Now that your strategy and plan are in place, you can begin searching for opportunities to pursue, but searching itself is not enough. You also need to apply your Strategy and your Plan to selecting amongst the opportunities your searches return. And the more exact you can make the application of the details (such as your business area profiles) the more likely you end up pursuing the deals you are best suited to win – and that is worth its weight in gold (or diamonds, or crypto, or just good old US dollars). How to go about it is a good question, and we generally don’t have a good answer, so lets look at the possibilities.

Have you ever asked, "Is there an easier way to find out what they want, so I can pick the best opportunities to pursue?"  Well, I have a great answer for you - NO! [Bet you thought we were going to say something else😏] Of course you can spend your mornings looking through those SAM searches, checking out eBuy, catching up with the emails from your GWAC, trying to figure out what's new in that agency forecast; or you can subscribe to a data service, give them a little of your history, put your life in the hands of that new AI they have, and still find there is a lot of stuff to read through! Is there a way to make this less painful and get a better result.

CLEVER Teams save their clients time and enhance their probability of win. They aren't instructed, or called by a client asking for help, they are simply working the business development process and pipeline every day. This is a real story of one team's effort on one day.

The first time you heard someone refer to a company’s sales pipeline, did you wonder why it was called a pipeline, or did it just seem to make sense? Why wasn’t it called a deal list? Was someone trying to imply something by naming it a pipeline? If they did, have you thought what the implications might be?

Unfortunately, we see a lot of “simple calculators” to tell you what your pipeline needs to be worth, and that is an important number, but it’s not a plan. A plan needs to tell you how much and how many by type (say prime vs. sub and opportunity vs. bid), the timing of expectations (when you expect to complete certain milestones), the cost, the resource requirement, and the return on investment.

We often see people providing BD advice where they say, "deals are won or lost in capture." It’s true they can be, but they can be lost even before capture begins if someone else has been in there to shape the deal, and it can also be lost if the proposal does not live up to the expectations set during capture, or the pricing simply went off the rails. BD is a complex set of activities ranging from marketing to pre-sale customer interactions, to deal evaluation, win strategy, capture, technical proposal, possibly orals, and pricing. Those who beat the average win rate and consistently grow are the companies that pay attention to every phase of the process on every deal they decide to invest in.In this shop talk series CLEVER (the smart one serving coffee) will explore the details behind all the stages of the process. This is going to take some time, so look for our emails and enjoy the coffee.

Your proposal is more than just its content, it is the totality of all of its visual components, including design, layout, organization, and style. Don’t risk all that hard BD & Capture work by restricting your content to words alone.

What I think BD and Executive staff have to do more of is think through whether these claims are realistic, can they be delivered on by the tool set being offered, are they even possible within the framework of the government acquisition process, and are they really a benefit that will help you reach your financial goals?

This quote sums up the challenge: "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got." You sign up for a data service to find opportunities. Then you try to develop some system, usually a CRM, to store the data and provide some activity tracking and contact management. Congratulations, you have now completed doing the same thing everyone else does, and you can now expect the same results.

Sometimes it is useful to create a simple view of complex challenges so we can see how critical success factors fit together, which can help in analyzing value and how we apply resources. Everyone in B2G knows BD is complicated, but allowing ourselves to fall prey to the complexity can blind us from the best path to follow. Because of this, at CLEVER we have tried to produce a “simple” representation of the world of BD to help create a clearer perspective on what needs to be done, and who should do it.

Everyone is bombarded by this statement: “competition is intense, and it is getting worse.” It’s a great opening line if you want to get someone worried about how to make their next successful bid. I am not going to disagree or agree with the statement, because I do not know how you would choose to define the word ‘intense.’ At CLEVER-BD we prefer to deal in real intelligence (things like numbers and analytics) to help you win business, so we thought it might be fun to provide some actual numbers about what is going on in the Government market, and you can decide how ‘intense’ you think it is.

To enhance the success of your BD you must apply techniques that are ‘smart’ and execute as if it is a process – because it is. So, what happens when you skip steps or neglect aspects of a process? – results diminish in quantity and quality. Of course, people make a difference, but a well-designed and executed process makes everyone, regardless of skill level, more successful. And like any process, you must get the first step right for the rest to work.