Description
Foundations of Capture Management training will arm you with real knowledge and tools you will apply immediately to capturing Government contracts and dramatically improving your win probability (Pwin). Government capture planning process starts after opportunity qualification, and continues past proposal submission. Its goal is to position you to win before the Government releases a Request for Proposal (RFP). Your chances of winning Government proposals without capture planning are the same as cutting classes during the semester in college and hoping to get an A on the final exam. It can possibly happen but hope to win is not a good business strategy for a Government contracting company (or any business). In order to raise your win rate, take this capture training to master techniques for customer engagement, intelligence gathering, win strategy development, competitive analysis, teaming, solution development, and more. The course uses a real bid opportunity to practice all the capture steps in hands-on exercises using typical tools available to business developers and capture managers. Participants practice developing key elements of a capture plan using a capture plan template provided with the course, and brainstorm on win strategy using a case study. This is an interactive 2-day workshop that is 50 percent lecture, 40 percent exercises, and 10 percent discussion. It will teach you real skills to raise win probability of the Government contracts you pursue. The experts who teach our business development, capture and proposal training are highly experienced currently practicing proposal professionals whose years of successful experience in Government acquisition and training allow them to offer valuable insights to our students. Our instructors can answer tough questions as they come up during the course. They can also tailor the material to their students’ specific challenges, and share their experience based on the most current realities. Check our instructor’s bios on our About page.
Course Curriculum
Learning Objectives
Upon course completion, the participants will have learned and be able to put into practice:
- Understanding where capture fits in the business development lifecycle.
- Identifying six types of decision makers and developing relationships with the customer.
- Preparing customer profile and contact plan.
- Collecting the opportunity intelligence in ethical ways and analyzing it for applicability to the capture effort.
- Developing a capture plan.
- Developing a win strategy and compelling win themes.
- Identifying top competitors and performing competitive analysis.
- Identifying and vetting potential teammates.
- Postulating the requirements before RFP issuance.
- Developing Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and solution sets for proposal sections.
- Staging capture materials for proposal.
- Preparing a proposal plan and capture schedule.
- Organizing the capture team.
Course Highlights
Module 1: Introduction
- Introductions and learning objectives.
- Introduction to capture and overview of the capture process to offer you a big-picture perspective.
- Overview of the class project.
Module 2: Customer Engagement
- How to create relationships and customer contact plans with your Government customers.
- Four key tasks for interfacing and building relationships with Government customers.
- Understanding how your customer buys and using information to gain an edge.
- How to identify six key types of Government buyers and buying influences and what they want.
- Customer contact plan for marketing, information gathering, and influencing.
- Rules of interfacing with Government personnel that you don’t want to break.
- 20 questions for gathering information from the customer during a visit.
Exercise: Identify customers and their key goals from business development inputs. Create a customer profile and draft contact plan.
Module 3: How to gather actionable intelligence – since the best-informed wins
- Ethics of intelligence gathering and how to avoid legal repercussions that may cost you your business.
- How to collect intelligence during Government site visits, proposal conferences, and industry days.
- The most useful capture research databases and other online resources.
- How to analyze opportunity history.
- Purposes and key components of a capture plan.
- How to develop a capture plan.
Exercise: Development of a draft capture plan.
Module 4: How to develop a great win strategy and win themes to prepare you to finish on top
- Definition of a win strategy.
- How to develop a viable win strategy.
- How to devise top-level actions that create a winning offer.
- How win strategy is related to win themes.
- Three types of win themes.
- How to develop powerful proposal-level and section-level win themes that drive strategy.
Exercise: Identify win strategies and action items.
Module 5: How to analyze your competition
- Techniques for identifying competitors and their likely strategies.
- What information to collect on your competitors.
- Where to find information on your competitors ethically.
- Relationship between competitive analysis, teaming, and other aspects of capture.
Exercise: Identify top competitors and perform competitive analysis. Update capture plan.
Module 6: Teaming
- How to choose and engage the right companies to create a team that compels the customer to select you
- How to decide when it is beneficial to team and when it is not.
- Teaming strategies pros and cons.
- How to decide between priming, subcontracting, joint venture, or a contractor teaming agreement (CTA).
- How to allocate scope between teammates.
- Where to find teammates.
- How to select and vet teammates that will contribute to your win.
Exercise: Identify potential teammates and update capture plan.
Module 7: How to develop the solution pre- and post– draft RFP that will wow your customer
- Overview of solution development.
- Typical problems with solution development.
- How to postulate the requirements.
- Concept of Operations (CONOPS) development techniques.
- Developing solution sets for proposal sections.
- Staging capture materials for proposal use.
- Preparing a proposal plan.
Exercise: Develop a solution for a proposal segment and document in a capture plan.
Module 8: How to manage your capture effort effectively while conserving your resources
- Sequence of capture steps and decision gates, and how they line up to the Government acquisition process.
- How to develop an effective capture schedule that conserves your resources but enables you to prepare well.
- How to organize your capture team.
Exercise: Develop a capture schedule.
Module 9: Summary and recap.
Meet Your Instructor
Olessia Smotrova, CF.APMP Fellow
Olessia has more than 25 years of experience in business development. She led winning bids for four out of the top five Government contractors, winning more than $26 billion over the course of her career in single award contracts. She is an AI developer and strategist, pioneering the use of generative AI in Government contracting. She has created and implemented AI tools for business development processes, proposal strategy formulation, and competitive analysis. She is an AI super-user and thought leader in the practical application of generative AI in synthesizing complex data, generating innovative solutions, and driving decision-making in high-stakes Government BD environments.
She is the author of the book How to Get Government Contracts: Have a Slice of $1 Trillion Pie and seven other books. She has taught a graduate course for the Stevens Institute of Technology, and she provided training to Treasury and NASA. She has served for 2 years as the President of the National Contracts Management Association (NCMA) Bethesda/Medical Chapter and for 2 years as the President of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) National Capital Area Chapter.
Olessia is recognized as an APMP Fellow for her contributions to the field of capture and proposals – the highest honor in the business development profession. Her skills span every aspect of business development, sales, and marketing. Prior to supporting Fortune 500 companies and small businesses as a proposal consultant and growing OST, she worked as a business developer for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and wrote for the Financial Times of London.
