In This Chapter

After submitting your initial proposal in all its radiant glory, your proposal team has every right to feel relieved and satisfied. The work of a proposal team can be grueling, so completing the process can be quite satisfying.

Everyone looks forward to the relief of actually seeing that hand receipt, or now more frequently an electronic receipt, confirming your proposal is in the hands of the people who might choose to award you the contract. So it’s not only natural but also perfectly acceptable to want to take some time off and release the tension of the proposal process you’ve survived.

But this was only the first lap of the race, and so begins the second lap and perhaps later a third—and—no, that’s too discouraging to contemplate. But you must be ready for more laps, so let’s take it one at a time. In this chapter, you’ll find out what the major tasks are, those laps between initial submission and contract award.

The bulk of this information presumes you’ll make it to final selection and award, but be aware that a down select may take you out of contention earlier. There are several reasons why your offer might be declared “no longer in the competitive range.”

The easiest way to find yourself taken out of the running is to be judged noncompliant, which means you failed to follow all the solicitation instructions. This is a serious shortcoming. Submitting a noncompliant proposal is almost without excuse. Your team should be experienced enough and thorough enough to avoid this disqualification. But if this happens, your next step is to ask for a debriefing by the Contracting Officer (KO) as soon as possible to determine exactly which instruction or instructions you failed to follow. Unfortunately, obtaining the required debriefing may have to wait until the competition is over and a contract is awarded.

Another reason you might be out of contention is that your technical, management, or other scores were so low in relation to other offerors that your offer no longer stands a chance of award. If you are rated fifth best in a field of six for a single award, the KO could easily judge your bid as no longer in the competitive range.

Related to the point about low scores is the fact that your offer could be judged not acceptable, and further, “not susceptible to being made acceptable.” The difference between “noncompliant” and “not acceptable” is that the first fails to comply with the solicitation instructions. Not acceptable can be for a variety of reasons, including the following examples. The bottom line is that your proposal no longer has an opportunity for award.

An easy example is that you’ve taken an exception to one of the terms and conditions set out in Section K of the solicitation. For example, if you have taken an exception to the method of payment (probably a silly thing to do, but this is just an example) and all other offerors have not taken exception, then your offer could be judged unacceptable and removed from the competitive range. Another example is that you cannot meet the required 18-month delivery schedule, and you instead base your offer on a 24-month schedule. If the offers of three other offerors meet the 18-month schedule, your proposal will probably be judged, by the KO and the evaluators, as not acceptable.

In some cases, an offer could be judged unacceptable but could be made acceptable through relatively minor changes in the offer. But in other cases, it could be so bad that no reasonable amount of effort could make it acceptable, and you’re no longer under consideration.

Perhaps you’ve submitted an acceptable technical and management solution, but the price you’ve offered is either much too high (most often the case) or, in rare cases, too low.

Most major solicitations contain language allowing the government to eliminate offers with prices so low as to indicate that the offeror does not understand the complexity of the required work. This prevents an offeror, through its own error, from contracting for work that is far different from what the government really wants to buy. You can decrease the probability of this happening by carefully watching the prices of contracts for similar work.

If your submitted price is too high and judged very high by the evaluators, then there is reason for the KO to rule that you don’t understand the complexity of the work, but this time on the high side.

Regardless of how well you believe your proposal team has done in creating a proposal, it’s highly probable that you know of at least a few defects. Things happen at the last minute. Inconsistencies creep in. The technical and management volumes don’t quite match. You had to use the name of a person who resigned three days before the proposal was due, and you didn’t have time to change all 13 references to that person, by name, in the proposal. Almost anything that could go wrong in the last few hours of your proposal creation did go wrong. These glitches are nothing to cause the evaluators to judge you as noncompliant or nonresponsive. But they are things that require correction should the customer give you a chance to change your proposal of record.

One of the first things to do is to create a tiger team. This team should have both holdovers from the proposal team and at least a few members with fresh eyes and no ego involvement in the proposal.

This is a good time to engage contractor technical editors or proposal gurus as supplements to your full-time staff. You should also consider enlisting some help from any subcontractors on your team for this opportunity. The tiger team should spend two or three days looking at all aspects of the proposal of record. The holdover proposal team members should list the known deficiencies and errors. The members new to this proposal look for instances of internal inconsistencies, undefined terms, and similar problems. This team’s work then gets saved in the electronic files until you have the opportunity to formally submit the changes.

The customer questions and requests for changes can come in a variety of forms. For some proposals, the customer gives you Clarification Requests (CRs) and Deficiency Reports (DRs). A CR is less serious; it simply asks you to clarify a part of the proposal. This could be a minor change in wording to make your statement clearer. A DR, in contrast, is more serious as it means the evaluators see a part of your proposal as deficient in some way. If not changed, this could eventually lead to your disqualification for being outside the competitive range, nonresponsive, or disqualifying in some other way. You and your team must take the DRs very seriously, even to the point of having your best senior staff look at these carefully.

Another form of feedback from the evaluators is to provide you with a list of Discussion Items (DIs). DIs are replacing CRs and DRs in more recent evaluations. These can be all over the spectrum, from relatively minor tweaks to major issues. Typically, you’ll have time to prepare a response to the DIs by first submitting your responses in writing. Then, if the KO and his team desires oral discussion of these DIs, you will have a chance to discuss them with you and your team on one side of the room and the KO and the KO’s team on the other side. These discussions can be pleasant or unpleasant, depending on the circumstances. Hope for pleasant; prepare for unpleasant.

After all discussions are complete, the KO may call for another round of proposal submissions. One common one is to ask for a Best and Final Offer (BAFO). This call usually means that the KO is now willing and able to make an award and is soliciting a final round of offers. Often, but not always, the issue is cost or price. This is the one last chance for the KO to attempt to drive down the offered costs and prices. Most KOs find it difficult to skip this round in the belief that offerors will submit more attractive terms with each round of negotiations.

Prepare early for such an eventuality, and know how much flexibility you and your company have on the offered cost/price. Here is a very good example of where it’s absolutely necessary to have top management on board and fully informed of the issues. TM and only TM can approve any final cost/price concessions. Only TM has the perspective and authority to make this call. In fact, in large companies, the person or persons who have been TM for the proposal team to this point now must go to the next higher level of management to get permission to further reduce cost/price.

Typically, major proposals require you to submit plans. Examples of plans are:

Typically, you will submit proposals under significant time pressure. Unfortunately, the various plans often get less attention than you would really like. Now that you have more time, it’s a good idea to take a look at each plan you’ve submitted with the proposal, to see if you can improve them. If you’ve been asked for and submitted a “plan for a plan,” now consider whether it’s to your advantage to spend a few more hours of effort to create an executable plan; that is a real plan, specific to this program.

For example, if you’ve submitted a quality plan, which was really more like a “plan for a plan,” you may want to spend some time developing a quality plan tailored to this specific customer and this specific situation. You need not achieve a polished plan, but you could develop an outline for what would, upon award, go into the executable quality plan for this program.

The Least You Need to Know