It seems that the tides have turned in the Government contracting world firmly in the direction of IDIQs and GSA/VA schedules. If you are the Government, it is hard to imagine why it would not be the case. Instead of a lengthy 12-18 months procurement process, the Government can award a contract in two to four months, reducing risk of protest. In addition, the budget approval and end of the fiscal year window shrinking, it is hard to imagine that anything will change any time soon.
Although the Government often states that cost is the least important factor in proposal evaluation, and that they buy on best value, recent statistics show that cost is the deciding factor in most, if not all, of the federal contract awards. In other words, cost is incredibly important if you want to win. Proposal managers, however, work very hard on the technical volumes and wield little influence over this all-important volume.
We got a question from one of our class attendees last week as to how she could expand into other fields in the proposal profession. Where could she grow from a proposal writer? Truthfully, in this field, there is always a way to command higher pay, be more in demand, and ultimately become a more successful professional with a high success record -whether you are an employee or a consultant. Today’s article is about how to go about it – but it is also relevant to you if you run a team of business developers and proposal professionals because this is how you will develop your “regular” BD capability into a high-functioning machine.
Picture a daunted proposal evaluator who has yours and a pile of other proposals to read. Visualize hundreds of pages of boring technical text with sparse graphics, until lines turn into ants running through a page. What will this evaluator remember about your proposal by the time he or she reads the next proposal, and the next?
There are many things that are accepted as truisms in proposals. One truism is there is always a pizza and coffee shop within one mile of where a proposal is being produced. Another is if your resume does not show it, you did not do it. The flip side of truisms is falsisms. One big falsism in proposals is that resume preparation is quick and easy. The ability to show what your people have done on similar programs is a huge contributing factor to the final outcome. Yet, quite often, younger writers are put on resumes because companies place a lower priority on them than they do on the technical section or executive summaries. However, to guarantee a winning outcome, the same attention to detail needs to go into shaping and presenting resumes as that which goes into other sections.
There are proposal professionals who fight the battles and don’t complain about the lack of budget, imperfect capture, tight deadlines, or tough customers and difficult proposal team members.
