Opportunity/Capture Pl Development Opportunity/capture planning is the process of identifying opportunities, assessing the environment, and developing and managing the implementation of winning strategies orientated toward capturing a specific business opportunity. Consistently successful opportunity/capture management requires written, action- orientated opportunity/capture plans. These document the actions and capabilities required to meet the customer’s needs and win the bid. Introduction Long before the RFP is released, your customer is forming opinions of potential suppliers. The aim of opportunity/capture planning is to position the customer to prefer your organization and your solution to the exclusion of competitors, or to at least prefer to do business with your organization prior to proposals being submitted. An opportunity/capture planning best practice is to prepare a written, action- orientated plan. Although the length, complexity, and format may vary, a written plan offers reviewable evidence of the quality of thinking and the soundness of the plan. The primary audience for an opportunity/capture plan are the people who will manage, approve, or execute the plan, the proposal, and the resulting contract. A good opportunity/capture plan will be realistic and specific, detailing the objective, action, responsible individual, timing, and frequency of review. Organizations that use a formal opportunity/capture planning discipline are helped in the following ways: More realistic understanding of each opportunity
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Opportunity/Capture Plan DevelopmentOpportunity/Capture Plan
Development Opportunity/capture planning is the process of
identifying opportunities, assessing the environment, and
developing and managing the implementation of winning strategies
orientated toward capturing a specific business opportunity.
Consistently successful opportunity/capture management requires
written, action- orientated opportunity/capture plans. These
document the actions and capabilities required to meet the
customer’s needs and win the bid.
Introduction Long before the RFP is released, your customer is
forming opinions of potential suppliers.
The aim of opportunity/capture planning is to position the customer
to prefer your organization and your solution to the exclusion of
competitors, or to at least prefer to do business with your
organization prior to proposals being submitted.
An opportunity/capture planning best practice is to prepare a
written, action- orientated plan. Although the length, complexity,
and format may vary, a written plan offers reviewable evidence of
the quality of thinking and the soundness of the plan.
The primary audience for an opportunity/capture plan are the people
who will manage, approve, or execute the plan, the proposal, and
the resulting contract.
A good opportunity/capture plan will be realistic and specific,
detailing the objective, action, responsible individual, timing,
and frequency of review. Organizations that use a formal
opportunity/capture planning discipline are helped in the following
ways:
More realistic understanding of each opportunity
Opportunity/capture planning is initiated following the pursuit
decision process milestone and continues into program
start-up.
Best Practices
1. Implement an opportunity/capture planning discipline to capture
business more effectively. Opportunity/capture planning offers
benefits to everyone involved:
Executives gain early and regular visibility over business
development opportunities Sales and business development
professionals win more opportunities by efficiently specifying and
managing opportunity/capture activities Senior Managers increase
sales revenue by efficiently deploying limited business development
resources Participants are motivated by knowing their efforts are
productive Employees stay employed Stockholders make money
Unlike the top-down management-driven corporate planning process,
opportunity/capture planning is opportunity specific.
Opportunity/capture plans are driven bottom-up by the opportunity
and the customer. To meet the organization’s goals, sufficient
specific business opportunities must be won. The discipline
associated with best-in-class opportunity/capture planning aligns
organizational objectives and investment with high-win probability
opportunities within approved strategic business objectives.
Opportunity/capture planning nests efficiently within existing
business development and planning processes. Strategic business
plans contain data about markets, trends, buying history, and
competitors. Some organizations will prepare
a strategic plan and a separate annual business plan.
Account plans contain data about the customer’s strategic
direction, management, history, financial performance, issues,
buying plans and patterns, competition, and suppliers. Strategic
business plans and account plans are rich sources of data for the
opportunity/capture plan. Much of the information in one plan can
be reused in subsequent plans, such as proposal or closure
plans.
Business opportunity/capture efficiency and effectiveness are
improved when all employees have consistent information and
communicate consistent messages to customers. Business development
professionals often question the emphasis on a written plan.
Because an opportunity/capture plan is the product of a
collaborative effort, contrast the before-and-after states,
summarized in Figure 1.
PRE-PLAN STATE POST-PLAN STATE
Fuzzy concepts Clear concepts
Potential actions not aligned, assigned, or managed
Potential actions are aligned, efficiently allocated, assigned, and
manageable
Willingness to take action is not known
Willingness to take action is still unknown but likely
increased
Figure 1. Benefits of Written Plans. In the pre-plan state, each
individual may have inconsistent information. When the plan is
collaboratively written, individuals share information, every
individual has more information, and potential actions can be
agreed to and aligned. Both states require the willingness to take
action, or your efforts are wasted.
2. Enhance opportunity/capture planning effectiveness by aligning
activities and opportunity/capture plan elements. In the overall
context of moving from an unknown to a favored position with the
customer, Figure 2 shows the types of activities and the focus of
those activities aligned with opportunity/capture plan
elements.
Figure 2. Aligning the Opportunity/Capture Planning Process to the
Opportunity/Capture Plan. In the overarching opportunity/capture
planning
process, you seek to move from positions of “unknown” to “known,”
and then to an “improved position.” Elements of the
opportunity/capture plan are matched to this iterative process by
phase. The specific content of your opportunity/capture plans will
vary depending on the opportunity, your organization, and the value
of
the opportunity to your organization.
To move from an unknown to a known position with the customer,
research, analyze, and validate your data with the customer.
Validation is key because the only relevant view is the customer’s
view. It’s not enough to know what requirements a customer may
include in an RFP. You must also determine why those requirements
are included.
Similarly, it’s not enough to know which competitors are planning
to bid. You must also gain insight into what they’ll offer, at what
price, and most importantly, what the customer thinks of
them.
When you have completed this analysis, take the intelligence you’ve
developed and complete a Bidder Comparison Matrix. This tool scores
the strengths and weaknesses of all significant bidders against the
“what” and “why” of the
requirements. Try to reflect the customer’s perception in your
scores. Otherwise, your evaluation may be skewed in your favor.
Full honesty in this exercise is difficult, but it’s important for
success.
The next step is to document the strengths and weaknesses of each
potential bidder. The best-known way to do this is using a SWOT
analysis, but other techniques, such as gap analysis and the chain
of differentiation, can be useful in certain situations.
Many strengths and weaknesses will surface during the bidder
comparison exercise to justify the scores selected for each team.
Others are known characteristics that may not be directly related
to this opportunity. Examples might include recent changes in
company leadership, legal actions or judgments, or even rumors
about merger and acquisition activity. Competitor weaknesses are
viewed as opportunities. Their strengths are considered threats.
When completed, this SWOT analysis will drive your win
strategy.
The next step is to develop and define your solution, strategy,
cost, and price-to- win from a known position. The listed
opportunity/capture plan elements comprise tools and templates that
help you develop and document your position. Next, implement your
action plans to influence the customer and improve your position.
Change requires action. Keep iterating to achieve and then maintain
a favored position. With every action, factor newly gained
information into your analysis. Fine-tune your solution, strategy,
cost, and price-to-win. Update your action plans and
implement.
3. Select a compatible medium to develop, review, share, and update
opportunity/capture plans. An opportunity/capture plan is a
framework—a series of folders or buckets where you assemble and
organize data by topic. Ask opportunity/capture team members to
add, update, share, and purge data as relevant and permitted. The
following types of collaboration tools are typically used to
develop, collaborate, and share opportunity/capture plans:
Type of Opportunity/Capture
format; Allows reading before gate decisions
Long time to prepare; Hard to update; Often not
current; Multiple outdated versions on laptops
Presentation-based plan
collaboratively; Is web conference adaptable,
offers ease of scheduling, reduces meeting costs, and secures input
from
geographically dispersed team members; Easily
customized
Customization can be problematic or not carried out fully; Lacks
supporting
detail (requires all contributors to provide links or references
or
attach supporting files and folders); Multiple outdated
versions on laptops
location; Latest data is always available; Help communication with
a
team in multiple geographic time zones; Senior Managers can track
progress easily; Generally work well
across operating systems and platforms
Each team member has to be granted access to
specific folders; Person controlling access is not
always readily available for geographically dispersed
team members
Database products
Transparent and near- automatic data reuse
from plan to plan saves time and preserves data; Data security and
control
are improved
Might require additional software or training; May require specific
operating systems and/or platform
Opportunity/capture plans evolve continuously as new content is
added, but standard topics are helpful in guiding the process to
develop an opportunity/capture plan regardless of whatever medium
is used:
Opportunity overview—executive summary External analysis (detailed
descriptions of the opportunity and its requirements, customer
analysis, and competitor analysis) Internal analysis (the proposed
solution; your experience and risk, including opportunity and
pricing) Strategy development (customer communication and
intelligence gathering, win strategy, and risk management) Action
plans Execution and monitoring
4. Keep the process dynamic, flexible, interactive, and current.
Keep the opportunity/capture planning process flexible to permit
adjustments depending on the importance of the opportunity to your
organization, the competitive situation, and the resources your
organization can afford to commit. Avoid becoming a slave to your
process. Adapt to the needs and acceptable norms of your
organization.
Build the plan interactively to support a fast start with
reasonable effort and to encourage regular updates.
Opportunity/capture plans are living documents that are repeatedly
updated as you gain information. Information will change and become
more specific as the opportunity matures.
Figure 3. Iteratively Develop Your Opportunity/Capture Plan. Keep
opportunity/capture planning current and correct by repeatedly
updating the
content. Populate: complete what you think you know; validate:
check and confirm; update: add and correct data; and
implement.
Work collaboratively with the customer to craft a solution
addressing explicit requirements and hot buttons.
The opportunity/capture planning process should be dynamic,
flexible, current, and collaborative. At this stage, your solution
is notional, but it should reflect the intelligence developed to
date and position your offer positively with the customer. Using
all the elements of your opportunity/capture plan, including
internal and external intelligence, craft a proactive solution
outline. Create a clear customer contact plan and agree on the
messaging you want to present to the customer.
Present your notional solution to the customer to obtain feedback
on how to strengthen your solution and even to shape the
requirements to favor your offer.
As you continue to refine and improve your intelligence, the
specifics of the customer’s concerns, requirements, issues, and hot
buttons will surface. In
response, your solution must evolve to gain even greater traction
with the buyer and reflect customer-focused writing. Execution of
your win strategies improves your solution, so focus on developing
differentiation beyond the reach of your competitors (i.e.,
discriminators).
The period before the RFP drops is also the time to develop
pricing, gather past performance data, and select relevant case
studies and metrics to use as proof points.
5. Keep a good balance between planning and execution. Changing
perceptions requires action. Detailed plans without action are a
waste of time because they fail to influence the customers’
perceptions. Limit your plans to the resources available. If more
resources are needed than your organization will commit to win,
reconsider your pursuit decision.
Effective opportunity/capture planning requires a balance between
planning and carrying out actions.
6. Carry out customer, competitor, and capability analysis using
consistent tools, even when time is short. Use consistent analysis
tools and apply them throughout the opportunity/capture process.
Early in the process, use it to focus collaboratively with the
customer to define the issues and influence the requirements.
If you discover an opportunity after requirements are defined, use
it to define the underlying issues driving the customer’s
requirements.
Next, extend your analysis to outline your solution, outline your
competitors’ solutions, and identify discriminators, and then
develop your strategy and actions to better position your solution
with the customer.
The Bidder Comparison Matrix or SWOT is used to analyze the
customer’s current perception of how your solution compares to
those of various competitors. Use it repeatedly throughout the
opportunity/capture process to measure the strength and
effectiveness of your positioning.
7. Gain and maintain senior management approval and support. Top
management must endorse and help communicate the plan to everyone
managing and executing the plan, as well as those impacted by the
reassignment of individuals to support the plan.
Management support must begin with the pursuit decision and
continue through to the signed contract. If the opportunity remains
worth winning, keep management sold by emphasizing the value to
organizations. If contingent items change your assumptions, revisit
your pursuit or bid decision.
Recognize and avoid the bias toward “comfortable information.”
Opportunity/Capture Managers should be able to reveal negative
information to senior management. Similarly, senior management
should never punish an Opportunity/Capture Manager for honestly
revealing new information that might suggest a no-pursuit or no-bid
decision.
8. Commit the right people to the opportunity/capture team.
Organizations pursuing competitive business should assign their
best people to opportunity/capture teams. Organizations that assign
only the people they can spare from other activities usually lose
the sale.
Opportunity/Capture Manager is normally a role rather than a
position. This role requires a person with customer and market
knowledge, sales savvy, proposal experience, leadership skills,
broad technical understanding, knowledge of the organization, and
positive enthusiasm. The Opportunity/Capture Manager advocates the
customer’s position while focusing on winning the opportunity.
The
Opportunity/Capture Manager is concerned by the customer’s budget,
the program cost, risk, competitive analysis, opportunity/capture
strategy, price-to- win, the customer’s view of best value, and
implementing the opportunity/capture strategy.
Program Manager is likely to be a position as well as a role. The
Program Manager advocates for the selling organization, focusing on
profit, the seller’s risk, schedule, personnel, resources,
assumptions, terms and conditions, and the shape of the delivery
organization.
The Bid Manager role, while not mutually exclusive to the
Opportunity/Capture Manager role, requires different skills to
integrate the concerns of the opportunity/capture team and
Opportunity/Capture Managers. The Program Manager focuses on
compliance, responsiveness, keeping the proposal strategy aligned
with the opportunity/capture strategy, proposal strategy
implementation, and managing a team of solution experts to produce
a persuasive document with set deadlines.
In addition to leadership, opportunity/capture team members’ skills
must be suited to their assigned action, whether direct customer
contact, internal development, or assisting the proposal
team.
Figure 4. Powerful Leadership of the Business Opportunity. Win
rates improve when the Opportunity/Capture, Program, and Proposal
Managers’
relationships are balanced and integrated.
When you understand what it will take to move from an improved
position to a favored one, establish the resources and budget
required. The strategic importance of the opportunity will affect
the level of resources and budget committed to the effort.
If the opportunity is significant enough and your organization is
able to provide the necessary resources, the Opportunity/Capture
Manager can continue to focus on improving the win probability. If
not, it may be a good idea to no-bid, or consider switching to a
subcontractor position with another firm acting as the prime
contractor.
Initiate teaming and make/buy decisions
Teaming partners are a key means of achieving capabilities not
available within your own organization. Teaming is also important
in public sector bidding to
achieve small business or other set-aside goals. A third benefit of
teaming is the ability to keep discriminating capabilities from
your competition. You can improve your competitive position by
cementing good partnerships early.
Teaming can also facilitate make/buy decisions. As its name
suggests, a make/buy decision occurs when an organization must
choose between producing a product in-house or purchasing it from a
vendor. Teammates may offer strategic opportunities if they have a
brand favored by your customer. Consider your legal options (joint
venture, prime/subcontractor relationship, or supplier) and get a
confidentiality agreement and/or memorandum of understanding in
place early.
Making make/buy decisions early can avoid distractions later and
preserve vital resources for when you need them most. For maximum
effectiveness, teammates should be involved in strategy
development, competitor reviews, kickoff meetings, and other
important activities.
9. Assign specific, measurable objectives, schedules, and
completion dates to actions and individuals. Most
opportunity/capture team action assignments are part-time and for a
limited duration. Only the managers of the assigned individuals can
ensure task completion.
Many opportunity/capture efforts fail because the individuals
assigned to the task are expected to complete the task in their
spare time.
The Opportunity/Capture Manager is responsible for finding a way to
get each critical task listed in the plan completed. This often
involves negotiating with the Senior Managers responsible for the
right amount of resources both in time and effort. If the right
resources are not forthcoming, the Opportunity/Capture Manager must
consider whether the task can be eliminated or explain to senior
stakeholders the consequences of not having the right resources
available for the task. Another option is for the
Opportunity/Capture Manager to recommend a no- bid due to lack of
resources; this often focuses the minds of the senior stakeholders
on how important the opportunity actually is to the company.
The
single biggest reason for losing competitive business is the
failure to adequately influence the customer prior to the proposal
submittal. Set and schedule specific measurable action objectives
to simplify task management.
Figure 5. Typical Role Involvement During Opportunity/Capture. Time
commitments of individuals in different types of roles vary
throughout the
business development process. A Business Development Manager leads
the process, then hands over responsibility to an
Opportunity/Capture Manager. The Opportunity/Capture Manager’s
involvement declines as the Technical Lead and
Bid Manager become more involved in proposal development.
10. Establish regular gate decision points. Decision gate reviews
are milestones between business development process phases.
Focus on four key questions:
Is the opportunity winnable? Do the potential returns justify the
expenditure?
Is the opportunity/capture team prepared for the next phase? What
additional resources are required to win?
Keep the reviews short and effective, focus on reviewing the
actions taken, analyzing the results of those actions, and then
adjusting future actions.
Base every decision gate review on the current opportunity/capture
plan. Keep your plans updated, eliminating the need to prepare for
each review.
Establish organizational standards for each review. Set clear
expectations by specifying review inputs and outputs linked to the
value of the opportunity, selling the environment and strategic
importance to your organization and the customer.
Progressively add content and detail as the opportunity matures and
you advance through successive gates. Your initial interest
decision gate will likely be short and have information at a basic
level, but successive bid and bid validation reviews should expect
to review how the plan has changed and what information has been
added. Each gate decision or bid validation review should expect to
see additional information as evidence that the opportunity/capture
phase is progressing to the plan.
Recheck the underlying data, assumptions, and analysis only when
objectives are not met or new data is uncovered. Reviewers that
over-focus on the data and analysis usually under-focus on future
actions. Changing a customer’s perceptions requires action, not
analysis.
Maintain a positive, constructive tone. Avoid penalizing
contributors who raise unfavorable information that might lead to
no-pursuit or no-bid decisions. Remember that the most successful
organizations eventually pursue less than 30 percent of their
pipeline and achieve win rates of more than 70 percent.
Early warning signs for a no-bid decision are limited information
or limited opportunity/capture team or senior management
commitment. Winning competitive business requires laser focus on
winnable opportunities.
Losing bids are the most costly bids. No-bid decisions free you to
shift limited resources to winnable opportunities.
11. Conduct opportunity/capture plan and competitor simulation
reviews. The essential quality-improvement principle is to review
for the right things at the right time. Use reviews to get
constructive recommendations for opportunity/capture plan
improvements. Focus reviews during opportunity/capture on quality
improvement; focus Senior Managers at decision gates on whether to
advance, defer, or end the pursuit.
Make sure the reviewers can offer different perspectives on the
customer, competitor, and solution. Constructive recommendations on
the opportunity/capture plan and independent assessments of the
competitor solutions and discriminators allow the Opportunity
Manager to build improvements on a broad perspective.
The following reviews should be carried out during the
opportunity/capture process, and could be carried out many times as
information is refined and things change:
Win Strategy Review Competitor Strategy Review (Black Hat)
Use the opportunity/capture plan to help the proposal planning
process; see Linking Opportunity/Capture Plans to Proposal Content
and Executive Summaries.
Common Pitfalls and Misconceptions Focusing on the plan rather than
the customer. Opportunity/capture plans can be time-consuming to
create, and teams may be eager to complete an opportunity/capture
plan before focusing on other tasks. Keep in mind, however, that an
opportunity/capture plan must be developed collaboratively with
a
customer. Spending time with your customer can improve your
position (or reveal that you are unlikely to achieve a favorable
position). Interacting with the customer during opportunity/capture
plan development benefits your company in the long run.
Believing it’s enough to complete an initial opportunity/capture
plan and have it reviewed. Opportunity/capture plans should evolve;
if no new information has been added since the last gate review,
question whether any progress has been made. If no progress has
been made, is it time to make a no-bid decision?
Summary
Use opportunity/capture plans to document your work, inform your
organization, and facilitate reviews. Tailor and scale
opportunity/capture plans to match the opportunity. Endeavor to
gather information collaboratively with the customer. Endeavor to
gather information on your competitors and their likely solutions
and to monitor what changes. An early draft of the executive
summary is a key element of a good capture plan because it serves
as a valuable aid in the transition between opportunity/capture
planning to proposal planning and should be used to brief the
proposal kickoff team. Start early; front-loading proposal planning
can give you more time to develop a winning proposal. Remember to
do the work, not just “fill out” the opportunity/capture plan. This
means working closely with customers to understand their needs.
Keep completed opportunity/capture plans for reference and reuse on
future deals.
Terms to Know