Hi, I am Albert Pines, the founder of 90Degrees of Design and a friend of CLEVER. He told me I am to tell you a little about myself (specific guidance was to keep it brief), and tell you who we are. So, here goes.

We are a marketing, research and process design firm founded in 1992 to work with companies pursuing government business. Before starting 90Degrees I ran BD for three small businesses and one large contractor. My job at the large company was to grow it enough to allow us to go public on the N.Y. Stock Exchange, which we did. At the three small firms I was tasked with growing them quickly so they could be sold. We did that too, but never by myself. One of my father’s great pieces of wisdom was to always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. Makes it tough to fail. I was lucky to have both great mentors and great staff. — I also managed a market strategy consultancy for a large European consulting firm with operations in 32 countries, which afforded me the extraordinary pleasure of meeting people from all over the world.

For many years 90Degrees provided marketing, capture, proposal and orals consulting. Seven years ago I got the idea we could help more companies by encapsulating our concepts and processes into a cloud based portal and provide dedicated client support teams to operationalize the capability. Our idea was to significantly reduce the time BD staff spend screening opportunities, finding teaming partners, identifying key government personnel, analyzing competition, tracking documents, and maintaining their CRM data. Our hope was this would enable them to spend more time on client relationships and selling their companies capabilities - leading to more bids and more wins.

This was the beginning of CLEVER, and the concept of Smart BD, which you will find reflected in the CLEVER platform in a variety of crucial analytical tools from our strategy builder, pipeline modeler, smart selector, deal flow and predictive analytics, competition analyzer, smart score dashboard, and more, including collaboration tools, a full function CRM, and platforms for proposal development and orals preparation.

Every craftsman will tell you the right tools for the job are critical, but so are having the right people to use them. The question we asked was, “Do you want your BD people to be tool experts and data analytics specialists, or salespeople?” We think the latter is preferable, so we decided not to license CLEVER. Instead, we offer a subscription program where we provide the tool experts, researchers, data specialists, and strategy consultants so your BD staff is free to do BD. Rather than being data gatherers they are information users. The result - more bids, better preparation, more wins, greater revenue growth.