The How of
Elevating Your
Probability of Win
T H E S E C R E T F O R M U L A TO W I N
BUSINESS IN THE NEW NORMAL OF
GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING
MBD i White Paper
Mastering Business
Development, Inc.
7422 Carmel Executive Park Drive
Suite 202
Charlotte, NC 28226
Phone: 704-553-0000
© 2015 MBDi All Rights Reserved | 0401
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The How of Elevating Your Probability
of Win
Driving Business
Development Results
T H E S E C R E T F O R M U L A TO W I N B U S I N E S S I N T H E N E W N O R M A L
OF GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING
Unless you’ve been in a cloistered environment for the last few years, you know the
defense contracting business has changed dramatically. You can no longer merely rely
on writing a good proposal to win business. This environment has validated the old
quote, “If you don’t know by bid day if you’ve won the business … someone else has.”
You have to be proactive and engage prospects early in their buying or acquisition
cycle, when they are involved with solution or concept development. Doing so allows
you to consultatively engage with them to fully understand their needs and wants. You
can then assist them in identifying the right solution. If required, you’re in the position
to “shape” their needs, wants and ultimately the RFP requirements. Remaining
reactive, merely responding to RFPs leaves you at a major disadvantage.
Without customer engagement you will never truly understand their needs, and you
then have limited opportunity to change requirements that may already be shaped by
your competition. Simply responding to RFPs without prior engagement or shaping,
positions you well behind the curve in the buying process. As a consequence, your
revenue growth will be limited to winning a small percentage of the proposals you write.
THE CASE OF THE SNUBBED SUB
A Director of Business Development in a firm providing systems to the intelligence
community shared this scenario. His company, a sub on a contract, was dependent
upon a Prime for a large portion of their ongoing revenue. Due to turmoil in the
GovCon industry, the contract was cancelled and the revenue dried up. His company
was left to offset the resulting revenue shortfall on their own, or face drastic
circumstances. His team had no choice but to abandon their reactive, dependent
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MBDi White Paper: The How of Elevating Your Probability of Win
model and embrace the thinking and skills of a proactive Client Engagement Process
(CEP). After directly engaging prospects, they realized their services were in high
demand. Through directly understanding prospect issues, they were able to replace 75%
of the lost revenue within six months.
Don’t assume that moving from a reactive/dependent stance to a proactive client
engagement model was accomplished easily in this turnaround case. It wasn’t. But now,
proactively utilizing their newly independent position and procuring business on their
own, the firm is predicted to grow revenue by 50% this year.
THE MISSING LINK OF HUMINT® (HUMAN INTELLIGENCE)
Most organizations have
well-documented policies and
processes detailing what to do
and when to do it in each phase
of the BD or business acquisition
process. The vast majority lack
the how to component of client
interaction and a purposedriven Client Engagement
Process to gather HUMINT®.
Most organizations have well-documented policies and processes detailing what to do
and when to do it in each phase of the BD or business acquisition process. The vast
majority, however, lack the how to component of client interaction and a purposedriven Client Engagement Process to gather HUMINT®.
The importance of client engagement is referenced in almost all Business Development
methodologies. However, it remains a mystery to many. Most companies leave this up
to individual interpretation. They mistakenly believe that their BD Team knows how to
do it. A BD Professional recently shared, “Even if we knew what information we needed
to get, we have no clue how to get it!” This is especially true in the GovCon environment,
where BD personnel tend to be hired more for their past relationships or roles than their
prior Business Development experience.
In our observation over the past 30 years, successful BD professionals utilize a
consistent and repeatable Client Engagement Process to engage prospects early in
the buying cycle. In organizations with low win rates, we generally see a different
trend. In this case, the BD team lacks the ability to engage with prospects beyond a
superficial level. They do not understand what customer Intel is critical to gather, and
they certainly don’t know what questions to ask to acquire it. The result is an assumed
or poorly extrapolated view of the opportunity based on hunches or invalidated
information. The consequence is ineffective decision-making during reviews, which
in turn leads to valuable time and budget resources being spent on unqualified
opportunities with a low probability of winning.
Validated HUMINT, gathered using a CEP, is the critical component needed for
qualifying or disqualifying decisions made during the Opportunity Identification and
Qualification (OI&Q)i SM Phase of a company’s BD process. If the CEP is so important,
then why aren’t more BD Professionals able to do it effectively? In reality, customer
engagement is not intuitive. It’s not an inherent skill or process that everyone
instinctively knows how to execute. It is a deliberately planned and executed four-phase,
multistep Intel gathering process, which results in HUMINT. HUMINT is intelligence
gathered by engaging in client-focused and trust-based dialogues with qualified
leads and prospects concerning their problems and concerns. It cannot be gathered
by analyzing data and information from online investigation, paid research or other
listening-posts.
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MBDi White Paper: The How of Elevating Your Probability of Win
A CEP provides you an opportunity to validate or triangulate information, data or other
HUMINT, by asking questions about information obtained and confirming it from
other sources. With validated HUMINT, you “get” what your customers’ real issues are,
and you understand their concerns better than anyone else. As the MBDi Intelligence
Pyramid SM illustrates, validated HUMINT transcends data, information and general
knowledge/human Intel. In order to gather and validate HUMINT to support your
decision making, you need a documented, institutionalized and repeatable Client
Engagement Process.
This process, when utilized correctly, builds trust, allowing in-depth conversations about
issues, and provides you a unique advantage as indicated in the following example.
C E P I N I N T E R N AT I O N A L P U R S U I T S
A retired military client, whose second career was in government contracting, has now
embarked on a third career working directly for the U.S. State Department. He recently
explained how using the proactive thinking and behavior of a tailored CEP enabled him
to deal with the personalities and protocol intricacies in a totally different environment
from his previous two careers. His current role is within an unstable area in the Middle
East, controlled by a newly formed government. Using a CEP learned from MBDi,
he and his team are able to better understand and fulfill their mission of providing
high level services to a diverse group of customers, which includes career diplomats,
government contractors and the leadership of the foreign country itself.
Additionally, his knowledge of customer engagement psychology enables him to be at
ease with slowing down and sharing tea with foreign government leaders to build the
personal relationships regarded as necessary components in the business culture of
the Middle East. Using a CEP to ask the right questions and acquire HUMINT on those
issues which are significantly important to all individual stakeholders, allows him to
understand, prioritize and provide the services required to all parties involved.
A CEP is a highly disciplined Intel-gathering process with the sole purpose of providing
intelligence to qualify and/or shape opportunities. It is a learned system of gathering
HUMINT by following four frequently overlooked steps:
1. Complete homework before a call;
2. Develop a proactive call plan and scripted questions to gather HUMINT;
3. Execute the call;
4. Utilize the intelligence gathered to assess and update your plans or business case.
THE 4 PHASES OF THE HUMINT CLIENT ENGAGEMENT PROCESS
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MBDi White Paper: The How of Elevating Your Probability of Win
This process is not an isolated methodology to pull out and use now and then in business
pursuits. Every role within an organization that interacts with customers can benefit by
using a disciplined CEP … from accounting to purchasing. This is a protocol that should
be followed every time a prospect or client is contacted by anyone within an organization.
D R O P T H E “ D O G & P O N Y S H O W ” P R E S E N TAT I O N M E N TA L I T Y
A CEP is also highly effective in commercial business pursuits, as described in the
following case. An energy client, with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, describes his
transformation after being trained in the thinking, discipline and components of a CEP.
From his engineering background, he originally believed the only way to develop new,
strategic business was to offer impressive multi-slide presentations and briefings to
prospects concerning his firm’s highly regarded technical expertise. He now realizes the
value in doing homework, planning calls and scripting Intel-gathering questions for use
in customer engagements. He describes discovering the CEP and discontinuing the “dog
and pony show” expert presentations, as a liberating experience; one he wishes he’d
been exposed to when he started his career as an engineer 30 years ago.
Your credibility as a Business
Development Professional is
determined by the level and type
of questions you ask,
not the statements you make.
A CEP applies to organic opportunities also. This same client believes that young engineers,
serving as his company’s client managers, would benefit greatly by learning to execute a
CEP. They’d learn to ask questions and gather HUMINT about additional problems to
uncover organic growth opportunities while interacting with customers on projects. His
hunting and winning new business added to their organic/farming efforts can provide the
potential for exponential revenue growth, even in a competitive, energy-based industry.
When engaging your customers in a dialog, it’s easier and far more enlightening to ask
intelligent questions than to make bold, sell-centered statements. Executing a CEP,
you have to think, prepare and practice your questions. According to another client
serving as the Chief Engineer for major energy projects, “It’s amazing how smart you
can look when you ask an intelligent dumb question.” According to him, when you try
to influence prospects when giving “expert” presentations, “It’s amazing how dumb you
can look when you try to be the smartest person in the room.” In fact, your credibility as
a Business Development Professional is determined by the level and type of questions
you ask, not the statements you make.
You can only acquire HUMINT by connecting with customers directly, engaging in a
dialog and asking questions. Digging up data any other way doesn’t suffice. There’s
a reason you won’t find a crystal ball included with your BD/marketing materials.
Without HUMINT, your early pursuit decisions are made on educated guesses. It should
be clear that executing a proactive, deliberate Client Engagement Process is 180 degrees
from reactively submitting a bid after little or no upfront customer contact.
Take a tip from the tortoise’s playbook, not the hare’s race strategy. The CEP is a slow,
deliberate game plan to win business. It’s not a sprint to deliver a proposal in response
to an RFP.
H O W D O W E K N O W T H AT ?
The Director of BD for an aerospace component manufacturing company detailed
how he’s directed his team to slow down in their quest for opportunities. They are now
© 2015 MBDi All Rights Reserved | 0401
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MBDi White Paper: The How of Elevating Your Probability of Win
required to invest time to complete extensive homework before any client engagement,
and then to plan the call with scripted questions to gather HUMINT. The objective of
all of this pre-contact activity is to understand what is known and unknown about the
suspected opportunity.
During WWII, U.S. Army General George S. Patton, Jr. was quoted as saying, “We
must always know exactly what we know and what we do not know. Never get the
two confused! If we get confused over what we know we can cause many men to die.”
According to reports, Patton directed his staff to sort through the known and unknown
facts to identify exactly what they knew to be true and what they didn’t. Supposedly, he
frequently asked them, “How do we know that?”
Another classic case of securing data, but not validated HUMINT, is the controversy
which still exists over the performance of U.S. and allied intelligence groups in
collecting and evaluating information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
It’s this WMD Intel disparity which led to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. The
reliability of data and sources has been questioned. Experts have suggested that some
human intelligence may have actually been purposeful deception by Iraqi intelligence
and security services. Exiles and defectors may have provided other intelligence seeking
to influence policy.
While pursue/no pursue decisions in the arena of Business Development are far from
being in the same category as life and death military battle determinations, HUMINT is
crucial for business decision making. According to our aerospace client, it’s of the utmost
importance for his team to acquire and confirm firsthand, factual data directly from the
customer on an opportunity. By doing so, they know where their company’s engineered
products fit within a program from a priority, funding and project timeline perspective.
Client Homework
Before the Call
Opportunity Analysis
In another example from this same client, he learned from experience that slowing
down to do homework and research before every customer call is a critical step.
According to him, this is true even when you’ve secured the assistance of peer-to-peer
or flag-to-flag introductions on your first contact with a client. In one case, by taking
the time to do homework, his team discovered that the government program executive
they were planning to meet was a former naval aviator and Annapolis graduate. With
this knowledge, they arranged to include a colleague with the same background in this
introductory meeting. Their homework and resulting background knowledge facilitated
in bonding and building trust upfront with this prospective customer.
CONCLUSION
Executing a CEP is not complicated; however it takes discipline, planning and practice.
It forces you to slow down and plan your engagement. A CEP makes you think about
how best to structure your prospect call. You must script qualifying questions prior to
the call to turn your customer dialog around from making statements and presentations
to asking insightful questions. It forces you to practice, drill and rehearse, raising your
confidence level ahead of the meeting. With these steps accomplished, you execute the
call and subsequently assess and utilize the intelligence gathered to update your plans
or business case. Performing these steps at any stage of your customer engagement will
differentiate you from the majority of your BD peers. Do this early in the prospect’s
buying cycle, and you will secure new business.
© 2015 MBDi All Rights Reserved | 0401
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Who We Are
Founded in 1979, MBDi is a global Business Development services firm headquartered
in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, providing expertise in Business Development best
practices in the national security, defense, scientific, energy and engineering industries.
Our Mission
Our Mission is to transform our clients’ organizations and people into proven Business
Development leaders by addressing the conditions and behaviors that assure positive
culture change creating clear paths to professional success.
Our Business Development Services Include:
S T R AT E G Y & P L A N N I N G
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Strategy Development & Planning
Objectives Measures and Initiatives
Core Capability and Market Alignment
C O N S U LT I N G
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BD Process Design
BD Development and Improvement
Implementation Coaching
CRM Implementation
E D U C AT I O N , C O A C H I N G & P R O F E S S I O N A L D E V E L O P M E N T
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Mastering Business Development® Workshop Series
Corporate Curriculum Development
Personnel Training Needs
Skill Gap Analysis
Individual Coaching
Team Coaching
PERSONNEL SERVICES
Driving Business
Development Results
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Recruiting & Candidate Assessment
Incentive Compensation Plans
Professional Development Plans
Position Descriptions
Mastering Business
Development, Inc.
7422 Carmel Executive Park Drive
Suite 202
Charlotte, NC 28226
Phone: 704-553-0000
© 2015 MBDi All Rights Reserved | 0401
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