1. There aren’t enough higher win probability opportunities to generate the desired orders and revenue.
2. Senior management has decreed that the pipeline will be filled without taking a serious look at whether there are sufficient business development (BD), capture and proposal resources and whether the organization is adhering to an effective BD process.
3. As a result of a lack of oversight or #2 above, too many opportunities in the pipeline are outside the company’s current capabilities, target clients or target services.
4. The status of several opportunities hasn’t been updated for months.
5. Opportunities are not progressing through the standard BD phases (qualification, capture, proposal).
6. Win probability estimates are too subjective, lacking analytical justification. Centurion’s Opportunity Assessment NOW^TM tool is putting a real dent in this problem.
7. The pipeline has too many unqualified leads with near term RFPs that should be dropped.
8. Projected Request for Proposal, contract award and contract start-up dates are too optimistic.
9. There aren’t regularly scheduled weekly or bi-weekly pipeline status reviews.
10. Operations or engineering management hasn’t bought off on the opportunities that market research or BD has entered into the pipeline. Great opportunities are useless if no one owns and works them.

A new business pipeline is only as useful as the quality of its opportunities and the company’s ability to refine them as additional information is gathered. Otherwise, garbage in will definitely result in garbage out.

Mike Lisagor is the founder of Celerity Works and the Centurion Research Solutions Business Development Subject Matter expert

1. Purpose……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3

2. Business Growth Strategies…………………………………………………………………………………. 3

3. BD Process Overview…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3

4. Roles and Responsibilities……………………………………………………………………………………. 5

5. Lead Identification and Decision to Qualify Review (Step 1)………………………………….. 8

6. Lead Qualification and Decision to Capture Review (Step 2)…………………………………. 9

7. Lead Capture Review (Step 3) & Bid/No Bid Review (Step 4)……………………………….. 11

A.    Capture Strategy………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 11

B.    Positioning…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 11

C.    Competitive Analysis…………………………………………………………………………………………… 12

D.    Contractor Teaming………………………………………………………………………………………………12

E.    Price to Win…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 14

F.    Capture Review (Step 3)……………………………………………………………………………………… 14

G.    Win probability…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15

H.    RFP Release and Decision to Bid Review (Step 4)…………………………………………… 16

I.    Reporting……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 17

8. Proposal Development, Submittal, and Follow-through……………………………………….. 17

9. Post-award Debrief……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 20

10. Post-award Transition to Contract Start-up…………………………………………………………. 21

11. BD Reporting and Metrics……………………………………………………………………………………. 21

Appendix A: GCC BD process overview…………………………………………………………………….. 23

Appendix B: Opportunity Pursuit Decision Matrix………………………………………………………. 25

Appendix C: Bid Decision Matrix……………………………………………………………………………….. 26

Appendix D: Acronyms……………………………………………………………………………………………… 28

Mike Lisagor is the founder of Celerity Works and the Centurion Research Solutions Business Development Subject Matter expert

1. Cost-plus fixed fee – Kind of like investing in certificates of deposit. A lower known profit with no upside potential but minimal financial risk.
2. Cost-plus award fee – Either some or all of the potential profit is awarded based on pre-defined performance criteria. A good deal for reliable companies – not so good for poor performers.
3. Cost-plus incentive fee – Same protection from overruns but with performance based fee.
4. Time and materials – Depending on how the contract is written, there is the potential for higher profit if you hire and manage to your negotiated labor rates. The opposite is also true.
5. Cost-plus with rate limits – Something for everyone and, if you ask some people, nothing for anybody!
6. Firm-fixed price level of effort – I’ve never had a good experience with the words “firm-fixed price” and labor contracts. Too many variables that can go wrong.
7. Performance based – Not “officially” a contract type. But, very suitable when the government knows what it wants. When it doesn’t, this can be a nightmare. Hence it is high on my risk spectrum.
8. Fixed price deliverable – Depending on the product or service to be delivered, this isn’t necessarily risky. But, particularly onerous for system development projects including commercial not-really-off-the-shelf software.

Disclaimer: My past experience is no guarantee of future risk or results. Carefully study each Request for Proposal statement of work, pricing requirements and special clauses. Thanks to Steve Charles of immixGroup for contracts advice — any mistakes are mine!

Mike Lisagor is the founder of Celerity Works and the Centurion Research Solutions Business Development Subject Matter expert

1. Be prepared and do your homework before requesting a visit.
2. Remember that a first impression is often lasting.
3. Establish a personal rapport; if possible, find common interests.
4. Assess the buyers’ needs, not your wants.
5. Uncover their areas of concern — what keeps them up at night?
6. Make your overview pitch as short as possible.
7. Watch for body language. If there is no interest, change the subject.
8. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.
9. Try asking for the sale — anticipate objections, but don’t push.
10. Follow up ─ or someone else will!

Mike Lisagor is the founder of Celerity Works and the Centurion Research Solutions Business Development Subject Matter expert

In general, there are usually four possible outcomes of a bid decision meeting.

1. The first, and for many companies, the most difficult, is to say no to the bid. I’ve had clients tell me one of my major contributions was to help them say no. There are many reasons for this reluctance to kill a bid including a fear of going against a strong individual’s attachment to the bid, not wanting to have to admit that any investment up to this point was wasted, an unfounded confidence in your competitiveness, and pressure to fill the new business pipeline. In other words, to make the numbers look good.

2. I know some leaders whose response to a fear of making the wrong decision, is to delay it. This can be especially frustrating to a proposal team that is waiting to start a proposal as they watch the proposal due date rapidly approaching. It’s even more damaging when it occurs after RFP release. Maybe someone should pass a law that all executives must work on at least one proposal so they understand the impact their bid decisions have on the staff they rely on to do the work. However, delaying a decision can provide time for additional thoughtful and extended analysis and new alternatives to be recognized or created. For instance, with further meetings with other companies and the customer, you may decide not to prime one job but to subcontract another.

3. Sometimes a bid decision is contingent on some condition being met. For instance, the identification of a project manager or key teammate to include in the proposal, resolution with the government contracting officer of a potential conflict of interest, or the determination as to whether the client has a favored contractor and it isn’t you!

4. The final possible outcome is to make a decision to bid. And, of course, then the real fun begins!

Mike Lisagor is the founder of Celerity Works and the Centurion Research Solutions Business Development Subject Matter expert

The ideal key personnel are known, trusted and respected by the customer. This means you have introduced them prior to the RFP being released. Or, they are already known from prior work you have performed at this agency.  Or, you have hired them from an incumbent contractor or on a contingent basis.

I have seen companies win bids with key personnel who had relatively weak resumes but were really liked by the client. Which, of course, speaks to the importance of establishing strong relationships with the customer during the capture phase of the competition.

Because of their skills and seniority, key personnel often have salaries at the higher end of their pay range. The staffing mix or balance you bid is a critical decision on lowest cost technically acceptable bids as opposed to best value or best technical and management acquisitions.

No matter how desired or qualified your key personnel are, they must be willing to be bid in the proposal and available upon award. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, some services contractors got a well-deserved reputation for the unethical practice of bait and switching. They bid John knowing that he would not be available and so delivered Mary upon award. Fortunately, I’ve seen less of this in the past decade. Still, there are occasions where the time between proposal submittal and government evaluation and award is so protracted that some of the people you bid are no longer available. In this case, anything goes!

Mike Lisagor is the founder of Celerity Works and the Centurion Research Solutions Business Development Subject Matter expert

Project managers should be required to write a contract summary and update it at least once a year. Staff members should have a current resumes. Some companies make the annual resume update an annual review requirement.

Unfortunately, most companies struggle to collect and maintain this type of information. It’s one those tasks that is either not funded or too low on the priority list to get implemented. So, unless proposal writers can dig up previous proposal sections, each proposal has to be written from scratch. This is both costly and frustrating.

Boilerplate material should be gathered in a shared drive or database utilizing some sort of file structure or indexing scheme that allow proposal writers to easily find it. It should also be searchable.

But, even if the information is available, some contractors make the mistake of inserting boilerplate text and graphics into a proposal without carefully adapting them to the specific request for proposal requirements. The use of unmodified boilerplate can easily become habit forming.  But, to government evaluators, generic proposals are also an obvious sign of laziness or a lack of competency. While it makes it easier to write the proposal, it also makes it easier to lose!

Mike Lisagor, Celerity Works founder and Centurion Research Solutions BD subject matter expert

This is one of those areas that can be very difficult to bring up in a bid decision meeting; especially if the organization’s leader is emotionally invested. I have worked at companies and consulted for a few companies that had executives who stifled honest discussion. There is a direct correlation between this behavior and lower win probabilities. And, it is also indicative of a failure to develop a key set of core competencies and clients necessary to sustain continued growth.

Mike Lisagor, Celerity Works founder and Centurion Research Solutions BD subject matter expert

]]> http://celerityworks.com/2012/03/13/what-do-strategic-envelopes-and-business-growth-have-in-common/feed/ 4 http://celerityworks.com/2012/02/22/five-government-proposal-past-performance-guidelines/ http://celerityworks.com/2012/02/22/five-government-proposal-past-performance-guidelines/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:28:45 +0000 lisagor http://celerityworks.com/?p=443 Agencies are increasingly relying on past performance as a key evaluation criteria to select contractors as a way to lower their acquisition costs. Here are a few guidelines to help raise your evaluation score.

1. Select projects that are relevant to the current request for proposal.
2. Verify that the former client is willing to provide a positive performance review, and that you haven’t recently over-burdened them with similar requests.
3. If the past performance was negative and you want to include it anyway, you should indicate the corrective action that was taken to fix the problem.
4. It is a good idea to notify former clients that you have included them as past performances references.
5. Obtain current contact information for the contracting officer or other point of contact to include in your project summary write-up. Also, verify the accuracy of the information being presented. Don’t indicate Oracle DB experience when it was SAP.

- Mike Lisagor, Celerity Works founder and Centurion Research Solutions Government Business Development Subject Matter Expert