Because winning is the only option.

Bid & Proposal Con 2012

We’re looking forward to another great APMP conference this year! Bid & Proposal Con 2012 is going to be held on May 22-25 at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel. Propel ‘s founder, Michelle Petty, submitted an abstract to present jointly with Microsoft’s Marci Glennon on a 2011 initiative in which Propel helped Microsoft develop a bid and proposal framework. The objective of the initiative was to provide bid and proposal teams with a standardized process and streamlined experience for the entire lifecycle of the pursuit. Our proposed presentation describes the challenges and risks with existing bid desk resources, the change management plan we implemented, and our approach to cutting across markets and internal geographic boundaries to deliver a realistic solution.  We’re crossing our fingers that we’ll be selected to present, and we’d love to see you there!
 

WORK SMART(ER)

One of the most daunting tasks proposal managers face is establishing and managing proposal team expectations. Whether we’re making proposal assignments, preparing for proposal deadlines, or coordinating with teammates, the success of the proposal hinges on our ability to bring together an often disparate group of individuals with competing priorities.

There is an effective – and SMART – way to handle this task. The SMART methodology, originally developed as a goal-setting framework, translates quite nicely to proposal management. The idea is to use the pneumonic to assign proposal activities that incorporate all of the following criteria:

S –Specific– Clearly and succinctly explain what action is needed and why it is needed.

M –Measurable– Define the acceptance criteria. How you will monitor progress and completion?

A – Achievable – Verify that the assignee(s) can and will complete the task.

R – Results-oriented – Focus on the desired outcome.

T – Time-bound– Establish a clear deadline.

If you want to work SMARTER, you can add two more:

E – Exciting – Make it fun! Seriously, aren’t all proposal activities exciting?

R – Rewarded – Let your team members know how much you appreciate their efforts.

So, instead of asking the resume writer to “finish the project manager’s resume – ASAP,” consider a SMARTER option:

We need to tailor the project manager’s resume to emphasize his experience managing systems integration projects (Specific). Please interview him (Measurable)by 5:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 12, 2011 (Time-bound) using the attached questionnaire (Measurable and Results-oriented).

The project manager is a great guy. I can’t wait to see how we can use his experience to beef up the key personnel section! (Exciting!)

Please email me by 10:00 a.m. ET tomorrow morning (Time-bound) to verify that you can complete this assignment or to let me know if you have questions or concerns (Achievable). I appreciate all your hard work and effort to-date (Rewarded), and look forward to seeing the completed interview questionnaire (Results-oriented) on Wednesday.

Working SMART(ER) keeps me accountable for setting the right expectations to help the proposal team achieve the best possible results, so everybody wins!

 

Win Rates: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Win rates are a hot topic in our industry. Many believe a high win rate is worthy of some serious chest thumping. I’ve been following a great LinkedIn discussion on this topic. The responses in this discussion reflect the difficulty of answering the question: What’s your win rate?

Settling on a universally applicable definition of a “win” is more challenging than it might seem at first. Some people define a win as a contract award. Fair enough. But what about that proposal manager who has an RFP dropped on her doorstep two weeks after it was released? No sales lead, no customer relationship, nada, except for the directive that this surprise RFP is somehow a “must win” deal. Is it fair to place the customer’s choice with her? Objectively, I think most professional would say no, recognizing her limited ability to sway the decision makers.

Some people include government-wide acquisition contracts (GWAC), multiple award contracts (MAC), indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts, and blanket purchase agreements (BPA) in their win rates. While this can help bolster your win rate percentages, I find their inclusion interesting. It reminds me of my husband. He buys a hunting license every year, but his guns seldom see the light of day. Those “wins” – in the form of a GWAC, MAC,ID/IQ, or BPA – are about as likely to turn into revenue as my husband’s hunting license is to fill up our freezer with venison. It’s true that these “hunting licenses” provide access to opportunities, but you’re pretty much on equal footing with your competitors, with no real advantage and no revenue-generating results to show for your effort.

Some declare a win if they’ve helped the team successfully progress to the next stage in the sales cycle. I love that definition! After all, our job as proposal managers is to transfer the sales strategy and customer solution into a compliant, compelling proposal.  If we do that well, the team has moved one step closer to closing the deal.

In the end, I agree with Gregg Easterbrook, who says, “Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.”1 What do you think?

1Gregg Easterbrook.(n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved October 11, 2011, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/greggeaste171133.html

 

Bloomberg: Vendors Use Software for Edge in $532 Billion U.S. Contract Market

By Leah Nylen, Bloomberg Government

August 15 (Bloomberg) — After a year and a half’s work, Eric Gregory’s team at CACI International Inc. was getting close to submitting their proposal for a federal government contract when he realized a key document was missing.

Within five minutes, Gregory found it had been misplaced in another folder, using custom software that can sift quickly through documents and a proposal that had dozens of components and was several hundred pages in length.

“I have had experiences where this created major problems on proposals before,” said Gregory, CACI’s vice president of capture and proposal development. The software “saved us time, money and rework.”

Federal contractors have adopted elaborate metrics and data-management processes to determine when and how to bid on work, said Rick Harris, executive director of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals. Now some are turning to tools that help automate some of the myriad aspects of a bid.

Far from replacing the networking skills that have often driven business success in government contracting, these new computer tools add a new element to vendors’ competitive efforts. The processes have helped some companies win as many as 90 percent of the bids they submit, Harris said.

“It’s the people and the process that determine a win or a loss,” Harris said in an interview. “There are teams that are working in different states or different parts of the world. You need that collaboration software so you can update in real time.”

$3 Million Gamble

Vendors often risk 1 percent to 3 percent of the total value of the contract on proposal efforts before knowing whether they’ll win the bid, said Robert Lohfeld, chief executive officer of Lohfeld Consulting Group Inc. and a former division president at Lockheed Martin Corp.

For a $100 million contract, that might amount to a $1 million to $3 million bet. Many proposal managers still do most of their work by hand, marking up documents and sending them via e-mail or traveling to another location to work with a team at its “war room.”

That face-to-face approach can be expensive, said Michelle Petty, owner of Propel Consulting Inc., a proposal consulting firm in Austin, Texas. For one proposal in 2009, the client paid more than $70,000 to bring 15 people on-site for three weeks, she said.

“That’s a huge expense,” Petty said. The total cost of software “is going to be much less expensive than having people continuously travel to different locations.”

Automation Tools

Dozens of automation and collaboration tools are now available as companies seek ways to create virtual war rooms and make the proposal process more efficient.

At CACI, proposal teams use Privia, a product developed by closely held SpringCM, to pull in information from government web sites on an agency’s needs and pull in market research or analysis on previous contracts for the same work.

CACI’s capture management team can also upload documents, such as information on potential competitors or teaming partners, and if it decides to bid, the software helps manage version control, audit trails and real-time collaboration on the hundreds or thousands of pages that go into a proposal.

SpringCM’s pricing starts at $16,000 and varies depending on the number of users and hosting options, Michelle Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mail.

Bid Tools

Another tool, VisibleThread, scans documents and suggests wording changes to make the language clearer and remove legal liability, said chief executive officer Fergal McGovern.

Proposal Software Inc.’s PMAPs 2011 specializes in proposal assembly, helping vendors manage the process by pulling from a trove of documents to quickly put together proposals and responses, said John A. Laurino, chief executive officer of the closely held Westport, Connecticut company.

Nearly nine out of 10 proposal managers said adding automation tools would improve their “win rates,” a metric that measures how often a company succeeds in its contract bids, according to a May survey of 102 industry professionals conducted by VisibleThread at the APMP’s annual conference.

Some long-time proposal professionals are less enthusiastic about the use of automation tools. Creating a defined and repeatable process is the key to improving win rates, said Hélène Courard, vice president for corporate capture management at Salient Federal Solutions, an affiliate of Chicago-based private equity firm Frontenac Co. LLC. If you don’t understand the concept of multiplication tables, using a calculator isn’t going to help, she said.

No Panacea

“Automation can certainly help in some areas,” said Courard. “But I don’t think it’s the panacea.”

Shipley Associates Inc., one of the leading proposal and business development companies, has stayed neutral on the use of automation tools, said Brad Douglas, the firm’s vice president for business development. Based in Davis County, Utah, Shipley counts Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co. among its clients.

The company developed a 96-step process, the Shipley Business Development Lifecycle, which forms the basis for the proposal process used by many federal vendors. Some of the major steps include identifying potential opportunities that fit with a company’s long-term goals, assessing the opportunity to define likely competitors, and planning the bid strategy and pricing structure. Shipley recommends using content management software so that a vendor can reuse content across proposals, said Douglas, who has worked for the company for 21 years.

Limits to Automation

“If you try to automate much more than that without a disciplined lifecycle process, it will probably fail,” he said. Using Privia and other automation tools has helped CACI increase the number of proposals it works on each year, Gregory said.

It also lets him track the progress of each opportunity or proposal without having to meet with the team for an update.

“As we become more practiced at using these environments, it will have a significant effect on our probability of win for any opportunity and will perhaps increase our win rates,” Gregory said.

“Using these tools will have a positive effect on revenue growth and profitability over the long haul.”

For Related News and Information: Top government news: GTOP Contracting stories: TNI ORDER BN Legal contracting news: TNI LAW ORDER

—Editors: David Rapp, David Ellis

 

News and Events

Michelle Petty  — owner of Propel — loves learning new ideas and sharing our perspective on industry trends and hot topics. Please join us at one of the upcoming events on our schedule. If you’d like us to come talk with your team or organization, please contact us.

Upcoming Events

Achieve 2011 — SpringCM Privia’s 4th Annual User Conference, November 1 – 2, 2011, Reston, Virginia

Automation is great, but it’s not a panacea. Without solid process backing it up, even the best technology will become shelfware. In this interactive session, we will walk through the development of effective, repeatable processes tailored to your organization and teams. We’ll talk about how to automate the process, and we will compare the features and functionality of a variety of technology solutions, including Privia.

 

Recent Events

The Art of Winning, 22nd Annual APMP® International Conference & Exhibits,  May 31 – June 3, 2011, Denver, Colorado,

Propel was a sponsor again at this year’s conference, and it was great! We hope to see everyone in Dallas next year!

Zero Emissions Proposals — Successful Virtual Teams, June 1 – 4, 2010, Orlando, Florida

The challenges and costs associated with bringing proposal teams together have increased dramatically. Whether the result of frequent, extended trips; pulling operations staff from client sites; or decreased productivity resulting from travel time, co-locating the proposal team can have far-reaching impacts on budget, performance, and morale. Amy McGeady and Michelle Petty offer practical tips for determining when to consider virtual proposal teams and how to work effectively in a virtual environment. They will address both remote office and home office environments, discussing when to bring the team together (if at all). In addition, they will present an overview of the tools, technologies, processes, and procedures that provide a solid foundation for successful virtual team management.

The APMP Pacific Northwest chapter invited us to speak on virtual proposal teams at their first annual fall symposium, September 24, 2010 in Seattle, WA.
As a corporate sponsor of APMP NCA’s Washington, DC chapter, Propel was actively involved in APMP-NCA Annual Conference (formerly Professional Day) on October 12, 2010.
Art of the Question, APMP NCA Proposal Basics Bootcamp
Washington, DC, April 19, 2010

RFPs often contain conflicting requirements and confusing instructions, or they may be missing key information needed to prepare a viable response. Even though writing and submitting questions may seem like a simple task, there is an art to asking good, strategic questions. This presentation provides tools and techniques regarding when to ask questions, how to ask questions, and which questions to ask.

Propel was a platinum sponsor of the first annual APMP Texas All-Star Symposium in Houston, TX on March 5. The event had a fantastic turnout and was a great opportunity for we Texans to share ideas and get to know one another. We’re looking forward to next year’s symposium in Dallas.
Technology and Proposal Management, APMP Texas All-Star Symposium
Houston, TX, March 5, 2010

Proposals often challenge the most seasoned professional, often due to complexity of content, aggressive timelines, and incredibly challenging review and approval processes. In the fast-paced world of proposal management, any approaches and tools that can help get the projects done can be an attractive proposition. Propel Consulting CEO, Michelle Petty, will serve on a panel that will explore considerations in existing technology, search for answers, and share stories about technology in the proposal management process.

Art of the Question, APMP Texas All-Star Symposium
Houston, TX, March 5, 2010

RFPs often contain conflicting requirements and confusing instructions, or they may be missing key information needed to prepare a viable response. Even though writing and submitting questions may seem like a simple task, there is an art to asking good, strategic questions. This presentation provides tools and techniques regarding when to ask questions, how to ask questions, and which questions to ask.