The proposal development journey is a long and winding road which can be fraught with horror stories for the uninitiated. Millions of dollars are wasted by organizations in pursuit of winning Government contracts.

The following are some real-life horror stories (company names have been replaced with fictitious ones and any resemblance to actual companies or Agencies is purely coincidental).

Platinum Proposals Group will help you avoid those pitfalls, so you can preserve your precious bids and proposals (B&P) dollars and maximize your win ratios. 

The Rush to Write

The RFP dropped and Beltway Government Systems had 4 weeks to respond to the Must-Win solicitation that was right in their sweet spot. A proposal team was assembled, kick-off meeting held, and a good outline and schedule were put together. Due to the aggressive timelines, the team was told to start writing “without delay” – no time to do storyboarding. The team was encouraged to use existing material from previous proposals (boilerplate) as much as possible.

The proposal quickly grew to 300 pages. The team, including the color review members, spent most of the time chopping and changing words by committee to make it “answer the mail” and address the specific questions asked in the RFP. But alas, the proposal had grown too large. At Gold team heroic efforts were made to answer the mail, but by then boilerplates had taken over. 

The company lost the bid. At the debriefing, they were told that while the proposal was technically compliant, the responses were too generic and did not specifically address “how” the solutions would be provided.

Lessons to be Learned: Do not underestimate the power of storyboarding. This does not have to be an exhaustive exercise taking a disproportionate amount of time; it can be scaled to suit the activity, timeline and available resources. However, starting to write a proposal without a solid storyboard is akin to building a house without a proper blueprint and foundation. Initially it will go up fast but will end up a disaster.

A Bad Case of Incumbentitus

A young independent consultant was hired by Technologies R Us as a Proposal Manager to win a contract for which the company was the incumbent. The Program Manager on the current contract was told that for two weeks his highest priority was helping with the proposal. This was a Must-Win for the company. The Agency was happy with the way the current contract was going and there were no major issues. The Program Manager convinced all (including the Proposal Manager) that he had such an intimate knowledge and good working relationship with the client that he knew “what they really wanted” and what their hot buttons were. The Program Manager was highly regarded and the Proposal Manager did not see a reason to doubt him. The company developed a compliant proposal and a “good” price based on the advice of the Program Manager and submitted it.

The company lost the bid. The competition had provided more innovative approaches which not only cut costs but improved performance and quality control procedures.

Lessons to be Learned: Statistics show that incumbents lose more often than win. Agencies recompete contracts to get better services, features, and functionality – preferably at lower prices. Providing the “same old, same old” while your competition aggressively pursues the recompete in most cases ends in a loss. To maximize their chances of winning recompetes, incumbents cannot be complacent and should always be trying to find new and better ways of improving their service and offering innovation to constantly stay one step ahead of the competition.

Burn Rate Gone Wild

Global Communications Unlimited hired a proposal services company to staff and manage a proposal to win a high value solicitation. Staffing and budgets were developed based on a proposal schedule of 12 weeks to submission and the team started work. The work proved to be more extensive than originally anticipated by the proposal services company and more resources were used. The burn rate was creeping up slowly but surely.

By week 8, the budget was 95% depleted so the proposal services company requested additional budget. The CFO informed the Capture Manager and the team that additional budget was not available. The company had to let the consultants go and use internal resources for the remaining 4 weeks during which they worked 60-70 hour weeks.

Despite the heroic efforts of the team, the company lost the bid. The proposal was non-compliant both from a technical and a proposal submission instructions stand-point.

Lessons to be Learned: Plan the proposal resources and budget very carefully at the beginning of the effort. Monitor the proposal Burn Rate on a weekly basis to make sure that you are on the right trajectory with your company’s precious B&P spending and fine-tune if necessary. Deviations are much more easily corrected at the early stages of proposal development.  

The 99-Step Methodology

Wild West Technologies decided to revamp their proposal development methodology from an informal set of home-grown processes “islands” to a standardized methodology. They hired a respectable proposal shop to help them design and document a new, improved methodology. The contract was signed, work started and a number of consultants interviewed the stakeholders involved in bids and proposals. After a few weeks, the process was completed, documented in full living color and presented to senior management. Buy-in was obtained and victory declared. Everyone involved in the bids and proposals process was issued an impressive laminated color flow chart which summarized the steps, milestones, deliverables, roles and responsibilities and decision gates in the process, as well as a detailed handbook documenting the methodology.

Fast forward three months: The new methodology was so detail-oriented that it was proving too cumbersome, time-consuming and rigid to be used for real-world proposals. Employees began feeling that they were serving “THE Methodology” rather than the other way round.

Fast forward another 2 months: “THE Methodology” was all but abandoned or at least several watered down versions of it (based on the size of the proposal and the schedule) started to mutate. However, the company was left with very impressive, full color, laminated flowcharts of “THE Methodology” which adorned many cubicles. 

Lessons to be Learned: Proposal development methodologies and processes need to be nimble and instantly help your proposal team.  They need to be designed with built-in flexibility such that they can be scaled up or down based on the complexity and size of the proposal.  If your team members see benefits such as saving time and increased efficiencies in the methodology, they will embrace it. If not, they will most likely abandon it.