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hey neil mcdonnell here welcome to linkedin live we are going to get started in just a minute um just want to check all my technology to make sure it's coming through before i go into some kind of massive uh great content do me a favor um if you can hear me a couple of my uh favorite fans out there if you can just give me a thumbs up or something in chat that lets me know uh or see sir gus text me uh let me know um as i'm waiting and we're getting started i did just want to give a uh a shout out to people who are beginning to learn your core competencies and it's important i think when you think about knowing and liking and trusting people that uh people know you and these are some of the folks that i'm getting to know better and better on their core competencies so that when i'm off talking with customers or agencies et cetera then i remember them so uh amit shah data and artificial intelligence solutions hunter and greg from the band crew about san diego the sharepoint folks in office 365. taz ruby cyber security and innate a stars freeholder along with kimberly wright also an 8 a starstreak contract holder and a cyber security firm specializing there jim norwood jim cropper other cyber security folks they're just solidly in my head keith swanson cyber security and doug keaton cyber security i think there's a trend here about cyber security right um and then jim berry office furniture i just want to uh give a quick little shout out and i'm happy that i'm beginning to remember who you are and and what you do because i work with hundreds of small businesses and it's important to me to begin to learn you know just even having it casually enough when somebody says hey do you know somebody to cyber security yeah i sure do you know anybody can help with office for furniture sure jim you know let's talk over there so um and there's there's cyber security right there so thanks kelly for the uh the bump on quality i think we're good to go i'm gonna get uh started in just a second here so i'm neil mcdonald i'm the president of the govcon chamber of commerce and i want to welcome you to my daily linkedin live where i discuss process and procedures for you to achieve success in the federal market i spent 20 years as a small business owner in the federal market and since 2018 i've been working with folks like you to just teach you that government contracting is not a secret it's just a process the process goes from a to z and at different points we'll talk about different steps in the process today we're going to be talking about the sales pipeline in the federal market um one thing i just want to mention as it relates to those shout outs i just gave is go ahead and put your company name and core competency in see if you can start getting me to remember who you are but i did want to give a gift to you often i attend these type of webinars and you know if you wait to the end you get this well i just want to say thank you for showing up because it actually makes it um so much more fun for me who's coming in in the middle of the day trying to provide these daily training sessions it makes it so much more fun and more rewarding for the effort i put in to try to prepare each day's topic so today i want to give you a gift for any of you who are interested in this i'm going to be talking about the sales pipeline and i'll i'll be talking about something that i have a checklist for and it's called a pipeline planning checklist it's a health check if you will of your pipeline and um i'll explain it a little bit or i'll you'll see me explain what might be on it as we go along but if you'd like a copy of that just in the comment put pipeline planning checklist and i'll make sure i shoot it to you when i get a chance so let's get started with a uh kind of a baseline question right what is a sales pipeline and why is it important for me the the two words you can use for this is reliability and predictability um so let's let's take predictability for one second because as a small business owner or as a leader i want to be able to look into the pipeline and predict the amount of revenue i'm going to get i've said this to people before that we're in business and businesses are to make money that's our whole goal as a business there's all sorts of nice things we want to do um but the reality is if you're not making money then why are you in business i'm a uh i run the govcon chamber of commerce that organization's job is to not make money so nothing i think about is trying to make money through the chamber but in a business whether it was my old business or whether it's media in the box or your business we want to make money and so when we look at a sales pipeline it gives me the predictability of how much money will i make or will i be making the money that i set as a goal and i'll talk about goals in a second um and the uh by the way i don't really monitor chat i want you to put chat i want you to engage with each other but in order for me to stay focused on the message and give you what i hope to deliver today first i focus on delivering it and then i come back and look at the comments and chat um excuse me the other word i used was reliability so in a sales pipeline there needs to be reliability that what is in the pipeline leaders or you if you're not the leader but maybe you're in a sales role you can count on what's in the pipeline to come out the other end of success or you can count on whatever is in the pipeline independent of win or lose whatever's in the pipeline is what you do i talk about core competency you need to focus on a core competency well in a sales pipeline you want that um only opportunities going into your pipeline the only opportunities going into the pipeline should be related to your core competency so i mentioned greg and beyond grew up out in san diego doing sharepoint or or office 365 which is kind of the next level up for it any opportunity in their pipeline when greg or sales people like hunter look at it they should be able to see that every one of those relate to their core competency and they're not rationalizing why it's in there right and so that's the um reliability and predictability of a sales pipeline and so what is a sales pipeline i think i started with the why is it important what is it it's just a sales funnel of all the opportunities you're going to have so if you think about a funnel and you drop leads or opportunities at the top right that's the whole activity of business development a sales pipeline takes that funnel and defines the stages an opportunity will go through to either mature in its ability to deliver a winning proposal score or winning proposal to the government it'll either mature to that level or it'll evolve enough for us to realize you know what it's not a fit let's abandon it by the way saying no to an opportunity that is already in your pipeline is a measurement of strength and uh and conviction to your plans and your in your focus so make sure as you're going through something makes you think that's not the right opportunity get rid of it so there's room for the right opportunity in your pipeline so a pipeline is just a list of opportunities and the pipeline description as it goes through goes into that um in the minute i'm going to share a couple of slides where i talk numbers but but right now i want to talk um just more face to face for a second because i don't want to go crazy on building slides but one of the questions that sometimes people ask and you might be asking yourself right now is in my sales pipeline in the federal space what's the you know should i treat subcontracting or subcontracting opportunities and priming opportunities differently and my short answer is no right so when you look at an opportunity whether it is a subcontract position or a prime it is still going to go through the exact same process the only difference is if your subcontracting somebody else is doing the bigger lift on writing the complete proposal on sometimes even leading the capture some primes don't really need a lot from subs on uh capture activities sometimes they do i actually really like being involved when i'm a sub but either way it doesn't matter it's just the amount of work that goes into the opportunity you tend to do less work i don't know why i'm quoting again today but you tend to do less work when you're when you're um subcontracting than when you're priming you must know this right and but that's the only difference other than that a subcontract and a prime as it goes through should be the same um one thing i wanted to mention with you to be tracking is when you think about federal sales when you think about um capture and a pipeline there's a lot of complexity that can go in most of you should have been aware of something called a shipley's process or an organization called shipley you could not find a more complex process out there than shipley right it's everything out there i want to make this very clear i'm not here to debate ideas with people what i'm trying to do is to figure out how do i take something very complex not just shipley but the overall life cycle of a sales lifecycle of an opportunity how do i take something very complex and bring it down and that's what i'm trying to do today is simplify the complex so that you can then begin to build yourself up in skill set and experience so let me give you a story as an example i spent a lot of my career as a project manager right so i've been 30 years in sales and at least 20 years in project management back when i was in the army and then when i came out i was serving customers um as a small business owner but in project management we used to have something called waterfall and unfortunately we still have something called waterfall but in project management waterfall is this huge effort to look at something you're going to work on a project and define every single piece and then along the lines came agile software development or what i call agile project management and the idea is i'm not looking at everything i got a big picture understanding of what i'm trying to do beginning with the end in mind but i'm really operating on a much more uh measurable and shorter life cycle to get things done and this allows me to either abandon the project or to continue forward my point though is waterfall is very complex and when people start thinking about getting into project management i used to have people talk to me and and not do any kind of project management government people in fact would say they want these fancy tools project management tools that they can put in place they they really want to get into um fancy processes and and talking about earned value management and all these things that that can go into project management and when i think about it right it goes into building a rocket ship to go to the moon and back level of project management and what i would tell people is if you're not doing project management today start with writing down the titles of any projects you have and due dates if you have titles and due dates now you're doing project management because you're looking at it saying are we on track and as you start going forward day after day or week after week you can slowly start adding to the level of complexity you're tracking on a project to move forward well in the sales side it's the same thing you could get overly complex with your pipeline and the sophisticated algorithms and calculations that go on to judging a pipeline uh in the reliability and the value of it but what i want to tell you today is if you don't currently trust your pipeline or if your pipeline is basically empty then stop for one second and start um fresh and begin to put things in as you grow you can get more com complex with how you're looking at your pipeline but if you're not a billion dollar firm don't operate as a billion dollar firm and here i'm talking mostly to firms that are under 40 million dollars and you're looking at stuff your goal really is sales and getting more sales don't add so much more complexity that your sales people aren't able to sell and so this goes into the the complexity that's in the pipeline um so i wanted to talk to you about stages that are uh in a pipeline and these are stages from my perspective after years of just looking at stuff um i'm not saying they're right or wrong again i don't like debating people on just uh the concept these work for me and for my customers and it moves things forward and so i want to um share my screen really quick let me just do this um okay okay so um i'm just going to walk you through a really basic slide but in the uh pipeline i have a set of stages unqualified is what i tell people um anytime you find forecasts you see something in gov win whatever when it goes into your pipeline put it in as unqualified the reason i say uh i have an unqualified thing is because i used to find customers who's captured people and maybe you're like this would work on opportunities that are not in the pipeline because they're preparing them to be ready to go into the pipeline and i think that's crazy because excuse me you'll put a lot of effort into that but no one's tracking it and so what i tell sales people is get the opportunity into the pipeline as soon as you um start tracking on it you know the the company should not be counting on an unqualified thing the company shouldn't even be looking at unqualified but you should put it in so it follows a predictable set of process steps that move forward you can begin to learn from all the ones that you put in as unqualified that move forward or don't move forward but anyways unqualified are these opportunities you haven't nailed down yet in this particular training i'm not talking about what each stage really means or what the criteria is for moving forward i've got a different time i can talk about that but i'll use this one as an example nothing moves forward from qualified i mean unqualified to qualified unless it's a 100 match to our core competencies we want the work i'm sorry allergies um 100 match to our core competencies 100 match to our core customer let's say the air force and it's a real opportunity of some sort the government has somehow said it's out there and or so whether it's the program office saying yeah we're definitely pursuing this it doesn't have to be we're not the budget stage or anything but just it has to meet these three basic uh criteria every stage that i have has a defined criteria so you move from qualified into pursue at this point you're moving into the company spending more on proposals and or opportunities and maybe they're looking at solutioning i'm going to go through this fast because i want to get to the number parts that i really pay attention to unqualified qualified pursue bid and so pursue a bit of the true heavy capture periods um and then when the rfp drops it goes into proposal and then when you submit a proposal goes into awaiting awards these are the six that i use right when i move something forward and most everything's is in that qualified and pursue range right it's it's uh it takes a lot to go to bid and it obviously takes a lot to get a proposal including the rfp dropping but i wanted to talk about and the reason this is important because i'm going to talk about dollars in a in a minute not just on this slide but on the next slide um when i look at an opportunity in quo in unqualified i say that five percent of those uh will result in some sort of uh proposal that i'll be submitting and i'm just trying to give myself a number all of the opportunities in qualified i can look at those and go well 15 of them will move forward to proposal and before i move forward i want to pause for a second with data my numbers here or anybody else's numbers here don't matter the only thing that matters to you is your numbers based on your data and so if you have no data if you haven't been tracking how many opportunities have we put into the qualified stage that have gone to proposal if you haven't been tracking that then just use my numbers because it doesn't matter use them as a baseline and then once you start actually tracking your data then you will have a company specific set of data that says when we put an opportunity qualified it's one out of four not 15 but it's 25 or something move forward whatever it is it'll be your number so don't don't dwell on the numbers here it's the idea that you can see the numbers increasing that when i move something forward in my pipeline it goes to pursue i'm thinking that one out of four of these will move forward into a proposal they'll result in a proposal where i'm going after um and i'm just going to move through these a little faster let me try to go back for one second so these ones go forward and what i'm saying is in proposal it's 50 so when i when the rfp drops and i get something in a proposal one out of every two that moves forward into proposal will go to the customer as a completed proposal again i'm not looking to get into debates with people on it these are loose numbers and the idea is to sit there and say um when you're trying to decide how reliable and how predictable is my pipeline you have to give it numbers so that you can start tracking those numbers when you start tracking those numbers you can adjust these baseline type numbers um these assumptions to something else matching closer reality to your company but what it does is um give you just a start of knowing being able to predict your pipeline and so proposal is 50 in my old company it was 100 my number was 100 i wouldn't push something forward a proposal if i didn't actually know back and pursue that it was a slam dunk for us and we were going to write to it um other people you know you tend to be in more of a 50 range maybe that 50 is because you let something get to proposal that should be abandoned or more likely what happens is you might have too much in your pipeline and then you don't have enough people or resources to write to all the proposals and it's vitally important that if you have multiple proposals in a single month for example get rid of the ones that are the least important so your proposal team can work on one and slam and knock it out of the park right compared to working on three and doing a half-baked job um so the last part of this one in the pipeline stage is what i mean by um five percent if i'm using a million dollar i i didn't put this on the top but if i use a million dollar uh goal is what i'm trying to get and i'm looking at excuse me a million dollar opportunity value then the there's two numbers i want you to keep in mind an annual contract value and a total contract value which in the federal government let's just say is annual times five because most contracts are five years so right now what i'm saying is that if you have an opportunity in unqualified and it's got a five percent chance of moving forward then in the pipeline that value to me is basically 250 000 right 50 000 times a five year period it's just an assumption there right but uh that number works and you can see as this moves forward if if it gets to qualified and i've got opportunities and qualified any opportunities i haven't qualified i'm only counting 15 of their value to my total pipeline value and i'll talk about the total pipeline in a second um so when i look at uh pursue it's the same thing now as things are moving forward i can count on more of that revenue to to count towards our goals again these numbers can be adjusted once you get there you might find that you're you're higher than 25 you only go after stuff um in you know that's hitting pursue at that level it's 50 for you that's fine whatever the number is you can make any number up you want as long as later on after you track you put the real numbers um but here you see when once it gets to proposal i can count on 50 of the value in proposal the opportunities in the pipeline in the proposal stage i can count on 50 of that actually coming to my company and um and so in that case when i'm looking at a pipeline i'm trying to look at total dollars this is how i measure it the stages and the dollars don't change right there's i use calculated um algorithms basically to just automatically measure this this if you heard me before talk about a winning proposal score even the that score is automated and so all these data points i put into my pipeline they're automatically telling me about the value of the contract to the company i don't ask a capture person to tell me what they think the value is the system tells me so let's go to this next stage really quick and i want to talk about the um the goals so when i look at a pipeline the way i just did in stages here uh i just want to walk you through a scenario of the dollars and how i think about them and and how you might think about them so if i'm looking at uh annual contract value let's just agree what that means for one second what i basically mean is i want to get one million dollars for 2023 new revenue not net noon on any of these things i just want to add a million dollars to my company next year in order to do that i need to make a certain amount of sales etc so we need to go back in the numbers so annual contract value in order for me to get a million dollars next year in the federal space i operate on the assumption that every contract is actually a five-year contract so to me i have the second bullet is total contract value so the annual contract value expected will be one million perfect it'll help me hit my goal but in order to get that i need to win a five-year contract that has a million dollars a year makes sense and again basic assumption numbers here for a second um so annual contract value total contract value the next one is proposal contract value and this means how much money is uh how much value of my proposals are sitting with the government these are proposals i've submitted and the reason i use 20 million here is because i operate without data i operate with a 25 win rate or every four proposals i submit i'll win one right the number doesn't mean anything until you have data to say what your company specifically would have but i just use 25 that's fair rate um i never won less than 30 when up when i was in my last company that's why i like coming down to 25 um so anyways what this this is telling me is if i want a million dollars in 2023 i need to win a 5 million contract in order to win a 5 million contract i need to submit 20 million dollars in contract value or proposals to the government and when i say submit i mean that there's some criteria and i don't want to go too far into this because we're limited on time but this has to be four five million dollar proposals i'm submitting and and there's all sorts of numbers that are in here but it can't be just one right because if i'm winning one out of every four contracts uh or proposals that i submit then if i win a middle one it can't be for 50 bucks when the other one's for 19 million or something right and so every contract every proposal i submit is currently just assumed to be five million dollars as i'm backing up into the pipeline now i'm looking at this saying when i look at my pipeline i'm saying one out of every three opportunity dollars that i have in the pipeline will win and again this is in this some assumed number 30 33 your own data once you start tracking it should tell you exactly what you uh your company is running into or what you as an individual sales person is running into but here the pipeline value is 60 million what this is telling me is if i want to win a million dollars so that i can bring it in next year for revenue in 2023 i need 60 million dollars in my pipeline for proposals that will be going out the door this year right that'll be awarded this year to start and and be fully billed next year um so that's the level there let's do this again though at a 10 million level right i tend to work with companies that are trying to bring in 10 million annual contract value per salesperson if you will and so here it's the same example as you go forward 10 million i need 50 million of total contract vehicles or value because it's um it's multiplied and then um proposal value so i need four proposals out there that are 50 million dollars a piece basically right basic i just want to keep it to that basic number so i need four opportunities out there that means they have to be 200 million dollars in value and in order to do that times three i need a pipeline that is 600 million dollars if i was looking as a leader to 2024 saying i want to bring in 10 million then i would be looking to you as a salesperson saying do you have 600 million dollars currently in the pipeline for um 2023 dollars let me come back here really quick um you know i'd be looking at that and so that math in there that's the stuff i'm talking about in the pipeline checklist if you want to copy that i'll give it to you it the checklist is designed in a way that if you start plugging in some numbers it gives you the the value you should have in your pipeline one of the things i didn't talk about and i can expand another time on is each one of those when you look at each one of the stages of a pipeline they have calculated value that give me the weighted value so if it's a million dollars is a weighted value and weighted just means how much of that million dollars is real is my way of describing it because then you have a realistic look i don't want a 600 million dollars here i want 600 million weighted or real dollars going forward um i know this was a lot in there uh let me see question uh i'll take one of these questions i i just um focus on the time is my only thing i'm happy to come back and talk to folks but how do you approach track pipeline pursuit between new opportunities on sam versus existing awarded contracts that are going to expire six to 12 months so um to me if i'm if i'm answering this question correctly right um there's there's they're all the same a new opportunity or one you think is going to be recomputed that's what the question really is is how do you track the difference between new and recompeted in each one of those stages of um of the pipeline i have criteria that needs to be met i did a previous video where i talk about proposal winning score and basically the proposal winning score is calculated by those the activity that happens in each stage and so if i have a re-compete i might get to pursue a lot faster because a lot of the information is already there already i already know who the program office is the core i can go find the incumbent and try to find their people and learn more so i could move forward faster because i'm checking things off on my capture activity list if it's excuse me if it's a new opportunity then i'll move slower through this and it's it's vital that as you move to each stage you make sure you're checking off the criteria or the activity that must be completed in each stage um so i don't think of new or re-compete differently i just know that a recompete um is easier to find information but perhaps a new means i don't have to compete with an incumbent right so but going through the pipeline uh new or re-compete subbing or priming it's kind of all the same we're checking off do we have all our ducks in a row so that we're going to win the proposal um hey i'm sorry i was going to i have a whole nother set of bullets i was going to talk about on um how to get into uh um how to add opportunities into the uh pipeline and uh obviously i didn't get to it we're gonna wrap up here but i'll do a whole separate one uh maybe i'll try to do it next week where i just talk about well how do i find opportunities just like what people were asking how do i find opportunities that are new how do i find opportunities re-compete i'll just do a separate linkedin live for that um i think we're going to wrap up here my times down to the wire if you found value in this please give it a thumbs up so other people find it if uh if you have any questions for me right if your company's uh really at this stage where you're trying to go after uh um 10 million plus kind of value in your contract value and you want one ask me questions really anybody but feel free to reach out to me on linkedin and ask me questions and the last thing just remember if you'd like a copy of that pipeline checklist uh put it in the comments especially if you're watching the replay feel free to put put it in and i'll come back to you so remember government contracting it's not a secret it's just a process i'll see you in tomorrow's training