In This Chapter

As with any major undertaking, starting with a strategy for winning is a critical first step toward a win, so that’s why this chapter is all about basic principles for creating winning responses to customers’ solicitations. Here, you’ll find a list of rules you must follow to learn what to do and not to do. You’ll also learn how to offer a solution that can make a difference to the customer, rather than just going through the motions of a response. And you’ll learn what to expect of the leadership and management of your team and how trends in the procurement process affect your strategy.

Getting government contracts is much easier if you know and obey the rules the government contracting industry has established. Just as a failure to obey traffic laws has consequences, failure to obey the rules of government contracting has consequences, so let’s look at the absolute rules you must follow in creating your response to a government solicitation.

The mail is the solicitation that gives you directions for how to answer. You’ve probably already learned the life lesson that following directions will get you far. Well, contracting is no exception. For example, when the solicitation has four sections numbered one through four, your solution must conform to that same order. Reordering your solution may seem like common sense to you, but the customer may see it as nonsense.

One of my former bosses had a great analogy for this: “When you come into my house, don’t rearrange the furniture. You may not like the furniture, and you may have better furniture in your house, but that’s irrelevant. Don’t rearrange the customer’s furniture either. Rearranging can confuse the scorers and can’t improve your ranking.” The customer evaluators’ scorecards, used to compare your solution with the solicitation, are in the same order as the solicitation, not your “better” order.

Use the customer’s terminology rather than substituting your own. If the customer’s term is “Management Volume,” don’t use a “Management Approach” and vice versa. There may be no significant difference between the two terms, and either could apply, but the customer sets the rules, and you have to play by them.

Consistent terminology is also important when describing the roles of people in your organizational charts. Use titles that reflect the function of that person in the program you are proposing. For example, if Clyde Clodd is a senior scientist in your organization who is going to be your program manager, use “Program Manager” as Clyde’s title, not “Senior Scientist.” The internal title doesn’t mean much to the customer when evaluating Clyde’s ability to do the Program Manager’s job.

Here’s another example. Let’s say the customer’s solicitation clearly states the desire for a product featuring a certain level of quality and reliability. Translated into the automobile arena, let’s say the customer wants to buy a Buick. Your winning solution should demonstrate that you know about Buicks and you have a plan (included in your proposal) to deliver the best Buick possible at a competitive price. Nowhere should your proposal speak to the advantages of either a Chevrolet or a Cadillac, which the customer doesn’t want to buy.

In your solution, at all costs avoid describing something that doesn’t fit the customer’s wants. If you took the opportunity to submit a draft solicitation or other pre-competition customer document or briefing (see Chapter 7), then you’ve already had your chance to put forward a different technical or management solution. Your immediate task now is to show that you understand the customer’s problem and that you have a plan to achieve a solution to that problem with the minimal (or at least bondable) amount of risk.

Anything else offered is not only an example of technical (or managerial) arrogance but is also unlikely to be accepted by the customer’s evaluators. The time for you to put forth a somewhat different solution is as the winner, not as an offeror.

Imagine you are a government evaluator and an offeror submits a solution radically different from the terms of the solicitation. The solution is clearly superior to those of the other offerors. What would you do? Would you scrap the entire procurement and start again, giving the other offerors an opportunity to resubmit their offers using those new specifications? Not likely. The most likely course for the evaluation team is to reject the radically different offer as being nonresponsive. That offer shows how to solve the problem, but it’s not what you, the customer, have said throughout the solicitation.

Make the customer the center of attention. Beginning every section or subsection of your proposal with, for example, “The Acme solution gives …” puts the focus on your team. Instead, begin sections with, “The (Agency’s) requirements drive our solution to be …”

Another way you can break this rule is by putting the names and functions of people in your organization who have no relationship to the customer into the organization chart. Listing the business development department is an example of making an internal proposal reviewer happy (proud to see his or her own name shown in the organization chart as the Vice President of Business Development), but that position is not likely to have relevance to any customer during the execution of the contract.

The customer’s Source Selection Evaluation Board (or similar team of evaluators) compares the incoming proposals with the score sheets that the KO or someone representing the KO has provided to them. These score sheets come directly from the solicitation and combine the elements of the three major solicitation sections: C (Statement of Work); L (Instructions to Offerors); and M (Evaluation Factors for Award).

These are the traditional solicitation elements. Not sure we need to deviate from them. However, today we are seeing solicitations that do not have the traditional sections C, L, and M. In fact, we are receiving SORs (statement of requirements) or SOOs (statement of objectives) that do not have separate sections C, L, or M.

The theory of evaluations is that the evaluators judge each proposal against the score sheet and evaluate each of the incoming proposals on its own merits rather than against the other proposals. The theory has been known to break down as the evaluation process devolves into a head-to-head competition among or between offers. If this is to your advantage, you may be able to induce such a comparison through the inclusion of anti-competition themes. For example, assume you’re in competition with a certain known competitor. You know your competitor is going to propose a Windows-based operating system (OS), so you propose a Macintosh operating system, OS-X. Each of these systems meets the specifications without question. But you know that Mac OS-X has several additional features at no additional cost that are not included in the evaluation criteria, and that these features are not available under a Windows-based OS. Further, you know these extra features are of great value to the customer. So a strict interpretation of the solicitation instructions does not require you to include a discussion of those features in your proposal. But it’s certainly optional for you to include the advantages of those extra features.

Now here’s the tough judgment call: do you use valuable page space to do so or just ignore your advantage? If you do include a discussion of those features, it casts doubt on the competitor’s solution and could cause the evaluators to favor your solution. It’s a judgment call, but I usually favor including it if you can spare the pages.

There are almost as many scoring methodologies as there are contracting offices in the government. Buyers tailor their scoring processes to fit their own needs and biases. So be aware that the scoring process shown here is only an illustration.

The customer’s score sheets should not be a mystery to any experienced proposal process person. This is typically not an issue. However, there can be, and often are, subtle spins on “what counts as good” to that customer. These considerations often correspond to the “hot buttons” for this particular customer.

The industry standard term for your answer to the solicitation is “response.” We use this term throughout the book to conform to industry standards, but a better term to use is “solution.” A solution is what the customer is seeking. A solution goes beyond a response, telling how your company plans to provide what the customer wants to buy. Here’s a good test: if what you’ve written to the customer does not read like a solution, then you probably have a response. Go back and rewrite it, reconsider the text, and restate it as a true solution.

In responding to government solicitations, the proposal team must determine what the customer wants to see in the proposal and thus really wants to buy. Here are some considerations in formulating the proposal:

A major reason why you should talk with the customer before solicitation release is that the client may not talk to you at all once the RFP hits the street. If they do answer your questions, you can be sure it won’t be on a level that provides real insight. To effectively give the evaluators what they want, you must have a real understanding about the client’s environment, goals, and agendas.

In the vast majority of proposals I have worked on, the proposal team desperately wanted to give the evaluators exactly what they wanted. Giving them what you want them to have is a recipe for losing, and most teams understand that. The problem is that knowing what the customer wants requires insight above and beyond what is in the RFP. The only way to gain this insight is to understand your client—what are their goals, what problems do they face, do they have an internal consensus or competing factions, do they have preferences or bias, do they have constraints they have to work within, standards to comply with, or anything else that may affect their decision and may or may not be in the RFP?

If the solicitation has just been released and you’ve never worked with the customer before, your chances of getting this kind of insight are slim. Therefore, your company’s job is to get to know the customers well before the solicitation release. Using the considerations, develop a list of questions, submit them to the KO, and study carefully the KO’s responses. When the solicitation is released, you can look for ways to demonstrate your insight and stand out from the pack.

You know from Chapter 6 that top management (TM) ought to be involved at more than just a figurehead level and that you need to find ways to engage TM in your proposals. This person (or group of persons if a committee is holding this role) is singularly important to winning. The number-one reason for losing competitions is the lack of TM involvement in the proposal creation process. Getting and keeping TM committed is of the utmost importance.

There are some specific ways you can keep TM engaged in the process. Invite and encourage TM to visit the regularly scheduled meetings to see, firsthand, the issues and activities of the staff. They don’t have to come to every meeting, but showing up occasionally is an important demonstration of support. When you create early versions of your response, show these to TM for their review and feedback. And if no other mechanism is effective, send regular notes to TM on the highlights of the good and bad events in the life of the proposal team.

Have you heard the story about the hen and the pig passing the church on a Saturday morning? They see a sign for “Bacon and Egg Breakfast.” The hen suggests they go in and help out. The pig refuses, saying, “I don’t mind making a contribution, but my commitment is a lot greater than yours!”

So the question is, how committed are your team members? Commitment is an often misused word. For example, marketing materials, sales brochures, and formal letters from TM to government officials may claim that your company is “committed” to a certain type of work or a certain program. But unless accompanied by hard evidence of a real commitment, such claims are just that—claims. Avoid the word commitment unless you can provide proof.

Real commitments are made real by tangible, verifiable actions. See the entries on the left. Anything else (see the entries on the right) are not verifiable, and are therefore of far less value to the proposal team.

The landscape of getting government contracts has changed drastically in the decades I’ve been doing this. So to craft an effective strategy for your response, it’s important to understand recent developments in procurement.

One significant trend is the increased use of relatively broad, multiple-award schedules. The General Services Administration (GSA) awards the most common multiple-award contracts. The formal name for these contracts is “GSA Schedule Contracts,” and the casual names are “GSA Schedules” or just “getting on GSA.” They all mean the same thing. GSA Schedule Contracts are discussed in more detail in Chapter 12.

This type of contract fits best the case of the government wanting to acquire a spectrum of products, usually over a long period of time and when there are many qualified suppliers. One good example is the GSA contact for telecommunications services. In April 2007, GSA awarded Networx Universal contracts to three (of four submitting) offerors. These contracts are for 10 years and have a total estimated value in the tens of billions of dollars. They include about 40 different services, covering virtually all the possible government requirements in telecommunications for the length of the contract. These contracts were highly competitive, and each of the offerors spent millions of dollars to secure a contract for this work.

There are many other examples of multiple-award contracts. The Department of Commerce has awarded multiple winners to contracts in the NETCENTS series. Instead of the three winners of the GSA Networx Universal contract, there were more than 40 winners for NETCENTS. Each “win” of a contract was in effect a “hunting license,” the right to market to the ultimate customers using that contract as a vehicle. This allows the government to acquire goods and services in a much more efficient way as compared with a discrete solicitation for each and every requirement.

Typically, the KOs at, for example, the Department of Commerce, release a solicitation for responses under that contract. These solicitations are called “task orders” and go to either all awardees or often a small subset of those awardees—those judged as qualified to perform the work described in the task order. The resulting winner of the task order competition then performs the work under a task order. These awards are an addendum to the master multiple-award contract.

Your interest in this type of contract is twofold. The good news is that, if you can get a multiple-award contract, you are an eligible offeror for a long period of time, often years.

The bad news is that, if you are NOT an awardee, you are mostly shut out of that market (at least as a prime contractor) for that same length of time. Your only chance at that point, and it may be a good one for small businesses with a strong niche market, is as a subcontractor.

The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which established the Bureau of the Budget (since 1970, the Office of Management and Budget), held a tight rein on government spending. It recognized and enforced the Constitutional requirement for congressional authorization (Article I, Section 7, 8, and 9) of any funds expended.

Until the late 1970s, the government typically limited contracts to a single fiscal year. Multi-year contracts were rare. However, this restriction became increasingly burdensome and costly because effective program management required commitments over many fiscal years. Therefore, government contracts now are typically for many years, and multi-year authorizations and appropriations are used where warranted. Such multi-year contracts remain subject to the Congress’ annual authorization and appropriation processes and to oversight by the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President.

The days of 20 hard copies of a 500-page technical volume and 15 hard copies of a 200-page management volume are largely (but not entirely!) gone. Governments are increasingly taking advantage of the Internet’s power and allowing responses to be submitted electronically. You can often submit by e-mail, with proposal documents attached, and increasingly can even post your proposal documents directly onto a secure customer website. Electronic submission is a great time and money saver for both the offerors and the government evaluators.

Offerors are increasingly requiring that respondents make oral presentations as a way of making final decisions among offerors.

See the discussion of the use of oral presentations. See also Appendix B for sources for fee-for-service help with your oral presentations. See also a discussion in Chapter 6 of the government use of oral presentation on making award decisions.

The Least You Need to Know