The US federal government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the world.  The sheer size of its purchases tantalizes most any businessman.  But selling to the government is not the same as selling to other businesses.  To the uninitiated, this market is a vast wilderness of unique procurement regulations and arcane processes.  Crossing this wilderness alone may take years.  Finding the shortcuts through this wilderness demands a experienced guide with a map, a compass, and the knowledge of how to use them.  Even the largest federal contractors with decades of experience utilize outside guides to help them find the best path through.

Rocky Mountain Technical Marketing, Inc. (RMTM) provides comprehensive business capture support with decades of experience focused on federal business capture.  Our lengthy experience includes both Defense and Civilian agencies, as well as state-government and commercial opportunities – many valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  We support both contract and grant opportunities.

RMTM business capture services include the following:

Capture Strategy

• Work with executive management to assess and prioritize opportunities, devise customer communication plans to cultivate relationships and influence specifications, vet solution concepts, and demonstrate credibility
• Work closely with capture managers, business development personnel and business unit leads to develop bid strategy, themes and discriminators, with the creative ability to thread solutions into a compelling proposal that will win
• Assist in identifying teaming opportunities and evaluating prospective teaming partners
• Provide in-depth understanding of the federal procurement cycle and commercial-sector sales cycle and the implications for capture, marketing, and proposal preparation
• Provide the initiative, organization, stamina, attention to detail, flexibility, and ability to forecast resource requirements to produce winning proposals

Proposal Management

• Ensure that proposal submissions comply with the applicable RFP instructions and delivered on time
• Work with proposal team and sponsoring executive to determine author assignments and with the sponsor’s Business Development Manager to integrate win strategy, themes and discriminators into proposal
• Manage/coordinate/support the schedule, proposal content, and strategy
• Provide leadership, insight, and guidance to authors on content and graphics development, and ensures proposal is ready for scheduled reviews and final delivery
• Facilitate multi-organizational teams in planning, storyboarding and developing an effective customer-focused proposal
• Identify and escalate issues
• Serve as authors/editors as needed
• Provide production and quality controls
• Manage matrixed team of Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs) and authors from business units and teammates

 Proposal writing

• Leverage client Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs) to compose RFP responses targeted at customer evaluation criteria to maximize proposal score
• Define supporting graphics to make the story easily understandable to customer evaluators

Technical solution management

• Guide client SMEs in developing technical solutions that resonate with customer
• Capabilities across a wide range of technologies

Security-cleared resources

• Top secret cleared resources available
• Secret cleared resources available

Cultural differences often create an invisible barrier to effective execution. Whether the differences are international or merely inter-departmental, the clash of cultures can impair the ability of an enterprise to succeed. What’s worse, they often go unrecognized. An enterprise opening up a new office in another country discovers that its operations are not achieving expected results. They are using processes that they have used successfully for decades at home and never question their effectiveness in the new culture. Instead, they treat the symptoms by blaming the manager. After changing management a few times, they then withdraw altogether. They may never recognize that the underlying cause of the symptoms was a cultural difference that impaired the effectiveness of their proven process.

In other situations, the failure of the IT department to acknowledge the need for flexibility of an operating department causes the operating group to create their own solution. The new solution is not only inefficient from an enterprise perspective, but presents various security vulnerabilities which lead to exploitation by an adversary.

Rocky Mountain Technical Marketing, Inc. (RMTM) provides consulting to identity and resolve business process failures resulting from cultural differences. Cultural differences include national and regional differences, but also include behavior barriers that typically arise between departmental cultures (e.g., sales, accounting, or human resources).

We work with clients to identify these often-hidden barriers that compromise the effectiveness of business processes that commonly overlook the friction created when processes cross cultural boundaries.

RMTM cross-cultural consulting includes the following:

International Operations Optimization

• Identify the reasons that proven processes fail when exported to other national/regional markets

• Modify processes to account for cultural differences

• Create communications plan to address cultural barriers

• Manage organizational change to resolve cultural differences

Inter-departmental Facilitation

• Identify the reasons that processes that cross departmental barriers fail

• Devise solutions to overcome barriers

• Create communications plan to address cultural barriers

• Manage organizational change to resolve cultural differences