Many of our clients shared with us their frustration with their current state of business development (BD). They either weren’t growing fast enough because they weren’t bidding on enough projects that were in their sweet spot, or they had wasted money going after poorly qualified opportunities that they had no chance of winning. All of these were symptoms of a broken BD process. To add an insult to an injury, majority of them had a bad experience with their business development service provider (either an employee or a consultant).
1. In the capture phase, win themes are a first step in defining win strategy (and not the other way around). They help create customer messages to position the company; identify competitive advantages; and document the real reasons the company will win.
2. During the proposal, the win themes focus the proposal team’s writing on the benefits to the customer – providing an even bigger advantage if your competition has not taken the time to spell out their own value proposition.
3. During evaluation, inserting your win themes in different forms throughout the proposal helps the customer remember the key benefits of your solution, and answers the evaluator’s question: “Why should we select your company?” They also help your customer draft an award justification.
Consultants often get the blame for high proposal costs because their fees are an obvious big-ticket item. Many business developers tell me, however, that when they tally up the proposal costs at the end of the proposal effort, it is not the consultants that blow the budget. Surprisingly, it’s the in-house employee costs that take them way over the plan. Either way, there are three solutions that business developers can adopt to keep proposal costs under control – solutions I am going to discuss below.
As a proposal manager getting a proposal plan approved, I always found it difficult to get my management to approve a budget that was based on 40-hour weeks for employees and 50, 60, or even 70-hour weeks for consultants. It just didn’t look good: a consultant often cost more per hour than an employee, and got paid for every hour worked to boot. Yet, I managed to stay on budget and win. I would like to share how I did it with you.
Let’s talk about the sensitive topic, proposal consultant prices. I don’t think I am revealing any trade secrets here.
How much proposal consultants charge varies from individual to individual, and can range between $60 an hour on the low end to $250 an hour and up on the high end.
A business owner has two options when engaging consultants: they can either outsource the proposal work entirely, or have consultants augment your business development team. Typically, there are severaltypes of situations when you should hire proposal consultants:
