In the task of relationship building with the Government, you need to know that the Government actually wants industry to approach Government customers. FAR part 15.201, “Exchanges with industry before receipt of proposals,” states: “Exchanges of information among all interested parties, from the earliest identification of a requirement through receipt of proposals, are encouraged.”
The FAR then states that the purpose of exchanging information is to improve the understanding of Government requirements and industry capabilities, thereby allowing potential offerors to judge whether or how they can satisfy the Government’s requirements, and enhancing the Government’s ability to obtain quality supplies and services at reasonable prices. The FAR goes on to express the Government’s desire to further increase efficiency in proposal preparation, proposal evaluation, negotiation, and contract award. The same law encourages one-on-one meetings with potential offerors.
You will find that despite this law, the govies are often worried about breaking the procurement integrity rules—so you will have to learn when to talk to them, and when not to. Generally speaking, you can talk to the Government freely before they have developed an acquisition strategy (or the way they are going to run the competition) for a specific pursuit, and then the communications become increasingly limited and formal. Therefore, you want to start as early as possible before their doors shut.
All successful capture pursuits have to have a sound strategy, just like sports competitions or military campaigns. Win strategies help you run a pursuit in a way that separates you from the pack of your competitors. Essentially, you have to be able to articulate what will enable you to win. Your win strategy has to be written in a succinct set of statements, reviewed regularly to make sure it is still accurate, and adjusted as necessary.
Old recycled proposals or boilerplate in the form of well-prepared model sections from your proposal library seem like the right answer to speed up your proposal development process and save you precious B&P dollars. It is great to have a proposal library, and starting from scratch every time you craft a proposal response flies in the face of all arguments for efficiency. Used incorrectly, however, boilerplate and recycled text are dangerous.
Evaluating boring proposals is akin to biting into a cardboard cake. As a poor evaluator sinks their teeth into the unappetizing content, the effect is predictable and rather expected.
Highly readable text is paramount to getting a great score for your proposal. To be persuasive and appealing to the evaluator’s senses, your proposal text has to have compelling content and correct structure. It should use metaphors and stories to make it more engaging and vivid, and less flat and one-dimensional. It should also use appropriate language and be so simply written and accessible that even a high-school student could understand your offer.
Winning proposals is a team effort. Even if you are a one-person shop, you have to find someone to check your work. It is easy to miss or misinterpret requirements because they are so numerous. Someone else also has to review and edit your writing because you are too close to it. Proposal reviews are a best practice, and you should have at least one, no matter how quick is the turn-around.
When you respond to large proposals, you will need to involve numerous parties to shape your proposal into a winner. Your and your teammates’ Subject Matter Experts have to participate and lend their technical know-how and ingenuity to find innovative solutions to customer’s problems.
GSA schedules, also referred to as the Federal Supply Schedules (FSS) or Multiple Award Schedules (MAS), are lists of prequalified suppliers in their respective areas of discipline, who will have submitted their price lists and other qualifying information to the Government in the form of a GSA proposal. GSA vets companies to provide to the rest of the Government a wholesale supply source for millions of products, services, and solutions. According to BGov analysts, as of 2011, roughly 7 percent of all Government contracting is done through GSA schedules.
GSA includes a Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) and the Public Buildings Service (PBS). Basically, any company in good standing, registered as a Government contractor, can apply to obtain a GSA schedule.
You need to know as a business developer that it is not always advisable to get a GSA schedule, nor is it required to sell to the Government, contrary to what many unscrupulous businesses around Government contracting might tell you.
When you are a small business or a brand new department in a larger company, you might start as one person who is responsible for winning Government contracts. This is not a problem—you can join the ranks of many who have started at one point or another and are still the only one writing proposals, even as their company has grown to a nice size and they have the capital to afford professionals. We once met the CEO of a 1,200-person business who still was the company’s best proposal writer—he had a 99 percent win rate. (He’d lock himself in a hotel room for a week at a time with a few six packs.) It was possible because the company was focused on a single set of offerings and wrote for the same set of customers.
Many companies reach a point at which they have to start maturing and growing their business development, capture, and proposal capability. It usually happens when they have a constant volume of bids and they are looking for a more efficient way to develop proposals and win consistently. They want to scale up, grow aggressively, and create a true business development engine.
This book will be especially useful for your professional development and growth to get a full view of what it takes to deliver winning results – to round yourself out as a proposal professional.
Good teaming partners are like parking spaces in an office building’s parking lot. The closest ones to the building get taken by those diligent souls who arrive to work before 7 am and have half their day’s work done before their colleagues roll in at 9 am. If you are one of those people who come in after 9 am but before the lunch break has started or morning meetings have ended, you might have to circle around the lot to find the spot that’s furthest away from the door, the one that no one wanted.
The key to success is to start the teammate identification process early, so that you don’t find yourself teaming in the 11th hour with companies that will bring you no closer to winning than bidding by yourself.
Marketing to the Government is very different than marketing to commercial customers. With most commercial customers, you can wine, dine, and entertain them. Not so with the Government. If you do, there are two outcomes: Government personnel will either start avoiding you outright because they will know that you don’t know how to work with the Government, or they might be corrupt and accept your gifts—and when that gets out in the open, you will lose your job, and your company will lose Government business in a big scandal. It’s simply not worth it.
Competitive analysis is your measuring stick against the rest of the world. To use a boxing analogy: your form may look impressive when you are boxing a punching bag, but it cannot hit you back. There are also no surprises and no unknowns. Ultimately, to see what you are made of, you have to be pitted against an opponent. Your capabilities, in and of themselves, may be impressive, but would they stand up to your leaner and meaner opponents? Let’s look at the reasons why you should mind your competitors and predict their possible actions; what you need to know about your competition; how to find this information; and how to put all the pieces of the competitive analysis puzzle together to exploit your competitors’ shortfalls to you advantage and outdo them through strategic actions.
Graphics, focus boxes, paragraph order, structure, text layout, and flawless spelling and grammar are all the necessary attributes of a great proposal. After spending years in proposal management, however, I have noticed that one important attribute, readability, is often overlooked. Since editors frequently refrain from making in-depth content edits, it is the technical writers’ task to make their sections more readable before their sections go to editors. The problem is that many people tasked with technical writing do not know what readability means or how to make tangible changes to make their sections more readable. This article offers a tutorial on improving readability that proposal writers could start using immediately.
You submitted your proposal, and then waited anxiously to hear whether you won or lost. You had your hopes up, and maybe got exactly what you were wishing for: the contract is awarded to your company. You have millions of things to take care of since you now need to start up the program. You may not even have enough time to plan your win party because you are so busy. Or, maybe you have lost and are thoroughly disappointed. After all, you have given it your best, spent scarce resources and sleepless nights, and witnessed heroic efforts from your entire team putting the proposal together. Whether you won or lost, however, you cannot consider your proposal effort complete until you have asked the Government for a debrief. You are bound to win a lot more proposals if you consider lessons learned after each pursuit to improve your proposal management process, your knowledge of your customers, and your offers.
I used to be so scared of flying that I would sit on a plane and breathe in a bag to deal with an anxiety attack. I forced myself to travel for business, but each flight was such a high-stress event that I would feel depleted, as if I had run a marathon. I felt as if I had to hold the plane in the air by sheer willpower the entire flight.
Workshop in 1.5 weeks: Foundations of Federal Business Development.
September 11, 2012, 9.00am-5:00pm, Rockville, MD. Gain understanding of the Federal Business Development (BD) lifecycle, and learn how to navigate the U.S. Government marketplace, perform strategic BD planning, market analysis, federal marketing, pipeline development, opportunity qualification, and maximize your Pwin. Only 4 seats left: www.ostglobalsolutions.com/federal-business-development-training.php
Have you ever noticed that even when companies know ahead of time about an RFP (when it will get released and what the subject matter will consist of), often times they are still not ready when it drops? The current state of the economy is forcing us to reduce the amount of resources we can engage for each effort, creating an environment that makes it difficult to deliver winning proposals.
We have to perform like Olympic athletes, winning against the competitors breathing down our necks, and rely on uncanny endurance to last through those 16-hour workdays. Michael Phelps said that “You can’t put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.” Visualizing victory will help us push the limits of what’s possible. We have to always remember that we are here to get that contract, and not just throw together a compliant proposal by the deadline.
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.
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.
