Help Me With Sign Ohio RFP

Help me with document type sign rfp ohio

co.com at any time I will be answering questions well after today's presentation so I'm just going to jump into why we're here today so this is a very basic training for companies and professionals who are just starting out in the government contracting world if after today you'd like some more advanced advice or if you want to take the next step I recommend that you attend my follow-up webinar how to speak the proposal language which will be run by the SD video on September 22nd so on your screen you can see the objectives for today's training to understand what a proposal is and what it isn't to understand how to read an RFP to understand how to use that RFP to create a proposal content plan and then understand how to fill out that content plan and develop a complete proposal so today is basically an introduction on how to go from having an RFP in your hands having a compliant proposal to turn in so this slide is a an extreme over oversimplification of the government procurement process basically it starts with the government having an idea or in need and then they capture this need in an RFP which is a request for proposals you'll get the the RFP from a variety of sources such as FedBizOpps com then you'll crash the proposal and you hopefully get a word of the contract and we begin the work parts of the RFP are actually going to become the basis for your proposal and then parts of the proposal and the RFP are going to become of the eventual become part of the eventual contracts the proposal is your input into the process now in more sophisticated procurement efforts there are other opportunities to provide your input to the government this is called capture but once the RFP is out you really can't communicate with the government in any other method besides submitting your proposal so that's our topic for today the interesting the thread through all of this is the documentation the RFP pertains to writing the requirements the proposals puts into writing your approach to meeting those requirements and then the contract is the agreement between you and your end user customer on how you're going to deliver so I kind of want to start out with what a proposal is not there are some common misconceptions about what a proposal is and what it isn't being a proposal specialist I know my point of view is a bit skewed but I think it's pretty much impossible to underestimate how important proposals are for your company if you want to do work with the government so a proposal is not a technical report think about the difference between a commercial for a new refrigerator and the manual that comes with it you don't necessarily care what kind of refrigerator gas it uses as long as it keeps your food cold so it's not a technical report telling you all the little details you are you are selling with your proposal a proposal is not an academic study you don't need to do research on industry trip industry trends or cite articles to validate your claims you do have to substantiate your own claims but you're going to do that from your company's point of view a proposal is not just paperwork unfortunately many companies do proposals as an administrative task or just paperwork that has to get done in reality a proposal is the last thing standing between you and your customers money proposals are becoming increasingly competitive and sophisticated and you don't want to be the one company that didn't take it seriously and didn't put adequate resources behind it and finally despite what you might think a good proposal is not about you or your company it should be written from the customers perspective and focus on all the things that are important to your customer for example it's pretty unlikely that the customer care is what year your company was founded or what industry your CEO came from unless you can demonstrate the value and the benefit to the customer and that's a refrain that I will echo throughout this presentation is that you really have to demonstrate the value and a benefit to your customer at every turn in writing or proposal so now that we know what a proposal is not how can we define it so first of all and I would say above everything else your proposal is a marketing document you have to remember that its purpose is to sell your company's product solution or people to a customer it's not a technical report so you're allowed to make it flashy you can have color it can have fancy graphics just make sure you have a purpose behind what you're doing clipart is not going to cut it but a flowchart about your automated recruitment system might catch and evaluators eye if they've got trouble with turnover so you have to think about what your customer needs and how you can respond to that in your attractive marketing document a proposal needs to respond to the gauge of the customer it isn't about your cuffs your company so much as it is about how you can help the customer with what they need their RFP will typically tell you what they need or what they think they need but your proposal will be stronger if you can respond to needs you know their needs you know they have that are not in the RFP so the stage needs are in the performance work statement and then the unstated needs are things that you know about your customer maybe budget constraints they've been having or problems with turnover if you can respond to those you can outstrip your competition a little bit it's also important to remember that your company can typically be held legally to any language that you put into your proposal now you don't want to use wishy-washy language just because you're scared of what you might be held to but then again you don't want to make promises that you can't keep a great proposal is going to anticipate and mitigate the risks to both the company and to the customer so all sections of an RFP are important at least one person your company needs to read the RFP and its entirety preferably everybody involved in the process should read the whole thing but an RFP can run 80 to 100 pages and longer so you need to be able to prioritize if you are leading the writing of the proposal you should be focusing on section C L and M now not every agency follows the polar format of having sections a to M but most Sue and all RFPs are going to have these major sections the statement of work the instructions to offers and the evaluation criteria so I'm going to go a little bit out of how to order here by by how they shape your proposal but I'm going to go through these sections and tell them why they're important so we'll start with section L because it provides the architecture for your proposal section L is going to tell you how to organize your proposal for your section what to write about and how to format your response it's absolutely essential that you adhere to all requirements in Section L if they want it double-sided our legal size paper and purple binders with only one sentence per page and that's what you have to do your proposal can be thrown out for being non compliant to the RFP they don't have to throw it out but if they've received 500 responses to an RFP evaluators are going to be looking for simple ways to narrow down the playing field so your proposal is going to mirror the instructions in section L talk a little bit more about that as much as you can you want to match your numbering system to the headings that are numbered in section L the single best thing that you can do to increase your chances of winning bid to make your proposal easy to navigate you need to make it easy for evaluators to find what they are looking for even mind that they have scoring sheets and evaluation criteria checklist the first thing they're going to look for are the parts of your proposal that line up with what they're looking for generally proposals are not read designers don't start beginning and go all the way to the end they are looking for the things that allow them to check boxes on their list they are not read that are evaluated so you can see in the graphic here that this might be the way that the table of contents the RFP is organized and then that's how that translates over into your proposal making it very easy for them to find what they're looking for okay section M is the evaluation criteria proposal evaluation can come in many forms some RFPs have numerical scoring systems other have others have color systems and so others use adjectives adjectives or ratings such as good excellent poor fair the evaluation criteria should always be at the forefront of your mind as you're composing your solution your graphics and your writing the evaluation criteria is what you are scored on and the highest score is what's going to win the bid if the evaluation criteria is not provided or if it's big and you're it's up to you to use your knowledge of the customer to figure out what is important to them sometimes you can even create craft your own evaluation criteria and if you're really ahead of the game and you're starting to put your proposal response together before the RFP even comes out which I do highly recommend you need to use your knowledge of the customer to craft your own evaluation criteria and really hit those hot buttons that are going to really resonate with your customer as they're evaluating your proposal and finally another useful use of evaluation criteria that you can use it to develop your forms for internal reviews you can basically do a pretend source evaluation board within your own company with your colleagues acting as the evaluators using the evaluation criteria from the RFP and they'll go through the proposals to see how it stacks up see what kind of score you're going to get in the next really important section is on section C statement of work slash objectives section C tells you what you shall do and your proposal is going to say what you will do these are slightly different verbs here but they're very important in the proposal world now saying the government's can tell you what you shall do and you're going to say what you will do these are going to be the same things but I say that you have to show your work this is basically saying the who what when where how and why of what you're doing it's important that you use the same language that's in the RFP so if they say content management systems and you say database then you need to say content management system you need to be whenever you're talking about the same thing is use the government's language just like people do with a lot of resume tools now some agencies are using evaluation software which will go through your proposal and find keywords again if they can't find what they're looking for you're going to get a poor evaluation score now I do have to caveat that with the warnings don't parrot the language now parody is this example the RFP says the contractor shall conduct the virus scans and you say we will conduct the virus scans that's parroting you're not adding anything to the conversation and the evaluators aren't going to like it some RFPs expressly forbid parroting because the agencies have seen it so many times don't be the ones make your evaluators sigh and frustration be the one to make them smile because they're seeing what they want to see now sometimes it might seem that there is a lot of text and the statement of work it's a lot of stuff to respond to and you don't feel like you have enough pages and your proposal to respond to everything in these cases it's really important to number one use the evaluation criteria and number two use your knowledge of the customer and spend proposal real estate hitting the points that are most important to the customer okay so how do we get from here to there the RFP you want to get to the proposal well you have all the ingredients now you just have to create the recipe from which to work so I'm going to start with a few methods that you can use to create this recipe this is a screen shot of a tool we call a compliance matrix compliance matrices are great for really long RFPs that have really complicated responses such as a lot of volumes a lot of sections if you have a lot of people working on your proposal teams this becomes sort of an access point for them to find what they're looking for without having to shred the whole RFP themselves some RFPs even require that you submit a compliance matrix as part of the response they might call them a response matrix in some cases the compliance matrix might be an unnecessary step but if you're just starting out with proposals it will be a helpful tool for you to ensure that you aren't missing anything so across the top you're going to list the proposal section number the section title then the RFP section numbers for section L M and C just like we went over and then you can even add columns to the actual text from the RFP from L M and C and assign page limits define an author you can put as many columns in here if you want to create a helpful go-to point for all the information you need to complete the proposal section and then as you go down row by row you've got a follow section L so section one of your proposal is going to mirror section one of section L and just go right down you could consider the compliance matrix to be a way to assemble and measure out your ingredients of course this only contains the ingredients that the rfp provide your company and your subject matter experts are going to provide the ingredients of your solution and your wind chatterjee now I'm going to go to a second tool that we use a lot at deacons which we call the content plan so content plans come in many shapes and sizes it's all that it's going to be up to the needs and habits of your company to figure out which type works for you sometimes these are called storyboards or annotated outlines 'deacon we call them content plans because they help us plan our content the content plan is really your recipe so what you're going to do is start with your document template now this could just be a blank Word document or if you have a template that you use for all proposals you'll start with that and you're going to add the numbers in the headings from section L or from your compliance matrix then you're going to add the evaluation criteria to the top of the section that's going to focus you so that you are always you always have evaluation criteria at the forefront of your mind then you're going to add the instructions from section L to the appropriate section might be helpful to make these instructions a red font color so that you know to take them out later then you're going to add relevant sections of sexualy C so that you're talking to the right topics again you might want to color these blue or purple so that you know that you take them out before the proposal is complete and then you're going to write the proposal by replacing your instructions with your response the writing basically becomes a process of elimination so here's a screenshot from a sample content plan this is at one that I recently put together you can see that the heading 2.2 management organization this directly correlates to Section L point two point two and the RFP which is also called management organization I also have a green line for the same statement and the same statement is basically the number one selling point from this section of your proposal and then I have the subheading in the blue font I put the page limit for the section and some recommendations about what should go here is your basically my instructions to the writer of this section in red are the instructions from the RFP as well as the evaluation criteria and finally there is a suggested table that can be filled in as a response to RFP requirements instead of text now although I'm talking today about writing a proposal it's important to note that evaluators love graphics any information that can be presented graphically instead of in words it should be a graphic thinking tables flowchart organization charts they seem like they take up a lot of room but they really make your evaluators job easier and that is the number one thing you want to be doing ok so now I want to talk a little bit more about how you're actually going to write the words that's where a lot of people get hung up but once you have a pla in front of you you don't have that broad page syndrome it should be a lot easier to really get your words out don't be afraid to brainstorm you make a lot of notes they don't all have to be perfect sentences right now what's important is to get your thoughts down on paper the easiest way I think to write a proposal is to look at your statement of work Section C and follow this simple proposal formula what we're how when and why so let me just quickly go through what these mean in the proposal world so you're who is who will do the work who will manage the work who does the customer call if there's a problem who is responsible for what or what what needs to be done what needs to be delivered what will be required to make these deliveries what kind of customer expects what's it going to cost rare where will the work be done will be done on-site at the government site will would be do done off-site at your company site where will the deliveries take place how how will the work be done how will it be deployed how will be managed how will you achieve quality assurance and customer customer satisfaction goals how will risks be mitigated how long will it take and finally one of the most important questions you can answer how will your work benefit the customer okay then when will you start when will key milestones be scheduled when will the project be complete finally the why why have you chosen the approaches or the personnel that you have and finally why should the customer select you give them the reasons that they need to pick you over your competition so there are a lot of specialized for polar writers out there like myself but many companies especially small ones don't have the luxury of a dedicated proposal writer often the writers end just end up being your subject matter experts your engineers sometimes it's just whoever is free a lot of people are nervous about writing but they shouldn't be especially with proposals so that's the reason I included this slide I think these are the top four criteria that are essential qualities and skills of a proposal writer conviction you have to believe in what you're selling for your writing is going to seem flat you can't convince yourself that you have the best solution there's no way that you can convince your customer I would also add that you want to have passion about your company and passion about what you're offering your clients Nexxus flexibility RPS get amended proposal team shift priorities change you have to be able to go with the flow proposal their cuffs projects because they're so fast-paced and there are a lot of moving parts deadlines changes sometimes people have to drop off with proposal or be pulled on late because of shifting priorities a good proposal can handle a good proposal writer can handle all of this and still deliver the projects of the product at the end analytical thinking skills sometimes writers will be given a solution from their subject matter experts or from engineers it just doesn't seem right for example you don't think bidding enough teeth you don't think your companies bidding enough people to get the job done or maybe you don't think that you can do what you said what you're saying you're going to do in a set budget a good proposal writer is going to bring this to the attention of the district makers if it doesn't look right to you it's not going to look right to an evaluator so you have to use your animal analytical thinking skills to make sure that you are closely evaluating everything that you're writing and finally the ability to follow directions like I said earlier you have to follow with sending RFP instructions no matter what you can't make up a better way of doing things the government expects all proposals to be organized in roughly the same way this is not a time for you to follow your non conformist tendencies read what they tell you to do and then do it notice that I did not say that you have to be a good writer proposals are not read they are evaluated your evaluators are looking for specific information and they're looking for the reasons to choose you over your competition if you make it easier easy for them to find that information that's really all you have to do I would recommend short sentences and short words you don't have to be fancy you don't want to tire your evaluators out you just want to give them the information they need to make the decision in your favor now once you have your proposal down even in the draft form it can be really tempting to spend a lot of time tweaking your document formatting looking for misplaced commas fixing spelling mistakes but with a limited amount of time you really need to focus your energy on what's going to win bid so this is why I included a hierarchy of proposal needs the top of the pyramid are the things that can be chopped off first when you run out of time things at the bottom are the things that you have to have if you want to win this proposal at the bottom you have compliance like I said earlier you have to follow all the instructions an RFP or they can use that as a reason to throw you out after that you need to be sure that you are optimizing your text against the evaluation criteria you should be focusing on what the government has said is most important to them because if you don't get the highest score you're not going to win the contract about that you want to make sure that you have your win strategies in place another way of saying win strategy is your reasons that the government should pick you give them their reasons and they will follow them love that you have presentation visual communication and navigation aids these are things that make the proposal easier to evaluate five evaluators about that proofreading and proofreading and editing and finally style some people call that one voice if you have a lot of sections written by different people it may sound like they're written by different people it's not as serious a problem as some people might have you believe it's really the least important thing you have to worry about make sure you cover the bottom portions of this pyramid and you will increase your win probability so these are my final thoughts you can't win if you don't show up but you also can't win if you just show up being merely compliant just following directions and RPS is really the least you can do it's not going to impress anyone you're only telling amongst em what they already told you anyone with an rfp and be compliant and you are doing nothing to differentiate you differentiate yourself from the competition so I would say stay tuned for my next webinar how to speak the proposal language and I'm going to give you more tips on how to plan your content and how to maximize your evaluation score by getting the words right so I think I'm going to hand this back over to Gloria and you might take some questions that would be perfect while you are right on time with this great job great job but we do have many questions that have come in I don't know if Christine is available to take any of those questions or ask any of those questions that came in through email sure I am I have a number of questions that came in the first one Ellie comes from Susan and she asks if it's acceptable to use more creative style of writing using maybe marketing language or is it better to be direct and simple not using superlatives and in addition would taste studies be okay in your proposal that is a really fantastic question thank you for asking a soothing this all goes back to knowing your customer there's no one answer for all proposals you really have to have some intelligence on her who is going to be evaluating your proposal for instance a military organization might be much more interested in the hard facts and statistics a more creative organization may be looking for you to tell them stories and anecdotes and case studies would be a great example of that so I think that there can be a case a case can be made for either one of those styles you really have to be you have to know what your customer is going to want to expect to see in the proposal there are other schools of thought in that you want to stand out from the crowd and if you know that all of your competition is going to be submitting really dry facts facts based proposals that you can make yourself stand out by being a little bit more colorful and more creative in your proposal that's a riskier approach but again it just goes really back to understanding your customer and what they're expecting to see and then delivering that to them at that a lot I have one more question from Paul he asks I'm not clear on what a theme is can I just write our ideas and add the pricing that's an interesting question I love to talk about wind themes I'll be talking about them a lot more in my next webinar because I can talk so much about them I didn't include them today but to really boil it down a theme is one or two sentences that sums up the reasons why the evaluators should pick you theme generally has three elements the first element is the what it's the what part of your solution you're talking about the second part is how that part of the solution will benefit the customer and then the third part of the theme is some substantiation to that claim you can tell them that something will benefit them but it doesn't hold up as much as if you tell them that you have an example of how it's worked in the past for example you might see say that we have ABC software and it has been proven to reduce run times by 35% as 26 of out of 27 of our customers offices so you start with the what what part of your solutions talks about the benefit to the customer it's going to reduce your time by 26 5 by 35% and then San Shi ation is 2,620 70% of our other customers have experienced this ideally you want have a little theme at the beginning of each major section to sort of sum it up for them there's some evaluators and I go through and are just going to look at your themes are just going to look about the highlighted portions of your proposals so you want to be sure you're putting something really strong in there the focus is on the benefits and a value that you're going to bring to them hey talk about step by step instruction that's pretty pretty good Gloria do you have any questions oh yeah we've got we've got a ton that have come in I've got one question from Barbara on the executive summary she says I've heard some people say write the executive summary last others say right at first I'm confused what do I do that's a great question thank you so much for bringing that up this is a real point of contention and I have to admit that I used to get this wrong when I first started in this industry because the term executive summary is used across a wide variety of different kinds of writing but it really is its own animal in the proposal world in a typical technical report an executive summary is a lot like an abstract it is just a summary of the meat it's in the rest of the report but at a proposal it is not like that your executive summary and proposal is not a summary of what's in the proposal it is a summary of your top reasons that the government should take you your executive summary should say that we run about ten percent of your total proposal length so if you have a 50 page proposal your executive summary can be up to five pages and you're going to want to pick the top three to four things that are most important to your customer and respond with how your solution meets those needs for example if they've experienced a lot of turnover in there and all this contract maybe one of your points in your executive summary is how you have a low historical turnover rate you have processes in place to retain value employees and then you're going to pick two or three more things that are important to the customer and address each of them basically everybody who evaluates the proposal is going to read the executive summary you don't want to have them reading the executive summary and then moving on to another portion of the proposal and reading the exact same language you want them to have you want to thank you summary to have that language it's really going to hammer homes all the reasons evaluators should pick you that's perfect that really is a unique what you have a very good way of getting right to the point I'm going to come to all of your webinars Donna sent in an email saying that she has not seen proposals for her exact work should they submit an unsolicited proposal that's really interesting and I'll admit that I don't know a whole lot about unsolicited proposals my experiences told me that the government agencies have to in most cases they have to competitively procure work so if you do submit an unsolicited proposal or say a white paper to an agency they would probably use that to turn it into a statement of work and then release a competitive RFP unsolicited proposals are much more prevalent in the commercial sector which I am not as familiar with but I would say instead of submitting an unsolicited proposal that you just get in there and talk to the customer present your capabilities to them and really listening to what they need and encourage them to put an RFP out so that you can submit a great proposal along with your competition but the more information you have ahead of time the more competitive you can make your proposal when that competitive RFP does come out and Thank You Jackie at says it's just me here I don't have anybody around to review my proposals how do I make sure that I don't make mistakes how do I proof it correctly wow that's a great question I think that's really probably relevant to a lot of people who are attending today because small companies just don't have a lot of resources the first answer the came to my mind is that you can hire people to be our professional proposal reviewers they'll come into your organization get an idea of what the RFP is all about and then read your proposal and help you suit some fixes to it now that's not always the most cost efficient way to do it your alternative is to sort of work backwards you'll start with your your planning tools that we discussed earlier your compliance matrix and your content plan and really make sure that you put a lot of energy into making sure those are correct that you're covering everything that's in the RFP in Section LM and C and if those end up in your content plan and then your content plan becomes a checklist to review your proposal against so you look at your final proposals you'll go back and look at your content plan and you can check off and make sure that you put everything is your proposal that you were supposed to based on your plan ask you if you don't have an extra set of eyes that can be objective that'll be your easiest way to make sure that you put in everything that you need to once again right on target Claire asks we have a very specific style guidelines for font colors etc this relates to our brand and image if they say Times New Roman 12 can we use our own style instead Wow another great question you guys have really thought a lot about this that's really interesting because my company Deakin recently underwent a rebranding we got a new logo a new website it was really really exciting and people couldn't wait to start using our new orange logo and orange color scheme on all of our documentation but kind of had to stop that a little bit because as I said before you really have to follow the instructions that are in the RFP because you risk non-compliance you don't now the other there's more to it than that though and I'll explain the reason that you you don't want to necessarily use your branding all over a proposal is because your proposal is not about your company it's about your customer you want your proposal to look like something that is familiar to them something that they would be comfortable with so I'll go back to a military organization if you're making a proposal for the Army you might not want to come in with a bright orange proposal you might want to come in with something more subdued with some greens and some Gray's using the fonts that they have requested because it's what they're going to be comfortable seeing it's going to make them fe l comfortable with your organization and that you'll be a good fit so I'm all about branding I think it's a very it's a great way to market your company outside of the proposal world but inside the proposal world you want to be delivering something that looks like your customer that is excellent advice and succinct and to the point so that I never thought of it that way make sure that instead of it being all about you that's a perfect way to consider it being all about the customer instead good point let's see we have one more question that's come in and remember for those who want to think of questions afterwards you can still send them in even after today's session is finished and we'll make sure that Christine or Ellie get back to you with your answers that's it a scat FD video calm and the last question we'll take today is Bernie says how do we plan for the number of pages is there a rule of thumb or guideline say 20% for each section what should I do a really interesting question because that's a problem that people are going to basically encounter every time sometimes you'll luck out and get an RFP that does not have a page limit requirement but then some other company will submit a question and that encourages the government to put a pages limit on it so I think the easiest way to sort of divide up your proposal is to divide it up proportionately into these instructions in Section L so if they have a like five pages asking about your management but they only have one page asking about your personnel that should tell you that they want you to spend five times more space talking about your management then talking about your personnel and that goes for any of the different kinds of sections that you encounter in a proposal just sort of use the RFP as your guide because again you want it you want your proposal to mirror the instructions in section L so it's a really long section a really long requirement than your section your proposals going to be really long it's a really brief requirement your proposal section is going to be brief once again I can't say this enough you have to know your customer know what they're going to be expecting to read if you know what's important to them then you know what is what was most important to be spending your time on in the proposal um yeah I think it's not all on that topic