November 2016: Followup: Importance of Customer Keywords and Denial of Protest Example

In my September article, I wrote about the importance of including customer keywords in our proposal response. “While we understand that the mere inclusion of keywords is insufficient to win, it is better to argue from a position of strength (where keywords at least provide pointers for evaluators) versus a position of weakness (missing keywords, where evaluators must hunt for the answer).”

In a recently published protest decision (Matter of: MacAulay-Brown, Inc. B-413311), the protestor did not address a particular aspect of the PWS using the customer’s terms. Subsequently, the GAO was not able to determine how the protestor’s response addressed that aspect of the solicitation “using alternative terms or otherwise,” which in part resulted in denial of the protest. Hence, because the protestor did not clearly demonstrate compliance with the solicitation by at least using the customer terms, it helped open the door to an unfavorable proposal evaluation and protest result.

Using Proposal Navigator®’s keyword search utility, we can perform in minutes the required analysis on our proposal documents. Output formats for our review provide sentence context, page and line number where all keywords are found (or not), so we may quickly make targeted corrections. Black Dog Technology LLC's innovative processes and Proposal Navigator® toolsuite efficiencies add significant productive work days to your constrained proposal development timelines. Contact us for your capture/proposal support needs or to arrange your Proposal Navigator® system capability demonstration. 2016 pricing is $25,000 annual subscription (unlimited use) per proposal center site.

The Proposal Team's Mission

Synthesize and package the capture team’s vision into a compliant, convincing and compelling offering whose selection can be successfully defended ... without breaking the pursuit budget “bank”...