Change is nothing new in our industry. For many of us, it is a constant reminder that the Government is always trying to improve their processes and save money. IDIQs have been around for years and anyone that has worked a few proposals has heard the term and the horror stories that remain in the wake of a company working one. IDIQs are like a distant rich relative – we want the spoils that they can bring but do not want to deal with the hardships that must be endured.
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My 7-year-old daughter, when working on a puzzle, knows to glance at the whole picture first, before starting to assemble the pieces. So, her process is to study the picture, and then find a corner piece to which she then starts adding pieces.
Many of our clients shared with us their frustration with their current state of business development (BD). They either weren’t growing fast enough because they weren’t bidding on enough projects that were in their sweet spot, or they had wasted money going after poorly qualified opportunities that they had no chance of winning. All of these were symptoms of a broken BD process. To add an insult to an injury, majority of them had a bad experience with their business development service provider (either an employee or a consultant).
What separates outstanding proposal managers from mediocre ones is the ability to lead their teams in developing winning content on top of running a smooth process. No matter how compliant and attractive the document may be, most often it is the substance that will distinguish a winning proposal from the rest. Many proposal managers rely on Subject Matter Experts (SME) to create the substance, but most SMEs require guidance, facilitation, and significant rewrites in order to produce something innovative and compelling. Rarely is a proposal team blessed with a solution architect who can guide the SMEs. In the majority of cases, a truly top-flight proposal manager steps up to become that solution architect, to ensure that their proposal content shines.
1. In the capture phase, win themes are a first step in defining win strategy (and not the other way around). They help create customer messages to position the company; identify competitive advantages; and document the real reasons the company will win.
2. During the proposal, the win themes focus the proposal team’s writing on the benefits to the customer – providing an even bigger advantage if your competition has not taken the time to spell out their own value proposition.
3. During evaluation, inserting your win themes in different forms throughout the proposal helps the customer remember the key benefits of your solution, and answers the evaluator’s question: “Why should we select your company?” They also help your customer draft an award justification.
Consultants often get the blame for high proposal costs because their fees are an obvious big-ticket item. Many business developers tell me, however, that when they tally up the proposal costs at the end of the proposal effort, it is not the consultants that blow the budget. Surprisingly, it’s the in-house employee costs that take them way over the plan. Either way, there are three solutions that business developers can adopt to keep proposal costs under control – solutions I am going to discuss below.
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As a proposal manager getting a proposal plan approved, I always found it difficult to get my management to approve a budget that was based on 40-hour weeks for employees and 50, 60, or even 70-hour weeks for consultants. It just didn’t look good: a consultant often cost more per hour than an employee, and got paid for every hour worked to boot. Yet, I managed to stay on budget and win. I would like to share how I did it with you.
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We all hate being wasteful. I gather this is why some people feel that they don’t really want to spend money on pursuits until they get to a real battle – the proposal. They avoid pre-proposal work or capture, thinking that it’s there for those with bigger budgets and deeper pockets. After all, who has time or money anymore for lengthy brainstorming meetings, large Black Hats, proposal development before an RFP ever hits (so you get to rewrite the sections almost from scratch when the RFP is out and your SMEs really focus on the problem), or composing lengthy PowerPoints for your management to feel comfortable.
Should proposal professionals redefine the way they think about themselves? Eric Gregory of CACI, Inc., delivered a keynote address at the APMP International Conference that caused some serious audience buzz at the follow-on networking session. He somberly stated that proposal professionals are different from the “normal” folk: we are warriors, the vanguard, the point of the spear, pioneers, adventurers, the legion, the cavalry…
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Let’s talk about the sensitive topic, proposal consultant prices. I don’t think I am revealing any trade secrets here.
How much proposal consultants charge varies from individual to individual, and can range between $60 an hour on the low end to $250 an hour and up on the high end.
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A business owner has two options when engaging consultants: they can either outsource the proposal work entirely, or have consultants augment your business development team. Typically, there are severaltypes of situations when you should hire proposal consultants:
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If you have limited experience hiring proposal consultants, and wonder how they charge for their services as they help you develop your winning proposal or are curious if there are better ways to negotiate and work with consultants, read on.
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Intelligence gathering permeates every capture activity. It not only overlaps with the first capture aspect—knowing your customer—but is part and parcel of everything that drives capture – since the best informed wins!
Basically, Intelligence Gathering is research and detective work—you painstakingly collect little pieces of the puzzle and put together as complete of a picture as you can to make good decisions. As you learn about the opportunity and the customer, you will get into a full-blown intelligence gathering process that has multiple dimensions and involves a slew of information sources.
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A win strategy is a simple set of bulleted statements outlining how you will win the targeted bid, which leads to a comprehensive plan that prepares you to finish on top. It looks at all aspects of the opportunity, and leaves no stone unturned.
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Something happened to me over the past year – as if a switch flipped in my mind. All of a sudden, I can’t get enough of life and want to savor its experiences. Perhaps I’ve clocked too many years in the proposal war room, stayed up late nights seven days a week building a business for too long, and spent every free moment with my kids. Maybe I blew a circuit at one of the Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties. I am not yet at the BASE jumping stage, but I find myself fantasizing vividly about stuff like catching a jet ride to a classroom in another state with the top guns I will be training. This from a person who finds even the kids’ rollercoaster terrifying!
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Where do proposal consultants come from, and what are the upsides, downsides, and risks typical to different proposal consultant sources? This is the second article in our eight-part series on How To Benefit The Most From Working With Proposal Consultants. If you have not yet had a chance to read the first part, please visit our blog at www.ostglobalsolutions.com/blog to read it.
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This class covers a spectrum of the most important topics, from preparing for a proposal effort and making a bid-no-bid decision, to orchestrating a great proposal kickoff, driving subject matter experts to produce winning content, exhibiting superb leadership and...
IDIQs are now one of the most used form of Government procurement, and if your company is not on any of those vehicles you might be missing a significant increase in your revenue. One major difficulty with IDIQ contracts is that even if you got on the “bus” (an IDIQ...
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One type of growth challenge that business developers and owners face stems from not having enough time, personnel, or expertise to prepare and respond to the solicitations that otherwise would be a perfect fit for the company.
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How hard can it be to do federal business development? All you need is to be good with people and a willingness to talk to decision makers, right? If it were so easy, why for years has BD been given a bad name, and why have many companies struggled to hire business developers who produce results?
