Corporate qualifications for federal proposals

8 tips to help you write corporate qualifications sections.

by Dave Alexander, Lincoln Strategies, LLC


Almost all federal procurements for services require offerors to describe “corporate experience,” “corporate qualifications,” or “relevant experience.” The intent is to enable the evaluators to assess the breadth and depth of each offeror’s relevant experience in performing work of the type, magnitude, and complexity of the services being procured.

In presenting your firm’s experience, and that of your subcontractors and consultants, you want to persuade the proposal evaluators of the following:

  • You are seasoned veterans. This work is well within your firm’s comfort zone. You and your team members have successfully performed exactly the types of work that will be required under this contract.
  • Your experience is relevant. The work you are presenting as evidence of your experience is relevant on as many dimensions as possible— scope, technical complexity, magnitude, geographic area, timing, and so forth.
  • You have a sophisticated understanding of this solicitation. Your selection of contracts and projects to present in your “corporate qualifications” section or chapter and is tightly focused, reflecting your firm’s sophisticated understanding of this solicitation. Your descriptions highlight aspects of these contracts and projects that are directly relevant to this solicitation, again reinforcing your firm’s deep understanding of this solicitation.

This article provides 8 tips to help you achieve these goals.


1. Explain relevance; don’t assume it’s self-evident. 

For each contract or project that you present as evidence of your corporate qualifications, take great care to explain the relevance to the solicitation’s Statement of Work (SOW). What is obvious to you might not be so to some of the evaluators. Describe all similarities that are relevant to this solicitation. This often means that you will have to edit or tailor pre-existing project descriptions.

Does this mean that every example of corporate experience you select has to be relevant to the solicitation’s SOW on each and every dimension? No. But for each example of corporate experience that you highlight, provide a compelling rationale for its relevance.

2. Weed out the irrelevant.

It can be tempting to highlight what you consider to be “gems” in your firm’s roster of contracts and projects or examples of your corporate experience that are technically impressive, albeit not relevant to the solicitation. Resist these temptations. You will run the risk of leading evaluators to reach one or more of the following conclusions:

  • Your firm does not have much relevant experience; therefore, you’re presenting filler material to run up the page count. Alternatively, you are trying to dazzle the evaluators in a way that would only be successful if your firm assumes that the evaluators are easy to fool.
  • Your firm made an earnest attempt to provide examples of relevant experience but missed the target. Your firm apparently does not have a very good understanding of what the agency is trying to procure under this solicitation.
  • Despite the fact that your firm is known to have good corporate qualifications that are directly relevant to this solicitation, you did not take the time to customize this proposal. Your firm’s corporate qualifications section comes across as off-the-shelf boilerplate. Maybe your firm is too overloaded to write a quality proposal. Maybe your firm is resting on its laurels and assuming that it’s not necessary to describe its relevant experience within the four corners of this proposal. In any event, this simply puts more of a burden on the evaluators to slog through irrelevant material. This is not a good sign of what might be to come if your firm was awarded this contract.
3. Your team members are excellent—and relevant..

A good corporate qualifications section should always highlight the relevant experience of the offeror’s subcontractors and consultants. (In certain types of solicitations, the instructions might limit the extent to which you should present information on subcontractors and consultants. This is sometimes the case, for example, in the first step of a two-step A-E selection process.)

You should take care to describe each team member’s experience in a way that resonates well with other sections of the proposal. For example, the “Management Plan” section of your proposal might describe specific technical roles for each subcontractor and consultant. In the “Corporate Qualifications” section, you should briefly restate these roles and then highlight each subcontractor’s and consultant’s experience that is directly relevant to those roles. To do otherwise might lead evaluators to conclude that you were haphazard in selecting team members or that you do not have a clear vision of how to integrate them into your effort.

In other parts of your proposal you might be highlighting the fact that many members of your team have worked together successfully in the past. In describing the corporate qualifications of your subcontractors and consultants, try to pick contracts and projects in which you have worked together; and don’t forget to highlight these relationships somewhere in the descriptions.

4. Respect the time of the evaluators.

Government staff members who have been drafted to evaluate proposals usually have to read many proposals under tight timelines. In almost every case, the evaluators are performing this duty as a collateral assignment, taking time away from pressing line responsibilities. Therefore, any part of a proposal that is poorly organized or unfocused risks putting an evaluator in a bad frame of mind.

Evaluators will not want to spend a lot of time slogging through poorly written, badly organized, or unfocused discussions of “corporate qualifications.” Put yourself in their shoes. What if you had to read hundreds of pages of proposal materials over the next few weeks, and you encountered a badly written, lengthy description of a project that, in the final analysis, was irrelevant to the solicitation? What would you think of the company that subjected you to the torture of garbled, meandering prose or undefined jargon? Would you take the time to decipher it?

Your best bet to avoid these problems is to figure out how to present your corporate qualifications in as crisp a manner as possible. Think about options such as:

  • Using matrices and exhibits to highlight relevant corporate experience, where the reviewer can easily see the relevance of each contract or project with respect to key areas of the SOW or key evaluation criteria.
  • Organizing your discussion of corporate experience thematically, where the major themes are defined by, for example: (1) the SOW; and/or (2) your understanding of the problem; and/or (3) the evaluation criteria.
  • Succinctly describing your corporate qualifications in text, with numbered cross-references to formal project descriptions, and relegating the actual project descriptions to an appendix.
5. Describe challenges.

Whenever possible, enliven your discussion of corporate qualifications by describing the special challenges that your firm overcame, such as these listed below.

  • Your firm had to perform the project under particularly tight timelines. (Better yet: Your firm was confronted with unforeseen events out of your control, which delayed project startup; nevertheless, you were able to modify your approach and complete the project within the original deadlines.)
  • The project required your firm to integrate an unusually broad spectrum of technical disciplines.
  • The project presented particularly tough technical challenges (describe them).
  • The project required your firm to perform many analyses under conditions of substantial uncertainty (e.g., unknown site conditions, regulatory uncertainty).
  • The project required your firm to apply sophisticated diplomatic skills (e.g., in interacting with other agencies, in helping the client interact with the public, in interacting with other prime contractors associated with the project).
  • The project presented tough writing challenges (e.g., our firm had to prepare multiple versions of some documents to address different audiences).
6. Write each description as a sales piece.

In discussing your firm’s corporate experience and writing individual project descriptions, always keep in mind that this is sales activity. You’re not describing the project to illustrate a chapter of a textbook or to support a short-course. In a proposal you want to convince the evaluator to draw the following conclusions about each example of your experience that you provide:

  • I understand the project that your firm performed. I understand which methods your firm used and the results that the project achieved.
  • I understand the types of functional or subject matter experience and skills that your firm applied to the project.
  • I understand the special challenges that your company faced and how your firm overcame them.
  • Your firm pays attention to good writing. Reading this description was almost enjoyable.

To achieve these goals, describe tangible indicators of the quality of your firm’s work, such as:

  • The client was so pleased with your firm’s work that he or she awarded substantial follow-on work.
  • The project was completed on time and within budget.
  • You received formal commendations from your client.
  • At each critical juncture of the project, the inspection and review process went smoothly.
  • Your firm’s excellent work helped your client succeed (e.g., by enabling your client to stay on schedule and meet their externally imposed deadlines; by helping your client win praise from external parties or stakeholders).
  • The project resulted in an award for your firm (e.g., a design award).
7. Less is more.

Many GSA RFPs place tight page limits on each section of the technical proposal. If possible, try to be even more succinct. Writing reams of material is not a good strategy. You are not competing against other companies: GSA will award you a contract if your proposal is acceptable with respect to the RFP’s evaluation criteria. If you write a tome, you will jeopardize your proposal. Overachieve in another way: write sections that are persuasive and brief.

8. Write outside the boxes.

The “corporate experience” section or chapter of your proposal will obviously be your most important opportunity to convince the evaluators that your firm and your subcontractors and consultants are highly experienced in performing the type of work being procured. Many successful proposal writers try to reinforce this theme in other parts of the proposal, in sections such as these listed below.

  • Understanding of the Problem. This section or chapter will focus on your understanding and insights into the technical problems that the selected contractor will have to solve. In this discussion, you can make it clear that your insights are based, in part, on lessons learned from similar successful projects that you have performed. This gives you an opportunity to briefly describe this experience.
  • Technical Approach. In describing your proposed approach and its merits, you can emphasize that your confidence is based, in part, on the methods you have honed by virtue of having performed similar projects. Again, this gives you an opportunity to describe- briefly- the breadth and depth of your corporate experience.
  • Sample Work Plan. Some solicitations for task order-type contracts present a sample task order for which offerors are required to prepare a work plan. In describing your understanding of the problem and your proposed approach for this particular task order, you again have an excellent opportunity to describe specific examples of your corporate experience.
  • Management Plan. In this section or chapter you will focus on your firm’s systems and procedures for ensuring that you perform high-quality work, on time and within budget. You can improve the credibility of this section or chapter by briefly establishing that your proposed systems and procedures are based on your successful experience in performing similar contracts.
Copyright © 2015, Lincoln Strategies, LLC

The author of this article, Dave Alexander, the Principal of Lincoln Strategies, LLC, can be reached at (978) 369-1140, or dave.alexander@LincolnStrategies.com.