Capture Management

Capture Management is the key ingredient to increasing your probability of winning. It is especially critical on large-size, longer-term, strategic bids. It’s as much art as it is science, and results are often highly dependent on the personality, knowledge, and experience of the Capture Manager.

While our clients typically bring their customer relationships, Smart BD provides disciplined Capture Processes, proven Capture Templates, and expert Capture Managers. Whether you need to augment your existing Capture Team or need a dedicated Capture Manager to lead the pursuit end-to-end, Smart BD can help!

Capture Planning

An intelligent Capture Plan lays the foundation for the pursuit strategy. It collects all of the building blocks: customer call plan and messaging, RFP shaping, teaming, competitive analysis, value proposition, key solutions and key personnel, themes and discriminators, etc. Our experienced Capture Managers use proven templates and processes—tailored to your business needs and opportunity size and complexity—to best position your proposal for a win.

Customer Call Planning & Execution

Understanding the needs and desires of the key customer decision makers is critical to ensuring that we propose solutions and benefits that will resonate with them. Our experienced Capture Managers develop call plans and customer messaging, and can even accompany you to your meetings with the customers. We carefully analyze all of the collected information, document it within the contact reports, and use it to inform proposed solutions and their subsequent benefits.

Teaming and Negotiations

Selecting the right Team is not only key to winning, but is even more important for execution. Teammates should bring complementary capabilities, additional customer relationships and knowledge, competitive pricing, and help write the proposal. Smart BD can help you vet your Teammates and help with Teaming Agreement negotiations based on our decades of experience.

Win Strategy Formulation

A Win Strategy is a recipe for what it takes to win a bid. Every Win Strategy is unique: it may include hiring specific key personnel, acquiring a niche capability, securing a key teammate, or setting up a new operating unit to reduce costs and lower pricing. Successful Win Strategies require innovative, outside-the-box thinking. Smart BD’s experts use their experience and know-how to help you create a custom Win Strategy that works.

Workshops

Our Capture Managers are experienced facilitators of various types of Capture Workshops and will select those that make sense for your business and the size of your opportunity. The key to each workshop is delivering a set of tangible, documented Capture Artifacts that feed the proposal artifacts. Some of our most popular workshops include:

• Black Hat (competitive assessments) – a detailed look at the competition and what they will offer, resulting in Capture Actions, feeding into the Win Strategy, and informing proposal ghosting and threat neutralizing opportunities. This type of workshop can range from 4 hours to 1 week in duration and is tailored in complexity specifically to your competitive field.
• Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) – this is a streamlined alternative to a Black Hat that enables not only a look at the competition but also an internal look at our own Team’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Themes & Discriminators – a structured brainstorming session resulting in a concrete set of Themes, Discriminators, and Sub-Themes that propagate through the proposal, feeding into the overall value proposition.
• Voice of the Customer – analysis of customer contact results and a structured brainstorming session to consider successful attributes of a winner and detrimental attributes of a loser from the customer perspective.

Executive Summaries

If your Capture strategies do not get translated into Proposal artifacts correctly, a lot of your Capture efforts end up being wasted. The Executive Summary is a perfect tool to help formulate a crisp synopsis of your value proposition, themes and discriminators, and features and benefits, to then propagate them throughout the proposal. Whether required for proposal submission, or used as internal tool to set the stage for the proposal team, the Executive Summary is a critical proposal artifact. Writing an Executive Summary is an art in itself—the one we can help with!