Five Proposal Resolutions for Increased Win Rates
As we head into 2020, many of us are making our New Year’s resolutions.
I have some professional goals that I’m working towards—including continuing
with these blog posts—as well as some overall health and wellbeing initiatives
that I’m pursuing. On top of these more individualized goals, another goal many
of us have for 2020 is increasing our win rates. Here are five resolutions you
can make this year to help increase your overall win rates.
1. Start Earlier
One critical thing you can do to increase your win rates is
start earlier. Long-term planning provides corporate awareness of upcoming
opportunities aligned with strategic goals.
Once opportunities are targeted, Capture Managers should begin gathering customer,
opportunity, and competitive intelligence.
Remember that building a
relationship with your customer and understanding their underlying concerns takes
time. Without solid customer relationships, you won’t have the opportunity to
understand their programmatic concerns or determine what really keeps them up
at night. Further, you won’t be able to develop solutions to meet their needs
and vet those solutions prior to the RFP release. Once the RFP is released, the
Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) limits customer interaction, so it’s too
late for effective opportunity shaping and solution vetting.
By starting early, you’ll have sufficient time to build
critical customer relationships and document competitive intelligence—which
will significantly increase your chances of winning.
2. Document Your
Capture Intelligence
Another key thing you can do to increase your win rates is
to be more diligent about documenting your capture intelligence. An effective Capture
Manager builds the approach and win themes around intelligence gathered and
documented during the capture phase. But how often have you entered the
proposal phase with an incomplete or nonexistent Capture Plan? The Capture Plan
is a critical document for transferring knowledge of the customer, opportunity,
and competition to the proposal team. I’ll use the analogy of baking a cake. If
the ingredients you put into the batter are rotten, or you leave out a critical
ingredient, what kind of cake will result? If the capture information feeding
your proposal is similarly bad or incomplete, you can expect a comparable
proposal product.
By documenting the capture intelligence in a solid Capture
Plan, you’ll improve the quality of content that makes it into your
proposal—which will ultimately increase your probability of winning.
3. Maintain Your
Reuse Materials
Having up-to-date reuse materials will help make the proposal
process smoother so that the writing team can focus on weaving in themes and
tailoring content to meet the customer’s specific needs. To improve your
proposal readiness, make an effort to keep baseline past performance write-ups,
proof points, and metrics current and up-to-date.
When your reuse content is ready and up-to-date upon RFP is
release, you’ll increase your probability of win because your team can focus more
time on integrated themes and tailoring content to meet the customer’s needs.
4. Make Smart Bid
Decisions
Another key way to increase your overall win rate is to make
smarter bid decisions. It can be difficult to ignore the sunk costs that have
gone into a pursuit; however, it’s critical to consider the opportunity costs
of developing and submitting a proposal with a low probability of win. Remember
to reassess the bid decision once the RFP is released and, if necessary, during
key proposal reviews. Critical questions to ask include:
- Does the opportunity fit your business plan?
- Do you have an excellent customer relationship?
- Do you understand the customer’s goals, issues, and requirements?
- Do you have/can you get the people to support the requirement?
- Do you have the required experience/past performance? Can you team if not?
- Do you have the required corporate commitment and resources?
- Do you have a committed proposal team? Can you augment your staff with consultants if not?
With a live RFP, if the answer to any of the above is NO, you should think long and hard about
whether you should really be pursuing the opportunity at hand. In addition to
lowering your overall win rate, consistently pursuing opportunities with low
probabilities of win is an ineffective use of resources, which can burn out
your staff, lower morale, and increase proposal staff turnover.
When you focus your resources on efforts with a higher
probability of success, your overall win rate will improve.
5. Conduct Lessons
Learned
Another way to improve your win rate is to make sure you are
diligent about conducting lessons learned debriefs. When analyzing your lessons
learned, look at common themes and share those trends with your team.
Understanding these trends will not only help you to improve in the areas that
may need some work, it will also allow you to pinpoint the things that have
enabled you to score well.
By addressing key shortfalls as the year progresses, your
team can continually improve to increase your probability of success—and win
more as a result!
Remember, the best proposal resolutions you can make this
year start well before the RFP is released. Start earlier, document your
capture intelligence, maintain your reuse library, and make smart bid
decisions. But don’t forget to conduct critical lessons learned after all is said
in done. These resolutions encourage you and your teams to prepare well in
advance of the RFP, make smarter bid decisions, and continually improve—which
are all critical first steps in improving your win rate this year. Happy
bidding!
Written by Ashley Kayes, CP APMP
Senior Proposal Consultant, AOC Key Solutions, Inc. (KSI)
Comments
Post a Comment