Healthcare Business Development

Here are a few final tips. These have been garnered from many years of working on medium- and large-scale public sector health care procurements.

Having an outsourced proposal development team does not absolve internal staff from their primary responsibility to design the technical solution and to answer the proposal developer’s questions. It does free internal staff [...]

In many years of working on proposals, I’ve seen three different kinds of situations where multiple consulting firms might be involved in working on the same bid. These are as follows, with some notes regarding potential problems:

Finance or Actuarial Consultants. In health care proposals (our domain) we frequently see a separate firm or firms working [...]

During the course of a proposal project, you – and your chosen consulting firm – are going to run into problems. It’s the nature of the beast – you are working on a large and complex project with a very short timeline. Effective project management techniques will help you and your consultants get through the [...]

Now you have a contract. The tasks have been defined, and consultants are assigned and eager to begin work. What’s next?

Several things need to be addressed. The most important one is: who is in charge of the consultants? The consulting team needs to be clear about who gives direction, makes decisions, and resolves conflicts. If [...]

You will probably work out the structure of the arrangement as you are considering different proposal consultants. However, there are a variety of ways to structure the engagement. Let’s talk about the two primary models for the scope first:

Defined scope: we need someone to write the narrative only for sections 3.12 through 3.25 of the [...]

Now your work becomes much more difficult. Who is the right choice for outsourcing your complicated and important proposal?

There are many sources out there for finding proposal consultants. The professional association for proposal development and management is the Association for Proposal Management Professionals (APMP). APMP has various national and local resources to help you find [...]

If you have decided that you need to outsource some or all of your proposal development work, now you need to decide:

What do I outsource?
To whom?
How do I structure the arrangement?
How do I manage the engagement?
What do I do to solve problems?
How do I use multiple consulting firms on the same bid?

What do I Outsource?

Before [...]

 If you have not already read Part 1, I would suggest taking a look at that now – the scenarios regarding Company A and Company B are fundamental to these recommendations. And – these are strictly general recommendations – deciding whether to outsource proposal development requires a much deeper analysis of the company’s market position [...]

If you do business with the state or federal government, chances are that you will need to submit a proposal to secure any substantial contract. And – if you have ever worked on a proposal for a large contract – you know that it can be time-consuming, arduous, and maddening. (“What solution are we proposing [...]

At the end of an intense and arduous proposal effort, you – and the team – may feel that you’ve put forth your best effort. Designed a great solution for the customer, pulled out all the stops, written compelling text and included gorgeous pictures depicting the utter beauty and elegance of your solution….

And then:

You win.

Or, [...]