Proposal & Capture Management Consulting & Training from Lohfeld Consulting Group » opportunity identification

7 Reasons to meet the client before RFP release

Beth Wingate — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:00:36 +0000

The better you understand a new business opportunity, the more likely you are to make an informed decision about whether you should bid.
Similarly, the better the government understands your firm’s capabilities, the more likely they are to want your company to compete. Meeting the client is an essential first step in this process.
You must conduct face-to-face information-gathering meetings with clients to increase your knowledge about the opportunity and to begin positioning your firm as a leading competitor for the procurement. While market research provides a running start at understanding the opportunity, the clients are the ones closest to the opportunity and can provide information that outsiders cannot.
By holding true conversations with a client as soon as possible in the opportunity identification and qualification stages – versus holding thinly veiled marketing meetings – you can gather information that helps you to understand the client’s requirements and objectives, tailor your capture strategy to the client’s needs, and identify other key client staff with whom you should be meeting.
When you meet with multiple client staff, you begin to understand more fully the opportunity, the different desires of the individuals involved from the government client’s staff, their preferences, and their concerns. This interactive process not only helps you to understand the requirement and objectives, but if done well, can establish your company as one of the top competitors in the procurement and influence potential decision makers to favor your approach.
These client conversations improve your ability to prepare for an RFP and are essential to making an informed qualification decision.
Your goal is to be the best-informed competitor because we all understand that as Bob Lohfeld succinctly puts it, “Best informed wins.”

By the Lohfeld Consulting Group Team

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Top 5 reasons to gather info about business opportunities – and what to gather

Beth Wingate — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:58:31 +0000

There are multiple reasons to gather information about an opportunity.

1. We need to confirm the four opportunity elements listed in our previous blog post, 4 Major Elements of Qualified Business Opportunities.

2. We have to ensure that no organizational conflict of interest (OCI) situation exists that will affect our business—such as our already holding a contract that specifically precludes our bidding on the identified opportunity.

3. We need to work internally and with any teammates to determine ways to influence or shape the procurement—ethically, of course—and to gather details continually to support our ongoing Bid/No Bid assessments.

4. We need to determine the who, what, where, when, why, and how to qualify an opportunity. We want to:

Identify our strengths and potential gaps related to the opportunity
Gather necessary information to tell our story before RFP release
Scope the size of the opportunity and identify resources for success
Determine whether we have sufficient time to develop necessary capabilities, gather necessary information, or form a team to fill those gaps

5. Fundamentally, we need to stay ahead of our competition in all aspects of discovering information about and preparing for any targeted procurement.

Lohfeld Consulting Group Team

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4 Major Elements of Qualified Business Opportunities

Beth Wingate — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:53:47 +0000

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. –Mark Twain

Determining if there is actually a business opportunity for our company is the first step in business development (BD). The government competes thousands of procurements each day, and not all of them are suitable for our company to bid. Picking those that are a good fit—and turning down those that are not—is one of the most important decisions we can make in winning government contracts.

We can use multiple approaches to identify potential opportunities. Key parameters such as historic buying patterns, projected industry trends and demands, and revenue and market share can help shape our understanding of future opportunities. We can use personal relationships (current and former clients, retired agency personnel); hire marketing consultants; use agency forecasts or research services (e.g., Deltek); and conduct primary research (agency publications and websites, trade journals, Congressional budget review) to help form hypotheses about market trends and future demand.

Regardless of the approach used, we are always looking for an opportunity we can qualify.

The four major elements of qualified business opportunities comprise (1) a client, activity, or program with (2) sufficient funding and (3) intent to purchase a service/product/solution that (4) we are positioned to provide. Careful discrimination drives successful competitive selling. It is essential to pursue opportunities that are in our strike zone—focused on our company’s strengths—and we need to engage early enough in the procurement life cycle so we can shape our client’s thinking and procurement approach to our advantage.

By maintaining awareness of client issues, market conditions, and buying patterns, we can prepare and track a pipeline of targeted opportunities and gather information to determine which opportunities are real, which we’ve identified early enough to shape to our advantage, and which we should begin aligning our resources to pursue.

Lohfeld Consulting Group Team

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