Streamline pipeline bid management for facilities

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the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode hello and this is Jennifer shells welcome to our government contracting webinar series summer of 2017 we're joined today by David how he's going to speak and present on identifying the qualifying pipeline opportunities which is an important part of your government contracting practice this concludes our second week but we were going to go for a full seven weeks and possibly eight providing a government contracting webinar every day of the week starting at noon and wrapping up on or before 12:30 so these are short and sweet they're all listed on our website under the webinars tab if you want to stay abreast of our additional webinars and government contracting events and seminars you can sign up for our newsletter on our website under the contact us or just check our website for the events section a lot of those on us very briefly based in downtown Washington DC and providing various services for contractors ranging from market analysis reports capability statements proposal writing 8a certification GSA schedule services and so forth again the websites listed their briefs background on myself as it relates to government contracting is on this slide but more importantly I'd rather use our time wisely and dig into the presentation learn a little bit more about David and OSD Global Solutions and talk about the pipeline so David thanks so much for taking time out today and sharing your knowledge expertise and I'll give the floor over to you great no thanks for having me thank you for everybody who is here listening my name is David huff I'm the director of business development OST Global Solutions were a full lifecycle business development consulting firm located in Rockville Maryland and we provide business development manage type lines capture management and proposal management type services to our clients I began my career in the United States Army at the AAA Airborne Division I was a fisherman I have two deployments to Afghanistan in 12 years military and government experience I have a bachelor's and Business Administration from George Washington University and it was just kind of fell into government contracting because I already spoke the language and was able to write so I jumped in two proposals early on in my career and kind of worked myself up and learned all about the business development profession and my time here at OST I teach at our pin proposal Academy where we have 18 public courses this Velva capturing proposals and we have our business development center of excellence here in Rockville so we support 18 out of 20 federal government contractors and we've won over 21 billion dollars for our clients since 2005 and that doesn't include IDIQ vehicles so it's actual funded work we support a multitude of small medium and large business clients in our proprietary set of Lema business development processes are based on industry best practices our own internal lessons learned and what the top government contractors do in this end the space our website was there to visit that to learn more about us and sign up for a newsletter if you'd like but let's get into the actual meat of the conversation the presentation today because there's a quite a bit to go after these slides come from our our blueprint which is our premier self-study course that we sell on our website it has 11 modules that cover the full lifecycle business valve including proposals so we define the business development life cycle in these nine steps here and the focusing on pipeline is really the fuel that runs your gear engine for your company and it's the way to grow strategically in the government and be able to say no to opportunities along that look good and look promising and really distract from what you're trying to do which is grow your company so we're going to talk about finding the right opportunities determining whether they're the right fit sifting through them and selecting those the ones that you could win so when you start this process you want to build your capacity to do business with the government and that may be getting the certifications like I said or CMYK so the clearance getting your accounting system audited all those types of things registering where your where your customers buy things like that so getting set up to do business and then conducting the strategic business development planning session is a key part of this and I'm going to spend some time talking about this because we're going to come back to it the outcome here is that we want to develop an ideal opportunity profile and that's going to be key for us when we go start researching opportunities to fill our pipeline to have some kind of benchmark to measure ourselves our decision-making process and say you know are we chasing something that we want to go after is it the right agency is it is it the size of a contract that we can win is it within our wheelhouse in terms of our capability or still we have the past performance to support it and we're going to use that profile to qualify our opportunities when we get further down the process but for here we want to talk about in what agencies are when your target how did they buy what do they buy how much of it do they buy and there's a lot of market research that goes into this determine you know what vehicles they purchase it off of which offices purchase your services and things like that so that's kind of a feedback loop there when we have enough information we finish this process we want to stand up our marketing effort to the federal government partners we're not going to go into that too much we're really going to focus on step five here which is build and manage the opportunities pipeline and then qualifying each individual opportunity and at the technical level then conducting capture and proposal and a really important side note here is that the your operations people on sciatica need to be feeding your pipeline they're the ones that are sitting next to the government they hear the hopes they hear the fears that hear the biases every day and they should be communicating with the capture managers and business developers to say hey I think that this is maybe an opportunity for us to get in here and create a contract or create a requirement that doesn't exist already so training your workforce to be your sales force is key to kind of round out this whole process so if you want to click on the next slide Center for some of them are automated so so let's get into it now so if you just want to click through the next the words that pop up here so they can see it the pipeline is the backbone of your company straight up like sitter there's the fuel that drives your growth and if you don't touch your pipeline every day you're not refilling your pipeline consistently then you're going to run out of gas and pipelines get stale they get old and they become less useful the less you do with it but the strategic business development planning process and developing this ideal opportunity is going to spill out where the growth is going to come from it's going to tell you where you're going to focus your efforts for your limited big proposal budget because all these things costs money to do time and effort and we need to spend our money wisely where we have the highest probability where so this pipeline or this funnel here on the right hand side has what we would call gate reviews and the different qualifications I'm not going to go through gate reviews but this is essentially what it looks like and we're going to stop at the opportunity qualification the interest no interest decision that is generally called gate 1 which is qualified not qualified it's not on the slide here but that's where we're going to stop for this through today's presentation is going to be these first two lines here but every single one of these lines the point of this qualification process is to get opportunities out of the pipeline stop pursuing ones that don't have a high probability of winning stop pursuing ones where your capture team your business developers are not making progress spend your money wisely and on the opportunities that have a high probability of winning or the opportunities that you can increase the probability of winning through your actions through capture we want to ensure that the opportunities are real we're going to talk about that we're going to rank them in order a priority talk about that too and then we have to clean update and edit our pipeline regulation shirts pipe dream and we got to do these weekly meetings to keep these pipeline as priority for the company so that and I know that they're painful and they're horrible and they're so boring but people need to get together your capture manager your business developers your portfolio managers whatever you call them your EPO sales you need to get the team in the room and say here are the opportunities were going after let's talk about the updates talk about your plans your win strategies qualify these opportunities to make sure that we're spending our mind wisely so you can go on the next page here excuse me so let's talk about developing the pipeline where do these opportunities come from you need to use a combination of paid or free databases there's tons of them and marketing which is the actual legwork so the the free databases you can get opportunities from our FBO everybody knows that you can look at FPDs to see which contracts are expiring you can look at usaspending.gov for your total market analysis it's that website's come a long way in researchers I just looked at it not too long ago and the functionality is increased a lot of people are familiar with gov win IQ that's a great way to find opportunities to they pull from those free databases Bloomberg government's another one because they needs another one and there's a whole bunch of other paid services that will forward you opportunities based on your profile you also get your opportunities from marketing you're out there you're meeting potential teammates they may bring you opportunities you're meeting with customer you face time with the contracting officer and a program manager they may tell you about new opportunities the Small Business Administration they so there's lots of places where this is going and a note here a lot of clients that are small we kind of come across or using like an Excel spreadsheet to track their opportunities that's fine when you're small but once you start getting multiple people putting in putting in input configuration control becomes a nightmare and it's just not a really efficient way to do it so we use iMeet central you can use SharePoint whatever platform that you have but you basically need some kind of program management system that's also a document repository and you can customize that for different fields and tracking information but you want to constantly be out searching for your opportunities that are either short mid or long term opportunities so next two to five months six months to a year one year five years as soon as you win a contract that automatically goes back into your pipeline as a muscle and you got a defendant your turf to grow so your capture planning is going to be different depending on where these opportunities fall in how long it's going to be till the rfp drops so the closer you get to the RFP the less interaction you can have with the government some contracting offers will shut off all communication at the draft RFP but essentially a rule of thumb is the closer you get to the RFP the less you have to less opportunity you have to really shake the requirements communicate with the customer so we want to start as early as possible to really prepare to write outstanding proposals and so simple great team brainstorm on the solution bet that with the customer all the activities that you would do it captured but the takeaway for this slide is that you have to call the Contracting Officer to make sure it's real are you planning to recompete this is there a budget they may or may not know they may or may not tell you but until the contracting officer tells you that yes we're recompete in this and yes it's funded it's not really an opportunity maybe you can see progress on it and video are advisor sources saw it site visits some opportunities per picture least a source of extra rooms our market research so if you want to click on the next couple once in your pipeline you need to rank the opportunities in order priority clean and edit the pipeline regularly and really if you're not bidding monthly then you're not so you got to build that backlog and I'm talking about submitting proposals monthly and if your goal is growth you need to have a pipeline that will fill that will sustain you bidding on 12 contracts 12 proposals for year with high highly qualified highly vetted opportunities that have a high probability way so all this upfront stuff which is this all this business development and managing of the pipeline which is this process here comes before capture and captures the pre proposal preparation it's really how I look at it all the activities that you do in capture need to be geared towards developing artifacts that you can copy and paste into your proposal with the actual RFP comes out if you're not doing that then there's a lot of activity and no progress so for building to manage the pipeline here is a detailed breakout of kind of the steps and it starts with the market research strategic planning results analyzing the competitors customers and the opportunities developing the ideal opportunity criteria develop a list of keywords for your search engines so generally these are I'll do keywords based on capabilities so depending like when I go in and do this planning with our clients I'm learning about the company and learning about their past performance and I'll take those groups of keywords like software development or agile development or facilities management or whatever database management the list goes on develop a set of keywords and start plugging these into the different search engines to see what kind of results I get back for the desk top desk side work you can also filter those based on the specific focus you want to look at the expiring contracts and calculated rebid dates if you're an 8a a great thing to do is to look to see if incumbent has graduated from the 8a program and if they're eligible to bid or not or if it's a small business contract whether they're still small things like that you will look at where the announcements about new bids come from some up sometimes they come on FBO sometimes they come on agency specific websites but you go look at their ID the appropriate vehicles that you need to be on I call I DVS and definite delivered vehicles those include ie excuse G wax BPA's you know the whole the whole gamut the government has roughly about 2,000 of them and some of them are single Wars some of them are huge like the gsa ones that they they do DoD has some huge ones too but as we get these things as we get these targets and we need to start putting these into the pipeline we need to validate all the opportunities for the government context so if it's 98 if it's 93 we need to research okay when is the next on-ramp expected or when is the next time we can get on this vehicle that goes into your pipeline for having network difficulties here can you go back Jennifer area for Network and market preferred network and marketing your personal connections social media events prospecting all these you need to contact the contracting officer the procurement Authority if it's an opportunity if it's a contact you can follow this process here Bob but basically what it comes down to is once you've said okay this is an actual opportunity I'm gonna do some research this is before the qualification I need to read what is this contract about and determine the fit for the company so I'm going to look at the timing when is the our feet expected to be released I'm going to read the past statement or work in the past instructions and evaluation criteria I'm going to look at protests if there were any I'm going to look at how many bidders bid on this look at the budget the bird race who's going to bid on it in win strategy I'm going to really engage the subject matter experts you know this customer have maybe insight into what this procurement is about if we if we got people in the operation side who are familiar and then I'm going to conduct this qualification cake review and we're going to talk about that here next but if it's not qualified we say this doesn't really meet monster this is where the team by the way we're going to down grow dit downgrade it to new interest and put in a pipeline to retain it for future references metrics like bid rate capture rate those are important things how many opportunities you're putting in the pipeline versus how many you're asking this qualification review so there's a bunch of different metrics that you can track to see how well you're doing you want to prioritize them and identify the must wins and then we're going to proceed to capture so let's go into the next slide here you want to use a multi-faceted approach to find opportunities you want to use more than use two or three methods so there's the paid databases that we talked about there's your network keep the program managers at the government office the contracting offers sometimes the small business office will help you identify opportunities so there's lots of ways to fill your pipeline your teammates may bring you some salsa for you leverage your Rainmaker so these are the door openers the people who know everybody and they can set up a meeting with you with the customer and you and you always want to have them work with one of your business developers or train them properly because rainmakers don't update pipelines they don't really produce results they just open doors so I call these types of people to BD ferries they know everybody and they want you to hire them for a year or two and they're not really going to produce they talk a lot I know a lot of people they name-drop I know so-and-so at such-and-such agency and that's really their value so just understand that those people are valuable but only in certain projects so if you're not bidding monthly on objects that are perfect for you you're not growing you're stagnating if you have a 33% wind rate which is industry average then and you bid on one proposal month that means your girl in three to four contracts here is that fast enough to sustain your growth depends on what types of projects you bid on so if there are short-term projects like six months to a year maybe not if there are long-term projects and yeah that might meet your protocol so it's really two deciding on what your growth goals are and how many proposals you have to bid on every year to meet those goals so you got to commit to this bliss can campaign to build up your pipeline at first there's a lot of work that goes into it a lot of research that goes into it and then after the initial pipeline is built a lot of it is just maintenance and rerunning your your searches every now and then to make sure that you are catching all of your stuff qualifying the opportunity I like to use this little chart here on the right this is a quarter chart there are two things that you have to really decide upon how much customer relationship you have in your corporate capabilities this can also be called past performance so there are two things that no consultant can recreate for you and that's past performance customer relationship so when we're qualifying an opportunity we need to judge ourselves realistically where do we fit on this quarter we ask ourselves a lot of questions what exactly is this opportunity why do we want so what are they written in unwritten requirements why do we want this opportunity is it setting this up for some future work is it going to get us our facility clearance is it going to help us break into an agency you know why do we want and how does it fit with our growth what's the RFI or ROI return on investment how much am I gonna have to spend to win this and how's that going to impact my profit do our past performance capabilities national requirements be able to win the proposal first or win the contract and then execute your contract maybe we need a team partner what's the current status where is it in the procurement lifecycle you can get this off of Google or maybe somebody that has access to the Internet and your agency can get you the agency's specific procurement lifecycle and you can call the Contracting Officer and ask them where they are how do we stack up for the initial customer computer analysis can we win is something we beat the people who are expected to go after beat the team's perspective do we have the resources available to run a good capture effort write a good proposal executed contract so I like to use Gantt charts to see when all the proposals are expected hit when the our computer supposed to come out so I can kind of get a idea of the workload I missed missed facilities here do you have facilities that are the right clearance do you have facilities that are close to the customer and so on so you go on the next slide here this is the interest no interest review scoring sheet so what I do is based on the business development strategic planning and developing that ideal profile I make this interest no interest review okay so we said during our annual strategic planning session that we want to target army-navy DHS so one of the checklists I'm going to have interest no interest review sheet is is this opportunity from army-navy guess and maybe we can get more specific if we're going deep in the DHS maybe it's a Coast Guard or ice or whatever right so we want to list out these things and want to ask our business developers who's ever doing it research is ever doing the the capture on this depending on how you set up what kind of resources you have to use it's just a real opportunity so if you call the Contracting Officer have where those are past performance and capability stack up against state work what's the opportunity background are there any written or unwritten requirements does this appear wired for somebody else is the incumbent what's their standing what's their reputation with the customer right so there's lots of information that we can find before we make this interest no interest review because the the standard that I put this against is that you have a limited visit and proposal but you and you're going to have to spend money on when this goes forward so when I present this to a client I'm essentially saying hey client trust me here's all the information that I have here's why I think this is good opportunity for us to focus on versus some of these other ones that may be great - right so you should spend money going after this one because I think you have a great probability of winning and here's the here's how I back up my logic and that's what all these questions are about so the takeaway for this is that you need a full pipeline to support your growth depending on how many proposals you're won the bid on a year is going to depend on how many qualified opportunities you get coming down your pipeline and you need to document a process to qualify these opportunities against your business development plan and your growth goals so this will prevent you from going after the Bluebirds and hopefully it will front-load some of the proposal works that you're not spending the week before to do staying up all night Ron efficient puzzles fixing this upfront part is going is going to help you increase your win rate and invest your money a little bit wiser and instill the discipline to say no so thanks for listening if you have any questions you can email me my information is right there and Jennifer I'll turn it back over to you thanks David for a great presentation on the pipeline and thanks everybody who was able to join us today the recording will be available on our website on Monday for download and next week we're covering topics on cybersecurity deadlines developing indirect rates good protest mentor-protege program and reviewing for a contract purchasing review system so again these are all complimentary webinars we're going to continue use this for eight weeks total that wraps up around the middle or end of September and again they're all recorded you can find us on our website thanks again David thanks everybody for joining us today Thank You Jennifer take care