By Marsha Lindquist and Lou Kerestesy

Every company bids to win but few companies plan their bid to win. Many companies assume they have a strategy to win. They copy their technical approach from another proposal. Then they price the proposal like a baked cake recipe. You can win that way if your competitors do the same – and if the Government bets on the hope of strong delivery in the absence of a compelling offer. But earning the Government’s highest technical rating and winning on price is possible, and it is closer than you think. And the best part? Make a few key changes once and they will serve you in every proposal after that.

Why A Proposal Plan Enhances The Proposal

There is always a plan. It is just that some are better than others. Describing technical methods,  phases, and steps plus your successful past performance is a plan. It will get you a technical approach to propose. Estimating hours by task and multiplying by labor category rates is a plan. It will get you a price to submit. You will not be disqualified for this. But you will not earn the Government’s highest technical rating or best value determination.

If you want to earn those judgments, you must make them your explicit goal. Everyone must know that is the goal, and everyone must know what’s expected of them to meet it. That plan would enhance your proposal and increase your odds of a win. And that is what this article is about.

A good proposal plan includes a Strategic Pricing® plan. A Strategic Pricing® plan is part of the pricing process – every time – and should always address all the tools available to you.  Those are not just wrap rates and profit but also items like impacting your G&A, developing a new cost center for this project, and bidding all costs directly to the project.

A Strategic Pricing® plan will give leadership insight into the key decisions they need to think about and investigate as it fits this procurement. Leadership needs to know all the pricing points that are important to achieve the right price. Giving leadership an early and frequent view of the strategic pricing® will move you closer to achieving those high marks.

Get A Strategic Technical And Pricing Process

Let us assume you are pursuing an important opportunity. Not a nice-to-have, a must-have. What does it mean to have a strategic technical and pricing process?

For a Government agency, a contract is a means to the end of accomplishing mission objectives. For the offeror, a contract should be a means to accomplishing business strategy and objectives– with before-the-fact intent, not after-the-fact justification. This means you know that the opportunity aligns with and serves your business objectives, and you can articulate how.  Plus, you can wisely and judiciously plan your pricing approach rather than just throw the pricing together – it must also be compelling.

The second thing it means to have a strategic technical and pricing process is to be deliberate. This means making technical and pricing decisions and trade-offs knowing how each helps you earn the Government’s highest technical rating and favorable price determination. The actual evaluation might be out of your control, but telling the story you think will evaluate best– and the pricing story is part of that telling – is completely in your control. And you should decide exactly how to present your qualifications to evaluate best.

The third thing it means to have a strategic technical and pricing process is collaboration. No single individual can or should make every decision needed to submit a winning proposal. Many people in your company have roles to play and should have room to play them within the business objectives you set and the objectives of the story you want to tell.

A final important ingredient is an ability to use the same process repeated each time.  It must be repeatable. Certainly, you will update the process as you discover some things work and others do not. Then you can enhance your process and make it better. It is strategy rich. It improves your probability of winning with each use.

Having a strategic technical and pricing process requires clear business and proposal expectations, capable people in every role, continuous communication about their roles in the process, and trust that the appropriate delegation of authority to them will produce a proposal that earns the Government’s highest technical rating and best value determination.

How do you get a strategic technical and pricing process? Think of this like correcting your golf swing: The most important thing you can do to follow a strategic technical and pricing process is to return to basics. Basics never fail. Doing what is simple is best because you will use a straightforward process each time. When it is complicated, you will shy away from using it.

How you do things today might include the basics or might not. How you do things today likely includes shortcuts you developed to save time, but which might also undo some of the basics. Use the simple steps that got you results before. Make them foundational to your process. For pricing that might include things like developing an internal price model or designing the progression of price from deep dive decisions through investigation and color reviews clear through to responding to evaluation inquiries.

You can swing a golf club any way you want, and you’ll score well if the sweet spot of the club strikes the ball in the right plane. It is just that some ways to swing a club make that harder, and some ways make that easier. The next two sections highlight the basics which will make it easier for you to earn the Government’s highest technical rating and best value determination.

The Technical Approach Geared Toward High Ratings

Winning is your business goal but that does not make “winning” a proposal strategy. To get a winning proposal strategy, explicitly aim your team at a single desired outcome: To earn the Government’s highest technical rating.

You cannot be sure evaluators will give you that, but that is not why you set the goal. The purpose is to focus your team on one question: “What’s the best corporate story to tell to earn the Government’s highest technical rating?” Do not think your story is your story. It is not. Your core capabilities carry over from contract to contract, even as you mature them. But, if you drew 10 Venn diagrams of your capabilities against 10 technically similar requirements, the diagrams would look alike. That is not what we are talking about.

The reality is, you evaluate 10 ways against 10 sets of business objectives, and that means you tell 10 stories. Ten opportunities mean 10 specific ways to demonstrate the low-risk capability to meet the requirement – as a means to the end of meeting the Government’s business objectives. And doing that, especially when competitors do not, makes you stand out.

How does taking a strategic approach to proposals to get you there? Let us say the opportunity is a recompete you want to win to not forgo a sizeable portion of revenue. And let us add business objectives to that such as building organizational capability in an area of the emerging need for your client (imagine certain technical and business needs were secondary during your incumbency but will be primary in the recompete) and building a solid past performance in this work for future opportunities in other agencies. Add staff for this work, particularly certain labor categories, because you want to offer the Government an attractive total price while being very profitable in those labor categories.

With “win the recompete to retain revenue” as your primary business objective, your proposal team can get strategic. One obvious, strategic proposal message could be, “Based on our existing relationship, no one is better positioned to understand and help you control the risks you’ll face” as you innovate… engage stakeholders… enhance customer experience… whatever the objective of the recompete. But the delivery team knows the story the customer tells itself, so collaborating with them and getting specific also makes what you write very deliberate aiming at their hot buttons.

The delivery team knows best how the client views the relationship, by whom, and for what reasons. They know where respect and admiration are, and where the incumbent relationship might feel dated or overstayed. Does the customer trust your company and the personnel? If so, talk about it. Are there trust issues even though performance has been good? Then do not use the word trust to describe the relationship. What has been the interaction about innovation, stakeholder engagement, or customer experience during your incumbency? Who on the team does the Government like to work with, and not like to work with? What impression did how you handle filling vacancies or invoicing leave with your management approach?

These questions are not new to you, but they are not supposed to be. We use them to illustrate the point that if you take a strategic business approach to the proposal from the outset, collaborating with people who have relevant, specific information related to the story you want to tell – and price – gets information on the table early so the proposal team can write it into the offer in the most advantageous ways. Strategically. Deliberately.

The Strategic Pricing® Golden Home Run
Strategic pricing is a must for every proposal regardless of “must win” status or otherwise.  We addressed why a well-developed process is so important. Now we will talk about how strategic pricing® can turn your proposal into a golden home run too.

While pricing is rarely assessed as an evaluation factor by itself, generally the price may be a determining factor in a best-value procurement. How do you help make the price a home run, so you add to the Government’s high marks for your proposal?  The simple answer is to go beyond arriving at the price you bid and give the Government reasons to choose your company and your proposal.

Price is important to every proposal even if the price is not separately evaluated. Make pricing engagement of your team an early endeavor. To increase your probability of winning, early pricing involvement is critical to the investigation of long lead items, competitive assessment, key leadership decisions, design of a dynamic internal pricing model, and most importantly your pricing story and the resulting monetized value proposition.

Most Gov Cons arrive at what they believe is the right price.  By presenting your merits in a strong message in the written price proposal, you stand a better chance of convincing the reader of your worth. And their willingness to recommend your bid as the winner.

Describing your value proposition is so critical to making your price story part of the best value you give, that if you miss the opportunity to do so in the price proposal, you miss the chance to call attention to all that your company’s price gives your customer.  Merely stating the features and benefits of your price is not enough.

Creating a meaningful difference for your customer, monetized, and expressed visually, right up front in your written business proposal will beat your competition every time.  Why is it so important? Because your Government customer needs to be convinced that the value you bring is more than just the dollars you bid.  If you want to win that award, that reader needs your monetized visual representation and information of the worthiness that you are the best answer to their needs.
Make it easy for them to draw the right decision by giving them reasons to choose your offer over your competition. Do it in the price proposal right up front in the price proposal executive summary.

Why there? The Government evaluator should not need to hunt for the reasons to choose your company. You want them to find your important value immediately when they open the price proposal.  Give them substantiated benefits in both visual and pricing themes to show them you are innovative, a leader, unique and forward-thinking. You want the evaluator to use your words to validate their choice. Make your offer powerful. Then you make it a golden home run for the customer and your company.

Decisions

From the time a company decides to pursue an opportunity to the time an award, the proposal process will rack up scores or even hundreds of decisions. They range from small to large. They occur within and across technical to pricing. They can even occur after the proposal is submitted. Singly and in combination, they produce your technical rating, the Government’s opinion of your pricing approach and price, and a best-and-final negotiation. Leadership makes only a small number of these decisions. The proposal team makes most of those decisions. It is hard for an owner, executive, or proposal manager to know how their decisions will produce a winning offer.

We see proposal teams all the time whose win themes, key messages, and pricing strategy are not settled until color reviews. We all know leaders who decide an opportunity meets strategic business objectives without a clear articulation of how and why. Or fails to consider equally valid contrary views between leaders, project managers, and financial executives.

Humans are creatures of habit. Behavior change is challenging and the demands of proposal development make it a hard time and place to change habits. Engaging the proposal team early about the company’s strategic pricing® goals, and how an opportunity meets the company’s overall business objectives, positions it to be more deliberate and collaborative in every following conversation. There is no guarantee of Government high marks, but there never is. A strategic approach to proposal writing and pricing increases your odds of earning higher marks.  That is what all Government contractors want.

Lou Kerestesy coaches proposal managers and writers to earn the government’s highest technical ratings, and to build corporate capability to consistently win more work. Lou has spent decades leading, writing, and winning proposals and task orders and owns Louis GovProposal Coach.

Marsha Lindquist
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