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Using Privia To Enhance Your Lead Tracking System
Privia is the only tool that we know of at this time that out-of-the-box automates both lead tracking and lead pursuits for large, complex proposals. This is critically important if you want to smooth the transition from business development/capture into the proposal process.
A major reason why companies do a poor job of reflecting what they know about the customer is that the business developers use different tools and data repositories from the proposal staff. In addition, the lead tracking system and the place where contact reports, capture plans, and client documents are stored are usually separate. Privia brings all of them together, with a workflow system that manages task assignment and lends itself well to automating a process like the one we have developed.
In Privia, the "pipeline" is where opportunities are stored prior to being "launched" (which generates a workspace to be set up for pursuit). This is an interesting approach because it provides you with a place to put opportunities that you are researching, but are not ready to declare as leads.
Once the opportunity is launched, you can define the stages or phases you want to use to track it. For example, you could use Privia to track your opportunities through the four Readiness Reviews that we recommend in our process.
The Privia reporting system allows you to identify opportunities that have reached each review phase. It will even let you choose between reporting by dollars or by number of opportunities. This is also compatible with the articles we have written about how to use business development reports to ensure that you hit your targets. You need to be able to see both views to assess the health of your leads --- Are they dominated by a few, large opportunities? Is the distribution of opportunities across phases properly balanced? How are they allocated against the calendar?
One of the things that I really like is that you can define target metrics, and then generate charts that show how well you are performing against those targets. You can also use Privia to collect metrics, like what percent of bids drop out of each phase, so that your future targets will be more accurate.
If there is a chart that you really want to see, then you can export the data from Privia and generate the chart using something like Microsoft Excel. One of the charts we like is a stacked bar graph that shows submissions and wins compared to the target. If your win rate is high, you can reach your target wins with fewer submissions. If your win rate is low, then even if you hit your submission target you may not hit your revenue target. It really helps to be able to see this relationship. But it's so specific that an off-the-shelf package probably won't generate it for you. You can easily export the data need to create the right charts and graphs using Privia's exporting feature.
Another thing that is nice about Privia is that it enables you to generate your win rate by number of opportunities or by dollars. Win rates are very important and everybody talks as if they know their win rate. But win rates can be tricky. Win one large opportunity, and lose all of your small ones and if you calculate win rate by dollars, your win rate might look excellent even if you lost almost every opportunity you bid. The opposite is also true. Many other factors can also impact or distort your win rate. You need to be able to look deeply at the numbers if you are really going to understand how your business is performing.
Most business development systems can track and report. Privia adds to that a workflow engine and a data repository. The result is a single tool for both lead tracking and lead pursuit with consistent and up-to-date reporting of opportunities throughout the lifecycle. In addition to simply providing a list of what opportunities you are pursuing, you can task assignments, and track their completion. You can report not only on the fact that you have a certain number of leads, but also on what you are doing to pursue each one. If you define your goals for each phase of the pursuit, you can use the workflow system to achieve those goals. It brings the oversight and execution into the same system where you can make sure that people are doing what they should to not only track the opportunities but also to capture the wins. And isn't that one of the reasons we have business development reports and executive oversight in the first place?
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