This month, proposal development expert Beth Wingate, APMP Fellow, offers tips to help you build effective proposal schedules—whether you’re scheduling a month-long effort or a 5-day quick-turnaround task-order (TO) response.

Briana Coleman provides sound guidance for developing your own production battle plan, taking you through the BD life cycle and discussing how to incorporate production into each phase.

“Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.” Learn how to forecast risk and assess your risk exposure.

Explore the steps you need to follow throughout the business development life cycle to use ghosting in your proposal—including the type of competitor intelligence that supports ghosting—and how to get that intelligence.

Brooke Crouter explores how to build compelling gate reviews, when to hold them, and how to generate strategic discussions. She details material that should be presented and discusses how to build that material through capture so the team can determine its proposal readiness.

Win rates vary widely among companies, and we see them range from as low as 10 percent to as high as 80 percent based on a variety of factors, including companies that bid anything and everything to those that bid too conservatively.

Dear Proposal Doctor,

You must help. The senior proposal manager has gone on emergency medical leave, and the big and long-anticipated RFP is in my lap. This is hugely scary for me. I have never managed something this big and complex.

Having a “core” team of reviewers that moves from one color review to the next during the proposal’s development helps avoid confusion from one review to the next and ensures consistency because this team retains the “institutional knowledge” gained during each review.

“More companies are fighting for smaller pieces of business out here in the market, but those companies that invest and work hard to build and optimize their processes will do better in competition,” said Robert Lohfeld, CEO and founder of Lohfeld Consulting, a proposal services consulting firm, and a columnist for Washington Technology. “It’s a lengthy journey to creating and optimizing them, but once established, these processes become the economic engine the drives the company. They can really raise your win probability up to where you’re capturing between 60% and 80% of the deals you pursue.”

With all the talk about budget cuts, we see some companies overreacting and altering their bidding strategies. Budget reduction numbers out of Congress indicate that 2011 spending will decline by $38 billion.