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good afternoon i' like to welcome you all this afternoon to our webinar on bid pipeline management uh this is Tom Johnson I'm the publisher of set aside alert a newsletter and Market uh information resource for small business Federal contractors um our host today and and speaker will be Ed salsburg uh vs advisors uh Ed and I have known each other for over seven years now and he recently introduced me to the um business acquisition tracker the B and I was quite impressed with this particular tool and seems extremely useful to small businesses in the federal Contracting Arena and so I asked it if we could get together and do a a webinar today on the pipeline management uh tool and uh a demonstration of its use as well as a discussion of of pipeline management in general uh and the business analytics that uh can be brought to bear I know that many of you are government contractors and many of you probably also commercial contractors one of the great values of this tool is that it's useful in both instances uh both for tracking commercial work uh proposal status capture tracking as well as in the federal uh Marketplace so uh um as I mentioned um set aside alert is a newsletter for small businesses uh we have a daily email that gives you all the new opportunities announced as of two that morning and a bi-weekly newsletter in both print and online form uh that enables you to keep up with changes in regulations programs um metor BR agreements how to find teaming Partners uh calendar of events like this one both uh educational as well as networking and a column by expert in legal or financial matters they're particularly important to small business Federal contractors uh we'll talk about to a little bit at the end but in the meantime I'd like to introduce Ed at this point and uh begin the webinar on uh bid pipeline management thank you very much Tom let me just hop right into uh what we're going to do here's the agenda for the day and I promise you'll get a lot out of this this will be packed with information I've got a few offers I want to I want I want you to consider uh but the point of this is to understand better the benefits of of managing a bid Pipeline and very few firms do that actually I was with a friend of mine yesterday with who's a senior VP at one of the major firms and we're talking about pipeline management I have to say that if you were to use this system you would be well ahead of of that company and several others in terms of the rigor in which they manage their business development program I'm going to spend just a minute or two talking about the benefits of pipeline management and then I'll go over the important pipeline analytics then I'm going to do a live demonstration of the business acquisition tracker which helps you execute an effective pipeline Management program also helps you execute a capture program so it works on two levels management should be interested in the pipeline management part of this uh Business Development professionals and capture leads should be interested in the capture management function of this but it's a complete system overall I have two offers that I want to talk about at the end we have a survey if you could just take um I'm sorry at the end we have a survey if you just take a second to fill that out it would be very very helpful it would only take you a minute and you can submit questions in the go to webinar window uh under the little section that says questions and I appreciate set aside alert hosting this for us here's their website you should go and take a look around there's a lot of there's a lot of value out of a set aside alert subscription for small businesses but also for large businesses as well first question you might ask is why should you listen to me uh the real reason is is that I have Bedrock Bedrock experience in in the Consulting business excellent Consulting experience uh I learned the business at saic when we were only $50 million I was part of that explosive growth to a billion dollars in about 13 years I was a corporate VP uh very early on I was there only a couple years and I moved right through the organization you could do that at that time and I it wasn't I can't say that it was because of me that it became a billion dollar company but I saw what it took to go from a smaller company uh to a large company and uh from S I moved to a couple of small companies that were able to use that experience as a partner in those organizations to grow them significantly uh and then in 2007 I busted out on my own and I work with government contractors helping them be more competitive implementing more effective systems analytical systems like the ones I'm going to talk about here and also do some capture as well let me just first talk about the some of the critical problems that pipeline management addresses well first let me Define it pipeline management is managing the suite of opportunities that you have as a as a portfolio rather than as individual captures by doing that you're able to develop you're able to use analytics and measures that enable you to make more effective Investments and you're able to make the make those opportunities or drive those opportunities through a maturing process much more quickly so here's what they address and there are more than six but these are the six that are really important uh the issue of rfps being released before you have sufficient competitive information which absolutely lowers your win rate the business is much too competitive to run into it and think that you're going to win just by writing a good proposal well it does happen once in a while but chances are there are firms that are well positioned well ahead of you for that for that for that procurement and you have to get started early and there's certain information that you need and pipeline management helps you stage that in a way that you know very early on whether you're competitive or not second it helps you make no bid decisions early in the process rather than late in the process you have to gather the same information to make a fully informed bid decision but to make a no bid decision there's certain pieces of information that if you get right away you can make that no bid decision early and not waste those resources and reinvest them pipeline management is a way to do that and the metrics that I'm going to be demonstrating here help you do that if you're uncertain about the viability of your bid list and the organ organizational growth potential a systematic approach to pipeline management will help you improve that viability so that you only have a meaningful list of opportunities not just a list of things that you may be going after or may not be going after for a variety of suspect reasons it helps you allocate resources effectively across the opportunities so that you know where the where the investments from a pipeline standpoint from a management standpoint need to be made as opposed to looking at opportunities individually and you really can't see the forest for the trees as to whether you're making good Investments with your total marketing and B&P budget organizations that are slow or reluctant to adjust to shifting markets the pipeline management tools especially the bat map uh which arrays the the opportunities in a way that management can make some decisions really addresses this issue U and gets to the heart part of the matter about whether you're you're you're you have an issue with Services you have an issue with markets uh and whether one or the other has to be shifting and finally you're basing uh your growth on Market opportunities and this is really the point in the end all of these things wouldn't matter if your company is growing but if it's not then chances are you're not allocating those resources effectively to the right opportunities as a suite of opportunities in order to drive growth within your op within your organization and even if your organization is growing and you're not managing your pipeline effectively at some point in time that misallocation of resources is going to have a material effect on your growth rate the C may be rising in your area but when it stops rising or starts to go down that's where the effective pipeline Manager Management really separates the firms that continue to grow through the bad times from those that don't um I I'm going to go through a lot of material here but I'm making an offer at the end to uh to buy the video training it's a two and a half hour training special it really goes into a lot of depth here um giving an incredible price of only $79 for this which I'll go in the end but I just want to point that out here that everything I'm addressing here if I if I don't cover all of it you'll you'll get a tremendous education from this video that covers um all aspects of the capture and pipeline Management program so let me talk about the important analytics first well here's a depiction of the opportunity life cycle it's really the pursuit life cycle what changes as you're going after an opportunity is not the opportunity itself it's fixed what changes is the maturity of your Pursuit from prospecting where you don't know too much about the opportunity right through the proposal development um I'm not going to be talking about prospecting here other than to introduce it as the way in which you you find Opportunities to put into the on-ramp of your pipeline fedbizops is One Source agency schedules and websites some of them are very very good in anticipating and projecting and forecasting uh agent subscription services like set aside alert which gives you really rich information about opportunities that are that are coming up uh I'm going to be concentrating in this part of the proc suit life cycle the Precision part um in which I stage opportunities um in a in a ontology of one through four which I'll explain just a just a second uh I won't be spending much time on Readiness which is the transition from positioning into proposal writing but many firms especially new to the business um may not realize the importance of positioning with the with the with the client so that you're even with the competition in the eyes of the customer or maybe ahead of the the client ahead of the competition in the eyes of the customer contracts procurements are one or lost in this area rather than in this area very often it's game over at this point uh unless the firm that really has done all of the positioning writes a lousy proposal but you can't count on that all the time once in a while you might throw in something that's not very well marketed or positioned in win uh but that's really the exception and not the rule I want to talk about the health measures or the analytics before I get into the demonstration first one I want to talk about is firm contract backlog and what that is is re it's revenue from defend Dependable sources and it doesn't it doesn't include any new business so this is what would happen to a company if it didn't win any other contracts didn't submit any other bids eventually its backlog on its current contracts would run out as those contra contracts and see I have two two companies here one I call the Frantic company because it's waterfall or pipeline firm contract back blog is dropping off very quickly and the relaxed company where it's not it's just coming down very very slowly here you want to know which which you are one of the measures I use is a measure of firm contract backlog you can see why it's really important to have a measure of that critical analytic and it's really a measure of urgency you can see the Frantic company is really much more urgent than the relax company and as a result it's going to focus its B and D resources in different areas than the relax company would so let me just talk about the bid pyramid and and you may see a funnel um to show the same thing this is the winno process I like a pipeline rather than a funnel because when you drop things into the funnel they all call naturally down as so you don't have to do any work and things spit out at the bottom which is absolutely not the case you have to drive things you have to drive your Pursuits from one stage to the next to the to the higher qualified stage and being able to do that effectively and doing it in the right order is what separates the firms that really are growing consistently and sometimes explosively in this business from those that aren't so a stage one opportunity is work the firm can do and I'd like to get up or off that that stage in four weeks if I don't then that that opportunity is really languishing in that area if I can move to the next level I'm really answering the question are we on the playing field so if the if the opportunity is is open and some are not open for legitimate reasons um it may not be possible for a for an organization to change from the incumbent because for example they have a they have a syst an integration system that they developed which is gerain to the program and regardless of what you hear about the company the client is not going to change they may have access to data that's that they've built a network that they built that very very hard to replace but if that's not the case and it is a lay Level Playing Field then I would move the pursuit up to the second level but it doesn't mean that the client thinks you're on that playing field uh when I was at saic uh we were a very good hazardous waste company but down in Oak Ridge uh where a lot of the Department of energy hazardous waste work was being done we were an IT company and we didn't have any doe hazardous waste experience we had DOD hazardous waste experience we never could convince them that we were credible for the for the Hazmat the Hazardous Materials contracts very big contracts that were coming up for competition we never could get in focus with them even though it was a Level Playing Field for those competitions we were not on that playing field so we know bid that and spent all of our time the next five years actually qual qualifying ourselves in the eyes of the client so when it came around the next time we did Bid and Win successfully the next stage is stage three um if we know that we're on the playing field then um the we that what that means is the clients think thinks that you're credible and then finally moving up to a a preferred position you can see that I'm getting to a mature stage um but the whole way the the whole rationale for staging these analytics is getting getting measures to tell me how how much activity I have in these early stages how much I have in these later stages and whether I have opportunities or Pursuits in the right stage so the first measure I use is called leads backlog and I have an A an analytic that I use to determine whether the company has enough activity going on in that early stage or not to drive their growth plan and I call that the Vitality of the marketplace if you have a very good method of identifying opportunities and you can't find any then it's has nothing to do with your business development program what isn't working what isn't happening is there's no opportunities in in your area so then you've got to change and look for new markets or provide new Services into that Marketplace that's why I call it the Vitality not of your program but the Vitality of your Market uh in this middle stage the qualified leads backlog it's really a measure of the vibrancy um of your program pram uh and if you if you if you drive those Pursuits through a systematic process um then I provide a measure that will show you whether or not you have enough opportunities enough activity and a dollar volume to um to really drive your program and then the third measure is the qualified proposal backlog regardless of which stage that you're stage that you're in and I call that stability because that's where your replacement work is going to come from to really quickly raise that waterfall slope to a flatter or maybe an increasing line but regardless of where that Pursuit is the goal here is to get up or off into a defin time frames and I put notional time frames in here too to give you some idea of what it how long it should take to move from one opportunity to the next so if you keep these stages in mind I'm going to move into the demonstration but before I do that I'm just going to quickly show you a a chart that I use in the training to calculate one of the backlogs which is the proposal the qualified proposal backlog and and this is the backlog for an example firm you can see that the P the total price is about 40 million over five years we discount it because of what we know about the client budgets what we know about the win rate which is really which stage you're in in the opportunity here we have stage three and four and here we're down in stage actually this is stage three and we have three well-qualified ones up here stage four so if you put in 40 if you have $40 million wor a proposal your expected value is only $12 million and if you have a 20% growth rate and you're a $10 million company you need to be driving $90 million in business over the next five years um in the support to this um I show that there's about 30 million in their contract backlog which means they need 60 million from Business Development to bridge that Gap and if you can see that 12 million over five years gives you the 60 million so you can start to see that there are ratios here that begin to become important that can tie the amount of business you're doing to win rates to expected value to the Gap that you need in order to hit a growth rate um and then the the final targets that you need in order to really develop a business development program that's going to meet these goals overall so I just encourage you to U take advantage of the offer to get the training uh it's streamed to your desk um it's a one-time charge you'll always have access to it uh it's packed with information and you can go back and and refer to it so let me get into the bat and let's see if I opened it up so I'm going to spend about 20 minutes talking about this tool and I'm going to pull out the highlighter this is the home homepage for the bat and over here is the different sections of the bat and I just want to point out what you have in here there's a section for management uh it includes a dashboard the bat map which I'm going to pull out in just a second which uh which is which is a visual that I've never seen anywhere else uh and then from contract backlog and this is the management the corporate or Senior Management part of the bat map uh it's the real differentiator of this program there's 's also a section for contract capture which has different screens prospecting managing the the capture itself uh managing moving into the proposal win winning and losing holding tanks uh sticking opportunities out into the future a market assessment tracker which is really important because this is your sales and your longer term marketing it's not about a particular opportunity but it's being it's a it's a set of tools and data sheets that enable you to design a marketing program uh and execute that with with project management system and customer relationship system built right into it if you're working on GSA schedules you can track those opportunities here separately from contract management uh there's a training part of that a way for staff to look atj just their own opportunities it's just their own assignments I'm sorry and then finally a setup section where you can configure every one of the visuals all the screens uh you can configure how the reporting section and and customize the the bat to to your company and to your organization I am going to take a look at the management part of this first let me just call up kind of the punchline here when I designed this bat and I designed it uh when I was working for a client about four years ago I got the initial initial design developed for them because I was searching for a way for management to see everything in one Visual and one look which they were struggling with they were getting down into the weeds uh getting blindsided by their by their own staff in terms of the Vitality of the opportunities you know the staff would fall in love with the opportunities very difficult to get them off the list so let me just pull out the bat map here here's a visual that takes the entire pipeline of opportunities regardless of what degree of maturity the pursuit is in and puts them on one visual so on the left side I'm measuring the stages or how well qualified that opportunity is from not knowing very much about it to a Level Playing Field to competitive which means we're on the playing field and then advantaged or we tilted the playing field in our Direction which can be done on the xaxis I'm plotting weeks until the RFP comes out so regardless of when the RFP is due uh here's four weeks until the RP comes out 26 and so forth um the symbols have something to do with whether we're prime or sub and the colors the size of the opportunities and you can see that it's really four quadrants in which you have things that you are interested in but don't know much about but have time to qualify them and then a section in which opportunities are very well qualified Pursuits are very well qualified but and you're out of time which is good because because you want to get those into your proposal backlog and out of your contract capture backlog but you can see that at a glance I can I can as a manager I can start to determine where I want to focus some of my efforts like right over here what's going on with this opportunity it's still a stage one and the RFP is due out management should have caught that back here as it's coming into this point and ask the questions to the capture team to get them get that opport opportunity up a level uh what you don't want to do is be bidding from stage one or even from stage two but only from stage three and stage four and as a manager I would be insisting on meetings on presentations or at least discussions to determine where these opportunities are so they don't get into this situation so you can see the power of this Visual and here it is at the corporate level I can also I can also do this at a division level which we just call te and you can you can change the name of that to whatever um names you use within your organization if you're if you're organization is large enough that that you do have subdivisions the bat has worked up to um the largest firm that's used it is $140 million company with uh six divisions and it worked really effectively so here's in here here I've just segmented to the first tier uh and let me go down to tier four which I know is not doing very well here's a tier that doesn't have any opportunities on on it at all so I can look at can you drill into one of the opportunities oh I will sure I want to introduce uh Mike Gallow who's on with me Mike is the president of valaris and he works with me on the bat and helping to figure out how to um talk about it more effectively like a question like that let me just let me dig into one um here's a little cheat sheet and what's in that opportunity but I can go from here right to the record and here's the form view of all the information that's relevant um about that about that opportunity and uh you can export you can import um information from any of the search engers directly into the bat so that you don't have to enter that most of this information um individually uh the opportunity information uh in terms of what the scope is who the client is is listed over here information about when it when the RFP releas is due who the client is um a little information about the type of award is over here the size of the opportunity is here here we've done an estimate of what the proposal costs are going to be at the end we put the actuals in in order to compare them this is a great exercise for staff it makes them it it it improves their estimating ability uh for for bidden proposals and for marketing this section is for capture it has a variety of sections in it um that can be used to drive an opportunity through the capture process a management SE section here where I can drop in and uh comment on on on the status of the opportunity and get little messages into the capture team and and they can and the capture team can answer I don't have that part configured but the capture team can answer back and forth so with with the with the home base or this the screen the opportunity screen I have information about the opportunity about the capture and about the management W window but the real key to effective capture management and pipeline management is this section right over here it's the information needed to move to the next stage or the next level here we have a stage three opportunity and stage three means that we're on the playing field and in order to move to stage four which is we're advantage or Tilted in our Direction I want to get specific information from that capture team and here are some hints here under the eye of the information have we tilted the playing field in our Direction uh I want the capture team to be working on these actions determining that we that the client prefers us but specifically what have we done to make the client want this value proposition and how do we know the client is not also seriously considering other biders uh we may think we're preferred but all we've done is raised the bar for stage three we haven't actually moved into stage four all of the competitors have have solutions that the client is interested in but if this weren't a stage three but let's say was a stage one opportunity uh let me move it down into stage one and you'll see how this systems system worked and this system right here is what drives the pipeline and and makes this an an effective pipeline management tool right here because it forces the capture team to get the right information at the right time in order to move those opportunities through the maturity stages so if this were a stage one Pursuit that would mean all we know is that we're capable of doing the work but we don't know how competitive it is never never mind whether we're on the playing field or not so what I want to know in order to move from stage one to stage two is is this a Level Playing Field or does Boo Allen or saic or EMS or any firm CSC have a lock on this work for some reason that's not obvious um so I want to know answers to questions like what's the evidence from client contacts or Pro or program information that we're getting that this is a Level Playing Field even though there is an incumbent here what's specifically have we heard from which competitors I want to triangulate here who are our coaches and what evidence have they provided in the training program I talk about coaches and how to get a coach and the importance of the coach and why you need a coach coach for these opportunities whether that's an individual internal or external to the to the company someone that can answer these questions for you or with you and save save a lot of time I'm not going to go into how you answer those questions that's the subject of other training programs that I do the how is extremely important this is the what management needs to know in order to move it to the next stage the how uh is hand toand combat um in the trenches and I go into that in a more extensive training program too so let's assume the answer is from from all of that that the incumbent has been okay but they'd be interested in a change and they're looking for some new Solutions I then can move that to stage two um I don't have an opportunity in here but or at some actions in here but let's see what kind of questions management should be should want to see answered in stage two in order to get to stage three so we want to know now that now that we know the playing field is Lev are we on the playing field how do we know the decision makers see us as a credible Prime not not an answer like oh they see us as a credible Prime that's not what I'm driving at I want the evidence how do we know decision makers see us as a credible Prime capture managers very often are drinking their own bath water here they've fallen in love with this opportunity or its job security to be going after it I want to flesh that out and get the hard facts of why that opportunity deserves to be moved to the next level and then equally important if we're not on the playing field now and we need to get there how much time will it take and what will it cost because I may make a no bid decision based on that can you see that if I'm sure you can see that if this is a stage one opportunity and I can't get to stage two that means somebody has a lock on the work why would I bid it I'm going to know bid it right there and save all of that money if I'm in stage two but I can't convince the client that we're credible like my siic example I'm going to no bid it right there like we did if I'm an in stage three now I know that it's open competition Level Playing Field I'm on that playing field I'm going to bid that unless there's some reason at the end what like re competition for resources that I'm not going to go after that you you might have noticed over here that the win probability changed when I Chang those stages where stage one is a one in 20 assigned value a stage two is a one in 10 assigned value stage three is a 30% um assigned value bidding things that are 30 if we have a 30% win rate you bid several of those you're going to do pretty well it's hard to get up higher than that you can for incumbencies and things you have very special capabilities for um if you get to stage four then I would raise that to 70% because things can still happen the competition could then maybe jump ahead of you maybe late in the game um but the bat calculates that all um automatically and it's important because these percentages Drive the analytics um for the bat map over for the um for the for the different views that I'm going to show you in just a second okay Mike did I go did I did I did I go into too much detail and bore everybody there I think that was really good I'd make one other point Ed and as a former CFO this would be important with your uh win probabilities As you move the opportunities through the pipeline and you're increasing your win probability uh you go from speculating about whether or not you can win the proposal to actually investing BMP funds to win the proposal and as a CFO former CFO that's an important uh distinction for me in terms of making the decisions on what I want to invest my limited B&P dollars in absolutely great point if you could raise your volume just a little bit you're just a little bit soft we do can you go back to the batm now uh you were reviewing um how well the opportuni the pipeline and can you show the audience now how management can determine if enough opportunities are on this map sure okay so the bat map itself shows you whether they're moving through but the question of whether you've got enough opportunities in here is really tied to the size of the company now and the size of these opportunities that you're going after and the bat map doesn't show that but the dashboard does so we're still up in the management section I drop down into the capture part of it and let me just pull up the dashboard the dashboard is chopped full of information at the corporate level or at any of the the division levels about the status of the pipeline in each of the stages and each of the pursuit levels leads backlog qualified leads backlog qualified proposal backlog and firm contract backlog so here's a notional firm that's $16 million in revenue and its firm contract backlog is $49 million and I use a benchmark of 32 million which is two times Revenue as that Benchmark um I I'm not going to teach you anything that's that sophisticated or probably that you don't know already I'm just going to organize it in a way that you can execute it uh the difference between firms that do well in this business and firms that don't do that well in the business has very little to do with the quality of their technical capabilities most people are good it's having a better organization and simplifying the the measures and simplifying the captured directions so that they're easily executable and that's what the bat map does that's what the dashboard does and that's what the bat overall does and what the training does so I'm using a very simple measure here and these guidelines are the multipliers against Revenue 221 and one work pretty well for most firms but when I work with firms directly um we'll talk talk about this and look at the Cadence of their business and the cadences are different so those windows are different and sometimes I'll change those guidelines based on the nature of the business that an individual client or company is in and for people that by the bat especially the server version of the bat we just work with them as part of the installation exercise so here you can see the backlog gauge shows that the firm contract backlog at the company level they're doing really well actually they're going to in they're probably going to blow right through their growth estimate for the next year or so but look what's happening in their qualified proposal backlog it's only half what I would expect and as I go deeper into the pursuit stage into the less mature stages 18 and 41% they're not making enough Investments here now I don't know whether that's because the market is not that vital they don't have a very good system to identify opportunities they're reluctant to spend time on capture but for whatever reason I know there's a problem in this organization however there may not be a problem in every division so let's check let's look at division one or tier one 125 206 7165 I don't see much of a problem here I don't look at at these measures individually at least the last three I look at them as a group and as a group in pretty good shape well over here well over here a little low here in very very good shape this organization is on a growth path but it's only on a growth path if those opportunities that they bid and they put into the proposal backlog are stages three and four if there are any stages two and stages one in there all bets are off then then they're just rolling the dice I don't want to roll the dice I want to be more like the house and kind of game this in my favor and you do that by bidding only out of stage three and only out of stage four when you think about it how can you not grow you're never bidding a flyer where you don't know whether someone has a lock on the work you're never bidding a flyer in which you don't know whether the client thinks you're credible you're only bidding opportunities in which you're clearly credible you've done the positioning and the marketing and some of those you've tilted in your favor if 70% of your opportunities are stage three and 30% are stage four you can't help it grow explosively it has to happen the rest of this uh just looks at other parts of the uh capture program um itself down to qualified leads but let me just pull out the all in Excel down here just to show you uh one of the one of the visuals here um so I can I can drive these into an Excel spreadsheet where at a glance I can tell important statistics about the corporation or I can do this at a at a division level here's the backlog gauge so at a glance I can tell that there are issues here here and here and I've got to be investing more on the on-ramp I'm looking at at total bid Pursuit costs here by stage so I have an idea of when I'm going to have to be ready prepared to step in with B&P dollars and what's my return on investment I'm measuring over here and there's some pretty good benchmarks 100 120 is pretty good I'm not I'm I'm bidding on opportunities over here which are pretty costly and I'm not getting the return on the investment so I've got some questions here to ask across the company but so you can see why these management tools uh can be really effective for for management to step in and really get their program rolling uh this is just the process and process is only as good as the data that's in at number one but as committed as management is to use the process and actually lead an effective system there isn't anything that takes the place of good leadership I'd rather have that than a good process but having both would be great so we're about 10 of and I want to stop to ask questions but before I do that I just wanted to show you one of the data sheets this is this is all of the contracts that are either in stage one through stage four at the corporate level I can do that at different stages I can filter this information by account manager um so I can segment that just to the ones that I'm going after if I'm leading an account to funding Vehicles how they're coming through to which agencies so there's a lot of power here to segment this information to be to be specialized for individuals and then also if any of the opportunities are in a stage longer than a prescribed period of time usually four to six weeks it'll show up as a yellow so these four are I I call this languishing on the bid list and that's what I want to avoid I don't want anything languishing on the bid list I want things moving through those stages as quickly as possible to get into stage three and then hopefully into stage four and I'd like to uh bring up one thing you've um referred to the various divisions and so forth by uh uh tears and in the particular um demo that I've been working with instead of divisions those are individual people uh Business Development people so you can use this to monitor what each of your BD folks is doing probably including yourself as a means of uh of you know acknowledging the pipeline that each guy is working on uh each one of those Business Development Specialists is focus on and how they're doing absolutely yep and you can you can um you can get at that several different ways uh everything here is every every uh important feature is is configurable so I can change the names to the names of the divisions um and then I can sort this in a variety of ways um positioning in Readiness is a way to run an individual capture and I just wanted to show you the query generator before I get off of this there's a very very powerful query generator that that my developer has developed and we' we actually put it into an access format too and I use it all in all different applications but I can um I can develop it I can export a report which is filtered or sorted on any of the variables in here any of the fields I can name that query and Export the results and save those results and here's um here's here's all of the data that's in that's in the database itself and I can customize that report save the report and then call it up anytime I want um and that's really effective for for um management meetings okay I have covered pretty much everything on here Mike did I leave anything else do you think no I think you covered all the the main points before I open up to questions let me just hit two things um if you're interested in the bat uh I'm just offering a 30-day free trial at the end of the trial after you've loaded your own opportunities in there if you don't buy the system you can export the results and keep all of that analysis that you've done also the names of the fields and you know all of that analytics will right be will be right there I have a server version that's uh that's installed in several of my clients and I'm offering that at a if you do the trial and or you just want to buy it as part of this webinar special webinar discounted price of of $5,000 it's a $10,000 system and for smaller companies up to about $10 million I have a single user version that's a desktop version in which you can manage your company um until you get up into several million dollars uh up up close to 10 or up to 10 million you can run a $10 million company with it um at that level moving over to the server version certainly would make more sense because then there are multiple users um there's shared information in here which you don't get there and if if you want to tr to do the trial version of this if you go to to uh ERS advisors.com fors software there's a description of the bat and on the lower left side there's a there's a form to fill out to get the trial version or just zip me an email give me give me a ring and we'll make sure that you get a copy of that uh I'm also for the months of June just for the trial subscribers I'm going to be running a weekly Workshop to answer questions and go over pipeline analytics so in addition to examining the bat and answering questions about how to use it I'll talk about how to use the analytics develop the analytics how to calculate them and how to use them uh in a management concept I would take that offer uh and then second I mentioned the training the feedback I get on this training is is really excellent um and it's about performance process inside approach and informed decision- making there are examples in here about how to use the uh the staging process and the analytics to actually run a capture program um and it's worth the $79 just for the examples over here two and a half hours of insights and I deal with tactics I talk about strategy but strategies don't win contracts it's the tactics that win contracts and that's what I focus on right there webinar training special is the website that I I have this on is the page on the website I have this on it's not a visible website so you'll have to write that down and remember it or zip me an email if you don't and I'll get you over to that it it sells for $4.95 but just for this webinar I'm just going to drop the price of $79 because I want you to buy it and I want you to use it because you'll be a better consultants if you do whether you're a manager or you're at the staff level you're going to learn a tremendous amount from it uh if you're a seasoned veteran some of the things in there you can say I knew that I knew that but you're going to see a process in there that's going to make you much more effective as a BD manager and if you're at the staff level you're going to learn approaches and terms that are really going to put it into context for you how to be successful in the Government Contracting field or in business development overall we have a few more business we have a few more business uh webinars coming up that I do with Jimmy Baker many of you have been into those uh there are three right here we're doing one in social media boot camp Le leveraging LinkedIn and then uh the Department of Justice so let me move move over to questions we we had one question about um set aside alert and the question is is is there a trial version of of that uh you can go to our website and see samples of both the daily email and the bi-weekly newsletter and then uh we have uh a six-month trial which is $297 and that give you an excellent opportunity to check us out and I had a question about the bat is there a money back guarantee if it does work for us and yes um if it doesn't work we'll just take it back um there's one question about configuring it on a server since it's a it has to be installed so our developers work with your it team or will step right in directly get it installed get it running get it tested um and that's all part of the price um overall and let's see there's a question is Ed there's a question is the $495 a one-time fee or annual fee it's a one-time fee for the um for the desktop version the $5,000 also is a one-time fee which is different from some of the other systems other there are other systems that are very good um to use and you could configure your own um most of them are much more expensive first of all and second you know very often you're left to configure the database bases yourself if you were to configure this in Salesforce or using Privia or one of the other ones or configure it in go to meeting configure it in in uh I'm sorry in Microsoft Dynamics or um or one of the other database Management Systems the bat was configured by me uh and I packed 35 years of experience in in Government Contracting and in business development overall into this system this system has all of the features I would want in it if I were running a company still running a company or running a business development program and it has all of the conveniences I would want to see in it to make sure staff can use it easily so they actually do put data in and manage it um and we have another question does the bid information have to be manually input into the bat um it it doesn't you can export there's an there's an import uh function there's an import function um in prospects that you can just import it in you just configure it in Excel spreadsheet and it comes up so if I'm using other tools to identify opportunities or subscription Services I'm able to I get that information into a uh export I have an ability to automatically import that into the bat that's correct that's correct yeah so you don't have to do the data entry at least the basic data entry there's some that you still have to do because it's not in the um in the central sources so there's a related question how is this different or similar to e pipeline okay e pipeline deals with prospecting and finding the opportunities and then putting the putting those opportunities into a spreadsheet or or a data system in which then you can apply whatever it is you want to apply to um evaluate the the opportunities and run a run a capture program so it stops at that point so the export from E pipeline or any of the other business intelligence systems is the is the input to the to the bad okay we have a question are the slides going to me available uh yes right after the session I'll get them up and everybody will get an email and you'll also have access to the video too to this recording okay Mike you're doing great on the question why don't you just keep going I see I was looking in a different section um I let me see if there's any other ones that we didn't touch on there was a question about where the probability of when process comes into play but I think you covered that when you showed the detailed screen in in the back uh there was another question about that the process seems kind of subjective how do you address the veracity of the the claims that you know we are the preferred vendor I think the question there is related to to we're answering questions about whether or not this is we're on the on the playing field and if we can actually win the bid is this a subjective process um or is there does the process lend itself to be more objective in the evaluation and opport right right that that that really is a great question remember I said that I'm going to talk today about what to do but not how to do it and going from the answer we're on the playing field to the question how do I know we're on the playing field is the Tactical part of this um I can set up a matrix or do a worth assessment and you know in which I'm doing some calculations and putting it together but it really comes down to what is the evidence that the playing field is level and that we're on it and the evidence will change from opportunity to opportunity but from a management standpoint I want to have that discussion and I want I want that proof to be presented to me in a formal away uh in a review or in a in a separate meeting where I'm convinced that there's enough that there's enough information there and in the training that I do I go into how you actually get that so that you're testing the veracity of the information all the time and that's one of the that and if there was a way to do that without management involved you wouldn't need management and that's clearly not the case um management has to be asking those questions and Contin continually asking the questions how did you get that information why is this the right answer what else can be done um and it's that process of review and critic and critiquing that that gets to the point in which you can't ask another question I I'm completely out of questions um and at that point you know it's either time to move or it's time to move it off and several of my clients that I don't do lot of work for anymore because I've trained them and taught them and I don't have any more to tell them call me into their pipeline review meetings just because they want me to be tell them yes you've got enough you've got enough information to make that that decision to move it to the next level um so that was a really good question I wish I could give you an answer to the say you know take one take a plus b equals c and you're done it isn't that c it isn't that it's providing management with a way to ask those serious probing questions getting the answers and then assuring itself assuring itself that there are no more questions to be answered and then we can move to the next level we're running out of time here Ed one more question came in and I think this will be the last question can the system be used on both the desktop and laptop yes yes it can it the screen you can see the whole thing on a I use a 13-inch screen um and I can run run the program right off of there my little laptop got to scroll a little bit to do it um on my on my desktop I've got a a 19 and a 22inch screen and it works great on there so it's a little better in a bigger screen it works fine yeah I've been using it on a laptop and it's it's working great so good okay Mike we got to the end of the questions that I think that's the last one yes great and we're only about six minutes over so uh thank you Mike for stepping in and helping with the question questions and also making sure I stayed straight on the presentation and Tom Johnson from set aside alert for setting the webinar up and giving me the opportunity to do it I think it's going real well Ed and the you know the power of the tracker is obvious here um we will be in contact with the attendees with a special offer and set aside alert as well well thank you very much and thank all of you who uh stay to the to the very end of the session I appreciate your interest and your attention