Government buyers don’t take a sales call and shake hands. They publish a request, collect written proposals from several companies, score them against rules they wrote down in advance, and pick one.
That changes the whole game. You don’t win on the call. You win on paper, against a scoring sheet, usually with a deadline of a few weeks.
Most of what I see go wrong for small contractors isn’t a weak product. It’s a weak process. This post walks through the process the industry uses, why it uses it, and what you need to be ready, whether you’re one person learning the field or an owner building a team. At each step I point to the free and paid guides I built for it.
How a government bid actually works
A contract usually becomes visible long before anyone can bid on it. It shows up as a budget line, then in a forecast, then maybe as an industry day or a request for information. The formal request for proposal (RFP) comes last, often on SAM.gov.
By the time the RFP is public, the requirement is mostly written. Someone has usually been talking to that customer for months. The teams that win most often are the ones who were in that conversation early. The industry calls that early work capture.
So the job splits in two:
- Capture: find the opportunity early, learn the customer, decide if it’s worth chasing, and shape a plan to win.
- Proposal: once the RFP drops, write a document that answers every requirement and scores well against the published criteria, on time.
The method most of the industry runs on
Most government contractors follow some version of the process popularized by Shipley Associates. People say “we follow Shipley” the way sales teams say “we use MEDDIC.” Six habits do most of the work:
- Qualify early. Look at opportunities before the RFP is out, and drop the ones you can’t win.
- Run a bid/no-bid gate. Score the opportunity against set factors and make a recorded decision. Every bid you skip frees people for the ones you can win.
- Write the win strategy first. Name the customer’s hot buttons (what they care about most), your discriminators (what only you can claim), and how you’ll quietly contrast yourself with the competition.
- Build a compliance matrix. In a standard federal RFP, Section L tells you how to write the proposal, Section M tells you how it will be scored, and Section C describes the work. The matrix maps every requirement to the place your proposal answers it.
- Write to the evaluator. Lead with benefits, open each section with a theme statement, and make the evaluator’s scoring easy.
- Run color-team reviews. At set points, people who didn’t write the draft read it and ask one kind of question each.
Color-team reviews: the quality gates
This is the part people new to the field find most confusing, so it gets its own section. Each review is named by a color:
- Blue: before writing. Is the win strategy sound?
- Black Hat: before writing. Reviewers play the competitors. What will they propose, and how do we beat it?
- Pink: about a third to half drafted. Is the outline right, and does it cover every requirement?
- Red: about 90 percent drafted. Reviewers score the draft the way the government evaluator will. This is the big one.
- Gold: final. Executives sign off on price, risk and commitments.
- White Glove: before submission. Page limits, fonts, file formats, every form signed.
The order matters. Problems get more expensive the later you find them. A wrong strategy costs a meeting to fix at Blue and a rewrite at Red.
I wrote a free 8-page field guide on this: Color-team reviews, explained. It covers each team, how to run a review that helps, and a small-business version you can use on sales proposals and marketing launches too.
Why the industry works this way
It can look like a lot of ceremony. Here is why contractors put up with it.
- The buyer scores you on paper. Evaluators follow written criteria. A strong company that misses a requirement can lose to a weaker one that answered everything.
- A miss can get you thrown out. A missing form or a page over the limit can make a proposal non-compliant before anyone reads the good parts.
- Bids cost real money. Every proposal eats weeks of your best people’s time. A bid/no-bid gate protects that time.
- Writers can’t see their own gaps. Reviews by fresh eyes catch what the authors read past.
- Everyone speaks the same language. When a teaming partner says “Pink Team is Thursday,” everyone knows what’s expected.
What an individual contributor needs
If you’re new to proposals, or you’re in sales or BD and just got handed your first RFP, start here.
- Learn the vocabulary. Capture, compliance matrix, Section L and M, discriminators, PWin, color teams. You’ll hear all of them in your first week.
- Learn the six habits above well enough to explain each one in a sentence.
- Practice on a real RFP. Pull every “shall” into a compliance matrix. It’s the fastest way to learn how a solicitation is built.
- Sit on a review. Volunteer for a Pink or Red Team. Reading someone else’s draft against the criteria teaches more than writing your own.
- Consider a credential. APMP is the professional association for proposal people, and its Foundation level is the common entry point. It needs no experience.
My free APMP certification, explained guide covers the three levels, which one to start with, and a four-week plan to pass Foundation on your own.
What an organization needs
If you own or run a small contracting firm, the job is to make the process repeatable, so wins don’t depend on one heroic person.
- A pipeline you can see early. Free federal sites are a start. Paid tools can show you work sooner. My free white paper, GovWin IQ vs HigherGov, compares the two most common tools and includes a break-even test, so you only pay for what you’ll use.
- A written bid/no-bid gate. Same factors every time, with the decision recorded.
- One owner for each bid. Someone who runs the schedule, the matrix and the reviews.
- Standard templates. A win strategy page, a compliance matrix, a review form. Reinventing them on every bid wastes the time you don’t have.
- Reviews on the calendar. Put Blue, Pink and Red on the schedule the day the RFP drops, and leave days between Red and the due date to fix what Red finds.
- A lessons-learned habit. Ask for a debrief on every loss and every win, and write down what you’d change. My post on a blameless review of a lost deal shows how to run one without blame.
- Three numbers to track: win rate, no-bid rate and cost per win.
The tools I built for this
If your team has been told “we need to follow Shipley” and there’s no budget for formal training, this is what I made for you:
- Bid to Win: the field guide, $29. A 17-page plain-English guide to the six habits, with five fill-in worksheets and a 30-day adoption plan.
- Bid to Win Toolkit, $59. The guide plus an Excel workbook with an auto-scoring bid/no-bid, a compliance matrix that flags gaps, a review schedule and pipeline metrics. It also includes Word worksheets and an AI Companion with 11 prompts for Claude, ChatGPT or Grok.
And the free ones, if you want to start there:
A simple order to start in
- Read the color-team guide so the reviews stop being a mystery.
- Pick one live or upcoming opportunity and run a bid/no-bid gate on it.
- If you bid, build the compliance matrix the day the RFP drops.
- Put a Pink and a Red Team on the calendar.
- After the result, write down three things you’d change.
The catch
None of this replaces knowing the customer. A clean process around a bid you were never going to win is still a loss. Most of the winning happens before the RFP is public, so the method only pays off if you start early and say no often.
Colors, timing and scoring scales also vary by company and by agency. Treat this as the common pattern, and ask how your team or your prime runs it.
My guides are independent. They aren’t affiliated with or endorsed by Shipley Associates or APMP. “Shipley-style” describes the widely used process, not their materials.
Questions about any of it: hello@sethlevanen.com.
I’m Seth Levanen. I find the AI shortcuts that keep the quality and drop the busywork. Email me if you want to talk about it.