Your capture plan is fine, but no one is executing it

Last quarter you sat in a gate review and heard this: "The customer's been buried, so we didn't meet with them as planned. Relationship's solid, though. Nothing to worry about." You nodded, and they moved on to the next slide.

I've been in those reviews. The name on the contact plan was a real person. The call was due in May. It's now September, and the two of them have never spoken. Your capture plan called for it. Your contact plan assigned it. Your gate review let them off the hook, and you were complicit.

THE GAP IS NOT THE PLAN

Your capture plan isn't the problem. Every capture process preaches early customer contact, requirement shaping, co-solutioning, and win strategy execution. The words are right.

The strategy is never the bottleneck. Bridges Business Consultancy found 80 percent of leaders say their companies are good at developing strategy, only 44 percent say they implement it well, and a mere 10 percent achieve most of their objectives. Your team doesn't need a better capture template. They need to execute the one sitting in your binder.

THE CONTACT PLAN IS NOT A PHONE BOOK

Open the customer relationship and contact plan slide, and you'll find names, titles, and org charts. A relationship-strength column filled in from memory. An owner column filled in with whoever has the closest title. You won't find what the customer cares about, what intel we last gathered, what we want to learn next, or when the next call is scheduled. Half the rows are empty. The other half haven't changed since the plan was written.

Populating the contact plan feels like progress, and it is the easy part. The hard part is executing on it. Meeting the customer and gathering the intel you need. This is the part your team puts off.

THE EXCUSE YOU ACCEPTED

The delay always ends with a plausible excuse. The customer didn't want to meet. I didn't know who the right person was. There was nothing new to bring them. Each excuse is true. Each one is also a training gap presented as a scheduling problem.

The customer didn't want to meet because the request offered them nothing. We didn't know who to call because nobody asked their contacts who the other stakeholders were or for an introduction. They had nothing to bring because they think a customer call is a capabilities briefing, not a customer-focused conversation. None of this is a character flaw. Every one of them is an engagement skill nobody taught, yet the owner is measured on schedule, burn, and a clean CPARS, never on relationship quality.

WHY LEADERS LET IT SLIDE

Then you accepted the excuse. Why? Because pushing back means confronting someone who clearly dreads making sales calls, or someone who often doesn't report to you. Assuming the relationship is fine is easier than forcing someone to do something they've never been taught.

The excuse sounds reasonable because, without training, it is. So the box gets checked, the plan stays green, and the room breathes a sigh of relief as the review moves to the next slide.

WHAT HIGH-PERFORMING ORGANIZATIONS DO DIFFERENTLY

They stop accepting the excuse and do three things instead.

1. They measure where they stand. Not activity, not the number of touches logged in the CRM, but the customer's view of them: whether the customer calls them first with a problem, shares what is coming before the RFI, and sees them as the option rather than an option. A customer relationship score built from those questions turns relationship-building into a number leadership reviews with the same attention as burn rate. It ends the debate about whether the relationship is fine.

2. They train the people who already have customer access. The PM, the lead engineer, and the contracts manager talk to the customer more in a month than the capture team does in a year. They don't need to become salespeople. They need the skills to be more effective in the meetings they already have: listen for customer intel, ask follow-up questions to go deeper, and share intel rather than daily noise with the team. Those skills are learnable, and most companies have never spent a dollar teaching them.

3. They hold the line on the contact plan. An owner, a date, a line in the program review, and a consequence when it slips. When the excuse arrives, the question is not whether it is true. It is what the owner needs to do to execute the call now.

START WITH THE PLAN YOU ALREADY HAVE

Pull up the capture plan you approved at the last gate. Find the contact plan. Count the calls assigned and the calls made. If the number surprises you, you've found the problem, and it isn't the plan. Then ask three questions of every name on it. Were they trained to do this? Do we measure whether it worked? What happens when they don't?

The capture strategy was fine. The engagement and intel gathering side is hard. It is also the part some of your competitors have already fixed.

Nic Coppings is senior partner at Hi-Q Group, where he helps federal contractors build a growth culture across the whole organization, not only the BD team. Hi-Q trains and coaches BD and delivery teams to gather customer intel and execute the contact plan, and gives leaders decision tools built on engagement and relationship strength, so pursuit, recompete, and investment decisions rest on real customer data. He has more than 20 years of federal contracting experience. Reach him at ncoppings@hi-qgroup.com.