This blog was originally featured on our website, http://www.privia.com/blog. It is based on a presentation that Privia's President & CEO Glenn Giles gives on a regular basis about capture management best practices. Mr. Giles has several decades of experience in the industry. As a Capture Manager with Waypoint LLC he had a 100% win rate. Before Waypoint he served as COO of the District of Columbia under Mayor Anthony Williams.

1. The Capture Process: 8 Best Practices to Evaluate Winnable Business
By Glenn Giles, President and CEO, Privia
This is a blog post written based on a presentation I have given frequently, most recently as a webinar
which is available at http://www.privia.com/resources/webinars-archive. It outlines the things
organization should be doing to improve their capture methods. My years in the industry have led me to
witness some very bad habits that occur all too often but are easily correctable.
Right now we're seeing three major trends in the market:
1. Between federal and state/local governments, agencies are spending approximately $10
trillion.
2. There are 32,000+ GSA suppliers, thus increasing competition for contracts.
3. The federal government is moving toward more Multiple Award Contracts (MACs) because
agencies feel that they get the best value through the task order process. Task orders are less
protestable than full and open procurements, and the use of them creates "supplier lists" that
agencies can go to in the future.
There is a lot of uncertainty right now in government contracting because of three major things:
The ongoing budget resolution
The threat of sequestration and
The possibility of Israel attacking Iran
all make for instability in the federal government. This uncertainty is causing many organizations to fill
their pipelines as much as possible. Yet this is the opposite of what executives should be doing right
now, a point we will get back to later.
Interestingly, the uncertainty has not caused a significant decrease in professional services spending
because there is still a need for the services that consultants can perform. We're seeing this trend
because agencies do not have the budget to add personnel, but they still have work that must be done.
It's more cost effective to hire professional services, since organizations can pay them for the short
period of time that they are needed.
A sound capture process is the key to winning any opportunity. There are three basic steps to the
process:
1. Identification: Build your pipeline with opportunities that you can realistically go after.

2. 2. Pursuit: Perform competitive analysis, dredge up your past performance, and outline how
your organization can fulfill the requirements.
3. Capture: Finally, you respond to the RFP, RFI, etc.
The biggest issue most organizations face is that they either a) don't have a sound capture process or b)
they don't follow the capture process in a consistent manner. That is why I advocate a process that is
guaranteed to succeed. These steps are straightforward, but proposal teams often forget to follow
them.
8 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL CAPTURE
1. Optimize Your Pipeline
I was speaking recently to a CEO about sequestration and he mentioned that he was filling up his
pipeline with as many opportunities as possible. My only response to him was “Why?” That is the
opposite of what you should be doing! You should focus solely on the realistic opportunities, ones you
think you have a real chance of winning. You can waste a lot of time and money on capture when the
decision should have been a no-go from the start. An executive should review the pipeline on a regular
basis and challenge everything in it. It's not easy but is important and will pay off in the long run.
Keep in mind that padding your pipeline with opportunities you know you can't win makes it harder to
be realistic about other aspects of the organization. It will skew your budget, your sales team, and your
allocation of resources. Of course it’s fine to have some stretch goals as these help the organization
grow by forcing your team to innovate.
2. Establish a Relationship Between IT & BD
When I meet with a customer, one of the first things I ask is whether or not their proposal teams have a
service level agreement (SLA) with the IT department. In the past three years, I have not met a proposal
manager who answered “yes”. Proposal teams must have a relationship with IT that has established
terms. This is especially important when it comes to task orders, which can have turn-around times as
short as seven days. If there is ever an outage in any system, IT is going to be the department that
addresses and meets the needs of the BD team. With the compressed time constraints of a proposal,
you want to make sure that your IT organization is ready and positioned to support your team.
The goals of IT and BD are diametrically opposed and this can pose a problem. IT wants to centralize
everything it can in order to improve efficiencies and lower costs. BD wants to generate revenue, which
can be hindered by IT's desire to lower costs. It's actually in IT's best interest to give BD the tools and
support they need to win, because higher revenue translates into bigger budgets for every department
in the organization.
3. Define Roles of Capture and Proposal Managers

3. I've seen organizations establish roles in a variety of ways. Sometimes the proposal manager reports to
the capture manager, and sometimes they are peers who share responsibilities. Generally the structure
is based on the experience and skills of each person. It's important to establish who is in charge of what
and whom. A lack of clear definition of responsibilities leads to confusion and uncertainty; other
members of the team start asking, "Who owns what? Who's in control?" Your organization might have
more than one answer to the capture v. proposal manager question but no matter what, make sure
there is an answer and everyone knows what it is.
4. Proposal Manager or Coordinator?
Proposal managers and coordinators are different roles and it's important to decide which one you
need. The role of a proposal manager is to be involved in every step of the process and really manage
the writing, editing, and production. They have the power to approve or decline volumes and they
micromanage everyone else on the team. The role of a proposal coordinator, in contrast, is mostly to
coordinate scheduling and production. They step in to make sure everyone is doing their job on time
and that everything gets put together properly. The important thing for an organization to do is decide
who they want in charge and what role they want them to take.
A really good proposal manager will be costly but worth the money; you get what you pay for in this
case. A proposal manager is not an area where an organization should be trying to cut costs as this role
can be the difference between a win and a loss.
If you decide to bring in a proposal manager from the outside you need to let them manage the process.
By "you" I mean members of the executive team and the proposal team. An independent proposal
manager comes in to oversee the process; they are not there to make friends with the team. There is a
reason you chose this person to come in and manage your proposal effort, so follow their process and
listen to what they have to say. It will pay off in the end.
5. Manage Executive Involvement
The pattern I tend to see in organizations is that executives are not involved until the end of the process,
when they become heavily invested in the proposal and thus create more risk. When they are involved
late in the game, they are more likely to want to change volumes, win themes, and graphics - the things
that are incredibly time consuming to change and could lead to missing the deadline, or delivering a
proposal that is not agreed upon by both the proposal manager/coordinator and the executives. Your
success is predicated on managing your executives during an opportunity. Get them involved early. By
the time you've made it to the final draft, management involvement should decline. This lowers the risk
of having to make major changes as the deadline approaches. If the capture and proposal managers are
on track and report to management regularly, they shouldn’t feel the need to get involved as often.
6. Know How to Triage
Once the final RFP is released, all of your efforts leading up to that point are going to need to be re-
evaluated to make sure that your strategy, win themes, outline, content plans and graphics are aligned

4. with the final requirements. Before anyone starts writing, your team needs to sit down and decide if
your win themes and strategies are still applicable, if there is anything new that will change the
structure of the proposal, and whether or not you need to modify graphics. Assess everything you have
done so far and compare it to the new RFP in case there are any changes; this decreases the likelihood
that any member of your team will waste time on non-compliant work.
7. Graphics, Graphics, Graphics!
After the win themes, graphics are the most important component in scoring. Proposals are scored
more than they are read. Agencies will perform an initial review of the proposal for compliance before
they read the sections in detail, and the first thing they notice is graphics and the captions that go along
with them. A study by the University of Minnesota found that the human brain can register and
understand a graphic up to 60,000 times faster than written words. Graphics will greatly increase your
chance of getting your message across the first time an agency views your proposal.
There should be at least one graphic per page, if not more. There are so many options for graphics as
well, including charts, photos, computer-generated images, and infographics. Infographics are especially
helpful because they combine images with facts in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and informative
(hence the term, info-graphic). It's important to have a large repository of graphics also; it's likely you
will recycle them for different proposals so it helps to keep them in one place.
8. Manage Color Team Reviewers
External reviewers can be tremendously helpful but they rarely read the requirements. Reviewers with
past agency experience can be especially difficult to work with, since they believe they already know
what the customer wants even if their opinion differentiates from what is in the requirements. They
tend to forget that the requirements are there for a reason. The best thing you can do is be anal about
proactively preparing your color team. There's no such thing as too much preparation. Here is the
process that I have found is the most successful:
1. Two weeks beforehand, start by giving an introductory presentation to the review team. This
can be done as an online meeting if getting together in person is difficult. You can also send
them a Powerpoint presentation and then schedule a conference call for further explanation.
2. Once they know what the requirements are, send the reviewers sections C, L, and M. After
you've given them a day or two to look over the requirements verbatim, follow up and make
sure they looked at them and understand them.
3. Last, send the kick-off deck you used for your proposal team to the reviewers. This gets them
in-the-know about your process, win themes, and strategies.
Every color team needs to have a full understanding of an opportunity in order to be effective reviewers.
Keep track of the reviewers you use; build a past performance for your teams so you know ahead of
time who reads the requirements, who is helpful, who is ineffective, etc. Having individual past

5. performances will help you put together great teams for the future. When you actually have your team
together, make sure the reviewers stay in their own swim lanes. Reviewers may have a tendency to try
to review other volumes they are not assigned to because they have the experience; make sure your
proposal manager reminds them that they were chosen to review certain volumes for a reason.
Also remember to treat pricing as its own review; do not try to run it at the same time you do volume
reviews. Find different reviewers to do your pricing, specifically people who are qualified to do it.
These 8 points may seem obvious but I can't tell you how often I see organizations not follow
them and fail to get a win. The best thing you can do to ensure success is discover what works
and what doesn't, create a repeatable process, and stick with it. For more information on the
capture process you can watch my webinar version of the presentation here. Reach out to us
via email or through our various social media outlets if you have further questions.