Proposal Reflections

  In the world of proposals, time is often tight, deadlines are fixed, and expectations are high. Successful teams know that thinking strategically before putting words on the page saves time, strengthens the response, and increases the win probability. That’s where solutioning comes in. Solutioning sets the stage for persuasive, compliant, and compelling proposals. It helps your team align around the “what” and “how” before trying to figure out how to word everything. What Is Solutioning? Solutioning is the process of designing your technical, management, or staffing approach in response to the customer’s requirements. It goes beyond checking boxes: it’s about understanding the customer’s mission, identifying their pain points, and crafting a tailored, value-added response. Solutioning is important because it: Ensures technical accuracy and feasibility. Your writers can’t sell a solution they don’t understand. Aligns your team. Solutioning sessions bring togethe...

  Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators before responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP) is critical because it enables your team to position strategically, respond persuasively, and compete effectively. A realistic view of your position relative to competitors helps your team determine whether to pursue an opportunity or walk away. And understanding where you’re strong and where you’re vulnerable supports smarter investments of time and resources. When you understand your strengths, you can emphasize them throughout your proposal response. Highlighting relevant capabilities and past performance helps build trust and show that your team is low-risk and high-value. Beyond strengths, identifying your differentiators is key to standing out. Whether it’s a unique technical approach, proprietary tool, past success with similar customers, or unmatched talent, identifying these elements early ensures they are woven throughout the proposal in a meaningf...

In federal business development, getting ahead of the opportunity is always the goal. Ideally, your team has identified potential procurements well before anything appears on SAM.gov, allowing time to shape requirements, engage with stakeholders, and gather valuable customer insight. But that’s not always possible. Sometimes the first sign you see of an opportunity is the release of a Request for Information (RFI). Whether it’s due to bandwidth, shifting priorities, or limited access, many teams are now finding themselves reacting to RFIs rather than shaping them. And with the recent surge in federal RFIs, it’s more important than ever to respond quickly—and strategically. So how can you stay competitive, even when you’re late to the game? One powerful shortcut: use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the customers’ issues and hot buttons so you can tailor your messaging with speed and precision. In this article, we’ll walk through how I used ChatGPT to extract in...

In today’s environment, proposal development often involves hybrid or fully remote teams spread across different locations and time zones. While this enables teams to leverage the best qualified team members while minimizing travel costs and impacts on personal lives, it also introduces some key challenges. These include communication breakdowns, challenges coordinating across time zones, lack of visibility into progress, version control issues, and limited opportunities for real-time problem solving.  Clear communication, efficient workflows, and team cohesion become even more critical when your contributors are not in the same room. To follow are some best practices to help proposal managers lead hybrid or remote proposal teams effectively. Start With a Clear Proposal Management Plan Just as we do with a collocated team, before drafting begins, the proposal manager must take time to develop and circulate a clear and complete proposal management plan. The proposal mana...

With key legislation in place and the end of the United States Government fiscal year less than three months away, we’ve seen the busy season starting to pick up in the government contracting space. To navigate competing priorities and limited resources, it’s helpful to have strategies in place to handle the surge without burning out your team.   Review and Prioritize the Pipeline Weekly Pipeline reviews become even more critical during the proposal busy season because tough decisions may need to be made about which opportunities to pursue. Leadership should consider the various opportunities in the pipeline, the level of readiness of the team (i.e., how much capture has been done), and the resources available to support each opportunity. Sometimes pursuing an opportunity with a low win probability can take critical resources away from an opportunity with a higher win probability.  Additionally, as part of the pipeline/milestone reviews, make sure you have a b...

The use of generative AI tools is becoming almost commonplace in our daily lives, much in the same way that we use cell phones and the internet without a second thought. And why not—it’s so easy to enter a prompt into ChatGPT and use the response to start an email, thank you letter, or social media post. So, it’s not surprising that the explosion of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and others has sparked major interest—and debate—among those in the proposal community.  AI promises so many benefits to our proposal process: it can save time and increase productivity, it can help brainstorm win themes and messaging, it can improve readability and clarity, and it can serve as a knowledge assistant. This can help reduce burnout on proposal teams since AI is saving the team time doing the “grunt work” so that proposal team members can focus on higher-value tasks.  However, AI use does not come without potential risks, including confidentiality and dat...