Why We Don’t Win

What are the Reasons Proposals Don’t Win? What are Common Traits of Proposals That Fail?

APMP staff asked members for their answers to these questions. Here are some of your responses:

Bill Dailey • Vice President
BizConnex LLC 

In my experience—which includes being a member of government SSEBs—the name of the game in responding to RFPs is “make it easy on the evaluator.” Keep in mind that most SSEB members have been pulled away from their regular jobs to take on the daunting and frequently mind-numbing task of working through a pile of proposals. They want to get it done quickly and efficiently and get back to the emails, voicemails, and regular business piling up on their desk. The harder it is to wade through your text to find the required RFP items to be addressed, and the further your proposal deviates from the Section L RFP topic order, RFP terminology, and Section M criteria used in the RFP scoring scheme, the lower your score will be!

You may still end up being rated as compliant or acceptable, but that’s not good enough to win.

With that in mind, these are my top 5 from a “how easy is it from an evaluator’s point of view to rate your proposal against the RFP required discussion areas and evaluation?” criterion:

  1. Failure to follow the RFP topic outline exactly.
  2. Failure to use the RFP terminology.
  3. “The RFP says to discuss this, but we know what they really want us to discuss is that. “We’ll just describe our team capabilities, what we do and have done that’s similar to the RFP requirements, and they’ll obviously conclude we’re the best solution.”
  4. Unsupported statements like “We’re your best value/low-risk/uniquely qualified, etc., etc.” that essentially insult the evaluator’s intelligence.
  5. One other reason that—rightfully or wrongfully—is a fact of life in our business is the government has pretty much made up its mind in advance on who they want to get the work. That is the rather large—but unmentionable—elephant standing in this discussion room!

Thomas Leech • Owner
Tom Leech Winning Presentations (Thomas Leech & Assoc.)

Mine is a bit different perspective, that of a proposal orals coach, having coached about 250 teams over the past three decades:

  1. Competition’s lower price. A team I recently coached did very well in their customer presentation (per later review board feedback); were told later Brand X undercut all competitors’ prices by 30 percent. Gone.
  2. Poor preparation and team performance at proposal orals. Here are two real quotes (received later) from two teams with orals RFP format sample tasks (where they give you a representative task order to prepare from scratch—no computers or PPNT): Team A. “We botched the sample problem … and lost.”
    Team B. “Wow! We aced that sample problem. Our preparation really paid off.”
    (Won the bid.)
  3. Inadequate preparation for post-orals Q&A. In a meeting with BizDev and CEO of a team that lost, they said they lost their bid on one question in orals to a prime subcontractor who would not give a positive answer. They agreed that practice sessions with potential Qs was critical—they had not tried out that (critical) Q in rehearsals. Likely would not happen today with rule allowing only clarification Qs.

One message is that it’s valuable to get, when you can, review board post-orals feedback. Another is to assess your (and others’) flaws and successes, and apply lessons learned to the next proposals.

Elise Gilbert, CF APMP • Director, Sales Support Services
Iron Mountain

  1. Lack of differentiation.
  2. Price.
  3. Misaligned references.
  4. Lack of strong relationship to or advocacy
  5. for prospect.
  6. Poor solution fit.

Lee Hendrickson, CPP APMP Fellow • Proposal Manager
FLIR Systems

I am amazed when an RFP is brought to me but no one has laid any significant groundwork with the customer to understand what they want (beyond what is stated in the RFP). You must differentiate yourself from the competition, and that implies an understanding of the customer’s hopes, fears, and biases.

Brian Bartholomew • Chief Technology Officer
Advanced Resource Technologies Inc.

  1. Noncompliance. This gives the reviewers an easy way to weed through the proposals and get rid of a few.
  2. Lack of content planning—or poor capture management.
  3. A proposal focused on the company providing the proposal rather than the client and their needs.
  4. Pricing. This comes back to poor capture management and not knowing the client’s needs and budget.
  5. Poor proposal structure—making it hard for the evaluator to score your response, structure that does not follow the same flow as the RFP, using words that are not in the RFP—although they may have the same meaning, grammar, spelling, etc.

Chris Simmons • Principal
Rainmakerz Consulting LLC

  1. Poor planning.
  2. Insufficient resources and/or poor proposal
  3. development discipline.
  4. Little or no capture information about the customer or the competition.
  5. Lack of proposal development processes, templates, and tools.
  6. Appropriate emphasis on pricing strategies, analysis, and development.

John W. Stevens Jr. • President & Principal
Synergistic Services, Inc.

  1. Lack of intimacy with the customer. You must keep in mind that there are three customers, not one: the buyer or acquisition customer, the user customer, and the requirements definition customer. Only through intimate professional relationships with these people who comprise “the customer” will you understand the customer’s needs, wants, and fears. Only through these intimate professional relationships can you influence the user’s concept and description of their needs, the definition of the requirements, and the procurement acquisition strategy. Only through these relationships can you develop a solid understanding of the competitive environment—including the customer’s perception of the competitors.
  2. Lack of executive buy-in and support. If you do not have a strong advocate or “sponsor” within the bidding organization, you will face opposition from within, it will be difficult to obtain the budgetary resources you need, and you will not be able to have the dedicated personnel with the right knowledge and skill sets needed to craft a winning solution and proposal.
  3. Failure to create and execute a strong win strategy well in advance of the procurement. A strong win strategy should lead to the creation of discriminators that do not initially exist. The win strategy should drive your major teaming and organizational decisions. The win strategy should drive development of your baselines. Finally, the win strategy must be implemented through a set of specific tactical actions, each of which must be assigned a project manager or leader, a budget, and a schedule.
  4. Failure to create strong viable baselines for your technical offering, your program plan, your organization, a price baseline, and your relevant past performance. The baselines define and document your solution before the RFP and preferably before the draft RFP is issued. The technical baseline should define not only your proposed overall technical solution, but also the trade-off analyses and make-buy decisions that drove your solution—as well as why your solution is the best possible one and the benefits it brings to the customer. The program baseline should define your implementation or execution schedule. In essence, the program baseline should constitute either an informal or formal integrated master plan (IMP) and integrated master schedule (IMS)—not necessarily called that, but a conceptual IMP/IMS that describes how you will execute the program.
  5. Failure to use a highly skilled and experienced proposal manager (I know this is self-serving, but true), program manager, and chief engineer to lead the proposal using a structured process that is tailored to the needs and schedule of the procurement and that imposes process discipline, schedule discipline, and high standards for the compliance and responsiveness of the proposal, combined with a compelling description of your value proposition of why you.

You must differentiate yourself from the competition, and that implies an understanding of the customer’s hopes, fears, and biases.

Of course, these may change based on many factors, as is well exhibited above. Notice I did not address pricing much at all. I did this intentionally, because I view a winning price as a result of doing the right things in items 1 through 4 above. I also intentionally avoided discussing specific steps or approaches such as price-to-win, black hats, competitive analysis, color team reviews, gate reviews, and many others, as I see these as implementation-specific and not necessarily universal. For example, am I going to perform a rigorous price-to-win analysis on a nonstrategic, low-value pursuit? Probably not. Am I going to perform a rigorous price-to-win analysis, competitive analysis, black hat review, etc., for a strategic, multibillion-dollar program? You can bet your sweet patootie I will.

Mike Parkinson, CPP APMP Fellow • Principal
24 Hour Company

My top 3 are easy:

Poor capture management/sales. (This includes lack of competitive intelligence and not “stacking the deck in your favor.” In my experience, poor capture/sales is the No. 1 reason most proposals lose.)

Pricing.

  1. Poor communication or miscommunication. (The best/most qualified solution provider can lose if the future client doesn’t understand your solution and why you are the best solution provider—for example, making the proposal difficult to evaluate, using poor writing, bad or no graphics, no clear benefits, and no discriminators.)
  2. Unprofessional. (For example, inconsistencies, poor writing, bad layout, lack of aesthetic appeal, poor editing, etc.)
  3. Poor or no marketing. (Your future customer does not know you, what you stand for, or your USP.)
  4. Lack of process or structure. (Crafting a winning response requires processes born from experience.)

Paul Thielen • Corporate Compliance Director
Herdt Consulting, Inc

Reading all of these responses, it appears that the No. 1 reason (stated several different ways) is lack of customer knowledge/intimacy. I call it the Golden Rule of opportunity screening: “If the first time you have scoped this requirement or built your CRM folder is at RFP release, you already lost.”

Nigel Thacker • Managing Director
Rebidding Solutions

I just finished some research of procurers, which was focused on recompetes rather than bids in general. One of the questions I asked was, “Why do incumbents lose?”

There was a range of answers—some of which are covered in the comments above, but for recompete bids, the answers seemed to be:

  1. Not delivering on the contract. As the incumbent, you’ve got a great opportunity to put yourself in a good position for the recompete—but if you haven’t performed on the contract, you start the bid on the back foot. Seventy percent of respondents said this had an impact on their decision. An additional 18 percent said it was the most important thing they based their decision on.
  2. Not focusing on the recompete with as much intensity and drive to win as you would a new bid. The word that kept coming up in respondents’ comments was complacency—which often seemed to come from an assumption that the customer would pick the incumbent anyway (because they had done a good job, or the competitors couldn’t understand the contract well enough to put in a good bid, or the risk of change was too high), so the incumbent bid team didn’t need to try as hard to win as they would if they were bidding for a new customer.
  3. Not focusing on the customer’s needs for the next contract. This came across in comments along the lines of “too many recompetes just offering business as usual,” “no innovation,” etc.
  4. Not answering the questions set. This seemed to come from either knowing too much about the contract as it is now and/or the incumbent thinking the customer already knew all about them, so they didn’t need to tell them again in the written response.
  5. Lack of preparation. This didn’t come from direct comments in the survey responses but seems to lie behind a number of the issues. You need a good capture effort to win a new bid. Incumbents seem too often to forget they need the same.

David Seibert • President
The Seibert Group, Inc.

I operate in the nonfederal world (commercial and state/local government), and by far the single biggest reason proposals don’t win is because vendors respond to RFPs they receive “out of the blue.” They have no prior relationship with the buyer, they have no understanding of the buyer’s needs, and in many cases they didn’t even know the RFP was coming. But they think they have a chance, so they respond anyway. Then they lose.

After that, one of the biggest reasons proposals lose is because they are more about the seller than the buyer. Instead of saying how they’re going to use their products and services to solve the buyer’s problems, they plug in lots of boilerplate information that is almost entirely seller-centric. “Here’s who we are. Here’s what we do. Here are the awards we won. Us. We. Us. We.” And the customer’s sitting there going, “Yeah, but what about us? What are you going to do for us?”

“Us. We. Us. We.” And the customer’s sitting there going, “Yeah, but what about us? What are you going to do for us?”
David Seibert

Bob Frey, APMP Fellow • Principal
Successful Proposal Strategies, LLC

Lack of demonstrated and documented understanding of the customer’s operational environment, business objectives, mission goals, governance framework, and political and fiscal challenges, both now and over the course of the contract life cycle. Of note is that past performance does not equal understanding. However, relevant risk identification does support the understanding section(s) of a proposal.

Lack of a clearly illustrated and described approach—with specific details regarding the people, processes, and tools/technologies that will be leveraged to achieve the requirements in the Statement of Work, Statement of Objectives, or Performance Work Statement.

Lack of sustained, front-end business development activities through which the customers’ hopes, fears, biases, critical issues, and success factors become known (and then documented and applied in the proposal), and also through which an organization’s solutions can be pre-vetted with the customer’s decision-makers for the specific procurement.

No clear articulation of “evidence of strengths” that a company will bring to a given federal agency/line organization, which align with the specific Section M, Evaluation Factors for Award, and are conveyed in quantitatively and qualitatively rich terms of (1) enhanced quality, (2) schedule adherence, (3) cost control and/or mitigation, and (4) risk mitigation (along with safety, productivity, security, export control, etc.). Importantly, the government does not care about industry’s “themes”—it cares about, and reports its findings from source evaluations in terms of, strengths, weaknesses, and deficiencies.

Lack of close integration and connection across all sections of the proposal. Too many times, the key elements conveyed in the management approach section do not appear in the résumés of the project manager and/or task leaders/functional area managers. And the building blocks of the technical approach are not reflected in past performance citations, indicating that the company has not performed work before in the manner in which they are proposing now.

David Christovich • Vice President, Federal Contracts Education and Training
The Total Management Group & Government Contracts Institute

  1. The vendor proposes a solution that is “better” than what the government specifications require. (“We don’t do what they want done, so we’ll propose what we do do.”)
  2. Irrelevant past performance. (“We’ve never done this before … but we could!”)
  3. Unqualified staff (“Ol’ Fred’s 40 years of work in the fabrication shop make him more qualified than any college kid.”)
  4. An illiterate proposal (“Hey their, spellin’ don’t kount, har-har.”)
  5. A clear inability to control the outcome of your promises (“Our technical staff certifications, DCAA-compliant back office, security clearances, HUBzone certification and 11 pending court cases will all be successfully resolved by contract award.”)

One good thing about the field we’ve chosen: Hope does indeed spring eternal.

Matthew Kelley • Proposal Manager
Segue Technologies, Inc.

  1. Your proposal is not from the incumbent.
  2. Your proposal does not include the incumbent on your team.
  3. You have not positioned your company to be the one favored by the government prior to RFP release. (You and the customer don’t know each other, and you are guessing at the price—what they are thinking and what it will cost to successfully support the work.)
  4. You have poor past performance and relevant technical experience to do the work (should have come to a no-bid decision on your own before the customer did it for you).
  5. Proposal stuff—bad outline, poor grammar, noncompliance, uncompelling write-ups, ugly graphics, uninspired action captions, lack of proposal process, planning, and templates (I’m not sure any of No. 5 actually matters after Nos. 1–4, but they definitely improve the quality of your proposal product; they just don’t matter if you were meant to win or not already).

Have any additional comments to share with your colleagues and fellow members? Please write to APMPJournal@theYGSgroup.com and look for your comments in our next issue.

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