Capture planning is now a common approach for winning new business. You can even get an APMP certificate in Capture Management. But what about planning for a rebid? When you’re the incumbent there’s sometimes less focus on this early effort. Perhaps on the assumption you already have customer relationships, know what the customer wants, and they already know you: so less effort is required in preparation.
Too often that’s just not true.
The answer is to have a clear Recapture Plan, the equivalent – but different – process for rebids to what the Capture plan is for new bids.
Why is a Recapture Plan different?
Our experience shows there are often different attitudes and assumptions at play when rebidding existing business compared to winning new business.
These, as well as the fact you’re already delivering the business, mean there are different approaches and different areas of emphasis that need to be used in a successful Recapture Plan. For example:
- As you’re already delivering the business there can be an assumption you already know the customer. That isn’t always completely true. You’ll know some people, who you’ve dealt with during delivery. But are they the real decision makers in the next procurement? Often they’re not. A Recapture Plan (and the Recapture Manager leading this effort) needs to overcome this assumption and focus on ‘getting to know the customer all over again’.
- There can be a tendency to underplay changes in the customer requirements. The Rebid is the customer’s opportunity to make changes to the service they’re receiving. The full impact of (and reasons for) these changes can be underestimated by incumbents, influenced by their existing delivery experience. The Recapture Plan has to focus on the changes and overcome any sense these changes are minor and can be ignored.
- As you ‘re already delivering the existing contract in a certain way (especially if you‘re doing so successfully against existing measures), there can be an in-built inertia against looking afresh at what the best solution going forward might be. A Recapture Plan must ensure you look beyond your existing solution.
- Being the incumbent, the customer already has direct experience of your ability to deliver, and your approach to them and the contract. This usually gives you an advantage – but only if you can effectively exploit it. The Recapture Plan needs to analyse all the information gained over the period of the existing contract. Both about the customer, about the contract, and particularly about your own performance.
- If things haven’t gone well on the contract, or if the customer is looking for significant change in the new contract, the customer’s experience of your existing delivery can work against you in their perception of you. The Recapture Plan needs to identify these potentially damaging perceptions and overcome them.
- As the incumbent you have delivery team ‘on the ground’. The Recapture Plan must balance the experience and knowledge of the existing delivery team with the experience of bidding processes bought by a bid team, and the new and innovative ideas and challenges to assumptions that ‘outsiders’ to the delivery team can offer
How do you put a Recapture Plan in place?
Get an early and strong kick off to the Recapture process
Get a clear starting date to the recapture effort by running a workshop or meeting focusing on the rebid at least 6 months prior to the official customer start of the bid process. Get people from the contract team, the bid team, other departments who’ll be involved in the rebid effort and others such as Account Managers, Sales people etc if they’re part of your structure, to attend.
Focus the day on asking questions about the customer, the contract and the rebid to see what’s already ‘known’, uncover assumptions and, crucially to find out what you don’t know as a team about the rebid.
Exposing areas where the assembled team are unsure, or things they don’t know can overcome any presumptions that all’s well and little action is required (or required yet). Create a set of actions from the workshop. This will give you as the Recapture Manager a reason to drive effort by people and review progress.
We say this should be done at least 6 months before the customer officially starts the rebid process. That will vary depending on the contract, industry, customer. Often it will be earlier. The principle is to start before the customer starts making decisions about the rebid which you might need to have input to, know about or maybe even influence. Because after those decisions are made they’ll be harder to change. So, think about:
- When will be customer be deciding on the timing of the rebid (and who’s making that decision)?
- When will decisions on the scope of the new contract be made (and again, by whom)?
- Who’s writing the specification, and when?
- What about price vs quality decisions?
- Who’s writing the questions, the evaluation criteria, deciding on who’ll evaluate (and who are those evaluators)?
Just as with a bid that’s new to your organisation, all these decisions and others will most likely be made months before the procurement is published. The customer will go through a process about these decisions. Who’s involved in that process? Does the customer have a ‘standard’ procurement preparation process they’ll be following? What research are they doing about the market, other customers’ procurement, end user needs and wants?
Your Recapture Plan needs to be ahead of these decisions, not finding out late about decisions already made.
Set out a clear calendar of actions and reviews for the Recapture Plan
Your initial review of the rebid above will have created a set of initial tasks, and some action and focus. However, there’s a danger if you don’t keep momentum going that focus will drift. To maintain the initiative and keep a focus on the Recapture Plan, moving forward the actions needed to win, make sure you put in place a calendar of actions and reviews to check progress and readiness.
Put your resources in place
Unless you’re running a very small rebid, the job of the Recapture Manager is not to do all the work yourself. Instead, it’s to coordinate, manage and lead the activities of the teams doing the work. As with a new bid, this is likely to comprise people for various departments as well as members of the bid team.
But with rebids you’re also working with the operational team delivering the existing contract. They’ll have a vital part to play in the rebid. They form part of the team creating the new solution, and providing costings and materials for the written submission. But they will also, though their actions on the existing contract, influence your chances of winning.
What to focus on in your Recapture Plan
Creating a calendar and process, and bringing together resources gives your Recapture Plan structure. But to win you need to be focusing your time on the right things:
Review your existing contract performance
Assuming the customer knows you and what you’ve done, and not using it strategically in the rebid is a common mistake for incumbents. But this performance is unlikely to be at your fingertips for immediate use when you need it.
To properly understand your performance you need time. That’s why you should start collating and analysing information about the existing contract as one of the first actions in your Recapture Plan
Broaden customer relationships and your understanding of the customer
A key aspect of a Capture Plan is building relationships with your new, potential customer and gaining an understanding of their needs. As we’ve said above, there’s often a presumption in a rebid that you already have these relationships. But for the rebid, other people will become more involved – and have influence and potentially ultimate control of the key decisions. Typically, these won’t be people who get involved with day-to-day ongoing contract delivery –and therefore your team may not know them, or their priorities.
Just as with a Capture Plan, a key part of the Recapture Plan is to build relationships with these key decision makers and influencers. Relying just on your existing relationships could mean you miss out on vital information, and key opportunities to influence.
Build a clear understanding of the customer’s strategic needs
As the incumbent you should have had more time and exposure to the customer to understand the customer’s priorities. But a key part of your Recapture effort should be to make sure you really do understand these strategic aims and priorities properly. And understand how they relate to your contract – and how your contract can help the customer achieve these goals.
Your experience over the contract will be part of that – but your Recapture effort needs to test, challenge and build on any existing knowledge and assumptions.
Focus on what’s changing in your customer’s needs and the rebid
We said at the start of the paper that one of the reasons why Recapture efforts need to be different to Capture Plans is that there’s a tendency for incumbents to underestimate the amount of change there will be in the customer’s rebid.
Make sure, from the start of the Recapture process, you’re focusing on finding out what changes the customer has faced and will be facing, and what changes they’re likely to be looking for in the next contract.
Challenge internal assumptions and inertia early, even if it’s uncomfortable and potentially creates angst and even resistance. Any angst now will be less than what you feel if you lose due to not making the changes you needed to win.
Develop a new outline solution early and test it with the customer
As part of your Recapture Plan you should be putting together a new solution as early as you reasonably can, as you collate the information on what your customer will be looking for in the next contract and what’s available in the market.
But you also need to be creating a new solution that will challenge your existing assumptions from your existing contract delivery of what is right. We call this a Greenfield solution. It’s a solution based only on the new needs you’ve found out the customer wants – with no reference to how you deliver at the moment, or the ‘inertia’ to real fresh thinking and change your existing delivery model can create.
Creating this solution from the ground up will give you a fresh insight into what might be possible. It will give you a basis on which to look at your existing delivery and challenge all aspects of it.
By creating your new outline solution early it also gives you the opportunity to test it with your customer contacts, get their feedback and potentially modify it further
Make necessary changes to your existing delivery
As we’ve said before, the big difference between Capture Planning and Recapture Planning is that as the incumbent you’re already delivering to the customer. One of the big benefits of having a proper Recapture Plan implemented early is you can influence your existing delivery during the period of the Plan (the months prior to and during the rebid itself) to put yourself in a better position to win. This can take a number of forms:
Fixing issues
Ideally your existing contract delivery will be perfect. Too often though there are either minor or underlying issues.
It might seem too late to fix a problem in the last few months of what might have been a long contract. And it’s true that fixing the problem now is not as good as fixing it earlier (or not having it happen at all). But it’s much better than leaving it and saying the submission you’ll solve it in the next contract (or even ignoring it).
If you’ve not been able (or not bothered) to resolve the problem during the years of the existing contract, why would the customer believe your promises do it in the next?
Getting new information
Another issue you might identify in the early review of your contract and in the early part of the Recapture Planning effort is that you have missing information or data. One example is customer, and particularly end user feedback.
Even if you only have time for one iteration of a survey, it’s often worth doing one. It will at least give you some data you can use – and it demonstrates (even if late) to the customer that you’re willing and capable of listening (and hopefully acting on the results).
Testing your new solution
If you’ve identified new ways of working as part of your new solution early enough, you might have time to test them in your existing operation.
Some might argue that anything new should be held back until the rebid submission to prevent it getting included in the final customer specification for all to respond to, or leaked to competitors.
But our experience is that this danger is outweighed by the potential benefit you can gain from;
- showing the customer you’re capable of delivering something new,
- of testing the customer’s reaction to the new idea,
- being able to show data in your submission about the benefits delivered
- gaining an understanding of the costs and details of how to deliver
- avoiding the customer asking ‘if you can deliver that in the next contract, why haven’t you delivered it already in the current one?’
Influencing the customer
Just as a Capture Plan is more than just bid preparation, so is a Recapture Plan. How can you use the relationship you’ve built, and the credibility you’ve (hopefully) gained through your delivery and Recapture efforts to influence the customer (within appropriate boundaries of course) in ways which will give you advantage in the rebid?
Can you avoid a rebid altogether by putting in a proactive proposal showing the changes you’ll make (and the benefits they’ll deliver) if the customer re-awards you the contract without a competition? That’s much more likely to work in the private sector than Public / Government. But worth thinking about.
Can you get an extension to the contract, if that’s an advantage to you (it isn’t always)? The longest extension might not be the best in all cases. Is there a particular time when your competitors are busy when a rebid might suit you more?
And are there changes you could agree to make in delivery during the extension which bring you closer to what the new contract will be asking for (so you can evidence to the customer before and during the bid you can deliver the new requirements)?
Can you influence how the customer runs the rebid – for example the type of procurement rules or process used; using a framework where you’re strong vs competitors; the quality vs price ratios they use; the specification; the questions they ask?
Are there benefits, savings, ways of working which will benefit the customer you can (perhaps having tested and proven them as above) influence them to include in the new contract requirements? This should give you a benefit over competitors as not only have you got credibility for suggesting them, but you’ve hopefully shown the customer they work, know more of what they cost, and can evidence how they will work for this customer.
Summary
As the incumbent you should be have considerable advantages vs your competitors.
Too many incumbents squander many of these advantages by failing to prepare early enough, with the right vigour, and with the right approach.
By creating and implementing a Recapture Plan you should be able to make the most of your advantages and win more of your rebids.
