Simple Workflow

Posted in: Blog, What's New on February 22, 2010

The first essential step to winning government opportunities is simple: do everything on time. We’ve recently added some features in Bidspeed that help you with this. There are 4 important milestones to track:

1. Internal Response Date. Originally, this date is set to the same date as the response date on the solicitation. By default, you’ll get email about the due date starting 3 days before and continuing until you change the status (to “Responded” or “Won’t respond”).
2. Questions Due. This is the date for the last day of questions. This isn’t part of the data we get from FedBizOpps, so you’ll need to enter it yourself. Bidspeed sends a reminder email 3 days before.
3. Pre-proposal Conference Date. This is the date for the pre-proposal conference (or conference call), if there is one. Again, you enter this date yourself. Bidspeed sends you a reminder 3 days before.
4. Site Visit. This is the date for the site visit, if any. Bidspeed sends you a reminder 3 days before it’s due.

We’ve tried to keep both the number of steps and the number of email reminders flying around to an absolute minimum. (Bidspeed only reminds you once of the Questions Due, Pre-proposal Conference, and Site Visit.)

This is a frequent topic of discussion around here, and it’ll probably continue to evolve. We’ve tried to strike a balance between annoying and useful with the understanding that annoying is, well, annoying. The general opinion being that something is never both useful AND annoying.

In order to set any of these dates you simply need to edit the opportunity (click on the caption at the top of the opportunity detail page).

Along with this, there have been a few other changes:

1. There is a new Win/Loss Status: Cancelled. Choose this status when you’ve gone to the serious trouble of responding to the opportunity just to have the agency decide they aren’t going forward.
2. There is a new Yes/No field named: Bid Bond Required.
3. There are 2 new status types: Review and Future. The “Review” status can be used when you are still deciding if you should respond. Opportunities in the Review status are still treated as active (same as “New” or “In Progress”) and you will still be reminded when the due date approaches. You can put opportunities in the “Future” status if you are planning to respond, but the solicitation is either early stage (see http://www.fedbidspeed.com/cracking-the-code) or considerably far away.

Finally, we have added a feature that will allow you to change the overall display width of pages in Bidspeed. To do this, click on My Account, Preferences, and check “Full Width” box on the Preferences page. When you save, the page will now expand to fill the entire width of your screen. This has been a much requested feature and one that those of you that have larger monitors will likely want to use.

Cracking The Code

Posted in: Blog, Using Bidspeed on February 18, 2010

If you’re new to government contracting one of the first things you’ll need to do is understand the maze of government terminology. Even if you are a regular user of FedBizOpps, there is a good chance you still find it confusing.

The absolutely first code to crack is the Solicitation Type on posted federal opportunities. The Solicitation Type field, as you’ll see below, is often less than accurate. What it should tell you, at a glance, is exactly one thing: “Should I read this notice?” Here’s the short version:

1. Award – Super easy to understand. This is the list you want your name on.
2. Combined Synopsis / Solicitation – This is a real, live, actual deal. Most opportunities classified this way are going to actually happen. All of these should include specifications for the product or service and a due date for the proposal. A “Combined” means the agency is expecting a proposal or quote from you.
3. Sources Sought – A Sources Sought notification almost always means “Small Business Sources Sought.” The government is loosely required to “set-aside” a certain percentage of their procurements to small businesses. (This small business “requirement” has many, many exceptions, and there are many, many workarounds, but the general idea is sound.) Sometimes the solicitation will specify explicitly that they are looking only for small businesses (or 8(a), HUBZone, …) to respond. (Even if it doesn’t say “only small businesses” it means only small businesses.) If a Sources Sought opportunity is in your wheelhouse then you’ll want to add it to your watchlist to manage. Sources Sought is your chance to “get in early.”
4. Pre-solicitation – Covers nearly everything else. In some cases, it’s really a “Special notice.” In others, it’s a Request for Information (RFI). Sometimes, the Pre-solicitation is, surprisingly, a pre-solicitation – meaning, the “real” solicitation isn’t released yet.
5. Special Notice – Could mean anything (unless you’re GSA). Often this is a way to post a “sole source” notification which means you aren’t getting the deal. Other times it’s simply a notification of a follow on contract – again, you aren’t getting this one. In some cases (GSA in particular) it’s a Request for Quote or a notice that a RFQ is going to be issued. Still other times the description for the “Special Notice” will begin with the phrase “This is a combined synopsis/solicitation…” Really. (One of our favorites: F3PT710034AG01. The description reads: “this is a streamlined combined synopsis/solicitation…”)
6. Synopsis / Solicitation Amendment – This is either a change or a cancellation. Most of the time these aren’t top-level items, but rather listed (in both Bidspeed and FedBizOpps) as changes to a solicitation. When they ARE top-level items, it’s almost always because someone mistyped the solicitation number. (W912EP-10-Z-0007 vs. W912EP10Z0007). Just for reference, this doesn’t happen much – for example, there are 272 “Synopsis / Solicitation Amendment” items out of 256,352 total items as of February 18^th, 2010.

Now What?

In general, you’ll want to concentrate on numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 (Synopsis / Solicitation, Sources Sought, Pre-solicitation, and Special Notice). You need to keep “Special Notice” in your list, especially if you sell to GSA, even though many of these are really “sole source” notices. (GSA has a fondness for Special Notices.)

We’ve tried to make this easy in Bidspeed. To do this, we have a concept of an “Active Solicitation.” Bidspeed defines an “Active Solicitation” as being one of the four important types: (Synopsis / Solicitation, Sources Sought, Pre-solicitation, and Special Notice), NOT archived, and with a response date EITHER in the future or missing.

In Bidspeed, most of the time, you’ll want to keep the “Active Solicitations Only” filter applied. (Click ‘Active Solicitations Only’ on the Filters menu.) This dramatically narrows down the list. Add your NAICS, Class Code, Distance, Date, Agency, Full Text filters to this list. (This isn’t really possible on fbo.gov, one of the many reasons Bidspeed users are happier than non-Bidspeed users.)

Just so you know, a missing response date does not mean what you might expect. Many times, pre-solicitations that are really pre-solicitations don’t have a response date. These are still interesting and often you’ll want to add them to your watchlist as they are going to become opportunities that you’ll need to manage in the near future.

See? Easy once you know how to crack the code. So, go ahead, get cracking.

If you want a way to get started then you should try Bidspeed. It won’t cost you anything for the first 30 days and after that it’s less than $0.63 a day. Click here to read about plans and pricing.

Location, Location, Location

Posted in: Blog, Using Bidspeed, What's New on February 9, 2010

One of the more requested features was for us to add “State” to the list of searchable fields in the opportunity list. The latest update adds this ability, and more to the main search pages. To add the field to your list, click on “Customize” then “Additional Fields” and choose “State” from the list.

You can now use the standard Bidspeed search to find items in your state:

If you want to include items ONLY in your state type the state code in the list and press enter. If you want to include multiple states, separate them with the word ‘OR’ (CA OR AZ OR CO). If you want to include items that do NOT have a state, you can add the phrase “IS NULL” (without the quotes).

You’ll notice that if you hover over the state column (even when there isn’t a state identified for the opportunity) you’ll see more information about the location – Zip, contracting office address, state, latitude, and longitude.

You’ll also notice that some solicitations don’t have a state (about 500 of the active solicitations as of February 8th). Most of the time the reason for this is because the opportunity is to be performed at multiple locations – for example: “Various locations in Korea, Mainland Japan, Okinawa or Guam Torii Station, Okinawa, Japan.” We don’t have a good way to put a state or a geo location for these types of opportunities.

Another reason is that the listed place of performance has a military zip code (APO, FPO) or it takes place in a country where the only data provided is a name (Columbia or Iraq) and we can’t determine the state (or geo location) with any accuracy.

For most users this isn’t much of a problem, for example if the opportunity takes place in Baghdad the fact that it’s 7,667 miles your office isn’t generally all that important.

New features like this are in response to requests by our users. So, if you have an idea for something that could be better in Bidspeed, send us an email: support@fedbidspeed.com.