Pricing Strategy, Price-to-Win and Price Proposal Services

Suss Consulting has been supporting clients with winning pricing strategies, price-to-win analysis, and price proposal preparation for over 40 years. We organize support teams of program subject matter experts, business development/capture specialists, and pricing analysts with decades of experience. We help clients assess risk and profitability tradeoffs and develop profitable contract execution strategies as well as winning proposal strategies.

We've provided proposal pricing support across the spectrum of federal information technologies, including:

Fixed Price, Time and Materials, and Cost Plus Professional Services
Engineering Services
Operations and Maintenance Services
Help Desk Services
Cloud Service Migration and Management
Terrestrial and Satellite Network Services
COTS and Custom Software
Software-as-a-Service
Cloud Services
Managed Services

Our client engagements leverage the best of client and consulting pricing resources. We support clients ranging from large federal and DoD marketplace leaders to mid-tiers, small businesses, and new market entrants. The leaders of our pricing practice are:

Peter Dube, a seasoned business executive who built a $1.5 billion contract portfolio across defense and civil markets, is our point for pricing strategy development and execution.
Pete Alpaugh, a project manager with almost 30 years of experience supporting pricing strategies, analysis and proposal development, is our lead on day-to-day client engagement management and task execution.
Alex Filoteanu, an expert pricing and market research analyst with over 25 years of direct client support, is our manager for pricing data analysis.

The Suss Consulting Approach to Pricing Strategy

Pricing strategy begins with a top-down analysis of the target program office’s organization, budget constraints and contract histories.

Budget commitments and risks
Historical contract award values and spend rates
Published labor ceiling rates
Contracting office preferences and approaches

The second, parallel approach to pricing strategy development is a bottom-up analysis of project tasks, cost elements and assumptions.

Work breakdown analysis
Cost estimates for direct labor, equipment, software, and facilities
Assessments of competitor approaches, tools, and cost drivers
Estimates of competitive indirect rates for fringe, overhead, G&A, and handling
Quotes from subcontractors and suppliers

Key cost and price items vary widely depending on the type of project, the customer’s priorities, and the likely competitive field. In general, win prices include analysis of the following.

Different risk profiles for labor, cost, and fixed price contracts and task orders
Competitive subcontract sourcing and bidding across services and materials
Likely strategies across competitors for appropriate rate and fee structures
Shrewd analysis of services the customer needs vs stated requirements
Opportunities to grow contract revenue and profit over the period of performance
Challenges to engineering teams on alternate, lower cost technical approaches
Preparation of reasonable solution assumptions that reduce the evaluated price

Suss Consulting Pricing and Price-to-Win Consulting Services

Suss Consulting provides pricing support across the contract lifecycle – from opportunity assessment, competitive analysis, bid/no-bid decision, price-to-win analysis, B-table completion, and price proposal narrative development.

Basis of Estimate – The Suss pricing team will work with Suss Consulting and client solution engineers to prepare an estimated level of effort across services, equipment, software, and professional labor. They will work with the client to identify commercially available and project-specific benchmarks that can be reasonably applied to project tasking. They will develop time-phased estimates to map project resources to schedules, deliverables, and service levels.

Labor Rates – The Suss team of pricing experts will organize an effective mix of standard and project-specific labor categories with job descriptions and minimum education, experience, and certification requirements. They will compile and analyze government and commercial salary survey data and map labor categories into the basis of estimate documentation. They will consult with internal resourcing and external human resources surveys to establish competitive indirect rates and fees.

Business Case – The Suss pricing team will identify the significant drivers of project costs and profitability. They will assess the prior, stated, and likely levels of demand across product and service sets. They will estimate expected opportunities for unspecified post-award contract growth based on the operating environment, decision makers, and competing vehicles. They will prepare pro-forma profit and loss estimates with sensitivity bands around key cost variables.

Price-to-Win and Pricing Workbook Development – The Suss pricing team will organize detailed proposal price-to-win workbook templates and supporting files providing the client with transparent access to all data sources, formulas for estimates and projections, and modeling assumptions. They will prepare strategies to guide the division of labor and will develop data call packages for subcontracted services, equipment, and supplies. They will populate proposal worksheets, audit formulas and line-item build-ups, and conduct sensitivity analyses on key variables. They will help the client finalize the documentation package for delivery to the customer.

Proposal Narrative – The team of Suss pricing experts will help to prepare compelling, compliant, and concise proposal narrative outlines and content themes. They will develop proposal copy with supporting tables, graphics, and attachments. They will facilitate color team reviews with clear instructions for feedback from reviewers. They will edit cost/price content as needed based on color reviews and prepare the document for submission with other proposal volumes.