u/GovConTips

A lot of contractors assume the government buys on price. Sometimes it does. But most competitive federal acquisitions use a best value tradeoff approach, and that changes the math.

In a best value tradeoff, the agency is explicitly allowed to pay more for a technically superior proposal. The contracting officer documents why the higher-priced offer was worth the premium. I've seen awards go to proposals that were 20-30% higher than the lowest bid because the technical approach was meaningfully better and the evaluators could justify it on paper.

What this means practically: if you're submitting a technically strong proposal and pricing conservatively to win on cost, you're leaving money on the table. And if you're submitting a weak technical proposal at a low price, you're not necessarily safe either.

The factors that typically get evaluated alongside price: technical approach, past performance, and management approach. Each solicitation weights these differently and the RFP tells you the relative importance. The relative weights tell you where to spend your proposal hours. Read that section carefully before you write anything.

Lowest price technically acceptable is a different evaluation method where price does dominate. The solicitation will say which approach applies. Knowing which one you're bidding under before you start writing changes how you allocate your proposal hours.

After a federal contract loss, you're entitled to request a debriefing from the contracting officer. The agency has to provide one. For negotiated acquisitions, you have three days after receiving your award notification to put the request in writing.

Most contractors don't do this. Some don't know it exists. Others assume the feedback won't be useful. In my experience the ones skipping it are leaving real competitive intelligence on the table.

A debrief tells you how your proposal scored against the evaluation criteria, where the winning offeror separated from you, and what evaluators thought of your technical approach. That's not available anywhere else. Going in with specific questions gets you more than a passive listen. Ask where you lost points, what the score gap looked like, and whether your past performance rating helped or hurt you.

The part that gets skipped even when people do request one: writing down what you heard. A debrief without documented lessons learned is just a conversation. The agencies where contractors build win rates over time are usually the ones where they've lost two or three times first and paid attention each time.

Curious whether people are actually doing this or if it's one of those things everyone knows about and nobody does.