By Doña Storey, President & Founder,
Every year I update my strategic plan by first looking back at the previous year’s wins, losses and, of course, profitability. I do a high level SWOT analysis in order to lay out a plan for the upcoming year: fine tuning business processes and enhancing best practices. I then implement what I have referred to as the 360° Branding Plan™. There are three key level one areas that you should examine to implement your plan:
• Capture management for finding bigger, better opportunities
• Improving your competitive edge with proposals that win
• Managing contracts won.
Level two areas that are impacted are attracting and retaining the best team players in the industry both internally as employees and externally as strategic partners.
Fine tuning the capture management process is simply understanding how to track the funding for opportunities that closely align with your company’s strengths that will result in greater profitability. Understanding this concept and having a team that knows how to perform in this area can focus your assets for greater returns. Using a SWOT analysis to clearly define your company’s strengths will allow you to align them and track those opportunities that are worth expending assets in the world of marketing and proposals.
When identifying new opportunities use simple yet clear evaluation factors to evaluate them such as: Can we really win after reviewing our performance and pricing? Can we perform? Can we finance it? Is it profitable? Does it grow our brand? The next step that will make a difference is having a strong proposal management process. Having a true process in place and not just a person to write a document is critical in growing in the federal sector. Managing the proposal process should be like managing a project for a client, but in this case you are your own client. Even the smallest company can effectively compete for large projects when this critical process is fine tuned. The process is scalable. I know that when I grew my business this was the single most important business process that I learned to manage internally without ever outsourcing any part of it.
Preparation in advance of those items that the government repeatedly asks for should be continuously updated and ready to go at a moment’s notice for any competition no matter how large or small with any timeline no matter how short or long. As examples do you continuously update key personnel resumes?
Develop Your
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360 Branding Plan™