12 Reasons Why You Need Capture Management

Capture management helps organizations strategist contract wins. Business development and proposal processes take hefty amounts of time that would not be complete without clearly defined capture management. Imagine you take on a construction project and your crew spend days and days building a house without first knowing the type of house that needs to be built or even verifying that the prospective buyer wants a house built at all. Business development or responding to an RFP without a capture management strategy is somewhat similar. You need to first qualify an opportunity and have a strategic plan for winning the contract before you place a competitive bid to win.

Capture management holds the building blocks for making smarter decisions, while saving your organization significant time and losses in money or business.

Business development may look a bit different depending on the organization but fundamentally capture management allows you to understand the customer requirements, industry, hot buttons, issues, and motivators. Understanding the customer in depth will help your leadership determine whether the opportunity fits into business objectives, as well as help the proposal team craft a tailored and attentive RFP response.

If you could use another strategy to increase win probability for a government or commercial contract, why not? There is no harm in greater preparation. Here are 12 reasons why you need capture management:

You win more with better-qualified opportunities.
Increase overall win probability.
Decrease costs and losses.
Improve the proposal management process.
Provides your team with greater confidence in contract acquisition.
Focus efforts to a verified deal.
Increases stakeholder communication.
Enables end-to-end qualification.
Improves lessons learned evaluation.
Encourages strategic thinking across teams.
Saves time spent on blind responses.
Additionally, the process is scalable as your business grows.

According to industry expert, Bob Lohfield, “defining your process is the first step toward implementing capture management. This requires developing detailed procedures that mesh with your company’s corporate culture, along with supporting templates to make the process efficient. It takes several iterations to ensure that you establish a defined, repeatable process that works.”

Capture management is not an overnight or one-and-done process. It takes effort at the onset of the business development lifecycle and ought to be revisited several times as you gather more information over time. Overall, your capture management plan must be able to lead your organization in customer acquisition and confidently develop the proposal management process. Capture management software and techniques help reduce some of the burden of the effort and maximize replicable processes. Our capture management E-books Volume I and Volume II will provide you with the skills to make you a better capture manager, with the capture management strategy that overcomes planning roadblocks, and more.

Traits and Skills of a Good Capture Manager

Good capture management requires a strong capture manager to lead it. Now if your organization does not have a formally titled capture manager, that is no excuse to forgo capture management altogether. Many organizations add the responsibilities of a capture manager to other leadership roles on the sales team.

We have taken a look at some capture manager job descriptions and compiled a list of traits and skills that would make a good capture manager:

Strategic with experience capturing large-scale projects
People-oriented with good communication skills
Project management or account management experience
Extremely detail oriented
A good delegator and multi-tasker
A good negotiator

Capture managers oversee the acquisition of contracts that often value well over $1 million. Thus, with great responsibility comes great expectation. Our list above includes the minimum requirements for a good capture manager to help you determine if you have the chops for the role or to understand what to request of a new hire. The role is extremely beneficial to the business development of an organization and to the cohesiveness of the team.

There is a myriad of reasons in favor of capture management. Overall, it helps your organization become more proactive in pursuit of new business and more revenue. Zbizlink is a verified tool that enables you to manage business development better, collaborate with business partners and resources, and make smarter, analytical decisions. Its all-inclusive capture management software and proposal management software combine with four additional applications to offer its users end-to-end solutions.

Also, Read – How to Write an Executive Summary for Your Business Proposal