Capture Management: Building Your Win Strategy
by Dr. Pat Dougherty, VP Strategic Planning & DOD, SSD

Everyone has their own definition of “win strategy”; I will begin by presenting mine to put this article in the right context.

A win strategy is a statement that describes why the customer will select your team. It includes your key discriminators and several major win themes. Your win strategy provides the overarching guidance for tactical decisions that are made by your team particularly during the pre-proposal and proposal period.

I have a process that I use to develop a team’s win strategy. It begins with the identification of the following:

This information is compiled in a brainstorming session that consists of key technical and management staff who have been involved in the capture process or relevant predecessor programs.

From this set of information, 4-6 major win themes are developed. The most important theme statements are then combined into one statement that summarizes your win strategy. You benefit greatly when this process is performed with your key staff members because you can glean from their expertise and experience to enhance your tactics and also have the opportunity to achieve their “buy-in” to the final win strategy. The process of assembling this information in a brainstorming session typically takes about 2-3 hours.

A significant benefit to having your main proposal authors join management in generating your win statement is that they will continue to think about your overarching strategy as they write the first draft of the proposal text. It’s much better to incorporate your strategy into the original text than to try to add it later after a Red Team review.

A win strategy statement might consist of something like the following:

Our company will be selected to build gizmo A because we have the only relevant and successful predecessor program, key participants from the predecessor program, and because we provide a credible, low cost solution.

As mentioned previously, your win strategy provides guidance for many of your tactical decisions. In the example above, your win strategy would drive you tactically to take extra care to ensure that your cost truly is “credible”. You would then diligently find relevant past performance cost data for each of your basis of estimates in your costing volume. Additionally, you promised to bring the same staff who worked the predecessor program to this opportunity, so tactically you must re-align their work load to allow them to join this team.

I find that the win strategy statement and the themes continue to evolve even while the proposal is being written. This seems to be common as more information is revealed. An example might be that you find you can’t bring all the key personnel to your new pursuit because of other high priority programs. As a result, you would modify your statement slightly to cover this change.

In summary, build your win strategy well before the RFP is released and then update it as needed until your team starts writing the proposal. Avoid modifying during the proposal writing unless it is unavoidable. When your team is on-board with the win strategy, your authors will have a much easier time convincing your customer in the proposal why they really want to select your company.