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What makes your bid a winner or a loser?

I was asked to review a major best-value bid for a firm that was notified they had lost and wanted to protest.

Emotions were running high, and they were making all sorts of allegations about the government not wanting them to win. I asked to see their debriefing file, and what I discovered was surprising—at least to me.

Like many companies, they failed to understand why companies lose and what it takes to win.  Read more...


Capture and proposal innovations

With the uncertainties and cost cutting we weathered in 2013, the 2014 market demands contractors increase competitiveness. According to Deltek GovWin, Federal Government contract spending has declined by $35 billion over the past 3 years, which amounts to a 6% drop in contract spending. In the most recent annual Grant Thornton contractor survey, 60% of respondents reported either no profit or profit in the 1–5% range. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Government reports that the trend towards multiple award vehicles decreases revenues for firms previously dependent on single-award deals while simultaneously increasing Bid and Proposal (B&P) costs.

An effective way to stop wasting money in a tight market is to increase B&P productivity through innovation.  Read more...


Lohfeld Business Winning Webinar Series 

Led by our capture and proposal experts, our bi-monthly webinars present advancements in business development, capture management, and proposal management.

Check out our latest on-demand webinars.

Stay tuned for info about our upcoming April webinar!


Learn how to automate business winning with WinCenter™ Integrated Capture and Proposal Management Tool

Finally—a single, integrated Capture and Proposal tool that will help you win more new business and increase your win rate. Powered by CorasWorks and SharePoint, our WinCenter(TM) provides the competitive edge you need to manage your business. Our proven 5-phase Business Winning process is embedded in the software, allowing you to easily manage your opportunities, action items, documents, artifacts, graphics, resumes, reporting, color reviews, and gate reviews—all from a single location.

Read more and watch a demo...


How to deal with sensitive proposal info? Ask the Proposal Doctor

Dear Proposal Doctor,

As the proposal manager for a large and important bid, I have access to information that senior executives in my company

When people on the proposal team ask me what is going in the proposal, I don’t like telling them something that isn’t true, but the higher-ups insist that certain things be kept confidential. This puts me in a bind. What is the right approach in this situation? consider sensitive. Sometimes this is information about future assignments or promotions, and other times it is information about our solution, which suggests something about staffing, relocation, and the like.

-Torn Between the Team and the Execs   Read more...


Marketing: the engine and fuel that drives successful companies

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005), the world-renowned management visionary and guru, was fond of saying, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two—and only two—functions: Marketing and Innovation… Marketing and innovation create value; all the rest are costs.”

The esteemed Dr. Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, known to many as the Father of Marketing, and hailed by Management Centre Europe as the world’s foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing, has defined his life-long discipline as, “Generating the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication and business development… Marketing is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships, and create value for their customers and for themselves.”

So why does marketing so often appear as an afterthought in the world of federal contractors?  Read more...


Latest Lohfeld Insights

Enjoy our latest capture and proposal-related blog posts.


Need to win more business? We can help you with:

Market strategy and pipeline development

Successful business and successful marketing strategy and execution go hand-in-hand, and that is never truer than in the U.S. Federal Government marketplace, which spends more than $3.6T annually on products and services procurements. Lohfeld Consulting Group’s Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy and Execution offerings provide contractors with proven, tailored, and actionable plans, practices, and methodologies.

One key component of an effective GTM program is developing, building, and sustaining a successful business development pipeline – through  relationship, targeted, intercept , and/or traditional  marketing initiatives – that ensures your company has the necessary pipeline density in all phases of the sales process, including suspects to leads, leads to qualified leads, qualified leads to prospects, and, of course, prospects to new customers (contract awards). 

Contact Kevin P. Young at 703.794.1100 or KYoung@LohfeldConsulting.com to discuss your market strategy and pipeline development requirements, and  click to learn more.

Capture and proposal professional services

Our expert capture and proposal staff can plan and manage your capture campaigns and manage and professionally write your proposals.

All of our capture and proposal leadership team members are senior experts in winning government contracts.

We provide:

  • Capture managers
  • Proposal managers
  • Volume leads
  • Graphic artists
  • Desktop publishers
  • Orals coaches
  • Technical writers
  • Editors
  • Proposal coordinators
  • Proposal expert reviewers

Contact Amy Barden at 703.820.0075 or ABarden@LohfeldConsulting.com to discuss your upcoming proposal-support requirements, and click to learn more.

Capture and proposal process and tools

We provide capture and proposal process evaluations and develop process improvement roadmaps to increase your government business acquisition win rate. We can tune up your existing processes and build and implement your business development infrastructure enterprise-wide. Use our WinCenter™ Integrated Capture and Proposal Management Tool—powered by CorasWorks and SharePoint—to help you manage your BD, capture, and proposal activities all from a single workspace.

Contact Tom Gorman at 443.534.8204 or TGorman@LohfeldConsulting.com to discuss your proposal process and infrastructure support requirements, and click to learn more.

Capture, Proposal, and APMP Foundation Level training 

Public courses

We teach public classes in capture, proposal management, and proposal writing at Deltek University. Sign up for multiple classes at Deltek and check out the discounts for Lohfeld and Deltek clients.  Click each class to learn more.

On-site corporate training classes

Let us design and provide your corporate on-site capture, proposal management, and proposal writing training programs. 

APMP Foundation-level Certification training

Train your capture and proposal team and achieve APMP Foundation-level Certification for everyone in your organization. Public classes are available on:

On-site Certification training classes can be taught at your company location.

Contact Vicki Shaffer at 703.327.4357 or VShaffer@LohfeldConsulting.com  to discuss your team's training requirements, and click to learn more.

Contact us

Virginia Office - Amy Barden
703.820.0075
ABarden@LohfeldConsulting.com

Maryland Office - Bob Lohfeld
410.336.6264

RLohfeld@LohfeldConsulting.com