Business Development Blog
Here are some realistic strategies for penetrating the market if you don’t have extensive government connections. We will start with the easiest approach and end with the most challenging entry method.
1. Start as a subcontractor to an established government ...
Graphics will always prevail over text. Quite simply, they are infinitely more effective at presenting your marketing and sales message. No company would issue a marketing or sales brochure without images. Yet people routinely underuse graphics in ...
The General Services Administration (GSA) updated the draft RFP for Polaris, the agency’s new small business IT services contract that replaces the $15 billion Alliant 2 Small Business contract. The latest version of the Polaris draft RFP adds a Pool reserved for ...
Proposal writing can be challenging for many people. Subject matter experts (SME) often enter the engineering or technical fields because their strengths are in detail-oriented, technical work. They probably did not anticipate they’d be asked to write proposals. ...
When you face a bid-no-bid decision and look at the Request for Proposal (RFP), you need to watch out for signs from the Government that suggest, “I know what I want and who I want to buy it from, but my Contracting Officer is forcing me to get competitive ...
Evaluators choose a proposal based on two things: your written proposal and your price. In order to find the best price for your proposal, you need to understand how to perform bid opportunity-specific competitive analysis. Black Hat and Price to Win (PTW) ...
A Proposal Manager is the single point of accountability for delivering a compliant and compelling proposal on time and on budget. It’s your job as the proposal manager to make sure your team is working well together, producing high-quality content, and meeting ...
OST President and CEO Olessia Smotrova taught a business development workshop to 48 veteran entrepreneurs this week at the Veteran Institute for Procurement (VIP) START Session.
The course was a hands-on workshop reviewing a government Request For Proposals ...
Last time we talked about having enough opportunities in your pipeline so that even after you have a flood of solicitation releases and you forego some opportunities because you are short-staffed, you have enough to bid on during the months when it’s barely a ...
Win Themes are pithy, memorable phrases in a proposal that tell the government customer exactly why they should choose you — not your competitors — for a contract. Win Themes explain the benefits you can bring the customer through your solution, and they’re ...
Last time, we described the opportunities pipeline and why it doesn’t look like a straight pipe. It looks like a funnel with a series of progressively thinner pipes with increasingly finer filters in between them. Today, we will talk about another reason to have ...
Many government contracting business owners ask us: “How many opportunities per month do you need to find so you can submit enough proposals to reach your financial goals?”
The answer is somewhat detailed and has three parts with information we will send to you ...
Most problems that surface when government contractors struggle with writing winning proposals are systemic, upstream issues related to flawed opportunity identification, qualification, and capture, not the just proposals themselves. If a company bids on an ...
Business development metrics offer insights into your business that help you maximize your growth and success. For example, your win rate has a major impact on how many opportunities you need to qualify, capture, and bid on to make your target revenue goals. If ...
Finding the opportunities starts with identifying your ideal set of customers through market research who buy what you sell, and who have money to buy. You first need to define the profile of your ideal opportunity. Here are some of the parameters you could ...
Win Themes are pithy, memorable phrases in a proposal that tell the government customer exactly why they should choose you — not your competitors — for a contract. Win Themes explain the benefits you can bring the customer through your solution, and they’re ...
Part of persuasion is getting people to understand your point of view. It is convincing someone that what you’re saying is true and that they should do what you suggest. With proposals, you don’t have the advantage of being face to face with your customer. You ...
A proposal kickoff meeting is arguably the single most important event of the entire proposal schedule. It can set a Proposal Manager and his team up for success or failure on a bid. If you botch the kickoff, your team will leave the meeting without a clear plan, ...