Capture Plan: The Advanced Strategy to Win More RFPs
It’s Tuesday afternoon, and you’ve just returned from lunch to an email alerting you to an award for an RFP you responded to two months ago. You open it, the anticipation building…only to find out it went to one of your competitors who always seems to be two steps ahead of you.
How can you get the leg up to start winning against them? They always seem to know about RFPs months in advance and have meetings with buyers before there’s even a whisper of a possible RFP. If you could do this, you know your company would win. You have a better product, better support, better track record. You just need to find the missing step to set your company up for success.
The answer you’ve been searching for, my friend, is capture planning.
What is capture planning?
Originally coined by Shipley Associates, capture planning is the process of assessing the competitive landscape and creating a winning strategy for a specific opportunity. For most businesses, this means identifying a key contract and putting resources in place to figure out how to win it. The steps you take will vary, but most companies touch on the following aspects as part of capture planning:
Customer Engagement. Meeting with buyers and understanding their reason for the contract is key.
Competitive Assessment. RFPs are designed to elicit competition. Your goal is to know why the customer would choose you over the competition (and show that in your proposal).
Solution Refinement. If you meet with the customer early enough, you can update your solution to overcome any gaps before the RFP is released. This might include teaming with partners, adding a feature, updating your process, and more.
Win Strategy and Proposal Creation. All of the above steps will inform your win strategy. Once you have these pieces in place, document your approach to create a strong and persuasive proposal that earns high evaluation scores.
Benefits of capture planning
Companies who use capture planning have higher win rates. It’s an effective approach to RFPs. Some of the benefits of capture that lead to those higher win rates include:
Clear contract pipeline. When you have a list of contracts you’re tracking and actively pursuing, you no longer have to watch RFP sites hoping that one will align with your solution that you can win. Instead, you’ll be planning the RFP drop date and have a strategy in place before the RFP is even released. No more scrambling to find resources while the deadline ticks closer.
Strict lead qualification process. If you have several contracts you’re planning for, you don’t have to respond to everything. This allows you to be stricter with where you actually do spend time and energy responding to RFPs.
Better performing proposals. Spending months refining your win strategy means you’ll be able to clearly show why your company is the best choice in your proposals. There also will be less confusion and stress once the RFP is released because you’ll be prepared.
Is capture planning right for your company?
Contract Capture started in the Federal contracting space, but variations of it work across all segments. The structure will vary depending on your industry and who you sell to. Below are a few examples of what this looks like in practice:
Selling to Government. Sales, Capture, or Business Development lead the capture process by meeting with customers and uncovering competitor strategies. They advise product/program managers on how to alter solutions to remain competitive and hand off insights to the proposal team.
Selling to Education and Healthcare. This might be a similar process to the above, but it’s less common in these industries to have a dedicated capture person. Your marketing team will play a bigger role in the process, often facilitating conversations with leads through webinars and conferences.
Selling to Private Sector and Non-Profits. Because these contracts aren’t publicly available, business development and marketing play a large role in building a pipeline and uncovering who is in the market for a solution. These teams will then connect sales to have a conversation and often work closely to establish the win strategy and competitive insights.
A few signs capture planning might be right for you:
You frequently bid on large, highly competitive RFPs.
You’re pursuing contracts for ongoing solutions that will renew.
You can’t clearly articulate your win strategy.
What if you don’t meet all three of the above but you still want to improve your win rates? Check out the simplified process at the bottom of this article.
How to Create a Capture Plan
If capture seems like a good fit for your company, below are the steps to take to create a capture plan.
Identify the Right Opportunities. True capture focuses on a specific contract, not broadly winning more opportunities (that’s business development). An easy way to do this is to review past RFPs you bid on that were a good fit and see when the contracts will be expiring. If they’re about 12-18 months out, that means you have enough time to implement a capture plan.
Create Customer Plan. Everything starts with the customer. Here you’ll create a plan for how you can learn more about their needs and actually meet with key decision makers to understand how they evaluate and what they want to achieve.
Conduct Competitive Analysis. Use all available resources to learn more about who might bid in the future and how they’ll bid. Create a SWOT analysis of each key competitor.
Develop Win Strategy. Once you know the customer and the competition, identify how you’ll stand out. Do you need a partner? An update to your solution? A special certification? Create a plan to win and follow through.
Document for RFP. With a win strategy in place, create a plan for how you’ll showcase this in your proposal. Even if you follow through the above steps, you won’t see the results if the buyer can’t clearly see your differentiation in your proposal.
Is there a simpler process?
Maybe you're a sales manager responsible for hitting a quota and you don’t have time or resources to go through all of the above steps. Maybe you do have resources, but you sell more one-time solutions where it’s harder to identify contracts. Maybe you sell to private or commercial customers and you don’t have insight into buying trends like the government space.
Whatever the reason, the above steps are too complex for your process right now. So what do you do?
This is where a more comprehensive win strategy can help. Contract capture is excellent for specific, highly competitive RFPs, but not every RFP is worth tens of millions of dollars with a two-year lead time. Sometimes buyers decide they need a solution and move to RFP in just a few months. How can you win more of those opportunities?
We recommend following a revised capture process that lays the groundwork for winning across all opportunities. Instead of doing all of this work to win just one contract, we like to take these steps to create a win strategy that can be used on all of your RFPs. Here’s how:
Review 3-4 Past RFPs. Start with a few of your “best” RFPs—they don’t have to be ones that you won, just opportunities that seemed like a perfect fit for your company.
Document Customer Insights. Take note of why current customers signed with you. What did they like about your company? In sales meetings, when do customers get excited? Create a picture of why customers need your solution.
Assess Competition. Conduct a deep dive into your competitors as if you were the buyer. What are their main selling points? How do they position their company and their solution? Would you buy from them if you were in the buyer’s shoes?
Honest Reflection. This is the step most companies miss. It’s not enough to take a look at your competitors and the customer. You also have to honestly review your company and how you sell. What are your gaps? Your strengths? Are you inadvertently alienating buyers (this can happen more than you think)?
New Win Strategy. After the honest review, it’s time to put it all together for a new and improved win strategy that you can use across all future RFPs. This should include strategies to neutralize your competitors and highlight your strengths as well as how to put this into place in your proposal. (Don’t forget to review your writing, design, and structure!)
This simplified approach across the board for your proposals will help you to efficiently update your sales process without focusing on just one contract. Companies who do this have grown their win rates by more than 50%.
Follow the above steps to see for yourself. Or if you’d like help, we can do this for you.
Download the Free Checklist with the 7 Key Sections to find when reading RFPs.
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