Most often used to refer to the executive review of the costs and proposed price.
Not a standard term in Proposal Land, however, and has been seen referring to what most folks call Red Team.
Does it matter? Nope. Not as long as everyone involved knows what is meant.
I have made much in these pages about the importance of asking clear questions: here, for example. And seriously, who can argue? Unclear questions bemuse the client and frustrate your team when the answer given by the bemused ones is, itself, unclear or unhelpful.
But it isn’t enough to be clear. More is needed.
If you want thoughtful answers to your questions – and you likely do – then submit them as early as possible, even before the deadline, to give the client time to think.
If you don’t want nasty surprises later on – and you likely don’t – then review all parts of the RFP (the SOW, the draft contract, the response instructions, the evaluation criteria) as soon as it hits the street, so you can submit all your questions soonest for the best chance at timely answers. There’s nothing much more irritating than trying to assemble a document and realizing at that late date that the response instructions and the packaging instructions aren’t aligned. And, yes, it happens.
Maybe you’re using a question to ask for a change:
Again, asking early is your best bet, while recognizing that any heavy lifting with respect to influencing the requirement really ought to have been done before the RFP came out.
The process, meeting, or decision that finalizes whether an opportunity will be pursued.
On a proposal team (OK, maybe on any team), don’t jump in to help without first checking on a few things:
The rule applies to everyone, but it applies more the more senior you are, or the more removed you’ve been from the main work stream of the proposal.
The sales guy responsible for the client receiving this proposal was understandably eager to help. As I started to assemble the package for the in-house printing and copying centre, I kept finding him standing behind me, smiling.
That, I could live with, although it was a bit unnerving. Where it started to go south was when he started trying to help. First he reorganized my piles of documents, lining everything up in nice rows with no gaps.
“No,” I said, “those gaps are how I know that I still need something from Production.”
He stopped moving stuff around, but he wasn’t happy.
Then, when we had everything, I started to pile documents together to take them down to the folks who would copy them for us. He jumped in again, happily stacking documents in a way that they hated downstairs, because it cost them another step to realign the piles for input to their humongous copier.
“No,” I said, “they need them stacked like this.” And showed him.
This time, he pouted. “If you don’t want any help,” he huffed, and moved off.
I stopped for a minute and looked at him, wondering whether it was worth my bother.
“I do want help,” I said, “but we’re always asking the copying department for help with a last-minute job – that’s the nature of our business – so we work hard to make it as easy for them as we can. To keep them as happy as we can.”
He came back to the table and watched me closely as I assembled packages of files in a way that would cause the least irritation for those folks who were so necessary to our on-time delivery of “his” proposal.
And then he started doing it the same way.
Hurray.
A markup added to a bidder’s calculated cost of products and services to cover costs not solely attributable to the production of said products and services but nonetheless attributable to them (for example, a percentage of the cost of corporate services, like accounting or marketing, that supports all projects from a central department).
Also referred to as “overhead.”
Acronymized as G&A; pronounced “gee and eh.”