Carl Dickson

When the customer announces that an opportunity you have bid on has been awarded, you should request a debrief to provide feedback on how your proposal was evaluated. On Federal proposals, they may be required to provide one when requested. If you have lost, the feedback can help you improve your future proposals. But you should request one even when you win, and for exactly the same reason. A debrief can help you understand how the customer perceived your proposal and help you make better decisions. Keep in mind that you don't want to impose on the customer and that some customers will be concerned that you are going to protest their decision. There may be some questions that they are not comfortable answering, and you shouldn't push. If you do not intend to protest, you should make it clear to the customer that you just want feedback so that you can provide them with better proposals in the future --- it's in their interest too! Here are some questions to consider asking during a debrief: Basic questions: Who won? How many bids were received? What was your overall score? Was your score closer to the top or close to the bottom? What was the winner's score? Did the winner have the lowest price? Did the winner have a higher score on the technical evaluation factors? If price was a major factor and you lost: Did you score higher or lower than the winner on technical factors? Did you scope the level of effort (number of people/hours) appropriately? Was the skill level of your proposed staffing too high? Did the winner propose more or less staff/hours? By how much? If you scored higher on technical factors but lost: Did you lose because your higher score on technical drove up the cost? If your price had been the same as the winner, would your proposal have represented the best value? If you scored lower on technical factors: How did your staffing score? How did your technical understanding and approach score? How did your past performance score? Did you have any compliance issues? If the incumbent won: Did the incumbent score higher on the technical evaluation factors? Did the incumbent score higher on experience? Would a more clear statement that you would retain the incumbent staffing have improved your score? Miscellaneous: How did the presentation and appearance of your proposal stack up against the competition? What differentiated you from the other bids? Was your proposal easy to navigate and score? Was the appearance of your proposal better, worse, or about the same as your competition? Did it contain any fluff or content that should have been substantiated better? Is there anything the customer would recommend for you to improve?

"I could satisfy the government, but I couldn't give managers the information they needed to do their jobs," says Shannon Winston, Controller for Apex Environmental. Apex Environmental, like many professional services firms with a competitive edge, offers a widely diverse group of services to both government and commercial clients. Managing and accessing data is critical with every contract. Recently - after years of using multiple software systems, supplemental spreadsheets, and manually transferring data from one incompatible system to another - Apex Environmental purchased and deployed a single software system (developed by Wind2 Software) that handles the entire operation and serves both public and private sector clients with an integrated package. The new system streamlines planning, management, and reporting requirements for the entire company. It also helps contract managers win more contracts, manage them more efficiently, and make them more profitable because it automates the entire process - addressing everything from the initial technical proposal to the DCAA close-out audit with greater efficiency and reliability. Business Complexities As a comprehensive health, safety, and environmental services firm, Apex Environmental specializes in consulting and remediation work. The firm's professional, technical, and field experts are located in 10 offices across 25 states, and services include compliance, environmental assessments, remediation, health and safety, program management, energy management, and information technology. All clients, of course, require careful tracking, reporting, and invoicing of actual labor and direct project expenses. The company's government clients, however, also demand strict adherence to a host of requirements as defined by CAS, FAR and DCAA. In working with their government contracts, Apex staff members must meticulously account for allowable overhead expense (which can vary considerably from contract to contract); they must follow strict guidelines for time and expense entry; and they must report project direct and overhead charges on pre-approved government forms. In addition to being an environmental consultancy, simply charging fees for professional services, Apex also has a $6 million construction division that performs actual remediation work in the field. In support of this division, Apex staff must also handle construction-related activities -- generating purchase orders, managing subcontractors, and hiring and paying construction workers. Searching for Solutions Apex Environmental has attempted to handle this complex mix of data tracking and reporting requirements in a variety of ways over the years. During its first few years in business, the firm used a manual record-keeping system. Quickly outgrowing the manual system, company leaders purchased a basic accounting program in an effort to automate the operation. That program managed the financial aspects of the business, but it offered no support for the governmental reporting requirements. Thinking they had found the answer, Apex purchased an accounting system designed specifically for government contractors. While this program did a better job of managing information needed for government reporting, its project management and general reporting capabilities were weak. In an attempt to make up for the lack of functionality in the accounting software, office personnel used several spreadsheet and word processing programs to generate reports and other documents in the formats they needed. As a result, staff members were constantly re-entering data from the accounting system into these supplementary programs - a time-consuming and frustrating duplication of effort. "I could satisfy the government, but I couldn't give managers the information they needed to do their jobs," says Shannon Winston, Controller for Apex Environmental. When the firm decided to replace this piece-meal system with a more powerful and useful software system, the most important requirement for the new software was flexibility. "We didn't want different software for different types of work," explains Winston. "The software we were looking for had to have the flexibility to do everything we needed it to do on both private and government-sector work." Cost was another consideration. Apex leaders wanted a system that could meet all current needs, expand its functionality to meet future needs, and still sell for a reasonable price. The company simply did not want to spend $100,000 for a software system, even one that could handle their needs. Meeting Contract Requirements and Business Goals After extensive investigation and product comparisons, Apex Environmental decision-makers chose a business system from Wind2 Software that fully integrates general accounting functions with project invoicing and reporting, budget control, profit analysis, employee management, cost proposal development, accounts receivable tracking, and government contract management. The system is flexible enough to handle the company's mix of clients and activities today, and its scalability makes it capable of doing more as the company grows. "We needed an application that would let us focus on being a smart business first, while still handling our government contract specific needs completely," says Winston. "Wind2 enables us to efficiently handle all of the requirements of our federal, state and local government projects, without sacrificing good, solid and simple business practices. That flexibility is really what makes this program so well suited to a company like ours that has so many different activities and a mix of government and private sector work." Like all government contractors, Apex Environmental must comply with all government accounting requirements (e.g., FAR, CAS, Incurred Cost proposals, DCAA guidance) and prepare for government audits. According to Winston, the company is saving hundreds of man-hours every month by eliminating the use of spreadsheets and simple accounting software to meet the stringent audit and reporting requirements of their government contracts. These resources are now freed to support ongoing work and to land new contracts. Apex's new software is fully equipped to meet the 17 contract and billing types defined by DCAA, including fixed price, cost-plus, and time and materials. It addresses "Other Transaction Authority" (OTA) contracts and handles timekeeping practices, direct and indirect costs, overhead and G&A rates, unallowable costs, pre-award costs, incurred cost proposals and invoicing properly. Within two months of installing the new software, Apex was able to reduce its accounts payable staff through attrition from six people to five. Staff members no longer need to manually calculate expense rates or enter data into two systems to prepare reports. And they have immediate access to financial and project data that has been unavailable to them in the past. Winston explains it this way: "When a vendor calls asking about a payment, staff members can now query the database to find the answer. Instead of searching through old hard copy reports and files, we simply find the vendor record and drill down into the database to see all the related invoices and payments." According to Winston, Apex Environmental now has the system it needs to handle its complex spectrum of government and private sector work. And company leaders know that as their business continues to grow and evolve, the Wind2 system's inherent flexibility and scalability will let them expand its functionality in any direction they chose to go.

So you want to do business with Uncle Sam? The approach you take will be based largely on the type of business. Do you sell products or commodities? Are you looking to provide services or solutions? Or are you interested in seeking a grant? Each type of business requires a different approach to marketing and goes through a different procurement process within the Government. The processes that the Government uses are heavily regulated. The principle document that governs Federal procurement is called the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). One thing that they all have in common is that the Government publishes a request for what it wants, and then those who are interested in providing it respond in writing in the format requested. Another thing they have in common is that if all you do is wait for them to publish what they want and then respond, you probably won’t be successful. This is less true for product or commodity purchases, but even there it separates those who occasionally do business with the Government from those who are consistently successful at it. Various government purchasing offices maintain supplier lists that they use for notifying suppliers when they wish to purchase something. For products/commodities, they often use “Request for Quotes” or “Invitation for Bids.” For small ticket items (less than $2,500), Government end users can purchase directly via credit cards. Most agencies are moving these lists into the electronic age and are using web-based catalogs of items. The Department of Defense operates a centralized contractor registration site, but you should also register with the individual procurement offices that you may be dealing with. Regardless of the format or media, it is important to get on the supplier lists so that the agency will know that you exist and so that you can receive the notifications. Getting on all these lists means finding the acquisition offices. You can do this via the web. First you have to figure out which parts of the Government you may be dealing with. Who in the Government might be interested in purchasing from you? The Federal Government is so large that you can’t address the whole thing (at least not all at once). Instead you should target those agencies or departments that best match what it is you are offering. If your business is local or regional, it is a good idea to seek out agencies with offices in your area and register with them. When dealing with Uncle Sam, it is a good idea to have multiple ways that Government customers can purchase from you (just like people expect to be able to pay by cash, check, credit card, ATM card, etc.). Only for the Government, you want to have multiple contract vehicles. If the price exceeds certain thresholds, the Government can’t simply buy something. They have to follow a regulatory process designed to ensure competition, appropriate pricing, and prevent corruption. This process usually takes the form of a contract that once signed enables the Government to purchase from you. Contracts are usually announced, competed, and awarded in a process that can be lengthy. However, some agencies employ Basic Purchasing Agreements (BPAs) and other contract vehicles that are highly prized because they are quick to put in place and easy to use once signed. Another vehicle to pursue is the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule, which is a large catalog of items that can be purchased by any part of the Government. If all else fails, the Government may be able to purchase from you by using the GSA Schedule. Vehicles that can be used Government wide, like the GSA Schedule, are especially useful if your business is national or equally applicable to all agencies. More complex purchases are procured by publishing a Request for Proposals (RFP). Notice of an RFP release is published in the Commerce Business Daily and electronically at FedBizOpps.gov. Often, the size and complexity of these procurements requires multiple companies to join together and form a team to respond. One will be the prime contractor, and the others will be subcontractors. Many Government contractors do business by simply monitoring RFP releases and bidding on those they think they can win. As is frequently the case in life, the easy approach is not necessarily the most effective. To achieve consistent success, you must have a marketing program to develop customer awareness ahead of RFP release, while the customer is still considering what they need and what to do about it. To do this, you must target specific offices and get to know them long before you actually start doing business with them. One of the biggest difficulties in doing business with Uncle Sam lies in knowing which offices to target and getting to know the future customer. Once an RFP is released, putting together a compliant, persuasive, and winning proposal can also be difficult. But more often than not, the battle is won or lost by your marketing, before the RFP has even hit the street.

Figuring out how to become a "Government Contractor" can seem difficult, even intimidating. Relax, if you follow the right steps you can become a Government Contractor. Even though are a ton of rules and regulations, most cover a whole range of circumstances that won't apply to you, at least not all at one time. These rules are contained in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), a huge document that spells out the rules for Government contracting. Luckily, you don't have to memorize it to become a Government contractor. Most of the rules apply to services businesses. If you deal in off-the-shelf products or commodities, doing business with the Government can be as easy as processing a normal customer's credit card. There are also thresholds to consider. Below a certain amount,the Government can pay with a purchase card (credit card), above a certain amount and they must issue a Request for Quote or a Request for Proposal and get competing bids. It is above these thresholds, which can vary by agency, where things can get complicated. If you are selling services things tends to get more complicated, more quickly. You will have to register at sam.gov before you can become a Government contrator. One of the hardest parts of the transition to becoming a Government Contractor is that you may need a completely different kind of accounting system, one that provides pricing in the right formats, with sufficient justification for Government Contracting. The next hardest part is that the process is based on contracts. Service contracts between businesses are hard enough, but the Government has to comply with a myriad of laws and rules that have been created over decades to counter every possible scandal and corruption. Most Government Contractors employ specialists in both contract and finance who understand the language and the rules. Doing the work on the contract can be fairly straightforward. But first you have to get a contract with the Government. This is not as hard as it sounds. For most purchases above a certain threshold, the Government publicizes what they are going to purchase, and nearly anyone can bid. The reality is that many procurements require specialized capabilities and expertise, greatly limiting the number of companies who can respond. Another major consideration before you get started is how you want to be classified. For example, there are special programs for small businesses, and even special programs for small businesses that are considered economically "disadvantaged." Getting started as a Government Contract will be significantly easier if you are a small business or small disadvantaged business. Among the rules that apply to Government Contracting are requirements that are certain percentage of procurements go to small businesses. There are also Mentor Protege programs in which a large company is incentivized by the Government to help a small business get started in Government contracting. You will also be categorized according to the capabilities and offerings of your business. In order to be able to code and classify businesses, the Government uses the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The forms you fill out will require you to supply the NAICS codes that you qualify for. Once you have registered and start looking for contracting opportunities, you may find so many opportunities exist, that it's hard to find the opportunities that apply to you. And when you do find an opportunity that applies to you, you may find it hard to respond in time. You will also find it hard to achieve success without customer and competitive intelligence, but you've got to start somewhere. When you do try to bid, you're going to have a tough time meeting "Past Performance" requirements if you've never done business with the Government before. One way to get started is subcontracting. You can do part of the work on a Government contract as a subcontractor. And along the way you gain experience. All you need is a good relationship with a prime contractor (usually a larger, more established Government contractor), a business opportunity/RFP, and a reason why the prime-contractor should include you rather than do the work themselves. As you gain experience you will find that it is easier to succeed when you stake out a territory, whether it's a particular agency, a capability, or a region. It is far easier to learn who to contact, who the competition is, and to monitor business opportunities when you narrow it down to something more manageable. It is also easier to gain the customer and competitive intelligence needed to win. Does all that sound complicated enough? Let me summarize. If you stay under the thresholds ($2500) for purchase cards, doing business with the Government is just like doing business with a customer who pays by credit card. If you stay under $25,000 you won't have to deal with RFPs and most of the FAR requirements, but opportunities won't be advertised. If you go above $25,000 you're on your way to becoming a Government Contractor. You'll need to register. If you're going to stay a Government Contractor, you'll need the to develop the right accounting and contracts management capabilities. If you're going to succeed as a Government Contractor, you'll need to learn the ins-and-outs of business development in the Federal marketplace.

While Fedbizopps.gov lists bid opportunities, you need to know how to pursue federal contracts if you want to win them. To win the bids you find on FedBizopps.gov, you need to learn how to market the Federal Government. In addition to the announcements and notices themselves, Fedbizopps.gov provides features like keyword searches, RFP downloads, solicitation notifications, interested bidders lists, and more. You can also find potential teaming partners. The information available on Fedbizopps.gov includes solicitation files, sources sought notices, draft RFPs, and other documents related directly to the solicitations. Government buyers often use Fedbizopps.gov announcements to conduct market surveys to locate qualified businesses. The upside for contrators is that you get immediate access to information about thousands of solicitations. The downside is that it makes it easy to fall into the trap of looking for solicitations after they are announced and bidding as many as possible. If Fedbizopps.gov is the only way you learn about leads, then you discover them at the same time as everybody else, after it's too late to gain the kind of insight you need to have a competitive advantage. The trick is to discover leads before they are posted on Fedbizopps.gov. To do this you need contacts, relationships, and a Federal marketing program. You need a business development process that puts you in position to win, before the RFP is released. When you combine Fedbizopps.gov with a strategic marketing plan and a process for identifying and capturing leads, you will be more successful. If you just use it to search for bids and respond blindly, you will frequently lose becuase someone else has the competitive advantage. Advance marketing and the right pursuit process are how you become the one with the advantage.

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. So, what is a debrief? The government is required by FAR 15.506 to provide official feedback on your proposal to your company, if you make a request within three days of the notification. During the debrief, the government contracting officer, with support from other evaluators, discusses strengths and weaknesses in your proposal, provides the overall evaluated price and technical rating of the winner, offers summary rationale for award, and provides "reasonable" responses to "relevant" questions. It makes sense that a debrief after a loss is a way to understand what you missed and what you could have done better, but it may seem redundant to ask for a debrief when you won. Obviously, they loved your proposal and chose you, so what more could you ask for? Besides getting a reassurance that you got things right, there are a couple of important reasons you should ask for a debrief. One reason is that you may be surprised as to what the government thought was the most compelling part of your offer. What swayed them to your side may not have been what you thought was the most important part. Now that you have a vested interest in keeping them happy not just as your evaluator but as your full-fledged client, this information is vitally important to make sure that your company meets and exceeds client expectations. You also need to share this information with your business development team to replicate the successful techniques in your next proposal to this customer. Another reason is that even winning proposals have weaknesses, and you'd better know about yours. If this is an open competition contract, you are never secure from a scorned, losing competitor finding a legitimate reason to protest and get the proposal re-competed. Since it is a normal practice for a losing competitor to get a debrief, they are guaranteed to get information on their proposal weaknesses, and would then have a chance to make informed changes in the next go-round. If, simultaneously, you fail to get a debrief because you were a winner, and assume that all you need to do is resubmit your old proposal with minor tweaks because it has already won, think again. It is not totally unheard of to lose in the second go-around. Proposals are not read, they are scored. Even if yours got the higher score and won, you may still have had some weaknesses, or some areas that were rated "good" but not "outstanding". Your competitors will have corrected weaknesses in each section to get the highest score. You will have made no changes because you didn't know that some of your sections may have gotten an average score. Think how frustrating and unfair it would be to lose what you had won. If you have lost, request a debrief immediately, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem. It may feel like going willingly to a session where the government gets to add an insult to an injury. Debriefs are often tense and formal, and not particularly forthcoming with information because many government employees have concerns of their own. First, there may be a simple human aspect of not fancying being the "bad guys" because many understand that it takes money, sweat, and blood to prepare a proposal - so the natural tendency is to keep the encounter as short as possible. Second, the government always worries about your launching a protest based on what you learn in the debrief, so they have to watch their every word. Protests are an overwhelming concern because of the resulting project delays, endless paperwork to investigate and adjudicate, and possible questioning from the Hill. In order to make the best of your debrief, you need to assuage the government's concerns of your launching a protest. You also can put people at ease by not acting on the natural temptation to express sour feelings or act defensive. You need to put yourself and your colleagues in a right frame of mind to think of the event as an important milestone in a long-term relationship. Your attitude going in should be forward-looking, with sincere curiosity and good sportsmanship. You've hit a snag and would like the government to provide some insight into how you could better meet their expectations in the future. Tell the government that while you lost a proposal this time, you have full intention of continuing to work with them and you value your relationship. Phrase your questions to be entirely focused on lessons learned and constructive resolution. Smile, look the government straight in the eye, hold your head up high, and take detailed notes. At the same time, do not let the government get away with glittering generalities that you do not understand or that they fail to fully explain. Prepare specific questions on the features of your offer to verify whether your assumptions were correct, and if and why the government liked or disliked each key feature of your offer. Draw information out of them concerning what they think would get the specific sections scored higher; what would be the ideal offer that you could provide, even if it is unrealistic; what benefits they would like to see that weren't obvious; and how you could improve your writing, graphics, and features. You should leave the meeting with a clear understanding of what you need to do to be more competitive in your next solicitation. In summary, requesting a debrief after you have won or lost a bid is a proposal management best practice. Come to the debrief well-prepared, having reread the proposal, and bring a copy with you for quick reference. Take detailed notes to share with your colleagues and management, and conduct a formal lessons learned session shortly thereafter. You will be surprised how much your win rate goes up.

The government has moved away from maximized competition and lowest responsible, responsive pricing to Best Value Procurements. Best Value is a gray area that is open to subjectivity and therefore we offer the following comment. The term's "best value" and "lowest overall cost alternative" are not mutually exclusive. A best value analysis lends itself to determining the "lowest cost alternative." Best value procurements involve tradeoffs between cost and technical. For example, if one vendor offers a high-end computer at a higher price, while another vendor offers a lower-end computer at a lower price, then the higher-price computer may in fact be the best value and result in the lowest overall costs to the agency. This is true if the greater computing power of the high-end computer increases the efficiency of the agency's operations, thereby saving the agency money when compared to the capability of the lower-end, lower-priced computer. The agency should document its decision to demonstrate that its evaluation of the vendors' responses to a Request for Quotes (RFQ) was reasonable and in accordance with the criteria outlined in the RFQ. There is no legal requirement that the agency quantify any cost/technical tradeoffs in dollars. An agency should use whatever evaluation approach (e.g., narrative, quantification) best suits its needs, while at the same time being sensitive to the streamlined nature of the Federal Supply Service process. For example, agencies can use narrative explanations or its cost/technical tradeoff, so long as the evaluation is reasonable and consistent with the criteria identified in the RFQ. If an agency has concerns that it may not be able to explain why a higher-cost item represents the lowest-cost alternative to meet its needs, the agency should look to the technical aspects. These may include warranty, computing power, reliability, past performance, or service locations. The question is whether the technical aspects provide a better deal to the agency than a comparable lower-priced item. For example, a higher priced product with a 5-year warranty may in fact be a better value at a lower cost to the agency than a lower priced product with a 2-year warranty.

Under past performance the Government picks winners based on their track records and not just the promises in their proposals. This makes a lot of sense and is the way commercial companies often pick vendors. The result has been significant --- companies pay much more attention to successful performance and customer satisfaction because they know their past performance evaluations are riding on it. The problem with past performance evaluations is that they make it difficult for new companies to do business with the Government. In effect, they have no track record to evaluate. In theory, these companies are not penalized, they are merely given "neutral" past performance ratings. In truth, this is the kiss of death. If you are a company without previous Government contract experience, you can still pass a past performance evaluation. But you have to understand the process to make it work. Most past performance evaluations follow the process recommended by the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), which has published a best practices manual for conducting past performance reviews. Often the evaluation of past performance includes a survey of customer projects that are similar to the work being proposed. The main focus points of this survey include whether you submitted deliverables on time and whether you completed the project within budget. You can emulate a past performance evaluation by identifying work you have done that is similar to the work required by the Government procurement, and completing the survey yourself. Often commercial projects and Government projects use different terminology to describe essentially the same things. To make it easy for the Government to evaluate, you should use their terminology. You should present your commercial projects in the terminology used on the past performance survey form. You should also describe your project's scope, processes, and requirements using the terminology of the RFP. Finally, you should also align the project's attributes with the evaluation criteria described in the RFP for the procurement. Your project description should read like it was a Government project, even though the customer was a commercial customer. The main difference between commercial and Government projects is often that Government projects have more structure. Government project processes are usually formal and documented, as are milestones and deliverables. Making your commercial projects read like Government projects may mean emphasizing the structure of your processes, milestones, and deliverables. Finally, on a past performance evaluation, the Government may call the customer. You must make sure that the customer is aware they may call, that they phone number you supply works, and it is a good idea to know what the customer might say about you. A successful past performance evaluation requires the participation of your customers, an imposition commercial companies are often reluctant to make. You might want to send the customer a copy of the survey form so they'll know what is coming.

Contracting can be a strange business. Someone you work with today, could be working for a competitor tomorrow. And vice versa. Large procurements are often pursued by a team of companies, with each member bringing something to the table. As a whole, the team has more to offer than as individuals. Other companies may be competitors, but they could also potentially be teaming partners. Be careful treating the competition like the enemy because you may need them as your business partner later. In fact, you are better off being friendly with them since even if you don’t end up teaming together, you may from time to time be able to compare notes. In Government contracting, sometimes teaming happens because the Government requires a portion of the award to go to small businesses. When this is the case, a large company may team with one or more small companies. They will divide up the work to be done if they win and the work to be done in submitting the proposal. How things get divided is a matter of negotiation. Companies will also team to provide specialized expertise, staffing, geographic coverage, or customer presence. The process of teaming is much more of an art than a science. Knowing who to team with requires knowing what companies have the expertise, customer presence, and other attributes. It also requires knowing who to talk to at those companies. As a project manager, you can focus on knowing the companies that do business with your customer and find out the names of the other project managers. If you go much further, you’ll have a personal “network,” and might cross the line into “business development.” The fun really starts when the need for teaming has been recognized, and potential partners identified. Because teaming partners are potential competitors, sometimes you may have to approach them about partnering, without telling them enough about the opportunity for them to pursue it themselves. Furthermore, you may have to put your team into place before the actual RFP hits the street. The problem here is that you don’t know the final statement of work, making it difficult to define how work will be divided. Once you have recognized the need for teaming, and have identified potential partners, it is a good idea to involve business development specialists and your contracts department, if you haven’t already and if your company has them. Before the negotiations go too far, you will probably need to exchange non-disclosure agreements with your teaming partners. These are usually a prelude to a teaming agreement which will describe the opportunity, who will do what in pursuit of it, and how business will be divided upon award. Teaming agreements are sometimes done in two parts, pre-RFP, and post-RFP, depending on the circumstances.

We have written about the reasons why nobody uses storyboards to plan their proposals. The first step in developing a better alternative to storyboards is to be clear about what we need from our proposal planning efforts. Here is a list of things you need in order to successfully plan your proposal content. It should be in a format that will save people time. Section planning should be done in a similar format to that of the draft document to facilitate going from planning to writing. The format of the planning tool should not increase the amount of work required to generate a document. Instead, it should be a simple step to convert the plan into a draft document. It should provide instructions for the authors to follow. Instead of collecting information, we need to collect instructions for the authors to implement. It should provide a container to hold the ingredients for the section.It should hold everything that will go into the proposal section, such as topics to address, requirements to comply with, reminders, points of emphasis, conclusions you want the evaluator to reach, terms to use, placeholders for graphics, etc. It should work like a recipe. Reviewers should be able to look at it and ask “if all of these instructions are followed, will it result in the proposal we want to submit?” In other words, if you follow the recipe, will the dish be what you want to eat? It should provide a baseline to compare the draft against. You should be able to compare the draft against the plans to see if the draft addresses everything it should. In fact, you should be able to use the plan like a checklist to review the draft. It should provide a means to plan the solution as well as the content. Planning how you are going to do the work for the customer or how you are going to complete the project is very different from planning what you are going to write. You need to do both, and one planning tool may not address the needs of both. However, once you have determined what your approach or solution is going to be, you should be able to incorporate it into your plans for writing the proposal. What would something like this look like? It would start off as a shell proposal with all of the headings in place from the outline. Into this shell would go all of the instructions for the authors. These would start with the RFP requirements. These could be direct quotes or referenced by paragraph number. Then you would include everything else: things you need to do to implement your win strategies, things you have learned from intelligence gathering, things that will need to be addressed even though not required by the RFP, points of emphasis based on the evaluation criteria, placeholders for graphics, etc. The result is a document containing instructions (at the bullet level) that works like a “to-do” list or recipe. It is, in effect, a heavily annotated outline. Writing becomes a process of elimination, replacing each instruction with the writing that you incorporate into your text. When your Content Plan is complete, you can review and validate that it has addressed everything it should. We have taken these ideas and incorporated them into the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process. We use checklists to make sure that everything has been considered and that the Content Plan is complete. After the Content Plan is validated and turned into a draft of the proposal, we bring it back to review the draft. It is really helpful to compare the draft against the requirements put into the Content Plan. The real test is whether the approach to planning enables you to plan before you write and whether it enables you to validate the draft. Storyboards aren’t used because people find that they take a lot of work to provide a mediocre plan that generally isn’t suitable for validating the draft against. The real reason to use a more efficient format isn’t simply to lower the effort; it’s to make it feasible to plan before you write. For the process to be successful, it must be clear to the participants (don’t expect them to take it on faith) that the effort saved during writing and getting through the review process is greater than the effort that goes into planning. Storyboards won’t get you there, but a Content Plan that puts everything into the document that they need just might.

Storyboards are one of those things that everyone recommends as a best practice, but hardly anyone actually uses. They are typically implemented as a form, often on oversized paper, that people use to plan proposal sections prior to writing. Authors are typically asked to complete the storyboard forms and then a review is held. Authors are supposed to wait until after the storyboard review to start writing. Very few organizations start with storyboards, and those that try them encounter numerous difficulties. With or without storyboards, you still need to plan what will go into your proposal sections. Companies that don’t use storyboards should be using other methods to plan the content of their proposals. Here are some reasons why nobody (or at least hardly anybody) uses storyboards. Most RFPs make storyboards unnecessary. Things have changed over the last 20 years. RFPs have become better organized. In the past, the instructions, evaluation criteria, and statement of work did not match up, requiring complicated cross-referencing and numerous judgment calls. Today the parts of an RFP are usually in better alignment and you can respond to most RFPs by simply following the outline provided in the instructions. You still need to plan the content of your sections, but you don’t need storyboards to plan the outline. Storyboards are difficult to format and work with. You can’t fit everything you need on a storyboard on a single 8.5x11” sheet of paper. But even if you can print on 11x17” paper, it’s difficult to work with. For example, field offices, teaming partners, and people at home can’t print that size. If the end users assigned with completing the storyboards can’t manipulate and print them, they will have difficulty completing their assignments and the quality of the content will suffer. Storyboards are difficult to move information into and out of. If you are using tables, boxes, and lines to make your storyboards more like visual forms, then cutting and pasting text into or out of the storyboards usually means difficult and pointless reformatting. Storyboards put too much time and effort into documents that are intentionally orphaned. After all the production effort that goes into preparing storyboards, they get pushed aside when it’s time to create the proposal document. Even though storyboards give you some content to work with, you still start the document from a blank screen. Too often, they are abandoned completely. Storyboards don’t provide good instructions for authors to follow.Storyboards collect information, but don’t provide any guidance for what to do with that information. Storyboards do things like provide an out-of-context place to identify “themes,” without telling the authors where the theme should go in the draft or how to address the theme in their section. Storyboards don’t address everything that should go into a section.Storyboards have headings that address the most important things. The more headings, the more complicated it is to complete the storyboards. Anything left out makes it harder for authors to complete their drafts and creates potential quality issues. Storyboards are not flexible. The information you need to collect varies from one opportunity/RFP to the next. The goals that you are trying to achieve in a proposal can change from section to section. Having one format to use across all proposals, or even across a single proposal, means that in many cases it won’t quite fit. And that means that you are not quite collecting the right information. Storyboards don’t provide a good baseline to compare the draft against. It is so difficult to compare a draft document against a storyboard that most organizations using storyboards don’t use them in reviewing the draft document. The storyboards get left behind and the draft is reviewed on its own. The real problem is that storyboards aren’t providing what people need to successfully plan their proposals. The goal is good; it’s the implementation that has problems. When planning your next proposal, you might want to consider what your planning and validation goals are, and look for better ways to achieve them.

Storyboards are a planning tool that many people have heard of, but very few have implemented successfully. With storyboards, you complete a form for each item in the outline. The storyboard contains headings for items that should be addressed in each section. Authors complete the storyboards to provide the information that needs to be presented in a section and complete the low-level outline. Stakeholders can add and review information on the storyboards to perfect the plan prior to writing. Storyboards work well for proposals that require brainstorming a unique solution to the customer's problems. However, storyboards have a number of problems: They are inefficient, requiring the production of a document that is separate from the proposal itself. Because they are separate from the proposal, they are easily left behind and ignored by authors. They don't work well in a distributed environment with remote authors. There is a limit to the amount of information they can accommodate. Storyboards have one big advantage. If you take a large room and put them up on the walls, you can walk around the room and see the plan for the proposal. This assumes that you have a large room, and that all authors and reviewers are physically co-located. This is often not the case, mitigating the primary advantage of using storyboards. We prefer a different approach, one that we refer to as creating a Content Plan. We prefer this approach because: The planning document becomes a set of instructions that the authors follow. It smooths the transition from capture planning to proposal writing by providing a vehicle to carry intelligence forward. Authors work directly in the planning document instead of leaving it behind. Instead of creating extra steps, Content Plans make it easier for the authors. Content Plans can be used with geographically dispersed authors. The Content Plan turns proposal writing into a process of elimination and enables progress to be measured. The Content Plan provides a baseline that enables the proposal to be validated. While many of the goals are the same as storyboards, we find that this approach delivers better and more reliable results.

While you can't turn bad news into good through clever wording, the way that you deliver bad news in writing can affect how it is received the same way that it does when speaking. Some speakers know how to deliver bad news, and others only make it worse. The same is true in writing. The introduction is very important. It sets the context for the bad news, and context has a lot to do with how bad news is received. Instead of jumping straight into the bad, try leading with something positive. Describe what went well or a beneficial outcome. Or explain something positive about the future. Take the long term view, and present a positive vision for the future. The bad news itself should go in the middle of your message. If there are five paragraphs, the bad news should hide in the middle of the third. Your goal is not so much to hide or minimize the fact of the bad news, so much as it is to place it in context and make it part of an overall message. You need to introduce it, and you need to leave them with it explained and in context, so the bad news should go in the middle. Once delivered, the bad news should be followed by the remedy, lesson learned, or course of action that will result in future prevention or improvement. You should consider making a commitment to taking some kind of corrective action. Turn your weakness into a strength. However, your response must be credible and verifiable. Conclude by showing that you care. It could be nothing more than an apology, but it should show genuine empathy. You have mastered the art when your handling of the situation earns you respect and you are seen as someone who can be relied on when things go bad. And it's OK to tell the reader that this is what you hope will result in the long run. You want your reader to recognize that everyone has to deliver bad news sometimes, that you are making an effort to do it right, and that if the shoe was on the other foot, they would be saying and doing the same things. The key to delivering bad news is trust. When you have bad news to deliver, it often means that your trust has already been damaged. If your message is not credible or you fail to live up to your commitments to make positive changes, the result can make things worse instead of better. If your delivery of bad news is deceitful or lacks credibility, it will be like pouring gasoline on the fire. If the reader's trust in you is damaged, it can be earned back, but only if you are willing to make the effort.

Generally, the Government is required to give a meaningful de-brief to the bidders in a competition. And, again generally, the Government is pretty good about doing it, even though I suspect the individual de-briefers would just as soon be doing almost anything but performing this task. Here are some rules that work regarding de-briefs: The time to insist on a commitment to a meaningful de-brief is BEFORE you create the proposal, not AFTER it. I suggest that your marketing people arrange for a face-to-face meeting with the Government Program Manager, or even a higher authority (your best guess at the Source Selection Authority - the person who is actually going to make the procurement decision - is a good start). Of course, this must be done well before the curtain goes down on customer contact, at which point you can deal ONLY with the Contracting Officer. Typically, this is 3 months or maybe 6 weeks BEFORE the solicitation comes out. The essence of this brief meeting is: We intend to bid on this job. We bid only to win, and therefore, we’re bidding with the expectation of winning. Win or lose, we expect, in return for our hard work in seeking your business, that we will obtain a detailed, comprehensive, candid de-brief of how our proposal was evaluated highly, and where you found it lacking. Win or lose? Why would you want a de-brief if you WIN? Hey, we’ve won. That’s enough. Now let’s proceed with the program. WRONG. Even when you win, your proposal probably had some hard points. And just because you won doesn’t mean that you won for the reason you THOUGHT made you win. I’ve heard of cases in which the supposition was that "we won on our superior technical solution“, when in fact the only reason you won was your price, and the customer wasn’t all that crazy about your technical solution - you won IN SPITE OF a so-so technical plan! Take along at least one Designated Listener / Designated Recorder. This ensures that at least someone on your de-brief team is taking careful notes, not only of what was said, but the body language of the de-briefers. If the Program Manager-Designate and the Marketing Manager are asking questions, and probably emotionally involved (especially if you’ve lost a "must-win“ competition), these people can’t be good note-takers or objective observers. Document the results, and circulate it widely. This is true even if the results are an embarrassment to some individuals. Yes, this is risky, and you must use SOME discretion, but the organization as a whole, and especially those proposal team members who labored long and hard in the trenches to create a winning proposal, DESERVE to hear the positive feed-back that comes from a win, and NEED to know the negative feedback from a losing proposal. The only way to get better is to learn from your hits and misses. Insist on, and then carry through with, de-briefs.

Most companies just try to do "the best job they can" at collecting intelligence and preparing for an RFP release. If they have any structure to their process at all, usually it emphasizes collecting intelligence to justify a bid decision. While establishing a positive return on investment is a good thing, there are a lot of other things you need to know to write a winning proposal. Here is a list of things you can use to assess your progress. Scope Define the scope of work Determine the locations of work Influence the scope to your advantage and to the competition's disadvantage Develop approaches to fulfilling the requirements Scope staffing requirements Identify any gaps between the scope and your own capabilities Identify relevant project references Identify relevant internal subject matter experts Schedule What is driving the customer's procurement schedule? What are the milestones in the customer's procurement schedule? When is the RFP release expected? How much time will be allowed for preparing the proposal? When would the customer like the project to start? When would the customer like the project to be complete? Will there be a phase-in/transition period? Acquisition Strategy What are the customer's acquisition strategy, contract vehicle, and/or approach? What are the customer's procurement process/procedures? Will there be any small business, local business, or other preferences? Evaluation Criteria Will the customer have written evaluation criteria? If so, what are they? If not, what are their unwritten criteria? How is your company positioned against the evaluation criteria? Can you influence the customer's evaluation criteria? Do you understand what it will take to win? Financial What is the estimated value of the opportunity? What is the customer's budget? Is it funded/approved? Can you influence the customer's budget for the opportunity? Points of Contact Can you draw the customer's organizational chart? Do you understand the lines of authority and influence? Who are the points of contact (POCs)? Who should be contacted for which reason and by which person in your company? Do you have a contact plan? Competitive Intelligence Can you identify all potential incumbents? What other companies might be interested in bidding? If you can't identify the potential competitors by name, have you identified them by profile (type, size, etc.)? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each one? Competitive Advantage What are your strengths and weaknesses compared to the competition? What is your strategy for positioning against the competition? Why will the customer select you instead of the competition? What are your other win strategies? Can you articulate what you offer the customer and why they should select you? Teaming Who could potentially fill any gaps in your ability to cover the scope of work? What companies could potentially strengthen your bid or position? Are there any companies that you would rather team with than compete against? Identify reasons for and against teaming with other companies to pursue the opportunity. Identify the requirements, process, and negotiation strategies for potential teaming partners.

Most companies know that to have the best chance of winning an opportunity, you have to be aware of the opportunity before the Request for Proposals (RFP) is released. When you are aware of an opportunity prior to release, you have better access to information about the customer, the opportunity, and the competition, as well as time to find out more. You also have a chance to influence the RFP. Finding out about the RFP prior to its release gives you a chance at tilting the playing field in your favor. Finding out about opportunities prior to RFP release is one of the most important things you can do to gain a competitive edge. Unfortunately, most companies do not do a good job of taking advantage of the time before RFP release, even when they know about an opportunity in advance. They end up starting the proposal without being as well positioned or informed as they should be. The reason for this is that most companies never define what "bid readiness" means. They don't have a specific plan of action for how to best take advantage of the time before RFP release. While they put their best effort into it, they treat bid preparation as part of the sales process or some mysterious art that cannot be measured. How can you be ready to bid if you don't have specific criteria that tell you when you are ready? How do you measure your progress towards being ready? How do you know what you have accomplished and what you still need to work on? Making bid preparation measurable is the only way you can consistently be prepared. Unfortunately, this is difficult for a number of reasons: You don't know what will trigger the start of the process. You don't know how much time you will have --- it can range from days to years. The customer controls most of the milestones and they vary greatly from opportunity to opportunity. You will never be able to collect all the intelligence you would like to have. Most companies just try to do "the best job they can" at collecting intelligence and preparing for RFP release. There is a better way… The first step is to identify the information you need in order to be prepared. We generally break these down into categories such as: Scope of work Schedule Acquisition Strategy Evaluation Criteria Financial Points of Contact Competitive Intelligence Competitive Advantage Teaming We have identified a list of typical questions for each of the areas identified above, and have published them in a separate article. We recommend checking your progress at least four times between when you first become aware of an opportunity and when the RFP is released. If you become aware of an opportunity a year in advance, you have three months between each check. If you become aware of it one month before the RFP is to be released, you only have a week between each check. The purpose of checking is to determine whether the progress made to date is sufficient to ensure readiness when the RFP is released. While you will have limited knowledge at first, by the time the RFP is released you need to be ready. The checks ensure that progress is made in an orderly manner, without things being left to the last minute or forgotten entirely. Each check provides an opportunity to re-evaluate how you are going to get answers to the questions that you do not have answers for yet. At each review you should see progress towards being able to answer those questions. Also, at each check the answers should become more detailed and more specific. The first time you review your progress, it may be sufficient to have a high level description of the scope of work and a point of contact. By the fourth progress review, you should be able to answer most of the questions and be turning that information into specific plans and strategies for your proposal. The combination of specific questions to answer and regular progress reviews ensures that the critical time before the RFP is not wasted. After all, it would be a shame to squander the advantage that being aware of the opportunity provides you with. This is what happens all too often when companies lack a definition of bid readiness and the means to measure progress towards it.

Especially after reform in contracting, past performance has become the section that often decides who wins or loses the contract. The dozens of proposals we have worked during the past three years have usually assigned 30 - 40% of the total evaluation score to past performance. Past performance can assume an even more important position in the proposal, however, because no Source Selection committee is going to award a contract to a vendor lacking strong past performance. The key questions are these: (1) How complete is the past performance archive? (2) How is the process of preparing the past performance going to be managed? And (3) who is going to write the past performance? It has been our experience that the number of companies that maintain an up-to-date past performance archive is small. The usual case is that the past performance citations are out of date, incomplete, or non-existent. The first step in the job of producing a responsive past performance section is to assess the requirements and plan accordingly. How many past performance citations are required? What are all the technical / experience areas that must be addressed by the citations? How many of the requirements will need to be addressed by citations from subcontractor firms? Given the situation, how many person- hours of labor will be necessary to complete the past performance section? Which citations are long-lead items requiring advance planning because of the need to interface with subcontractors or develop information lost from corporate memory? The question asking who will write the citations can have different answers. Occasionally, there will be project or program managers with the time and ability to write at least a first-draft response on some of the citations. Usually, most of the work will default to the editor(s) assigned to take responsibility for the past performance section. If the past performance section is complex at all, it will be helpful to begin with an audit of the solicitation requirements. Determine what are the important elements of experience required to do the job. Format the past performance so that each citation addresses as many parts of the spec as possible. At the end, audit the body of the citations to ensure that you have conclusively demonstrated the capability to do all parts of the spec. Our experience has been that, at least 90% of past performance citations will have to be edited to a lesser or greater extent. Usually, the citations are out of date, incomplete, or fail to adequately address the requirements of the job being proposed. Consequently, it is incumbent on the bidder to edit the citations as appropriate to tell an effective story. Usually, you can plan on expending at least four hours per citation, if not double that, given average field conditions. The editors will sometimes be lucky in having one or two citations that are already close to the spec. However, it is more frequently the case to have citations that require complete reformatting. Often this work will require the editors to interview the cognizant project / program managers on the phone, and just finding these individuals frequently requires a significant expenditure of time. In cases where these managers have left the company, the editors may need to use their creative imagination. Many solicitations require the bidder to provide references in the past performance section, including the name and phone number of a customer contact person who can be called. It has been our experience that, for every proposal, any references provided need to be checked. Sometimes, it is a challenge to even find the references, as they have changed job, or agency. Consultants are good to do this, because the references will speak more candidly to the consultant than to the contractor. Any bidder who skips this step is courting disaster, as companies sometimes do not have an accurate understanding of their customer opinion.

No matter how smart a business development consultant is, he or she is not the customer. I relish every chance I get to talk to customers to try to better understand how they think. In our last newsletter, we asked people who have participated in evaluating proposals to send us their comments. The validation of the advice we have been giving people was very satisfying. Here are some excellent suggestions we got from those evaluators who wanted to pass on some advice to proposal writers. An evaluator of childhood literacy, teen pregnancy prevention, and academic enrichment programs didn't like having to read through irrelevant information, but did like concise proposals that linked staffing, pricing, and other information to the program's objectives. An evaluator of grants for teacher training institutes liked bullets and a description of how each activity addressed the program's objectives. An evaluator of marketing services did not like being overwhelmed with irrelevant information about the background of the service provider, but did like it when the responses followed the order of the RFP requirements and the pricing was aligned with the services to be provided. An evaluator of IT, finance and property management, and training services was put off by people who waffled and talked too much about how "excellent" they are. He made awards to people with a track record who submitted simple proposals that were easy to understand. A telecommunications procurement evaluator deducted points when people didn't follow the RFP instructions for formatting. A user who participated in the evaluation of a design, build, and operate commercial project saw major players lose because they did not fully read and understand the RFP. An evaluator of military avionics, engines, and systems procurements noted that proposals lost when they didn't clearly state the benefits of the offering to the end users. A rural economic development evaluator took notice when people put more effort into the formatting than on the information in the proposal, or filled their proposals with meaningless fluff. The offerors who won didn't promise the sky for the lowest price, but instead provided a realistic plan. An evaluator of consulting proposals saw those who properly scoped and understood the work lose contracts because they didn't follow the RFP criteria. The winner understood the work and followed the RFP. A government contracting officer liked the use of an RFP cross-reference matrix, hated the use of small type, and was honest about making awards based on the lowest price. Other recommendations included: Minimize the use of buzzwords Make the pricing clear Keep any recommendations to the client relevant to what you have been asked to provide Check to ensure your references are current It's remarkable how similar the comments are. Whether reviewing a grant for social services, procurement of military hardware, information technology services, consulting services, a government acquisition, or a commercial procurement, the evaluators all had similar concerns. What are the common themes? Customers don't want proposals; they want the product or service that will fulfill their needs. If your proposal doesn't show, clearly and simply, why buying from you will fulfill those needs, the evaluators will not be pleased. Evaluators also expect you to follow the RFP. Don't overwhelm them with information just because you think they should have it, or provide generic information that isn't directly relevant to the RFP. Just give them what they need to evaluate against the RFP — and drop the fluff. If you align your pricing with the services and benefits you offer, customers often will often spend more to get more. But you have to know the customer, becuase not all will. Even small players can win over big players, if they make an effort to understand the customer.

It is possible to eliminate the false starts and “do overs” that seem to plague proposals. Here are solutions that can prevent the most common ways that proposals go bad. They may not be easy to achieve, but they do make it clear what you have to do. Achieve executive level buy-in for process enforcement and adherence by the executives themselves. You’ve got to start at the top. Typically this means the Executive Sponsor of a bid, or the person with profit and loss (P&L) oversight responsibility and control of resource allocation. The problems you need to be on guard against are: Late starts due to indecisiveness or a failure to commit at the beginning. Radical changes in direction near the deadline because it’s the first time that the person in charge has actually looked at the document. Reviews that are not called for by the process, but required by the Executive Sponsor and usually introduced without warning. You cannot prevent the Executive Sponsor from leading in a direction that is different from what you would choose. But what you can do is get the Executive Sponsor’s buy-in so that their own self-discipline prevents it. We recommend three strategies: Be up front and honest about what you want --- their support and enforcement of the process, starting with themselves. Let them know exactly what they can expect. If your process is not well defined, then they have no way of knowing what to expect from it. We designed the MustWin Process so that you can place it in their hands and they can see exactly want to expect at every step. Remember, they have the P&L responsibility and really want to know how things are going to go. Give them a chance to opt-out. Let them know that they are not forced to do it your way. Forcing them is just begging for resistance throughout the process. Instead, after showing them the process, ask them if they want what the process will deliver (efficiency, expectation management, quality validation, etc.). If they want that, then there are certain things they need to do in order to get it. If they want it, they are less likely to break it. We have found it to be very effective to forge a pact with the Executive Sponsor based on you both having commitments to each other. Gain access to staff who are able to fulfill your expectations.Because many proposals do not have enough people assigned to them, people tend to think in terms of having enough staff. It almost seems unreasonable to ask for top quality staff when you can barely get staff of any quality. But you need to apply a filter, because staff who cannot fulfill your expectations are no good to you. However, you must be able to define your expectations. Consider these: Able to conceive of a winning solution to the customer’s problem and then write about it. Able to read an RFP and incorporate the requirements into the proposed solution. Able to formulate a content plan prior to writing and then to incorporate all of its instructions into the text when writing starts. Able and sufficiently available to meet the proposal’s deadlines. Familiar with both the technical terminology and the customer’s terminology. Having some of what you need is not always better than nothing on proposals. Wasting time with someone who fails to deliver or delivers a broken write-up can leave you with no time to recover. Don’t simply accept the staff offered. If you expect to deliver a quality proposal, you need to filter your staff to make sure they can meet your expectations. Be able to articulate your expectations. Expectation management is critical to addressing the needs of a team of people and having their individual efforts align to create a document that will win over the hearts and minds of the proposal evaluators. Managing expectations is often easier than articulating them. Before you start the proposal, you should consider all of the many ways you will need to be prepared to state what you expect: Before the proposal starts At the start of the proposal When planning the content Before making assignments When enforcing the process When enforcing the schedule When preparing a validation plan Before assigning and guiding reviewers When receiving reviews and assigning changes/corrections Before finalizing changes Before starting production When preparing the proposal for delivery Keep in mind that you will also have to manage the expectations of others. You may even have to articulate their expectations for them. Also consider all the various stakeholders who will be involved in expectation management. One of the reasons that our MustWin Process is so helpful, is that it documents the expectations of the entire team in a way that you can put into each person’s hands. If people don’t know what is expected of them, they probably won’t deliver. Define quality in objective, measurable terms. Defining quality will not only end arguments over whether the proposal is “any good” but will also enable you to measure progress against it. You should use a definition of proposal quality that: Reflects what it will take to win Makes clear what writers should deliver Is measurable Can be used to validate the design and execution of the proposal document We go far beyond simply providing a definition for quality in the MustWin Process. We built the entire process around that definition. Instead of measuring performance against the outline or the deadline, we measure it by whether the proposal fulfills the quality criteria, which in turn are based on what it will take to win. Discover problems before it is too late. If you wait until you’ve got an end-to-end draft or until you can see the proposal the way the customer will see it to discover problems with it, it will be too late. Engineers don’t build a car and then begin the process of looking for problems in the design. They validate the design at every step along the way. They actually have it easier, because they have the luxury of time to develop a prototype. It might be more valid to compare building a proposal to building a rocket without having any engine tests before the launch. Instead of writing the proposal and then reviewing it, you need to hold reviews prior to writing so you know that what you're going to get will be what you need on the first try. The review that comes after the writing is just to make sure that what is produced is within spec. The MustWin Process provides a methodology for Proposal Quality Validation that enables you to validate the individual attributes of what you need in the final product so that you can check them as early as possible.

Instead of being afraid of saying something wrong that causes you to lose the whole proposal, you should be more concerned with saying a bunch of little things that dilute your message. This happens far more often. Maybe it's because people take a while to get warmed up before they start writing anything decent. Many of the examples below are things that people often write out of habit to help them get started. You can write a better proposal just by breaking these habits. Qualifications Without Benefits It's not about you. Your proposal should be about your customer. Instead of saying: When you were founded Who the founder was How much you have grown How long you have been in business How big you are How many employees you have How many cleared staff you have How many locations you have What your mission is About your other customers Where you are located We're ISO certified We're certified in... We're an 8(a) or SDB Say how your size, age, location, or other qualification will benefit the customer. Make it about them and not about you. Who cares? If you find yourself saying any of the following, you should find a way to re-write it so that the customer will care: We are pleased to respond We pride ourselves Our strength is our people We believe Empty assertions The adjectives below are often used without any substantiation. Empty assertions do damage to your credibility and do the opposite of persuading the customer. Avoid saying that you are these things, unless you prove it. You may be able to drop the adjective and just keep the proof. State-of-the-art technology Top firm Great reputation Premier Low risk Excellent customer service Best value Respected Our customers come first We are the only ones Best of breed/class Leading edge State of the art Quality focused Uniquely qualified Innovative Miscellaneous Don'ts Don't tell the customer what their needs are. If you feel the need to document the requirement, do it in the form of a statement about what you are going to do to fulfill the requirement. Don't summarize requirement. You can show your understanding by stating what you will do to fulfill the client's needs. When you summarize the requirement, it's redundant with the RFP and runs the risk of being patronizing or just plain wrong. When you say what you are going to do and how the customer will benefit, they will recognize it as something they need (or at least something close). Don't use passive voice. It's a grammar thing. If you don't know what it is, look it up. It's important. And finally, here are some things that are OK to say... We don't know, but we'll find out What you expect of the customer What other people say about you There are risks associated with the project There is nothing wrong with being human. You don't have to be perfect or have all of the answers. You just have to show that you are an excellent partner to work with through the ups and downs of the project.

If you anticipate being higher in cost than your competition, your proposal should justify the value in your bid. If possible, you should quantify that value. For example, if you have a higher up-front cost but offer lower long-term total cost of ownership, you should show how much you will save the customer in the long run. In Federal Government contracting, the evaluators specifically look for "Best Value" and may consider awarding to a higher priced bid if they can substantiate why it represents a better value. If you are worried about being undercut in price, then emphasize risk and continuity of service. Again, it is important to quantify things. Show the customer what an interruption in service can cost. If a lower cost means lower capacity or longer delivery time, show how the customer will be impacted. If a lower cost means lower quality, then demonstrate the cost of defects. The costs don't necessary have to be in dollars. For example, a delay might not have a dollar cost, but the customer will be negatively impacted. Show the down-side to every trade-off decision that can result in a lower cost. Position yourself as the low cost provider, because anything lower is simply unrealistic and not worth the risk. Show that you are cost conscious and how you have a lean, mean, and highly productive solution that is worth it because it represents the best value to the customer. If you anticipate being lower in cost than you competition, you need to defend against the higher costs justifications above. Steal their themes. Demonstrate how your bid is the best value. Describe in detail how you've mitigated the risks. Provide a credible story for how you will ensure the customer is not negatively impacted. If there are trade-off decisions, show that the ones you made represent the best value. Show that you've provided the right amount of capacity, capability, and quality without building in any unnecessary costs. Show that there are added benefits to the customer of having an efficient solution. Turn things around and show how you can be quicker and more responsive because you've built in less fat. If you are not sure whether you will be high or low, you have to assume that you will be high. But as you can see in both examples above, the key is value and how you show it. If you think you are probably in-between the highest and lowest costs, then you can position yourself as the best trade-off --- you have the lowest possible costs without making high-risk sacrifices. People often make this claim, but for it to be credible, you have to show the risks and how you've mitigated them.

An important part of finishing any proposal is making the final page count. Many government agencies have a policy of returning excess pages to the bidder unread. At least one agency starts their review by counting pages from the front of the proposal. When they get to whatever their magic number is, they remove all the rest and send them back to the bidder unread. If this happens to your proposal, you have problems. Not only will your evaluators not see something that your team thought was important (whatever was in those returned pages), you will probably be judged "non responsive" to parts of the RFP. You will also have left your evaluators with the indelible impression that you cannot follow instructions… not exactly a message to make someone want to choose you instead of a competitor! So how do you get your 20%-over-page-count, ready-to-go-to-press, Final draft down to size? The first step is to have the authors and volume managers make one last pass through the almost-final document. After authors and volume managers take their last shot at page count, consider going to the "3-2-1 system." With one or two days to go before printing, three people - good candidates are the Capture Manager, Program Architect, and Proposal Manager - take the entire proposal and try to take out material. With half a day to go, cut the number of people "negotiating" to two. And with a hour before any section has to be printed, anoint someone king (ideally, you already have - the Capture Manager) and let him or her make the final decisions. But page reduction is not just a matter of judgment about what to cut and what to keep. In many cases, because of the way sections break between pages, just removing a few words can save an entire page. Here are some useful hints that will help you reduce pages. Look for paragraphs with only one or two words on the last line. Find some way to reword part of the paragraph to eliminate the extra words. It is almost always possible to do this without losing any meaning. Ways to do this include: Rewrite wordy phrases. Even after a good edit, there are ways to rewrite sentences that may not be as pleasing to the eye or ear, but take up less space. - Change from passive to active voice. "We did…" takes up less space than, "Thus-and-so was done by us." Adjust paragraph margins by as little as 0.05". A punctuation mark after a word is treated as part of the word, sometimes causing the whole word to wrap to the next line. While this trick may technically violate the strict letter of the RFP, it will not be noticed in a paper-only submittal. If you don't overdo it, the odds of anyone noticing it, or complaining if they do, in an electronic submittal are negligible. Turn on automatic hyphenation. Adjust the "hyphenation zone" in your word processor to a smaller number and allow unlimited sequential hyphens. The result may look a bit awkward, but you'll get more words to the page. And lastly, one that seems very odd but actually works quite well: Eliminate every instance of the definite article "the" in the paragraph. Then reread it and put the "the's" back where they are absolutely necessary. (I once cut nearly one full page from a 100-page proposal using this technique. And the proposal actually read better!) Allow sentence fragments as Headlines. Newspapers do this all the time. If you have boxed summaries at the start of sections, allow sentence fragments there, too. Change stand-alone Headlines to run-in heads. No, they don't look as nice, but looks must sometimes take a back seat to content. If the RFP doesn't specify a maximum number of lines per page, consider reducing the leading of the paragraph. ("Leading" is the spacing between lines of the paragraph.) You can also reduce the spacing between paragraphs. While both of these tricks certainly push the intent of page budgets in the first place (and if you aren't careful, you can make the pages look very crammed), they do work. But don't overdo it, either in the amount of leading reduced on each page or the number of pages on which you use this trick. Used judiciously, the chances of aggravating an evaluator with either of these techniques are small. Change the typeface in your tables. Even if the RFP calls for a specific type size in tables, it is rare to see a typeface specified. There are many condensed typefaces that will allow you to pack a lot of information in a small space but are still quite readable. Eliminate references to artwork. If your artwork is clear and well-captioned, eliminating references is not a bad compromise to increase information density. Eliminate unnecessary graphics. Look for artwork whose only purpose is to reinforce points made in the text. Reduce the amount of substantiation of any claim. If you have two examples to illustrate a point, make it one. If you provide excerpts of data from some report, eliminate the excepts all together. While the preceding list is not complete, it does demonstrate that there are lots of ways you can meet page count, even when you discover the problems at the last minute. But a better way to address the problem is to prevent it in the first place. Practice the P7 rule: Proper prior planning prevents probably poor performance.

How to make the most out of your resources People are not interchangeable parts. You should use people where you can get the most out of them. Some people are better than others at tracking and record keeping, following instructions, document formatting, proof reading, sticking to the schedule, following the RFP, etc. These skills do not always correspond to experience or pay-grade. It will help if you understand what you really need. For example, some people have knowledge, but are lousy writers. They can contribute information, but the best way to get it might not be to ask them to write a section. Instead, pair them up with someone who has good interviewing and writing skills. If you have a good writer, instead of giving them a specific section, you might want to task them with re-writing instead. Then you can feed them the input from all of your subject matter experts. There is always more than one way to divide up the work that needs to be done. Pick the approach that best fits the resources you have available. How to deal with subcontractors Your subcontracts will always be late with their submissions, and when you get them they will not be what you asked for. Plan accordingly: Put your subcontractors on a different schedule from everybody else. Get their stuff early. Make sure you have multiple contacts at the subcontractor, including the boss of your primary point of contact. Make expectations absolutely clear. People will agree and then be late anyway, but at least it won’t be because they didn’t know what you wanted. Get your subcontractors to commit to being present and working out of your office at key times. If key writing will take place over a few days or a week, ask them to be there. Do this early, when they are still excited about the opportunity to team. Better yet, make it part of the teaming agreement. A version control process is vital You must have a simple to follow, preferably documented, process for version control. It should include your file naming conventions, and address back-ups and roll-backs in case of a problem. But most of all, it should provide a complete and thorough audit trail. You may need to know who made what change when. You may not be able to simply rely on file date stamps, and may need to use tracking sheets. How to use compliance tables One of the major reasons that people are forced to do proposals The Wrong Way™ is that they are out of time. This is almost always caused by starting too late. You probably even know why and who’s to blame, but can’t do anything about it and have to figure out a way to submit anyway. When you create your proposal outline, you can create extra work for yourself, or you can save yourself effort by combining requirements. A good proposal will track to the RFP perfectly and will address all requirements in detail and with examples. But you don’t have time for that. Instead, consider combining similar requirements and addressing them as a group. If you have time, you can provide a list of RFP paragraph numbers that a given section addresses. RFPs often say that you should not simply respond by saying that you will comply with the requirement. So you have to do it without anyone catching on to what you are doing. One way is to combine requirements in a table or exhibit. Then introduce the topic with high-level language talking about what will be done, the benefits it will provide, or your experience with it. Then refer to the table for a list of steps or components of your solution. You can improve on this by providing a column in the table for your approach (where you provide a single sentence’s worth of detail), the benefits of your approach, or how your approach mitigates risk. Miscellaneous Tips Process is whatever you call it. The purpose of a proposal process is to ensure that information flows in an orderly and reliable way into the document. The goal is the orderly and reliable flow of information into a winning document – not process. Therefore, when in doubt: cheat. Do the proposal The Wrong Way™. Achieve the goal if not the process. Avoid having to show authors that their changes were made. While verifying that changes were made correctly is a good idea for quality assurance, that does not mean that you have to include the original author. For one thing, you might decide not to include all of the edits! Especially near final production, if an edit won’t affect the evaluation score of the proposal, you might decide to ignore the edit. You won’t have time to discuss the finer nuances of every edit you ignore. Start a Text book library. Text books are filled with wonderful high-level lists that can be used to invent an approach out of thin air. And since most text books don’t deal with real-world applications, a lot of what you will find sounds really good and technical, but doesn’t actually commit you to much. Feed people. Have food available so that you don’t even have to take time away from the proposal to order it. Wasted food is better (and cheaper!) than wasted time. And the cost of the food is miniscule compared to the investment in the proposal.

People often assume that because the topic of a proposal is similar to an earlier proposal, that earlier proposal can be easily recycled just by "changing a few words." This is hardly ever true. We call pre-written ready to re-use proposal sections “boilerplate.” Working from boilerplate is supposed to save you time because editing is assumed to be easier than writing. But unfortunately, the level of effort required to transform the focus, goals, win strategies, themes, results, keywords, and points of emphasis into another document can easily exceed what it would have taken to write it the way you need it. The danger with boilerplate is that the writer won’t bother to review and rewrite everything they should, and will instead just update any numbers or key details. The goal should not be to finish quickly; it should be to win the proposal. Boilerplate that is not edited properly can cost you the bid. So what do you do when your users are complaining that they have to start from scratch writing something that “must have already been written” before? First, you need to understand the real reasons why people crave boilerplate: They don’t want to do their proposal assignment If they have to do it, they’d like to finish quickly They don’t know what to say What this really boils down to is a cry for help — “Help me do the proposal faster” and “Help me figure out what to write.” There are better ways to speed things up and inspire proposal writers. What is a Proposal Cookbook? Our first alternative is something we call a Proposal Cookbook. A Proposal Cookbook contains topics that proposal writers typically need to write about. For each topic they provide a recipe consisting of: Questions to answer. This is simply a list of questions for the author to answer in their section. With the right questions you lead them to the best response while ensure that it's tailored for this bid. Topics to write about. Sometimes it is easier to give the authors a list, table of contents, or outline than to put everything in the form of a question. Just keep in mind that outlines imply a particular sequence, and a hierarchy that may change from proposal to proposal. A list of topics avoids this problem. Strategies and approaches. The selection of topics and the way that questions are answered depend heavily on your win strategies and themes. For example, when you are the incumbent, you will write about staffing very differently than when you are not. However, you may be able to anticipate strategies to suggest when you are the incumbent (or not the incumbent). Examples. You can give examples for items that are always the same from proposal to proposal, or when you are describing a topic that is difficult to visualize. It can be a page, a paragraph, or even a sentence. Sometimes an example is all the writer needs to get started. The idea is to help the author without exposing the proposal to the risks that come with using boilerplate. One big advantage to using Proposal Cookbooks is that you don’t have to worry about giving the writers too many topics or addressing contingencies that aren’t relevant. The writer gets to pick and choose from the list of questions and topics to write about, and can select the ones that are most relevant or fit the page limit. However, by providing the Cookbook, you help the writer make sure they don’t overlook any possible topics. A Proposal Cookbook can adjust to the idiosyncrasies of RFPs in ways that boilerplate can’t. With a Proposal Cookbook, you get a speed boost and a quality boost, without exposing the proposal to the risks of using boilerplate.