Welcome to Advantage Consulting

Advantage Consulting is supporting an opportunity for a large firm to engage the services of several experienced Sales Executives to work in a program that will contact C-Level executives of Fortune 100 companies in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions. The program supports the sale of an enterprise-wide managed software product and service. The initial organizations that would be interested are in the Financial, Health Care, Higher Education, Pharmaceutical and Retail sectors. This is not a Federal opportunity. The company providing the solution will provide the market entry plan and technical sales support people.

The requirement is for sales people, who are experienced in these specific commercial markets, understand the key market factors, and who bring contacts in the areas. In other words, they can "speak the customer�s language." The task will be qualifying and arranging for initial meetings with CEO/President, CFO, CIO and CTO management that will result in technical briefings by the large company to present the enterprise-wide solution. The sales person will be expected to follow up to close sales. The opportunity is immediate; compensation will be a base plus success fees.

Please contact Sid Jaffe at sjaffe@acibiz.com or 703-642-5153 to discuss this opportunity.

NCSES Analytical & Technical Support Services (ATSS), Division of Acquisition and Cooperative Support

If you want the free full summary of this target go to: http://login.epipeline.com/limitedDisplay?ID=FOSRCUSA22008&FLAG=SUMMARY. This target is only available for a short period of time.

If you need help designing and executing your capture program or proposals to win this procurement contact Sid Jaffe, at 703-642-5153.

Then Art of the Proposal - Capture Team Participation (Sixth in the series)
By Bill Hamilton, Vice President, Advantage Consulting, Inc.

This decision to pursue an opportunity is usually made about six months before a solicitation is expected. It kicks-off many things, including opening an account to pay for bid and proposal efforts (B&P), and activating the capture team, headed by a capture manager.

The capture manager is typically the person most knowledgeable about the issuing organization and about the opportunity itself. It may be the prospective program manager. It may be the marketing manager who identified the opportunity. Or, it may be a person who came from that organization. The best capture managers are resident technical experts. Some companies use a capture administrator approach where the leader is not the expert but acts as the effort manager; this approach requires that subject matter expertise be added to the team to provide knowledge.

The capture team nucleus includes several prospective senior project managers. If the capture manager is not the prospective project manager, that person will be on the team. Some companies use the business developer who identified the opportunity as capture manager, if they do, business development duties should be significantly reduced to enable capture efforts to be accomplished.

A corporate officer will serve on the capture team. This is normally the division head that will manage the program when you win. This person is critical to success because he or she is your advocate at the corporate level. In addition to the managers, the capture team will have access to subject matter experts who know the technology being applied and the agency or organization using the proposed technology. There should be a cost analyst permanently assigned to the capture team so the team can cost all solutions as they are developed. Capture is a detail-oriented process and there should never be any surprises during solution development, particularly in the financial arena.

Capture activities involve convincing the customer that your solution is the one they should choose. It is an active operation consisting of a series of demonstrations and instructional sessions. Good capture is not possible without access to the customer at all levels. It is a tactical effort concentrating on one opportunity with the object of winning. The capture team is tasked to develop a winning solution, determine the winning themes for the proposal, and identify the strategies to implement them.

All questions and comments are welcome. Contact Bill Hamilton at bhamilton@acibiz.com or by phone at 703-642-5153 and let's talk.

Training the Capture Team
By Sid Jaffe, President, Advantage Consulting, Inc.

The requisite capture activity for a recompete is too often taken for granted by incumbent companies and their project teams. We frequently learn about contractors whose project teams are simply "waiting" for the recompete to come out without doing any preliminary work; the same work that won them the project years before, the work their competitors are doing now to unseat them.

The participants on Source Selection Boards generally change on recompetes as people leave the Government or move to different positions. This means there is a need to re-establish your team's value proposition and confirm the win themes and "dreams" for the coming years. Consider having Advantage Consulting train your team in Capture techniques, using specific strategies for the opportunity your team is pursuing. Also consider tuning up your teams' oral and written proposal skills. To learn more about how we can support this important effort contact Sid Jaffe, sjaffe@acibiz.com, at 703-642-5153.

Business Tools Can Make 2012 Results Better Than 2011!
By John Bender, Vice President, Advantage Consulting, Inc.

Now that you have done your end-of-year assessment on your business processes-including finding, tracking, qualifying, bidding and performing on business opportunities-you should be ready to take action. Improvements made early in the year provide results the entire year. Waiting to make changes only reduces your ultimate payback.

We have experience helping companies improve their business development and proposal processes with training, software tools, and shoulder-to-shoulder coaching. New and improved software tools are continuously coming out that can help make real changes in your business results.

Don't let another year pass. Contact John Bender at 703-642-5153 or jbender@acibiz.com for details on what is available and what might work best for you and your company.

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can never fool a Mom.