5 Basic Principles for Keeping Productive State of Mind
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.
Task Order Proposal Management Best Practices
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:
Successful Planning for your BD Strategy. Interview with Business Development Expert
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.
Developing your pipeline and preparing for a great year of winning business
This article is for everyone else who is not a planning maven, or like me, tends to pile the plate so high that no amount of planning is enough, no matter how hard I try. Now that the holiday hustle and bustle is over, and there is relatively smooth sailing through...
Overcoming Difficulties in Calling Government Customer
At OST, we often get a call to line up proposal support for an upcoming RFP. We hear that “RFP is about to drop, so send us a proposal manager, pronto.” Instead of reaching out to our consultants, however, we first pick up the phone and call the contracting officer to...Top 7 Problems With Proposal Win Themes
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.
Obtaining Senior Management Buy-in
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.
Capture Wars
Government contractors engage in capture wars on invisible battlefields, playing the games of strategy, endurance, and focus. The stakes are high, and some do a better job than others. Here is a real life example: Team A is an incumbent, and they know the whole world...How to Capitalize on IDIQs
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.
Reminder and Olessia’s 5 tips for proposal professionals
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).
Roadmap to winning in proposal cost volumes
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.
Creating Job Security, Higher Pay, and Development for Federal Proposal Professionals
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.
Rules of Thumb for Proposal Win Themes
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?
Nothing is great right out of the can, proposal resumes included
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.
Tips for overcoming proposal writer’s block
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?
How to organize to win every task order on an IDIQ
Those who have been around IDIQs for a while know that your chances of winning a task order diminish with each month that passes by, and each competition where you lose or fail to participate. This is why it is critically important that you set up a bid engine that...When you don’t have time for capture
I often get this question: “What to do when you have no time for capture?” These situations happen more often than we prefer: our management tells us we have to bid on something, NOW; or we are in a situation like a fast and furious task order environment and the...Developing a Winning Capture Strategy and Avoiding Legal Pitfalls
While implementing capture strategies, firms must be mindful about the legal pitfalls that could impede their ability to successfully pursue the work.
