by Dr. Pat Dougherty, VP Strategic Planning & DOD, SSD
 The fifth fatal “Pitfall to Avoid” during the Capture process is waiting until you write the proposal to develop your team’s winning strategy. Your “win strategy” is a brief statement of why the customer should select your team over your competitors to win a particular program. It includes key discriminators and provides overarching guidance to your team as they pursue the opportunity. While it is logical for your win strategy to evolve during the months prior to the RFP, your strategy still should be relatively stable by the time the RFP is released. There are several reasons why not having defined your strategy can be “fatal” to your Pwin (probability of winning).
The first downfall of not having a win strategy early is that your customer does not know what to expect from you when your proposal arrives. The best approach is to expose your customer to your win strategy early in order to get feedback and make adjustments to your approach as needed. You may discover during a meeting with the customer that they recently had a bad experience with a key vendor you had planned to incorporate into your team. After receiving this kind of feedback you are likely to change your plan and choose a different vendor. When you have not defined a strategy until the RFP arrives you have no time to make corrections based on customer provided feedback.
A second negative about waiting for the RFP is that your team may not be committed and onboard with why they will win. When they understand and buy into your win strategy they can more easily gather additional data to back up your approach prior to the RFP and then write text which soundly defends your win strategy. This is much preferred to having a reviewer modify the first draft of text by inserting themes and win strategy statements later.
Furthermore, if you wait until the last minute to generate your win strategy, it may be too late to have a viable strategy to get you the win and there may be no time to develop a new approach. In many of these cases it may be better to no-bid than to continue with a flawed strategy. More often than not, the team will continue to spend the money to write the proposal anyway, in spite of the low probability of winning.
In summary, if you develop your win strategy early and get feedback from your customer on your approach you will substantially improve your Pwin. Your customer will not be surprised by what they find in your proposal, you can modify your strategy based on customer feedback, your authors will more easily help you identify items supporting the win strategy and you will not be struggling in the end-game to revise a flawed approach.
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