we don't take uh funding from government contractors I mean excuse me from the government or from large Prime contractors our funding comes from sustaining members like you we're self-funded and I just want to say thank you on behalf of all those who are benefiting from everything the govcon chamber puts out it's because of your sustaining members okay let's tackle um what is capture management let's let's in in federal sales there's three parts of sales that I described there's Business Development there's capture management and there's proposal writing and so business development is about finding an opportunity to put it in your pipeline and proposal writing is writing a response to the government and in between is the actual sales meat of that sandwich if you will and it's capture management so capture management is about learning more um learning more about the customer and who they are right understanding the agency's mission when you think about a customer there might be an agency or even a department then an agency and then underneath that is the program office and so your customer has kind of different levels to them they're an onion that as you're doing capture you're you're either peeling back that layer and you're learning more about them or you're putting more and more layers on um as you continue to know more about them so that's understanding that customer more than just what you might see in a PWS or an RFP when it drops right you want to go learn about that customer you want to learn about the requirement where did this requirement come from what are you trying to do with it you know obviously the technical depth or the scope of the requirement that's there but you also want to get an understanding of the requirement in the context of everything else that customer is trying to do and the last thing as it relates to learning more about your customer or learning more in the capture management activity is understanding your customers expectations there's some things that they write into the um into the PWS Etc that says what they want to get done but when you do capture in there learning this from the customer themselves they're sharing their expectation maybe those uh expectations that they have that they weren't able to write down because they couldn't articulate it or the Contracting Office uh didn't really want to include it in there whatever it is when you have conversations and you're learning more you're able to uncover those expectations that are out there the next thing about capture management when you think about what is capture management it's about shaping the opportunity right so you're learning about the customer and you're researching and you're going in and having discussions but all of it is driving towards two main purposes shaping the opportunities acquisition approach and shaping the opportunities technical approach this week by the way I'm doing five days of training on capture and so I'll go into more of these in particular as we go along I have a whole training I think just on shaping the opportunity and so I don't want to push it all into 30 minutes I'm going to spread it out but from a high level when I say shape keeping the acquisition approach that's the Contracting officer what decisions are they making about this requirement that they have when they're coming to Industry trying to buy from industry you know whether it's a contract vehicle set aside type things like that that's the acquisition approach how they will acquire this services or product for that requirement the technical approach is the scope right so think of it a cloud as Cloud for example if the government wants to get on cloud do they want to get on Oracle clouds do they want to get on Google Cloud do they want to get on Microsoft cloud shaping the opportunity is trying to convince them to go to the cloud that you love best right and so that's the idea of technical approaches you're getting in and shaping the requirements and you do this with the program office um and so in there they're the ones with the need they're the ones looking to talk to subject matter experts like you and to see you as a trusted advisor as their understanding and shaping and writing down the requirements for an opportunity that'll be coming out the third thing about capture management out there is about positioning your company company favorably with Buyers so when you have discussions when you're in there learning more about the customer you're just the very fact that you're having conversations is helping them know like and trust you and people buy from those they know like and Trust so you're in there early and um the government the government buyer the people you're talking to they're seeing you favorably because you're listening you're in there talking to them about their needs you're trying to understand the requirement you're not just trying to come in and bid and get a piece of the contract you're trying to truly help them and they can see that as you do the research they can see that you care there's this great line that says people don't care what you know until they know that you care and in this case you can expand a little bit they don't care what you say you know in The Proposal until they know that you care and you're positioning your company favorably if all of the people who are going to make a decision are going to remember your company's name maybe even you but most importantly your company's name the fourth thing is capture is about building a winning team we can't do this alone the bigger the opportunity gets the more you need teams and so in capture you're identifying who you need on that team and then you're building that team and finally capture is about um engaging the buyer long before the competitors and what this means is um for many people who did that biggest mistake where they put something in the pipeline and they basically respond to it when the RFP comes out they're not doing anything to engage that customer they're not doing anything to try to shape or influence that opportunity but you are when you do capture so capture is about getting in there and really um engaging this buyer and talking to them uh in a way that is collaborative compared to when you just respond to the RFP it's just responsive and reactive and so the buyer is really not going to know who you are you have this whole period think about it right I mean three months is a very short timeline to go after an opportunity in the federal space really it's more likely that you've got six months before and RFP drops and when you put it in your pipeline or if you're even doing this more proactively you've got 12 and 24 months and so you have all this time to get in there and do capture while your competitors are sitting and waiting for the government to tell them something hey here's the next thing you need to do here's the next document I want you to respond to here's an RFI whatever it is capture is about getting in the door and engaging the buyer not just responding so hopefully that makes sense a quick intro of what capture management is I want to talk about the different parts about capture management and as you go through and and by the way I'm okay leaving I'm trying to go back and forth to decide whether I want slides to build with animation or let you just see it all on here so if you got feedback let me know on how how it works for you do prefer to see the whole slide or do you see do you prefer to see it build by Major bullet um but anyways there's three three main um areas that I want you to pay attention to when you think about capture right and the first one is information capture management is definitely about information gathering you're going out you're trying to talk to the customer uh talk to anybody out there who might know about the customer teammates Etc you're talking to all these people and you're trying to gather as much information information knowledge is power it allows you to be able to execute um on that information you're finding and so some of the examples of information you want to find are the opportunity background so what I mean by the opportunity background uh is a little different than what you see in a PWS so if you go into a performance work statement or or any kind of the set of documents for an opportunity that's coming out in the RFP you'll see them have a section right at the beginning called background that's not what I mean that's their background that's where they're talking about um you know the program office and some of the things they're doing what I'm talking about when I say opportunity background is where did this come from is this a new opportunity is it a recompee if it's a recompete right how happy are they with the customer or the the incumbent what have they been doing on this opportunity did they start a long tail um requirements definition phase where they're really trying to define the requirements that are coming out so um was this previously awarded on a different vehicle it's coming out on this one any of that information about the opportunity have there been rfis Etc understanding uh if you've ever seen me do a training on the road map of the acquisition life cycle for the federal government they have all these stages like 30 or 40 different steps they go through as they bring something from the idea to the award you want to understand where have they gone have they done a government an independent government cost estimate right this is where they're understanding they're setting their own understanding of what they think it'll cost and then they're looking to Industry to see if there's a match well up opportunity when you gather information and you're gathering information about the opportunity background that's what that means is really understanding it from all different angles and then there's these traditional pieces of information you really want to get and you don't want to leave it to just a performance work statement where they might mention some challenges or they might mention objectives yes those are a great start but when you do capture you're talking to somebody you're talking to either industry or the or the government buyer and understanding what are the challenges and pain points they run through sometimes it's so easy because you go into an agency and they've got a document from the oig or they got a office of Inspector General or they got a document from the government Affairs office that are labeled sometimes top challenges top management challenges there's been documents out there about dod's top cyber security challenges so digging into that but also meeting with the program office you begin to understand it's like hey you've been on Microsoft for a while do you like that what are the challenges you run into do you like how they drop features all the time whatever it is you're trying to explore those pains because Your solution is this bomb this this um fixed to a pain they feel but if they don't feel the pain how can they see your solution as this as that bomb as the cure to what ails them right and so you want to make sure you're not only understanding it for yourself so you can get it into proposals Etc but you also want to make sure you're having the conversation so they're reminding themselves of the pains and the challenges they have because often customers forget about that they know their own little world but they don't know the bigger problems that are out there um goals and objectives very similar to to the pain points right as they might be written down in the PWS and they'll have um some objectives in there but what are you really trying to get done right and so having these conversations you can understand goals and objectives from the written standpoint and then also the discussion standpoint I I call them um implied needs and explicit needs implied needs are things that are kind of noodling around well we wish we had that and they didn't really write them down but explicit needs is you know what we need this as salespeople as capture managers our job is to help them see an implied need a need that kind of is something they want as an explicit need something we need um and that's where you sit there and go to town because you respond to the proposal based on the RFP documents and then you can slide in some additional information that you have learned by doing that information gathering around goals and objectives and the last bullet I have for information uh Gathering as it relates to um capture management is getting in there and understanding a customer's voice and their language to me this primarily is information that you would gather from written documents and written material right even actually recorded briefings that they do that but I'm talking about strategic documents or annual reports um industry day slides things like that or industry day briefings we can listen to them talk but you want to hear how do they talk first off about some of the jargon that might be used that's really important there's an example of this term called devsecops it's a development type term but Dev secops and very recently industry has been toying around with making it SEC devops so security development operations and it's really important that if you're talking to a customer you don't get so far ahead of them that you're on this Cutting Edge way of talking about devsec Ops and calling it SEC devops you want to understand what are they using and how do you how do you talk um how do you make sure you use that same jargon language but also there's this language around the child challenges they face you don't want to describe cyber security risks in a way that matters to Banks or to Walmart you want to describe cyber security risks as it relates to DOD or as it relates to EPA or whoever the agency you're working with is well they have strategic documents they have plans out there that you can ask to get a copy of if you can't find them on the Internet and when you get them and you read them you really begin to Able you position yourself to be able to talk uh using that customer's language speaking a little bit in that customer's voice not that person but the agency's voice this is the way we describe something so that's information gathering as part of capture management the second major part of capture management that I want you to track on is identifying the selection board this is really really really really really important selection board basically are the people who are going to look at your proposal when they get it evaluate it and say yes or no right there's a formal process of yes and no means but basically the selection board and it could be called many different things the selection board though are the people who are going to evaluate your proposal and decide on whether you're going to be a winner or a loser that's simple right I mean I'm not trying to sit there and label this ing to the far and what that means is you need to figure out who's going to be the Contracting officer because they're going to be looking at let's say the pricing or the acquisition details they're going to be looking at whether you used 11 Point font or 14 point font you know all that kind of stuff who's who's going to look at the technical scope who's going to look at the past performance and decide whether those are good smaller opportunities have less people bigger opportunities have many people and you want to begin to figure out who they are you can do your research and capture it takes time but you can begin to find out who was doing that you might reach out to for example the incumbent or somebody who've been on it in the past and see if they got any recommendations for you hey did you guys ever do a debrief did you find out who was looking at your documents you could meet with the customer in the program office literally you could be asking them who's tracking on this you might not use the word selection board right but who's able to evaluate our proposals to even know whether it makes sense and technically acceptable right um understanding who are the leaders within program offices when you meet with a program office person and you're having conversation so you can say you know hey when you look at proposals that come in what are some of the things that are just um you know not specifics but what generally do you like to see um in there for example I talked to a contract officer and they say they tend to want to see this type of thing what about you by asking that question not only can you learn it if you get the answer right if they have an answer for you but also you can begin to understand would they be somebody who's actually on the selection board so depending on how you do your capture um you can find this information but most importantly you just gotta try to identify who are going to be the people looking at your proposal because those are the people you want to talk to early on and those are basically the people you're trying to write to in addition to being compliant the last major part of capture that I wanted to talk about from this introduction level is solutioning I feel like sometimes people wait to the proposal to start writing the wait till the RFP drops to start writing the proposal um I feel like they're waiting too long if you're doing capture correctly you know that you've got a good opportunity in your pipeline that you're going to write a proposal to and so capture to me is about getting an earlier start it doesn't mean you spend a a ton of hours right the whole point of moving through capture stages is to determine whether you're going to invest more and more energy into an opportunity but you want to start talking about solutioning and solutioning is this idea of basically just figuring out here's the customer's requirement here's our technical approach right and and when you do that you're truly beginning to understand uh the requirements they have by thinking about solution well we're thinking about doing this and your colleagues might go well wait it's not addressing this task area or it's not addressing this kind of challenge they're facing um you're able to engage your teammates and begin to find the ones that really work before you write a TA when you start just at a high level talking about solution how would you do this what are you thinking about could you do this things like that you're engaging your teammates so it's helping you build that relationship as you're getting closer to RFP but it's also allowing your teammates to begin to get engaged with the capture process it shouldn't be subcontractors are on their own they should be part of that activity of shaping an opportunity or understanding it so solutioning is one of the best ways let's all look at all the requirements to figure it out the last part about solution that I love is this ability to go in and talk to the customer and so say start saying hey this is the direction we're thinking right you're not trying to share anything overly proprietary that you might be worried about but I talked about Oracle and Google and Microsoft cloud for example AWS um well you could be talking to a customer say hey we're thinking about recommending you go this way oh yeah we tried that three years ago we hated it oh okay thanks for telling thanks for telling us right so beginning to bounce solutioning back to your customer you know we're thinking about really putting the focus one of my favorite things is communication and Outreach user adoption when it comes to technical projects I might go in and say hey we're really thinking about you know focusing on the challenge of getting users to adopt oh my God yeah that's why most of our projects go south is because the users just reject it when we get there okay good so if we come in with a solution that is is not only just Tech heavy but a little bit of communication heavy that might be helpful to you oh yeah I hadn't even thought of that right and so if you can have these conversations you're talking to the customer about solutioning you're able to start figuring out what's working for them what's not working for them and you're able to keep giving that information back to your colleagues teammates proposal managers whoever and I get by the way uh just really quick if I come back here I get that uh some of you are small businesses right remember my guidance is if you're under three million or haven't been in business for three years you should seriously be looking at subcontracting under a small so uh a small business doing five ten twenty million dollars a year there's a lot of room for you to grow there and so you're captured will be a little different where you're doing a lot of assists this kind of capture what I'm talking about having people you've got to have at least three people who are going to be tracking on it like a proposal manager a capture manager and somebody else on the team leadership or whatever when you're at that level you can do a lot of what I'm suggesting when you have less people it's a little harder so you find that balance but it's the same kind of activity so the last thing I want to talk about is how you know why do capture right why do capture correctly and how can capture make proposals um much stronger and be better and be winning proposals that's what I'm really looking for is capture is making proposals uh lined up to be winning proposals I I describe it as the capture scoring as a winning proposal score meaning if I do these capture activities I'm going to have a top winning proposal so here are some examples of how capture can really make proposals better for your company the first thing is you're able to when you're doing capture correctly you're able to continuously refine and focus on Slam Dunk opportunities slam dunk opportunities are ones that you feel like were written for you the more you get to know it you the more you confirm to you and your your colleagues and your teammates that hey this opportunity is one that we we can win and so capture Done Right is going to make sure that your company's focused on Slam Dunk opportunities and that makes proposals better because you're writing proposals on what you're good at and you're not writing proposals on random requirements which goes to the second bullet here right right only to the very best opportunities when you have slam dunk opportunities and when you have enough of them you're going to run into a challenge where you're um you know do I go left or right on us on two slam dunk opportunities well um when you're doing capture you'll begin to add more to it so both opportunities could look great but you have better capture activity on B this B opportunity compared to a object you're getting more traction maybe you're able to talk to the program manager and they're sharing more details like I described you're gathering information better on opportunity B well now you begin to focus your energy or the proposal folks could focus their energy on opportunity B and they'll write only to the very best opportunities and the very best opportunities are defined both by the requirements that they want but also by the traction you're getting with the customer if your customer is not talking to you then that's not a very best opportunity it's still a slam dunk opportunity but it's not you know one of the very best ones um another way that capture helps proposals get better and to be stronger is that when you're doing capturing you're talking to the customer remember I talked about the program office but this can be done with the acquisition shop as well is you're maximizing your company's strengths hey we're a Microsoft gold partner or cmmi level 3 or um our strengths are our past performance like we really did a project just like this with a sister service not Army but Air Force but it was this thing and it did this kind of results and you're you're able to talk to your strengths because you're going to weave your strengths into the proposal and so you're maximizing your company's strengths and when you're shaping an opportunity which I'll talk more about later this week when you're Max or shaping an opportunity you're able to shape that opportunity so the customer is focused on your company's strengths they don't know it right I mean obviously they're thinking it but excuse me but they're what they're starting to believe is that what you say is important is what they should think is important and so that's maximizing the strengths and the reverse of that is what you say is not that important your company weaknesses generally is what you're advocating there they begin to see as not as important so an example is there's a certification called cmmi and it might be CMI level three and you have cmmi level two well you can begin to talk to them about how uh Sumo mind level three that certain level of certification it's really not that important and so you're taking something that they thought was a requirement maybe it's just been in every proposal for the last 10 years so they keep it in but you're getting rid of it you're saying you know what cmmi level two is good enough and so you're minimizing your weakness which is that high rating cmmi level and so that's capture though you're getting in and helping the customer see your strengths as more important to them and see your weaknesses is less important to them that is sales flat out um the next reason that um I have listed here that you know why capture is so vital to uh proposal writing and how it can help make it better is that when you do caption you're talking about the customer you're going to be able to make informed decisions not uninformed decisions around proposal development when the proposal managers are trying to you know decide do we go this way or do we go that way many times they'll have to guess not many times they're always going to have to guess if you don't do capture but if you do capture now you're bringing them information and saying I talked with Sally she said this I asked this and this is how um this is how I understand this part well now the proposal manager and the proposal team you know whether you're a big company or small they're able to make proposal development decisions from an informed basis not an uninformed basis and that's the difference between just bidding blindly and doing sales doing capture correctly and making those informed decisions so keep that in mind because that's vital that you have uh that you're enabling your proposal team to make informed proposal development decisions and the last thing is that I just put here and there's so many ways the capture help proposals but I I put down just six as an example the last one I put down that's really important is stronger technical approach and this goes back to solutioning the more I talk to the customer about solutioning the more I do capture with my teammates and talk to them about solutioning and getting more than just my brain on this problem but getting several well the stronger our technical approach is going to be and that's one of the criterias right always tactically acceptable but we don't want technically acceptable we want technically wow that's knocking it out of the park if that's a phrase right and so you want a stronger technical approach meaning we really see a requirements and understand it and this is what we're going to do so capture management is about caring enough to learn your customers requirements in depth take that time right and then shaping Your solution early enough to get feedback from the customer so it is strong and finally implementing an informed not uninformed proposal development process when you do this you're going to start winning more if you value these trainings that we do become a sustaining member today if you're already making money in the government space you want to go to the next level and you'd like to work with me and my team reach out to us we've got a BD accelerator Workshop it's a 90-day program happy to talk to you about it just ping me in LinkedIn messaging and I'll get back to you and remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a process I'll see you in the next training