Corporate qualifications for federal proposals

1. Explain relevance; don’t assume it’s self-evident. 

For each contract or project that you present as evidence of your corporate qualifications, take great care to explain the relevance to the solicitation’s Statement of Work (SOW). What is obvious to you might not be so to some of the evaluators. Describe all similarities that are relevant to this solicitation. This often means that you will have to edit or tailor pre-existing project descriptions.

Does this mean that every example of corporate experience you select has to be relevant to the solicitation’s SOW on each and every dimension? No. But for each example of corporate experience that you highlight, provide a compelling rationale for its relevance.

2. Weed out the irrelevant.

It can be tempting to highlight what you consider to be “gems” in your firm’s roster of contracts and projects or examples of your corporate experience that are technically impressive, albeit not relevant to the solicitation. Resist these temptations. You will run the risk of leading evaluators to reach one or more of the following conclusions:

• Your firm does not have much relevant experience; therefore, you’re presenting filler material to run up the page count. Alternatively, you are trying to dazzle the evaluators in a way that would only be successful if your firm assumes that the evaluators are easy to fool.
• Your firm made an earnest attempt to provide examples of relevant experience but missed the target. Your firm apparently does not have a very good understanding of what the agency is trying to procure under this solicitation.
• Despite the fact that your firm is known to have good corporate qualifications that are directly relevant to this solicitation, you did not take the time to customize this proposal. Your firm’s corporate qualifications section comes across as off-the-shelf boilerplate. Maybe your firm is too overloaded to write a quality proposal. Maybe your firm is resting on its laurels and assuming that it’s not necessary to describe its relevant experience within the four corners of this proposal. In any event, this simply puts more of a burden on the evaluators to slog through irrelevant material. This is not a good sign of what might be to come if your firm was awarded this contract.

3. Your team members are excellent—and relevant..

A good corporate qualifications section should always highlight the relevant experience of the offeror’s subcontractors and consultants. (In certain types of solicitations, the instructions might limit the extent to which you should present information on subcontractors and consultants. This is sometimes the case, for example, in the first step of a two-step A-E selection process.)

You should take care to describe each team member’s experience in a way that resonates well with other sections of the proposal. For example, the “Management Plan” section of your proposal might describe specific technical roles for each subcontractor and consultant. In the “Corporate Qualifications” section, you should briefly restate these roles and then highlight each subcontractor’s and consultant’s experience that is directly relevant to those roles. To do otherwise might lead evaluators to conclude that you were haphazard in selecting team members or that you do not have a clear vision of how to integrate them into your effort.

In other parts of your proposal you might be highlighting the fact that many members of your team have worked together successfully in the past. In describing the corporate qualifications of your subcontractors and consultants, try to pick contracts and projects in which you have worked together; and don’t forget to highlight these relationships somewhere in the descriptions.

4. Respect the time of the evaluators.

Government staff members who have been drafted to evaluate proposals usually have to read many proposals under tight timelines. In almost every case, the evaluators are performing this duty as a collateral assignment, taking time away from pressing line responsibilities. Therefore, any part of a proposal that is poorly organized or unfocused risks putting an evaluator in a bad frame of mind.

Evaluators will not want to spend a lot of time slogging through poorly written, badly organized, or unfocused discussions of “corporate qualifications.” Put yourself in their shoes. What if you had to read hundreds of pages of proposal materials over the next few weeks, and you encountered a badly written, lengthy description of a project that, in the final analysis, was irrelevant to the solicitation? What would you think of the company that subjected you to the torture of garbled, meandering prose or undefined jargon? Would you take the time to decipher it?

Your best bet to avoid these problems is to figure out how to present your corporate qualifications in as crisp a manner as possible. Think about options such as:

• Using matrices and exhibits to highlight relevant corporate experience, where the reviewer can easily see the relevance of each contract or project with respect to key areas of the SOW or key evaluation criteria.
• Organizing your discussion of corporate experience thematically, where the major themes are defined by, for example: (1) the SOW; and/or (2) your understanding of the problem; and/or (3) the evaluation criteria.
• Succinctly describing your corporate qualifications in text, with numbered cross-references to formal project descriptions, and relegating the actual project descriptions to an appendix.

5. Describe challenges.

Whenever possible, enliven your discussion of corporate qualifications by describing the special challenges that your firm overcame, such as these listed below.

• Your firm had to perform the project under particularly tight timelines. (Better yet: Your firm was confronted with unforeseen events out of your control, which delayed project startup; nevertheless, you were able to modify your approach and complete the project within the original deadlines.)