Do You Know the DNA of A Competitive Win in GovCon?

Context Is King?

A common saying in the Government Contracting (GovCon) marketspace is that “The best-informed wins.” ?This is particularly true with high-dollar value, mission-critical, solutioned-based, prime contracts.

Context of your company, customer, and the competition is essential to win. It is needed to formulate the right strategies to influence the customer and procurement office before they go silent because they are in acquisition mode. Plus, it is essential in order to formulate the strategies and particularly the strengths that will get you maximum points against the government’s evaluation factors for your submitted response.

The Problem

Gathering context of your company, the customer, and the competition takes both effort and time. It is a proactive effort that occurs in an incremental and iterative manner in many and diverse ways. In fact, this context is your company’s equity. It takes an investment to gain it, and if you are not careful, it can be easily lost (e.g., The sudden departure of a business developer or capture manager from the company who were assigned the opportunity/pursuit), which can be costly.

Common issues often exist in GovCon with the information and eventual context gathered from it needed to support winning a competitive pursuit.? They include not:

• Doing proper collaborative analyses around obtained information to derive context from it to support sound decision-making and strategy formulation (i.e., The information analyzed is only subjected to a single point-of-view).
• Having the results from one analysis easily be able to support a subsequent analysis (e.g., Insights gained from using a competitive assessment technique such as a SWOT analysis never end up feeding proposal strategy formulation as it should).
• Being able to have a traceable, defensible, and explainable reason as to why the customer should select your company above all others based upon capture activities before pen is ever put to paper to write the proposal response.
• Having an inventory of strengths in advance of proposal writing that be allocated to a compliant outline where each strength is part of a digital thread of analyzed information that traceably weaves together:

―??? Customer issues and key factors

―??? Requirements

―??? Proposal strategies

―??? Benefits (preferably quantifiable) and risk mitigations delivered to the customer

―??? Evaluation factors/sub-factors

The Need

There is a need today for an innovative software capability that enables business developers and capture managers to be more successful in their roles— particularly with the upfront thinking and analyses necessary to win a competitive GovCon pursuit.? You can call it, “Collaborative Analytical Thinking Software,” and it would allow a capture manager to:

• Assess the goodness of business development efforts in support of a bid/no-bid decision.
• Conduct:

―??? Issue & Key Factor Analyses

―??? Notional Winner Benchmark Analysis

―??? Competitive Assessment

―??? Discriminator Qualification

―??? Gap Analysis

―??? Win Strategy Development

―??? Win Theme Formulation

―??? Proposal Strategy Development

―??? Strength Inventory Formulation

• Visually and digitally integrate captured data.
• Preserve digital threads of context of the company, customer, and competition as it pertains to the capture effort at hand.
• Build an inventory of proposal strategies and “scoreable strengths” in advance of any proposal writing and then allocates them to a requirements-driven outline to facilitate scoring the most points against the evaluation criteria.? As it is often said, if you do not have the proposal strategies and strengths in advance of the writing, then what are you writing to?? You cannot get the proposal strategies and strengths in advance of the writing unless you do the necessary upfront thinking and analyses.

The Benefits

In particular, the benefits of such a ““Collaborative Analytical Thinking Software” capability are that it would:

• Ensure the right opportunities are being worked and bid
• Help do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.
• Enable better decision-making, particularly at the C-Suite level.
• Assist with answering the most important question when pursuing a competitive pursuit ― “Why your company?”
• Support the design and development of the solution for your company’s competitive response.
• Store the rich context of how and why a deal was bid to increase overall company value over time.
• Capture the company’s intellectual capital to enable future growth.
• Lower the cost of capturing new business.
• Support collaboration across the lifecycle of the pursuit in the post-COVID-19 hybrid work environment just as effectively as if the members of the pursuit team were working face-to-face.
• Protect the customer business that your company already has.

Up Front Thinking Energizes the DNA of a Competitive GovCon Win

There is now available to the GovCon marketspace an innovative cloud-based or on-premises-based “Collaborative Analytical Thinking Software” capability called “SET?.? It is designed to enable business developers, capture managers, and others involved in a competitive pursuit to do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.? As a result, SET enables the winning of more competitive pursuits and increases the overall enterprise value of GovCon companies.

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Author: Copyright 15 December 2023, Peter Lierni, Founder, Solutioneering, LLC

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