I don’t remember when or where I started using these terms, but I love them. They are the right amount of offensive to get attention, but still innocent enough to not be outright mean and nasty.
First of all, I want you to understand why Contracting Officers put page limits on proposals. Simply put, we don’t want to read through an unlimited number of pages for each of the multiple proposals we are going to get. And we can – and will – weed out offerors who cannot follow instructions.
Everyone writing proposals for a government contract has run up against a page count at some point in their career. It is inevitable – you’ve got 15 pages (or other small number) to explain your entire management or technical process, but you’ve got hundreds of pages of capabilities and expertise to describe. Can you do it? Yes. You can. And you should.
Which is clearer to you?
Company A:
Our company support team consists of Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Human Resources, Security, Contracts, Travel and administrative support personnel. These 8 personnel are located in our HQ in Tampa, FL and support all of our 65 employees operating in the continental US.
Or
Company B:
Our highly trained and vastly skilled administrative support staff have extensive knowledge providing enterprise level business operations support. With over 140 years of combined experience, this staff leverages existing and previous career knowledge, insight and relationships to provide unparalleled and cutting edge capability to world-class employees.
I hope you picked Company A. Don’t laugh at the second one – I just made those up in 5 minutes – but they aren’t really a stretch from what I’ve seen as a CO, Proposal Manager, Writer or during proposal reviews. (Slight FYI tangent for you Contracting Officers reading this – industry often calls these reviews ‘color reviews’, assigning different colors to different phases of the proposal preparation process. i.e. In-process, near-final, final, post-production, pre-submission, etc…)
Company A was 42 words, just under 3 lines, and told the reader 5 very clear facts about their support team (department names, # of support personnel, location of HQ & Staff, total employees, general location of supported employees the staff is responsible for). Company B was 46 words, but took up 3.5 lines, (fluffy words are BIG) and the only thing we know (and I use that term very loosely here) is that they’ve got 140 years combined experience.
Both of those paragraphs may technically pass as a description of support staff. But only one has meat with the potatoes. The other is flabby because of all the fluffy wording. One thing (not the only thing) that you need to do in your proposal is instill confidence with the proposal evaluator.
Imagine now that you are a contracting officer and you just read two 25 page management volumes, one written like the Company A example and one written like the Company B example. Who do you think will rate higher on this volume?
Say what you need to say. Limit the fluff.