Capture and Proposal Management

What is Capture Management?

Capture management, also known as ‘Capture Planning’, is the strategic process of maximising the win potential of a request for proposal (RFP) opportunity. You can achieve this by optimising resources, business connections, and processes and gathering competitive insights. Ultimately, these methods of capture management help to position your company as the best solution for the customer. Compared to your competitors, your company can understand and meet the customer’s needs.

Crucially, all of this work happens before the RFP is received.

While this is not a part of the proposal process, it is a vital plan needed to elevate a company from an unknown to a preferred partner.

As such, it can dramatically increase your win rate potential.

Top four advantages of Capture Management

• Increased chance to win RFPs based on research and connections.
• Write more focused proposals – with shorter proposal timelines and ability to assess potential risks.
• Faster sales and develop a more qualified proposal pipeline.
• Reduce proposal writing costs – guide your pricing using competitive insights.

Key Information to Include in Your Capture Plan

• Customer requirements, expectations and issues.
• Evaluation of market and wider economic climate that may influence the availability of RFP opportunities.
• Competitive insight and its advantages.
• Primary win themes.
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis.
• Collate previous RFx (request for ‘x’) documents to help craft responses to common questions.

When to Use Capture Management?

Though valuable, capture planning is a time-consuming process that requires great detail. To achieve the highest possible return on investment (ROI), capture planning should be reserved for the most complex and valuable opportunities. So, not every RFP demands the same in-depth strategy. Many companies adopt a shorter version of their capture management strategy for routine RFPs to save time, as the majority of capture plans take between nine and eighteen months to complete.

Who Can Create Capture Management?

Capture management is a highly difficult job in any company as it requires a varied skill set and experience in many fields. They also have the difficult task of selling internally and externally to both their company and the customer. Therefore, capture managers must create and develop strategies utilising their knowledge in areas such as:

• Marketing
• Human Resources (HR)
• Finance
• Contracts
• Corporate Strategy

Capture and Proposal Management

When the RFP is released, capture management hands over to the proposal management who put their strategy into writing. However, the capture manager is responsible for involving the proposal management before the RFP release, so that they are better prepared to win the proposal. Ultimately, the proposal management are responsible for producing the written document which will help close the sale.

Further, consistently winning proposals heavily relies upon a strong proposal management process, which works in tandem with the capture management in a partnership. If one role is not filled effectively, the chances of winning a proposal significantly decrease.

Responsibilities of Capture and Proposal Management

As aforementioned, capture and proposal management must work together in order to achieve the best possible potential of success.

Capture Management can detrimentally affect the proposal management processes if:

• They fail to identify how the company differentiates itself from its competitors.
• Impacts the proposal management’s effort by involving them too late, so they have little room or time for making necessary changes and improvements.
• Winning becomes a secondary concern to simply completing the task with minimal research.

Proposal Management can detrimentally affect the ability to win a proposal if:

• They fail to identify any further information required from the capture management team.
• They fail to receive information from capture management which can be used in their proposal plan.

Overall, the proposal management of any company identifies what it will take to win the proposal from the research conducted by the capture management – this takes the form of criteria in which the proposal management can then value the quality of the proposal they produce.

Capture Planning for Government Contracts

Capture planning for government contracts often occurs when the RFP is in its early stages of creation – bids are often unofficially won before the RFP actually comes out.

A strong capture strategy is crucial for identifying the customer’s expected timeline and demands the same process as mentioned above – research, pricing, the company’s assets and the customer’s issues

The key to success when regarding government contracts is using the same outline of the RFP and paying attention to strict proposal guides – word count, font and graphic size.

If you fail to meet their requirements, your proposal can be discarded.

Importance of Keywords in Government Contracts

Keywords play a crucial role in the success of your business. By increasing your online visibility and discoverability, you can grow your business at a faster rate and drive profit from this exposure. Simply, this is how customers find your business!

When it comes to RFPs, this is also how your business finds bidding opportunities. Unfortunately, government procurement offices don’t use standardised keyword descriptors, which would make finding RFPs that match your strategy much easier. Instead, there are seemingly endless databases, portals and search functions that make sourcing suitable RFPs a difficult task.

As a result, keywords should be carefully and deliberately chosen as part of your growing keyword list.

The aim is to think like a buyer!

Techniques for identifying successful keywords:

• Avoid umbrella terms that will return a vast number of irrelevant results.
• Ask specific questions about your business – What do you specialise in? What unique services are provided by your business?
• ‘Related searches’ function – Making use of this function can benefit your search, but Google should not be used as your primary resource.
• Keep evolving your keyword list so that you can avoid keywords that no longer align with your strategy.

It is time to put the effective keywords to use. For example, the optimal method of building a connection with the customer is by mirroring their keywords and language in your own proposal.

Let’s sum it up!

Capture management, proposal management and the utilisation of effective keywords are all crucial planning tools for securing a winning RFP opportunity.

Things to remember:

• Effective capture management can decrease proposal writing costs and produce faster sales.
• Capture and proposal management must work together in order to provide the best possible chance of winning a proposal.
• Keywords work most effectively if they are precise, regularly updated and tailored to the buyer.

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Find more helpful tips and advice in our blogs. We cover topics including:

• How to Secure Government Contracts Without a Huge Bid Team
• How to Win Contracts: 7 Secrets You Need to Know
• 5 Essential Tips for Winning Tenders and Bids
• How to Secure Government Contracts for Bid
• RFP Tenders: Everything You Need to Know
• The Tendering Process
• And many more.