A $7.8B Lesson: Your Win Strategy isn’t a Strategy – It’s a Hope

Olessia Smotrova Mar 31, 2026 3:49:32 PM

What separates average capture teams from the great ones who win consistently.

Most capture teams have a win strategy section in their capture plans. It’s usually one slide that gets written for the gate review. Nobody reads it again.

That’s not a win strategy. That’s a hope dressed up in a template.

A real win strategy is a set of prioritized action items that close the specific gaps between where you are now and what the customer needs to see before they decide to award you the contract. Miss the actions, miss the win.

WinMoreBD.ai connects your win strategy to what the customer needs to see before award.

See it live on your real opportunity.

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A $7.8 billion contract. A 20-year incumbent with a structural advantage built into the solicitation.

A few years ago I was working capture for a recompete of a massive Government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) facility. It was a $7.8 billion 20-year contract. The incumbent held it since the early 2000s.

We spent months analyzing the public record, congressional budget justifications, environmental assessments, task order modifications, and everything else we could find. We compared the incumbent’s published modernization schedule against their actual funded task order performance. What we found was damning. Projects running two times over budget, years behind schedule, and a facility that couldn’t produce what the customer actually needed for modern weapons systems.

Then we went further. We started attacking the incumbent’s built in advantage in pricing.

Everything the facility produced was priced at a per-pound rate, and that per-pound rate had to bear the full operating cost of the facility: security, maintenance, environmental compliance, fire, cyber, etc. The department policy was deliberately designed that way in 2003, so that every branch buying from the facility paid their fair share instead of one service subsidizing the rest. The Government’s intent was sound.

The unintended consequence, twenty years later, was that the customer had lost all visibility into what they were actually buying with their money.

The customer spent over $550 million since 2015 to modernize the facility, but they had no way to measure whether any of it was working. Every dollar of capital investment disappeared into an opaque per-pound rate spread across dozens of compound types and production bands. No insight into cost reduction. No ability to recoup the efficiency gains those investments were supposed to generate.

The customer could spend. They they couldn’t measure, control, or learn anything from their investment.

We focused on the customer’s pain and showed them how to solve it.

The requirement of pricing everything as a per-pound rate introduced massive risk for bidders, other than the incumbent, because we had no insight into ordering forecasts or historical rates. We needed to convince the Government to change their pricing structure that would simultaneously de-risk the program for us and chip away at the incumbent's data advantage.

I led the brainstorming and wrote a white paper showing the customer how their contract structure was getting in the way of solving their biggest pain. That argument was harder to land than it sounded.

I walked them through how industry priced and planned quantity-based contracts, the risk uncertainty introduced into planning, and how it was increasing the price to the Government unnecessarily. I showed how moving to a new pricing structure where the operating costs are fixed and the variable production costs are priced separately would result in the Government gaining true insight and control over their program.

What I was really asking was for a Government agency to voluntarily walk back a policy it created deliberately, that solved a genuine problem when it was designed, and that had been in place for two decades. The only way it worked was if we showed the customer their current pain AND gave them a path forward that met all of their goals.

The customer changed the pricing structure and released multiple draft solicitations afterward.

The incumbent's structural advantage, twenty years of pricing data that no challenger could replicate, was gone. Now we could actually compete.

Sound strategy and execution need to match.

Here’s the pattern I see in capture after capture: teams write a win strategy that says things like “demonstrate agency intimacy” or “establish technical credibility with the program office.” The language is right. The intent is right. But many do not connect those statements to the execution needed to close the distance between where they are today and what the customer needs to see before award.

Great capture managers live in that gap because they dive into the problem, surface the pain properly, and then translate that into effective customer messages. They don’t just name a discriminator. They ask: does the customer already believe it? If not, what actions close the distance? That’s rare. Most teams document the claim and call the strategy done.

WinMoreBD.ai is built to elevate your insights into the true customer pain points.

That’s the difference between a strategy and a hope.

If you’re heading into a competitive pursuit and want to know where your win strategy actually stands, let’s talk.