How Do You Qualify Opportunities To Get a Win?
#011 A gate 1 brief to qualify an opportunity is strategically important for your business growth!
The past two newsletters, we have focused on the role of Business Development and Capture, aligned to the federal acquisition process. We noted the Business Developer is generally in charge of opportunity identification and qualification leading up to a Gate One (1) review. Today, we will cover the Opportunity Qualification process.
What is a Gate Review?
Most Large Businesses (LB) conduct multiple gate reviews to qualify, pursue, and bid. This is typically 4 or 5 gates dependent on the established process. As a Small Business (SB), every one of your opportunities should at least go through a Gate 1 or qualification gate to establish whether your company should spend the time or money to pursue.
Keep in mind, you are building a business case, identifying what help you may need to establish the win strategy and assist the capture manager with building a capture plan. Think about your audience and anticipate their questions ahead of time. This isn’t a “gotcha” briefing but should be constructive to provide valuable feedback. Submit the gate review briefing ahead of time, so the team can think of questions to effectively qualify the opportunity.
Opportunity Identification
Last week, we noted many small businesses typically identify an opportunity after a federal agency releases their quarterly or annual forecast. Additional ways are by engaging the small business office (OSDBU) or utilizing a business intelligence CRM.
During the Gate 1 qualification, it’s important to present the opportunity description, scope, period of performance (PoP), and known incumbent prime or subcontractors. Accurately describing the scope and other key parameters of the opportunity is essential to understanding whether this opportunity is a good fit. Having a thorough understanding which offices the work supports, types of labor categories, tasks, technology, and aspects of the opportunity will help ensure that your future proposal meets all the necessary requirements, provides value to the customer and established a business case.
Is the opportunity real and funded? Before investing time and resources into creating a proposal, it is important to verify that there is a real opportunity available with the customer and that it is properly funded. Has the customer developed a requirement and conducted market research to determine the acquisition strategy? It is also important to understand vehicles being considered or set-aside restrictions the government might have. This information can be identified through calling the contracts specialist assigned or the small business office.
Building the Business Case
The next step is ensuring the opportunity is principally aligned to the business strategy and your capabilities. It is important to understand which core capabilities or past performance is applicable to this project and how they relate to our broader business strategy. Understanding these factors allows us to assess whether we should pursue this opportunity as a prime or a sub.
It is also important to consider the Return on Investment (ROI) for this kind of project in this market. This helps us accurately estimate how much we should invest in Capture and Bid & Proposal (travel, conferences, proposal management, pricing, or other expenses) funding necessary to win the contract.
Finally, we must assess any potential Organizational Conflict of Interest (OCI) issues. This is critical to ensure that all participants in the capture process are aware of and compliant with all applicable government regulations.
Customer, Positioning, & Win Strategy
With this information in hand, we can begin to develop a comprehensive strategy for pursuing the opportunity. This strategy should include tactics for positioning our capabilities against competitors, identifying key decision makers, understanding customer requirements and preferences, developing competitive pricing, and developing a win strategy. Have we been actively calling on the program management office? Does the customer know we are considering pursuing this opportunity? Have we identified the decision makers and their issues with their mission? Do we maintain a relationship, or have a strategic consultant who can provide a formal introduction to the decision maker? All of these activities should be accomplished before or during the government’s market research phase. Our goal is to provide a favorable introduction to our capabilities and ability to solve their issues.
Competition
It is important to identify the potential competitors in any procurement process. Knowing who the competition is and what resources they are likely to bring to bear will help inform your company's approach in bidding for a contract. Analyzing the competitive landscape can provide insight into how best to position your capabilities against those of other bidders and increase your chances of success.
Having identified the competition, you can then assess your company's chances of winning the contract. Developing an initial Probability of Win (PWIN) estimate is a useful way to begin this process and will help build a case for developing and executing a successful bid strategy.
Your Capability and Technical Expertise is important!
Have you conducted a Gap Analysis? When it comes to being viewed as credible by potential customers (or Primes if you intend to subcontract), having technical expertise and past performance in similar projects is key. To be competitive, you must demonstrate that your company has the capability and capacity to deliver on customer requirements. This will require providing evidence of past performance as well as being able to articulate how your people, processes and resources can meet the customer's needs. A comprehensive approach to constructing a credible proposition to customers or a prime will help position your bid for success!