This is a follow up post from one of TAPE’s “capture managers,” a member of our business development team.
It’s important to understand that there are different intelligence zones involved in capture management – customer, competitive intelligence, program, staffing, and pricing. Being able to define it in those chunks helps us understand the kind of solution that we need to write towards in our proposal. Each of those zones have some basic questions and KPIs (key performance indicators).
We looked at client relationships and competitive intelligence in Part 1. Today we’ll look at staffing, and how the TAPE team works together and decides what to bid on.
Staffing is one of the most important aspects of capture to get right because clients don’t buy products or companies; they buy people. Having the right people on your team is critical for success, but who are the right people?
It’s important to distinguish between the key personnel and the rest of the team. Your key personnel are usually the people who lead the program, and their resumes are usually required to be submitted with the proposal. If they’re not already on your payroll, letters of commitment are often required.
The right key personnel will have all the required certifications, training, and years of experience, are known to the customer and have a good reputation, and can help you write the proposal.
For non-key personnel (other team members), it is important to identify as many qualified candidates as possible before submitting a proposal. Staffing matrices are typically required, listing all of the positions and hours assigned to the project.
If the only names in the staffing matrix are those for the key personnel, the program looks unstaffed and therefore more risky to evaluators. That’s why it is important to identify as many qualified candidates as possible (those with all the required certifications, training, and years of experience) before submission.
TAPE’s capture team
Because TAPE is a small business, we often have to wear a lot of different hats. There is always a locus of intelligence in one area, for example our senior vice president, administration and our chief financial officer will certainly help with pricing, but so will others who can bring the customer intimacy and program knowledge – perhaps someone who’s been in government and knows the program or its people. That person may be on staff at TAPE, or we’ll hire subject matter experts who can provide us that information.
It’s a shared responsibility amongst the team to go out and find this information, and my role to coordinate all these efforts and all of these people. What’s most important is having a team you trust, because you can’t do everything. Trust is the biggest component – trust, good working relationships, and good communication.
Also important are positivity, a can-do attitude, and being able to see things from multiple perspectives to gather what’s really important and what can wait, as well as graciousness and thankfulness for everyone’s efforts. At TAPE we always put a high value on our working relationships and communication – things are just so much easier when everyone’s on the same page.
Some days there is bound to be confusion. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt can be difficult but at the end of the day it keeps us communicating and honest with each other.
Successful relationships require trust and credibility. So often we deal with teammates who are not a part of TAPE. When we’re not teaming, we’re competitors – it’s a friendly competition, but building and maintaining trust in those relationships is vital.
Yes or no?
A big part of capture is about continually vetting and re-vetting opportunities to understand exactly what it is you’re investing in. So often there’s a huge disconnect or built-in conflict between the business development and capture proposal sides of the house. Business development wants to say yes to everything and capture proposal wants to say no to everything. It’s essential to build a bridge between the two because proposals often get seen as Dr. No and business development seen as snake oil salesmen.
When you do decide to qualify a bid and devote capture resources to it, you’re making an investment – though not all investments are equal. Sometimes you invest in a contract that will lose money so you can establish a relationship with a customer; other times you make a smaller investment by teaming with someone. But in all cases these are investments in time and resources, and you must understand exactly how that investment impacts your bottom line.
Thinking back to Lohfeld’s wise words that the best informed win, we can look to the data for this purpose. When discriminating what will remain in the pipeline and what we’ll invest more into, we need to know how much a proposal will cost. Do we have the necessary internal resources, or will we have to hire out? What will that cost?
Capture management means having a systematic way of reviewing an opportunity to determine your probability of win, and how that equates to what you’ll see in revenue and return on investment. Measuring those things and collecting that data in order to make an informed decision is an important component of what we do in capture.
