-1.svg){kind=icon}
By establishing a capture management process, businesses position to win and maximize the probability of winning. Especially for large, complex or highly priced opportunities.
This blog delves into capture challenges and benefits, as well as tips for implementing an effective strategy.
Benefits of Capture for Tendering
Capture management, or capture planning, gives you an advantage with the client, and over the competition. By dedicating resources 12 - 24 months before the tender, a capture process delivers a number of game-changing benefits:
- More Qualified Pipeline: Staying informed about opportunities helps you qualify your pipeline. This leads to better go or no-go decisions and better resource allocation.
- Influence the Process: Building relationships can potentially influence the tender to align with your strengths and capabilities.
- Greater Differentiation: Proactive engagement builds credibility and differentiation that will echo with the client during proposal evaluation.
- Address Concerns: Addressing potential client doubts or objections early on helps you reduce risk. And surprises during the proposal phase.
- Competitor Positioning: By increasing your brand’s value, you communicate a more compelling reason to evaluate your solution.
- Improved Proposal Quality: Create a more personalized and engaging proposal. Capture details about the client and competitors to make it stand out.
What is a Capture Manager?
A capture manager’s goal is to increase the chances of winning a contract. They are typically sales or business development professionals assigned to large, complex projects with long sales cycles. They are responsible for research and analysis, as well as the capture plan and win strategy. They work with sales to shape the opportunity and with the proposal manager to develop the proposal.
Capture Challenges for Tendering
While capture management is a powerful tool for increasing tender win rates, it does come with its own set of challenges. Understanding these challenges is the first step to implementing a strategy that works for your business and your industry.
Common capture challenges include:
- Limited Bandwidth: Balancing capture and sales activities can be challenging, especially for smaller organizations.
- Skill Gaps: Capture is its own profession, and developing the skills required to be effective can be time-consuming.
- Managing Expectations: Balancing client expectations with internal capabilities is also challenging, especially if there is a disconnect with product planning.
- Data Capture: It’s not unusual for information to reside in the head of the capture manager. This makes it difficult to harness info during the proposal phase.
- Translating Info to Strategy: The information is in-depth and on-target. But unless the team knows what to do with it, it will not support the pursuit.
- Competitive Landscape: Gathering competitor intel is time-consuming. Especially when it goes beyond the usual suspects.
Capture Management Process for Tenders
Capture management involves a series of well-planned steps to identify, qualify and pursue strategic opportunities. It can save time and money by prioritizing tenders and better allocating resources. And it can help you influence decision-makers and stand out from the competition.
While capture managers typically focus on large, complex and highly priced opportunities, this process can be scaled back to effectively support medium or small sized tenders as well.
Identify and Prioritize Opportunities
Research the market and organizations to find opportunities that match your capabilities. Assess your current situation and establish criteria and goals. Generate and evaluate ideas, weighing them based on the value they bring to your business.
Access Risk
Determine if the opportunity is a good fit. Consider your strengths, capabilities, and qualifications and conduct a SWOT analysis. Weigh the risks against the potential outcomes, considering qualitative and quantitative factors.
Assess Competitors
Gather competitive insights and incumbent information. Look for their strengths, weaknesses, and performance on similar projects. Consider their target market and audience, pricing and market share. Identify if they have any existing relationships with the client.
Write a Capture Plan
Develop a detailed plan outlining how you intend to win, from identification to award. Include what you need to make the go/no go decision and develop the proposal. For example, client hot buttons, competitor messaging, and even an executive summary outline.
Build a Solution Framework
Understand the client's problems and their impact on the organization. Map your strengths to each of the problems you solve. Then, prioritize based on what the client values and question your benefits. Create a preliminary solution as a model for pursuit.
Develop a Win Strategy
Create a draft win or bid strategy including your solution, its strengths and weaknesses and your unique value proposition and win themes. Highlight what makes you unique and better than your competitors, and how to counter weaknesses. Include strategies related to features, pricing, management, staffing, schedule, and performance.
Develop an Action Plan
Define your communication channels and create a plan for client communications, including events, meetings and calls. Work with marketing to proactively create relevant sales-branding content to support each channel. Work with management and sales to allocate resources for capture activities.
Connect with the Client
Define your communication channels and proactively create relevant content to support each channel. Build relationships with decision-makers and influencers across the organization. Share information and insights to build awareness and position your business.
Develop a Winning Proposal
Work with your proposal manager to translate your strategy into an actionable plan for your proposal process. Create a presentation for the kick-off that shares your vision for the story, messaging, language, and evidence. Interpret vague or ambiguous requirements. Inform the writer's package to help guide contributors.
Price to Win
Price to win or PWIN is a methodology used by capture managers to estimate the price that will most likely win the contract. Analyze a variety of factors, including what the competitors will likely offer, the client’s priorities and budget, and your value proposition. Strike a balance between the features and price that deliver the most client value based on what they prioritize.
Tips for Effective Capture Management
Capture management provides a structured framework for winning large, complex or highly priced opportunities. By incorporating these tips, you can increase its effectiveness and achieve long-term success.
- Baseline SMART (measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals to measure and continuously improve your capture process.
- Establish regular product direction discussions with capture to head-off any solutioning challenges or missteps.
- Align your capture process with the criteria of your go/no go process.
- Establish opportunity briefings with your proposal team to prepare for development.
- Establish milestones for evaluating new information, risks, and changing win probability.
- Cultivate capture skills with active listening, non-verbal communication, and effective questioning workshops.
- Use your proposal solution to document and share opportunity and competitor information as it evolves.
- Consider using your social media channels to connect and share relevant insights that build credibility. Regularly publishing a LinkedIn newsletter keeps you top of mind with your audience.
- Double-check the tender for “wired” opportunities. If the response time is extra limiting, it might be an indication someone else is practicing capture management.
Successful capture management is a critical component of a large, complex tender. By understanding your client's plans better, you can influence them. This helps you position your business as their top choice before the tender.
