Transcript for "Rapid Response: Build the BD and Proposal Capability That Wins in Today's Faster Federal Market": Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. We're gonna begin shortly, but I have a few housekeeping notes to go over. First, for the browser, please use Google Chrome for the best experience. The audio is streamed through your computer, and there's no dial in, so ensure your volume is turned up. Slide will be made available. They are in the top right docs tab, and the recording will be emailed to everyone within twenty four hours of the webinar concluding. I'll ask you... Ask questions in the q and a box. Any unanswered questions will be addressed offline. And, if we don't get to your questions during this webinar, your contact information will be shared with Shipley Associates to answer your question. So, with that, I'd say let's go ahead and begin the webinar. Hi, everyone. My name is Nia Mahalati. I am the SVP of professional services with Shipley Associates. We are a long term partner of deltech gov win, and we are so excited to be here today. This is a wonderful partnership, and it's a wonderful topic. So we look forward to answering any questions, going over rapid response, going over anything that you may want to address. We're gonna spend about forty minutes going through the content first, and you're welcome to put all of the questions into the chat. We are live. And then Nico, who was just the presenter, will ask those questions, and I will answer them. But please feel free to put them in there as we go along. If you wanna talk about agency specific, FAR overhaul, anything like that, please feel free to bring it up. We will try to answer as many questions as possible. And And the ones that we can't answer, we will then, like Niko said, go offline. And with that, we can get started because I want to get right into the content. So rapid response RFPs, I think that we know what this all entails. But just in case we don't, going on to the table of contents, this is what the content is gonna look like. What does that lead to? Shorter time, obviously, compressed capture the proposal. There may not even be a capture. How does the government score? I do wanna make a disclaimer here. Yes. This is Deltek GovWin, so it's a lot of, government contractors here. However, these, what we're gonna talk about also applies to b two b. It applies to every business model. So if you are not having the government quite yet as your end user, but you hope to, this is also applicable to you. If you're doing state and local, what's applicable to you? These are tried and tested principles. They apply no matter what, and we'll get into that. The one to 10 color band specifically addresses government scoring, but solicitations are primarily scored because there is a justification and award system that they have to defend, essentially, the award. So it does apply. Then we go over the standards for scoring, the four buckets of every solicitation. We'll get into that. I think we all know what that is, but if we don't, it's technical past performance management cost. We'll get into details on that. How are we gonna mitigate issues with cross volumes when we have short lead time? What are we gonna check? How are we gonna check it? How are we gonna quantify this and know where we are to where we need to get to be and how we're gonna make that happen in maybe a seven to ten day turn or whatever their turn may be. And then, again, we'll go into questions and answers for the last twenty minutes. So that's kind of what the content and the outline looks like. With that, we're gonna get started with the next slide. To give you a brief overview of Shipley very quickly before we get into this, if you are not familiar with Shipley, we have been doing this since 1972. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this except except for why it applies to rapid response. We developed the seven phase business development model and the 96 step approach. Some of you who are in GovCon are familiar with this. That was in 1972 before the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the FAR, came along in the early eighties. When that came along in the early eighties and it wasn't traditional marketing and sales to the government anymore, The Shipley process, we we took off 95% of GovCon's basically adopted it. And so, however, it's basic tried and tested principles of writing, capture, client report, competitive analysis, it all applies. 80% of what we do is leading BD capture and proposals consulting, so we see thousands of these. That's all we do. 20% is training to corporations, open enrollment. So, essentially, we look at what wins and what doesn't win and why, and we do data integration in... Data analysis on what that entails, and we roll out new information. So with that, with rapid response, we just did an... A survey, 1,400 proposals, GAO protests, agency protests, what won, what didn't win, and we're gonna go over all of that. So very exciting stuff. With that, what is rapid response? Well, speaking of this process that we were talking about, normally, that's a seven phase approach, long range business development, market, you know, positioning, core competency establishment, client establishment. How does that stretch out? Then we go into capture, which is opportunity specific, qualifying an opportunity, putting it in the pipeline, measuring what is a p win, which is probability of win, running a capture, and then measuring the p when and it should be going in the right direction, which is up right percentage wise. And then into pre RFP and then submittal, post submital. So, normally, on large vehicles that can take two or three months on short vehicles, short turns, OTAs, white papers, BAAs, so different timelines. Right? Even with vehicles like the VA's t four n g that I've seen at seven to ten days because past performance is already established. Right? So what do we do when we're short on time? That's the point of this here. What we do is this. There are only four buckets of what is going to be scored at the end of the day. Regardless of whether you get a technical volume and a cost and your technical volume is 10 pages and it says price this, there will be an element of past performance weaved into that. They may call it relevant experience, but it's so that the end user can see that you have done this before. It's tried. It's tested. If you have done something statistically 72 times and you have done it successfully, chances are the seventy third time, it will be successful unless there is a bifurcation essentially. And that is what the end user is looking to see because at the end of the day, this is about risk mitigation to your client. Right? So there's going to be a past performance component to there. It could be, you know, relevant experience. Again, it's not a formal citation. So that's your second bucket. You have a management bucket, which is essentially your third, and I call it a bucket. This section's components. Right? Management is essentially showing that we can do this work and carry in regular federal acquisition regulation driven type of opportunities, 51% as the prime. We can carry this thing. Meaning that we're not a small business where the subcontractor is essentially managing everything for us, and that's where you see the subcontractor plans and this kind of thing. So they wanna see that in additional to the technical and the past performance, you're able to manage these contracts. Cost, again, here, we're not talking about lowest price technically acceptable. We're not talking about service contract award. We're talking about best value. So cost, you're gonna see something in the requirements that essentially say management and technical together combined are gonna be scored higher than cost. So your cost here has to be reasonable, and it can't be something that looks like it... You you either can't implement because it's too low or it's too high and we're not understanding the requirements. So it has to fall within a reasonableness window, and we'll talk about that. These are your four buckets. How GovWind can help you with this? They can tell you for opportunities that exist, essentially, who the incumbent is. You guys know this already. How much money the government is spending on this, the data on the competitors potentially, you know, what top contract vehicles these agencies are on, what their purchasing methodologies is. Are they... Is there a use of small businesses? Is there a set aside? These are the types of things that you can blend in with go win to essentially expedite your response and your intelligence gathering when the RFP drops. Then that... With that, we can go to the next slide. So here, we have condensed capture. There may not even be a capture. There may be an RFP that drops, and we know nothing about this, and we have to turn it in two weeks. What do we do? You look at those four components. Again, they may not be in volumes, but you say, where am I today in each of these components, and where do I need to get to by the time I need to submit? Right? So if you're looking at past performance and you have potentially two citations and you need a third one and you don't have it because maybe your evaluations aren't that high, your... Something happened with your CPAR, which is essentially a contractor performance appraisal review, which is what the the client in the federal government uses to score you as a prime or on a past performance questionnaire, whatever is not as high as it should be. Maybe you were prototyping, you got a satisfactory, we don't know. That tells you right there, you need to have... If the requirement says three to five, you need to bring on a teammate that you can propose that can give you that immediate past performance citation. So you're gonna go through... That's an example where you're gonna go through these four components, past performance, technical, capture, cost, and score yourself essentially with where am I right now if I have to turn this thing in ten days? And I'm saying that, you know, lightly because it's a lot to do in ten days. But in two weeks, for instance, where do I need to be? So when you're looking at management, for instance, if you're looking at a management volume that requires key personnel, and there is an incumbent sitting on this contract and they are three time incumbent, meaning that they've won three iterations of this contract, It's con... Contract is called, for instance, grids four. There was a one, two, and three. That PM is sitting on that contract. You're gonna look at that PM's background and say, what does mine need to look like to far exceed and knock out that incumbents? Right? And then you're gonna make a list, and this is hopefully not gonna be your PMO lead unless your PMO lead happens to do this for a living, but that's not always the case. So those are specific examples of what you're going to do, and we will get into this further on the next slide in terms of how we're gonna break out these buckets and score them. So with that, we can go to the next slide. So here in the traditional model, like we talked about, you have months of capture, you have a draft, you have a pink team, you have a red team, a goal to submit. These are all shipply, concepts of reviews and renditions. So when you're short on time, one of the things that we say is don't skip the review steps, skip all of the processes that go around them, meaning that your pink should be written to the opportunity, not 72 pages, and then you're trying to condense it to 12. You wanna write it to 10 upfront and give your writing assignments out that way. Your red team should not be a pink plus, a pink squared, a pink plus plus. And those of you who know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about. Those of you who don't, you are lucky. Don't worry about that. We're not gonna get in the weeds. What the red team should involve always is an evaluator objective form that scores. And if you can have fresh eyes on that, that would be wonderful because then you're gonna skate... Say on a scale of one to 10 in each section, you're gonna give this evaluator a separate form. We have them at Shipley. You can create them on your own, and they're gonna score it as a third party. That needs to happen on Red Team. Whatever else it is that we're doing on Red Team, that needs to happen because that's gonna give you where a fresh set of eyes can tell you where they see gaps because they're not as intimate with this opportunity as you may be. So if you have short time, you've never seen it before, you may not be either, but you always wanna do that. Another thing with red team, when we're short on time, do not make substantial or material changes beyond this because here, if we start playing around with technical and cost, we're getting into risk. So we really need to align technical and cost and management in the pink at red no further than that, no going into the volume two days before it's submittal and saying, okay. We need to reduce the cost by 10% at this point. That's gonna create risk. So we just need to tighten our processes. Then you go into gold and submit. Here, you wanna do a single draft for the pink if you're able to, and make it compliant and compelling. We will talk about the difference. Compliant meets makes minimum requirements. Compelling means makes far exceeds on scoring. And then when we get into the scoring slides on the next slide, I will show you. And I think some of you know what I'm talking about because we use the same scoring evaluation process as our clients do. So with that, we can go on to the next slide, and I can show you. So here, when we talked about what you're gonna do on Red Team, instead of talking about hypotheticals, this is exactly what we're gonna do. If the risk is too high, the client is gonna find it unacceptable. That's where compliant comes in. So if in a federal procurement you see under a section l, you always see it because the FAR... The Federal Acquisition Regulation, those that are driven by the FAR, it will say it's required to be in section l. That's FAR section 15. It has to be. It'll tell you the requirements, 25 pages beyond 25. Client doesn't have to read. They can throw it out. They have the discretion to find you noncompliant or not. Or they can come back and do an evaluator's notice if you make down select and say, can you please expand on this? Right? But if they find the risk to be too high, that's where you have the the risk of getting disqualified. So you wanna look at l there. You wanna look at m, which is the evaluation criteria. They're required to give you that. Again, you might say to me, Nia, I'm not bidding these federal procurements. That this doesn't apply to me. I'm bidding state and local. It's great because it doesn't have to be under section l and m, but the criteria exist. There has to be an evaluation criteria to some minimum. There has to be, and there has to be requirements for compliance. So you will see those. It applies. The next level is yellow. So here, this is where we have a lot of contractors, and we teach these classes 19 times a month, every month. So I can tell you because I teach them, and I I I... And as do our instructors, and we get the feedback from both corporations and open enrollment with different companies. Here, we can... It's it's tricky to get stuck in marginal versus far exceeds. So let's say we have past performance, and the requirement on this is a $20,000,000 contract. It has 15, personnel on it, state services, and there's, you know, a requirement for sudden tasks. We see a lot of companies that come in there, and they're like, we do this stuff. We do this stuff is marginal. That's not going to make far exceeds. I know that sounds like common sense, and it is, but we do this stuff is not gonna win because there is nobody that's gonna come in as your competition and write something that says we do not do this stuff. We don't know what you're talking about, but we're gonna use you as our guinea pig, give us $20,000,000. Not gonna happen. Your competition is gonna say they do this stuff. So the difference has to be we own it. How do you show that you own it? You cannot do that by saying past performance. This is a requirement of 20,000,000. We did this eight years ago on a contract with two full time employees for two months. That's not gonna cut it. You can weave that into your response in terms of background information and relevant experience, but not past performance. So here, to make far exceeds, which is the blue, you wanna have a $25,000,000 opportunity with 25 people on it where you have done it for the past ten years that's similar to this client as possible, if not in this client space. That's how you're gonna farm seeds, those citations. Now this is all well and dandy in Shipley land because you're like, yes. In Shipley land, we would have all this, but maybe we don't have this past performance. But when it's a short turn, that's when you look at your teammate and you say, if I have ten days to bring somebody on board, what does this teammate need to look like? They have to have the formal citations. They have to be close to this client as far as the processes are concerned. Right? We have to be able to use their formal citation. I'm just giving you examples here. But that's where you score yourself. So four to five is we do this stuff. Nine to 10 is we own it, and that's how quantitatively you show you own it. Another place where it's sticky here is the green and the blue. There's a lot of organizations that get to the green and they tell us in every class, but, Nia, you know, I've written proposals where I didn't own it, and I've won plenty of times. Yes. You are correct. You can do that. It depends on who is bidding against you because we are not bidding in a silo. So what we wanna do is aim for a nine to a 10, a 10... 12 plus if we can, and then land on the nine to the 10 to mitigate the differentiation here. So you're gonna make a spreadsheet for yourself, one to three, four to five, six to eight, nine to 10. You're gonna score your four buckets. This is about simplifying the process because we're low on time. So you make this, you give it to someone on red team or red color team review, and you say, please use these requirements, score our sections. Right? And this is gonna give you an overview of where you're gonna land. If there is an compliance issue, they're gonna catch it on the red, hopefully. This gives you an additional tool to catch these issues when you're short on time. So with that, we're gonna move on to the next slide. Hopefully, this makes sense to everyone. I'm sure some of you have seen it before. The scoring standard on short turns does not change. Your end user is not gonna say we're gonna bypass scoring and give these companies some slack because we're not giving them enough time. They cannot do that because they are creating risk. What they don't want is a lawsuit and a protest. So they're still gonna have preevaluated criteria that they're scoring, and it's gonna be those four buckets. So, essentially, unfortunately, unless we're writing a white paper, unless we have had discussions with the client, unless we know we're gonna get this thing direct award, the... Their scoring is gonna be there to some extent. So we just need to anticipate that and score ourselves. So there's no partial credit about, well, I told the government I was gonna bid this individual, but right now we don't have this person, so I'm gonna bid my PMO lead, and I'm gonna backfill them. Okay. So that... Whatever is going on needs to translate into that final submittal that's going in, and it needs to be score worthy. If they don't see it, they can't score it. So make it as simple as possible. Align it directly with the requirements. Do not get into fancy footwork and technical jargon unless you have to so that you make it easy to read, easy to score, easy to evaluate. What you wanna do on short response, you wanna plan your sections out, meaning I'm gonna have this much space on this opportunity, this much on this one. You wanna score that. Then I'm gonna score this. When you write it, you score it again. When you review it, you score it again. It's not a very long process. It's a one to 10. It's not that hard to do, but it's valuable because it gives you a quantitative way to measure your progress. And with that, we'll go to the next slide. Technical. Okay. How do we score in technical? So let's go to technical. Next slide. So here, you wanna do a priority triage. Look at the solicitation requirements. If the client told you 10 times in different places in the solicitation, we want this widget to go faster, that's a priority for them. That's a hot button. You wanna spend time and space talking to that. You wanna reverse engineer the customer's intent. You want to read this and say, what underlying problem are they trying to solve? And you wanna hit those things. You don't wanna talk about everything under the sun. Spending time talking about travel, warehousing, training, Those are ancillary tasks that they're saying we want you to do those things at no additional cost because here we have a product. You have to store it and you have to transport it. Yes. Now if they're telling you it's a training contract, then that's a different story. You wanna write to that. What the client is scoring is this. It is not indefinite. Okay? When we're low on time, when all else fails, break glass. What does that glass entail? It's program implementation. That's what they are scoring. So if you look at their evaluation criteria on a contract, you will see... And I'll give you an example of federal one. On a CPAR, what do you see? Deliverables, schedule, cost. Now you're seeing small business set aside requirements. That is what they are measuring and they are scoring. That is just gonna say far exceeds, outstanding, you know, not compliant, whatever. That's what they're scoring in the proposal to see how you are going to implement because they're concerned about risk, transition risk, progression, retention. So if you can speak to those components to include deliverables, schedule, cost. Yes. This is all common sense. But what we don't wanna see and write is things like we are going to deliverable on time on day one of the contract. That's not far exceeds because your competition is gonna say that. Everyone's gonna say that. I don't know that there's gonna be... We see a lot of these. We have never seen anybody come in there and say we're not gonna deliver on time. We're not gonna deliver on schedule, and you should award to us. So if we are saying things like we're gonna deliver on time and on schedule, we're not scoring far exceeds. What we wanna do is make the content data driven, meaning we wanna say we wanna exceed schedule. We're going to exceed, you know, we're gonna reduce cost because... Why? Because instead of doing it on day one, we're gonna be ready to go 20% earlier. Here's how we did it on 72 contracts. Here's how we can do it for you. The client is here. The client wants to get there. This is how our solution gets them there. Graphic data. On this contract, we did it. We reduced time by 20%, something reasonable. Then they have something to score, and that's where you come into the far exceeds. With low time, you wanna load in the data and the content, not the adjectives. So things like we have an agile management plan, we have a a strong bench. All of your competition is gonna be saying those things. They're they're... No one's gonna say they have a weak bench with no... With an archaic management plan. So those are not gonna make far exceeds if you don't provide the data. So it has to be strong and heavy on the data, the numbers, the graphics, the... Where did you do it, how did you do it. Right? So here, we don't wanna put everything under the sun. We want to identify two to real... Three discriminators. What's a discriminator? It's something that the client wants. You have it. Your competition doesn't. Now you're gonna say that's great, Nia, because, you know, we're like doing cots, and everybody's got it. Great. If that's the case, then we're gonna say, yes. We understand that we have commercial off the shelf and as do others. However, our product does this, which the competition... You're not gonna name the competition, but which other solutions don't currently, and this is what it's gonna do to... For you, and that's where the discriminator comes in, the score. You can score there. Right? You wanna identify. It's like making a risk matrix. High level risk, mid level risk, low level risk for the client. High level priority, mid level priority, low level priority, and you wanna hit those high level priorities and speak to them because that's where you're going to get the most amount of points, right? You want to confirm risk areas in your technical. You want to say this sentence, you want to write this in order to avoid the risk of doing X, Y, and Z, or mitigate it, we are going to do this. They love that. They can score it. It's clean. How can you work with Deltek to do this? You're gonna know who the top contractors are, who the competition is, potentially who the incumbent is, if there is one, again, the purchasing method of the client, what their patterns are. Do they have money? Do they not? Are these opportunities shifting to the right? Are they disappearing? Are they real? These are the things that GovWin helps you do to accelerate this process. And with that, we will go to the next slide. Technical proposal writing, write to the evaluation criteria line by line. This is not something creative. They have to be able to identify it. It has to be clean. This is where if copying and pasting previous versions of what we wrote isn't the best idea because instead of doing that and then trying to revamp it, if we write it clean from scratch into those 10 pages, there's gonna be a lot less revision than to take something that we had. Now if you have a ConOps plan that doesn't change, obviously, yes, you're gonna use that graphic, but you don't want to recycle everything because then we're gonna get into speaking to a previous client, speaking to previous requirements, their previous hot buttons. It may land green and not blue, and that's why we say that. What... The formula is feature benefit proof. So the feature of our solution is this, the benefit to the client is this, the proof point is this. If you can write every single sentence like that, you are now making your point system... It's... You're making it easier for your evaluators to score you. You wanna start off by saying the client on this project is looking for x, y, and z. They are currently in this state. This is what they have. This is what our solution is. This is where it will get them and the proof point. Directly relate your features to their benefits. So that's how you determine what their priorities are. Instead of having feature feature feature feature, and then we don't know if that client wants that feature or not. Compliance first drafting, we wanna make sure we're compliant on the first draft. So let's start from scratch. Let's spend a little bit more time on the writing assignments and less time trying to cut what all has been written in the past and or that SMEs subject matter experts are writing by giving them more definitive time, you know, shorter spaces and definition of what your themes are, your strategies, so that it becomes one voice upfront versus trying to do that on the back end. Graphics over paragraphs here, you're not gonna have as much time to write all of that. You wanna condense your data into graphics so you can score high on those graphics. Get a lot of information into a small real estate space and then give yourself more space to write. You wanna state your discriminators explicitly. Our approach reduces x by doing y. It reduces risk by 20% because there's less incidence, and then you're gonna explain that. So if you have color teams that are shortened, you still wanna score yourself on that one through 10 scale that we talked about, and you wanna have at least another person doing that as well who has fresh eyes on the opportunity. If you cannot have formal color team reviews for all of these, which you may or may not, those are opportunity specific. It depends. You have to use your judgment on those. So with that, we'll move on to the next slide. This is past performance. We touched on this, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this. But what we need to focus on, and we can go to the next slide on this, is... This is important. Scope, size, and complexity as you know, and we keep saying these things, but what does that mean? And you also need to focus on relevance and recency because that's what's being scored. In the end user world, now I'm gonna make the distinction between the government and non. In the government end user world, the government likes vertical. Okay? They want to go down and deep into breadth. So scope is, yes, we cover all the tasks in the statement of work. Complexity is to what extent do we cover them? Is it with the two FTs eight years ago for two months that we talked about as a subcontractor, or is it as a prime contractor on, you know, 20 contracts with... That exceed the requirements? Right? That's the complexity. The scope is all of the tasks. You wanna talk to both. So when you're done writing this and when you have less time, you want your writing not to look like our team is great because we do x, y, and z. You want it to look like a component of the client's strategy. So when they're reading, you're writing, they're like, wow. They speak our language. If we were gonna have a division that did this kind of work internally, this is what it would look like. Now you're talking because it's risk reduction. You're hitting the ground running. So here, you wanna focus on... If the contract is saying something like logistics, for instance, army eagle. I don't know. You have vehicles. You're storing them. You've got juice and a halfs, five tons. You're doing supply chain. You got all kinds of things going on. If that is the only thing you are doing all day long for eighty years and this just happens to be it, that's the way you wanna show that and speak to it. You can't be everything for everyone. So it's... It can't be like... And then by by the way, on the side, we had won some awards for NASA. Okay. But this is the army. And so we really wanna focus on the size, the scope, and the complexity of the opportunity and not ancillary information because we don't have time here. And that may cause a risk because then it may look like we don't know what the client wants, and we're over here trying to be everything to everyone who doesn't work. So for past performance, you wanna show size, scope, and complexity because that's what they're measuring. They're they're evaluating, and they're even gonna evaluate it. You'll see this high risk, medium, low risk, low risk, program implementation chances. Right? So here, relevance and recency. The more recent it is, the greater position you are in. Now I know that the federal procurement's three to five years, three to five citations usually. The closer it is to the client you're trying to bid in in that space, the better off you may be. So if you can find a teaming partner who's living in that space, that's a wonderful thing if you are not. Right? So here, you wanna flag things like, you know, if you had pure notice, you had bad CPARS, whatever that might be. But those are the five components you wanna focus on. Sykes, scope, complexity, relevance, and recency. Relevance and recency is not undermined just because the government doesn't say it in their RFP. Right? And with that, we can go to the next slide. I think we lost the next slide. I don't know. It's taking a lag on the system to show up on the next slide. Nico, did we lose you? No. I'm here. I have volume two past performance up right now. Yep. It's the next one. K. Thank you. So management, next slide on this. This is your next bucket, your next section. Right? Here, you want to get to the bulk of what the client wants on this. You know, if we're talking about retention rates and our recruiting and our staffing and all of this, okay. Yes. That's all very good, but we don't have time. What are they really looking for? Right? They're looking for key personnel if that's what they're telling you. That's where you're gonna score, and we talked about this and we hit on it. That key personnel needs to hopefully try to far exceed the incumbency very hard to do in ten days. So here, if you're already in that space, right, then you should have people. It's not always easy to get your teammates to get your key personnel because you can't have your subcontractor bidding their PM on the contract, for instance. However, then in that case, you want to tailor that resume, and we have an entire class on key personnel and tailoring resumes, to look as close as possible to what the ideal key personnel on this program would look like. This is why we say, please do not submit raw resumes because the formatting is gonna be all over the place. Some of it may be applicable. Some of it may not. You may know this person and know they're qualified, but does the end user see that upfront? So what we say to do on these is make a little checkbox at the top and put requirements, master's degree. Requirements, five years of relevant experience. Well, it's not gonna say that on program management. This is a twenty years of program management experience. PMP, you know, satellite services, support, contracts. Okay. Great. Then you put your candidate in that box and you put check mark. Master's degree. Ours has a PhD. Far exceeds. Check plus. Blue. Right? Next one. Satellite support services has supported NGA, AGC, whatever the agency is. Check blocks blue, twenty plus years of experience. RPM has twenty seven years of experience. PMP, yes. This person has been a member of PMP for twenty five years, and all their Shipley classes applied to their PMI, and there you have it. You want to put this stuff up on the top in a box so that it's easy to see and easy to score with low time. They may... You may not have time to write all of that narrative, but that box can be scored. And you're saying essentially, hey, user, end user, reader. If you stop reading, here's what we're saying up front. Right? So what you can reuse, use, like, ConOps plans. We don't recommend a lot of this because, again, it has to apply to that specific opportunity to score blue. So here, you're gonna look to GovWayne to look at the agency profiles. What are they looking for? What appeals to them? What does this client look like? What do they want? How do they award? When do they award? How much? Do they have money? Some of them don't. So these are the types of things that you wanna look at for management, and you definitely wanna show that you have managed contracts that are relevant, similar in size, scope, and complexity. You're doing that with your past performance, but here you're also doing that with your organizational resources, right, to say how many times and this type of thing. So that's what your management needs to look like. And with that, we'll go to the next slide. So management proposal writing. You're gonna start off with your org chart, your key personnel, your staffing plan visible on the first page. You're gonna hit it talking directly to the requirement versus to your general management approach. Right? You're gonna say, the client wants this management on this contract, and this is how we have done it in the past. This is how we propose to do it now. We've done it this many times. This is why we've been successful, and this is why we're gonna do it again. And it has to be scorable, which means you have to have data. We cannot say things like we have 100% retention rate. You guys are laughing right now, but I... We see this. Right? Because there's no data to substantiate where you came up with this. So if you're gonna say something like that, you'd have have to say on the past five contracts, and we did not have a revolving door. These people stayed on for five years because they had this, you know, education plan, and they were on there for five years, and here they are. Data gets scored. You wanna explicitly crosswalk it with section m, which is the requirements, you know, essentially, what is being scored, what's being scored highly, and you wanna speak to those things. Risk renegotiation, you wanna talk about risk over here in management in order of that to reduce risk of management. We're gonna do this. I'll give you an example of this. We have teamed with the same company three times in a row with a similar contract, and we're gonna do it again. We've been successful. Our CPARS were all excellence with this company. That's an example right there with data. Right? That they can score. But saying things like, well, we have an agile management approach, that's not gonna score likely. Right? Tailor the resumes. We talked about that. Reuse what you can. I'm... I don't know about 80%. But, we want to make it as specific as possible to the opportunity. And so with that, we'll go to the next slide. Cost price. Okay. What I wanna tell you guys here, this is really important. The, survey that we talked about that we did earlier this year with the 1,400 proposals, we looked at, debriefs as to why companies won and lost. And the number one reason that this keep coming up, and we saw this in protests where they were sustained versus not. The number one reason was totally foreseeable. So I'll tell you that one first. The most amount that lost and what was in the debrief said because the volumes didn't align and the data didn't align. See, that's a really defendable way for your client to not have you win and not cause risk to themselves. Because if you're saying something like, well, our cost volume says that, you know, our key personnel is this, and then the key personnel ends up being a different cost, then, yeah, they've got something there. It was because the volumes did not align, the solution and the cost did not align, meaning that what was being proposed was not realistic with the cost. That was the number one reason why they lost or the protest was sustained, meaning that they lost the award at the end of the day, both at the GAO level and the agency level. The second reason we had... And I... I'm getting excited about this. I know. Because we had no idea this was a thing, but, apparently, from the survey, it was. The second reason was because the contractor wrote to the tasks in the statement of work, but they didn't write to the subtasks. So the ones that did scored higher. So here, we wanna say, please align your solution, your cost, your management, your volumes, because if they do not align, we say write your sections as stand alones for this reason because references can be risky. Okay? For this reason. That... So make sure that all of those align and then make sure you're writing to the subtasks because that is where you can... It it can be a win or lose thing. Anything can really, but to the extent that we saw, that's where companies made the blue versus the green. So I... That's something I wanted to let you guys know that we had looked at. And with that, we can go to the next slide. I think we've got another five minutes left, and we'll go to q and a's. Ensure the margin requirements are met. Make sure there's cost realism. We're not, you know, proposing all of these very, very intricate technical volumes with very low cost because then it's gonna look like, you know, we may not be able to implement and and and it's too high. It's not something that they want. So if they're asking for a Honda, we could potentially propose a Jaguar, but we do not wanna propose an f 35. Right? We say this because we see very convoluted and complex and very interesting technical volumes, but that's not... The gov... The the client can't go beyond a certain threshold because it's preallocated cost here. So you wanna make sure it's realistic, your volumes align, confirm your basis of estimates. We have a lot of demand for this... These courses now so that they're aligned for the reasons that I said because that's the number one reason why we found that they were losing or at least that's what it's saying in the debriefs and what the client is saying. Flag costing impact decisions early so we're not doing things the last minute. Like, we talked about going in there, you know, two days before and changing around price and this kind of thing. The first thing you wanna look at when the opportunity drops or you see it at the first time for cost, what's our margin on this gonna be? Are we gonna make money on this? Before we do anything else, we do a green team, not just about what is this gonna cost to implement or what are we proposing to the client, but what is it gonna cost us to, number one, internal resources to bid this? Number two, to maintain it and run the program. If the margin is, you know, 7%, 6%, then some organizations has to justify that. Well, they can't go below 10% threshold. Right? We know a lot of those. They have to justify that. We're gonna do it at 6% because we're trying to bypass performance. We're gonna try to get in there. Okay. Great. But you make that educated guess on the margin. That's the most important thing. The first thing on when these things drop and they're... You have short amount of time. What's the margin on this gonna be? What's the profit gonna be? Should we bid it or not? You do an initial gate review, entire class on that. So those are the important, things here. Not only does GOVWIN have labor rates, as you know, on the GSA schedules and this kind of thing, mostly, like, on OASIS and, like, Alliant, this kind of thing. But you also have USA spending. You have all kinds of ways to try to figure out your pricing, and this is not a pricing class. So we're just gonna leave it at this for the... The pricing has to be realistic. It has to be reasonable. You have to make money on it. Okay? So with that, we go to the next slide. Trace your technical and your management. We talked about why we're gonna do this every LCAT. Every cost should be aligned with the rest of your response. Cross volume consistency. If we're talking about, please check volume x for this. It has to be consistent. Present cost credibly. We talked about this. Use scannable summary cost by CLIN, by year, by labor category. Keep it clean. Next slide. The volumes. So we say you want to have stand alone volumes because that way you're reducing your risk of contradicting cross volumes. If you only have two volumes and it's technical and price, easier to do than if you have multiple. Just because an opportunity is shorter term does not mean that it necessarily will have less volumes or will have less pages. Compliance matrix, you do not want to skip the step for the reasons that we said. You're gonna score one to three, and then you're looking at risk of disqualification. That we cannot skip on this. You have to do it, please, with AI. If we're gonna use AI, it's funny because Deltek used to be input in 2008, 2009 before all of that. They created actually a compliance matrix matrix back then that we were using. And it was an Excel sheet that would pop up and it would be every single line of the government shell. Right? Much better now than it used to be with the AI. However, having said that, we don't wanna allocate that to AI with no eyeballs because the risk is too high there. So we don't wanna skip it even if we get assistance from our friends at Claude and, you know, ChatGPT. We might have eyeballs on that. Discriminators. The more you have of these, the more you speak to them. I... We have this. The client needs it. This current systems don't have it. The more you're gonna score, we talked about that data driven key personnel has to be consistent. Generic, you reuse language. You just have to make sure that it matches what the solicitation says and what the client wants. And with that, we could go to the next slide. Rapid response. What are we looking for? Section l and m. If it's not a federal procurement, you're looking at statement of work, requirements, scoring, or what they tell you that they're prioritizing. You're gonna score your planning, meaning I have these four buckets. This is where I stand with these four buckets right now. This is where I need to score. This is how I'm gonna get there. There. That's your planning, and you're gonna score it one through 10. Then you're gonna write. You're gonna score your sections one through 10. And I'm not talking about your volumes necessarily. The sections, meaning in the paragraphs. Right? You can you can take this as deep as you want, but you're gonna score it. You're gonna have someone else score it as well-to-do QC. Right? You're gonna score on the review. Confirm that every discriminator is stated not implied. So again, no adjectives with no data. Adjectives... Look. If you only have room and time to put the data, put that instead of the adjectives. The walk will walk the walk, but the talk may not. Meaning that we don't have to put things like... So therefore, we are the trusted vendor of choice because we have the highest quality product with the lowest price. We don't have to say all that. If we can show the quality of the product and lowest price, we can skip that. So quantity has to be, I'm sorry, quantifiable data, not necessarily adjectives, Confirm every number matches in your volumes. Confirm your compliance matrix, and it has a human on it. And with that, we'll go on to the next slide, which should be wrapping up fairly shortly. And here we are with the q and a's. So, Nico, I will let you take it from here and let me know what questions have come up. So for our first question, when access to government customers is limited before an RFP release, how can we best assess incumbent performance? How useful are contract spending and ceiling utilization? And what other tools can help validate government cost estimates against market rates? Okay. This is a great question. We get this all the time because there are clients that are government that don't answer the phone even. I'm I'm not gonna call out who they are, but we know. So, essentially, that's a whole different reason why. They have outreach requirements, but they're not all the same. They're at the discretion of the agency, and and the far overhaul addresses that. But without getting into that level of detail, if you cannot get access to the customer and you can't quantify what they are saying... Now if you are a large, you have people in your organization that know these things because they came out of your competition, meaning that a lot of times the... Look. This environment is limited. It... It's it's a small industry. For those of us who know who have been doing this and this is all we've done for, like, thirty years, we see the same people. We have a blue badge coming out of government, then they go to a large company that looks just like ours, then they come to ours, then they go to a small and get a higher position. And then we know as capture managers, as BDs, we know this is what the client is looking for, not necessarily on this opportunity, but this is who this client is. If we do not know that and we are a large, our teammates, our partners will know. We pick up the phone and say, hey. I had... You have to triangulate your sources with three different places because what we don't want is the word on the street says, you know, Goliath Enterprises is going out of business and they're not gonna bid because that... It... You can't quantify that. You have to get it from three different sources. Now largest, there is something called... There's a small business portal that is run by the government. It's the, I think it's the small business, dynamic search portal. When I used to work at largest, this thing would be my helpful partner because I would literally go in there, put an IX code. I need a small business that does this type of work in Hunts small dynamic small biz... Because, like, I was bidding something for 800,000,000 with 35% set aside for DOD, and here I am trying to find a hub zone that does this in Huntsville. Right? So I would go in there and it would show me all the HUBZones and I would pick them and I... You would be surprised at how much information these small businesses have. And if you're a large and you call them, they wanna talk to you. You're like, hello, this is Goliath and I'm making up Goliath. Right? But you know, they will talk to you. There are small businesses who are exceptionally entrenched in those areas. And if they feel that you're gonna be a trusted partner to them, they will help you. If you are a small, you have people who came out of largest, who came out of those organizations. You have to triangulate what does this client want? What do we know about this opportunity? I wish there was a better answer than that that was easier, but, unfortunately, there isn't. You have to do your leg work and you have to triangulate. That's why we used to say you like, you have to walk the halls, you have to go to these events. Now a lot of it is virtual, but your teammates, your competimates, your frenemies are sometimes your biggest assets as far as intel is concerned. And if you are a trusted vendor, they will tell you things without compromise. Right? Especially if they know that you may team with them later on down the line, and there's a way of doing it without getting into conflict of interest and other issues. So, hopefully, that answers your questions. But there's a lot of different ways to do it, but that's definitely one of the primary ones. It's people who have worked there recently. There's another database called OnFrontiers. That's all SMEs. It's a subscription database. If if a company has access to that, it's government contracting officers that came out, OTARs that came out two or three years ago, and they have that information. So there's a lot of different ways of doing that. Right? But you want to triangulate whatever you do with two other sources for sure because what you don't want is then you're going down the wrong path and you're pretty adamant about it. So we don't want that. What's the next Sure. So lately, we have seen section m's that are vague or list criteria that seem contradictory to other parts? of the solicitation. In this case, how do we assess if we're meeting the evaluation criteria? So this is a great question because, I hate to say this, but the end user is on time limits as well. And sometimes they copy and paste stuff. And so now the l doesn't look like the m, and the m is saying one thing and from another procurement perhaps. The l is saying another. If they have a q and a session, right, so requirement drops. There has to be a way. Yes. Under the FAR, once the requirement drops, like, everything's, like, formalized, you have to do a q and a formal session. You got to write emails, whatever. It... It's opportunity specific. Right? You need to ask that question. You need to ask that question. Look, section L says the requirement is 50 pages on the technical and you want to have a risk matrix in there. And section M says risk matrix not required, Which... What's it gonna be? And I would say be adamant about it because you have a right to ask that question. They don't wanna answer your email. I'm gonna tell you. GovWin will tell you who the contracting officer on that opportunity is because the FAR requires that every opportunity be assigned a contracting officer. Yes. Yes. This is happening. So they may have 30 opportunities, but they're required to be there. And it lists who that is. So you send an email to that individual and you say, please refer me to the person that knows because I don't see a q and a session here that's formal. I need to have the answer to this question. They don't answer you, pick up the phone and call them. If you're a small business, call their OSDBU, their office of small business disabled, business office. Start copying SBA. You have a right per the FAR. There is a section in the FAR that tells you what you can and cannot ask, and discrepancies is one of them. You can ask about the technical. You can ask about the scope of work. You can ask about price. Somebody asked about ceiling rates and how realistic those are. That's agency specific. Sometimes the vehicle will, like, 200,000,000 and they've only expended 120,000,000. Again, you can ask. You can say, what is the government's IRGC rate? Have have they established a price on this? Do they have to answer you on all of this? No. They don't, but you will not know unless you ask. For discrepancies like this, you're not the only one who's asking. So they will likely answer you, and I would not be shy about picking up the phone, calling them, and being adamant because you have a right to know. You are spending time and money and resources on this. They have an obligation here. So that's the way we see it, right, without being pushy or getting yourself in trouble. What else, Do you have any recommendations for specific Shipley modules to help with GSA performance? Nico? GSA performance on vehicles. Is that the question? Do we know? We we don't know. Sorry. That that is the question as stated. Do we have any modules? Yes. We have 71 classes. They're on our website. You will see them under open calendar, you know, like, open enrollment. If you want to learn how to bid, I... I'm telling you the best one because we... I teach all of these as do all of us... Is the business development boot camp because it teaches you the entire process, how the clock works. It's worth the three days virtually. I'm saying this if you're in the DC area worth the five days in person, because once you learn that you cannot unlearn it and it's so valuable, that will get you on vehicles. If we're talking about GSA, like, oh, I wanna get on OASIS. Okay. That's easy. Well, okay. Maybe it's not. I can see I got on it in 2022 for a company with a small business, but like, so you... Symphony is not the funnest thing in the world. We're not gonna teach you that, but we're gonna teach you how to get on these vehicles. And then more importantly, how do we bid the task orders and win them on these vehicles? That all comes... You can take it in the business development boot camp. That all is connected. So regardless whether you're bidding a vehicle or you're bidding task orders, that will apply, the Shipley module on class. What else, Nico? How can a small business get on an agency's radar before the procurement begins? Beau, that's another great question. If we know that there's a procurement coming down the pike, we want to contact their small business office if we are a small business. I know we do this all the time. I have been at companies to include my own, which is, you know, under 5,000,000 versus very large companies. If we are the trusted vendor, we get in, meaning if we have something valuable. If we're just going in there to tell them here's our capabilities briefing, they they get 40 questions a day on this. I had the director of the OSDBU for the state department sitting in one of my classes in 2024, and I asked why are you here? And he said, I wanna know what you people are thinking when you bid these opportunities. I'm not gonna say who this was, but it's a, it's a close friend of mine because I was managing state department contracts in Afghanistan before coming back in 2022 to The US. And he said, sometimes, you know, we wonder. And I said, do you... You know, he had 30 people sitting on his staff for the OSDBU answering questions. He said, Nia, we get the same questions over and over again. These small businesses emailing us the same. When is the solicitation gonna drop when we just put that in Sam? If we don't get value out of it, if we get value and they come in and they say you want the solution, we have it. We've done it. We wanna show it to you. We're more inclined to be responsive. So instead of just reaching out to the client to try to get out in front of them, if we can take something that they want, they're more likely to see us. Again, it's agency specific and opportunity specific. Some of them just won't, and some of them love to talk. I had one who just wanted to talk all the time about stuff that, you know, wasn't wasn't on the contract. So it just... It's agency specific, but if you take value with you, if you do your research, it's like what we used to say in the army, one shot, one kill. Right? You have one opportunity. Make it the trusted vendor. You're gonna leave this client. You're the next, you know, company that's going to take their contract to where they need to be versus the, oh, I'm just here to talk about my capabilities. I'm the everything to everyone. I'm not saying you guys are doing this, but we see that where companies are like, well, we're just... You'd be surprised. We have companies that say, we just wanna bid this. We know we're gonna lose, but we wanna show the client we put something together. We don't recommend that because then they're gonna see your name over and over and missing these people again. It's better to go in prepared. So go in prepared with a plan that you think that you're gonna bring them something that they want. Whether they'll see you or not, that, again, agency and opportunity specific. What else, Nico? What do you do when the SVO is nonresponsive? The the small business office. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes believe so. they will be. You can contact the contracting officer. The contracting officer's technical representative. If you're... You know, you can try to go and see if there's industry days. You can try to see if there's a way... Because some of them are. Right? Especially in this environment now, which is much more scrutinizing than it used to be as we know. Recently, there was... I know that all the small businesses kinda know what's going on with direct awards and the investigations and the COVID, loans, and there... It's just much more scrutiny on small businesses than there used to be. So if they're not answering you, you can try to go to the contracting officer or the contracting officer's technical representative of your teammates, find out what they have done. I don't know that they're always gonna be responsive. They have a requirement. And I'll tell you, the requirement is that they have to have outreach. The issue is that outreach is not defined. So if they wanna have five draft RFPs, they can do that. If they wanna have one RFI, they can do that. However, at the end of the day, if they don't get enough bidders, then the scrutiny is on them because they didn't do enough outreach. So it's a balancing act. That's the best we can do to try to get to them. If they're being completely nonresponsive, then they're being completely nonresponsive to everyone else too. Right? But for the most part, those are our options, essentially. Anything else, Nico? I think we're coming up on time here, so. I think I'm gonna close this out. I wanna say thank you to Nia for a wonderful presentation and answering those questions. Before we officially conclude, we wanna remind you that you will receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. Thank you all for joining us today, and please visit deltek.com for more upcoming Deltek events. Thank you.