Why Develop a Tactical Sales Plan?

If you have an existing business development team or plan to hire one, a tactical sales plan is an essential tool for BD professionals.

It is often said that up-front planning makes for more predictable results and favorable expectations. A well thought-out tactical sales plan will provide your BD personnel with a step-by-step roadmap, tailored to the specific solutions in your portfolio and in your business plan.

The place to start is to match your performance and services with 3 to 5 agencies that have budget and requirements compatible with your solutions portfolio. Determining how each agency buys will directly impact your strategies for bidding, partnering and contracting. For example, every agency is unique in that they have preferred ways of doing business. Some utilize agency or government wide contracting vehicles; others prefer single or multi-award competitive acquisitions; while others are amenable to GSA Schedule buys. Each agency targeted must have a sales strategy unique to the agency. How you sell to the Army Corps of Engineers is very different from the way you would sell to the General Services Administration.

We recommend that a tactical sales plan be concise and straightforward. Suggested areas the plan should address include:
• Where you are currently selling and at what levels.
• Who you are going to target? E.g. agency heads, program management, major integrators, etc.
• What agencies, opportunities, and partners will you focus on (current agencies plus new agencies and partners).
• How management will achieve its objectives and measure success.

Components of the plan may include:
1. Target agencies and existing and future acquisition programs (large and small business set-asides) where your solution and value statement have the best fit.
2. Target partners to work with including large, small, and SDVOSB companies.
3. Strategy for utilizing additional contracting vehicles in addition to the GSA Schedule.
4. Differentiators to position you with customers and partners.
5. Key sales objectives and milestones.
6. Management reporting requirements and formats.
7. BD support required to implement the plan.
8. Lead generation activities to support the sales effort.

It is often said that one cannot manage that which cannot be measured. The Tactical Sales Plan is one of the tools in your kit that help achieve the measurement portion of this goal.

For more information, visit the website at: www.SenecaCreekConsulting.com.

Capture Planning Do's and Don'ts

The requirement to develop a capture plan should be limited to certain significant-sized acquisitions that warrant such in-depth understanding and market knowledge prior to making a bid decision. However, there are key components of this current process that can be streamlined and tailored to your business model.
The purpose of the capture plan is two-fold. First, it is the pre-request for management to make an unbiased and informed bid/no bid decision on prime contract bids. Secondly, once a bid decision is made, the capture plan becomes one of the key documents for the Proposal Manager and proposal team.
From the Proposal Manager’s perspective, the capture plan contains several key elements necessary to ensure that a winning proposal is developed. These include:
· Win Discriminators – What our solution has that nobody else has and why it is better than our competitor’s solution?
· Evaluation Criteria – How will the selection process be made and to what extent does our company address each criteria?
· Evaluation Board – Who will make or influence the selection and what do they know about our company?
· Purpose of the Solicitation – Why is the customer interested in a new solution and why have they chosen to do it in the manner reflected in the RFP?
· Price – What is the “right” price range for this work? Is this “priced to win” or “priced to value”?
The capture plan must be straightforward yet contain all the necessary ingredients to present management with a clear understanding of the opportunity and confidence that business development personnel have performed the required due diligence on the targeted acquisition. From the business developer’s point of view, presenting a complete capture plan makes them a key stakeholder in the opportunity and contributing participant throughout the proposal process.
The Capture Plan, is in fact, the pyramid on which other step-by-step decisions are made regarding the opportunity that your enterprise is pursuing. Viewed in this light, it is apparent that a proper, not overly-complex, plan is in place at the earliest point possible.

Winning Proposals: Making your Technical Proposal a Selling Document

Most people, regardless of their years in the business, confuse marketing with selling. In the competitive proposal arena, marketing is every activity that leads up to the release of a proposal solicitation. The proposal preparation is where selling happens. To win, a proposal must sell both in content and format. In many cases form and format can be equally or more important than content.

Putting together a compliant technical proposal, i.e., one that meets all procurement requirements, is a minimal starting point for winning. It just levels the playing field. Proposed innovative solutions, as part of meeting requirements, is also a prerequisite to being a contender, but not sufficient. To win, your proposal must also sell your message. What follows are tips for selling your message.

A winning proposal must answer the question, “of what benefit is your innovative solution to the procuring agency; how does it meet the requirements; and why is it better than a competitor’s solution”?

A winning proposal begins with the cover and extends all the way to the last appendix. The cover is the beginning of your executive summary. You must grab the evaluator as soon as the document is picked up, and maintain that hold, until the reading is completed.

We sometimes forget that evaluators are people just like you and I. They want to quickly get through the proposal and feel confident about their appraisal. Making a proposal an easy read goes a long way to winning. This includes a detailed table of contents and a complete compliance matrix. In addition, sentence and paragraphs should be concise, as short as possible, flow logically and be augmented by graphics (e.g., pictures, flow charts, diagrams).

Besides an overall executive summary, each major section should also have its own executive summary, complete with a major theme, graphics, and captions, integrated with content that together encapsulates and sells the more detailed content to follow. It should boldly draw in your evaluator, motivating him or her, to continue reading.

Extensive use of references and pointers are powerful ways to minimize redundancy and pull into the proposal text, appendix details, previously presented graphics, related details in other sections and plans, not required, not submitted and available for review.

These are just a few technical proposal tips for winning. Future articles will address other proposal form and format tips, including how to make your cost/price proposal a winning document.

Getting Your Proposal Started

A famous quote on writing: “The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.” - Tom Stoppard

Most proposals turn out to be more difficult than they should be for two reasons:
1. The effort is not started early enough
2. People are too anxious to get to the writing

Everyone knows that once the RFP is out the proposal effort is going to be a race to the finish line, and it is not a long distance run, it is a sprint. So why do so many companies wait until the RFP is out to start the effort? A good racer spends time preparing for the event before the gun goes off. You can do the same with your proposals.

If you have tracked a program and spent time marketing the effort then there should be a good deal that you already know about what will be required in the RFP. It is also common for the government to publish draft RFP’s which do not tend to change dramatically when issued as final.

With this information in hand you can, before the RFP comes out, begin to:
Ü gather resumes and place them in a common format
Ü gather data on the appropriate approach/solution you will propose (what we refer to as ‘information chunks’)
Ü develop win themes
Ü develop competitive ghosting concepts
Ü and develop competitive discriminators

All of these items will become useful as part of your proposal architecture, which needs to be put together and thoroughly detailed out before you start writing. This is the second big mistake that organizations make; they start to write too soon. The writing of the proposal will be much easier, and more effective, if it is guided by a well thought out and documented proposal architecture. While most organizations know they should take this step (every proposal training class, book, and consultant talks about it) rarely is it done well and often it is not done at all.

Just doing a decomposition of the RFP and creating an outline for the proposal does not constitute proposal architecture. Think about what an architect does when designing a building. They do not simply make up a list of what the building will contain and what materials will be used. They develop conceptual drawings and then detailed drawings to show exactly what the building will look like and how it will be built. Your proposal architecture needs to do the same thing.

How the Government Simulus Package Impacts GSA IT Contract Holders

President Obama passed the $787 billion dollar economic stimulus package into law on February 17, 2009. This bill earmarks over $100 billion dollars in Information Technology initiatives alone. This amount of money is more than the entire Federal Government spent in all of fiscal year 2008 on IT products and services. One key area of focus on the stimulus package is updating the federal government’s digital infrastructure. This new administration is very tech-savvy and plans to upgrade many of the processes the Federal Agencies utilize to do business with one another as well as with the taxpayers they support. GSA schedules are constantly changing and new Special Item Numbers are added to meet more specific categorization.

Has your company positioned itself to profit from this landmark legislation?

Many GSA contract holders that stay ahead of the curve with new product offerings could be the biggest beneficiaries of this new wave of funding. The best way to benefit from the various programs that will be funded is to have all of your available products and services on your GSA contract. Even having all of your products and services on Schedule will not make you competitive if you have not kept your pricing current and in tune with the current market conditions. In January, GSA sent out emails to all contract holders who have not updated their GSA Advantage! catalogs in over two years. GSA will remove these outdated catalogs (within 90 days) if the contracts holders do not update them or verify that there has been no changes in their product or service offerings in the last two years.

Make the most out of this historic time in federal spending.

By Rob Polland, The JDS Marketing Group www.JDSMarketing.com

Back to Basics: Let’s Go Fishing

In previous articles we stressed the importance of knowing your prospective customer’s business and perceived challenges. We talked about the importance of listening. Remember, the prospect is not interested in you. He or she is only interested in how you can help solve a problem or improve their services or cut costs.

Now let’s discuss the sales cycle. There have been many articles written on the sales cycle. Some are 4 steps, some 5. I happen to prefer the seven step process: interest, educate, demonstrate, design, pretest, propose, close. Pretty straightforward! Think about all the sales you have made in your career and apply this model. I am sure you will agree that you went through each and every step. So, why do so many salespeople feel they can skip a step or two or three and go to close in a single meeting? Well, it’s not to say that it can’t be done, it’s just that the likelihood is quite low when you are selling complex solutions based on services and/or products.

A sales call is like meeting a date for the first time. You go through all seven stages (although you may elect to skip the “propose” stage in this case). That’s not to say there are not exceptions to the rule. But for the most part it takes several or many dates over weeks and months to feel comfortable with one another.

The protocols for selling successfully are equally well-known by professional sales people. However, do we stop and think about the discrete steps in the sales cycle and carefully hone each one? The IT sales environment is dynamic by definition. Ever changing market focus and technology demand up-to-date sales techniques and different methods of presentation. However, the elements that do not change are the same seven steps we learned as fledgling sales people. Let us up date them and apply them in our own market arenas.

Before going on your next call think about it as though you are going fishing. The end game is obvious; you want to catch fish for dinner. However, in the process you need to determine what bait to use, how deep your line should be, and where to cast the line. Generally, you must adhere to established protocols if you want to increases your chances for a successful outing.

Now that I have my GSA Schedule, What is the Next Step?

Selling to the government is a difficult task even with a GSA schedule contract in hand. In today’s competitive market, an enterprise must possess the market intelligence, the most workable tactics and strategies, and the knowledge of where a firm’s offerings stand the greatest probability of acceptance by the procuring Agency.

We often speak with companies that hold schedule contracts who state that their revenue expectations have not been realized from these contracts. The reasons are not necessarily simple but most often we have found that these same companies did not have a solid, well-thought out “plan of attack” for marketing off their schedule contracts.

A basic starting point is to develop a Road Map. To simplify matters, the Road Map consists of 4 basic elements:

Discovery – What are the products/solutions that most closely align with both historical, as well as current mandated requirements? Do any of your products/solutions have unique discriminators that would provide a more favorable competitive position for your company?

Target Customers – Who buys what you are selling, the Government, Prime Contractors or a combination of both? Which Government agencies have the largest budget and contract actions in place or in the planning stage?

Acquisition Method – How do your target customers buy what you are selling? Do they use schedule contracts or other methods?

Sales Strategy – Can your products/solutions be sold directly to the Government end-user or is the Prime Contractor your customer? These are two entirely different approaches. The former is on the “push” side of the equation while the latter is on the “pull” side of the equation. What are the major program actions that need to be targeted over the next 6, 9, 18 and 24 months to position your products/solutions in a pro-active sales mode?

Follow the old adage: proper planning makes for more predictable results and favorable expectations. A well thought-out plan will provide your company with a step-by-step roadmap, tailored to your company’s specific products/solutions that permit rapid “traction” in the Government markets.

Why Would We Want A GWAC?

Government Wide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs) have become commonplace vehicles for Federal Government clients purchasing a vast array of products and services. In fact, such vehicles account for more than 50% of the money spent on IT-related solutions.

GWACS most often possess several inherent advantages. Among them:

Vehicles are often mandatory for users in the sponsoring Agency. If you are not on the GWAC, you have no opportunity to bid on the requirement.

Competition is limited solely to prime contract awardees thereby reducing greatly the number of competitors when compared with Open Market RFPs.

Major terms and conditions are pre-negotiated as part of the prime contract awards.

Awards tend to be long term. Typically, 5 or more years before requirements are re-competed.

GWAC can serve as a convenient procurement means for your Government customers even when they are not part of the sponsoring Agency; hence the term “Government-Wide.”

As with any process, there is a down-side to such acquisition vehicles. An enterprise must be completely candid with itself to determine if a particular GWAC, or even GWACs in general, serve their mission well. Considerations to be weighed:

There is generally a long timeline from start to finish in planning, issuing, and awarding many of these types of contracts due to their size and complexity.

An enterprise must possess a niche solution so that they may be distinguished from the many other awardees and their teaming partners.

If not the Prime Contractor, a team member must have assurances in their Teaming Agreement that the Prime will make available all Delivery or Task orders that are generated under the GWAC.

The GWAC is the proverbial “hunting license.” You must go out and genuinely market and sell to the end user. There are few, if any, bluebirds in this arena. Virtually all Task orders will be pre-sold by the time they are actually released.

You will invariably be faced with price competition from among the other Prime Contractors pursing the same Task Order as you are.

GWACs, because of their dominance, cannot be ignored. However, as with any investment, you must determine realistically the possible return on investment for the effort required to pursue, bid, manage, market, and sell to eventuall capture sales revenue.

Questions such as; “do we have the required clearances to support the tasks”; will our past performance support our case when bidding Task orders”; “what is our geographical reach”. These and many other questions must be answered prior to making the final bid decision for the initial GWAC award.