Believe in Yourself
Winning Government business is not easy. Someone once called it picking the low hanging fruit. There is no such thing as low hanging fruit. Doing business with the Government is much more than filling out a designation that claims your firm to be a minority owned contractor. In order to win Government business, you must compete. I suggest starting with FBO and doing a search for your commodity code. If you are in Information Technology, your commodity codes can be class 70 and class D.
Find those opportunities that are for these commodity codes and then make sure you have at least 4-6 weeks to prepare your proposal. You must use a proposal writing tool such as Sant Proposal Master to help you write persuasively. In my experience winning over $35 MM in contracts with Eagle Group International in Atlanta, it comes down to volume. At Eagle Group, we didn’t win everything we proposed against. In fact, we lost 50% of the task orders or proposals we went after.
To increase your chances of winning, you must bid on at least 12 projects per year and hope to increase your batting average to 30%. If you win 3 of these projects you are doing very good. The key to it lies in your ability to get proposals out the door and delivered to the potential customer. The proposals must address the RFP and describe the customers solution to their problem. It should not just tell about your technical skills.
The proposals that I wrote that won, all had full blown architectural diagrams with proposed solutions in them. The one’s that didn’t win, were light on providing solutions. We help medium sized businesses market your services to agencies. Get started today.
