Capture starts at the sources-sought notice, not the RFP.
A sources-sought notice posts to SAM.gov with a ten-day response window, and three people read it separately before anyone decides whether to answer. Capture is that sequence — notice, industry day, bid/no-bid gate, teaming agreement, proposal, award, then five years of task orders — and we build it as one system: opportunities keyed to solicitation numbers, a pWin someone owns, ceiling value kept apart from funded dollars.
The capture plan is a deck, and the deck is the system.
GovWin IQ feeds one tracker. The capture manager keeps a second in Excel, versioned by date in the filename. Contracts owns the vehicle list, and funded numbers exist only in Costpoint. Nothing reconciles, so the company cannot say how many proposals it submitted last year as prime versus sub, what a bid cost to write, or which teaming partners ever returned the favour.
No-bid is a decision, and it goes in writing.
Defense — captureFrom the sources-sought notice to the awarded task order.
The solicitation number as key
Opportunities keyed to the notice, with NAICS, PSC, contracting office, incumbent and set-aside as fields pulled from SAM.gov — so a recompete surfacing in 2029 links to the sources sought you read in 2026.
Your share of the pursuit, counted once
One pursuit, several roles. Teaming partners, workshare percentage and exclusivity recorded against the same opportunity, and the forecast counts your share only, so three teams chasing one solicitation stop counting as three deals.
Bid or no-bid, with gates that hold
Gate reviews modelled as stages with written entry criteria, pWin recorded by an owner at each gate, and no-bid reasons on a picklist. That is what makes win rate by agency and cost per bid computable at year end.
Vehicles and their ceilings
GSA MAS, SEWP, CIO-SP, OASIS+ and agency IDIQs as their own records — ceiling, period of performance, option years, on-ramp windows — with task orders as children, so pipeline can be read by vehicle rather than by account.
What stays in the enclave
The CRM sits outside it. Opportunity metadata lives here; technical data packages, proposal volumes and export-controlled material stay in the accredited enclave, referenced by link. The field list and permissions are written down, not assumed.
Ceiling, funded, and this year
Awards flow to the ERP; funded value, obligations and burn flow back. Total contract value, funded value and this year's revenue become three separate numbers instead of one field everybody reads differently.
One capture review at each gate.
Debrief
Two weeks with the capture manager, the contracts lead and whoever maintains the tracker. We read the last twenty pursuits, won and lost, and map where each one actually lived.
Storyboard
The data model on paper first: opportunity, vehicle, task order, teaming partner, agency office. Gate criteria, pWin definition and the fields that may never hold controlled material, agreed before anything is built.
Stand up
Built in HubSpot, with SAM.gov and the ERP wired in, gates enforced in the pipeline, and reporting on win rate by agency, by vehicle, by role and by bid cost.
Phase-in
Your capture team runs it. We train the owners, document the model, and stay long enough to see one full gate cycle and one task-order competition go through without us.
The win that empties the pipeline.
You take a seat on the IDIQ, and two years later the pipeline reads as empty. Every dollar now arrives as a task order under a ceiling, on a ten-day response clock, against the same eight awardees. If task orders were never modelled as records, the CRM shows one award and silence, while the real competition runs weekly.
