Competitor Analysis with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are a critical element of business development and capture. This is how you learn about a pursuit’s history and your competition. The problem is – FOIA requests are tricky:
They take forever to obtain – so someone needs to carefully track them and follow up relentlessly to get any results – sometimes taking months and rendering your requests useless for your capture effort.
How to Effectively Read a Request for Proposal (RFP)
As the saying goes, “well begun is half done”. Reading an RFP effectively is crucial to the rest of the proposal development process to eliminate sections rewritten over and over, omitted requirements, and ultimate lost of a proposal.
Nine Tips for Conducting Effective Pink and Red Team Reviews for Your Proposals
Proposal color reviews, such as Blue Team, Pink Team, Red Team, Gold Team, White Glove, and others, are proven best practices in developing outstanding proposals. However, many color reviews are not very effective despite their ability to dramatically improve the...
A Great Proposal Kick-Off = Smoother Proposal Development
I have a proposal horror story that involves a late and unprepared kick-off: When I was working in a corporation, we got a sudden “you must bid” directive from upper management. At a so-called kick-off, we sat in a room together reading the RFP, with senior people calling all of their contacts, trying to gather last-minute teammates to patch up holes in our strategy, and figuring out who was going to write what section. This was well after the RFP had dropped, with only two weeks left before submission.
