Understanding Pursuit Capture Forms

The best competitive advantage in service proposals is an information advantage. An information advantage enables you to write a better proposal, even though everyone is responding to the same RFP. 

You don't achieve an information advantage by randomly fishing for information. You gain an information advantage by knowing what information to seek, gaining more of it than your competitors, and then doing the best job of converting what you learned into a better proposal.

MustWin Now guides you to the right information, how to best make use of it in your proposal, and then builds it into your proposal section plans.

Pursuit Capture Forms for when you start before the RFP is released

MustWin Now uses Pursuit Capture Forms to collect information before the RFP is released. For each topic, MustWin Now has a simple question and answer form to complete. This prompts you to seek the information and provides a place to collect the answers.

Pursuit Capture Form Topics

Topic for building an information advantage	MustWin Now Pursuit Capture Form
What customer insights do you have?	Customer: Insight (5)
What are the steps customer’s procurement process?	Customer: Procurement Process (13)
What do you know about the opportunity?	Opportunity: Awareness (14)
What will it take to design the winning offering?	Opportunity: Offering Design (14)
What is the competitive environment?	Competitive: Environment (7)
Is there an incumbent?	Competitive: Incumbent Contract (4)
What will it take to design the winning offering?	Competitive: Teaming (3)

The number of questions on each form is shown in parenthesis.

There are a total of 60 questions. You will never get all of the answers you'd like to have. That is not the point. The point is that the answers you do get form the basis of your information advantage. The forms and the questions asked can be customized, so you can make them reflect the specifics of your business. You accumulate answers in the Pursuit Capture Forms until the RFP is released.

Proposal Input Forms for when you start at RFP release

If you are starting at RFP release, there is a separate set of forms to use to collect proposal input. They are different because instead of initiating research, they are designed to assess what you already know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. The proposal input forms enable you to document what you know so you can map it to the proposal.

The topics for the proposal input forms include:

• Proposal Input: Change (5)
• Proposal Input: Data Calls (6)
• Proposal Input: Graphics (12)
• Proposal Input: Insight about what matters (11)
• Proposal Input: Proposal sections and approaches (8)
• Proposal Input: Teaming (7)
• Proposal Input: Transition (12)
• Self-Awareness (6)

You know stuff. So what?

Once you have answers to the questions on the forms, you are ready to assess:

• How does what you know impact what it will take to win?
• How does what you know impact what you should say in the proposal?

MustWin Now makes this easy by providing a quick way to turn the answers in the Pursuit Capture Forms into instructions for proposal writers.

Once the RFP is released, you map the instructions to the proposal outline, just like you cross-reference the RFP requirements to the outline.

The result is that you not only have an outline with all the relevant RFP requirements mapped to it, you also have instructions for proposal writers that are based on what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment.

So first MustWin Now guides you to develop an information advantage. Then it prompts you to assess the impact of what you know on the proposal and convert your raw intelligence into instructions for proposal writers. The result is that it helps you drive your information advantage into the proposal where it must end up if it's going to help you win.