Prepare for 2020 with Training!

Hindsight is 2020. You don’t want to look back at 2020 and regret missed opportunities. The new year brings a lot of uncertainties – but one thing IS certain. To win, you need to differentiate your company and your offers from the competition. Training is key!

The new fiscal and calendar year bring budget uncertainties, flat budgets due to cost cutting initiatives combined with modernization and emerging technologies, and perhaps even threat of recession. Opportunities to win new business and retain existing contracts may shrink due to these trends as well as category management and Smart Buying initiatives. Staying viable requires a carefully crafted discriminating value proposition in a crowded marketplace.

To remain relevant in 2020 and beyond, prepare yourself and your employees. Harvard Business Review recently stated that “The future of learning is three ‘justs’: just enough, just-in-time, and just-for-me. It means that training is going to have to be just as agile as the workforce —where speed, flexibility, and innovation are key.”

The last quarter of calendar year 2019 is full of Lohfeld Consulting training opportunities, with flexible options to suit all levels of capture and proposal professionals.

Just Enough: Lohfeld Consulting’s one-day Strength-Based Winning™ training helps you vet, solution, articulate and deliver a compelling proposal that speaks directly to what the customer values. Our students learn how to develop a discriminating value proposition that government evaluators will award top scores. This hands-on class uses a case study with plenty of teamwork. If you need more depth in how to perform effective capture, Capture Management for Federal Contractors provides the tools, templates and processes to gain agility in capturing business. The capture class is the perfect complement to Strength-Based Winning.

Just In Time: Do you or your employees need Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) Foundation training? This well-recognized professional certification is, according to APMP, “the global standard for developing and demonstrating proposal management competency.” It is also rapidly becoming a minimum requirement for many proposal positions. Lohfeld Consulting offers an innovative virtual webinar in conjunction with the APMP Liberty Chapter to prepare for the exam. In addition, we provide full-day in person training in conjunction with the APMP National Capital Area (NCA) Mid-Atlantic Conference (MAC). In this class, students take the exam and receive results the same day. Students who take our training have a 99% pass rate.

Just for Me: You may recognize the need to hone employee proposal management and proposal writing skills. Join us for one or both of our one-day classes: Proposal Management for Federal Contractors and Proposal Writing for Federal Contractors. These classes provide hands-on activities and plenty of examples to mature your skills and focus resources on what is most important to success. In addition to public training, we can tailor any of our classes to your company’s requirements using company-specific RFPs, proposals and customer debriefs. Any of these training options help your company gain agility and efficiency building on lessons learned that result in wins.

The marketplace is more competitive, and the coming year is full of uncertainties. However, it is a certainty that you and your employees need professional development to at a minimum keep pace with your peers. Make 2020 the year of perfect vision by preparing the workforce of the future.

By Lisa Pafe, Vice President at Lohfeld Consulting Group, CPP APMP Fellow and PMI PMP

Lohfeld Consulting Group has proven results specializing in helping companies create winning captures and proposals.
As the premier capture and proposal services consulting firm focused exclusively on government markets, we provide expert assistance to government contractors in Go-to-Market Strategy, Capture Planning and Strategy, Proposal Management and Writing, Capture and Proposal Process and Infrastructure, and Training. In the last 3 years, we’ve supported over 550 proposals winning more than $135B for our clients—including the Top 10 government contractors. Lohfeld Consulting Group is your “go-to” capture and proposal source! Start winning by contacting us at www.lohfeldconsulting.com and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.