Featured
The GSA Schedule can be a great way to enhance your marketing efforts in the federal contracting arena. But this mechanism is not for everyone. Do you homework before you invest the time and effort to get a contract. GSA expert Jennifer Schaus offers 5 questions you should answer before you dive into a GSA contract.
Consistent winners are not the ones with the snappiest writers or the best graphics (though those help). Nope, the winners are those who have a well-thought out capture and proposal process that positions them above the rest for intelligence gathering and being the most efficient in getting the product out the door. Based on my 20+ years of doing this proposal thang, here are my 5 “Top Tips” for making the "W" happen. You can listen to the webinar on this as well.
2 weeks out from the submission date and everyone on the team sends you their draft sections.
You put them together and it is a hot mess.
Why is it such a struggle to get a good first draft out of talented people?
One of the toughest moments in proposal development comes when the proposal you’ve been working for 2 weeks suddenly is a “No-Bid.” Under what circumstances should you ABANDON SHIP!!
Figuring out what an RFP is asking for can be daunting. There are internal inconsistencies, puzzling requests and downright errors in the typical solicitation. When should you ask a question and how should you do it to get the best answer?
Proposal writing is not about coming up with the most impressive and clever writing. Rather it is about racking up points on the evaluators’ score sheet, and thereby winning. Pretty prose impresses English teachers, but data rack up those winning points.
Successful football teams have a strong organizational structure where various squads (offense, defense, special teams) know the game plan and their part in executing on it. Likewise, proposal teams have groups of experts, writers and pricers that all need to understand the win plan and their part. This plan is usually communicated through a proposal kick-off meeting. Our guest blogger, David Christovich, lays out some of the critical aspects of a successful proposal kick-off.
Turning out excellent proposals can stress out the staff a resources of small businesses. Let ZK Development Solutions take on some of your proposal tasks to make better use of scarce staff time and provide you with an expert outside perspective. We can up your win rate with
Proposal managers—how do you keep from losing your mind during the fourth quarter procurement madness? How do you keep from getting buried beneath the edits, conflicting reviewer feedback while keeping your writers from the window ledge after the review meeting?
Nobody likes to have rules imposed on them. Such was my feeling about the Federal Acquisition Regulations that govern all purchases by Uncle Sam. Yet over time, I have come to appreciate how these rules are put together and the value in understanding them fully.