How to Write a Government GSA Contract Proposal - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show how Proposal Kit is used to create proposals for GSA product and service sales proposals. These two types of proposals are typically created for posting on the GSA's website and they're going to be a little more free form and use usually more graphics and branding then say a government RFP response for a grant or a federal proposal, which are also proposals that can be created with Proposal Kit. This video will focus on creating GSA product and service sales proposals.

We do have an article on our website you can read how to write a government GSA contract and this will go over what we're covering in this video. If you just scroll down the article it will have links to two examples that are included in every Proposal Pack. One example of a product sales proposal and a service sales proposal created with Proposal Packs.

We have lots of different design themes, we have hundreds and hundreds of visual design themes. This article has links off to our Flag series which are just versions of red, white and blue USA flags. But you can use any of our Proposal Pack design themes.

Typically you'll pick a design theme that matches the look of your own company logo, color scheme and so on, your type of business or you can use these flag designs. You can use our plain design pack with no graphics. We have brandable packs where you can create your own design themes.

Our Wizard Expert Edition software has features that allow you to completely customize our design themes, swap in your own photos, logos and so on or create your own design theme. This is just the visual look of the documents. Once you have your Proposal Kit installed whatever Proposal Pack design theme will be your current style.

We've selected our Flag #6 just for illustration purposes. Whenever we're going to create a document whether it's a proposal, business plan, report, study or so on you just click this Document Projects button. Then click the Add New Project button and then click this Pick Documents button.

Now the Pick Documents screen is where you have access to the thousands of chapter templates for building up your proposal document. This first screen of check boxes will be the 40 most common templates most people use for proposals out of the thousands that are available. Like a Cover Letter, Title Page, Back Page, Table of Contents, Executive Summary, Products and Services.

You have the basic stuff. We do have a drop down here where you can actually get down to categories of chapters where you can get to the rest of the thousands of templates. You can get down to talking about just your company information, financial pages, grants, we have this category here government contracts.

That category is going to have a set of templates that are more specific to the GSA type proposals like Awarded SINs. This is your list of awarded SIN numbers, Special Attributes. Some of these might be templates you might want to or be required to add to your GSA contract.

We'll show this in the examples. This is how you can get to all of the chapters that you can use to build up your proposals. There's categories for types of businesses you might be in.

Say you're doing construction work, medical, IT and so on. Or you can just use the Search by Name if you need to search for a specific chapter in our library you can just search by a word here if you need to say find a mission statement or a budget template or templates to talk about individual product or service information. The samples, this is where you can get to our hundreds of samples that are included including the two GSA contract examples and they're all sorted alphabetically.

You can also use the Search Samples button and just search on the word GSA or contract, government contract, or so on. You just scroll down alphabetically and find the government contract product sales or service sales and we'll just start with the product sales example. These examples are two proposals that have been assembled using this process we're showing and then someone filled in all the pages and completed the proposal and then that is our sample.

So, you're not limited to what you see in the samples here. You can expand on these with additional chapters and you'll write in your own content into the pages you can use these samples actually as your starting point as well and we'll do that here. If you just want to look at the PDF version of the sample you can click this button here and this will open up an acrobat version of the sample and the first page of the examples will show you what chapters were checked off in this Pick Documents screen.

For this particular sample you can see the Awarded SINs and Special Attributes. We pointed out since this is a product proposal it's got a products page and it's got the government GSA cover sheet. This uses a different visual design theme, this uses one of our line art flag designs.

The GSA template and you can always pull down the current version of this template page from the GSA website and then the Customer Information. Again, this is kind of a standard GSA set of questions so you can always pull down this current version from the GSA website. Awarded SINs, this is the awarded SINs chapter that someone has filled in with actual information.

Special Attributes page and so on. We're just going to import this sample into our project and what this is going to do is it's going to load our project with these seven chapters out of the library and it's going to mark this project to import the actual sample content into the document that it's going to generate. Now that we've imported this project you can see the number of chapters that were imported.

We can always click this View and Reorder templates to see what chapters are selected and we can add more chapters. Even though this is a sample we're importing we can add additional chapters from the library into this layout if we need to expand on say the product information or the company information. You can see chapters have been checked off.

If we want to add a Table of Contents we can add that. If we want to add an Executive Summary to the front, if we want to add some more financial information, more product details and so on. Once we've selected all of our chapters just click the OK, Use Selected Templates button and we're back on the project screen.

I'm going to turn off the dynamic Excel spreadsheet linking because this proposal doesn't need it because we're not linking Excel spreadsheet cells directly into the Word document in in this particular case. This is also an Expert Edition feature. I'll give our project a title.

Now we'll look at the Company Data and Client Data screens. This is just going to be your company name and address information and then whoever you're writing the proposal to. This type of proposal, these GSA ones, are posted onto the Internet typically onto the GSA's website.

So, you're not typically writing the proposal to a specific individual, it'll be more of a high level who you're writing it to. All right, now that we've entered all the chapters, we've got the company and client data in there. Click the OK, Save Project button and now the Wizard is going to build us that template pulling in the sample content and it's going to build it in this Flag #6 design theme.

This is one of the reasons why the Wizard dynamically builds templates on the fly because they can be configured visually and through the content in countless different ways. Okay, this template's been generated. We'll open that up and take a look at it and you can see this is pulling in the sample content.

If you don't pull in the sample content these will be fill in the blank instructional text. This is name and address tags that were merged in from our company and client data tags so this will be whatever you information you put into the form. We've got the Flag #6 design theme, so this will be in whatever design theme you purchased and selected.

You'll see the Customer Information page which is common for GSA contracts and again you'll just fill in your own information into the form, the list of your products, prices and so on, awarded SIN numbers, special attributes page and then a back cover. If you look around at GSA service and product proposals on the GSA website you'll see they follow a similar structure and they'll all look a little different and typically there are going to be branded with that company's logos and visual look. Then they'll expand on the basic product pages or services pages with more information.

They'll all more or less follow the structure you see here. Proposal Kit is used to get you a leg up in getting your initial proposal documents created and we'll illustrate the second example showing the services example. To create a second proposal just click the Document Projects button again, click Add New Project and again let's go into the samples tab and we'll pull up the GSA services example.

Import the content and notice this has a slightly different set of chapters so instead of the products page it has the services page, has a labor rates page but it still has the cover information and customer information page but notice this one drops out the Awarded SINs page. That's just for this particular sample. How you structure yours is going to depend on what information you need to provide.

Again, enter your Company Data and your Client Data and when you click OK, Save Project it will build your document. Okay, this example has been generated and you'll just see it's got a similar GSA cover page with just different information, name and address information, merged in. You see that we gave this title in the Client Data screen so that title got merged in.

You have the customer information page again filled in, the labor rates page the services page, information about your personnel and you can expand on this with much more information if you needed to. You can expand on your company information with your capabilities, certifications, references, qualifications and so on. So that is how you can create a GSA product or service sales proposal using Proposal Kit.

Once you've created it you save it as a PDF document and upload it to the GSA website.