Federal Business Capture - (Part I) Allocating Resources Across Your Sales Cycle

In the Federal Space, acquisition is guided very closely by statute, primarily the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).  Opportunities are announced well in advance, sometimes years, and the business capture process for these opportunities has been turned into a science.  Generally speaking, Shipley Associates  is considered to be best practice in the area of Federal Business Capture, Bid and Proposal process/training.

While deliberate capture planning is critical to a successful proposal outcome, there are other factors that need to be considered in allocating resources to your business capture efforts.  It's very possible (actually very likely) that you may sometimes get too bogged down in your capture efforts/gate activities and briefings which can deleteriously affect your ability to quickly respond to near-term opportunities. So over the next few days I'm going to discuss some critical elements that you need to consider in your business capture approach.

Allocating your resources to both the front-end and back-end of the sales cycle.   This is definitely in the "easier said than done" category.  There is one analogy that really sums up the importance of allocation.  

During the Cold War we used to discuss the importance of simultaneously conducting the "close fight" (back- end of your sales cycle e.g. bid and proposal activities) and the "deep fight" (front-end of the sales cycle e.g. business capture planning).  The idea was that there were so many echelons in depth of Russian and Warsaw Pact bad guys (competitors) that you could never win the close fight (bid and proposal) unless you set the conditions for success with the deep fight (capture activities).  

Well this is exactly the case here.  Unless you set the conditions for business success by allocating your resources across the sales cycle, your probability of win will always be in the 10%-20% range, at very best.  You may also risk falling into a cycle of constantly chasing RFPs right before they are issued with little chance of success.

This is really a senior management/leadership challenge, particularly in a publicly held company.  They have the responsibility to make the numbers and the pressure to do so, particularly in a slow economy, can be incredible.  It's what drives people to chase RFPs in spite of the fact that they are significantly decreasing their chances of winning and they are putting themselves in a dangerous RFP chasing cycle.   You won't break the cycle unless you are willing to accept some risk by allocating capture resources to strategic opportunities in the front-end of your sales cycle.  

In Part II of this series I'll discuss "Business Pipeline Development".

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Picture courtesy of MackZ

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