Pipeline Optimization

Praxxs works closely with your leadership teams to develop a customized and optimized growth strategy through pipeline optimization. The strategy includes a well-defined pipeline of targeted opportunities, a harmonized set of business development processes and tempo, and a suite of growth initiatives to accelerate your ability to win new business.

We perform pipeline optimization by road mapping opportunities to agency initiatives; enhancing key market positioning; and productizing investments in emerging technologies as a means of achieving and exceeding corporate growth targets and market penetration. The purpose of pipeline optimization is to provide a targeted pipeline of opportunities by aligning our identified strategic and tactical opportunities with our client’s business objectives, their capabilities, and their resources. The ultimate objective is to increase your growth rates and revenues.

To optimize your business opportunity pipeline, Praxxs takes a market-driven three-phased approach:

• Phase I – Identify what, why, when, and how customers are buying
• Phase II – Identify what, why, when, and how you are selling
• Phase III – Aligning your sales with customer buys in the next 18, 36, and 60 months

Phase I of pipeline optimization is to identify what, why, when, and how customers are buying. To do so, we leverage various information sources, such as:

• Annual Budgets
• Agency Strategic Plans
• Customer Opportunity Forecasts
• Long Range Acquisition Forecasts
• Business Intelligence Services (e.g. Gartner, GovWin)
• Government Information Sources (Federal Business Opportunities, Federal Procurement Database)
• Industry Journals (e.g. Washington Technology, Federal News Radio)
• Social Media (e.g. Linked In, GovLoop, Facebook)
• Industry Days
• Vendor Outreach Sessions
• Matchmaking Events
• Customer Conferences
• Technical Working Groups
• Teaming Partners and Strategic Alliances
• Program Offices
• Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization Specialists (SADBUs)

From these diverse sources, we segment the market identifying the market drivers and direction, and develop a profile of the market buying factors. We correlate these factors to your market profile, valuation drivers, and internal business objectives. An important output of this correlation is identifying your business challenges in terms of what you target; how you sell and compete; how you leverage your core capabilities; what financial and time investments you need to make; and how you capitalize your investments.

In Phase II of pipeline optimization, we identify what, why, when, and how you are selling. We work with you to develop a plan to address the business challenges identified in Phase I. The first step is to baseline and measure your core capabilities. This step includes analyzing your service lines and products along with your teaming partners and mapping them to market segments and to your potential customers. Once mapped, we identify any gaps in your service and product offerings for that particular customer and develop strategies for closing the gap. Upon completion, this collection of service/product offerings to customer establishes your strategic marketing and revenue opportunities, which is your strategic marketing plan.

Phase III of pipeline optimization is the final phase wherein we align your sales with customer buys in the next 18, 36, and 60 months. We take your strategic marketing plan and analyze each targeted customer’s current contracts including their expiration dates to determine the timing of new acquisitions by customer. We also analyze what contracts will be consolidated into or replaced by other contract vehicles, and when. By aligning your marketing opportunities to the customers’ buying timelines and methods, we develop your final marketing plans for the next 18, 36, and 60 months. These three plans, which collectively form your optimized pipeline, become the basis for your capture activities including:

• Identifying and assigning capture leads for each customer and opportunity
• Developing comprehensive customer plans that span multiple opportunities
• Developing recommended marketing approaches
• Developing detailed customer call plans
• Identifying strategic capture consultants and strategic hires
• Identifying small business teaming partners or prime contractors
• Targeting strategic contract vehicles to pursue that enable customers to acquire your services

Throughout all three phases of pipeline optimization, we work with you to track all of these activities and to implement the final marketing plans in suitable customer relationship management (CRM) tools, or you are welcome to use Praxxs’ web-based CRM system. At this point, you are ready to transition to capture management, where Praxxs can help you establish a business development (BD) “battle rhythm” for consistently executing and tracking disciplined capture activities to promote your qualifications, prove your worth, and win customer confidence well in advance of the customer’s final acquisition plan. Ideally, while opportunities are in their early stages, you want to help shape the acquisition and develop a trusting relationship with your prospective customer.