Business Development & Proposal Writing

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This Government Business Development training offers essential skills in professional business development for Government contractors selling services and solutions to the Federal Government. The two-day course begins with an overview of the Federal business development (BD) process and what it takes to succeed in the profession. It proceeds to the basics of U.S.

Learning Objectives ≫

Course Curriculum ≫

Government business. It then focuses on the nuances of Government contracting that every Federal business developer has to understand in order to win contracts, such as rules of the socioeconomic program for small businesses, and how you can make the program serve your goals even if you do not directly qualify for the benefits.

Learning Objectives

Understanding where capture fits in the business development lifecycle.
Identifying six types of decision makers and developing relationships with the customer.
Preparing customer profile and contact plan.
Collecting the opportunity intelligence in ethical ways and analyzing it for applicability to the capture effort.
Developing a capture plan.
Developing a win strategy and compelling win themes.
Identifying top competitors and performing competitive analysis.
Identifying and vetting potential teammates.
Postulating the requirements before RFP issuance.
Developing Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and solution sets for proposal sections.
Staging capture materials for proposal.
Preparing a proposal plan and capture schedule.
Organizing the capture team.

Course Curriculum

Day 1 Highlights

Module 1: Introduction

Introductions and learning objectives.
Introduction to capture and overview of the capture process to offer you a big-picture perspective.
Overview of the class project.

Module 2: Customer Engagement

How to create relationships and customer contact plans with your Government customers.
Four key tasks for interfacing and building relationships with Government customers.
Understanding how your customer buys and using information to gain an edge.
How to identify six key types of Government buyers and buying influences and what they want.
Customer contact plan for marketing, information gathering, and influencing.
Rules of interfacing with Government personnel that you don’t want to break.
20 questions for gathering information from the customer during a visit.

Exercise: Identify customers and their key goals from business development inputs. Create a customer profile and draft contact plan.

Module 3: How to gather actionable intelligence – since the best-informed wins

Ethics of intelligence gathering and how to avoid legal repercussions that may cost you your business.
How to collect intelligence during Government site visits, proposal conferences, and industry days.
The most useful capture research databases and other online resources.
How to analyze opportunity history.
Purposes and key components of a capture plan.
How to develop a capture plan.

Exercise: Development of a draft capture plan.

Module 4: How to develop a great win strategy and win themes to prepare you to finish on top

Definition of a win strategy.
How to develop a viable win strategy.
How to devise top-level actions that create a winning offer.
How win strategy is related to win themes.
Three types of win themes.
How to develop powerful proposal-level and section-level win themes that drive strategy.

Exercise: Identify win strategies and action items.

Day 2 Highlights

Module 5: How to analyze your competition

Techniques for identifying competitors and their likely strategies.
What information to collect on your competitors.
Where to find information on your competitors ethically.
Relationship between competitive analysis, teaming, and other aspects of capture.

Module 6: Teaming

How to choose and engage the right companies to create a team that compels the customer to select you
How to decide when it is beneficial to team and when it is not.
Teaming strategies pros and cons.
How to decide between priming, subcontracting, joint venture, or a contractor teaming agreement (CTA).
How to allocate scope between teammates.
Where to find teammates.
How to select and vet teammates that will contribute to your win

Exercise: Identify potential teammates and update capture plan.

Module 7: How to develop the solution pre- and post– draft RFP that will wow your customer

Overview of solution development.
Typical problems with solution development.
How to postulate the requirements.
Concept of Operations (CONOPS) development techniques.
Developing solution sets for proposal sections.
Staging capture materials for proposal use.
Preparing a proposal plan.

Exercise: Develop a solution for a proposal segment and document in a capture plan.

Module 8: How to manage your capture effort effectively while conserving your resources

Sequence of capture steps and decision gates, and how they line up to the Government acquisition process.
How to develop an effective capture schedule that conserves your resources but enables you to prepare well.
How to organize your capture team.

Exercise: Develop a capture schedule.