Invest in Your Business Development Education
As a business owner, we know you recognize that you are ultimately responsible for achieving excellence in business development, which requires constant honing of your skills. Proposal professionals must constantly look for new training and professional challenges....
3 Ways to Become a Better Federal Proposal Writer
A proposal is a sales document. It’s not a technical paper, a white paper, or a point paper. When you create a proposal, you must convince your client to buy from your company. A professional proposal writer needs to demonstrate mastery of knowledge, expertise, and...
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.
How to Entice a Prospective Teaming Partner to Team with You
This is our final article in the Finding Contracting Teammate series. The first article explored the advantages and risks in teaming. The second article explained our detailed process for finding federal contracting teaming partners the right way. So, let’s say you’ve...
Finding Teammates for Federal Contracting Opportunities the Right Way
Finding great Government contracting teammates can increase your chances of winning a contract award. However, if you don’t invest time into selecting the right partners, you instead increase your chances of losing. In our previous article on the benefits and...
Federal Contractors: Team Up for the Benefits While Avoiding the Risks
You’ve come across a great opportunity, but you know your company alone can’t satisfy the customer’s needs. Perhaps you should consider teaming. In this post, we’ll go over why Government contractors team and some of the pitfalls to avoid. In later articles in this...
Focusing on Proposals For the Q3 & Q4 Spending Spree
We’re approaching the Federal Government’s spending rush that comes in the last two quarters of every fiscal year. In 2018, the Federal Government obligated roughly $560 billion to contractors. However, the Government obligated roughly $144 billion (26%) in Q3 and...
Using White Papers and Point Papers to Gain More Federal Business
We’re continuing along with the question, “What should you have in your business developer’s toolkit?” In addition to a capability statement and unsolicited proposals, you should also have white papers and point papers. A white paper is a thorough report that presents...
Using Unsolicited Proposals for Innovative Federal Solutions
Every business developer needs a toolkit. Within that toolkit should be skills and collateral to further your company’s federal business development goals. For example, one asset should be an updated one-pager capability statement. While not standard in your toolkit,...Master Getting Government Sole Source Awards to Make Life Easier for You and Your Federal Customers
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The Art of War by Sun Tzu When we talk about the goals of federal business development and capture management at our Bid & Proposal Academy training courses, we pragmatically reduce them to only...
Latest Indefinite Delivery Vehicles (IDV) Trends
The General Services Administration (GSA) has been leading a major Indefinite Delivery Vehicles (IDV) transformation effort through its Federal Marketplace Initiative (FMP). It’s a long-term, multi-year initiative to deliver a fully-reimagined, end-to-end experience...Use Pipeline Criteria to Find the Best Federal Contracting Opportunities
The Government has an annual goal to award 23% of all eligible prime contracts to small businesses. This is good news because that means you have a lot of opportunities. The bad news is that you don’t have the time to filter through each opportunity properly to...
Federal Fiscal Year End Opportunities
We’re in the fourth quarter of the Government fiscal year, and we want to help you take advantage of the federal spending rush. The Government has “use it or lose it” funds and Government contractors need to know how to take advantage of this annual high-volume...
Scaling the Government Proposal Development Mountain
Climbing a mountain for the first time can be just as unnerving to an inexperienced rock climber as tackling your first solicitation can be if you’re a proposal newbie. Scaling the Government proposal development mountain process may seem paralyzingly-scary at first,...
Win Federal Contracts By Improving Your Business Development Part 2
Federal contracting can be a profitable and dynamic business. Not to mention there can be advantages to being a small business in the federal contracting market. The Government aims to award at least 23% of prime contracting dollars to small businesses. In the last...
