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WHAT IS A BLACK HAT REVIEW?
Courtesy of Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com (Click to register for a free newsletter).
Black hat reviews are a little like Red Team reviews in that I have never seen two people conduct them in the same way. However, the subject of a Black Hat review is very different from that of a Red Team review. At a high level, a Black Hat review is a competitive assessment to address who the competition is and their strengths and weaknesses. The best Black Hat reviews score your company and the competition against the anticipated evaluation criteria.
There are many techniques for acquiring competitive intelligence and assessing it. These range from simple SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to more sophisticated methodologies. The technique you use is less important than your diligence at implementing it. However, like risk assessment and quality assurance, if you don’t implement a formal methodology, you are not going to consistently get good results.
Also, any assessment is only going to be as good as the data it is based on. Gathering good competitive intelligence takes time. If you simply bring all of the stakeholders into a meeting and ask them what they know about the competition, you will not get the best data to work with. You must collect and validate competitive intelligence data throughout the lead qualification and capture phases of the pursuit if you are going to have solid data to assess at a Black Hat review.
The key to a successful Black Hat review is to translate what you know about the competition into action items. And those action items should not simply be to fill in the holes in what you should know. The action items coming out of a Black Hat review need to affect your capture and proposal strategies in ways that will impact your odds of winning. Otherwise, it’s an academic exercise that doesn’t affect your chances (this is a fancy way of saying “a waste of time”).
One set of action items that should come from a Black Hat review relates to teaming. A Black Hat review should tell you which companies are strong where you are weak and therefore make good teaming candidates, because you are more likely to win together than you are if you remain apart. It can also show you who you might want to take off the street by teaming with them. It may be better to give up a portion of the revenue by teaming with someone than it is to risk losing all of the revenue in competition. Or not. A good Black Hat review should help you assess this quantitatively, by showing the affect on evaluation scoring of different teaming scenarios. That’s another reason why formal competitive assessment methodologies can be valuable. They help you look at things objectively by providing the means to rank and score the competition.
Finally a Black Hat review should help you finalize your win strategies. Win strategies cannot be developed in isolation from your competition. It is not enough to simply articulate to the customer why they should select you. You must also be able to say why they should select you, as opposed to your competition. A Black Hat review can help you formally position yourself against the competition instead of just guessing, the way most people (including your competitors) do.
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47 REASONS WHY YOUR RED TEAM MAY BE BROKEN
By Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com
It was a tremendous step in the evolution of proposals when people began to recognize that every proposal should have a formal review by people other than those who wrote it. This review is almost universally called a "Red Team" review. A Red Team can, at best, help convert a sure loser into a winner. However, in practice Red Teams are often carried out in a flawed manner that prevents them from achieving their goals. If any of the following is true, your Red Team is at best not doing the job right, and at worst:
1. The goals for the Red Team are not explicitly defined
2. Participants are not given specific directions regarding what to look for
3. The Red Team does not have any checklists or written guidance to remind them of what to look for
4. The Red Team is scheduled too early and the document is not ready
5. The Red Team is scheduled too late and there is not enough time to act on any suggestions
6. The Red Team gives you the guidance you should have had at the start
7. It is not clear who is driving: the Red Team or the proposal team
8. The Red Team shows up without having actually read the proposal, cover to cover
9. The Red Team shows up without having read the RFP
10. Red Team participants have no assignment other than to read the entire proposal, cover to cover
11. The Red Team is the only form of review planned for the proposal
12. You limit the number and types of reviews you do to the number of colors you can name (red team, pink team, green team, blue team, purple team, gold team)
13. You expect the red team to review compliance, accuracy, your approach, the persuasiveness of the writing, the completeness of the document, how you stack up against the evaluation criteria, implementation of win strategies, and incorporation of customer/solution/competitive awareness all at the same time…
14. The same people who wrote the proposal are on the Red Team
15. The Red Team is scheduled for only a couple of hours
16. Participants have to leave early because they have other commitments
17. The Red Team doesn't have an appointed leader, other than the proposal manager
18. The Red Team identifies problems without offering solutions
19. The Red Team does little more than what amounts to proof reading
20. The Red Team wastes valuable time proof reading copy that is going to significantly change or tells you about formatting problems on a document that has yet to go through final production
21. There is no guidance regarding how comments should be made
22. The Red Team examines your strategies instead of the effectiveness of their implementation
23. The Red Team wants to change the outline of the proposal
24. The Red Team is effectively a review by the executive sponsor
25. The Red Team looks at the proposal from their own perspective, instead of the customer's perspective
26. Red Team participants think they need to read every comment they've written on the document while everyone is at the table
27. The Red Team does not consolidate its own comments, but leaves that burden to the proposal team
28. There is no discussion regarding how the Red Team's comments relate to or will impact the evaluation criteria
29. Red Team comments fail to take into consideration the page limitation imposed by the RFP
30. The Red Team expects to see the document again after the changes are made
31. Red Team suggestions are expected to be taken as orders (the proposal team is not free to ignore a Red Team recommendation).
32. If there are holes, the Red Team doesn't recommend any resources capable of filling the holes
33. The proposal is so broken at the time of the Red Team that the Red Team can't do anything to help
34. Participants make comments that are not actionable (generalized statements that don't specify a correction or action to take)
35. The Red Team makes comments that contradict the RFP
36. The Red Team does not result in a set of specific action items that can be worked through a process of elimination
37. The Red Team doesn't take any time to meet as a group and discuss their findings before they debrief the proposal team
38. Some people are on the Red Team simply because they want to see the document -- not because they have anything to contribute
39. The Red Team identifies all of the defects, resulting in a proposal that merely answers the mail because they didn't look at what it takes to win
40. They aren't physically present
41. You haven't validated enough because you tried to do too much in a single review.
42. All of the technical expertise available is on the proposal team, leaving none for an independent assessment
43. The debrief consists only of the participants taking turns sharing their thoughts
44. The Red Team doesn't score the proposal according to the evaluation criteria
45. The Red Team doesn't do anything but score the proposal according to the evaluation criteria
46. The Red Team doesn't offer any useful advice or help (as opposed to criticisms)
47. The Red Team doesn't do anything to help the proposal WIN!