We have had a wonderful winning streak in the past year and a half winning literally every proposal we ran, but all of a sudden, our fortunes turned. A new client engaged us to help them prepare a proposal. They agreed to provide to us some key inputs such as subject matter expertise, raw past performance data, resumes, and a compliant price volume that they decided to prepare themselves. We went through our regular steps in educating them about the proposal process, held a kickoff, developed a schedule with plenty of contingency time and a goal to deliver the proposal a day early, provided guidance and templates, and prompted and waited for the promised information.
The deadlines kept slipping, as the client was busy with other priorities. We did what any good proposal people would do in the situation: increased the frequency of contact, added status meetings (that the client neglected), asked if the client would please allow us to interview them so that we could write everything ourselves (in vain), and made general pests of ourselves. As the deadline was nearing with no inputs from the client, we requested and got the extension from the government. We summoned the elusive client to our offices to pry the information out of them, but the client showed up to the daylong working meeting without a computer. Every time we confronted the client, he would absolutely, eagerly promise to get us the information “tonight, no problem.” It never came.
Within 48 hours of the due date, as we were finishing the technical volume, we saw the cost volume for the first time. It had serious compliance issues that required obtaining a formal quote, wrong labor categories, and discrepancies with the technical volume that effectively changed the solution. We proceeded to burn the midnight oil to correct multiple places in text and graphics in order to line up the solution with the price volume.
We got the first past performance reference within 24 hours prior to the due date. It missed some key information, including the actual narrative. The second promised past performance reference failed to materialize. It wasn’t looking good, and it wasn’t getting any better.
