All of us are hunting for the secret sauce that will help us win more Federal proposals in this – the most hectic month — of the fiscal year.  Let me offer some suggestions based on experience helping customers prepare 4,000 proposals during the past 33 years:

 

1. Get executive commitment early, where your executive gives the right priority to workers with multiple responsibilities AND shows his or her face to the proposal group at key times.

2. When you lack sufficient customer intimacy, read and reread the RFP until you can perceive what they really want, what they are afraid of, and what they are saying when they do NOT even mention a key factor.

3. When you are going to be short of key resources, find them ASAP from a sub, a consultant group, or wherever else.

4. Operate your proposal program like a chess game, where you assign scarce resources based on all the probable win and loss factors.

5. Provide enough just-in-time (JIT) training to your inexperienced authors that they can see how to match up the technical requirements with proof points and evaluation factors.

6. Find a way to reward your most dedicated personnel, whether that is a percentage of the win, a trip to Miami, or a pat on the back.

7. Inject enough price-to-win (PTW) into your process that you can put a scientific price on your proposal rather than probably losing.