Internally-Derived Competitive Intelligence—Your Company’s Real Equity

Winning A Competitive Pursuit Takes Investment

In the federal government contracting (GovCon) marketspace, winning a competitive pursuit takes investment in time, resources, and effort.?This involves:

• Building corporate capabilities
• Getting to know the customer
• Assessing the competition
• Submitting a winning response to a solicitation

It is key to formulate the right strategies during capture to shape the opportunity in your company’s favor before the government goes silent and is no longer talking to industry. It also is essential to develop the most effective strategies to materially put into your offering across a solution that is really an integrated set of components, which includes:

• Teaming Partners
• Past Performance
• Leadership Team (i.e., Key Personnel)
• Technical Approach
• Management Approach
• Frameworks, Processes, Methods, Tool, Techniques, etc. (Enable Success of?Technical & Management Approaches)
• Staffing Solution
• Price-to-Win and Basis-of-Estimate?

?These strategies are used to:

• Highlight your company’s strengths
• Minimize your company’s weaknesses
• Neutralize likely strengths of your competitor(s)
• Highlight likely weaknesses?of your competitor(s)
• Counter how a likely competitor could exploit your company’s weaknesses
• Counter how a likely competitor could neutralize your company’s strengths

Development of these strategies often are the result of time-consuming activities such as?Issue and Key Factor Analysis, Notional Winner Benchmark, Competitive Assessment, Discriminator Qualification, Gap Analysis, and more.?They usually involve your company’s best talent, particularly talent pulled away from billable work with existing customers (e.g., Solution Architect). In addition, there is the development and sharing of intellectual capital from this talent in the form of solutioning and proposal writing. ?Together these strategies and intellectual capital are your company’s real equity because they underpin your company’s own internal competitive intelligence (CI)—They are your crown jewels.

This CI is much more valuable than what can be bought by from a third party although purchased 3rd-Party CI might be factored into it. This is because it reflects the strategic decisions made as to how a particular deal was bid and supporting rationales—The underlying blueprint to the win. This is something that is not easily evident in the final written submission to the government if you are reading the proposal at a later time.?

The Problem

Very often this equity (i.e., company internally-derived CI) is ?lost due to life’s circumstances with little chance of contributing to increasing the value of your company via future competitive wins.?It could be lost for any reason such as when your company’s employees quit or are let go, individuals pass away, or even win the lottery.

Companies in the GovCon market are often acquired by other companies hoping to “rinse and repeat” on the success of the company being bought.?Loss of the selling company’s internally-derived CI for the aforementioned reasons increases the likelihood that the buying company will be less successful with its investment. Regrettably, this is a common occurrence in the GovCon merger and acquisition market.

Companies in the GovCon marketspace must make it a standard practice to deliberately capture and preserve internally-derived CI in order to be competitive. They have too much business risk when they just let it continue to reside in the heads of one person or small group of people at the company.?You just never know what will happen to it.

The Need

There is a need for a capability to help companies in the GovCon marketspace capture the rich context of how and why a deal was bid, as well as capture the company’s intellectual capital with each use to enable its future growth and protect the customer business it already has in a cost-effective manner—A company-internal data lake of CI for future reference.

There is a need for a capability that provides the C-Suite (e.g., Chief Growth Officer), business developers, capture managers, proposal managers, solution architects, and others with the ability to understand how and why past strategies (e.g., win strategies, proposal strategies, pricing strategies) and intellectual capital on prior competitive pursuits (wins or loses) were used. This would provide the analytical ability and flexibility to support win strategy and proposal strategy formulation, solution development, and creating the overall winning value proposition to the customer on future competitive pursuits. This would enhance the value of the company positioning for an acquisition in the eyes of potential buyers or investors.?

In fact, there is a need for a capture-as-a-service (CaaS) capability where such things are possible. Such a CaaS offering should be collaborative; analytical; strategy; solution; and customer/company value-focused. All of the data in it for any specific opportunity should federated (i.e., unified) to support the win, and all data in it across all enterprise opportunities should be unified and available to support winning a specific opportunity as well.

The Benefits

The benefits of such a CaaS capability are that it would be able to:

• Support the post-pandemic hybrid work environment
• Help do necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits
• Enable better executive decision-making by providing quantitative status on the goodness of business development and capture efforts, as well as readiness for recompete
• Help answer most important question when pursuing a competitive bid. “Why your company?”
• Be authoritative source-of-truth for a competitive bid
• Support design and development of solution for your competitive response
• Generate needed strategies and strengths to win bid
• Store rich context of how and why a deal was bid―Company-internal data lake of CI for future reference
• Capture company’s intellectual capital with each use to enable future growth
• Act as a living capture plan. In the traditional sense, a capture plan is a framework?a series of folders or buckets where you assemble and organize data by topic
• Quantify growth status of your enterprise
• Lower cost of capturing new business
• Protect customer business you already have
• Increase value of company in the eyes of potential buyers

You Can Have the Strategies to Shape Your Next Opportunity and?Reflect in the Proposal to Win??

We believe that if such a CaaS offering existed in the GovCon marketspace that companies using it would win more competitions and increase their overall enterprise value. For this reason, we have developed a capture-as-a-service offering for the GovCon marketspace for its use, which provides the aforementioned benefits and more. ?

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

? www.solutioneering.company/www.solutionengineeringtool.company