Winning Out Loud: Oral Proposals That Win Billion-Dollar Contracts (The Roadmap To BD Success)

Winning Out Loud: Oral Proposals That Win Billion-Dollar Contracts by Jack Harris and Barbara Harris is one volume in the Roadmap To BD Success series, a modular how-to guide devised and created by CAI/SISCo. The initial wave of books (2013) is to be followed by additional volumes, each by an established authority in the content presented. This book shows you how to win your next oral proposal competition, and how to win 90 of your next 100. When you are invited to orals, that is where you will win or lose, and the guidance in this book will make you a winner.

Oral proposals were a new experiment in the federal market in 1996, and the Harrises were the first people to specialize in winning these competitions for their clients. Their previous experience as corporate executives and business unit managers, whose careers depended upon success in proposal competitions, gave them a basis for launching the new practice. Since much of their career together had entailed political advocacy for giant technology programs—that is, speechwriting, ghostwriting, personal coaching, lobbying, strategic marketing, and public relations—they also brought a mastery of all the things that make oral proposals different from written proposals.

After their first fifty oral proposal competitions (almost every one a winner) they codified and service-marked their oral proposal development process, Winning Out Loud, which is the basis for this book. Their experience on the next 200 competitions brought refinements to a process which has added many billions of dollars to the top lines of the Harrises’ clients.