Dear Proposal Doctor,

Our team is in a pitched battle over the proposal outline, and until we resolve it, this proposal is going nowhere. The government’s Section M evaluation criteria (different from what is in Section L) are stated in paragraph form with no numbering or lists or bullets. The endless debate and churn is cutting into the valuable time available to write and develop compelling graphics. How can we achieve closure? Soon!

The powers that be took drastic measures after a number of proposals were submitted containing errors resulting from use of old proposal material. As of now, no one has access to old proposals so that everyone will have to write everything from scratch.

Is there an official best practice with respect to using previous proposals?

Most companies really miss the mark when building their new business pipeline.

Typically, the market research team dumps every conceivable deal they can find into the new business pipeline. One company that I reviewed even boasted that they had a new business pipeline with over 150 targets worth $8 billion. With a win probability of 5%, they thought they could bring in $400 million in new sales.

Their new business pipeline was nothing more than a pipedream. Let’s get real and follow these 6 simple tips when building a new business pipeline.

When people on the proposal team ask me what is going in the proposal, I don’t like telling them something that isn’t true, but the higher-ups insist that certain things be kept confidential. This puts me in a bind. What is the right approach in this situation?

There are two proven axioms in Federal Government business development (BD) and capture: “You probably don’t know what you don’t know,” and “If you don’t already know who’s the ‘pigeon’ around the poker table, it’s mostly likely YOU!”

Surprisingly, many companies don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to market strategy and Go-to-Market planning, and they make the same mistakes over and over. In this webinar, we discuss the top 10 mistakes and how you can avoid them.

Lohfeld Consulting Group’s 7 quality measures more than double proposal win rates and help government contractors compete more effectively.

Doing more with less does not mean longer hours for less pay, but rather leverages continuous process improvement, teamwork, creativity, and ongoing training to result in long-term savings. Lisa and Brenda share best practices for cost savings.

Chris Dorobek recently interviewed Bob Lohfeld to get more insights from our poll of government contractors’ 2013 results and 2014 competitive strategy changes.

As the proposal manager, how can I bring everyone around to a single point of view so that we can get on with it?

Nearly two-thirds of government contractors experienced moderate to significant revenue decline in 2013 as a result of sequestration and the government shutdown, according to a new PulsePoll™ of government contractors by Market Connections, Inc. and Lohfeld Consulting Group, Inc.