Streamline pipeline bid management for non-profit organizations

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thank you for joining Jennifer shot some associates in our 2019 webinar Wednesday series we are coming to you live from downtown Washington DC our webinars are every Wednesday and you can find the upcoming schedule on the website has Dublin ours mob recordings are also on a website on a YouTube channel with over 160 of the recordings on federal contracting topics all are complimentary if you have questions for speaker Joe you can contact him directly for the contact information you'll see it on the last slide just a little bit about us we are washington DC based firm and provide services for federal contractors this ranges from market analysis reports to proposal rating and also poster board compliant more information is on our website so please visit us there and since they're not killing events that you can find more information here also on our website and we do offer advertising so you can email me if you would like more information on that and our webinar today is sponsored by asset tracking here is a short message from them I keep track consulting and accounting services in a WSB CPA firm committed to supporting entities growth in government contracting our outstanding DCAA accounting solutions reduced audit risk include cash flows and give you peace of mind contact us today to learn how we can enhance your accounting efforts alright let's go ahead and get started our speaker today is Ed Salzburg and he's going to be covering three tips for effective lead pipeline management thank you for joining us today ed and I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to you great Thank You Valerie and thanks for having me on let's go to the next slide so I just finished a session in the first half hour and they both of the sessions comes from the same training I did and I'm not sure I got the titles right for each of them but but I tried to simplify the capture and proposal management program for especially January mid-level staff I work with a lot of senior folks as well but most of them are pretty experienced and I well I think I do help them I really can bring up junior mid-level staff to a much higher level of performance in the captured program just think about the power of that if your mid-level staffer much more in their understanding how to execute an effective pipeline management and capture program and so I've been called slides from a training that I've been doing for several years I think it's extremely effective customers tell me it's transformational and I've found that especially a mid-level staff will leave the training when I do it face to face right down to their office and start to execute some of the some of the principles that they've learned right in the training let's go to the next session the next slide so the the training that I do is called Whitmore government work and spend less money doing it the idea is to just upgrade your capture management and your pipeline management program based on heart analytics so that you can actually measure each aspect of your program and I use them I do more than just analytics but I bring some insider tactics for winning government contracts based on three concepts of Management which is the leadership scaling which is the analytics and unified which is common terms and I call what I do common sense but not always common knowledge ways to beat the competition because it things need to be simplified so it's very clear what to do to move from one stage of a capture program to the next and I covered that in the previous the previous webinar so I just ask you to go find that one if you didn't sit in on it and take a look at the the pipeline management system that's in there the bid pipeline pyramid I think you'll you'll just see a very simple way to communicate how to move from from poorly or early-stage opportunities and bring them up so that they are very well qualified leads where you've got a very very high probability of one okay next slide so I've been doing this for a long time I cut my teeth at SAIC in the 70s and 80s into the 90s like to say that I'm that old but I still love doing this I love leading capture programs organizing proposals leading read teams but I really like doing the training because I'd like working directly with the folks so I I was a partner in two small firms that we helped grow explosively and I think that where I really tested out some of the concepts here I had a great time at Patel in their environmental sector and since 2007 I've been working directly with government contractors to improve their win rates and just rationalize their programs overall and what I found is that across the government contracting industry very few firms or divisions grow explosively and that there's a difference from the between the firms that do like we experienced at SAIC and then add-on Corp and then SRA and those that don't next slide I do a kind of a shorthand of the training where I pulled out eleven what I call Ed's essential elements for to grow government revenue they really work for non government revenue as well I'm just going to quickly run through these these are 11 measures these are 11 elements in which I have measures for and I'm going to go through three of them here in this session the first one is the health measures those are the real analytics and I cover those in the previous section so I just ask that you go back and take a look at that recording B and that's and those they measure the various aspects of the health of your pipeline and also the health of your contract backlog and they really do go together bidding frequency determines the number of bids needed to meet financial goals the analytics actually apply where you can calculate how many bits in the time and the size of the bids in order to derive your business development program those analytics work if they're sitting on top of a very defined well-defined analytical pipeline management and capture program pipeline quality except rates meaningful bids from bids that are not meaningful by meaningful I mean that all of the questions that should be answered in the right order that they need to be answered are done and so that there are not bids wavering around between between sections of your pipeline programs so prospects are different than leads leads are different than qualified leads qualified leads are different than well qualified leads and your pipeline quality gets you to put the put your opportunities in the right stage so that when you add up those stages you're getting money you're getting total numbers that are really meaningful and representative of the quality of your pipeline bid pursuit information differentiates programs from business information I've got a slide on that one I believe I'm doing that I think I'm I'm doing that one in this in this session the big decision framework I did cover in the last training I did the last hour I'm not going to do it here pipeline velocity is a way to keep leads from languishing on the bid list I don't touch that in this one but there's a really slick way to make sure if leads get detached that that opportunities get well qualified well before the RFP gets out teaming sabotage I do talk about here proposal readiness I believe I talked about here in red team scores I'm going to talk about here too so if you just read through these it just sort of mentally check off if you think that you're doing each of these eleven things well and then at the end when I do that when I cover three of them or four of them that I committed to go back and rethink it and still if you see if you still think you're doing them well or not next slide I have mentioned any in the in the last half-hour that there that that the the difference between the average firm and the real leaders in the business is that the the leaders in the business have a way to have short treads and steep risers all firms grow in a step function you win a contract and then you fill the contract up and that pumps your revenue up you may lose and go back let's say that doesn't never happen joeys when you're recomputes and then over time you're going up and then over up and then over if you're up is faster than you're over you've got a very healthy program and so the industry leaders have a way of bidding more frequently and winning more often and the tactics that I teach can help you gain knowledge to get your organization on a much stronger growth path the one on the top the industry leader rather than the one below it okay next slide and this is Mellie this one has a lot of yeah let's just pull all that stuff out and go right there so what central element 5 and remember there 11 I talked about bit pursuit information so let's start from the left and I'll go to the right I do this training often and almost every time I do the training somebody asked me a question I hadn't thought of before and that'll end up in a new addition to the training so I was working with a company and did the training at a very senior person what I was talking about the the competitive the information that you need in order that you need to go get to qualify the biz and and she said to me and this is a senior senior officer in the company what question should I ask what marketing clients know now if you're a very experienced business development person you you probably would come up with the same answer that I did but I turned that back to her and I asked her what she thought would be important to ask in a client meeting and she gave me the questions on the left what are your data gaps do you need a more rigorous risk assessment are you having web access issues our subject matter expert what what subject matter experts are you using and while those are really good questions and they may lead to a task on a task order contract they really focus on the clients program needs and not not their contract needs or not their business needs and so the input the questions that I came back with and you can clearly see the different difference how they come it's doing do you currently view us as competitive are there must have consultants or subs what's special capabilities must a prime have for the thought leaders and decision-makers in your company so this leads to discussions that can help you position yourself from the contract for the contract and I just found that many technical staff don't necessarily know the difference without it having them pointed out to them program meetings program information on the Left competitive information for business meetings on the right and some are not comfortable asking the competitive questions and often need help getting past that reluctance which is why I like to focus on mid-career professionals to get them from the left to the right so on the check on that check box I don't know if you were able to download the slides or not but just think about that put a check down if your company guides staff on how to use competitive information many firms don't they just assume and I'd like to kind of commit and test that theory and provide some training when necessary okay next slide okay this one I love essential element 8 teaming sabotage keeping teaming decisions from sabotaging the bid teaming done too early look at the left side of the screen runs the risk of locking in the wrong subcontractors and done too late might lose the right ones teaming is an art not a science and there's no single way to do this right actually in most of the elements that I trained on there's no Universal answer to the question but a discussion about that question is so appropriate and having experienced people in the room with in that discussion does lead you down a series of activities that get you to the right answer teaming must be a constant topic in all bid review meetings it really is in my experience and capture team meetings what management can't think of more questions to ask about which firms should be pursued then it's time to start thinking about finalizing the tuning a good way to guide the teaming decision is to develop a theory of the team which is a brief statement of the rationale for each subcontractor slot not each subcontractor but he's slot which starts with understanding the competitive nature of the bid a concept i talked about in d in the in the last webinar and then moves toward the weakness is that your organization has that needs to be filled by subcontracting in order for you to be on the playing field for that opportunity good reasons for including a slot or things like the need for more client relationships special skills or tools added depth and other differentiators and it's important precept an important standard to only add subcontractors that fit into the theory or you're weak in the bid rationale and you you may really confuse the evaluators so you know very often and I've been on the evaluation side as well as on the proposal development side very often that the reason why the team is put together is not really clear so the evaluators are confused about what those firms are doing there are they tripping over each other are they are there any commitments to firms that they don't see is necessary so I'm not putting the time in to think through the theory of the team and to answer all of the questions necessary to define those slots and then find the right firm for those slots it's really important to run through that exercise as I said earlier I can't tell you how to do that universally for all opportunities there's not a there's just not one way to do it but there is an answer for every opportunity and it's it's managing the process of getting to the answer that is the is the real skill and require some experience so check this element off if your firm uses explicit criteria to add subcontractors and uses a theory of the team be interesting to get some feedback from each of you to see how you did in each one of the sections that I'm talking about okay I think there's one or two more that I cover one or two more of the elements and malorie let's look at the next one Oh proposal readiness yeah I love this one too okay so I do a lot of work on proposal development I love to sit down on red teams and I like to use a technique to determine if the proposal team is really ready to go or not um you know the the thought of think plan do rather than pick up your pencil and start to write before you actually understand what it is you're trying to accomplish what the proposal is just so true so maybe it took nine months and you've done all of that work on the caption you follow all of the eleven precepts you've gotten the competitive information you have a coach you you've you've answered all of the competitive questions so you know you're on the playing field you know the client prefers you you've tilted the playing field in your direction so you must you must have this in the bag you should be a shoo-in to win break out the champagne and then you lost why very often it's because marketing resources effectively and definitely position to win lose because the team is not fully prepared to bring in the proposal effort it takes both positioning with the client which is the captured part in competitors and readiness to write the proposal to be the successful bidder positioning means understanding under the blue on the right competitive landscape client preferences special differentiators teaming theory all of those questions need to be answered readiness are things like storyboarding the management plan resumes project description subs packages etc everything that can be done well before the RFP comes out so you're not struggling to do all of those things when the RFP hits you've already got all of that back-office stuff done and you can spend time on the creative part of writing the proposal but how can you be sure you don't waste a great marketing effort on a prototype or proposal I found that by far the number one test is to have the proposal manager draft an executive summary several weeks before the RFP is due out even if won't likely be used in the bid if the proposal manager can't tell a compelling story before the RFP is issued why would anyone think he or she can do that in the proposal a poor initial executive draft is a big red flag that the proposal leader and probably the proposal team is not sufficiently prepared to even start the effort you want to know that before the RFP is issued when you can take steps to get ready rather than after the proposal effort is started when it may be too late so if you're following along and checking off boxes check element 9 on the checklist if your company tests the proposal team before launching the proposal okay I think the next one is the last one about red team's getting high scores and internal proposals something most proposal teams don't take very seriously terrible red team's terrible red team versions are just I would have to say the worst thing you can do is a proposal manager poorly prepared drafts for internal reviews red team's of a series of potentially serious repercussions that will hamstring growth they waste the time I'm reading off from the left they waste the time of expensive senior reviewers that's just horrible to sit in a red team and they didn't really do the job miss the chance for serious critiques the feedback won't be there and leave the proposal team scrambling to recover rather than adding creativity to the bid and it's not that hard to fix this moreover everyone involved in the red team is having a negative experience have you guys been there which hurts company morale and it's embarrassing if subcontractors are participating firms that always get off to bad proposal starts just can't win consistently because government contracting is much too competitive for weak efforts to prevail moving to the right insists that each red team chapter scores 80% and it's important to actually score each chapter even if you don't know the evaluation criteria explicitly you can come up with a set that are going to be close enough based on past RFPs or just basic experience and the reviewers can provide can focus on providing important guidance if every chapter score is 80% then wasting their time struggling with a non-compliant difficult to understand and scored document in the final days of the proposal the writers will be working on polishing a good draft rather than panicking to get a poor one barely into compliance in time for submission when I moved from SAIC Davian company where I was a partner I ran half of the company and the first proposal we did I wrote one chapter myself for a bid that we were going after we happened to win it but not because the proposal was well done but I took on the role of writing one of the chapters and we scored very well in my chapter because I knew I had to get it done in time for the red team to score high and the rest of the folks didn't but it was very good guidance for the team to see that they had to do they had to deliver on top they had to deliver on time it takes just as long to write the chapter the last week as it does two or three weeks before doesn't take any more time so you might as well do it early when you can actually turn in a good draft rather than do it late in the proposal effort do it early in the red team will be a positive experience for everyone involved setting a high red team bar with lower proposal costs because you may not have to do the red team again which happens very often you know sometimes like to joke we we didn't have that the team the red team that the proposal team didn't have time to do it right they did have time to do it over though and that's very expensive so check item 10 element 10 if your company exists on minimum scores in internal reviews last slide Valerie so here's the checklist again just to refresh remember we went over let's see we went over big decision framework let's say I think we did we did bit decision framework no we did we did teaming we did proposal readiness we did red team scores and we did one other and now I can't remember because they did this so often but but take a look at that and you can see that the way I described these just gives you some clues as to how to simplify the your your over total the each element of your of your capture and your pipeline management program if you focus on these 11 items and you do them really well you can't help but grow your company so Malory that's the last slide and I finished in 20 minutes thank you so much as for sharing their knowledge and insight today today's presentation has been recorded and it will be on my website or YouTube channel within about 48 hours if you have questions for add email and directly with the phone number email shown on your screen and it concludes our webinar seek to everybody great thank you very much Mallory [Music]