Chapter 5
Long-Term Positioning
The starting point for long-term positioning is your strategic business plan. If you do not have a plan, your business plan and sales forecast will have to fill the bill. As the words imply, long-term positioning refers to activities performed long before the government prepares an RFP. These are activities designed to put your organization in a position to achieve its business goals. Long-range positioning comprises two key tasks: (1) building a strong relationship with your customers and (2) collecting marketing intelligence about future procurements, customers, and competitors. This information must be fed back into the organization, where it can be stored and evaluated to guide future bid efforts.
The role of marketing in the long-range development of new business parallels yesteryear’s wagon train scout. In the old West, scouts rode out ahead of the wagon train. Their job was to collect and report information necessary to ensure that the wagon train arrived at its destination safely. They had to scout the trail to assess its suitability, locate alternate routes when necessary, and identify potential dangers.
In a similar vein, marketing personnel go out ahead of the organization. They gather information to qualify potential business opportunities and confirm the viability of goals and objectives contained in the business plan. They also look for potential dangers that threaten the successful achievement of business goals. Such dangers might include changes in program requirements that reduce your competitive advantage, program delays or potential cancellations, technical and acquisition trends that could adversely affect future success, or competitors positioning themselves to capture business you have targeted.
A healthy marketing organization is one that promotes a continuous flow of market information into the strategic business development process. This information is used to develop, refine, and implement strategic marketing initiatives. It is also used to better define potential business opportunities, make bid decisions, and develop bid strategies.
DEVELOPING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
A key role of marketing is to develop good customer relationships. Marketing personnel are business ambassadors. Their job is to favorably represent your company and its capabilities. They work to create a sense of acceptance and trust that enhances the effective flow of information between the customer and your company. Although this role is led by marketing, it should not be marketing’s sole province. Other people who represent technical, contract, financial, and program interests should also be used, when appropriate, to foster positive customer relations.
Customer relationships are achieved primarily through personal site visits and actual contract performance. However, regular phone calls, letters, copies of company brochures, product announcements and press releases, advertising, presentations at trade conventions, and participation at trade shows offer multiple opportunities to develop relationships. Take care to coordinate these activities so that they all communicate a consistent message. Moreover, this message should be a direct outgrowth of your strategic business plan. Integrated and coordinated marketing activities can produce valuable results.
Customer bias—how the customer views your organization and its ability to fulfill contract requirements—plays a key role in determining the outcome of source selection. In fact, the content of your proposal, combined with customer bias, determines who wins and who loses. Rarely will customer bias alone decide the winner. It can, however, be a tie breaker. If two bidders are roughly equal in terms of technical performance, risk, and cost, the bidder that enjoys the most positive customer bias will likely be the winner. Even strong differences in proposal content can be overcome by an extremely strong bias. If a customer truly “hates” your organization, it will hard to win even with a good proposal. Alternatively, if a customer “loves” your organization, you might win with a less spectacular proposal.
My view is that customer bias works like a filter through which your proposal must pass. If a customer is favorably predisposed toward your organization, the customer might be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt when evaluating your proposal and when comparing the merits of competing proposals. If the customer is unfavorably predisposed toward your organization, just the opposite is true.
Clearly, we want to do everything in our power to achieve a positive customer bias. In addition to our actual contract performance, every interaction with a customer contributes to customer bias. Therefore, we need to manage these interactions such that they achieve the desired outcome. Creating a positive customer bias also requires some forethought and planning. What follows are some activities and tips intended to push the customer bias needle in your direction.
Visits by Senior Management
I am always amazed at how seldom senior managers visit their government customers and counterparts. This suggests to a government agency that management is not interested and probably not involved in the oversight of programs administered by that agency. Senior management is also deprived of special insights that can be gained by meeting with customers. This is information the managers might never hear from their own employees. It could also represent information about what is happening at the agency that could prove useful for future marketing efforts.
At least annually, a senior manager from your company, preferably your president or a division leader, should pay a call on any agency with which you have a contract and any agency with which you want to do business in the future. A word of caution is warranted concerning visits by senior management: Managers must be briefed on the status of current programs and any existing problems before they visit. Otherwise, they might appear uninformed and uninvolved. This could not only embarrass your management but also create a negative impression with your customer. The primary purpose of these visits is to impress the agency favorably and to demonstrate the interest and involvement of senior management.
Annual Briefing of Your Company Capabilities
At least once a year, you should schedule a presentation of your company capabilities to each procuring agency with which you plan to do business in the future. If you have existing contracts with an agency, do not assume the agency is aware of your capabilities. Chances are good that many who work there do not know. Many people are compartmentalized within their own program or area of interest. Moreover, personnel turnover tends to be high for most federal agencies.
Make sure you are aware of the status of your current programs so you are not “ambushed” during the presentation with a comment or question about a problematic program. The presentation should identify your company capabilities, what you are doing to improve these capabilities, and how the capabilities can be used to satisfy agency requirements or needs. Although this is a marketing presentation, the emphasis should be on technical and management capabilities. Sometimes it is necessary to give two briefings—one geared toward your customer’s senior management and the other geared toward the rest of the working-level technical and management staff. If you choose to do two briefings, tailor each presentation to the expected audience.
Other Customer Interactions
If you develop a new or modified product, consider sending a copy of the announcement or product brochure to your customers. If you run an advertisement in a trade journal, send a copy to your customers. Likewise, send copies of favorable press releases to your customers. Invite them to relevant trade shows and to your exhibit if you have one. Consider scheduling a private meeting with your customer to display your latest product or service offering. Do not be a pest. Do not bury your customers in emails, trivia, or irrelevant information. Instead, keep them informed with information favorable to the image of your company, and make them aware of meetings, trade shows, or new technologies that will help them perform their jobs. Treat your customers as you would an esteemed colleague. Do whatever you can to help them perform their jobs better or more efficiently. Never pass up an opportunity to contribute to positive customer bias.
Customers versus Users
It is important to distinguish between customers and users. Typically, your customer will be a procuring agency that has acquisition responsibility. The customer prepares the RFP, conducts source selection, picks a winner, and manages and administers the resulting contract. However, the user of the product or service often is not the same as the procuring agency.
Users are the ultimate recipients of the product or service procured. They may help prepare the RFP and participate in source selection, but they do not select the winner. For example, the Aeronautical Systems Center of the Air Force buys aircraft for the Air Force. The users of those aircraft are not the same as the people who procure them. Hence, some of your long-range positioning might need to take place with potential users. The term customer really refers to both customers and users.
COLLECTING MARKET INFORMATION
Collecting information about forthcoming contracts, customers, and competitors provides valuable input into the long-range positioning process. It is essential to planning and developing an effective bid strategy.
Identifying Your Customer’s Long-Range Needs
Successful marketing needs to look beyond programs already identified by the customer. This involves assessing current or future problems that your customer faces and determining potential solutions that your company can offer. There is no easy way to explain how to accomplish this important marketing activity. It requires a perceptive observer—someone who thoroughly understands the customer’s mission and can recognize potential trends that threaten its successful accomplishment. Changes and trends that could impact your customer include staffing levels, budget, agency or user policy, expansion or contraction of mission scope, emphasis placed on technical areas (e.g., increased awareness and desire for better logistics support, plans to guard against obsolescence), and technology trends.
The key is to identify customer needs early. Then work with your customer to develop a solution that will both solve his or her problem and enable you to gain competitive advantage. For example, you might tailor a solution that not only provides a cost-effective solution for your customer but also favors your company’s capabilities and strengths.
Understanding your customer’s “wants and desires” also creates potential opportunities. These may not be hard-and-fast program requirements. Nevertheless, if the customer truly wants something, you should be in a position to capitalize on that want or desire. I do not mean this in a negative way, like a snake oil salesman, but as the reasonable response of a supplier who is sensitive to the desires of customers and willing to help fulfill those desires.
Monitoring your customer’s long-range needs includes paying attention to the early stages of the acquisition cycle. Needs go away, are ignored, or eventually are defined as requirements. The process differs among customers and procuring agencies, but each one has a defined process. Military needs, for example, are translated and defined in documents like the operational requirements document. Again, marketing needs to be on the leading edge of developing requirements to define business opportunities and then to nurture those opportunities. Nurturing involves developing innovative solutions for those requirements and influencing requirements in a way that gives your company a competitive advantage. Developing innovative solutions or a special technical capability may represent an area where you want to allocate independent research and development (IR&D) funds as a way to gain the upper hand on the competition.
Most federal procuring agencies provide annual presentations of their procurement plans for the next three to five years. Many post these plans on the Internet and update them quarterly or semiannually. Procurement plans clearly offer a rich source of information for long-range market positioning. However, if marketing is doing its job, you should have this information long before it finds its way into a formal presentation.
Helping Your Customer Articulate Program Needs and Sell a Program
Sometimes customers know their needs, but they do not know how to formulate or articulate them adequately. By building a close working relationship with your customer, you may position your company to help translate a need into a bona fide requirement and program. Assistance can take the form of stating the need in a way that suggests potential solutions, brainstorming to articulate the need, or reviewing available products or technology to solve the need. Providing this type of assistance will help you build a great relationship with your customer. It also affords you valuable insight into how to respond to this need once it becomes a requirement and a formal RFP.
In some cases, you might need to help your customer “sell” a program. This may include defending the need and showing its benefits. Support here might include helping to conduct a cost-benefit, life cycle cost, or feasibility analysis; preparing a presentation to defend the need; or using your contacts to help support a customer program. Incidentally, this type of support is completely aboveboard, legal, and ethical. There are no regulations or laws against helping a government customer develop or defend a need or requirement. However, you cannot expect any favors from the government in return. That is against the law. The insight you gain by understanding the background and thought process your customer has gone through to define a need, and working with him or her to solve that need, will pay huge dividends in the long run. This type of information and level of understanding cannot be achieved by reading the RFP or attending a bidders’ conference.
Helping your customer does not always have to be self-serving. Providing assistance, even if it equally benefits other competitors, will eventually yield a dividend. Sometimes such assistance does more to positively impress a customer, and to create a positive bias toward your organization, than doing something that is solely in your company’s best interests.
Becoming Familiar with Your Customer’s Procurement Practices
The federal government procurement process is fairly standardized, as discussed in Chapter 3. Each procuring agency implements the process according to specialized regulations and according to its own unique procedures and requirements. Every agency is different. In addition, procurement practices and trends change. Part of long-range positioning is to understand how the procurement agency implements the acquisition process and how it conducts source selection. This information is important input into the proposal planning and preparation phases of the bid and proposal (B&P) life cycle. Everyone on the proposal team needs to understand the process.
Here is an example of how procurement practices can affect your success. In the mid-1980s, one of the major federal procuring agencies tended to select the lowest bidder that was technically compliant with all RFP requirements. Following an initial review of all proposals, the agency would issue clarification requests and deficiency reports to each bidder that was within the competitive range. Each bidder responded to these requests, amended its proposal accordingly, and subsequently submitted its final price in response to a best and final offer (BAFO) request from the procuring agency (now called a final proposal revision). Price was the deciding criterion. Therefore, clever bidders often bid just below what they believed were technically compliant solutions. If a bidder erred on the low side technically, the government let the bidder know by issuing a deficiency report. The bidder then adjusted the technical approach just enough to meet the requirement. These processes allowed bidders to “low ball” their initial bid and then use feedback from the government to adjust the bid to a minimally acceptable level.
The winner in these competitions was the company that had played the game the best. Knowing the rules and practices of the procuring agency was essential to winning.
Today, the vast majority of negotiated procurements are awarded on the basis of best value. As described in Chapter 3, the government does not necessarily award to the lowest-priced, technically qualified bidder. Instead, the government weights the value to the government of what is proposed and picks the bidder that represents the best value—technical, price, risk, and schedule—to the government. Clearly, bidding for today’s best-value contracts requires a different strategy than what was used when the winning strategy was a marginally technically compliant solution combined with a low price. Similarly, if the source selection pendulum swings toward awarding contracts based on price, as I expect it will, our proposal strategy will need to change accordingly.
Bidding for a contract without knowing the history and practices of the procuring agency is akin to competing in an athletic contest without knowing the rules. You might win, but you will have to be very good or very lucky. Imagine a baseball game in which you are out after only two strikes instead of three, or where you are ejected from the game for smashing a line drive over the left-field fence. Learning the rules after the fact will prove to be a painful experience.
Likewise, failing to know your customer’s formal and informal practices places you at a competitive disadvantage. Contract types, procurement practices, and what customers expect to see in your proposal change over time and from agency to agency. Staying abreast of these trends and practices, coupled with understanding a procurement agency’s history, will enable you to capture an advantage over your less-informed brethren.
Identifying Future Programs
As soon as enough data are available, you should begin developing a profile for each program opportunity. Initially, you might not have very much information. Over time, however, you can fill in the details. Program information is used to support sales forecasts and to support B&P planning, including bid strategy. Initially, the following information should be collected:
Customer/procuring agency
Brief statement of need/requirements
Program requirements/deliverables
Budget and phasing of funds
Period of performance
Procurement schedule
Unique or notable aspects of the procurement.
This information should be maintained in a business acquisition database and updated as new information becomes available. (Several commercially available software tools are available to support this task.)
As a program becomes better defined, it becomes even more important to identify any customer technical or business trends that could affect the procurement. Customers have biases just like everyone else. They might favor a particular manufacturer, product, or specific software authoring language, or they may decide to standardize using one manufacturer’s product to reduce the cost of logistically supporting multiple products. Similarly, customers might be enthralled with a particular technology or technological approach. Knowing these trends and biases can help you gain competitive advantage. Not knowing them might make the difference between winning and losing.
Building and Maintaining a Long-Range Schedule of Upcoming Procurements
Identify as early as possible the expected milestones and dates for future procurements. This is important information for planning purposes. Update the schedule for a long-range program at least quarterly. Continually update schedule information for procurements within 12 months of an expected RFP release. Milestones can include budget approval or requirements approval, draft and final RFP release dates, bidders’ conferences, contract award, and any other milestone dates that could impact program or proposal planning.
Identifying Potential Competitors and Building Competitor Profiles
Winning government business is all about competition. Imagine a professional boxer jumping into the ring for a title fight without knowing anything about his opponent. That would be crazy. It is equally crazy to spend B&P resources if you do not thoroughly know your competitors. How will you beat them if you do not know their strengths and weaknesses and their likely approach for the current procurement? Information about your competitors is vital to developing a bid strategy. Quite simply, the more you know about your competitors, the better.
Interestingly enough, many companies know relatively little about their competition. This puts them at a competitive disadvantage. Avoid this mistake by collecting as much information as you can about your primary competitors. One way to do this is to build and maintain a profile for each primary competitor. The specific information to be collected needs to be tailored to your particular industry and the areas in which you compete, but the following categories of information provide a good starting point:
Competitor name/division—If this is a division of a larger company, provide some information on the parent company.
Description of products and services—List the products and services offered by the competitor and provide a brief description of each. Include any relevant information that could be used in the future to determine a bid strategy against this competitor.
List of current contracts—Provide a list of current contracts held by the competitor and a brief description of each contract: procuring agency, users, deliverables, period of performance, value, any special features or work effort, plus anything that might provide insight into the capability of the competitor. If possible, organize current contract information by product line or service area.
Strengths and weaknesses—Strengths and weaknesses should be listed at the company level and for each product line and service area. Separating strengths and weaknesses into categories will facilitate future use of competitor information. General categories include technical, cost, key personnel, past performance, customer/political, and “other.” Technical factors should be divided in a way that corresponds to the particular products and services offered.
Tapping Sources of Competitor Information
Collecting useful competitor information is easier said than done. It is hard work and a never-ending challenge to keep the information current. Out-of-date or inaccurate information on competitors is worse than no information at all. Common sources of competitor information include copies of existing contracts, customer contacts, subcontractors and suppliers, personal contacts, trade journals, press releases, company brochures, annual reports, your employees who previously worked for the competitor, and the competitor’s employees. Many companies today maintain websites full of good information. Take advantage of the ease of the Internet to collect this information.
Request a copy of each current contract from the procuring agency and maintain a file of contracts for each competitor. Contracts can be obtained from the contracting office of the procuring agency or through specialty companies that provide this service for a fee. Submit a written request for the contract by name and contract number. This information must be released as directed by the Freedom of Information Act. Sometimes, contracting officers will let you make a copy of the existing contract without a formal request. This is faster and easier than making a written request. Much of the information you need to complete the competitor profile can be found in copies of existing contracts. In particular, contracts contain pricing information that will enable you to estimate your competitor’s bid rates.
The customer also is a rich source of competitor information. Customers administer and monitor the contracts being performed by your competitors. Customers have first-hand experience and a sense of what competitors do well and what they do poorly. This is valuable information in developing your list of competitor strengths and weaknesses. However, you will need to be tactful in gaining competitor information from the customer. Incidentally, your customer is also a good source of information concerning your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
Your competitor’s regular subcontractors and suppliers are another source of information. First, just knowing who they are will tell you something about your competitor’s technical approach. In addition, suppliers have first-hand information about your competitors, but from a different vantage point. Some of your competitor’s suppliers may be the same ones you use or work with regularly.
Building a Strategic Marketing Database
Information about markets, programs, customers, and competitors is worthless unless it is used. All too often marketing collects mountains of data but never shares the data with anyone. Many of the people who might otherwise apply this information to make bid decisions and develop bid strategies are not provided access. This is a waste of time and effort.
Marketing information should be reviewed and evaluated by a team charged with the acquisition of new business. The composition of this team should include at least one member from each of the following areas: technical or engineering, marketing, proposal management, contracts, finance, and program management (if your company has a program management group). These should be experienced people selected for their areas of expertise and ability to develop business strategies. For small companies, one person may cover multiple areas. Do not wait until the last minute before you involve technical, contracts, and finance personnel in the decision-making process. Every bid strategy and proposal response will require their unique expertise and insight.
One way to share marketing information is to establish a B&P library or database. This is sensitive and proprietary information. It must be protected, and access should be regulated. Most companies have computer systems connected via a local area network. It is fairly simple in these cases to set up a directory with access restricted to a list of authorized persons or to protect access by means of a password.
ESTABLISHING A BID AND PROPOSAL LIBRARY
Opportunities to gain competitive advantage often lurk in unlikely locations. For example, building and maintaining a robust B&P library is one way to gain the upper hand on your less-astute competitors.
For proposal managers, time is the most precious commodity. Anything that maximizes the time available to prepare a proposal is worth more than gold. Ready access to relevant B&P information is among the best ways to avoid wasting time searching for it. The information can be data required to prepare your proposal, information that helps reduce proposal development time or improve content quality, or competitor data to assist in bid strategy development. Reducing “lost time” tracking down information translates into more time available to develop your proposal. Optimizing this time through an effective B&P library might enable you to gain advantage over competitors. It will also seriously reduce the frustration associated with chasing down information that should be within reach.
For example, preparing a past performance volume should be a simple, straightforward task. Rarely is that the case. More often, endless hours are wasted contacting contract and program managers to obtain the required information for each individual contract. Another typical example is the time spent looking for past proposal write-ups that can be applied to the current proposal.
A well-maintained, readily accessible library can be a valuable asset. Yet, it is an advantage that most companies either overlook or fail to exploit fully. Inexpensive computers and the ease of storing vast amounts of information enable the efficient development and maintenance of electronic libraries or databases.
I highly recommend you give top priority to establishing and maintaining a B&P library if you do not already have one. If you must start from scratch, don’t try to establish everything at once. Lay out a reasonable plan and schedule. Start small and expand over time. The key is to get started.
An effective B&P library should contain the following:
Copies of previous proposals
Proposal database organized by topic
Graphics database organized by topic
Résumés for key personnel
Past and current performance database
Lessons-learned database
Competitor database
Marketing information database.
Copies of Previous Proposals
Maintain a complete file for each proposal you prepare regardless of whether it resulted in a win. Keep a copy of the RFP, any communication between the customer and bidders, questions you asked and the customer’s answers, copies of evaluation notices, slides for any oral presentation given, and a copy of the evaluation debriefing. By keeping the whole proposal file, you can go back and review the entire bid or any segment. If you organize this database by customer, you can review past RFPs and other communications to establish trends in how the customer asks for information and conducts the overall solicitation process. Knowing what customers expect and how they conduct their business can be an effective planning tool.
Proposal Database
The proposal database contains sections of previous proposals organized by topic. This is the same information contained in the previous proposals database. However, it is organized topically for easy reference. Capture team leaders can then access information through index terms or file headings and quickly find what they need. You can hyperlink the index to individual files to further enhance the search. This technique is particularly valuable when time is of the essence and you need to quickly pull together information on a variety of proposal topics.
Using information from past proposals can be a great timesaver. This is especially true for write-ups on processes, such as systems engineering or configuration management, that tend to remain constant across programs. However, every RFP is different. The writing requirements for the same topic can vary enormously between solicitations. Inexperienced proposal authors might not recognize this difference and simply plug old write-ups into the new proposal. Therefore, I recommend restricting access to this database to members of the capture team. They can draw relevant information from the proposal database and make it available to other proposal members, with the appropriate cautions concerning its applicability to the present proposal.
Actually, I prefer to have authors build detailed writing outlines before giving them access to past proposal information. This encourages them to formulate a response specific to the RFP requirements first and then use past proposal information to help with the writing task.
Graphics Database
The graphics database is the same as the proposal database except that instead of proposal narrative, it contains copies of proposal graphics. Like the proposal database, it should be organized topically for easy reference. Drawing a graphic from the database and modifying it to fit the requirements of the current proposal will save time and money.
Having a graphics database available also helps proposal authors envision ways to express complex ideas or concepts graphically. Again, hyper-linking the graphics index to individual graphics will enhance the ability to search the file.
Résumés for Key Personnel
This database reflects the needs of each individual company or division. If you bid regularly on programs that require résumés for key personnel, maintaining a database of current résumés will prove to be a great timesaver. Likewise, if the bid opportunities you pursue typically require a description of key personnel experience, rather than a full résumé, develop one-page summary résumés for key personnel in your organization and have each person update his or her résumé annually. Alternatively, if the programs you chase rarely ask for résumés, the effort to create and maintain a résumé database is probably not worthwhile.
Rather than asking for personnel résumés, some service-type programs request job descriptions for each technical position covered by the contract. If you routinely respond to RFPs with these requirements, build and maintain a database of standard job descriptions. These descriptions should be developed with participation from your human resources department. Include basic information on minimum education and experience plus a brief summary of the tasks performed by people covered by the description. Also, identify the level of supervision given or received for each description.
Past and Current Performance Database
Chasing down information required to prepare a past performance section typically consumes far more time and energy than necessary. Information about the organization’s past and current programs should be standardized and readily available. Building and maintaining a database for this purpose will significantly enhance your proposal development efforts. Moreover, many government agencies place considerable emphasis on past performance as an evaluation factor. Being able to respond quickly and accurately to this important aspect of proposal development is well worth the effort required to maintain a past performance database.
Build a standard format for past and current performance information. Most agencies require a common set of administrative data. In addition, you will want to include other relevant program information. In building the rest of your database format, consider the following topics as candidates:
Brief program description
List of key program personnel
List of major subcontractors and their program roles
Any significant technical, schedule, or cost challenges
Extraordinary achievements (e.g., solving an especially difficult technical problem, performing ahead of schedule or under budget)
Any customer problems encountered and actions taken to fix them
Periodic updates of program progress.
Program progress should be updated quarterly, or at least semiannually, for each active program being performed by your organization. Set up a system to automatically remind program managers when progress updates are required.
Maintain a copy of past performance proposal write-ups in this database. These often can be used with relatively little tailoring. I also recommend that you maintain in this database copies of any customer evaluations of contract performance. Many government agencies perform an annual contract assessment and provide a copy to the contractor. These assessments are especially valuable because they represent your customer’s assessment of contract performance. This is the information that will be provided to the procuring agency for a past performance evaluation, if such an evaluation is part of the source selection process. Clearly, you need to be aware of this information in preparing the past performance section of your proposal.
Lessons-Learned Database
At the end of each proposal effort, summarize the lessons learned by the proposal capture team. You also can solicit input from other proposal members. Maintain lessons learned in a database. This information can be used to detect trends that should be addressed. It can also be used to help train prospective proposal managers and as a periodic refresher for veterans. The maxim that “those who ignore history are destined to repeat it” probably applies in this case.
Competitor Database
Maintaining up-to-date information about competitors is critical. It is practically impossible to build an effective bid strategy without competitor data. If you cannot make a reasonable estimate of what your competitors will do, making a no-bid decision may be the better part of valor.
As discussed, several categories of data should be maintained in this database. First, include any competitor assessment you have completed. Second, maintain an active file for each competitor to keep track of contracts they have won, press releases, or any other type of information that will help you understand the competition. Finally, try to obtain copies of your competitors’ proposals whenever possible. You can request a copy of the winning proposal by exercising your rights under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, in most cases, the proposals you receive through this process will contain little relevant information. Contractors normally are allowed to cross out any information they consider proprietary, so you can guess the outcome. Nonetheless, the effort to get a copy of their proposal is still worth the effort. Occasionally, you will get lucky.
Alternatively, you should always be able to get a copy of the contract. Often a simple request to the government contracting officer will produce a copy. Otherwise, you can get a copy via the FOIA route. At a minimum, the contract will display contract line item number (CLIN) prices. This will enable you to perform a cost analysis of the winning bid. Comparing competitor costs with what you bid, integrated with your understanding of program requirements, will at least provide some insights into pricing strategy.
Marketing Information Database
Maintain a copy of current and past marketing presentations. Such information can be used as input to proposal volume and section introductions. By reviewing recent customer presentations, proposal authors can reinforce the marketing message in the proposal. Moreover, they can avoid putting contradictory or inconsistent information in the proposal. This may sound trivial. Yet, it is not unusual for marketing to tell your customer one thing, only to have the proposal say something vastly different.
Value of B&P Library
An effective B&P library will pay for itself many times over in terms of both time and money. For it to be effective, however, someone must keep the library updated. For a small organization, this will require a part-time person. For some large organizations, maintaining your B&P library may require a full-time person. In either case, developing and maintaining a B&P library represents an excellent return on investment.
The road leading to winning federal contracts starts long before a bid opportunity is fully defined. Start early to position yourself strategically with the customer. Take a long-range view of developing creative, cost-effective solutions that go beyond the immediate program needs of customers. Help your customers define program requirements and assist them in defending their program if necessary. Ensure that customers are fully aware of your technical and program capabilities. Demonstrate high-level corporate interest by having senior management periodically visit customers. Take every action needed to become the favored contractor long before the formal procurement process begins.
Know your competition. Maintain an ongoing program to collect information about competitors. Use these data to provide timely support for bid decisions and as input into developing bid strategies.
Build and maintain the currency of a comprehensive B&P library. Use this asset to reduce bid costs and to maximize the time and data available to prepare your proposal. Few activities will yield a higher return on your B&P dollars.