Business growth in the federal market does not happen by accident. Many companies grow to a certain point through hard, albeit, rather chaotic efforts. Many are stuck, however, at a certain size, and their ability to compete for new market share begins to shrink. We recommend that you implement proper strategies to grow aggressively in the federal market.
APMP 2013 Bid & Proposal conference in Atlanta became a great success with hundreds of people attending. And we are happy to announce that on behalf of the National Capital Area Chapter Olessia accepted the 2012 Communications Award, and especially the fact that our colleagues from OST, Julia Pochekueva and Alex Brown were largely responsible for the chapter communications during 2012 (Julia as the E-zine Chair and Alex as the Marketing Chair).
To develop your proposal winning strategy, you need cross-functional contributions that might include people in your organization who know the customer well, subject matter experts in the statement of work, contracts, pricing, and account executives or business developers who communicate with the customer.
Start the first team meeting with a presentation on the opportunity background, and then discuss what to expect during the meeting. Then, explain to your team what your win themes are, and how you are going to go about developing them.
A robust proposal process is integral to writing winning proposals. Being able to translate all the great information collected during capture into a compelling, concise, and compliant proposal by the due date (and without undue stress) is the key to success of a proposal effort. The use of proven processes eliminates chaos and it enhances and coordinates everyone’s efforts.
Anyone in the know in business development doesn’t get too excited if they happen to see something that looks exactly like what they are trying to bid on when searching FedBizOpps.gov (FBO). The Federal Government is supposed to post all unclassified opportunities over $25,000 on FBO. It is safe to say, however, that FBO is pretty much useless to you for bidding purposes because most of the opportunities that appear there have been discovered already by your competitors.
Your competitors may have been planning for these opportunities for a while, throughout the entire acquisition process from when the opportunity was created to the point of its culmination in a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Quote (RFQ). Rarely do you stand a chance of winning if you pick an opportunity off a website as public and popular as FBO late in the game, once a draft RFP, and especially the final RFP, has been issued. It has probably been “spoken for” or “wired” by some company that has taken its time to prepare.
Writing a proposal without formal and informal reviews is as absurd as making a blockbuster movie without dailies and other review meetings to scrutinize every camera angle or editing decisions. Just like in the film industry, missing a key detail or making a continuity mistake undermines your credibility in the eyes of the audience. It can outright ruin the impression you want to make with just a few gaffes, or even open you up to ridicule.
Everyone struggles with proposal writing—even proposal veterans. But when it comes to subject matter experts, it gets even worse. Here are ten things to avoid doing while writing proposals – with some suggestions on how to improve your writing experience and, of course, produce winning results.
Your proposal’s overall professional look and feel has a lot to do with presenting you as a credible and reliable company to your prospective customers. Even the best possible solution, presented it in a sloppy manner, may plant the seeds of doubt in your evaluators’ minds.
Another tool of proposal persuasion is graphics. Graphics will always prevail over text. Quite simply, they are infinitely more effective at presenting the marketing and sales message. You wouldn’t even fathom not using graphics when you put together a marketing or sales brochure. Yet, people routinely underuse graphics in proposals.
It is important to define that for proposal purposes, graphics or visuals are not just pretty graphs and flowcharts or photos. Instead, they are all the visual elements that break up the monotony of the text. A visual could be a figure, a text or a focus box, or a nicely rendered table.
Many companies question whether they can have an outside consultant come in and be their capture manager. They may not have internal resources to run proper capture on a pursuit, but they don’t venture outside the house to get anyone else.
When interfacing with Government customers while doing business development or capture, you need to remember that you are still dealing with people. The Government has its own rules, and the process is hard to navigate in the beginning. Government officials have their own culture and language, but all the universal rules for building business relationships still apply.
When you build a relationship with Government representatives, you have to take a multidimensional approach. Your first task is to create a contact plan using phone calls, visits, and, to a lesser degree (and very cautiously), e-mails. You need to build as many relationships as possible, with as many contacts at the agency as you could possibly find time to get acquainted with.
The majority of teaming arrangements usually take place between large and small businesses, where either one could be the prime, depending on the procurement type. A full and open procurement where anyone can compete will usually have large businesses as the primes with small business subcontractors, whereas in small business set asides, you might see small–large arrangements, and even teams of multiple small businesses.
Because the size rules are complex, small business size is the largest cause for protests. Teaming could be one of the contributors to the problem. Therefore, you must understand the rules that have to do with the small business type and size, and how the Government views your size.
In order to raise your probability of winning a proposal, you have to prepare before an RFP hits the street. It is virtually impossible to develop a solution in the mere 30 days or less you get for most proposals, unless the subject is your core expertise or you are an incumbent. Even then, you may not develop as mature of a solution as you otherwise could. You should, therefore, develop proposal content ahead of time.
Your advance preparation should include flowcharts, notes, graphics, and bullet points that describe every aspect of your solution, proposal section by proposal section. Ideally, this information will enable you to go straight to drafting your proposal, without much additional brainstorming, once the RFP is issued.
Having a few spelling errors or a rough-around-the-edges look certainly does not invalidate all the great content in a proposal. Or does it? After all, you should be graded based on the virtues of your approach and price. Most of the time, the evaluation criteria don’t mention grammar and spelling, and many Requests for Proposal specifically ask to avoid elaborate presentation.
The U.S. Government is all about transparency: it posts bids publicly. Yet, just because most opportunities are posted for the world to see, that doesn’t mean a level playing field.
In order to increase your win_rate, during capture, you have to learn how to take advantage of other open sources of information, in addition to gathering intelligence directly from your customers (or instead of it, if you missed the window of opportunity to talk to the customer).
