Winning on Best Value
Sometimes folks try to tell me that government contracts are discount price competitions.
I know they are “Best Value” competitions, and there’s a difference that’s important.
Regulations require all government contractors to provide the “best price” when proposing to the government RFP. That means you can’t sell the same widget to Walmart for less than you sell it to the US Army.
However, it is flawed thinking to extrapolate this fact as commodity pricing.
Low price wins when there is not a valuable reason to pay more for an item or service. However, when your offer provides “Best Value” it can win an award in the face of lower priced competitors. Here’s how it is done:
Prove Best Value. Most often, this will be by providing a better warranty or a better schedule. Other times, best value is provided by a difference in the attributes of the product or service.
For example, if you are selling trailers to the US Army, and have a corrosion resistant finish that is proven more impervious in desert conditions, that may be a better value for US Army for deployment to desert climates. In that case, you may win the contract over lower priced competitors who don’t provide this feature.
However, you must prove this in your proposal response to the RFP. If you gloss over it, or leave it out, you have no case for “best value” and will be relegated to a price competition. In order to make a selection based on “Best Value”, your contracting officer must be able to point to specific proven attributes in your proposal which are their basis for selecting a higher priced but better value.
After all, if there is no difference between your offering and a lower priced competitor, you are on a going-out-of business slope. I’m not sympathetic to whining about producing a better product and being under-priced by cheaper competitors. If your offering is a better quality that is valuable (as opposed to stubborn overkill) then you must prove it, put it in writing, and highlight it in your proposal.
Whenever I’m uncertain about the competition’s pricing, I scrounge for “best value” features to distinquish ourselves, just in case we aren’t the low bidder.
When your proposal generation uses a proposal management system, such as The Magic of Winning Proposals, you incorporate strategy in your government proposal writing.
Reader (RSS)
Email