You’ve identified who your “real competitors” are in federal contracting in your industry. Now, how do you improve your chances of winning against them?
Be selective in choosing opportunities to pursue. Here at Skyway, we emphasize targeting your market to all of our community members. Part of that “targeting” includes choosing opportunities that are in your weight class. This mean opportunities for which you clearly have the experience, expertise, and resources to perform well. Break down the Statement of Work (SOW) or Performance Work Statement (PWS) into individual tasks and compare your capabilities (not those things you could “probably” do if you find the right person) to each piece of the requirement. Consider teaming with a company that specializes in the unique requirements that your company does not have to team with to make your proposal stronger.
Analyze your competition. When you’re developing your proposal strategy, it’s natural to analyze your company’s strengths and weaknesses. You probably use a process called a “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Analysis. You look closely at the opportunity to identify where you can offer innovative solutions to meet the customer’s needs. And you identify where the threats are to your ability to win the contract. Once you’ve identified your weaknesses you can take steps to strengthen these areas, sometimes by teaming with other companies who specialize in these unique areas.
Don’t forget to conduct the same analysis on your competitors. What are their strengths? Make sure you can match them and if not, consider finding a partner to strengthen you in that area, or identify a different strength of yours that is valuable to the government to counter-balance it. Identify what your competitors’ weaknesses are and make sure the government understands why your approach is better in these areas. This is called “shadowing” and it does not mean that you say “We’re better than Company X because…” Networking is also a good way to gather intel on your competition. Agencies often conduct pre-proposal conferences and industry days to not only provide information on the opportunity you are chasing, but they also present opportunities to “rub elbows with” some of your potential customers. You may be able to gather some intel on incumbent performance while also getting to check out who your competition is.
Look for ways to improve your technical proposals. We have posted several blogs, podcasts and webinars on planning, organizing, writing and managing your proposal. Take advantage of these to improve the ease of evaluation, presentation, and professionalism of your proposal. While the government always says that glitzy proposal presentation is not required or desired, a professional looking, well written proposal where it is easy to find the information the evaluator is looking for, gives a good first impression of your company and is always appreciated by the potential customer who must evaluate 10 or more proposals competing against yours.
Ask for debriefings – even when you win! Debriefings can show you where your proposal was considered weak or even deficient. If you are the winner, a debriefing can tell you what the government rated you very highly on. This means that the area and your proposed approach are important to the customer. Make sure you note these areas so that during contract start up and performance you can ensure that you follow through especially in these areas. These should translate into better performance ratings as well.
Analyze your pricing vs the awarded contract price. Look for trends and make adjustments. There is a lot of information at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.toc.htm), and I particularly like the Employment Cost Index for helping to research labor rates. There are dozens of websites you can use such as www.salarysurvey.com and www.glassdoor.com for researching in-depth salaries by labor category in specific locations throughout the US and the world.
Take good care of your customers. Nothing sells better than having a reputation for outstanding performance. People talk, and you want them to say good things about your company. Agencies talk and share information now more than ever. Consider implementing a Customer Feedback system. It shows you do care what they think. Carefully review the feedback on a regular basis and use it to improve your performance. You may get some good comments that you can use as quotes in your proposals to show how great you really are!