Regardless of the type of strategy that you are developing; capture, corporate, change, product, etc., it is critical that you refine the strategy down to its essential elements. Complexity does you no favours. It makes the strategy hard to understand and easy to attack or avoid. Buy-in occurs when the fundamental tenants of your strategy are easily understood, easily remembered and easily put into practice. Continue reading
Tag Archives: actionable strategies
The Thrill of the Chase
A well-considered large pursuit capture strategy should initially be drafted years in advance of a formal release of the Request for Proposals (RFP).
This may seem like motherhood, but we rarely see well developed, long term, mature capture strategies, even in corporations with sophisticated bid and capture processes. More often we see some combination of last minute decisions, very poor competitive intel, simplistic pricing, late teaming, unnecessary additional program costs, and risk.
Why? Most likely because humans generally hold off, fear mistakes, want more certainty, like to deal in “the now” and underestimate their competition. Our articles on human biases here and here explore this issue. Continue reading
Proposal Best Practices
We have seen a lot go right and wrong over many years and many proposals. We have learned that, regardless of the type of opportunity or the size of program or target market, there are common threads – things that work well and common behaviours that trip up proposal teams. This article provides a high level overview of some of the key lessons that we have learned, with emphasis on what should be done in advance of the formal RFP release. Continue reading
Why Strategic Planning Fails, And What to Do About It
Many companies do a great deal of strategic planning and presentation preparation and then go offsite for a few days once a year to establish the company’s goals and direction for the next 12 to 36 months. The executive correctly understand that they needed to engage in this exercise to get everyone on the same page. It is also an annual perk for the staff involved.
Unfortunately, in our experience, these sessions can be generally useless unless the underlying process is very well developed and executed. There are many traps that can sideline good intentions. In fact, most executives that we have engaged over the years say that they’re unhappy with their strategic planning process. So while they know that strategic planning is necessary, they don’t fully realize the benefits they were hoping to attain from it. Continue reading