How many times have you been heads down in a proposal and wished you had more hours in a day to complete the numerous tasks and action items that arise? Plenty, right? Even the best planned and staffed proposals will encounter a barrage of issues that demand attention, action, or elasticity from the team. To put it simply, there are not enough hours in the day to prepare proposals for all of the opportunities you want to bid on. Even if your organization has the perfect solution, there is not always adequate time to prepare a winning response. 

Consider this: the “standard” work week is 40 hours, which means a normal workday is 8 to 10 hours long (unless you are working in a sweat shop, and that is for another blog). Managers hopefully understand there is only so much work that can be done in those 8 to 10 hours, which are part of one CALENDAR Day. 

What if you could TRIPLE the normal workday capacity? 

With Trident, you can expand the calendar for each response to create a better and stronger response. We're not talking time travel; we're talking about producing quality products by maximizing time zones.  

• Why Trident and why now? 
  • Because COVID has changed our perception of having to work face-to-face, and remote employees are more common (and efficient!) than ever. 
  • Because you want to win more business – our experts span the globe and bring decades of combined industry experience. 
  • Because technology and collaboration tools allow seamless hand-offs that don’t compromise quality, introduce configuration management risks, or increase administrative burdens for your team 

• The benefits: 
  • You can bid more proposals more effectively 
  • You can respond to “quick turn” proposals with abbreviated response timelines. 

Trident has team members located all over the globe, spanning multiple time zones. Our geographically dispersed team can squeeze three workdays into one calendar day because of where we are located. So why would you want to do that?  

Let’s break it down by the numbers. Say your team’s P-win ratio is 60 percent (i.e., you win three out of every five proposals) - and you normally respond to approximately five proposals in a month. Look what happens when you start taking advantage of ALL the hours in a day: 

Even if you are off by 50 percent, you still increase your yield by 33 percent ... so more bids = more wins, all things equally considered. What would a 33 percent or 50 percent increase in wins do for your business development goals?  

Now, before you get overwhelmed by the thought of responding to that many bids, it’s important to point out the value of pursuing the “right” bids (we’ll have a blog on that soon!). We’re not trying to turn you into machines, and Trident is not a “proposal factory.” Rather, Trident takes pride in our ability to have a widely dispersed team, which gives each of our clients the ability to always have a trusted, reliable teammate on call to support their efforts without burning out anyone. It can be intimidating at first, but the benefits of a dispersed team are very tangible, and the results speak for themselves! 

Alternate Perspective… 

How many times have you heard someone on a status call say, “I haven’t gotten to that yet,” or “it’s taking me longer than I thought,” or, my personal favorite, “something else came up that I had to deal with.” It’s easy to attribute lack of progress or missed deadlines to a task owner’s personal failing. After all, maybe they didn’t start the task soon enough or give it proper prioritization. But when it comes to proposals, there is another highly likely and rarely acknowledged explanation: people just have too much work to do and not enough time to do it.  

While the tyranny of time constraints can happen in any industry, the stakes are especially high in the bid and proposal world. You can’t sacrifice the quality of your delivery for your existing customers, but if you’re not finding and bidding on contracts, you’re not winning contracts, either. Add to that equation the uncertainty of solicitation release and due dates, and you are left with a vicious and exhausting cycle of working full days for your clients, and then writing proposals in your “free” time. Goodbye nights, weekends, and holidays – there’s a proposal that needs to get done!  

But what if you could decompress the calendar, level-load your contributors, and improve the quality of your response simultaneously?  

That’s exactly what working with Trident can help you accomplish. How?  

• We are a geographically distributed team. With Trident you can triple the amount of time you have to respond to a proposal by engaging our globally distributed team of experts. Why work late into the evening (or wee hours of the morning) when you can turn it over to someone who is just starting their workday and who is able to improve the documents with fresh (and well-rested) eyes? Because we span multiple time zones, we can take advantage of EVERY hour in the day.  
• We value delivering value. No, seriously – Delivering Value is a Trident Core Value. We are committed to producing high quality work that helps our customers win contracts and grow their companies. This means we will give you support when, where, and how you need it so that you can submit a compelling, compliant response.  
• We’re experienced, not experimental. Our industry experts are skilled at working with virtual teams because we’ve been doing it for years! We know how to leverage technology to increase the efficiency and collaboration that proposals demand. Clear communication and disciplined configuration management are cornerstones of our support. We ensure the team stays informed, in sync, and on track throughout the whole process.   

Proposals are tough, but they don’t have to be painful. Contact us today to see how our resources can help you maximize every hour of the day to deliver the best proposal.  

Written by Kiley Stewart
Kiley is a proposal and capture manager at Trident. She brings her proposal management, technical editor, competitor analysis, and resume development skills to clients. She is also the voice of the Trident Short podcasts (https://www.tridentproposals.com/podcasts/trident-shorts). A U.S. Navy veteran and military spouse based in Jacksonville, Florida, she supports clients around the world as part of our globally dispersed team.