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Tracking Pre-RFP Opportunity Pursuits
Most companies do a lousy job of managing their business opportunity pursuits. They think if they can name all of their pursuits and are hitting their numbers, they've got it covered. The truth is, they aren't managing them at all. They are barely even tracking them. You have to do more than take the pulse to track a patient's health. The same goes for opportunity tracking.
Businesses track opportunities to:
- Ensure preparedness. Are you doing everything you should do to close the deal?
- Track action items. What steps are being taken, who is taking them and are they on track?
- Prepare forecasts. Are you hitting your numbers? If you are publicly-traded, do you have sufficient accuracy and back-up to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley?
- Improve quality. Is anything slipping through the cracks? Are you capturing everything you should? Are you maximizing the value of what you capture?
Preparing to capture an opportunity is a combination of customer relationship building and intelligence gathering. Many of the tools on the market are really little more than glorified contact management systems. And while contact management is one aspect of business intelligence, it is not the only one (or even the most important). The answer to "Are you prepared and have you collected the right intelligence?" is more than when you last met with the customer or even what you discussed.
A good system should enable you to identify the specific questions you need to answer to have a successful pursuit and quantify your progress towards answering them. It should serve as a repository for your intelligence and should package the information in it in a way that facilitates using it to prepare the proposal that closes the deal.
Privia is one system that is far more than just a tool for the proposal team. It is an opportunity and pipeline tracking tool as well. With its repository and workflow features, you can identify questions you need answered in the pre-RFP stage and then easily carry the intelligence gathered forward to the proposal development team and process. Along the way you can report on your pipeline, including opportunity details, history, milestones, and financial projections.
Privia also has built-in support for teaming. If your bids are the kind that involve multi-companies coming together to maximize their qualifications in pursuit of an opportunity, being able to collect the right information about the teaming environment is vital. And because a potential teaming partner is also a potential competitor, gathering intelligence for teaming is closely related to competitive intelligence gathering. Privia enables you to track the expertise of potential teammates/competitors, allocate workshares, and track any discriminators that could make them a value or a threat.
The way Privia provides an integrated repository, workflow, and reporting system for both opportunity tracking and proposal development has many potential benefits:
- Improved preparedness and tracking of qualified leads to better bids and improved win rates
- Smoother transition from business development to proposal submission
- Better coordination between stakeholders, better information sharing, and better allocation of resources
- Better conversion of intelligence data into useful information that makes a difference
- Improvements and standardization in the collection of competitive intelligence and teaming information
The biggest hurdle most companies will face in implementing a system like this is executive capriciousness. Even though Privia is flexible, when it comes to opportunity reporting and financial projections, executives tend to want what they want in the format that they want it. The other big potential problem is legacy systems. It is probable that a company already has an opportunity tracking system or process in place, even if they don't like it. This is an area where people can be resistant to change. Changing the opportunity tracking system not only changes the reports (that everyone has been held accountable to), but it will change how people go about pursuing their opportunities. This can be sensitive territory. Buy-in is critical and hard to get with so many stakeholders. It helps to have active support at the highest level, since, ultimately, a system like this can change the way a company is run. Therefore, if you've got that support, it can be a huge step towards improving performance and bottom-line results.
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