Successful Proposal Strategies for Small Businesses: Using Knowledge Management to Win Government, Private-Sector, and International Contracts

Newly expanded and thoroughly revised to reflect and meet the demands of a high-velocity global business environment, the Fourth Edition of this popular book is a highly accessible, self-contained desktop references developed to be informative, practical, and easy to use. It helps small and mid-sized businesses as well as non-profit organizations and public-sector agencies to achieve effective, efficient, and disciplined business development, proposal development, and knowledge management (KM) processes.

Among an extensive array of updates and new material, the fourth edition…

· Introduces storytelling as a proposal art, along with solution development;

· Emphasizes the value of front-end proposal planning and storyboarding (including elevator speeches, annotated outlines, and pain tables);

· Underlines the importance of focusing on the customer mission in proposals;

· Significantly expands the discussion of performance-based acquisition (PBA) and the latest U.S. Government procurement reforms and what they mean for small businesses; and

· Discusses the development of successful grant proposals for the first time in this volume.

This edition contains one of the most complete, comprehensive, and fully integrated analyses of U.S. federal procurement reform from 1984 to 2004. In addition, you find numerous useful, up-to-the-minute resources for U.S. and overseas businesses that want to engage in international business and proposal development. Using this book, any small company or organization with a viable product or service can learn how to gain and keep a client’s attention, even when working only a few employees. Entrepreneurs can use this valuable resource to assist in the establishment of best-of-breed business development, proposal development, knowledge management, and publications infrastructures and processes within their organizations. In many ways, a small company's future performance in the federal, private-sector, and international market space will be a direct result of how effectively it chooses to implement the disciplined business development, proposal development, and KM processes and methodologies as well as the modes of thinking presented in this work.

Robert S. Frey, M.A., serves as the vice president of knowledge management & proposal development for RS Information Systems, Inc. (RSIS). During the past 6 years, RSIS has become one of the 50 largest federal information technology (IT) contractors in the United States, and is the largest African-American-owned company in the Washington, D.C. region. As a highly successful prime contractor with projected CY04 revenues of $325 million and a funded contract backlog of $1 Billion, the company’s 1,800 professional staff support 110 prime contracts and 125,000 users spanning defense, civilian, intelligence, and law enforcement federal agencies. With a sustained proposal win rate of 67%--more than 30% above industry average—RSIS is clearly an example of a business that successfully graduated from the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) 8(a) program and then moved forward to become a premier federal systems integrator. Robert S. Frey has leveraged knowledge management processes to perform rapid proposal prototyping for RSIS. He has personally supported more than 2,000 proposals in his career. In addition, he serves as an Instructor in technology management at UCLA in Westwood, California.