Preparing GSA Schedule Proposals
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Installment [ 52 ] Preparing GSA Schedule Proposals By Richard White
Our speakers are frequently asked in our GSA Schedule seminars questions such as "Why is preparing the GSA Schedule offer so difficult? Our company has been working on our offer for more than six months and we are still not even close to having it ready to submit to GSA." A number of factors contribute to the difficulty in preparing your corporate GSA Schedule offer. Some of the problems are discussed below.
Proposal Interpretation Problems
- GSA Schedule Requests for Proposals (RFP’s) are often poorly organized and even more poorly written. Some of the GSA divisions have recently improved the quality and organization of their respective RFP’s but the majority remain troublesome.
- RFP’s do not fully outline what GSA is looking for in your offer. It takes a significant amount of interpretation on the reader’s part to understand GSA’s proposal requirements. The foregoing is true for all aspects of the proposal but is particularly applicable for the pricing section of the proposal. The inherent pricing obstacles are even further magnified if your company discounts its products or services.
- It is problematic to separate the wheat from the chaff. In other words, it is difficult to discern which of the proposal’s clauses are significant and which are less so.
- Although each proposal lists a person within GSA to whom telephone inquiries may be directed, it is often impossible to get the contact on the phone. If you are successful in this endeavor, the responses to your questions are often vague and too general in nature.
Offer Preparation Obstacles
One of the greatest obstacles companies face when preparing their offer is making decisions such as those outlined below:
- How much information is required?
- How much should I write?
- Why are some proposals rejected?
- What information and data is critical and what isn’t?
- How does GSA really arrive at fair and reasonable pricing?
- What must I disclose in terms of my commercial pricing practices?
- What is the appropriate discount to offer GSA?
GSA Schedule proposal writers are often inexperienced in government contracting. Management, in effort to get the offer out to GSA quickly and without great forethought, frequently assigns the task to an employee who doesn’t have the government experience necessary to wade through the proposal. As a result, the proposal writer spins his or her wheels and s truggles to complete the offer. A frequent response given to management’s proposal status inquiries is "GSA is not being responsive to my phone calls" or "Our corporate lawyers and accountants can’t or won’t give me what is needed to complete the pricing section." Both are often true and can be extremely frustrating to the proposal writer. In fact, you may be familiar with this refrain.
We estimate that many companies spend as much as 200 person hours or more in preparing their proposals. The corporate time spent on the proposal can be reduced by about 80% by outsourcing the proposal’s preparation. Outsourcing costs can range from $10,000 to $75,000. The cost usually depends on the GSA schedule consulting service you retain and, more importantly, the complexity of the proposal.