Crunch Time is No Time for Reflection – How Effective is Your Proposal Process?

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Not just your win/loss record, but how well does your process support proposal creation and production? Proposal best practices and lessons learned are important enterprise assets that you should be capturing – and leveraging. After all, proposals offer hard and sometimes expensive lessons – and you should benefit from them every time.

Reviewing your internal proposal performance is one step to increasing your win probability. Ask yourself: how well did you handle team mobilization, task assignment, color team output, completion, and submission, etc.?

These are among the key focus areas for what did, and did not, go well.

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Be a Student of Your Customer

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by Steve Anderson

Last May I wrote about the importance of understanding your customer’s organization in a potential service relationship, i.e., how will your customer interface with your organization as you perform work? It’s not only important to get this right to be an effective contractor, it’s essential to winning the work initially. Continue reading →

SDI-NG2 Draft RFP Coming Soon

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Are You Preparing for SDI-NG2?

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has an ongoing requirement for software development and integration professional IT services.

Software Development and Integration – Next Generation 2 (SDI-NG2) is the USPTO’s $1.7B follow-on contract for software development and integration services for Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) products with customized software applications, database applications, and other solutions.  Continue reading →

We Just Won — Now What?

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By Paul McTaggart

Hearing you won a major Government contract usually brings tremendous satisfaction! — all the sacrifice and long hours needed to put together a compelling proposal have paid off.  But once the well-deserved celebration winds down, the reality often sets in that now you MUST do ALL of the things you promised in the proposal! You wrote a winning proposal that proves you can do the job. Now you get to prove it all over again by actually doing it.

During the proposal effort, every statement of work requirement had to be addressed or the proposal would be judged non-compliant. Even if there were areas where you did not have the required in-house expertise, you still addressed those areas in the proposal – such as systems engineering, reliability, logistics, Government contracting, compliance, scheduling, planning and reporting. You may have included a plan to demonstrate compliance by using subcontractors or outside consultants, or building an internal capability so that you can eventually do the work in-house.

In the Government’s eyes, performing these disciplines are as important as delivering the product.

If you find yourself needing to build an internal capability, or provide short-term crossover support, we can help.

ClientView assists our clients by bringing a wide range of capabilities to your organization, allowing you to be compliant in areas that you don’t have internal capabilities. With staff members that have previously held high-level roles in the Government and industry, we can bring our in-house resources and our network of partner organizations to your team, adding whatever additional capabilities that you require to win. We can also help you build internal capability in new areas, transitioning our expertise to your staff once the new capabilities are in place and operational.

Take a Fresh Look – This is Not Your Grandfather’s OTA

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Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there (Will Rogers)
By Ed Harrington

Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs) have morphed over time since their inception to create opportunities that did not once exist for Government contractors. Originally intended to access “nontraditional” contractors, foster increased technology innovation, and expand the Defense industrial base, OTAs continue to evolve in their utility and application to US Government (USG) contracting. Continue reading →

Take a Critical Assessment of the Opportunity

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Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity. Except, of course, pursuing the WRONG opportunity – that is a far costlier mistake.

Recognizing which opportunities to pass on is as important a skill as any in your business development (BD) approach. Unfortunately, it is common practice to sift through opportunity announcements looking for requirement descriptions that most closely align with organizational capabilities. I say “unfortunate” because this path usually leads to writing many proposals pursuing opportunities with a low probability of win (Pwin). Without a proper assessment, Pwin is unknown (at best) AND often falsely assumed to be high based solely on the alignment of organizational ability with the published requirements. Ability to meet the job requirements is where many assessments start, but it’s much more important to know IF you can win. Continue reading →

“We’ll Worry About That Later If We Win”

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We have all felt the intense pressure of a proposal deadline, when we will do just about anything to get a proposal submitted on time. Every requirement and statement of work item outlined in the RFP must be met for the proposal to be acceptable to the customer. During these times of high stress, it is tempting to say, “Just tell them we can do it – we’ll worry about that later if we win,” even if you have no capability or experience in a critical area. Trying to develop a new capability while under contract to deliver it is much like building an airplane in the air — risky business! Continue reading →

“I Meant What I Said and I Said What I Meant. An Elephant’s Faithful One-Hundred Percent!”

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Many of us who grew up with Dr. Seuss will recall this line from ‘Horton Hatches the Egg’ and know that we need to be careful when making promises. The simplest childhood lessons still apply in adulthood – including when you submit a proposal seeking a federal contract or grant. Continue reading →

Oral Proposals: Presentations that POP

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Part 2 – Planning Your Slides

Last November we blogged about CV’s approach to oral proposal development – how our Plan, Organize, Practice process makes your presentations POP. In this blog, we expand upon the Plan phase.

Typically, your PowerPoint Slides serve as your oral proposal’s official record. So, it’s essential they convey your skills, capabilities, and understanding, and, most importantly –establish that your company is the superior choice for the bid. Continue reading →