If you have limited experience hiring proposal consultants, and wonder how they charge for their services as they help you develop your winning proposal or are curious if there are better ways to negotiate and work with consultants, read on.
Intelligence gathering permeates every capture activity. It not only overlaps with the first capture aspect—knowing your customer—but is part and parcel of everything that drives capture – since the best informed wins!
Basically, Intelligence Gathering is research and detective work—you painstakingly collect little pieces of the puzzle and put together as complete of a picture as you can to make good decisions. As you learn about the opportunity and the customer, you will get into a full-blown intelligence gathering process that has multiple dimensions and involves a slew of information sources.
A win strategy is a simple set of bulleted statements outlining how you will win the targeted bid, which leads to a comprehensive plan that prepares you to finish on top. It looks at all aspects of the opportunity, and leaves no stone unturned.
Something happened to me over the past year – as if a switch flipped in my mind. All of a sudden, I can’t get enough of life and want to savor its experiences. Perhaps I’ve clocked too many years in the proposal war room, stayed up late nights seven days a week building a business for too long, and spent every free moment with my kids. Maybe I blew a circuit at one of the Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties. I am not yet at the BASE jumping stage, but I find myself fantasizing vividly about stuff like catching a jet ride to a classroom in another state with the top guns I will be training. This from a person who finds even the kids’ rollercoaster terrifying!
Where do proposal consultants come from, and what are the upsides, downsides, and risks typical to different proposal consultant sources? This is the second article in our eight-part series on How To Benefit The Most From Working With Proposal Consultants. If you have not yet had a chance to read the first part, please visit our blog at www.ostglobalsolutions.com/blog to read it.
How hard can it be to do federal business development? All you need is to be good with people and a willingness to talk to decision makers, right? If it were so easy, why for years has BD been given a bad name, and why have many companies struggled to hire business developers who produce results?
