Streamline your opportunity sales process for Government

How to create outlook signature

good morning to those of you out there in Alaska and Hawaii and way out there on the west coast and good afternoon to those of you here on the East Coast with me um I'm excited today just continuing my talk uh about capture we're going to talk about how to shape opportunities and this is a really important one to me when I teach sales and capture this is what I say sales is sales is about actually reaching out and shaping opportunities so that you have the biggest chance of winning um and so we're going to talk about that today as we go forward let me just share my screen okay today we're going to talk about shaping the opportunities for the win and this is fundamental to federal sales uh capture activity if you're not familiar with federal sales the way I describe it it's in it's really a way a lot of us describe it but I like making it this clear federal sales is about business development among other things it's identifying opportunities you want to go after and then um capture which is about shaping the opportunity that's what we're going to talk about today in proposal management that's taking all that early information wrapping it together in a winning document that the government says hey I like that I'm going to award the contract to you so that's sales BD capture and proposal management all of us work together to land a contract um sales is different than just bidding or quoting I call it um and anytime I say I call it it really is industry we call it in this but in sales there's transactional sales and there's solution sales or consultative sales right so transactional sales is basically I walk in I see something I pick it up I give you money I walk out and um solution selling or consultative selling is when there's a whole dialogue and it takes weeks months years before there's a sale made and that's because we're Consulting together the buyer and the seller are talking together to get the best requirements defined in product or solution coming to that set of requirements so I just want to say that if you're not talking to the customer you're not really doing sales you're just doing bidding and quoting there's nothing wrong with that my last business some of my business some of my most lucrative business was selling products that I had a 20 margin on so so basically I would sell them a million dollar product and pick up two hundred thousand dollars that's a good day's work but that's I didn't have to sell them on that necessarily unless I went in and I'm going to talk to you about how you can go in and do that kind of stuff so in today's training I'm going to cover three main things I'm really going to try to cover down on these with specific examples and how so the first one is you're going to shape the acquisition approach so this is basically working with the Contracting officer how they're acquiring your products and services the second one is shipping the technical requirements the scope of work and then the third one is shaping the past performance I put requirements here but what I should have put is the past performance criteria and so I want to shape that that's what we're going to cover today if you don't know who I am my name is Neil McDonnell I'm the president of the govcon Chamber of Commerce and um I want to welcome you to my federal sales training where I've been teaching people like you for 20 years wow sometimes I just have kind of a brain fart I've got my topic so cruising there around that I screwed up my whole intro but basically I want to welcome you to the federal sales training I've been a small business owner for 20 years and since 2018 I've been teaching people like you the Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process part of the process is following my script of introducing my training right um the reason I do this is because process goes from A to Z and when I follow a process when you follow a process you're going to have repeatable predictable results and this is what I want for you it's why I do the training okay so we got three main sections to go into in today's training um and I'm gonna move pretty fast but I think I got it locked down on just enough content uh to be in here so the first thing I want to talk about is shaping the acquisition approach this is where you go in and and fundamentally what I'm saying is you're trying to get the government to make a whole bunch of decisions that when they make them you'll reduce the competition you have to fight against and um it'll make it much easier for you to compete or in fact it will make it uh possible for you to compete sometimes the government can make a decision but now you can't compete you can try to get on a subcontracting team but you can't compete as a prime and so you want to shape the acquisition approach so that you can play in the game and then have the most likely chance to win um when I say reducing competition a good example is set as science so the first uh example here I have for shaping the acquisition approach is getting the government buyer to determine a set aside initially when the government looks set an opportunity a requirement they're saying okay we're going to go to the entire full and open supplier base 300 000 businesses let's say right that's there's about 300 000 businesses out there in the federal market and if they decide to go to small business they're shrinking it a little bit but they're getting rid of some of the biggest competition obviously so they're getting rid of the large businesses the billion dollar Contracting firms when they come down to shaping it or setting it aside to a small business but they could come down even further if they go to small business there's roughly 300 000 small businesses still right but when they go to hubzone as an example there's only about 5 000 firms so you're going from 300 000 down to 500 a thousand and this ability to reduce the competition is huge and it's the same things with these other ones right the the women-owned small business there's like 9 000 SBA certified women on small businesses and dsbs so that's the size of the pool 300 000 down to nine thousand eight days have about five thousand right so um that set aside is a big thing some of you may be familiar with some of you may be 8A small businesses well if you can get the government buyer to shrink that down even more to an 8 a direct award your taken that competition from everybody down to one company yours so a direct award is in there um and you're eliminating all the competition that's out there this is the idea of getting in there and shaping the acquisition approach and I talk about in many other trainings how you can do it but fundamentally it happens and the sources sought time frame you get into the government responding during sources saw it I highly encourage you to build a a group of competimates other women-owned small businesses for example and let them know about source of sauce so they too can respond you're not collaborating on your responses you're just collaborating on hey let's all respond and try to make this a woman on set aside and then we'll go Toe to Toe inside of the uh that set aside so anyways set aside's one way you could shape the acquisition approach another way and this goes back to even making it possible for you to compete is making sure that you push the contract to a contract vehicle of your choice right obviously the Contracting officer is going to make this decision but if you're in an agency where you've got a contract vehicle to use then what you want to do is start talking to them early and often and about using your contract vehicle business development is about building relationships and talking to people including Contracting officers to make sure they are using Stars 3 or GSA mass or you know age cats hcats is a contract vehicle that has like you know I don't know 20 or 40 people on it companies compared to um GSA Mass has a ton a day Stars 3s 1200 people and so there's um these different contract vehicles but when you get the government buyer to think about putting it on the contract vehicle of your choice you're both making yourself eligible to play by being on that contract vehicle but also eliminating all the competition who aren't on that contract vehicle um two other ones that are really creative ones I just want to mention your way is you can shape in the acquisition approach the next code that the buyer is using and I want to use this example by the way just keep in mind when I keep saying you can shape this you're shaping it through a conversation with the Contracting officer you're giving them the rationale and the data and evidence to make the decision to do what you want right but you gotta give them a reason you're not trying to Hoodwink them or something you're trying to say this is why you should probably go this way so I give you an example here with neg's codes let's say there's a project out there that's a web design project I want you to do a web design uh web redesign so we can reach out to our customers and encourage them to participate whatever reach out to our Air Force service members Airmen and guard or Guardians you know and to have them participate well that's uh that could be I.T right obviously computers website or it could be marketing and so an example here is uh say first say they're thinking about maybe coming out on five four one five twelve well the small business set aside or a small business um size standard is 34 million for five or four one five twelve that means a company that is um smaller than 34 million average over five years is considered a small business and so they can compete against it and if you're a five million dollar firm or something then your competition's a lot bigger because you got more people who are eligible to come in and then the next code I put in is the one maybe I would encourage you to say hey why don't you use this buyer instead why don't you use 541613 you don't talk to them about the 19 million right that's what you want to do is bring it down to a size standard of 19 million so anybody over 19 million will be considered a large business on that next code and uh so let's talk about these two descriptions really quick web design project if you look at the two next code descriptions one says computer systems design and the other is Market marketing consulting services and so what I would be arguing for if I was the smaller company is I would be arguing that this is really a marketing consulting services and the in the tech part of it it's just a technology enabler to a marketing need we want to Market it to our internal or external users to get them to do things the way we'll do that is with paper or with a website or whatever but it's still marketing uh Consulting Services a website is a market tool marketing tool um and so you know you can make that case for that and you can when you're making that case you can say it certainly is not a computer system right a computer system is a whole nother thing a web design project just designing a internet or actually type web pages those are just web pages those are just something on a system and so you you want to make that case and that's a really important thing think about this also from the flip side throughout my entire training today I'm going to go you can go this way or that way um or up or down but the idea is if you're a bigger company make sure that some company is not able to push it down to five four one six one three make sure that the next code is going to come out on five four one five twelve you know and the way you might do it is to show a bunch of other web design projects that we're using that makes in their agency so one way or another you want to think about every decision that the government's going to make along the acquisition approach and go what do I want right and then you use data and evidence to kind of push the government in the direction you want the second example at the bottom about really creativeness is the far Clauses a lot of us just get an RFP and we take it and we move forward right but take I don't want you to become an expert at the far in fact I always say don't even bother with the par until you're making money then you can worry about the far but the idea of the far is there's a couple of Clauses in there that if you start learning these and paying attention to them then you can figure out when to use them when you're talking with the government so here's two examples that I have used um the first one is you know and by the way I don't claim even remotely to be a far expert I'm good at using things but there's other people who are far experts but there's something in the far and I put 16.4 here but it's incentive contracts and basically I had a contract once with a customer and they really had a pretty hard deadline on when they needed this I.T work done and and so they wanted to penalize us if it wasn't done and they were going to put something in this is when I learned about this Clause I'm like well why don't you reward me if I get it done sooner and and so we were negotiating back and forth about that they were totally happy with that because if they got it done sooner then they could decommission this other site save money on that blah blah blah so look into a part of a far Clause like the incentive contracts that um reward you for better than expected services and penalize you right the risk and reward go back and forth between the buyer and seller that's a win-win Clause I really like it another one um is the uh it's subpart 19 something something here I put but really it's the hubzone Clauses and one particular clause in there is the price preference for Hub zones and this is for full and open contracts this is an important one to get put in to the contract if you see something that's going to be full and open try to push for this Clause to be in there and if it's not so that um if the government is using I don't again want to go too deep into this but if they're using price as a criteria um for how they're making the decision well the price preference basically says if there's 10 offers and all of them come in at one million dollars everybody's offer except for the Hub Zone will go up by 10 so a million one hundred thousand and the Hub Zone will be a million so the Hub Zone will win out on the price there all things being equal they'll win and so that's a clause and so you want to pay attention to Clauses in there um that you that could fit for your company and be really attractive okay so let's talk about the technical approach by the way I'm not looking at the chat but I really will come back afterwards and try to respond to anything I see in there including hey this is great thanks but most importantly if you got a question throw it in I'll come back have you got thoughts um on other ways to shape the acquisition or technical approach let me know that as well so the purpose of shaping the technical approach when you're going into doing capture you're having conversations with the program office it's really to minimize any weaknesses you have and maximize your company's strengths so if you're really good at um or Microsoft and less good at Oracle then minimize the need for Oracle and maximize the need for Microsoft that's basically what it is so um I just got in no particular order some suggestions on technical approach shaping that you can do one is and this is my all-time favorite for my last company is really push for oral evals get us to come in and have to talk with you and to bring our subject matter experts in um when we do that we're able to talk to the work and and the re the way I rationalize this with the customers I say hey avoid that bait and switch where they tell you in paper that they're really good but then when you get the contract it's a bunch of people with limited or no experience on this the scope that you had but if you force us to come in at the very least you will hear two different companies talk about the capab their capabilities and their experience in there so I push for oral evals because it's a way for you to impress the buyer uh another thing is just aligning Trends and best practices and what I mean by this is you were the subject matter expert the reason the buyer is looking out the reason the federal government looks to Industries because we're the experts they're the ones doing the job the Army's mission is not to be experts on you know uh Microsoft SharePoint or whatever right their job is to go out and fight the nation's Wars fundamentally so they need to do their mission we need to be good at what we do which is supporting their ability to do the mission and so we're the ones who are tracking on all the things that are trending or best practices across the commercial federal and state and local markets best practices really get shaped those guys are just in their Federal market so they don't see it all so you want to come in and talk to them and here's an example that I have and it's something I'm using right now in fact I just posted something today which made it even better um but I have a customers in the acquisition support services and we're helping her get farther into Government Contracting shops to be able to support them but one way we're going to differentiate her company is to be able to introduce the whole concept of using artificial intelligence machine learning in in the AI tools that are out there in the acquisition approach whatever level that is maybe it's something as simple as saying you know how to how to rapidly evaluate proposals for compliance basic shell statements or something automatically so you don't even have to look at them you know you can disqualify things automatically so there's um she doesn't know anything about artificial intelligence but we've got other people in in this community maybe even here today who are artificial machine learning experts we can tie them together with her so she can go in there and bring the acquisition expertise together with her teaming partner doing the artificial intelligence Etc so think about doing that and it's something when you're shaping opportunities is you want to encourage the customers to to talk to Industry saying well tell me what AI experience you have in the acquisition world really I don't have any like most of your competitions say I don't have any but if you can introduce Trends and best practices they'll see your opportunities differently uh bullet number four is push for specific o m and product manufacturers my last company there was this company called ad point that I was teamed up with they made a great product that was an add-in product to Microsoft's products and um and I had a partnership with them I actually had Partnerships with multiple companies but they were my favorite because they were good and so I would be able to go in and push for that specific company's products to be included or the requirements that that product could meet I would have that put into the PWS Etc and um and that's really important because when you start pushing for it you push for the OEM of the products that you're really good at if you're good at Splunk or Otis elevators or whatever it is you want to push for that one way that you can do this and I don't know if I wrote it somewhere else is you can I used to go in and bring product comparisons I would look at every one of these uh software companies and I would see how they compare themselves against the competitors and then I compile my own version of that and give it to the government and make the case for the the manufacturer that I wanted them to use and so that's something you could do so you're shaping the opportunity to the manufacturer that you like best one of the advantages for me when I did that was I had a strong partnership with this company that I could influence their next builds meaning the next features they put into their products that's how strong our partnership was and we were able to say that when we responded in The Proposal there's some second tier requirements I talk about Elevate those up when you think about technical approach shaping um the example I'm using here is communication and Outreach I got a huge multi-million dollar Enterprise architecture contract at the Department of Homeland Security and when I got it the reason we got it wasn't our Enterprise architecture expertise it was because we talked about communication and Outreach DHS wanted to coordinate all these different offices and bring them together and we said this is what we're an expert at yes we can do Enterprise architecture but you should really Elevate this because any of us can do EA but if you can't get people to listen to it then what good is it so we show them how we could be different by doing that and we showed we elevated that second tier requirement to a vital importance tell us how you can address communication Outreach not just tell us about EA all right the last one is um I really want you to understand the pains and this is just discussions going in and sitting down with John or Jane and talking to them about the challenges and pains and I don't mean a one meeting hey tell me your pains but through a series of conversations over a matter of months um you will begin to understand truly what are the challenges they're facing the goals Etc and then you can weave them into the technical approach so that when you're writing a proposal with a technical approach you're going back and you're kind of we call it ghosting you're ghosting those challenges and goals that you heard into your response all right so moving pretty fast because I got uh eight minutes left in this last major bullet I want to talk to but you can get in so you can shape the acquisition approach and you can shake the technical approach past performance is you know generally have pretty solid criteria for um awarding a contract but you can influence the past performance criteria or how they see that right the formal or informal and what I mean formal is they write it down in the RFP saying this is how we're going to evaluate past performance or informal getting them to think it in their heads and so that's why this first bullet I talk about um communicating with the potential selection board members a selection board basically is a bunch of people who will come together and look at your proposal and decide whether it's a winner or a loser basically right and so you want to be able to talk with them and begin to influence them in their thinking um an example of past performance that you want them and the Contracting officer to think about is um pushing for agency experience I use the Navy the other day and I like using the Navy because it's so clear here the Navy has people and bases on installations on land and they have ships in the ocean right and so they call it a Shore and afloat um so pushing for that agency experience if you have Navy experience you want to push for that you really want to drive through conversations with KL and the program office hey it's really important that um you know that you're looking for a company that has this experience so they don't waste three to six months at the start of a contract trying to figure out uh you know how do they even get something to the boats or the ships or whatever they're called right um they don't spend that time so you're trying to emphasize that the flip side is if you don't have that experience you want to de-emphasize the need for that you can say hey we have a team member who's got experience doing a flow to shore um what we really bring is interagency experience we bring the best lessons from from the Army and DHS into the Navy so that you really have the Navy Way based on experiences Lessons Learned in past performances from other agencies right so you're trying to emphasize it the other way one way or another right you're gonna on all of these it's up or down um the third bullet here is emphasizing larger past performances if I'm a company that's larger say I'm 30 million um small 30 million small business I want to emphasize that to the Contracting officer it's really important as your uh evaluating companies that they come in with five million or 10 million dollar a year contracts whatever that is or task word excuse me they're used to managing task orders at like five million dollars or more so you're emphasizing a larger past performance that you um that you're recommending the government consider because then it's more similar to the scope of work the size of work that this agency is putting out again the flip side is if you're a smaller company or you have smaller past performances you could say hey I know this is a five million dollar contract but really even a five million dollar firm fixed price task order but really inside of that task order and I had something like this where it was five million dollars a year but it was like 10 different projects you know and you can talk to the KO about this or the program office say it's really less important that you have one big task order but that you have people who have managed um the project sizes that you expect to have so that five million dollar contract we're really thinking that's going to be broken up into you know eight to ten projects of five hundred thousand dollars a piece and so that's what you're looking for for past performances we would encourage that that you look for more um experience there in smaller size projects so that's bullet three bullet um four is suggesting this one's really important right is sometimes opportunities come out you can only use the prime contractor's past performance and so I want to encourage the ability to use um subcontractor experience at least one past performance if I can do that and then I team up with Booze Allen or somebody or somebody has really good past performance we look really good um and so I want to push for that especially if I don't have all of the past performances that would make me look great I'd want to use the subcontractor right that's the whole reason I team is that they've got good experience and so if you're in that position push to be able to use the subs experience if you can do it all yourself and you're still going to use teammates but you're still going to do it yourself um you want to push for hey the prime must have three past performances and blah blah blah but it must be the prime because teammates come and go right now now I'm switching how I'm rationalize it right teammates subcontractors they come and go Anything could happen but we are going to be here so you really want the prime to be able to bring that experience and so you know in bullet number four here you're referencing that you're you're trying to eliminate competition by saying make sure the prime has it um and remember everything you're doing you're doing with data in and evidence so the LA the fifth one here is encourage the importance of written customer satisfaction this is really important if you can get written if you have customers and you work them all the time they like you and you're like hey I I'm continuing to get more and more work out there I need written uh customer satisfaction and written um whatever those sheets are past performance sheets from you uh you know encouraging them to do it if you're good at that and your customer likes you enough that they're like yeah I'll sit down I'll write that because usually they don't do it because they don't want to it's not because they can't they don't want to they're too lazy um but if you've got a customer is really good and you can get past performances really fast written down um in the way the new buyer wants it from your existing or past customers then you want to push for written customer satisfaction must be in C bars or it must be here um if you don't have a lot of that or if you have some customers sometimes they just are difficult like I said they don't want to do it then you want to minimize um that and you want to try to lean more on cpars or just really you should lean on C Parts since that's the official uh rating system right but one way or another you're pushing on customer satisfaction the last one is I really want you to push for a proven Roi oversized so instead of a five million dollar pass performance what you should be looking for is companies that can show that they save this much money per year or they reduce this much time or they got the ammunition to the soldiers uh 20 faster right some clear Roi on the projects they've done not that they've just come in Taken millions of dollars from us given us it stuff and then left it was like what did we get what happens if they never were here would we have been impacted well proven Roi will demonstrate that um so you can do that again prove it to the yes or prove it something now all right in this training we talked about shaping the acquisition approach we talked about shaping the technical requirements and then shaping those past performance criteria and this is the tip or task I want to leave for you go away you or your colleagues and build the list of what you want to shape in your opportunities when you're doing capture maybe you can't do everything I suggested maybe you have other ideas but write that list down so that you can actually follow that when you're talking to the government buyer hey I want to shape this I want to shape that you can use it as part of your capture plan if you will if you're getting value from our training do me a favor become a sustaining member so that you help more people get value from this there's all sorts of thank yous that I put into the membership but the the you know the true purpose of the sustaining membership is to make it available make this available to everybody out there um if you're already getting traction within the federal government you want to go to the next next level consider joining us in our BD accelerator Workshop it's a 90-day program you can just ping me on LinkedIn in messaging and I'll tell you more about it remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a lot of fun and a process I'll see you in the next time