Transcription
Hello and welcome to today's webinar on capture and opportunity management. I'm Mallory Price, and I will monitor today's session. With me is Brad Douglas, President and CEO of Shipley Associates; David Bull, Senior Vice President of Business Winning; and Mark Wigginton, Regional Vice President of Business Development.
If you have any questions during the webinar, please type them into the questions tab on your control panel. We will answer as many as we can. Brad, the time is yours.
Okay, Mallory. Thank you. And David and Mark, thanks for, uh, joining us today. Um, we're staying with our webinar theme for the rest of this year. It kind of goes along with the back to school, but motto or theme, if you will, and talking about some of the back to basics as far as business development and, uh, how we can compete for and win more business. So today's topic, we won't spend a lot of time introducing ourselves, and you could go see who we are if you like. But we wanted to talk about the basic, the foundational principles and ideas and best practices around what's known as capture management. We, we often also use the term opportunity management. What can we do as sales executives, as capture managers, to continue to get better at advancing opportunities and qualifying opportunities to actually win more of the right kind of business?
So we're going to focus on these, these points here, uh, today for this next 45 minutes to an hour. Uh, we're going to talk a little bit about what we mean by capture management. What's the goal? Our goal, obviously, is to improve our, our P win. P win stands for probability of winning. We'll go over a baseline approach and process, the methodology, if you will, on what the best companies are doing as far as capture management. We'll talk a little bit more about what's involved in that process. We're actually going to, you know, the old term SWOT, strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. We're going to point out where that fits into the, the whole idea of capture management. David's going to spend some time talking specifically about an opportunity or a capture plan. Why it's important, what it involves, what it should contain, uh, what's, what's the goal of having an actual capture or opportunity plan, and then we'll talk about executing the plan.
Now, some of you, when you registered, when you register for a Shipley webinar, you're given the opportunity to ask questions in advance. So some of you did that, and we have a list of questions here that some of you, when you registered, asked. And we are going to, rather than just pull those up on the screen and answer them one at a time, we're going to try to weave the answers and the questions into the webinar itself. So thanks for doing that in advance because it actually helps us shape the content of the discussion. And so we will identify these questions and address them as we go. And Mallory is keeping an eye on the chat bar and, you know, your discussion window there. So if you do have questions, if we say something you want clarified, please chat it in there. And if we can't address it during the actual webinar, we'll try to get back with you afterwards and provide you more information. So this webinar is being recorded. We will post it on our website. We will also post, um, copies of the screenshots that you see here. So if you wanted to refer back to them, they will be available on on Shipleywins.com.
Just some basic vocabulary for just a few minutes, just to make sure we understand what we're meaning by certain words. Capture may not be a familiar term to all of us, uh, in this session. So what we mean by capture as a verb is implementing winning strategies by trying to influence the customer to prefer, prefer our organization or services or solution. That's what we mean. So capture is, is an active effort to go win an opportunity, to try to shape the opportunity, influence the customer in a positive, ethical way, and try and win the business. Capture planning is the process of, of preparing to do that, put taking these winning strategies and actually putting them into an actionable plan, something we can actually go to work on. What we mean by capture or opportunity strategy, then, is the plan and actions to win a specific deal. So we've identified an opportunity, we're in the process of qualifying the opportunity. What now are the strategies and the tactics to go make sure we capture that and win that deal? Again, the capture plan, it's a, it's actually, we say here, a written plan. By written plan, I mean it's documented. It could be documented online in your CRM system, uh, as part of your pipeline and your pursuit pipeline. It could be documented in a series of Microsoft Office tools and templates that feed together and link together. But it's a documented, action-oriented plan summarizing how we're going to, to go after business. And then the capture manager, opportunity manager, we're going to use this term kind of interchangeably today for the sake of this webinar. This is the person, or maybe the small team, but usually a designated person who's responsible for pursuing this opportunity that has been identified. And they, the capture opportunity manager, as you'll hear from Mark Wigginton today, often is also quite involved in the actual qualification process of an opportunity. So that's, that's some basic terminology. Um, and we'll, we'll go through that. And we'll mention those terms again. If we, again, if we use a term you're not familiar with, feel free to, to, uh, chat it in the discussion bar and we'll go through that.
So one of you actually submitted, um, a question. What do you think the mission of business development and capture is? And actually, we've got a slide coming up on that very mission. It's really to advance the sale and win the business. I mean, that's the basic underlying mission is, uh, is to win business for our companies.
If we look at this now, some of you probably joined us for a webinar we did last month where we went through the basics of a business development life cycle. And here you see a summary of that life cycle with the various phases. I know a lot of your organizations have your own model or your own life cycle, if you will. But really, where capture fits in, and this was actually one of the questions submitted to us in advance, so thank you for that. Um, someone had asked, when setting up a business development approach, what step is capture management? Well, here it is. So capture is, you know, that activity, the strategy, the planning that takes place after we've spent time defining our market, positioning ourselves to compete in that market, and then we start to qualify and assess opportunities and develop a capture plan. So it precedes the proposal activity, but it comes after our long-term positioning and market research, market analysis. Uh, so the follow-up.
Okay, thanks, Mallory. So a follow-up question to the one submitted was, what's maybe the difference of a BD guy versus a capture guy? A business development, usually in a larger organization, is is not focused specifically on a specific opportunity. It's the business development activities of that company or that business unit. Where a capture manager is laser-focused on a specific opportunity. That's the difference between a business development person or professional and a capture manager. Capture manager is laser-focused on an opportunity.
So back to that question that was submitted a few minutes ago, what's the overall mission and goal of capture? This is it. You know, we want to go with, with a customer, with an opportunity, smaller or large company. We have to move and advance from often an unknown position where we're just now discovering an opportunity or a new market or something like that. We want to advance to a known position and become known in the market or to the customers. We want to start researching competitors. Then, of course, we want to move to an improved position. How, what can we do to improve our chance of winning the business? So we need to try and, again, always ethical, aboveboard way, what influence can we have on the customer and the opportunity? How can we help shape that opportunity so that we then become here, favored? We want to be going into a competition for work. We would like to go in as a favored bidder. So how do we position ourselves to bid and win in a favored position? This is where the capture manager comes in. It's the capture manager that should be driving this goal, this mission, this objective to move from a, maybe a lesser known, lesser favored opportunity to a more favored position.
Now, we talked about the idea of, and I know again, this is back to basics for some of you, but the idea of the P win, the probability of winning. Some companies go so far as to actually calculate them and they put a factor on it. It could be a percentage, it could be a number, it could be some type of color. You know, we have a 70% P win at this point in the deal. So, make it your own. But this idea of a probability of winning really has a few components to it. You start at the base, of course, with the customer. How well do we know the customer and how well do they know us? That's the foundation of the P win. The customer, do they know us? Do we know them? Next piece of the probability of winning is assess the competitors. Do we know who's competing? Do we know their strengths and weaknesses and gaps? Do we know their history with this customer? And what is our competitive position as it relates to our competitors? The next step in probability of win calculation and determination is a focus on ourselves, our capabilities. So you see these Cs, you know, the four Cs: customer, competitor, capabilities. What are our capabilities? How can we discriminate? Is there something we do better, faster, or cheaper than the competitors? And another critical part of P win is the cost. We have to understand the cost, possibly the price to win window. What's it going to take to win? And can we actually justify a business decision going after this opportunity? So our value proposition as it relates to the cost and the ROA for the ROI for the customer, it all goes into calculating the P win, the probability of winning.
So that's that. Again, I know it's basic for some, but to the extent that we go through trying to compete and we ignore any one of these plateaus on this pyramid, so to speak, or, you know, we skip over and say it's not important on this deal to understand our competitors, you know, we put ourselves at risk and we run the risk of competing for work that we might not want, we shouldn't pursue, or we have a low chance of winning. So this is all part of capture. The capture manager should always have an eye toward the P win, the probability of winning.
So there's a lot that goes into capture. And again, we're talking high level in this webinar. But a capture manager has to have a certain drive or or desire to collect data. You know, and not, not he or she personally, but we need a team to research data and and collect that information. And then take that data from raw data and do an analysis. What is the data telling us? Why is this customer buying the way they are? Why, what is their buying pattern? And then customer contact and relationship building. And Mark's going to talk more about that in just a little bit. And so that is very important for a capture manager. Persuasion and sales. Things are heating up. Things are getting very, very competitive in so many of our markets. It's much easier today to replicate some of our solutions than it used to be. We used to be able to be unique for 10 years, and now that life cycle has shrunk to one or two, and then you get copycats and people who make claims they can do the same thing you can do. So we have to be more persuasive in our work with our clients, with our customers. And then the capture manager has to be somewhat involved in solutioning. I, as a capture manager, I have to know what our baseline solution is sooner as opposed to later, so I can have good discussions with the customer and ask smart questions. And then, of course, a good capture manager is a strategic thinker, someone that can think strategically.
So if we were to break capture down into the most simplified form and just say, you know, what is it, ABCD? This is it. All right. We need to do a competitor analysis, customer analysis. We need to develop some type of capture or pursuit strategy. And then we need to develop an actionable plan. This is where companies fall short. This is where a lot of us fall short is we put together a pretty good strategy and then we don't follow through very well at actually assigning tasks to people and holding them accountable. We'll talk more about that later.
I'm going to click through this really quick because it's a lot of information, you know, a lot of, a lot of steps, if you will. But there is some method to the madness of capture management and opportunity management. And so here's a basic methodology approach that we subscribe to and that we've seen be successful out in the market, uh, in many of your organizations. So, and it kind of aligns with the, the, uh, P win, you know, the probability of win. But the first thing we really want to do is assess the customer. So identify and qualify the opportunity. Find out who the decision makers are and, and what is going to be the buying process, the evaluation process. In, in doing this, what are the customer hot buttons, issues, and requirements? Next, there's this competitive assessment, this competition assessment. We talked about who are they? What are their probable solutions and costs? Do they have gaps or weaknesses we might be able to expose during the pursuit? The company, again, the third C in, in the P win. Have we done a bidder comparison? Are we, are we, do we know where we stand competitively? Have we identified strengths and weaknesses? Teaming strategies come in here. Do we need to team on on this deal? And then win strategy development. Tactics to address the SWOT. What are the features and benefits we're really going to hone in on? And really important are the discriminators. What sets us apart? And from that, can we create a strong value proposition? This is what our proposal teams, or proposal writer, or people doing the proposal beg for. Give us a value proposition at the capture phase that we can write against. We can't create win messages and customer-focused messages if we don't have that value proposition. And then action planning, of course. And then again, we'll talk more about this. But if you wanted kind of a roadmap to what is, what are the basic elements of capture management, capture planning, here it is. You know, these, this is the high-level framework that we all ought to be looking at.
Now, one of the questions submitted, let me find it here in advance, was someone made the comment and question, capture processes seem to be designed for large companies with significant staff. What essentials should small companies use? Mark, if you don't mind, would you mind just commenting on that question?
So if, if you're not a large company with a large staff and you see this, this approach to capture, it seems a little overwhelming. Are there certain things that the small company just needs to make sure they don't forget about?
Yeah, thanks, Brad. I appreciate that. Um, you know, and this is something that I deal with a lot with my clients, is that, you know, they, they, they look at this model and look at some of the really large companies and go, how are we going to do that? But the bottom line here is what this all is about is understanding the competitive environment. And whether, you know, you're a small business and the leader in that business is the person who has the customer intimacy, who's, you know, kind of sitting eyeball to eyeball with your customer. Um, it's important to have somebody that's actually out there talking to the customer and not just shooting blind, so that you can get to that value proposition. Building rapport is a, is a critical piece of this. Done. If you have a sales force, again, outside sales people that are out there talking to clients, it's critically important to make sure that you're doing that. And even if you're in a non-profit and you're trying to go through the process of looking at grant opportunities, people, folks buy from folks. You know, that's kind of the bottom line. So finding a way to, to make sure you get eyeball to eyeball to understand your customer, understanding if possible who's involved in the competition, even as a small business, as little, you know, whatever you can get. And really understanding, be honest about your own strengths and weaknesses are, as, as important in a small business as they are in a big business. And they're the key elements that lead to the value proposition.
Thanks, Mark. And yeah, I would echo that. That, you know, small companies, um, sometimes the capture manager in smaller organizations is the leadership team, and they're the ones out drumming up business, building relationships. And so, you know, you just have to make, make this fit within your organization, shrink it down, tailor and adapt it into your situation. Thanks, Mark, for that.
But again, this, this bottom part of failing to develop an action plan and execute on it, I can't stress this enough. A large or small company, sales people are really, really good at doing what they do. Capture managers are usually really, really good at doing what they do, all of this front-end work. But beyond that, we all need to get a little better at executing, executing an actual strategy for winning the business.
So some of you might wonder, well, who should I be interfacing with if I'm a capture manager or if I have a sales person in my organization? Who should they be interfacing with? Well, it's a lot of people. Yeah, we have to be interfacing with the solution architects, you know, who's developing the solution, the customer, of course, subject matter experts, cost people have to be involved, leadership team. It's our job as capture managers to keep the leadership team informed on how it's going as it relates to maybe that P win. Um, so, um, a question that came in is, someone asked, you know, is understanding our capabilities? It seems like in this model we're showing here, comes late in the process. Actually, you know, on these visuals, it might look like it's coming in late. We should know our capabilities going in early. As a capture manager, I mean, we should know when we first start having dialogue or discussion or interaction with the customer or prospective customer, we have to know what our baseline capabilities are before we start, otherwise we don't even know what questions to be asking or what to be looking for. So if I came across like understanding our solution comes late in the process of capture, let me correct that and say, no, we need to understand our, our baseline solutions very early. And then as we advance the opportunity, we need to understand how can we tailor those solutions, customize that solution, or make that service applicable to, to the customer.
The other, another question came in, Mallory, actually, is really good, writing these out for me so I can respond to. Why is the customer's buying process important to know? Why is the customer's buying process important to know? It's important to know so that we know who we should be focusing discussions with, how long it's going to take, who might need to be on our engagement team, you know, [Music] we need to understand what their approach to source selection or buying is, just so that we can align the way we sell our services to the way they're going to buy.
And again, I'm not going to dwell on this a lot because, um, we, you know, this, this is a webinar, not a training class, and you can go back and look at this and print it off if you'd like. But here, what we've done is we've, someone might be asking here on the webinar, you know, if we had a job description, what should a capture manager be doing? Well, here's some primary responsibilities that we believe opportunity managers generally take on. You know, they need to be able to prioritize customer hot buttons, for example. They need to be able to explicitly say why us, why should the customer be buying from us? This is so important if we're in an organization where the capture manager activities lead into a proposal. These activities become just critical to the proposal team. We have to know these hot buttons and we have to know these discriminators so that we can write an effective proposal. You'll notice here also, we talk about a good capture manager creates a draft executive summary. This is best practice. It's not common practice, but it's best practice that the sales person, the sales lead, the capture lead should be the one at least crafting a notional executive summary that can guide the win strategy development. So that's why we believe that is a primary responsibility of the capture manager. And then we list out here some secondary responsibilities or some support responsibility. And then, of course, we talked about research. Um, the capture manager has to leverage any resources you have in, in your own organizations for researching these opportunities. And it can be subscription services, consulting firms, associations, professional groups, industry and customer websites that are just huge sources. So there, there has to be a part of our job as capture managers that focuses on the research.
And then one of your questions when you registered was very specific about this. You know, are there certain milestones during the pursuit of an opportunity where we ought to be have kind of a jumping off point? Mark will talk more about that a little bit, but we call these decision gates across the life cycle. And we've talked about this in some other webinars. But there's some critical points during a pursuit that we need to be aware of. For example, early on, someone needs to decide, do we need to mount some kind of marketing campaign, uh, in a certain market and start identifying qualifying opportunities? Once we've done that, then there's this interest gate, this gate number one, where we've got to verify that yes, we've got an interest in this specific opportunity. Then there's a pursuit gate. Are we actually going to put resources toward this opportunity and initiate a capture plan? Preliminary bid gate, the validation bid gate, and then finally, we're going to submit a proposal. Are we actually going to bid on this opportunity? So these are just, these are some decision gates that you as a company ought to be thinking about along the way to give you really the rationale and the business case for going forward on an opportunity.
Let's see. I'm going to pause here. There's a question. Can you discuss the timing of the teaming strategy relative to the action plan and RFP drop? Seems like the teaming strategy comes in and out of the process. And that, you're exactly right. I mean, if we've done our good capture work early and we have a feel for what the opportunity is that's going to come out from our customer, we should be thinking teammates very early in the process if we don't think we can do it all. And then once we get a draft, if we get a draft RFP or a final RFP and we really go through the requirements, we build a compliance matrix and capability matrix that that will help us solidify and identify where we have solution gaps and where we might need teaming partners. So your question is a good one and your point is a good one. Yes, the teaming strategies come in and out of the capture process. You know, we're constantly have to be looking at that and considering teaming as part of our capture plan.
Okay. A very critical role in the capture planning process for a capture manager is this idea of qualifying opportunities. And I've asked Mark if he would discuss the points here around how do we get better at making sure we're bidding on the right opportunities. And we call this opportunity qualification. So Mark, if you'll take the lead on this, that'd be great.
Great. Thanks, Brad. Before I start on that, I want to go back to a couple of things that you mentioned before. And you had talked about in the graph that you talked about with the value proposition kind of as the outflow of all the different elements of the four Cs. Just want to come back and reiterate that whether you're in a large business or a small business, quite often the person that's face to face with the customer is the only person on the capture team or proposal team that, uh, has the voice of the customer ringing in their ears. And, and that's what makes it so important to be able to bring this information back into the team, to have it documented, to have a written plan, to have action plans, because many of the people who are going to be writing the proposal have not really, you know, had that opportunity to, to interface with the customer as they go forward.
Brad, one of the charts you did a second ago referred back to the decision gates and it also talked about that go, no-go process. Where do you do this? And the graphic on this chart is an expansion of that. You can see on the right side of the graphic, you know, you can see this flowchart that says, does it fit in our plan? Are we the incumbents? Um, it's a yes, no decision tree. And all along the way, it's important to be honest with yourself about whether you have an opportunity to win. What is your, your possible P win? What is your probability of win? And do you have an ability to improve that? And if you get to a place where you say, no, there's no way we can do this, the smart thing to do is to determine whether you need to proceed on or whether you need to reallocate those resources someplace else. The other thing I want to mention on this chart is in the list of qualification tools. For me, the last thing on this list, which is the bidder comparison matrix, is the single most important tool. I think this is the key to capture. And basically, this is a matrix tool, and we can probably talk about that in another seminar, go into detail. But it's a matrix tool that allows you to first identify what's most important to your customer, what are the most important requirements, and then to honestly assess at this moment in time, how well do you deliver against those, and how well do you think your competition can deliver against those? And by, by integrating the customer, company, and competition together, you get a really good snapshot at a moment in time of what your strengths and weaknesses are. And that really works to help you develop your strategies so you can move forward.
To the next chart. I love this chart because this is such an important element again of, of, of what we need to do to be effective. And, and what most salespeople do and still today, even when people call Shipley, most of the people are on the right side, the part that says everyone else. And they spend most of their time, you know, if they're in the government sector, you know, it could well be that they wait until they see something in government or they see something in, in FedBizOpps. If you're in the private sector, somebody may call in the lead, and you kind of work it there. And most people spend their time just going through that proposal process. But what we found in studies is that the, the most effective people are really understanding their customer. They're taking the time to clearly qualify, to ask good questions, to listen to what the customer needs, to explore and research what the customer needs so they can advance the sales. And the result is that we really see the amount of time you spend upfront learning about your customer results in a higher cost, a higher capture ratio, if you want to say it, results in more revenue being brought in. The deals are bigger because you're spending more time listening to them and uncover what they need instead of just responding instantly to what they're after. So go to the next chart.
How do you do that? There are really three things that you have to do to engage the customer. And again, I just talked about research, and Brad talked about research earlier as well. And, and it could be as simple as Google, you know, doing a Google search, using Google Alerts. It could be something more advanced. It could be understanding the opportunity, uh, briefings, do going to industry meetings where you're able to hear in a, kind of a non-threatening customer environment where they're, you know, just kind of talking about their business or talking about their strategic plans. But the most important thing is when you're eyeball to eyeball with the customer and you have the opportunity to talk to them, ask quality questions. And quality questions is something that's been really important to me for all the different phases of my professional career, making sure that we ask questions that are open-ended, you know, maybe they start with what, they start with how, you know, they help us determine what the customer really wants, whether they have pain, whether they're trying to move something forward, whether, you know, they have internal biases about, um, you know, if they want something very conservative or something out. What is the schedule? What is it funded? How is it funded? And it's just really, really important to be able to not guess.
Next chart, please. And that takes us directly into how do you do that? And that's really talking, letting your customer talk. Asking these quality questions is, is, is the key to this. And, and I learned early in my sales career to look at this as a sales spotlight. And this graphic kind of really illustrates the sales spotlight. Whoever's in the sales spotlight, it's just like when you're on a play or you're, you know, you're going to a musical concert, whoever's in the spotlight is the star. And our job is to ask questions and then shut up so that our customer can talk. And our job is to make sure that we keep our customer in the sales spotlight. If we give our customer the opportunity to talk about themselves, they're going to tell us what their strengths and weaknesses are, what their goals are, because it's critical to them, it's important to them, and it's, it's top of mind for them. So as quality questions, step back and listen, let them answer. I often talk about multi-level questions. And if there are folks on this call who've seen me present before or who worked with me before, you know, my favorite question is the question, "What else?" And I ask a question, I get the answer, I reflect back, and I say, "What else?" And by asking the question, "What else?" you really get the person to think, and they go down to another level in answering the questions.
So the key to all that is to really asking the questions and getting the information is to make sure that we really identify the discriminators. And discriminators can be positive things, and they can be negative things. And Brad, when he talked about this, talking about going back to the old SWOT analysis, where we identify strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Again, the keys here, as you can see on the graphic, there are some positive discriminators, and there's some potential things we can exploit, and there's some real issues. And if you want to really think about this, if you think about on the top left corner, where we talk about our strengths, when we're developing our customer, our, when we've identified strengths for the customer, and we're identifying our contact, we want to really emphasize these strengths. If we go through the process of identifying weaknesses or things that could be negative, we really want to find a way to mitigate those weaknesses. That could be back to that question about teaming and where do you start to communicate about teaming? You know, could be that you've identified early on that you have a significant weakness. When you start to look at your competition, you look at threats, and you get, that's the strengths that the competitors have, and you've got to find a way to neutralize those, those strengths, whether that's through teaming, whether it's through, you know, educating your customer, going through that process. And then offer, finally, there's an opportunity when you see a competitive weakness. And that's where we do things like ghost or raise the specter of that weakness in how we communicate things to our customers to really make sure that, um, you know, we're not poking our competition in the eye, but we're, we're giving seeds of thought for the, the competition as well. Um, but the key of all of this is to really identify the, the discriminators and really help our customers identify the discriminators. And, uh, if you look at this final, present graphic in my section here, I just want to take a minute to talk through this process because this, this Venn diagram is critical. And if you can get to a place where you really understand how to deal with this, it's going to give you those one or two things that you need to be able to win more business. So if you look at the kind of the ghosted outer circle that says context, that's the overall picture of what's going on in this, in a specific, uh, opportunity. And then as you look at these other elements here, you see again, the three Cs on the left, you see the competitor's capabilities on the right, you see what the customer needs, and on the bottom, you see our capabilities. The key is where do the, do the Venn diagrams overlap to bring us the greatest opportunities that we have? First off, if the customer needs it and we don't have it, that's a killer. You know, that's a key weakness, and we've got to figure out how to, how to mitigate that weakness as we go through. If the, if we have it, and maybe even the competitor has it, but it's not important to the customer, well, it's irrelevant. If they don't care that it's blue, that's irrelevant. Somebody else might care about that. If we're in a place in the center there, where it says maybe we may be in a place where all three elements overlap, and there could be a message that we could develop there. Perhaps we can talk to the customer about how, you know, yeah, you have a need, our competitor can do that, and this is how we can do it. So you have the potential to build a discriminator. But the real sweet spot is the corner over there. Whoop, the corner over there, where you're really talking about the key elements. It's something that you understand that your customer needs, that you have the ability to support, that your competitor doesn't have. That's limited. There might be one, there might be two in the whole process. But when you can uncover those opportunities and really identify those by doing all the homework that Brad talked about earlier, you know, listening to your customer, doing the research, doing all the key elements, that's, that's the golden ticket. If we can get to that sweet spot, that gives us what we need to be able to increase the value of our sale to the customer, which potentially means increase the value, the value of the sale to our company. So Brad, that's, that's my section. I appreciate the time.
That's great, Mark. Thank you. And, uh, just a couple of comments. I can't agree with you more about, uh, the importance of asking, and asking good questions and listening. I mean, it's just, it's, I think it's just human nature to want to spew forth and tell the customer all the great things about us and our company, uh, instead of really getting on their side of the table and talking through things. So thanks for that. And then the other key point, this, that you get here, the, the discriminators. Um, let me address one question. And David, then I'm going to ask you if you'd spend some time, uh, talking about the basics of a capture plan. What is a capture plan? What does it do? There's a question that came in about SMEs. And, uh, just kind of a caution to all of us, I think that sometimes the use of the word expert can be risky in our companies. If we're calling, uh, people subject matter experts, that might oversell their, their true, uh, true expertise, if you will. And so this person said, maybe we ought to just call them technical, a technical, let's see, subject specialist. That's probably a safer term than expert. So thanks for that comment. And then someone asked about price to win as it relates to the capture manager. Here are my thoughts on that. I believe the capture manager owns the responsibility to do price to win analysis and comparisons and, and drive the process. But I believe it's more than one person that owns the whole price to win approach, method, and decisions. It has to, it's something beyond just a single person. But yes, I think the capture manager owns the responsibility, but there are others involved in developing an actual price to win, uh, approach and target, if you will, that includes the costing people. It includes senior leadership because that's when we really formulate, is there a business case for for following up on this opportunity?
All right. Well, David, I'm going to, I'm going to turn the screen over to you and let you talk a little bit, uh, with the group about the, the capture plan.
All right, Brad. Thank you so much. Folks, I'm going to do like Mark and I'm going to preface this. We've all, all on this call have worked on a lot of proposal opportunities. And one of the thoughts that enters our minds early is, what kind of information do we have and what kind of information are we lacking? And I'm going to go on record as saying that in my world, capture management, capture planning, and capture tools are the most important aspect of business development there is out there. What you do know and what you don't know directly impact your chances of winning or your chances of not winning that P win that Brad discussed. So, um, it's very, very important that we actually put this practice, you know, message into, uh, into play. And so it's my opportunity here to talk about what it is, which is an actual capture plan. You know, Brad brought up a really good point early, you know, a lot of it, we, we used to think of it as a PowerPoint presentation, it's 30 slides or a Word document. But folks, it can be a lot of things. I mean, we now have software tools like CRM, we have Salesforce, we have PowerPoint, we have Word. But the bottom line is, it has to be a plan. It has to be a document. It has to be a message that resides within the business development opportunity that says, here where, here's where we are. Because what it does is, if we don't, we see we have fuzzy concepts. You know, the, the salesperson, or perhaps in a bigger organization, the capture person, or, you know, someone else may individually have this, or they may not. And so consequently, what we need to know will be driven by what the capture plan captures. So with those four Cs, we start to understand who the, the competitors are. You know, we clearly have graphs up on the wall that may have all kinds of information of what their core competencies are, what their solution are, who their teaming partners are, what kind of pricing plans they put in, and how aggressively or non-aggressively they go. You know, we have clear understanding of the customer's needs and what the customer's asking for. And so the point here, folks, is whether it's shared with us in a software package, whether it's out on our SharePoint site, if we're doing all this electronically, or whether it's documents on the wall, it is an actual plan that clearly identifies, clearly articulates, and clearly sets the stage for that message that ultimately will be given off to the proposal team so that they can act upon the findings and articulate the discriminators that Mark just talked about, talk about our strengths and weaknesses and how to elevate and posture our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses. So, you know, the plan in itself becomes so critical to have. So, you know, like Brad says, we all, we're all good about gathering the information. Uh, it has to become actionable and it has to be part of a plan. And then, of course, we put a stake in the ground and says, here where we are. But another key thing, folks, is don't ever, ever, ever let it become stale. Um, one of the things about, one of the questions is, when do you start your, you know, your capture plan? And the simple answer to that is as early as possible. As soon as your senior management, or as soon as you know, as a business development person, that an opportunity is eminent and the very realization is, is that you'll go after it, it's never too early. We always know when it was too late, but it's never too early to start a capture plan. Now, the word of caution there, though, is when we begin to think about a capture plan, usually there's a little bit of cost of money in there. Somebody might have to travel, somebody might give up other opportunities to be focusing on this. So just be careful that now by clearly declaring that we are going to focus on a specific opportunity and create a capture plan to that specific opportunity, now, in fact, their money will be spent. And so sometimes that's a difficult decision that needs some justification at the senior management level because, you know, it's still uncertain whether that opportunity will actually hit. And we all know of situations where we put a lot of effort into an opportunity that never came to fruition. So sometimes it's tough. But back a second, Brad, but again, you want to populate and you want to validate. We've talked about validate, you know, just to briefly now started talking about updating. You know, typically at a kickoff, you have a capture plan that articulates all the things that we've talked about. But usually after a kickoff, you know, you're talking to your teammates that you've brought on board, you have an industry day that is typically after the release of an RFP where, you know, the company, the, excuse me, the customer will give you one final set of expectations. And again, sometimes questions and answers that other competitors ask will give you intelligence. So make sure that you are updating. And the last step that we've all agreed to is, is make sure it's actionable and can be implemented.
Next slide, Brad. I think the, um, I think the, the, the strategic benefits of the capture plan that I've seen is when you start to, you know, Mark indicated the bidder's comparison matrix, and we'll talk about that here in the next slide. But, you know, what that does is that begins to, if you're honest with yourself and if you take a good hard look at what your core capacities and capabilities are, you're going to see gaps and, and where you might be weak or where you might need help. And, you know, one of the things that a capture plan will help you do is it'll help you identify your weaknesses. And it may be, like Mark's slide showed you, it may be, it may be wise to no-bid. And okay, but that may not be the end of it at that point in time. You may have an opportunity to strengthen your position by adding teammates, adding people, or, you know, figuring out a different solution other than the initial one you thought about. But the point is, is, you know, you're, you're, you're looking at in consensus internally and with teaming partners as to what your strengths and weaknesses are. From this document, you're beginning to shape, you know, where you play and where you might need help. You've identified the gaps, and now you know what you have to do to, to fill those gaps. And, you know, folks, this is a hard, hard concept to understand. And we, at Shipley, work so hard to discuss this with senior leadership of the clients. We want to help. But the money spent in a capture phase usually is, is, is arguably some of the best money spent because it allows you, you're still in an opportunity in a time where you can talk to the end customer and say, hey, what do you think of this solution that we're going to propose? What do you think of this team? You know, in the past, this hasn't worked. This is where we're going. And so you actually have a chance to, as Brad started way off, maybe influence the, the solution. You have a chance to usually respond to a draft. But the point is, is the pressure hasn't mounted yet, and you really have a chance right now during this phase to learn and understand and to adapt to the conditions. When the RFP hits, a lot of
That goes away. And so, if we have spent money, and we've come up with a draft, and we've gotten to maybe a pink team and a red team based on our capture intelligence and our cat capture plan, um, you know, material, then now our solution has the opportunity to dramatically increase in both its specificity to the needs of the customer, one of the four C's, and the quality of the the document improves as to, you know, how our solution with its discriminators. So this money up front reduces all that scrambling at the end where now we're in a proposal phase and we're just throwing every huge, you know, item and and person that we can, and we just recklessly throw money where we spent, you know, very, very, uh, specifically at the front end, limited now at the back end. If we don't have a good capture plan, we'll do whatever it takes because we we seemed like we've committed, we just have to get it out the door. And so it's like, oh my goodness. So anyway, it's a very powerful tool to have up front, and it will positively affect your cash flow.
In the middle of this diagram is the bidder's comparison matrix, Brad. It's the yellow box there. And folks, that's, I agree with Mark, it's the key fundamental underpinning of all capture plans because it forces us to identify all four C's of the, uh, of the capture plan. And if you go back to the left, you're looking at your internal assessment. You know, how well is your solution or how well are your core capabilities aligning to what the customer needs? How well do you posture yourself against the competition? And, you know, we hate it when we go to a debrief at the end and we said, boy, we didn't even know these people were competing. And yet they won. So, you know, it, we had demands that we know the competition, and it demands that we have that relationship.
You see that box that says customer overview? Folks, that's, you know, that's the ask, ask, ask. Well, who are you asking? You're asking the customer. You're asking your teammates about the customer. You're understanding what their capabilities and needs are. And if you have them, it's all documented in just one specific tool called a bidder's comparison matrix. And out of that, depending upon your strengths and weaknesses and or the customer's or your your your um competitors' strengths and weaknesses, comes all your strategies. Every strategy that you could possibly think of comes from one of those four statements. And then, you know, again, because of it, it has macros and equations built in it that will give you quantitative scores of where you stand now, you know, a strategic position and what you have to do to perhaps elevate you above your competition. And it gives you very actionable plans. We maybe not are as strong in this area. What are we going to do to get there? And we come up with plans to get there. We have strengths in these areas. What are we going to do to make sure that we quantify and don't don't just throw out, you know, you know, best-in-class, world-class, best-of-breed unsubstantiated claims? The capture plan will help you gather that intelligence and be able to prove and validate your solution.
And then you come up with a schedule that fits, you know, prior to the proposal, probably is where most of the capture plan is done and built. But like we said, it's a living document. It lives clear up until submission. And so there will be times during the actual proposal that through industry day or documents, like I said, that you see from the customer giving back to you, amendments or answers to questions, there's always room to grow your capture plan.
So this next slider does like the who, what, where, why, when. The the what is just a plan, and it can be a wide variety of sources. It truly is usually laid out at the, um, at the, uh, kickoff. But it, you know, it is a plan that can be, you know, you know, based on documents, can be based on a PowerPoint presentation that you formally prepare to your audience at the kickoff, can be residing in your, um, Salesforce. But you just have to identify what it is and where it is. When is typically the overarching capture plan is made available at your kickoff because everybody's interested in what exactly has been gathered intelligence-wise up to that point. How, uh, it can be verbalized in a formal kickoff, it can be put up on the walls, it can be shared in your SharePoint, and there's a file that says capture plan, or it can be articulated, you know, in in conversations with the, with the, what do we call them, Brad? Technical specialists. They begin to write and and so, you know, whoever it, uh, we need to. And then who, uh, typically it's a capture person or a program manager or the account manager. But, uh, we all have to own it at the end because we have to take that message and put it into the proposal.
That's it for me, Brad. Great. Thank you. Thank you, David. And very good tips on why a plan, why it's important, what is involved in it. You know, so if I were trying to start from scratch, like one of the questions that came in in advance of the webinar, you know, and try to build a capture approach and methodology, I'm going to back up a little bit just here. You know, I would build, whether it's in your Salesforce.com, your CRM, like David said, you can do this in SharePoint by creating little entry fields. You can create it in a Word template, you know, with a link to Excel spreadsheets that do your scheduling. But these are the elements. You know, I would just, I would have a section where the capture person, the sales person can give me an overview of the description of the opportunity overview, the customer, the competitor assessment, what do we know, what don't we know, leave it blank if we don't know anything, fill it in later. Our internal capability. So I would make a heading or a placeholder, something for each one of these elements. That's where I would start if I were starting to build some kind of capture methodology.
So we're about to wrap up, but there is, there is a book I really, really like, and I actually refer to it often because I mentioned a weakness, a common weakness many of us have is actually executing a plan. And there's a book put out, The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney and some other authors. And they boil down execution of a plan or a project plan to four key disciplines. And I know this sounds simple, but if we can just do this better, it's focused on what's important. You know, and in our case, when we're in business development and capture management, it's the customer and the opportunity. Don't get distracted by other internal projects. You know, stay focused. In fact, that was one of your questions in advance. How do we stay focused? Well, it's accept the responsibility for the opportunity and don't let other things get piled on you to distract you. Their point two, their second discipline is act on leading measures of success. Well, we've given you a few of those today. You know, the the C's, you know, the customer, the competitor, the capabilities, and the cost. Those become the P win leading measures we should be tracking as capture managers. How well are we doing? The third discipline they mention in this book is keep a compelling scorecard. Well, that's the, David said it, you keep your capture plan evergreen. You know, it's iterative. You always are adding to it and changing it and updating it. Their fourth, uh, discipline, establish accountability. If we don't have accountability, timeline, people, David said, who, what, when, how, if we don't have that associated with our plan and a schedule, it's kind of meaningless. So those are the four disciplines of execution that I really, really like. And as I said, I refer back to that that book often.
So again, we want to thank you for, uh, participating. There are still, there's a couple minutes. So, um, Mallory's shown me a couple of questions that have come in. Um, in some cases, certain customers, engagement with them becomes difficult, especially, I think we're talking about government customers. How can we drive the P win in other ways other than having conversation? That is so valid. And it's not just valid in the government, it's it's working its way into business to business. I recently saw an RFP from a business to another business, and there was a collusion clause in there that once the RFP is out and released, there is no collusion with anybody from that company regarding that pursuit. So, uh, we have to find other ways to get engaged with the client. And and that can be bidders' conferences, industry day, professional associations, LinkedIn, social media. Be careful with that. Again, if they say no interaction, don't go jumping on LinkedIn and violate that through social media. That is a caution too. So it's harder in a government contractor situation where the customer shuts down and doesn't allow dialogue. But the point is, we have to try to find other ways.
Um, uh, I'm going to defer this next question. When a company does not have adequate proposal staff, any suggestions on how I would justify using consultants? That becomes an internal business decision and an investment decision. So I'm going to defer that question. But let me summarize what we've covered today. Effective capture management, it will improve our P win if we have the discipline. We have to determine an approach depending on the nature of our organization, the size, and we have to stick to it. You know, constantly changing our capture approach is so frustrating to others in the company. So determine an approach, stick with it, make it work, evolve it. Involve the right team members. Get people involved. Don't operate in a vacuum or a silo. That's so frustrating when the capture management function is over in this building and the proposal team's over in that building and they never interact. You know, this idea of siloing functions is is obsolete. We've got to interact with the right team members. Establish a plan and a template and and kind of a thank you for joining the webinar email. We're going to be offering you up a chance to download a very simple PowerPoint capture template if you would like. We'll put it out there for you. It's 8 or 10 or 12 slides that can become a template for a capture plan, if you will. And then execute on the plan and hold people accountable. That's that's a summary. And again, we thank you for spending this hour with us. Thank you for your questions in advance and during the webinar. If there's anything we can do to help you along the way, please let us know. Mallory, thanks for, uh, navigating and, uh, taking care of, of this webinar. David, Mark, thanks for your input and your expertise. Appreciate it very much. Here's our contact information. Any of us would be happy to answer questions or address your needs going forward if you'd like. So have a great day, rest of the day, and thanks for your time today. Take care.