Unless you are incredibly lucky and everyone assigned to the proposal is a great writer, you will need to do some just-in-time training to get everyone on the same page. The same goes for conceptualizing graphics. Here is how you go about quickly getting everyone on board to create a winning proposal.
It’s a given – price is important. However, price proposals are often prepared at the last minute, without much review, customization, or polishing. But what can we do as proposal managers?
With capture, many companies focus on the obvious: what are the company’s internal capabilities and the offering – and what can the company do in response to the customer needs. However, there are multiple other factors to take into account when capturing a contract that are all too often overlooked. There is no one right formula for every capture opportunity – but fortunately, I have discovered through years of practice and research that there is a simple model which you can use to tailor your capture effort to your customer and the procurement.
Do you ever yourself in a slump, mired in corporate politics, overwhelmed, or disenchanted? If you ever get in an unproductive state of mind, remind yourself of the five basic principles below.
The NCA chapter has nearly 1,000 members, and is the largest APMP chapter worldwide. At our last Dinner Series event, three speakers, Lauren Hammond, Director of Proposal Management and Support for Management Concepts; Dan Shyti, Vice President of the L-3 STRATIS; and Wendy Frieman, Consultant, shared their task order proposal management secrets:
Some psychological studies assert that if someone writes down an idea and its implementation, there is close to 50% probability of it becoming a reality. If the implementation is broken down into steps that are captured in writing, the probability of being down goes up to 70%. Adding a date to each step raises this idea’s chance of becoming real up to 95%. It means that planning ahead clears the path for even the most unpredictable and seemingly impossible projects. This principle also applies to the mystery of business development process in Government contracting.
Most companies, despite their best intentions (and even understanding of what a win theme is supposed to look like), fail to sell in their proposals. Win theme is one of the top five elements of proposal persuasion – and if they don’t work, it will be much harder to stand out.
Time pressures force the team to start writing before themes are sufficiently developed and the entire proposal process begins to unravel. Here are the top 7 problems with win themes we have observed in a number of companies, no matter what their business size and maturity level has been.
As I was teaching our IDIQs and Task Orders course on Monday, we were reviewing the best practices for a quick and efficient proposal development process. One practice was conducting a proper kickoff meeting. After attending many proposal kickoffs (some of which included a proper breakfast and a long PowerPoint), and then watching a proposal unravel, I have figured out what needs to happen in order to prevent a disaster. I distilled the information that needs to be shared with the proposal team into nine kickoff goals. It doesn’t matter what the size of the team is and what the length of a proposal is, you have to address all the goals – or there will be problems, guaranteed.
It seems that the tides have turned in the Government contracting world firmly in the direction of IDIQs and GSA/VA schedules. If you are the Government, it is hard to imagine why it would not be the case. Instead of a lengthy 12-18 months procurement process, the Government can award a contract in two to four months, reducing risk of protest. In addition, the budget approval and end of the fiscal year window shrinking, it is hard to imagine that anything will change any time soon.
I am in foggy San Jose in Silicon Valley, teaching a course for Stevens at NASA Ames. It is an intense, inquisitive, and exceedingly bright group of students. Some of their questions got me to remember some truths in the proposal profession that I began to take for granted – so I am sharing them with you after quickly jotting them down at 4 am (I am still on the East Coast time).
Although the Government often states that cost is the least important factor in proposal evaluation, and that they buy on best value, recent statistics show that cost is the deciding factor in most, if not all, of the federal contract awards. In other words, cost is incredibly important if you want to win. Proposal managers, however, work very hard on the technical volumes and wield little influence over this all-important volume.
We got a question from one of our class attendees last week as to how she could expand into other fields in the proposal profession. Where could she grow from a proposal writer? Truthfully, in this field, there is always a way to command higher pay, be more in demand, and ultimately become a more successful professional with a high success record -whether you are an employee or a consultant. Today’s article is about how to go about it – but it is also relevant to you if you run a team of business developers and proposal professionals because this is how you will develop your “regular” BD capability into a high-functioning machine.
Picture a daunted proposal evaluator who has yours and a pile of other proposals to read. Visualize hundreds of pages of boring technical text with sparse graphics, until lines turn into ants running through a page. What will this evaluator remember about your proposal by the time he or she reads the next proposal, and the next?
There are many things that are accepted as truisms in proposals. One truism is there is always a pizza and coffee shop within one mile of where a proposal is being produced. Another is if your resume does not show it, you did not do it. The flip side of truisms is falsisms. One big falsism in proposals is that resume preparation is quick and easy. The ability to show what your people have done on similar programs is a huge contributing factor to the final outcome. Yet, quite often, younger writers are put on resumes because companies place a lower priority on them than they do on the technical section or executive summaries. However, to guarantee a winning outcome, the same attention to detail needs to go into shaping and presenting resumes as that which goes into other sections.
Are you just like I was seven years ago? By that, I mean – do you struggle with writer’s block when it comes to proposals? Have you spent too many all-nighters rewriting atrocious proposal sections? Do you spend nights and days without seeing your family because proposal writing occupies all of your time? Do you work with people who dislike writing wholesale and will do everything else, but postpone the writing portion of a proposal as much as possible?
