Author’s Note: Zero dollar winning in federal contracting is what happens when your company is awarded a “hunting license”—a contract or agreement with no guaranteed money or work. The irony of zero dollar awards is how frequently zero dollars is all that will be realized by a majority of the winners.

In part one, I laid the foundation for what zero dollar winning is and how to recognize it when you see it. This time, I want to discuss key reasons many companies fail to monetize these empty victories. Given the array of reasons that contribute to zero dollar awards staying at zero, this will not be the final installment of my zero dollar winning conversation.

RTFM (Read The Full Message)

Congratulations! You’re the recipient of a shiny new zero dollar award. Now what? Little things can make a big difference, and many of us are not effective of doing little things consistently, and well. There’s an overarching desire to achieve results while using the fewest possible resources that often results in essential activities being streamlined, or sidelined. Something as small as reading an entire award document can help eliminate costly and inaccurate assumptions. Did you read the entire document? Did your understanding of the opportunity change? Did it become more clear? Without this complete review you might miss:

• – Schedule and details of reporting requirements;
• – Contracting and Project Management POCs;
• – How you will be notified of new opportunities;
• – Who can place orders;
• – Requiring offices;
• – Participation requirements (are you responding often enough?)
• – How to invoice and more.

RTFM can transform your award from a nice conversation piece to an active instrument of growth for your organization.

Assign Roles & Responsibilities

Remember when you decided to bid on this opportunity and that big mean proposal manager started bossing you around to make sure things got done? Let’s do that again. Not with your proposal manager but with the person or team that will be point-of-contact for the:

• – Contracting Officer
• – Project Manager/Contracting Officer’s Representative or COR
• – Task/delivery order requests
• – Task/delivery order customers, and
• – Invoices and payments

Designating POCs and socializing this with customer counterparts can go a long way in making things easy for you, and current and prospective customers.

Step1. Step 2. Step 3…

Does your team know what to do when the Contracting Officer reaches out with a question? What about when a new task order request arrives? Creating basic workflows will contribute to good decision-making for new opportunities and preparing bid submissions for selected opportunities. Being as prepared as possible will contribute to increasing your competitive timeliness.

Know Thy Buyer(s) and Customer(s)

In 2016, Bruce Springsteen thanked Pittsburgh concert-goers for coming out to support him. The issue? He was in Cleveland, Ohio. Yikes?

I alluded to this when I talked about RTFM earlier, but this is really important, and really overlooked. Make sure you verify (by reading the award documents) who can use the contract, and who can place orders. For example, some multiple-award contracts (MACs) are agency-specific with orders only placed by a specific contracting office, while others are multi-agency or governmentwide, meaning there can be a host of buying activities. The award documents will also indicate what customer organizations can use the contract. This is helpful should you want to market to them as they do their research to develop requirements, or when they first identify needs. This part is only helpful if you want to be in front of opportunities, though.

In the next installment of zero dollar winning, I’ll zero in on more tips for maximizing task order management, and creating opportunities versus waiting to see what comes over the transom.

Peach, Health, and Thriving,

Go-To-Guy Timberlake