How can a company best use ‘price-to-win’ (PTW) analysis to help win government contracts?  Imagine you are a CMMI Level 3  IT company bidding a service opportunity. You learn there will be four competitors, and they are all CMMI Level 4 or 5.  Would you still bid?  Or, what if you were bidding a services contract and learned that the Government had already performed an analysis of all contractors’ rates by labor category and indirect rate structures and intended to use this to determine the reasonableness of bids received?  Would this impact your labor rates or labor mix? 

Much like being Liam Neeson, creating bids takes a very particular set of skills. The more bids you create, the more refined those skills become. But not enough people take those skills out of the war-room and into the real world. You should, because in the real world those skills are like super-powers…