Transcript Advanced Proposal Development Workshop

Complimentary Webinar:
Government Proposal Writing for
Newcomers
Richard White
[email protected]
301.908.0546
888-661-4094 Press “2” for Sales
Richard White
Mr. White founded a federal contracting
company is 1973. He built the company form
its inception $170 million in sales before
selling the company in 1989. As CEO of his
company he headed a 300-person computer
services organization and a 1,200-person
federal facility management division.
Earning a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and
a Masters in Computer Science, Mr. White
dedicated his career to government
contracting and computer-related fields. He
has served as a management consultant with
Booz, Allen, & Hamilton and as President of
Macro Systems, Inc.
Mr. White is a recognized expert in
government marketing and sales. He knows
the nuances of selling to governments,
including the sales processes used for
individual government markets defined by
procurement size, multiple award schedule
sales, negotiated procurement sales, and
proposal writing.
Mr. White is the author of seven books on
government contracting and is a frequent
speaker on federal contracting topics. He
teaches the good, bad, and ugly of
government contracting and how to win
government contracts in the unique and the
seemingly irrational world of government
bureaucracies.
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Complimentary Webinars
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Realities of the Government Marketplace - Learn the truth about
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Realities of Winning
Government Contracts
1. Open competition is too expensive and time consuming for most
federal purchases. The government would grind to a halt if open
competition were used for every purchase.
1. Federal buyers cannot just purchase a product of service without
following rules concerning the amount of competition required.
Limited competition is allowed and the limitations depend on the
dollar amount of the purchase.
2. The actual competition is usually less than specified by the rules.
3. Discussions with vendors early in the buying process is critical so end
users know the features, benefits, and value of what they are
buying.
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Realities of Winning Government Contracts
continued…
5. Contracting officials often discourage early sales discussions (preselling) when in fact the federal purchasing regulations actually
encourage it.
6. Contracting officers do not tell prospective bidders about pre-selling
activity that may or may not have taken place with end users
because they probably won’t know. Or if they do know they don’t say
to give the appearance of a level playing field.
7. The award file and what it shows on paper is the all-important
document in federal contracting.
8. The appearance of competition in the award file is as important as
actual competition because the file has to pass the scrutiny of
superiors and the unsuccessful competitors, and survive an audit by
federal auditors.
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What You Should Know
1. Federal end users (the decision makers) are risk averse
because their jobs and reputations depend on contractor
performance. As a result, in most cases they will select
the known company over the new company.
2. Incumbent contractors usually win reoccurring contracts.
They have an inherent edge because they know the
contract and the customer inside and out. Some say they
should not be able to compete for contracts that they
hold but that would be not be practical or cost effective
for the federal government.
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What You Should Know
continued…
3. Companies with federal customers have a built in sales
network because they are known to their customers and
use customers for referrals to other customers. They can
pre-sell as they perform contracts at little cost.
3. Aggressive pre-sellers have an edge (whether new to the
market or insiders) because they know the customer and
the customer knows them at the time of the bid.
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Execution is the key to winning
federal contracts.
Almost all failures in the federal market can be
attributed to lack of execution of an aggressive
sales program.
Proposals close a deal, not sell it
Execution is difficult because of the lack of
(1)customers to use as a base, (2) money, (3)
talent, and distaste for rejection
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Effective Proposal Writing
Requires Experience
It’s Like Riding a Bike
You must have experience to write winning proposals.
Experience comes from writing proposals over and over.
Even natural and talented writers are not necessarily good
proposal writers.
An experienced Proposal Manager is critical to
success!
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Most Companies Hate Proposal
Writing
Why is proposal writing the Achilles heel of
government contracting?
They are:
• Messy, costly, and invariably behind schedule
• Emotionally hurtful when they lose
• Can impact billable percentage severely
• Like the dreaded term paper for college
Government evaluators hate them too!
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Are There Any Secrets?
Sell before you write, and write only winners (an overall goal)
Like any platitude, selling before you write has exceptions:
•Proposals for Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts for
which the primary requirements are qualifications and price
•Proposals where you are one of the few who may be qualified (“sweet
spots”)
•Teaming situations where one team member has sold the customer
•Intelligence gathered after the issuance of the Request for Proposal
(RFP) indicates that you can win, e.g., they don’t like the incumbent
contractor.
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Keys but not secrets
Day 1: Make a bid/no bid decision; the CEO is traveling
syndrome
Afternoon of Day 1: Start the proposal outline
Don’t reinvent the wheel, develop and store:
• Technical (subject matter) legacy content
• Corporate experience & resumes
• Model text for management plans & approaches
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Characteristics of a Losing
Proposal
Most proposals lose because the government had another
company in mind when the RFP was drafted and then don’t tell
you who they have talked to. Preselling is encouraged.
A loss can also occur because of a better “best value argument”
combined with a superior price, or you had an excellent “best
value argument”, but a “piggish” price.
In the case of an incumbent, you can expect your proposal to lose
if your company has inadvertently let its performance slip.
A loss will almost always have to do with your relationship with the
customer (or lack thereof) and its reflection in the proposal’s
content, and in how you have presented your solution to
the customer’s problem. www.fedmarket.com
Know When to Hold Them and Know
When to Fold Them
In making bidding decisions, your firm should be realistic in considering
six important issues:
Is there an incumbent?
Have you sold the customer prior to the posting of the bid?
Does the customer even know you?
What are your unique capabilities?
Who will be competing against you and what are their capabilities?
Do your competitors know the customer?
What are the costs of writing the proposal? How much content do you
have on the shelf? Is existing content well done and compelling and what
will be required of the professional staff in developing new, required
content?
When in doubt, fold’em and wait for a better hand.
CEOs tend to overbid
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Why a Structured Outline is a
Necessity?
A typical federal RFP will:
•Contain a morass of important and unimportant clauses
•A baffling list of proposal requirements, and statements of work that are
poorly written or insufficient in detail.
•And everything is smashed together in a poorly organized RFP.
•Missing a detail in this morass can lead you to file a proposal that does
not meet the agency’s requirements.
•A phrase, a misplaced punctuation mark, an ambiguity in an instruction
or requirement, or missing a page limitation can make the difference
between success and failure.
•Don’t give the evaluators a reason for throwing you in the “not
responsive pile”.
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Structured Proposal
Writing Process, You
Must Have One
The complexity of government RFPs demands a highly
structured proposal writing process; namely, a detailed
outline containing everything pertinent from the RFP.
If you have a structured system that produces winners, use
it.
But you must have a system; you are taking risks without
one.
Our proposed structure is a detailed initial outline containing
everything required to write, before you write
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Why Have a Structured Process?
The key to success is having a system (any system) that meets
the following five objectives:






Ensures compliance to RFP requirements. (Noncompliance is one of
the primary ways the government moves your proposal into the
“not worthy of further consideration” pile.)
Helps writers produce compelling content.
Helps to ensure readability, conciseness, and clarity.
Reduces proposal costs.
Helps to eliminate last-minute proposal production crises.
(Management involvement is the primary factor in reducing
crises.)
The larger and more complex the requirement, the more important
an RFP-driven, detailed outline becomes.
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Additional Benefits of a Proposal
System
A detailed outline (template) provides two other benefits in
producing a winning proposal.
1.A template is an absolute necessity for extracting content
from subcontractors.
2.Detailed proposal templates can be stored and improved
each time a proposal for similar services is written. On other
words, templates evolve and get better and better. Ask
veteran proposals writer and they will tell you legacy content
makes their lives worth living.
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Eliminate “Circling”
If done first and comprehensively, an outline eliminates the
endless circling around the proposal writing project and
wasted billable time, as everyone tries to communicate what
the proposal should contain without anyone actual
writing anything.
Typical circling statements include:
•“Let’s have a meeting so I can tell you my ideas, but you
write it.”
•“Let’s not write; let’s have fun and map out our ideas,
themes, and thoughts on whiteboards, and then schedule
another meeting to deal with the writing issue.”
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Help Writers with Writers
Block
Technical writers usually hate to write and will hide when a
proposal is scheduled.
An outline will assist them in getting it done and ideally will
show them models from previous proposals and a tight
organization structure with guidelines and instructions.
Try to make the technical writers think they are not writing
but filling in the dot points.
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Minimize Protest Risk
A structured system helps you fend off protests against an
award to your company by making your proposal bulletproof-compliant in every way.
•Address each and every requirement
•Substantiate all claims
•Check required personnel certifications and related RFP
requirements
•Justify your price in every way in case the government
attempts to go low bid
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How Do Proposal Evaluators
Think?
Making it easy on proposal evaluator’s scores valuable evaluation points.
They may have 20 proposals to read at 10 pm at night after their
children soccer games.
Reading a stack of overly verbose and off-the-mark proposals is no more
fun than writing them.
They read only portions and some hardly at all.
Many companies (usually large ones) provide proposal evaluators with
content, which (1) wasn’t requested, and/or (2) may actually reflect
negatively on the company.
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How Do Proposal Evaluators
Think? Continued…
Examples of worthless content include:
•Beautiful PDFs with complex graphics that say very little--great graphics can
enhance a proposal but the graphic must say something pertinent
•Confidentiality statements crafted by corporate lawyers
•Content that pushes the page limits, i.e., too much information
•Complex, state-of-the-art solutions
•Overblown puffery attempting to show technical superiority, and slogans like
“we strive for excellence”
•Features, features, and more features, but with little emphasis on benefits
•Long and flowery executive summaries that don’t succinctly explain the benefits
to working with your firm and how your firm will reduce the procurement
officer’s risk
•A regurgitation of the scope of work
•An attendee at the last webinar was a proposal evaluator and emailed me to
say: “we could spot corporate puffery even when we only skin read.”
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How Do Proposal Evaluators
Think? Continued…
In most cases, evaluators want the facts and the proof that your firm
provides the best value, and they want an executive summary that allows
them to skip most of the rest of the proposal and just read a few key
sections.
The headaches for evaluators come from figuring out how to dump the
duds as quickly as possible, how to score your favorite without looking
biased, and then how to write the “file” required to justify the winner.
When former government proposal evaluators attend Fedmarket’s
proposal writing courses, they invariably agree on the characteristics of
proposals that receive the most evaluation points:
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What do proposal
evaluators want?
superior organizational structure
brevity and clarity
easy to read and understand
no frills, extras, or puffery
contains only what the RFP asked for
the solution the customer wants, not what they need
an effective, practical solution to the customer’s problem
In short, make their life easy--it is not fun evaluating twenty
proposals in a limited amount of time.
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Proposal Writing Strategies
and Tips
Show the customer you understand their problem and
present a practical, risk-free solution laden with insights
and benefits.
Write the Executive Summary first using customer
insights, your experience with similar work, and contract
performance and management insights. Then refine and
rewrite it as the proposal progresses.
Don’t just parrot back the RFP requirements.
Develop, name, and store model text, so you can retrieve
and reuse what you have written for previous proposals.
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Proposal Writing Strategies
and Tips continued…
Always tailor model text to the RFP requirements. Evaluators
can spot untailored model text from a mile away.
Don’t use broad, unsubstantiated claims like “Collectively our
company has 100 person-years of experience . . .” or “Our
company is a world class . . .” You will make the government
evaluators guffaw and they’ll end up subtracting evaluation
points. Be subtle and if you are going to boast back it up with
evidence.
Never give evaluators more than they asked for, just to
impress. If the RFP asks for three experience summaries, the
evaluators want three of your best. If the RFP asks you to
submit a key persons resume only, that is what the evaluators
want.
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Proposal Writing Strategies
and Tips continued…
Pack the proposal with understanding of the customer’s needs
and with compelling solutions.
Write to the evaluation criteria and put the emphasis on
sections that count the most.
Consider not bidding if you can’t provide point-scoring content
that’s clearly based on the customer’s needs.
There is nothing wrong with abandoning a proposal in the early
stages of writing.
Be brutal and get out early if it appears that you cannot score
evaluation points.
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The Fedmarket RFP
Deconstruction System
Proposal Chapters
1. A government proposal outline is comprised of the following chapters
(or primary sections).
2. Executive Summary (Introduction, Summary Letter)
3. Compliance Matrix
4. Technical Proposal
5. Management Plan
6. Personnel
7. Corporate Experience
8. Business (Price) Proposal
9. Relevant Contract Clauses
10. Proposal Instructions
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RFP Deconstruction Procedure
Read the RFP cover to cover and note the basics of the government’s
requirements evaluation criteria, and instructions.
Set up the primary chapters (sections) in a Word document.
Now read the RFP again. Read sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-byparagraph and section-by-section and make a judgment concerning
the relevance of each item (sentence, paragraph, or section) before
you proceed.
As you read sentence-by--sentence the pertinent items that you will
encounter will be various types as shown in Table 1.
Move the item into the appropriate Chapter(s) of the outline and
color-code as shown in Table 1.
Use Table 1 and the Color Coding Guide as guides to deconstructing
the RFP.
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Deconstruction Procedure
Insertion Step/Type
of Information to
Insert in Outline
Insert in Outline
Section/Chapter
Color Code (Font
Color)
Person Responsible
Notes
1. All requirements
Compliance Matrix
from RFP (include title
and RFP section
number)
Black
Proposal Manager
This is the proposal
evaluator’s road map
to check compliance.
2. RFP Statement of
Work requirements
(item-by-item) into a
work hierarchy or
solution description
Purple
Proposal Manager
Work requirements
should be translated
into a work or solution
hierarchy.
Purple
Proposal Manager
Management plans can
vary from not required
to extensive depending
on the RFP
Technical Approach
(Work hierarchy
or solution
description)
3. Contract
Management Plan
management
requirements (if in the
RFP)
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Deconstruction Procedure
4. All pricing
5. Relevant
contract clauses
Business (Price)
Proposal
Relevant
Contract Clauses
Black
Proposal Manager
Black
Chief Financial
Officer
Proposal Manager
Contract Manager
When in doubt as
to relevance, insert
the clause
6. Evaluation
criteria
Anywhere they are Yellow
applicable
Proposal Manager
--
7. RFP pricing
instructions,
requirements, and
formats
Business (Price)
Proposal
Proposal Manager
--
Red
Sales people
Proposal Manager
instructions to
price proposal
developers
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Deconstruction Procedure
Proposal delivery Proposal
instructions, font Instructions
size requirements,
page limitations,
volumes required,
number of copies
required and
binding and
packaging
instructions
Black
Proposal Manager --
Proposal Manager Where needed in
instructions to
the outline
proposal writers,
suggestions, notes
& writing
guidelines for
creating content
Red
Proposal Manager The more the
better
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Deconstruction Procedure
Color-Coding Guide
Open the color-coding guide in a window as a reference when building the proposal outline.
Or print it out as a convenient way to determine color-codes.
Color Code
Information
Green
Application in-line help
instructions
Pink
Editable text in outline chapters
Red
Proposal Manager instructions of
any type
Purple
RFP requirements
Yellow
RFP evaluation criteria
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Deconstruction Procedure
Add non-RFP information to the Proposal Outline
Make the outline as complete as possible before assigning writing
tasks and beginning the writing process.
Make writing assignments and set deadlines. Hold a meeting to
explain the outline and discuss assignments and deadlines.
Monitor writing progress and assist writers as necessary.
Fill in the holes in the Word version of the outline as content is
provided and edit.
Hold reviews, edit again, text, and produce the final draft of the
proposal.
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Some May Say Deconstructing an
RFP is Easy (It’s Harder Than It
Appears)
Deconstruction of the RFP requires a proposal manager
with judgment and proposal writing experience.
Selecting which items to move from the RFP into the
outline is a highly selective process. (Sensing whether or
not a contract clause might be an issue.)
Knowing what content from previous proposals is
pertinent and rewriting resumes and corporate experience
requires skill gained from previous proposals.
Preparing guidance and instructions for technical writers is
a creative process.
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Or Some May Say It’s Too
Hard
What part of this would you not do, and why not do everything required
in the beginning?
Other reasons why you must do some form of outlining.
•
All writers are working from a common outline and the
government is getting precisely what they asked for.
•
Outlining is fundamental to good writing.
•
An editor can work with a sequence of clearly organized
sentences, but poorly organized content has to be rewritten from
scratch.
•
Makes the proposal easy to read and score.
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Fedmarket’s Proposal Writing
Tools, Services and Seminars
Seminars
Writing and Managing Winning Proposals
Advanced Proposal Development Workshop
Basic Cost Proposal Workshop
Advanced Cost Proposal Workshop
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Fedmarket’s Proposal Writing
Tools, Services and Seminars
Services
•Strategic Consulting on Proposal Writing
•Customized Proposal Training at Your Location –
call 888-661-4094, Ext. 2 for details
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Fedmarket’s Proposal Writing
Templates, Services and Seminars
Templates
Proposal Wrting Template
Price Templates
Call Fedmarket’s sales staff at 888-6614094, Ext. 2 with have questions concerning
products/service
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Other Available Complimentary
Book Downloads
 Rolling the Dice in DC: How the Federal Sales Game is
Really Played
 Cracking the $500 Billion Federal Market: The Small
Business Guide to Federal Sales
 Loading the Dice in DC, Legally: Learn the Politics and
Realities of Federal Contracting
 Government Contracting for Donkeys
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About Fedmarket
Fedmarket assists companies in obtaining federal contracts by providing
training and consulting services and online market intelligence services.
•Training
•Proposal writing
•Buyer contact lists (standard and customized for your company)
Please call me at personally at 301.908.0546 if you would like to discuss
any aspect of federal sales, or call Fedmarket’s sales team at 888-6614094, Ext. 2.
Richard White
Fedmarket
301.908.0546
[email protected]
www.fedmarket.com