Are you experiencing frustrations with your organisation’s tender win rate (e.g. the number of projects won, the number of projects bid)? Would you like to benchmark your business to evaluate your current bid development process and identify ways to boost your win rate?
The Business Development Capability Maturity Model® (BD-CMM), developed by the Carnegie Mellon University in the USA is a proven approach that provides a business benchmark and a framework for improvement. The real power of the BD-CMM is that it is designed to guide organisations in selecting high-priority improvement actions based on the maturity of their current processes. The BD-CMM narrows the scope of improvement activities to key processes that provide the most effective approach to improve an organisation’s current Business Development (BD) performance.
Table 1 shows the five maturity levels of the BD-CMM. The defining characteristics of each maturity level are broad so that they cater for a range of organisational types and behaviours, and are built on progression of increased maturity.
A typical scenario is that Maturity Level 1 is characterised by ad hoc organisational processes, Level 2 by managed processes within a function area and Level 3 by defined organisational wide processes. Benchmarking studies have demonstrated that organisations that attain higher Maturity Levels achieve enhanced bid development performance and results. Maturity Level 3 organisations typically experience 30-35% increase in win rates over Level 1/2 organisations or, in capture ratio terms, are up to 3 times more effective.
The BD-CMM enables organisations to work towards developing increasing maturity levels in a step-by-step manner. The attainment of higher levels of maturity through process improvement leads to excellence and sustained competitive advantage.
Where to start? A gap analysis comparing your current practice against specific practices within each Maturity Level will identify potential improvements using BD-CMM. This will provide a baseline position and allow your organisation to establish Maturity Targets and to develop a roadmap.
It is our experience that clients who approach future business opportunities using a targeted pursuit strategy based on the BD-CMM achieve substantially better win-rates. This approach is not the preserve of larger organisations it applies equally and in some cases more so to small and medium sized organisations. For example, Red Team has worked with a start-up business to develop and position their pursuit strategy to enable them to win business with a diverse client base. This involved understanding the strategic context, identification and analysis of key client prospects, competitive analysis and key discriminators, development and implementation of client engagement plans and a range of quality assurance and improvement initiatives.