Submission (of proposals)

(All images Imagen 3)

From the early 1990s to 2019, the majority of my identity/biometric proposal work was with U.S. state and local agencies, with some work with foreign agencies (such as Canada’s RCMP), private entities, and a few proposals to U.S. federal agencies.

I had no idea what was going to happen in 2020, and one of the surprises is that the majority of my identity/biometric proposal work since 2020 has been with U.S. federal agencies. Many requests for information (RFIs) as well as other responses.

The L&M does stop at Bredemarket, apparently. 

I’ve worked on client proposals (and Bredemarket’s own responses) to the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and perhaps some others along the way.

And no, there’s no uniformity

Coincidentally, the two most recent identity/biometric proposals I managed for Bredemarket clients went to the same government department. But that’s where the similarities ended.

The first required an e-mail submission of a PDF (10 pages maximum) to two email addresses. A relative piece of cake.

The last required an online submission. No, not a simple upload of a PDF to a government website. While my client did have to upload 2 PDFs, the majority of the submission required my client to complete a bunch of online screens.

And there were two separate sets of instructions regarding how to complete these online screens…which contradicted each other. So I had to ask a clarification question…and you know how THAT can go.

Oh, and as the consulting proposal expert, I could not complete the online screens on behalf of the client. The client’s company had a single login, which was assigned to a single person (a company executive) and could NOT be used by anybody else. 

So on the day of proposal submission the executive and I videoconferenced, and I watched as the executive answered the responses, in part using a document in which I had drafted responses.

And of course things were not perfect. The executive pasted one of my responses into the space provided, and only THEN did we discover that the response had an unadvertised character limit. So I rewrote it…at the same time that I resized a required image with unadvertised dimension restrictions.

But there’s some uniformity

Perhaps if I had written more federal proposals at Printrak, Motorola, MorphoTrak, IDEMIA, and Incode, I would have known these things. Perhaps not; as late as 2014 I was still printing proposals on paper and submitting 10 or more volumes of binders (yes, binders) along with CDs that had to be virus-checked.

But regardless of whether you submit proposals online, via CD, or in paper volumes, some things remain constant.

• Follow the instructions.
• Answer the questions.
• Emphasize the benefits.
• And don’t misspell the name of the Contracting Officer.

If you need Bredemarket’s proposal services, or my content or analysis services, visit my “CPA” page to get started.