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  • Message to Management: Why Should My Proposal Writing Capabilities Concern Me?
    Federal proposal writing is inherently chaotic, a drain on billable hours, and crucial to revenue generation...
  • Women Owned Small Businesses May Be in for a Treat
    Women Owned Small Businesses (WOSB) may get an advantage in federal contracting under a newly proposed Women-Owned Small- Business rule...
  • Stimulus Funding Program to be Stimulated
    The press is now saying that the Obama Administration plans to create 600,000 jobs this summer by speeding the outflow of stimulus funds...
  • Creating Green Federal Facilities Will be an Endless Process
    A recent article at Government Executive entitled GSA Officials Say They Are Off To A Fast Start On Energy-Efficiency Projects indicates the potential for revenue opportunities for facility maintenance contractors holding GSA schedule 03FAC Facilities Mai...
  • Distinguish Your Company for Stimulus Contracting
    The press is now reporting that stimulus spending is behind schedule; what a surprise! Did anyone on the inside believe the initial hype anyway? Where is the action in federal contracting so far? Engineering GSA Schedule: the Construction Management, ...
  • Jobs, Jobs, Jobs Quickly
    Job creation is at the center of the Obama administration's stimulus package. The focus on rapid job creation is discussed in the press daily...
  • Federal Facilities Slated for Overhaul
    The Obama administration plans to overhaul federal facilities to make them more energy efficient. This will be a daunting and expensive task since federal facilities number in the thousands...
  • Green Your Revenue
    The Obama administration announced recently that the proposed infrastructure initiative will include: Information Technology for school systems Internet access for rural and underserved communities Green technology for federal facilities The info...
  • Don't Get Caught without a Closer
    Here's an example of how the federal sales game is really played. Let's suppose a federal agency has the money to fund a large information technology project, creating a potential, although as yet unidentified, sales opportunity...
  • Learn to Play the Federal Sales Game Like an Insider
    How do you play a game where the rules are stacked in favor of insiders? Learn to stack the deck for yourself or don't play. Playing in the federal market is a game in the same sense that selling in the commercial market is a game...
  • The Future of Multi-vendor Contracts
    The federal government cannot function without multi-vendor contracts. Such contracts are being used more frequently because there isn't any other efficient method for federal contracting officers to buy everything needed by program managers...
  • Distinguishing Messages Win in the Federal Market
    Everyone thinks their competitors are worthless and that they alone have the best product or service known to man. Federal end users have heard "we are the best" so many times that it makes them scream when they hear it...
  • Trench Warfare in Federal Sales
    People on the outside do not realize what goes on when contracts worth millions to billions of dollars are at stake. Sales efforts can be likened to trench warfare and the meek inherit very little...
  • Pre-selling and Competition
    In buying services and solutions federal buyers need to meet with vendors to determine the intangible aspects of what they are buying including feature, benefit, and risks...
  • The World's Biggest Customer
    The federal government is the world's biggest customer; currently spending nearly $ 400 billion a year. Companies outside the market often have the misconception that the federal market exists only within the boundaries of the Capitol's Beltway...
  • Small Businesses and Federal Sales
    The following question often surfaces at our seminars, "What procedures should be followed by small businesses eager to participate in the federal market?" The answer to this question is that a small business should implement an aggressive federal s...
  • Keys to Success in Federal Sales
    Attendees at our federal sales seminars frequently ask us to summarize the keys to success in federal sales. Successful federal contractors all possess the following traits: * A willingness to invest in direct sales (i.e...
  • The Bid-No Bid Decision Process
    The proposal bid/no bid decision is crucial to proposal writing success. Make the bid/no bid decision early and base it on a realistic assessment of your chances to win. The decision should be made before or immediately upon RFP release...
  • The Bid or No Bid Meeting
    The bid/no bid decision should be made before or immediately at the time the RFP released...
  • The Consequences of Writing Losing Proposals
    Previous installments have discussed the need to pre-sell a client prior to the announcement of a public bid and the need to write proposals in the voice of the customer...
  • Outsourcing Proposal Writing
    Many newcomers to the federal marketplace believe that they can hire proposal writers to solve the proposal writing dilemma. You can, but you need to be careful in selecting the writer and realistic in your expectations...
  • About Proposal Writing
    The core of every successful proposal is a technical approach that describes a solution that meets the customer's requirements precisely...
  • Deconstructing a Request for Proposal
    Open the RFP in Word (convert PDF RFPs to Word)Read the RFP and cut and paste any RFP information that is meaningful into a blank Word document under the Proposal Chapter Headings listed below (or similar chapters): Technical Approach Management...
  • The Do's and Dont's of Proposal Writing
    Listing all of the do's and don'ts of proposal writing would fill a small book. Some of the more important do's and don'ts are: Do Write a proposal to solve the customer's problems as THEY perceive them, not how YOU perceive them...
  • Proposal Boilerplate: A Double-Edged Sword
    Using boilerplate -- written material that can be reused in different proposals -- is a double-edged sword. It can save the day from a time and cost viewpoint and can create guffaws (and many lost evaluation points) from the proposal evaluators...
  • How Proposal Evaluators Think
    Many people who have evaluated federal proposals have attended our proposal writing seminars. Without exception, they say the following: Give us exactly what we asked for in the RFP, no more or no less. Avoid sales pitches without substantiation, e...
  • Writing the Management Plan
    An effective Management Plan can be written by an experienced Proposal Manager with little or no expertise in the subject matter of the RFP. Writing one from scratch however, is costly, time consuming, and tedious...
  • The Proposal Writing Dilemma, Again
    We return to a frequent topic - - the practice of some companies to submit proposals that are both poorly written and not organized well...
  • Solving the Proposal Writing Dilemma
    Our last installment discussed the haphazard and disjointed federal proposal writing efforts that take place in most companies and why they occur. This installment presents concrete steps that can be taken to minimize the problem. 1...
  • Structure and Automate Your Sales and Proposal Processes
    In a recent Fedmarket installment "Integration of Sales and Proposal Writing," we recommended that you integrate the sales and proposal- writing process...
  • Corporate Experience and Resume Database
    In a recent installment "Solving the Proposal Dilemma," we recommended that you invest in building a database of up-to-date resumes and corporate experience and actually keep it updated...
  • Write the Executive Summary Early
    In a recent installment "Solving the Proposal Dilemma",  we recommended that you write the Executive Summary before the proposal kickoff meeting...
  • Implement an Incentive System
    In a recent installment "Solving the Proposal Dilemma," we recommended that you use an incentive system to compensate your best technical writers when your company is the successful bidder on a federal opportunity...
  • Implement Version Control
    In a recent installment "Solving the Proposal Dilemma," we recommended that you automate and "version control" your old proposals and Management Plan boilerplate...
  • Proposal Writing Is Not Going to Go Away
    Most owners of small and medium-sized federal contracting companies wish that writing proposals was not a requirement of doing business with the federal government...
  • Don't Waste Your Precious Proposal Resources
    Your most precious proposal resource is your technical staff. Their morale and attitude is critical to contract performance and the production of high-quality proposals. Don't waste this resource by losing proposals...
  • Cornerstones to Proposal Success: Past Performance Library
    A past performance library contains past performance write-ups that summarize your organization's experience on different projects. More often than not, you will be asked to reference past performances in your RFP response...
  • Two of the Deadliest Proposal Writing Sins
    A service company's two greatest assets are its corporate experience and the background of its staff. Often, both assets are not presented effectively in a company's federal proposals...
  • Curing the Two Deadly Sins
    The previous installment discussed the problems associated with waiting until the last minute to tackle critical issues and providing overblown corporate experience and personnel chapters for federal proposals...
  • How Evaluators Judge a Proposal
    You have been writing proposals for some time. You have become a pro on piecing responses together, writing, reviewing, booking, and delivering them...
  • Best Practices and Best Avoided
    Our seminar staff recently completed one of our monthly seminars on proposal writing. As we do in every class, we discussed how proposals should be written to be the "last proposal standing" or, said in Fedmarket-speak, a defensive proposal...
  • What is Wrong with the Proposal Review Process?
    Many companies have proposal reviews of different colors. The reviews we'll focus on in this installment are the two most common, Pink and Red Team reviews...
  • Saved by the Modification or Extension
    Does this scenario happen in your company? You are writing two or more proposals in parallel or perhaps even just one...
  • Working with Teaming Partners to Draft Proposals
    No one person or corporation is an island. If you are like most successful contractors, you team with other organizations to write winning proposals...
  • Why Does It Take so Long?
    Why does proposal writing take so long? Many underestimate the amount of time that must be devoted to such a project. The reality is that it often takes three times longer than you might have expected...
  • More on Defensive Proposals
    In an earlier installment, we defined a defensive proposal as follows: One written not to be eliminated from consideration by the proposal evaluation committee The proposal written with the goal of being the last proposal standing A presentation...
  • Hot Buttons Tell Your Customers You Get It
    From last week's post, you probably took away that the proposal theme (see The Proposal Theme: A Rhetorical Infrastructure for Selling) is not just some fluff language...
  • Storyboards Save Time and Effort
    Storyboards are conceptual planning tools used to help writers plan each section before drafting text. In the broadest sense, storyboards use words and graphics to outline a concept...
  • More on the Difficulty of Proposal Writing
    The process of creating a compelling and winning proposal is a difficult one. Proposal writing is different than anything else a company does...
  • Templates and Federal Proposal Writing
    Templates can play an important role in federal proposal writing. If a company wants to win a bid opportunity, the proposal it submits in response to a federal Request for Proposal (RFP) must be unique...
  • The Toughest Job in Federal Contracting
    Yes, you guessed it. I believe the toughest discipline in federal contracting is writing winning proposals. This is not because I want to achieve job security or because Fedmarket happens to sell proposal products and services...
  • How to Write Losing or Unsuccessful Proposals
    How to write losing proposals is not a particularly positive topic to discuss. However, many federal contractors seem quite adept at preparing such proposals so the discussion is most likely a worthwhile one...
  • What is in a Capture Plan?
    Before you start writing a proposal, be sure to insist on having your business development team prepare a capture plan...
  • Don't Put Them to Sleep
    Federal proposals, in response to Requests for Proposals, tend to be dry, dry, dry- including the last proposal standing (the winner). Even authors of books on how to write creatively frequently write dry prose. This happens for a number of reasons...
  • One or Two Pages May Do It
    Proposal writing is both an art and a science. The art part is the solution that the customer believes will solve their problem with minimal risk. Often several pages of creative solution content will swing a win...
  • Figure Captions, the Unexplored Selling Frontier
    Given the following table: Number of Personnel Position Responsibility 1 Project Manager Management of the project 1 System Architect Software architecture 1 Data architect Database architecture 3 Business Analyst Identificat...
  • Proposal Managers can Have a No Win Job
    Many proposal managers have a no win job and others are more fortunate. The fortunate ones are blessed with company management that is experienced in the federal sales game...
  • Templates Rule in Efficient Proposal Writing
    Almost everything in a federal proposal can be viewed as a template except the proposed solution itself: resumes, corporate experience descriptions, and management plan sections...
  • The Chaos of Proposal Writing
    Federal government proposal writing is treated like a mysterious step child by many companies. For these companies, the process of writing a response to a federal Request for Proposal (RFP) is not a process at all...
  • Could Your Proposal Writing Process Be More Structured?
    It is not possible to have too much structure in your proposal writing process and even the largest prime federal contractors do not have enough...
  • You Can't Learn Proposal Writing from a Book
    Crafting a well written and compelling proposal is a complex and difficult task...
  • Use Model Tasks to Improve Proposal Quality
    An example is worth a thousand words and helps to avoid a plethora of meetings. It is not uncommon for corporate management to assign the task of writing individual tasks in the Technical Approach to a number of staff members...
  • Submitting Proposals to the 'New GSA'
    In our previous installment, we discussed how the General Service Administration (GSA) is becoming more stringent and rigid with respect to its review or evaluation of GSA Schedule offers...
  • Guard Against Audits
    The General Services Administration (GSA) is increasing the number of pre-award audits of vendors with GSA schedule contracts up for renewal...
  • Electronic Representations and Certifications
    The federal government is now requiring that prospective contractors complete electronic annual representations and certifications at http://orca.bpn.gov (ORCA) in conjunction with registration in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) database...
  • GSA Schedule Competition in Real Life
    For political reasons the federal government takes the position that competition for federal contracts is 'full and open"...
  • Eliminate GSA Schedule Audit Risk with a Compliance Program
    Many contractors get an award of a GSA Schedule contract and think that their work is complete. The reality is that the tough work has really only begun. Compliance issues are of critical importance and are often overlooked or even ignored...
  • GSA Says it All in Using Schedules for Stimulus Contracting
    GSA recently published the following information at GSA.gov: The GSA Schedules program can help federal agencies meet their economic recovery goals...
  • Fitting Schedules to Companies
    "Which GSA Schedule fits my company?" That's usually the first question vendors ask, and it's the million-dollar question. The products and services covered by each of the 53 or so Schedules are listed at gsa.gov...
  • Contract Management and Discounting Policies
    Implementing an internal GSA management system within your company is the only foolproof way to protect against adverse audit consequences. An effective management system is not difficult to establish...
  • Contract Management and Pricing Compliance
    In plain English, the GSA Schedule Price Reduction Clause says: GSA negotiated a Basis of Award customer(s) with you. You specified in your proposal and during negotiations the discounts you give to your Basis of Award customer(s)...
  • GSA Schedule Price Reduction Clause (PRC) Compliance
    Our previous newsletter discussed the importance of identifying price reduction clause compliance early before the potential money claw back risk piles up...
  • Report from the GSA Expo, San Antonio, TX 2006
    GSA Schedule holders, GSA employees, government buyers and end users descended upon San Antonio, TX the week of May 14, 2006 for the GSA Expo...