How do you measure and validate capture progress?

During Bob Lohfeld’s recent Bold trends in capture and proposal management webinar, part of the Lohfeld Business Winning Webinar Series, Bob presented some of the more interesting trends in capture and proposal management and discussed how these are changing the competitive landscape for companies looking to increase their win probabilities.

Bob answered a number of questions for webinar participants during and after the webinar. This blog series presents those questions and Bob’s answers.

Q: Using the dashboard in slide #9, how are you creating a score, and how is the score being validated? I see a number, but what created that score?

A: You can use numbers instead of colors to assess how well each activity is performed. Don’t make the math too complicated. You can equate a numerical rating of four to a blue score, three to a green score, and so on.

Personally, I prefer the color scores because people will tend to rig the numerical scores to get the rating that they want. With the color scores, I asked them to justify why they chose that color and then listen to the explanation to see if it has merit.

Some of our more sophisticated clients have independent organizations that validate the assessments. For example, if you have an organization that does competitive assessments, then they can review the competitive assessment for a particular procurement and offer a professional opinion about the quality of the work that was done.

I don’t think you have to be too precise in this exercise and that notional scores will help you achieve what you want, which is to stop funding programs that are losers and help draw management attention to areas where your capture team needs assistance. If you can do that, your dashboards will be pretty effective.

Click to watch the webinar replay and download Bob’s presentation.

How do you measure and validate capture progress? Send your thoughts to me at BWingate@LohfeldConsulting.com, and we’ll share your advice in upcoming posts!

Lohfeld Consulting

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