Posts By Olessia Smotrova-Taylor

Developing Your 2012 Pipeline and Preparing For a Great Year of Winning Business

If you are anything like me, you’ve dealt with three challenges during the holidays – trying to keep from overindulging too much and gaining hard-to-shed pounds; fighting off a recurring cold; and trying to juggle family time with proposals that are due early to mid-January. By the way, I am officially envious if you facedRead… Read more »

Top 7 Problems With Proposal Win Themes

Most companies, despite their best intentions (and even understanding of what a win theme is supposed to look like), fail to sell in their proposals. Win theme is one of the top five elements of proposal persuasion – and if they don’t work, it will be much harder to stand out. Time pressures force theRead… Read more »

Obtaining Senior Management Buy-in

As I was teaching our IDIQs and Task Orders course on Monday, we were reviewing the best practices for a quick and efficient proposal development process. One practice was conducting a proper kickoff meeting. After attending many proposal kickoffs (some of which included a proper breakfast and a long PowerPoint), and then watching a proposalRead… Read more »

How to capitalize on IDIQs

It seems that the tides have turned in the Government contracting world firmly in the direction of IDIQs and GSA/VA schedules. If you are the Government, it is hard to imagine why it would not be the case. Instead of a lengthy 12-18 months procurement process, the Government can award a contract in two toRead… Read more »

Proposals Writing: Solution Development – Win Themes, Management, Risk, Past Performance, Resumes, Technical Volumes

April 28-29, 2011 in North Bethesda, MD This course will offer you techniques, templates, checklists, and opportunities to develop win themes, management sections, risk sections, past performance references, resumes, and technical volumes. This course focuses on solution development, including Concepts of Operations (CONOPS), and explores in detail the type of content that goes into compliant,Read… Read more »

Proposal Writing Workshop: Writing Better Sections in Half the Time

In this course you will learn and practice speed-writing techniques to produce compliant and compelling federal and commercial proposals in half the time. This frees up your schedule and resources for brainstorming on a solution and polishing your proposal to raise your win probability. It will help you stress less, and make the writing processRead… Read more »

Overcoming Proposal Writer’s Block

FREE One-Hour Webinar on April 14, 2011 (Thursday) at 1pm EST The proposal clock is ticking, pressure is building as the deadline is getting closer, and soon the stress becomes palpable. But you still have a hard time squeezing the words from your or your proposal team’s brains down on paper. You produce something byRead… Read more »

Beware of Proposal Editors

I will never forget my first bylined article in the Financial Times of London. It was back when Kathy Lee Gifford was in trouble as her clothing line for Wal-Mart was accused of violating the child labor laws in Honduras. As an aspiring journalist, I did a ton of research and preparation for this article.Read… Read more »

Cost Proposal Strategy for Proposal Managers

Although the government often states that cost is the least important factor in proposal evaluation, and that they buy on best value, statistics show that cost is the deciding factor in more than 90% of the federal contract awards. In other words, cost is incredibly important if you want to win. Proposal managers, however, workRead… Read more »

Preparing Winning Multiple Award and Task Order Proposals

Multiple award contracts make up more than 50% of all government contracts. Now every agency has to have its own multiple award vehicle. But all these new vehicles do not necessarily mean more money to businesses, because: Many companies run into difficulties in winning these vehicles: • Many don’t know how to win multiple awardRead… Read more »