Everything you learned about how to win Government Contracts is WRONG…
Baloney! – Balderdash! Nope. It’s wrong nonetheless, and I’ll tell you why. The reason is that everything you learned about “capturing” a government contract makes a good slide presentation to management, but it doesn’t translate well into winning the contract itself. The reason for that is what we are taught is how to do processes that can’t be directly related to the questions demanded by Section L and Section M of the RFP. We are taught to do SWOT, Key Issue Analysis, develop our themes, discriminators and features, ghost our competition, maybe put together a storyboard, and to generally have lots of “selling” of the various wonderments of our company’s performance and how happy the customer will be if they ultimately pick us. Corporate “color” teams (Pink, Red, Gold, Blue) then methodically look for those things in the proposal as it’s being developed, and punish any of the authors who do not comply. That approach works great if the proposal is being written to the company, but not so well if it’s being addressed to the solicitation. Companies who sell proposal how-to or know-how (at least none I’ve found) don’t teach the fundamentals of what really needs to happen, due in part that none of it makes for a good presentation, or because most of it requires real work. Not “hard” work, mind you, but the unglamorous work of slogging through vast amounts of data to learn details about the project/contract, and to be able to translate and address these in their proposal. Secondly, some companies are in the business of selling the “voodoo” of processes. But processes don’t prepare proposals, people do, and those people need to have more than a SWOT or a pretty storyboard, or the magic IT package from the solutions department for a contract in order to win. So. Having said that - just what DOES the team need? Here is a list of what I have found to be successful, from doing this for more than 30 years (of course, none of these are glamorous, but when they are added together, they are proven to work): 1. A REAL Proposal Manager – Not just any Proposal Manager. NOT just a person designated as a proposal manager. Anyone can hold a meeting twice a week. You need a professional Proposal Manager who understands win strategy, pricing strategy, estimating, proposal evaluation techniques by agency, contract and solicitation types, the FAR, one who is familiar with all of the operational functions within the targeted project, and who will be completely accountable for the completed proposal and everything in it. This is not a job done by a coordinator, committee, or with a matrixed organization. There can be only one person in charge of a proposal. If you’re not willing to turn the entire effort over to that one single person once the RFP is released, you have the wrong person, and you need to hire someone more qualified. 2. A Qualified proposal team – Not people collected from within the company who are trying to do this proposal in addition to their regular jobs, not operations people taken from other sites, not lower level consultants (trust me, that last one does not save you money. If you use consultants, buy the best…it will save in the end). These people should be highly proficient, and should form a core proposal team and should work all proposals as a team. This is the only way for lessons learned to be applied, and shortens the communication time during a proposal for conveying critical ideas (“let’s do it like we did in …….”). The core team should be small, made up of people who can act as authors, SMEs, and Volume Managers etc. The team can be supplemented with additional authors or SMEs as needed, and then reduced to the core team once raw material has been generated. 3. A suitable place to work – For the ENTIRE proposal team to work – estimators, authors, and SMEs. Not some here, some offsite, some working from their own office of the 6th floor, etc. Another of those small things that seem unimportant but have great power. When the whole team is present, they can hear conversations taking place, and can help keep the entire team on course. People who are not present do not have the benefit of hearing the conversations and so cannot integrate their ideas, or avert disaster by telling the team to do or not do something, and only receive new ideas or important course corrections at formal proposal meetings. Depending on the frequency, this could have a serious effect on the proposal in general, and also leads to completely unnecessary and expensive rework. 4. A complete and posted FOIA Contract – this is the “real work” mentioned earlier. By making use of the FOIA data, we can learn what the government has given the current contractor in award or incentive fees, (and scores), what the funding of various functions is, the contract values (by CLIN/ELIN/etc), what functions have been added or subtracted from the scope, IDIQ funding, and a myriad of other bits of information that lets us know if our bid is on track, if the customer is happy with the incumbent (and where or where not), how the Contracting officer is funding the contract, and much, much more. Timing of the request is critical – too early and there will be a gap near the end; too late and you may not receive it in time. 5. Continuous Real Time Configuration Control – Not an IT solution, this is best done using the walls surrounding the working proposal team. Placing the entire proposal (with the exception of cost volume, plans, etc) on the wall does a number of things; it keeps the information in view and available for review and use by the rest of the team, provides a method to display to the team who is responsible for each section (plus the page count – evaluation score, etc), provides a common platform for discussions in the group, and a place where internal company personnel can come for instant status and to integrate their ideas into the proposal – simply by writing them on the pages.
Ironically, IT solutions such as SharePoint®, Lotus Notes® or Documentum® have the complete OPPOSITE effect. They are a place to hide documents. I have seen many proposals crash or produce worthless paper due to last minute cries of “I put it in SharePoint” claims by authors that were allowed to work elsewhere. 6. “Guy on the Ground” – Simple in concept, but difficult to implement, it is one of the most important of any things you can do to improve your chances. NOTE! Do NOT violate any Conflict of Interest here. Read the FAR - know the rules. You want to find someone with detailed information that is not too dated, that has knowledge of the broadest contract scope with knowledge on internal processes in effect, staffing levels, and the work that is NOT specifically called out in the solicitation. These will be issues for strategy sessions during the proposal. Performing a bottoms-up estimate on RFP-provided workload and then finding that the incumbent has twice, or half that many people is where the guy on the ground becomes invaluable. Not knowing why is pure risk, and customers don’t always care about your detailed explanation of the mathematics. Their perception IS reality. 7. A clear division of responsibility during the capture – There are five distinct phases to the government business development lifecycle: the Positioning Phase, the Pursuit Phase, the Proposal Phase, the Post Submission Phase and the Operations Phase. (For a complete discussion of each these go to either http://ezinearticles.com/?The-5-Phases-of-Business-Development&id=4913632 <http://ezinearticles.com/?The-5-Phases-of-Business-Development&id=4913632> or http://businessdevelopment.co/the-5-phases-of-business-development <http://businessdevelopment.co/the-5-phases-of-business-development> )
One critical aspect to this phased approach is the concept of ownership, where a single person is assigned responsibility for all of the targets or work within that segment of the pipeline. For the entire pipeline to function successfully, each phase must have a clear handoff to the next owner, and then that person returns to the beginning for the next target. Because of the long lead-times involved with government contracts, these small closed-loop processes for each phase ensure that the entire pipeline stays full. Staying with a target from identification through to submission can be a yearlong effort and result in a fatal gap in the pipeline. The first six of these relate directly to the proposal phase. Regardless of how your company operates internally, if all you do is these, you WILL win more work. I (and others I work with) have won numerous contracts doing nothing but these steps. NO upfront marketing, and nothing but the RFP to start with and those six items listed above. I will also add that when we did, we were working in an environment of items 1 and 7, where either myself or another person was the single person in charge of the entire proposal, from start to finish. Granted, some of these do seem rather harsh, and some seem to oversimplify the problem. Not true. The fact of the matter is that: 1) Bid and Proposal dollars are precious, and wasting them on processes that don’t produce, or on people who cannot be effective due to lack of training or experience is a shame; and 2), a problem doesn’t have to be complicated to stop you (and your win rate) in your tracks. If you need help with any of these, or how to implement them within your organization, please feel free contact me.
Baloney! – Balderdash! Nope. It’s wrong nonetheless, and I’ll tell you why. The reason is that everything you learned about “capturing” a government contract makes a good slide presentation to management, but it doesn’t translate well into winning the contract itself. The reason for that is what we are taught is how to do processes that can’t be directly related to the questions demanded by Section L and Section M of the RFP. We are taught to do SWOT, Key Issue Analysis, develop our themes, discriminators and features, ghost our competition, maybe put together a storyboard, and to generally have lots of “selling” of the various wonderments of our company’s performance and how happy the customer will be if they ultimately pick us. Corporate “color” teams (Pink, Red, Gold, Blue) then methodically look for those things in the proposal as it’s being developed, and punish any of the authors who do not comply. That approach works great if the proposal is being written to the company, but not so well if it’s being addressed to the solicitation. Companies who sell proposal how-to or know-how (at least none I’ve found) don’t teach the fundamentals of what really needs to happen, due in part that none of it makes for a good presentation, or because most of it requires real work. Not “hard” work, mind you, but the unglamorous work of slogging through vast amounts of data to learn details about the project/contract, and to be able to translate and address these in their proposal. Secondly, some companies are in the business of selling the “voodoo” of processes. But processes don’t prepare proposals, people do, and those people need to have more than a SWOT or a pretty storyboard, or the magic IT package from the solutions department for a contract in order to win. So. Having said that - just what DOES the team need? Here is a list of what I have found to be successful, from doing this for more than 30 years (of course, none of these are glamorous, but when they are added together, they are proven to work): 1. A REAL Proposal Manager – Not just any Proposal Manager. NOT just a person designated as a proposal manager. Anyone can hold a meeting twice a week. You need a professional Proposal Manager who understands win strategy, pricing strategy, estimating, proposal evaluation techniques by agency, contract and solicitation types, the FAR, one who is familiar with all of the operational functions within the targeted project, and who will be completely accountable for the completed proposal and everything in it. This is not a job done by a coordinator, committee, or with a matrixed organization. There can be only one person in charge of a proposal. If you’re not willing to turn the entire effort over to that one single person once the RFP is released, you have the wrong person, and you need to hire someone more qualified. 2. A Qualified proposal team – Not people collected from within the company who are trying to do this proposal in addition to their regular jobs, not operations people taken from other sites, not lower level consultants (trust me, that last one does not save you money. If you use consultants, buy the best…it will save in the end). These people should be highly proficient, and should form a core proposal team and should work all proposals as a team. This is the only way for lessons learned to be applied, and shortens the communication time during a proposal for conveying critical ideas (“let’s do it like we did in …….”). The core team should be small, made up of people who can act as authors, SMEs, and Volume Managers etc. The team can be supplemented with additional authors or SMEs as needed, and then reduced to the core team once raw material has been generated. 3. A suitable place to work – For the ENTIRE proposal team to work – estimators, authors, and SMEs. Not some here, some offsite, some working from their own office of the 6th floor, etc. Another of those small things that seem unimportant but have great power. When the whole team is present, they can hear conversations taking place, and can help keep the entire team on course. People who are not present do not have the benefit of hearing the conversations and so cannot integrate their ideas, or avert disaster by telling the team to do or not do something, and only receive new ideas or important course corrections at formal proposal meetings. Depending on the frequency, this could have a serious effect on the proposal in general, and also leads to completely unnecessary and expensive rework. 4. A complete and posted FOIA Contract – this is the “real work” mentioned earlier. By making use of the FOIA data, we can learn what the government has given the current contractor in award or incentive fees, (and scores), what the funding of various functions is, the contract values (by CLIN/ELIN/etc), what functions have been added or subtracted from the scope, IDIQ funding, and a myriad of other bits of information that lets us know if our bid is on track, if the customer is happy with the incumbent (and where or where not), how the Contracting officer is funding the contract, and much, much more. Timing of the request is critical – too early and there will be a gap near the end; too late and you may not receive it in time. 5. Continuous Real Time Configuration Control – Not an IT solution, this is best done using the walls surrounding the working proposal team. Placing the entire proposal (with the exception of cost volume, plans, etc) on the wall does a number of things; it keeps the information in view and available for review and use by the rest of the team, provides a method to display to the team who is responsible for each section (plus the page count – evaluation score, etc), provides a common platform for discussions in the group, and a place where internal company personnel can come for instant status and to integrate their ideas into the proposal – simply by writing them on the pages.
Ironically, IT solutions such as SharePoint®, Lotus Notes® or Documentum® have the complete OPPOSITE effect. They are a place to hide documents. I have seen many proposals crash or produce worthless paper due to last minute cries of “I put it in SharePoint” claims by authors that were allowed to work elsewhere. 6. “Guy on the Ground” – Simple in concept, but difficult to implement, it is one of the most important of any things you can do to improve your chances. NOTE! Do NOT violate any Conflict of Interest here. Read the FAR - know the rules. You want to find someone with detailed information that is not too dated, that has knowledge of the broadest contract scope with knowledge on internal processes in effect, staffing levels, and the work that is NOT specifically called out in the solicitation. These will be issues for strategy sessions during the proposal. Performing a bottoms-up estimate on RFP-provided workload and then finding that the incumbent has twice, or half that many people is where the guy on the ground becomes invaluable. Not knowing why is pure risk, and customers don’t always care about your detailed explanation of the mathematics. Their perception IS reality. 7. A clear division of responsibility during the capture – There are five distinct phases to the government business development lifecycle: the Positioning Phase, the Pursuit Phase, the Proposal Phase, the Post Submission Phase and the Operations Phase. (For a complete discussion of each these go to either http://ezinearticles.com/?The-5-Phases-of-Business-Development&id=4913632 <http://ezinearticles.com/?The-5-Phases-of-Business-Development&id=4913632> or http://businessdevelopment.co/the-5-phases-of-business-development <http://businessdevelopment.co/the-5-phases-of-business-development> )
One critical aspect to this phased approach is the concept of ownership, where a single person is assigned responsibility for all of the targets or work within that segment of the pipeline. For the entire pipeline to function successfully, each phase must have a clear handoff to the next owner, and then that person returns to the beginning for the next target. Because of the long lead-times involved with government contracts, these small closed-loop processes for each phase ensure that the entire pipeline stays full. Staying with a target from identification through to submission can be a yearlong effort and result in a fatal gap in the pipeline. The first six of these relate directly to the proposal phase. Regardless of how your company operates internally, if all you do is these, you WILL win more work. I (and others I work with) have won numerous contracts doing nothing but these steps. NO upfront marketing, and nothing but the RFP to start with and those six items listed above. I will also add that when we did, we were working in an environment of items 1 and 7, where either myself or another person was the single person in charge of the entire proposal, from start to finish. Granted, some of these do seem rather harsh, and some seem to oversimplify the problem. Not true. The fact of the matter is that: 1) Bid and Proposal dollars are precious, and wasting them on processes that don’t produce, or on people who cannot be effective due to lack of training or experience is a shame; and 2), a problem doesn’t have to be complicated to stop you (and your win rate) in your tracks. If you need help with any of these, or how to implement them within your organization, please feel free contact me.
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