Federal Business Capture - (Part II) Building Your Business Pipeline

Last night I attended the National Capital Region Chapter meeting of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP). The discussion topic for this particular meeting was coincidentally, "Winning More Bids With a BD Pipeline That Works!"  If you are serious about Federal Business Development and you have never heard about APMP, then stop what you're doing and go to www.apmp.org. APMP is the preeminent national organization for best practice in both business development and proposal management and the National Capital Region Chapter is by far its most active chapter.  

So last night they had corporate business development leads (small, medium and large-sized companies) discuss their approach to business capture as it relates to pipeline management.  All three companies follow the Shipley Associates (discussed in Part I of this series) business capture and proposal development process but have adapted their processes to the unique needs and requirements of their individual businesses.  

This brings me to my first point - you need to adapt your business capture (to include pipeline management) and proposal development processes to suit your individual company needs. How you structure your business development approach may include factors such as business size, resources, training, experience levels and individual talent, to name a few. The bottom line is it's got to work for you.  Here are some additional thoughts which will help you.

1. Pre-qualify your opportunities BEFORE you put them in your business pipeline!  Once you put an opportunity in your pipeline, in essence, you should be committed to providing the necessary resources for conducting capture planning.  Among other factors, pre-qualification activities should include the strategic value of the opportunity to the company and a realistic top level assessment of the company's ability to compete for and win this work based on existing core capabilities.

2. Assess the strategic value of an opportunity to your company.  What makes and opportunity "strategic"?  While there can be many factors that help you determine an opportunity's strategic value, in my experience they usually fall into two major categories a) opportunity size (from a revenue perspective) and/or b) market positioning.

a) Opportunity size is often relative to the size of your company.  While a $2M contract (over 5 years) may not be "strategic" to a medium sized company with $250M in annual revenue, it's probably very "strategic" to a small company with $5M in annual revenue.

b) Market positioning.  A $2M opportunity may be very strategic, even to a large business, if for example, some of the following conditions exist:

• The opportunity supports a diversification objective,
• The opportunity positions the company with a new customer, possibly in preparation for a larger future opportunity with the same customer,
• Shifting Federal Government revenues to different agencies, different requirements.

Consider the following - pursuing 10 - $1M opportunities may consume the same amount of capture resources as pursuing 5 - $10M opportunities ($50M vs. $10M in pipeline value - you be the judge).    

3. Three words that really matter - discipline, discipline, discipline!  No matter how big or small your company is, it's capture discipline that will make the difference.

a) Be disciplined about what you put in the pipeline!  If it's in your pipeline then the responsibility for business capture and oversight needs to be squarely fixed on someone's shoulders and they need to be held accountable.

b) Be disciplined enough to say NO to opportunities if the capture resources are truly not available!  

c) Be disciplined about capture execution!  Conduct regularly scheduled pipeline reviews; there should be no excuses for lack of progress between pipeline reviews.  Any mitigating circumstances that might inhibit capture progress should be identified well in advance and NOT during the pipeline review.     

   
Part III - will cover what I refer to as business capture imperatives.  

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