One type of growth challenge that business developers and owners face stems from not having enough time, personnel, or expertise to prepare and respond to the solicitations that otherwise would be a perfect fit for the company. You may be completely new to hiring consultants. You may be worn thin from all the heavy hoursRead… Read more »
How hard can it be to do federal business development? All you need is to be good with people and a willingness to talk to decision makers, right? If it were so easy, why for years has BD been given a bad name, and why have many companies struggled to hire business developers who produceRead… Read more »
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are a critical element of business development and capture. This is how you learn about a pursuit’s history and your competition. The problem is – FOIA requests are tricky: They take forever to obtain – so someone needs to carefully track them and follow up relentlessly to getRead… Read more »
Unless you are incredibly lucky and everyone assigned to the proposal is a great writer, you will need to do some just-in-time training to get everyone on the same page. The same goes for conceptualizing graphics. Here is how you go about quickly getting everyone on board to create a winning proposal. Step 1. AssessRead… Read more »
It’s a given – price is important. However, price proposals are often prepared at the last minute, without much review, customization, or polishing. But what can we do as proposal managers? Often the best of us resort to continuously checking when the cost proposal will be done, assisting with scheduling cost volume reviews, or simplyRead… Read more »
With capture, many companies focus on the obvious: what are the company’s internal capabilities and the offering – and what can the company do in response to the customer needs. However, there are multiple other factors to take into account when capturing a contract that are all too often overlooked. There is no one rightRead… Read more »
When my phone rings for proposal consulting work, about 90% of the time the story is the same: we’ve got a Request for Proposal in and we need you to help us immediately. I say – great, would be happy to help you. By the way, have you done any capture? I hear either “yes,”Read… Read more »
Do you ever yourself in a slump, mired in corporate politics, overwhelmed, or disenchanted? If you ever get in an unproductive state of mind, remind yourself of the five basic principles below. 1. Mind the fundamentals. Especially if we have been doing something over and over again, we grow bored with things. We hit aRead… Read more »
The NCA chapter has nearly 1,000 members, and is the largest APMP chapter worldwide. At our last Dinner Series event, three speakers, Lauren Hammond, Director of Proposal Management and Support for Management Concepts; Dan Shyti, Vice President of the L-3 STRATIS; and Wendy Frieman, Consultant, shared their task order proposal management secrets: Company size doesn’tRead… Read more »
Some psychological studies assert that if someone writes down an idea and its implementation, there is close to 50% probability of it becoming a reality. If the implementation is broken down into steps that are captured in writing, the probability of being down goes up to 70%. Adding a date to each step raises thisRead… Read more »