When interfacing with Government customers while doing business development or capture, you need to remember that you are still dealing with people. The Government has its own rules, and the process is hard to navigate in the beginning. Government officials have their own culture and language, but all the universal rules for building business relationships still apply.
When you build a relationship with Government representatives, you have to take a multidimensional approach. Your first task is to create a contact plan using phone calls, visits, and, to a lesser degree (and very cautiously), e-mails. You need to build as many relationships as possible, with as many contacts at the agency as you could possibly find time to get acquainted with.
The majority of teaming arrangements usually take place between large and small businesses, where either one could be the prime, depending on the procurement type. A full and open procurement where anyone can compete will usually have large businesses as the primes with small business subcontractors, whereas in small business set asides, you might see small–large arrangements, and even teams of multiple small businesses.
Because the size rules are complex, small business size is the largest cause for protests. Teaming could be one of the contributors to the problem. Therefore, you must understand the rules that have to do with the small business type and size, and how the Government views your size.
The U.S. Government is all about transparency: it posts bids publicly. Yet, just because most opportunities are posted for the world to see, that doesn’t mean a level playing field.
In order to increase your win_rate, during capture, you have to learn how to take advantage of other open sources of information, in addition to gathering intelligence directly from your customers (or instead of it, if you missed the window of opportunity to talk to the customer).
In the task of relationship building with the Government, you need to know that the Government actually wants industry to approach Government customers. FAR part 15.201, “Exchanges with industry before receipt of proposals,” states: “Exchanges of information among all interested parties, from the earliest identification of a requirement through receipt of proposals, are encouraged.”
The FAR then states that the purpose of exchanging information is to improve the understanding of Government requirements and industry capabilities, thereby allowing potential offerors to judge whether or how they can satisfy the Government’s requirements, and enhancing the Government’s ability to obtain quality supplies and services at reasonable prices. The FAR goes on to express the Government’s desire to further increase efficiency in proposal preparation, proposal evaluation, negotiation, and contract award. The same law encourages one-on-one meetings with potential offerors.
You will find that despite this law, the govies are often worried about breaking the procurement integrity rules—so you will have to learn when to talk to them, and when not to. Generally speaking, you can talk to the Government freely before they have developed an acquisition strategy (or the way they are going to run the competition) for a specific pursuit, and then the communications become increasingly limited and formal. Therefore, you want to start as early as possible before their doors shut.
When you are a small business or a brand new department in a larger company, you might start as one person who is responsible for winning Government contracts. This is not a problem—you can join the ranks of many who have started at one point or another and are still the only one writing proposals, even as their company has grown to a nice size and they have the capital to afford professionals. We once met the CEO of a 1,200-person business who still was the company’s best proposal writer—he had a 99 percent win rate. (He’d lock himself in a hotel room for a week at a time with a few six packs.) It was possible because the company was focused on a single set of offerings and wrote for the same set of customers.
Many companies reach a point at which they have to start maturing and growing their business development, capture, and proposal capability. It usually happens when they have a constant volume of bids and they are looking for a more efficient way to develop proposals and win consistently. They want to scale up, grow aggressively, and create a true business development engine.
This book will be especially useful for your professional development and growth to get a full view of what it takes to deliver winning results – to round yourself out as a proposal professional.
