What is a capture plan & how to create a successful one.

A capture plan is essentially a carefully laid out plan to capture leads and is most commonly used for large contracts.

It might be a team effort from multiple sales representatives or a team lead and a few team members, or it might also be managed by a single person, a capture manager.

A capture plan usually features the following elements:

• Opportunity identification
• Competitor analysis
• An analysis of the cost and your potential for success
• Customer pain points identification and analysis
• An action plan for effective product or solution selling

Once an action plan leads to a request for a proposal, the negotiation process begins.

During that time, your team needs to show an expert understanding of the customer’s pain points and the ways your product or service addresses those needs.

Here are the steps to create a successful Capture Plan.

1. Identify opportunities

The first step in capturing high-quality leads with whom you might sign an important contract is to identify these opportunities.

This needs to happen before a prospect approaches you with a request for proposal.

Essentially, if you employ a capture management strategy, this means that you’ll already have built a relationship with a potential customer before they ask you to make an offer, or, at the very least, you’ll have studied their needs and the ways you can meet those needs with the services you offer, even if you have no direct relationship with them.

Identifying important opportunities in advance increases the likelihood to succeed in negotiating a deal with them and gives you the flexibility to adapt to their needs before they start actively considering you as an option.

2. Analyze the competition

Next comes competitor analysis, because, as McKinsey & Company puts it, to develop a successful strategy, you need to know who you’re fighting.

This means analyzing your competitors’ product and business strategy, predicting their potential reactions and behavior when they’re directly competing with you, assessing risks, threats, and opportunities, and being willing to act decisively when the time is right.

3. Define the pain points of your potential customer

Next, you need to define the pain points of your potential customer. Here, you can ask questions like:

• What do they currently struggle with and have no appropriate solution for?
• What do they need? Have they already identified their needs?
• What matters most to them at the present moment? What is likely to matter most in the future?
• Do we have the capacity and the solutions to address each of these pain points?
• At what stage of the buyer’s journey are they most likely to contact us directly?

The key here is to think from your customer’s perspective, map out their journey, and see what matters to them at each step of their journey — and think of ways you can address these needs proactively.

4. Evaluate costs, risk, and value

Look at the costs of pursuing this bid, the risks associated with it, your likelihood of success, and its value for your business.

Here are some important considerations to make.

Regarding costs and value

If the cost to get this particular deal far exceeds your typical customer acquisition costs, this doesn’t necessarily mean you should give up.

Instead, look at its potential value for your business, both in the short and long term. At what point will you break even?

Is this a deal that could be renewed for many years to come, or is it a strictly one-off business opportunity?

Regarding risks

Will pursuing this opportunity mean your capacity to negotiate other deals will then be reduced?

Will it expose you in some other way to an increased risk for your business?

Likelihood of success

How likely are you to win the deal? What does your success depend on?

What could you do now to improve your chances of success?

5. Design an action plan

Next, you need to design an action plan that would help you get a request for proposal and that would already position your organization as one of the best providers out there to choose from — if not the best one and the most obvious choice.

Your action plan should include:

• A strategy on getting the attention of your prospective client — at this stage, your marketing, business development, and sales teams should work together
• A dedicated person to be in charge of building a relationship with your prospect
• A way to position yourself as the best solution available
• A well-structured business proposal template that you’re ready to deploy as soon as needed (pro tip: you can use PandaDoc’s templates for free)
• A comprehensive plan to present your pricing to your prospect in the right way6. Send a proposal, negotiate, and close the dealThis last step is not strictly a part of the capture planning process, which ends in receiving a request for a proposal.Still, we wanted to include it to give you an idea of what comes next — and present capture planning with enough context to help you deploy it in the most efficient way for your business.So, after you’ve built a successful capture planning strategy, its logical conclusion is to receive a request for a proposal (RFP).Creating a well-structured proposal is a necessary step for all businesses that rely on an individualized approach to sales, in which a sales representative (or a sales team) builds a proposal based on a prospect’s exact requirements and needs.For larger deals and important contracts (which are also the ideal use case scenario for capture planning), professionally executed proposals are a must.The negotiation process can be greatly simplified if you’re using a contract management platform like PandaDoc.With our suite of tools, you can:

• Create offers, proposals, and contracts in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days
• Use a streamlined negotiation and approval process, in which all team members from your side and your customer’s side can collaborate in real time
• Store and manage all sales documents in a single location
• Present pricing in a way that’s convenient for your prospective customers, enabling them to compare proposals efficiently

In all that, however, there’s always the possibility of losing the deal.

For this reason, it’s also important to be well-prepared to hear a “no”.

8. Analyze past performance

Regardless of your exact strategy to capture leads, you always need to assess past performance and see:

• What worked well and why
• What didn’t work and might be not worth repeating in the future
• Which areas of improvement you’re able to identify
• What are the improvements you can execute quickly in order to start seeing results

Only by analyzing what helped you succeed (or what led to a failure to win a deal) will you be able to improve your capture management and become more efficient in the future.

Final Thoughts: As you can see, capture planning is a lengthy and resource-intensive process that requires careful planning, so it’s definitely not a must for all businesses.

To win large, impactful projects, however, you need to be well-equipped to capture the interest of prospective customers, position yourself as the right solution, and be top of mind for them when they reach the RFP (request for proposal) stage.

Having a well-designed capture plan for such opportunities will greatly increase your chances of negotiating a deal successfully and winning it — and also up the likelihood of renewing contracts in the future.