In This Chapter

You’ve reached the point where you’re seriously considering going for it; you’re committed to finding a government market for your products or services, or maybe you already know of a government opportunity. Now it’s time to begin building your proposal team, something you need to do even if you’ve not yet identified a specific opportunity.

This chapter describes the three key questions a team must work together to address and the 13 roles the team members must fulfill.

Customers’ solicitations vary in nature, so responses vary as well. But there is a lot of commonality in the form most responses need to take. No matter what a particular opportunity’s unique features are, the team must work together to answer three questions the customer usually has:

In Chapters 16, 17, and 18, you learn how to respond to an opportunity with a proposal that addresses these three questions. For now, you only need to know that your response will have a technical part, a management part, and a cost/price part. These parts are often called “volumes” or “approaches,” as in management approach. This is basically like saying “Here’s how our organization would approach this project from a management perspective.” But don’t worry about the terminology; whichever word is used, volume, part, approach, or a comparable term, it’s all the same.

For now, as you assemble your team, the thing to know is that some members of your team might work only on a particular part, while others might touch on multiple parts. But no matter how you divide the work, no one team member—or subset of people within the team—should bear the burden of creating a winning proposal. For example, there’s no such thing as a proposal team creating a winning technical part but a losing price/cost part. Nor does a team win on the technical part and lose on the management part. You either win as a team or lose as a team. Keep this in mind as you select team members; each person must be in it to win as a group and not as an individual.

When it comes to putting together teams to go after government contracts, 13 is a lucky number, as typically 13 roles need to be filled. This doesn’t necessarily mean your team will have exactly 13 people, however. Depending on the size of your organization and the complexity of the opportunity you’re vying for, you may need fewer or more people.

In large organizations, such as major federal government contractors, each role may have many individuals, or heads, covering that role. For example, in a large company, a half-dozen senior officials may carry the role of Top Management (TM), while in a small company, TM may be a single individual who plays one or more additional roles.

Just as the final number of people on your team may vary, so does the timing for bringing them on board. You won’t need to fill all roles at once. For example, you won’t need a proposal coordinator until the proposal effort is under full sail, but you do need a proposal manager and a capture manager from the get-go.

If yours is a small company, you undoubtedly have limited resources within the organization. So to cover all these roles, you can ask some individuals in your company to fill multiple roles. When you’ve exhausted your own resources, you can use temporary people with particular skills to fill any roles you cannot cover internally.

The roles you ultimately need to fill are:

The following sections describe the duties these roles entail and the types of qualifications needed for each.

Some roles on the team require such intensity of effort that a full-time or close to full-time commitment is necessary. Your situation may vary depending on the size of your organization and the contract you’re seeking, so don’t worry if some of the people in these roles can’t leave their other responsibilities to make a full-time commitment. But in an ideal world, the roles of relationship manager, capture manager, proposal manager, and pricing manager would be carried out with a singular, full-time focus.

The relationship manager interacts directly with the customer. The best person for the relationship manager role is someone who already has or can easily cultivate ongoing relationships with the important people in the customer organization. They might attend professional meetings with the customer’s people or social events such as golf outings, holiday parties, and informal gatherings. These are the people, for example, who get invited to going-away parties for important people at the customer organization.

Relationship managers are often recent retirees from the customer organization or someone who is not yet at retirement age but has worked in the recent past for that customer. Or they may have been a relationship manager for another company that did business with that customer. This familiarity can be both good news and bad news. If you don’t know this person well, you might be deceived. The candidate for the role might claim to have lots of connections and good relationships in the customer community, but be sure to vet that claim against at least two independent sources. The wrong person could do more harm than good.

Also, many likely prospects for relationship manager lack training in how to do the job, especially around the issue of ethics rules. You must insist that everyone with responsibility for customer contact and, therefore, most affected by the ethics rules and regulations that apply to contractor-government relationships be thoroughly trained and monitored through periodic reporting of activities, as well as receive periodic refresher training in ethics.

The capture manager is the pipeline through which the proposal manager or other team members speak to TM. For example, if the team discovers that it needs a critical technical resource, the capture manager goes to TM and makes the case for that resource. If the team believes the price being contemplated is too high (or too low), then the capture manager carries that message to TM for resolution and response.

Also, this person is a full member of the proposal team. The capture manager must be in the boat rowing and not on the bank watching the other proposal team members row. Capture managers attend daily meetings and fully participate in all aspects of the effort.

In many cases, the Capture Manager works with the Relationship Manager to gain customer intelligence, identifying the customer hot buttons, and serious customer concerns. All these are important to know as the proposal team develops a winning solution.

The proposal manager has two main responsibilities: discovering the best case for your company to make in this competition and communicating that case.

This means the proposal manager is not just a traffic cop, refereeing the activities of the team members. Although chairing meetings and ensuring version control of various outlines, graphics, and texts are each important subtasks, the real tasks are centered around building and communicating the case. Therefore, the proposal manager should have a high standing among the team members and not be just a glorified clerk.

Well-qualified, good proposal managers are difficult to find and just as hard to keep. A good source of candidates is the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP). This organization is listed, along with other professional nonprofit organizations, in Appendix B.

The task of discovering or building the case for why your organization’s solution is the winning one can be challenging because it cuts across organization lines within your company and often includes dealing with a variety of individuals from your subcontractors. The best approach is to believe that there is a good case and employ a variety of techniques and processes to discover that case. It’s a lot easier to discover a case when you believe it really exists!

At the same time, though, the proposal manager must understand the limitations of the role. For example, he cannot create a wonderful technical or management solution for your company if none exists. The best he can do is strive to find the best case possible. So an important part of the proposal manager’s job is to challenge—in the most positive way—not only the technical solutions being offered but also the management solutions being offered.

Communicating the best case can be a daunting task. It involves at least these three subtasks:

The proposal manager typically conducts two daily meetings. Through these meetings and also by constantly changing the “03 Proposal Development Schedule” and the “01 Contact List,” (see Chapter 12), the proposal manager is in a uniquely good position to observe the activities—or lack thereof—of all proposal team members. The proposal manager, therefore, can keep the members on task and on track toward a winning proposal.

This role is often the most abused and least valued function on the proposal team. Too often, the proposal team leadership hurries to create a proposal and doesn’t think to bring along someone to handle the pricing function. Then three days before the due date for the proposal, the authors of all the other parts of the proposal call in the pricing manager, hand over a matrix of bid hours, materials, and other elements of the price volume, and expect the pricing manager to create a responsive, winning solution. This is all the more unfortunate, because for many competitions, the offered price is, in the final analysis, either the determining factor in the award or at least one of only a few determining factors.

The best use of the pricing manager’s skills and knowledge is to weave the role into the fabric of the proposal.

Depending on the size and scope of the proposal, you will need additional roles carried out on a less than full-time or even just as-needed basis. These roles are: TM, program manager-designate, technical champion, proposal coordinator, evaluation team members, orals coach, contracts manager, legal counsel, and subject matter experts.

You may not need different people to handle all these roles; some people can do double duty, and some roles might not be needed at all. For small proposals, for example, the proposal manager will likely double as the proposal coordinator. And if there’s no requirement for orals, you won’t need an orals coach at all.

In the world of government contracts and in business, the TM holds an important role. With the resources and authority to lead the team in creating a winning proposal, TM people generally know what they’re doing. Their sphere of influence is greater than that of other team members, and typically, they have more to lose by losing and more to gain by winning than other members of the team.

The program manager-designate helps the proposal team describe to the customer how they will manage the program if they win the contract. This program manager designate must be a full member of the team. Unfortunately and typically, if this person is qualified to be the program manager of the new program, then she’s probably already fulfilling that role for another current program. The current job, her “day job,” probably has been taking all her time. So if the program manager-designate needs relief from some duties of that current job, the capture manager makes that request to TM. TM should understand that to grow the business, it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice short-term revenues (for example, the program manager-designate must give up billing the current customer) for the long-term gains represented by winning this new government contract.

This individual has the technical skills to carry out the program. This person also has the most to gain when your company is awarded the contract. Typically upon award, the technical champion takes on the role within the program team of chief engineer, chief scientist, or engineering manager. He also often guides the critical sections of the technical part of your solution.

This person serves as the right hand of the proposal manager; he keeps records, fills in during the proposal manager’s absence, may handle the maintenance of the proposal management documents, and generally coordinates the activities of the team members. This position is one level of responsibility below the proposal manager.

Evaluation teams assist the proposal team by evaluating the current state of the proposal documents. What’s important here is that evaluation team members be both qualified and motivated, qualified meaning the person has skills relevant to the proposal under development and motivated meaning the person has some interest in improving the proposal.

Typically, the evaluation team members are experienced in creating winning proposals. In some companies, reviews are tagged as “greybeard reviews.” This is not a derogatory term but simply a descriptive one as the reviewers tend to be highly experienced and are often significantly older than the average proposal team member.

Not all proposals, but an increasing number of them, require the candidate team to present an oral briefing to a customer panel, before an award decision. This session gives an opportunity for your company’s team to supplement and perhaps clarify the written proposal. In addition, it allows you to demonstrate the strengths of your team and especially the strength and suitability of your choice for program manager. For large teams, oral presentations offer you a chance to see how the team, led by your company as the prime, works with your subcontractors.

Orals coaches help your team with this important review by sharing their experience in leading other teams to successes in this type of examination. These individuals have usually acquired their skills from many years of concentrating on this specific niche market of business development.

One of the customer’s implicit evaluation criteria is how well you and your team members—whether it’s just a small company or a large company with many subcontractors on the team—appear to be working as a team and not simply as a jumble of individuals trying to get a contract. It’s not easy to hide dissonance among members of the team when giving an oral presentation. Therefore, your team should practice, take dry runs, do whatever it takes to prepare for not only the stated agenda but also those extra difficult questions the customer invariably asks to test the team for cohesiveness.

While it’s a stretch to say that oral sessions are the deciding factor, it’s fair to say that a poor oral presentation can mean a loss, and a superior presentation can bring a team across the finish line if the competition is close on all other evaluation factors.

In virtually all solicitations, the customer directs you to contact them through their contracting officer and only through the contracting officer (KO). Failure to adhere to that request is a serious matter. Many solicitations contain a clause stating that communicating with (in any way) anyone other than the KO (or the KO’s designee) can be cause for disqualification. Even in absence of that clause, best practices and convention dictate that your company’s people—anyone representing your company in any way—correspond with the KO only. To simplify and control message traffic, your own contracts manager (CM) should be the single point of contact to speak for your company.

But the role of CM isn’t just as a conduit. Experienced CMs can be of huge value to your proposal team and, hence, to your company. Your contracts manager adds value to the team by:

As with proposal managers, really good CMs are difficult to find and difficult to keep, but it’s worth the effort to find and retain a good one.

It is typical to see a requirement that you submit to the customer an offer ready for signature. In effect, this is the submission of a binding offer and must be viewed as a serious matter because the majority of offers could be converted into a contract simply when the buyer (through an authorized CO) affixes a signature to the completed submission. Therefore, such a document going outside the company surely requires an attorney’s review. If you’re in a small company, you probably already have an attorney you use for most corporate matters. This individual or firm may have been fine for your purposes so far but might not be experienced and skilled in government contracts. Government contracting is a niche market in law with its own specialized practices and conventions, which makes it difficult for an attorney inexperienced in this niche to handle.

All proposals depend on focused subject matter expertise to create a winning solution. The good news is that your company probably has a number of subject matter experts (SMEs); the bad news is that proposal creation is probably not the strong suit of these SMEs. In fact, it’s fair to say that most SMEs very much enjoy doing the work under a government contract but typically have little or no interest in helping with a specific proposal to get a government contract. In fact, many have a real dislike for the proposal process.

I have seen many—too many by any measure—super-qualified technical people who disdain anything that appears to be “sales.” This is truly unfortunate, because no work can be done until someone sells something. They often forget that the work they are doing today has resulted directly or indirectly from the efforts of someone who sold something a while back.

SMEs are often among the most important contributors to creating a winning proposal, so it’s vital that all team members and especially the proposal manager and capture manager find a way to motivate these experts and recognize their contributions, to exploit their strengths and work around their weaknesses.

Three team members have special importance to proposal teams: the program manager-designate, the capture manager, and the proposal manager. These people often make up a sort of core team within the team, so let’s look at why their roles are so special.

Every winning bid has a small handful of important individuals. Whoever is in this small circle, the program manager-designate is always included. The importance of this role cannot be overestimated. Why is that?

Customers buy not only an organization (say, Lockheed Martin) but also the people. The single most important “people” the customer has an opportunity to “buy” is the program manager. This is the individual with first-line responsibility—and corresponding authority—to ensure successful execution of the program. Therefore, if the customer either doesn’t know the program manager or knows and doesn’t like that individual, then the entire organization and the entire proposal is swimming upstream in that competition.

The proposal team needs a countervailing force to the capture manager and the relationship manager. These two team members’ primary concern is winning the competition, and they are typically not nearly so concerned about how to execute the program or how to make money on the program at the offered price. The relationship manager may be interested in earning a sales commission, which would only kick in if the contract is won. The program manager, on the other hand, knows (or should know) the implications the proposal has for program execution. So the program manager brings to the proposal team a steady hand that prevents over-promising or under-bidding.

There are often problems in achieving the full participation of the program manager-designate. Truly qualified program managers are indeed scarce, and difficult to identify. The normal situation is that good program managers are already the program manager on another, existing program. The following two responses are not really reasons, but excuses, for not having a program manager-designate fully engaged on the proposal team:

Placing the right program manager-designate on the proposal team has two benefits. It sends the right message to the customer and improves the probability that the proposal, as submitted, can be executed at a profit.

As the proposal team’s representative to TM, this function plays a pivotal role in not only keeping TM informed of the proposal team’s progress and needs but also keeping the proposal team advised of TM’s own thinking. Therefore, the capture manager must set aside competing responsibilities to strive for excellence in this role.

The proposal manager’s importance derives from the role of the “Doer of Last Resort.” This means that if and when other members of the team fail to provide contributions to the proposal creation, the manager fills the gap between what has been accomplished and what must be accomplished. Typically, proposal managers have come to that role after having filled many different roles on proposal teams. Therefore, this person is often the best one to turn to when gaps need to be filled.

The Least You Need to Know