Name: Proposal Cloud Deep Dive: Time-Saving Features That Win
Uploaded: 2025-09-24T16:16:11.004Z
Duration: 56 min 8 s
Description: Proposal Cloud Deep Dive: Time-Saving Features That Win

Transcript for "Proposal Cloud Deep Dive: Time-Saving Features That Win": Alright. Guys, thanks again for joining us. My name is Merrill Angelicola. I am pretty sure that I likely know a lot of you guys. GovCon is small. But on the chance that I don't know you, or, you know, we haven't crossed paths before, I will go ahead and introduce myself. So, I see a lot of customers here. I see a lot of folks that we've worked with in the past, but I also see some new faces. So, my name again is Merrill Angela Cola. I am our VP of industry solutions. I have spent twenty years in GovCon. I started when I was 19, and I am 39 now. So, actually, you know, quite literally more than half my life, it's all I've ever known, and I love it. I have done pretty much the whole spectrum of the workflow, at one point in my career from capture to proposals to delivery. And about two years ago, I, connected with the founders of GovDash, when it was just the founders and some engineers, and they asked me to come on board. I really believed in what they were building, but I had most importantly felt the pain points that they wanted to solve, so I wanted to be part of that. So I've been here since the beginning, and it's one of the best decisions I ever made. I at GovDash, I have a a few different hats, but one is helping, and working with our brilliant engineers. And when I say brilliant, I genuinely mean that they are some of the smartest, people I've ever worked with, and I'm really excited that, they are GovCon's engineers now. Right? We haven't had a lot of tools that were built for us historically. And now we've got an entire team of folks that are, building technology specifically for our workflows, and they're brilliant. So, my one of my jobs is to help them, understand our workflows and some of the pain points that we have and work with them on product and design for scope. And then my other half of what I do is leading our customer success team. We take a white glove approach with GovDash, and we'll talk about it here in a moment. You'll get a chance to interact with some of them in the chat. But we have a team called the pro team, and they are the ones that provide our customer support onboarding and account management. And then finally, I am also the founder of Proposal Team, which is a nonprofit, in this space. We provide free training to folks that want to get into GovCon and proposals from outside industries. You may have seen some of our memes on LinkedIn, especially around the spooky season with Halloween coming up. So, I alluded to this, but, we've got some folks in the chat today. So as you have questions, please put them in the chat, and they're gonna make sure that we've got them organized so that we can answer them. These are folks that come from industry as well. So everybody on our support team is a former proposal manager, capture manager, or delivery. And when I say former, I don't actually mean that. I think once a proposal manager, always a proposal manager. You know, you gotta love what you do to do this for a long time. But those are the folks that we have supporting us. It's a team of 12 people, and I'm really glad to have them as part of our team. Again, if you have questions, please, you know, put them in the chat, and then we will answer them as we go. If by some chance we don't get to your question, during this call, we will send out answers to those questions as well to make sure that you get the information that you need. Okay. So we have some new faces here and also some customers. So as a refresher or for folks that are new, GovDash is an operating system for GovCon and BD Teams. I alluded to this earlier on, but for a very long time in GovCon, we really didn't have a lot of options when it came to software that was built specifically for what we do, and our workflows. Right? And I don't have to tell you guys this, but I'll say it just for the sake of saying it. GovCon is a very unique industry. It can look somewhat simple from the outside, but once you get in, and have to navigate all of the, compliance requirements and regulations and working with the government, there's a lot of, you know, inflexibility there for good reason. There's reasons why we do the things the way that we do. One of the reasons I joined GovDash is because, I was getting a lot of calls from other companies that were trying to build for GovCon, and they basically wanted to fix the way that we worked. And that's not something I was interested in. Right? Because there are reasons for doing things the way that we do them. Yes, there's ways that we can be efficient and we can do things, you know, we can automate them, but they're the method to the madness. Teaming partners work together. It's an established process for a reason. And at GovDash, we're different because we lead with a very high respect for that process, and a very high understanding of that process. So as we go throughout today, I'm gonna talk to you about, my experience with traditional processes and some of the things that were most frustrating for me, and then show you in the system how we automate those and make those things so much easier. If you've seen demos for other software, I can promise you with a high degree of certainty that you've never seen anything like this before. So, set all of your, you know, expectations aside. I'm I'm gonna show you some really cool things today, and I think you'll be just as excited as I am. Alright. So building on what I was just talking about, how we're different. One of the foundational truths of GovDash and one of the first things that we built for when I joined was the fact that our goal is to win contracts, not just submit proposals. So, with AI, anybody can write something that sounds pretty good. Right? They can do it pretty quickly. But is that going to win you the contract, or are we setting people up for, a reality where they are just submitting more losing proposals faster than they did before. That is more stress on proposal teams. That is more money out the door for small companies. It is not success by any definition, and that is not what we do at GovDash. Winning proposals or winning, you know, proposals that win contracts are not created in a vacuum, and that is paramount to everything that we build, at GovDash. So as part of this, our foundation, is a three cloud approach. On the bottom or on the top here, you guys can see, but it's really the foundation of everything. We have our contract cloud, and that is where you manage your past performance. This is a single source of truth for your teams to work from so that you all have information about your past performance. You're able to manage it and see what you have. But more importantly, or just as importantly, this is also a foundation for GovDash to pull from. Right? So as you're going throughout the process, we wanna make sure that you and your team and also GovDash have access to really good information about what you've done in the past. This is something that AI cannot fake because it is your past performance. And in the age of AI where AI can fake a lot of things, your competitors, you know, have access to AI, this becomes even more critical. And so we build our entire system around it, and it impacts and informs everything we do. Next, we have the capture cloud, and this, is just exactly what it sounds like. This is an area for you to manage your pipeline, but more than that, it also guides your team through capture planning, gathering information, and coming up with a solution. Right? Depending on how much time you have before the RFP, even if you find it after the RFP is released, having a an understanding of what you're going to offer the customer, is really, really critical, and it's one of the most important steps to writing a proposal that can actually turn into a contract. I'm gonna show you this today. This is one of the things we're gonna talk about, but that is a a foundational element of our system. And then finally, we have proposal cloud. And this is, you know, a suite of tools that I will go into detail today that shows, basically, where you are at in the process. It takes all that information, your great past performance that you base selecting the opportunity on, analyzing the opportunity against, all of the capture that your team has put in the system, all the work they've done, the relationships they've built, the notes, the solutions, all of that then gets past the proposal cloud, and your team has a really great starting point to work from, to get to a pink team draft and then continue your reviews throughout the process. So today, we're focusing primarily on the proposal cloud. We do have several recordings that we've done with the other clouds if you guys are interested in those, and they are up on our website. So we can send out a link after this. But if you're interested in seeing the system more and how these other clouds interact, those are great resources too. Alright. So, one of the things that I love about GovDash, is that it's a shared experience. So I've only ever worked in GovDash. I don't know if it's the same in every other industry. All I know is that GovDash is unique, to other industries, but it is not unique when you're in it. And what I mean by that is, you know, with my with my nonprofit, we work with a lot of mentors that come in from other companies, that, you know, folks that are senior in proposals and capture and they're mentoring new folks that want to get into the industry. We also have students that come in that are just starting in the industry. The thing that I learned, and I didn't really fully understand this until about ten years ago when I started the nonprofit, is that it really is a shared experience. The the good that comes with that is great. So you have, a lot of predictability. There's a lot of information out there. Having an established process allows you to work with teaming partners very well. Folks that you just met, maybe, you know, the day that you do the kickoff, everybody kind of has that same understanding and workflows. They can work together very well and very quickly. The camaraderie, the connections, all of that is fantastic. And and the shared goal of doing something that matters, you know, and supporting these initiatives and missions with the government. All of that is great. But then the other side of this is it's also a shared experience with the frustrations and a lot of the things that, we've all experienced over and over and over again for a very long time. And there's just not time to figure out a better way to do it, and sometimes there just isn't a better way to do it. Right? Like, most of the time, these things are manual processes that they need to be done, that we need the outcome, we need the deliverable, we need the tool because it helps us, ensures we're compliant, ensures we have a good story to tell, but it takes a lot of manual work and a lot of hours. And the other shared experience is that people waste a lot of money and time submitting proposals that don't have a chance of winning because they're not, tailored to the customer or they don't utilize capture information well because that's not available. And the other shared experience that there's a lot of all nighters that are pulled. Right? A lot of weekend work, a lot of, holiday work. I can tell you guys if you're on this call right now and you're in proposals, I am very honored that you're taking, you know, forty five minutes out of your day during the end of fiscal year, to, you know, hear me out, and I take that very seriously. So, I know that it's it's it's bad. Right? It it could be very, very stressful and very, very time consuming. So there are some shared experiences that we wanna make better, and that is one of the first things that GovDash aimed to, solve and what I'm gonna show you today because we really have, gone a long way to solve a lot of those friction points. The first thing so these are five areas that whenever I started a proposal, whenever I was assigned a proposal, I knew that these things had to be done. Right? And I typically, it would take me, like, the first forty eight hours after an RFP was released. I just told my family, you know, I've got a little girl, my husband. I was like, hey, guys. You know what? Dinner is in the freezer or here's, you know, the number to the pizza restaurant, but, like, I'm gonna be locked in my room for forty eight hours, unfortunately, because I need to do all this work. And it's, like, sixty hours of work, and I only have forty eight hours to do it. The clock starts ticking. So the first thing that happens is the compliance matrix. For me, this is nonnegotiable. I don't know if you guys have the same outlook, but I will wake up at 03:00 in the morning, very stressed about compliance. This is every proposal manager's nightmare. The compliance matrix is a fantastic tool. It allows you to bring other people into the compliance checking process. It makes compliance a team sport, which is critical because no human being can catch everything. So you want to have those levels of support. That being said, it takes forever to create a compliance matrix. Many hours of many hours of manual copying and pasting. As soon as I put that in the spreadsheet, I'm already second guessing that I maybe I missed something that was in the RFP, so I'm constantly going back and forth to verify with the RFP. And then as soon as an amendment comes out, it's already obsolete, and it can be very, stressful and challenging to make sure that you catch everything. That is one pain point. Another pain point here is that when you are looking at your capabilities, as far as, like, what have we done and how does this line up with, this opportunity, it takes many hours of manual work to find that relevant past performance. Many times information is missing because you don't know where past performance is or you've got limited visibility. The PWS only gives you half of the story, and you don't know where all the, you know, deliverables are or status reports. And it's often done last minute due to time constraints. And at the point that it's done, a lot of times the RFP is released. There's no more time to come up with another teaming situation. Right? And so if you have gaps that you weren't anticipating, it's really difficult to fill those gaps when you're in the middle of an active proposal. The last three here are having no defined solution or strategy, capturing solution notes are everywhere. Writers work in silos without a shared vision. Messaging is unclear or cluttered. I don't know if you've had this experience, but, there's been many times when I needed to write an executive summary, and I go to the pink team draft, and I can't be sensitive any of it. Right? It all feels very disconnected, copied and pasted from other proposals. And if you feel that way, then your evaluators will feel that way too. Key personal resumes often come in at the last minute. There are many proposals that need to be reviewed and edited, and they are compliance risk waiting to happen. And then finally, when you get that pink team draft, the the largest portion of the schedule historically is, you know, you've got limited time. Let's say you've got two weeks to respond. A good three to five days of that is going to be people writing content for a pink team draft. And as you guys know, very few people, this is their only job. Right? And so we're often competing for subject matter experts' time and attention, and they're not using that entire five day period to write a pink team draft. Right? Oftentimes, they're waiting until the end, and what we will get is missing sections, content pasted in from other proposals, empty claims without proof, and now you have to fix it, with the remaining time that you have. So there's not as much time to iterate. And this is a this is one of the areas where people really fall into submitting a generic or noncompliant or non compelling proposal. And the very scariest thing, I alluded this at the beginning, submitting more proposals that lose and just doing that faster, which is the, risk of using AI that is not tailored on the back end with these, very specific workload workflow driven processes, that we have hooked into the back end of GovDash. It's not the easiest way to do it. Right? Like, it would have been much easier just to have a chatbot that we ask you to submit, you know, attach files to and ask you questions. That's one way to do it. But, we didn't wanna take that approach because, again, we want to solve these problems and not just give a Band Aid. And so we have really worked on these workflows on the back end. The logic that goes into proposals and winning them millions of dollars depend on that. Right? And so we think it deserves, more than a chatbot. So that's what I'm gonna show you guys today. These are a few of my favorite Govdash proposal tools, that I use to address the issues that I just talked through. I'm gonna take a quick break and just look at do we have any questions? Doesn't look like we do. Okay. Just as a reminder, as we go through this, please put your questions in the chat. You may have more questions, by the end of this because we're gonna show you some really cool things, and that's fine. So don't be shy, put as many questions as you want. We will stop and address as many of them as we can. And then if we don't get to it again, just as a reminder, we will answer your question, afterwards just so you've got the information. Alright. So everybody should be able to see my screen now. Sam, are you able to see my screen? Great. Okay. Cool. This is the GovDash interface. So, we've got a few different things here. Just very quickly, as you can see, we have a dashboard that's going to keep you organized. It's something that's super helpful. It is, going to bring everything together. We also have a life cycle, so you can see across the board where opportunities live, not just in the proposal phase or not just in the capture phase, but all the way over to evaluation, one lost, canceled, all of that because winning proposals are not, written in silos, so we connect the workflow workflow for you. We talked about the contract inventory where you collect your past performance and you, are creating these records of past performance that are detailed and everybody on your team, if you give them access to it, can, you know, learn about your past performance, but especially GovDash. And you can collect documents, status reports. You're not just stopping with the PWS or the contract. You're also adding many other things like resumes, contract awards, things like that, deliverables, monthly status reports, all of that is important. And then we have the capture cloud where you manage your pipeline. All of these are important to proposals because, again, they feed the proposal, life cycle. Then you get into the proposal cloud, and this is where we help you manage your active proposals and respond to them and write to them. So I talked a little bit about at the beginning, some of the things that are the most stressful for me. So the first thing is that compliance matrix. When you add an opportunity to GovDash, when you upload it, it starts in the capture phase and then it moves to proposal. The great thing about GovDash is when you are in the capture phase, if you have a draft RFP or you have a previous RFP, your capture team is able to help you prepare for a potential proposal response before the RFP ever drops. And that's important because you're still able to talk to the government customer at that point and influence the outcome. Some of the tools that we use to help you here are something called shreds. So, this is where when you upload a document to GovDash, we are not only, storing it like you would in something like, a SharePoint, but we are actively shredding it and we are, breaking it apart behind the scenes and we are understanding it, creating connections between data, so that you can utilize these documents throughout the process, very well. This is our shred view. So if you love highlighters like me, you're gonna like this. We highlight a lot of, a lot you know, in similar ways to the way that I do it when I shred a document, where I'm looking for proposal preparation instructions, task areas, evaluation, shall will must statements. This is important because they're not always included, just in section l or section m, and that is one of my biggest fears. Right? Like, how do we find all the requirements everywhere within this very large document? This allows your team to all be in control or all have responsibility when it comes to ensuring your suitability for going after an opportunity. So the reason I bring this up on the on the proposal call, this is within capture, but it allows your capture team to look at red flags that, may be an issue for you. Right? So not only can they see this and they can look at the things that are most important, but they can use our chat assistant to ask things like, are there security requirements us from bidding. Other security requirements prevent us from bidding. I don't know if you've had this experience. I have where you get all the way to the RP phase, and no one caught, the fact that you needed a facility clearance and it was very visible in the previous iteration that you guys had access to. And you put a ton of work into preparing for this, and now the RFP comes out, and there's a facility clearance requirement. And now there's no time to find a prime with that facility clearance. So you have to just not bid it rather than, being able to catch it in the capture phase and being able to find your team, right, that would, allow you to bid that as a sub. This is a great way to do that. Of course, there's lots of different use cases for this. We also do this when the RFP comes out at the proposal phase. So you are able to utilize this throughout every piece of the proposal. We also give you a a download that I will show you here in just a little bit, that is an Excel spreadsheet. So talking about that compliance matrix, that takes forever to copy and paste, it's a very important tool, but it is it takes a really long time. So we want to be able to give that to you guys without, having you manually do all of that. And this is that file that you will see. So, make my screen a little bit bigger. We're able to show you, you know, exactly what the requirements are. You can, you know, filter this or you can, make it however you want it to, but this is a tool that your team can utilize to help you, check compliance. Right? And so if you have folks that like to do it the manual way, we're giving you that tools. They don't even have to go into GovDash, and they can use this. And you didn't have to copy and paste, but you still have that tool that you can give to your teammates to help check compliance and make sure that everybody is on the same page. Alright. Let me check questions. Alright. Still good on questions. The next piece here is, so let me show you our other compliance tab. So that's the shred area. We give you an Excel document, but compliance is critical, and it's very stressful. So we also give you a compliance view. And this is going to go, section by section, document by document, and it's going to pull each of the requirements. It's going to show you where they live. It's going to categorize them. And so you can very quickly see like, let's say we want to, just look at what the instructions are. You can pull them out. Okay? So you can see all the instructions here. You can see where they live in the document. You can go and reference them. The other thing that you can see is let's look by outline section. So when GovDash generates an outline for you, you want to be able to go and make sure that everything that we're doing, is mapped back to a requirement. You want to understand what those requirements are. Now you're able to see this very quickly, and you're able to see what document they came out of, what page they're on, if they're accounted for within the the outline. This is a peace of mind, tool that helps you check things for compliance without taking many, many hours away from strategy. It equips more people on your team to do this, and it really is a great fail safe to have, as a tool in your toolkit because now everybody can be compliance minded. You can give this to your writers when they are reviewing or writing. If you have somebody that is, you know, recovering a section, after your pink team, this is a great tool to give this to them so they could see exactly the requirements that need to be, within their section. You can also export this to Excel as well. Alright. So that is the first thing, the the compliance matrix. Again, this is something that gets built in five minutes when you upload, an RFP to our system, and it can be done at any phase including the capture phase, where you're able to assess opportunities, but even into the proposal phase. The next thing that I love, is our capabilities matrix tool. Now this, again, is something that would take forever. Writing past performance, mapping past performance, all of that, doing a gap analysis, it all requires that you have access to your past performance. So the first thing that GovDash does to help you here is, just by nature of purchasing GovDash or, utilizing GovDash, so onboarding AI to your company, with GovDash, You are teaching your team and aligning them with best practices. Because in order to use GovDash well, you have to have your foundation of past performance set. And, if I've learned anything about a shared experience in twenty years of supporting companies, it's that that past performance information and record, it is a problem that every company really struggles with. After the end of fiscal year, most companies that I've worked with take the the down months to go through all their past performance and try to write records. Right? And so that everybody has the information. They don't have to go to this next year. But as soon as you write them, they're already obsolete because these are living, in many cases, active, contracts that are continuing to generate activity and really great proof points that aren't reflected in the PWS, or if they're inactive contracts, you never got to collect those things in the first place because you were too busy. Right? And that is that is a competitive disadvantage. So GovDash starts you off on your foundation strong, and we work with your contract team. Again, our pro team, so folks that are betting proposals and capture and contracts and delivery, and they're experts on GovDash. We work with your contracts team to get your information in a place where, it's going to help GovDash give you the best outcome and also help your team be, really equipped and empowered with that information. One of the ways that we do that, because you have your past performance in GovDash, and because we shred the RFP and the PWS document and we understand it, as soon as you add something to your pipeline and as soon as you have either a draft RFP or a PWS or previous one, you are able to do a capabilities assessment, an in-depth one. And your activity here or the action required on your end is no longer, many, many, many hours of manual, you know, seek and find. It's just clicking a button. And what GovDash is able to do is it's able to cross reference the task area requirements within the PWS and then look at your past performance and give you a rating, high, medium, or low. And this is very valuable, but just having this rating is not enough information. So in addition to that, we also give you in-depth explanations. You can run this at the click of a button on every past performance contract, in your inventory if you wanna really just get an idea of what you've got. Or if you if you know the contracts that you want to utilize, you can just load those up. And either way, you're going to get, a really good explanation of why we rated things the way that we did. So the past performance contract involves administrative and logistics coordination services, including some of these things. But the task area requires that they rekey or replace the effective lock. So sometimes these these titles in these PWS documents, administrative and logistic coordination services, that could be in the PWS. If we just look at that at a high level, we may assume, oh, yeah. We've done that before. Right? But unless someone takes time to actually get into the PWS and look at it, they wouldn't know that this is actually replacing locks. Right? This is this is actually more logistics than administration, and it's very specific. How many times have have you looked at a PWS document in capture and just looked at the titles because you didn't have time to go through the whole thing. This is helping you guys uncover, areas that would keep you from bidding well, on soft on, you know, a a proposal. Right? To keep you from, having holes in your team that you didn't account for once that RFP comes out. It's not the end of the world if you don't have every bit of experience, but you want to know as early as possible where you're weak so that you can start lining up a team early, and you can get the right people, and you can get to them before anybody else does. You can also prep folks on your team. If you find out let's say that you do have, you know, high experience in an area and you're not planning to use this particular past performance, but you see that it's rated high. Well, let's see why it's rated high, and then let me see if I can get this person who's delivering for the customer. Right? An employee of our company who's delivering to help us with this proposal or review this proposal because I didn't realize that they had experience with this, right, or they're doing this right now. You don't have to necessarily use this as past performance, but you can use it as, an overview to understand who your experts are within your staff. This is one of my favorite tools in GovDash. If I had had this, my first of all, we would have joined a whole lot more proposals across every company. But I would have been able to be so much more strategic because this is the information you need for strategy, and strategy is what wins contracts. Alright. In addition to this, just a quick note, we also provide an export option, and I will show you here. So if you, you know, have a, data call that you wanna send out to a teammate or they're asking you about things, we not only provide, you know, the high level rating by contract, but we're also going to give you the explanations here. So this will save your team a ton of time in having to do this manually. Alright. So we've gotten through two of the five. Let's keep going. So the third thing, that used to drive me crazy was, kicking off a proposal and no one being able to articulate what our solution was or people being able to articulate it, but it being, something that was very technical. And, I had not been involved in the conversations up until that point and neither had our writers. And so we are now all having to catch up to try to understand what the ideal solution looks like because proposal managers are the vision holders. We need to be able to understand what it is we're selling so that we can understand if we're doing a good enough job of it within the proposal. And most proposals that are generic or discombobulated, like, the fatal flaw of those proposals comes down to nobody being able to articulate what that shared vision is and what that solution is. If you can't articulate it and you can't pick it out within your proposal, then chances are high that your evaluators will also not be able to do that. So we wanna make sure that we have a very good idea of what our, solution is going to be. So in GovDash, we don't just give you a pipeline and, we don't just, you know, let you manage opportunities. We actually give you visibility into the process. We have you know, these are questions that I personally have used over twenty eight years of, experience when I'm gathering information and intel about solutioning and an opportunity, and I'm helping to guide capture managers to use that time before RFP to give us the information that we need. And now we're giving those questions to you. In addition, you can also create custom questions if your team has those as well. But these are the things that you really need to know in order to write a good proposal or make an assessment of bid or no bid. What are the win themes that we want to write to? Who are teaming partners for the role? What is the level of effort anticipated? Right? And these are things that are not always gonna be in an RFP. You want to talk to the contracting officer or the, you know, technical person who is actually doing the work on the ground, to understand, you know, what should your pricing strategy be. And then how are we actually gonna implement this? When you get to a technical proposal and technical approach, if you haven't thought about this or nobody thought about it and it's not someone with experience, then that step by step approach is going to be really generic and weak. Right? And that includes if you use AI. I love AI. It's an incredibly powerful tool, but it's not enough to win contracts. And so the companies that win contracts, and many of our customers fall in this category, they are using their expertise as human beings. So their subject matter expertise within their teams, the extra time they get back because we have automated these tedious processes, all of that. The relationships and the conversations they're having with the customer, and they're putting all that together during the capture planning phase. And this is where everybody is putting their notes rather than being in random team chats or emails or the worst is the PowerPoint from the gate review, right, that's immediately obsolete. All of these things can now be collected in one place. Your proposal managers, they know they're gonna be, you know, assigned a proposal. They can get in here early, talk with the capture managers. All of these things are really important. The other thing that we equip your team with, even if it's something that's very, very technical, we have Dash. So Dash is an AI assistant. It is, very powerful. It's got connection to all of your data, your past performance, context for the opportunity that you're in within GovDash, and all the documents, the RFPs. But it also has access to the web. Right? And so you can you can turn that on, and now you have a very powerful tool that not only, has information about everything you've done, it's able to use that as your baseline and also go and do research for you, a ton of research in a short amount of time. One of the things that I love to ask it to do, if it's a technical high level solution that I don't understand, is explain our solution to me. Like, I am someone with one year of experience in this. Okay? So they're looking documents on the current page. They're looking at the opportunity. Now you're able to look through all these notes, but you're also able to get a summary of it. Right? And so they don't have to, you know I don't wanna say dumb it down, but sometimes that's what they have to do for me. Right? Because I worked with NASA rocket scientists. I was not great at science in high school. I worked with CDC and NIH, actual microbiologist who discovered Lyme disease and studied the life cycle of the tick. I definitely was not qualified for that, but I knew what we were doing was important there. Right? And having them explain what they do to me in layman's terms was invaluable. And now we equip your teams to have that experience as well. So everybody, no matter their level of technical expertise, is able to understand what the end goal is. You're able to have better conversations with your, you know, capture folks and lead things better, and your review teams are able to understand things better. In addition to that, we give you sources so you can see exactly where we got all the information from. And as I mentioned mentioned before, we also allow you to upload documents, and connect to the Internet. So if you wanted to ask, you know, searching the web, Please identify industry recognized sources to help me understand this more. Now it's able to go to the web because it's pulling things out, and it's going to give you links, and it's going to help you understand this even beyond what you have within your data library or within, you know, the the company that you're within. And so it helps your team go beyond that, use their resources. I love it, and I love the fact that there is more visibility into how how much information we actually have about an opportunity or how much our solution is, as we're leading up to that RFP drop point because it is the most valuable time, between when you find the opportunity and when the RFP drops every single day makes or breaks your potential award. Right? And there just hasn't been a great tool up until this point to understand that and bring everybody together. So this is my other, favorite area of GovDash. Let me check to see if we get questions because I could talk about this all day. Okay. So I'm gonna pause for a second here. Actions and activity part of the template, are they customizable? Yeah. Let me show you this right now. Is this what you're asking about? Let's see here. I believe it is. So, yeah, we give you guys, an a place to manage, your tasks and also to track any activity against, a a record. So this record will live with the with the opportunity from identification all the way through to award when it becomes past performance. And you're gonna have an audit log and a record of everything that was done against that opportunity. You can see it as a kanban view or the list view. You can chat back and forth. It's a really handy tool to keep everything in one place. And, again, it lives with the opportunity, and it's gonna move from capture to proposal. This is part of our template, but it's what you make of it. So it is a tool, and you are able to, you know, add whatever you want and comment back and forth and use this however it works best, either as an active task tracking tool for your team or just a history and record of activities against an opportunity, or as both. Okay. Let's take one more question here. Right. Yeah. So, Michael, your to your question, are these default questions in the tool for us to fill in the blank answers as we build our proposal? Yes. So, what they're what they are meant to do in an ideal world is if you find the opportunity prior to RFP release and you've got time in between, this is a guide for your capture teams, to utilize as far as, like, what is the next step? What are these pieces of information that I need to gather? And this is where they would fill those out. You don't have to fill out all of them. Gov dash can write a good proposal, and I'll show you guys here in a minute how we do that. Even without any of these filled in, we give you we give you places to add your subject matter expertise and strategy within the proposal outline to guide the writing. But if you have time before the RFP drops and you're able to manage your capture process within GovDash, it makes it so much better because it passes right through to that proposal. And now you're going to be able to refine it. It's gonna have the context of all of the work that you've done over the last, you know, several months, as you waited for this RFP to release. Great. And we'll go back and answer a couple more questions after this is done, but I'll show you guys the next thing that I love. So now we've done capture the RFP drops. We are ready, to start writing. We kicked off the proposal. I talked a little bit about how one of my biggest pain points was if you have a two week runway, to submit a proposal, the first three to five days are always spent kicking off and then having giving people enough time to write, you know, 50 to 100 pages of narrative for a pink team review. And then you have very limited time to really have experts review it because it's not in a great state to review, because it is so disjointed or things are missing. And you have very little time to iterate on it and make it much better. So we flip that at GovDash. And one of the things that we do, is just by nature of uploading the RFP, we are able to again, because we process those documents and we're creating compliance, and mapping it, we are able to create an outline for you that is compliant, that matches the, you know, RFP requirements, takes into consideration not just section l, m, and c, but looks at everything for requirements so you don't miss things, but also uses best practices and logic, like going in the order. Right, mapping back to, the section of the RFP or solicitation. All these things that we do inherently as proposal managers because we know to do them, we've built those into GovDash as a practice. And so what you get is a very strong outline, that you did not have to do yourself, but you can check against it. So we give you, the tools to make sure that it's compliant and how you would do it. And if you wanna make any changes, you can change things very easily. You can drag and drop. You can create new sections. But this is your outline, and GovDash utilizes this to generate your final, pink team draft. Right? What's great about this is instead of your team spending, five days writing content narrative, they are able to just give you bullet points. So if you have subject matter experts that are great, but they're busy, one of my favorite ways to use this is to get them on the phone and do a solutioning session or a blue team review. I love the blue team. It's a lost art in proposals these days, specifically because there's rarely time to get all the the, you know, reviews that you want to get in. So this is our answer to that, and it's super valuable. Let's just take this for an example. So you can see that GovDash is able to write content, and it gives you sources. So it's gonna write content based on the requirements of the RFP and your capture notes. It's gonna give you sources, which is great. But the other side of this is, we also give you an area for a writing plan. And, my favorite way to use this is to get folks on the phone, and let's say it's a subject matter expert. It's our compliance expert. And now I'm gonna ask them, okay. These are the requirements. Let me show you in our compliance area. Right? These are the citations that we've mapped against this section. Right? We can go through those. We can look at them, talk about them. Right? They're they're gonna be right here within the RFP. We can show them. And then I can say, okay. Give me some bullet points. Like, what are the main things that we need to consider here? Like, you know, GovDash is gonna look at compliance, but from a compelling response standpoint, from our technical approach standpoint, what is the what are the top five things that we need? They can they can just write these in there or you can write them for them, take notes. All you need is a couple of bullet points to drastically improve the content that you get from AI. And especially with GovDash, it is different than any other tool because the context that we're passing in cannot be replicated easily with just a chatbot. So it took us, you know, years to get this right, and it's worth it was worth every minute of it. But because we have that context, because we're connecting the dots behind the scenes, and we understand how to use each data piece, you giving a couple of bullet points or your subject matter expert doing that, rather than taking five days or three days to deliver something that is half written or copied and pasted from other sections, they're giving you five or six bullet points to guide the content for this section, and you are gonna get a really, really solid pink team draft that your team can review against. Right? You can start right away. You can have this draft done, within that forty eight hour time period that I talked about as long as you can get folks on the phone. And it's much easier to get them to give you twenty minutes of their time to really talk through something with you, than it is to get them to sit down and write 15 to 20 pages of content. So that is my other favorite part of GovDash. I love it. And then I'm gonna show you the last piece here that I think will blow your mind, and then we'll save the last couple minutes for questions here. So the other side of this is, labor categories and key personnel. This is the bane of my existence. I've only ever lost one proposal, or contract because of noncompliance. And it was my third year in proposals, and it still haunts me to this day. And it was because of the key personnel resume requirement that got taken out at the very last minute. It was in the resume. I will never let this go. So it was in there. We had record of it. And then when we were editing the resume, it accidentally got deleted. And because it got deleted, we were kicked out for noncompliance, because one of our key personnel did not match all the criteria. So, this is an area that is a major pain point. When we upload an RFP to GovDash, we pull out key personnel, and labor categories. So you've got your key personnel here. You also have your non key personnel labor categories, how many positions there are. This is critical for writing those recruitment, retention, labor mix, you know, sections. But your key personnel, you wanna manage your resumes. Within Govdash, you're building your record of past performance, but you're also building a record of data. So So it doesn't have to be people that work on current contracts that can be current employees. It can be, you know, matches that are contingent hires or recruits that you recruited for this opportunity or partner employees, that you submitted in the past. But GovDash is going to look at all the requirements of the opportunity, and then they're gonna suggest people that are in your database that have a match. Right? What this tells me is, okay, we don't really have any employees based on, what we've got in our data library that would really match this, so we need to get our recruiters working ASAP. And when you find when they send you a resume, you can upload it and click adjudicate personnel, and this is going to give you an assessment based on their resume of whether or not they meet the requirements of the labor category. And it may be that they actually have these things, but it just wasn't included in the resume like what happened with me many years ago. And if that's the case, you can get them on the phone, ask them the information, correct the resume. Or if they really don't have this, you don't waste time, thinking you have a candidate that is compliant when you really need to recruit somebody else. It's this is a major risk area. It's a major pain point for managing things. GovDash allows you to do this and manage it throughout the process. It is super, super powerful. And finally, when you get to, the actual proposal, you can download the proposal, here. So we write the whole thing for you. And then I'm gonna show you I think I need to go back to my screen. Give me one second. Well, I'm not exactly sure how I Sam, are you able to share your how do I share my screen again? Because it just locked up on me. No worries. So we'll, go ahead and send you guys a screenshot of this or a video, afterwards. But we give you the, proposal in your own template. So, if you've ever copied and pasted things from one document to another or you've seen a pink team draft that has been franken signed together, it's a nightmare. The content that we give you with a pink team is complete. It is cohesive in one voice. It is informed by your past performance. So we are, mapping everything to metrics within your past performance. We are mapping back to the RFP. It is a really, really solid pink team draft. In many ways, it looks a lot like the red team drafts that, traditionally, I've seen in my career. What this allows you to do though is if you're able to do this within two days, now you have the whole rest of your two week period, your three week period to work with your subject matter experts in Word, in SharePoint, have your teams review the content, iterate on it, and we give you the assistant that I showed you on your screen is within Word as well. So you're able to utilize Dash connected to your documents and your past performance and, the RFP, all of that, and the Internet, to iterate on your proposal, recover, adjudicate comments. It gives you all the tools you need to write a really, really strong proposal. Word integration is a game changer. It makes word actually useful. It is so helpful. I wish I would have had this. One of the examples that we'll show you guys in video is, you can highlight a claim. Let's say you have an empty claim in the proposal. You can highlight and ask it to substantiate claims, and it will pull from your past performance and give you a metric or proof point, which is fantastic. So that is everything that I wanted to show you guys today. Again, I hope that this was helpful. I'm gonna go through, a couple of these questions here. How do we best handle sub integration with capabilities and past performance? So you have ability to upload your team partners capability statements and data calls directly to the opportunity and the proposal outline. We have a question in our, you know, capture plan related to teaming, but also in the section areas, where you are, you know, writing writing instructions, you can also attach documents. You're able to incorporate their past performance and their capabilities at that proposal or capture level. And then GovDash will weave those capabilities together, and yours when generating that proposal. So everything is integrated really well. It's one of my favorite parts, right, because we all work with teaming partners. It's critical. You know, hardly any proposals are done without a team these days. So GovDash not only allows you to leverage your past performance, but also those of your teaming partners without messing up your data library. Right? Because you've got your past performance in your contract cloud, it protected. GovDash always knows what's yours versus what somebody else's. And you're able to upload these proposals as you're working on them, the working documents to SharePoint and manage them in SharePoint because we give you word, the assistant within words. You don't ever have to change your process. You can invite your teammates, to SharePoint to open the document and iterate on it like they always have, but your team will have access to the word assistant. So you not only get their capabilities, their understanding, their subject matter expertise, your team is also able to access yours within GovDash. Yeah. So, Jen, I've got time for one more question, so I will answer this one. When you say the tool's access to past performance, what is typically uploaded? The actual contract p d PWS of the opportunity? Something else. That's a great question. So, it's really up to your your team. So from a past performance compliance standpoint, we always want to make sure that you have the PWS, right, and you have the contract. We have some customers though that, for whatever reason, are very hesitant to, add to the PWS or the contract, and so they prefer to create their own document or their own, overview, I guess. And that's okay. So as long as it's got the information you need, like, you know, the details that a contract would have, like, period of performance, you know, value, those sorts of things, NAICS codes, as well as the description of the work, we can work with that. But we prefer that if the contract is the PWS because it's we want that detail and that's what the government will use to verify. But then we don't stop there. We we encourage you to upload lots of things. So talk to your people on the ground doing the work. Put, your CPARS in there, your deliverables, your status reports when you're doing your reviews each month. All of that information expands on the PWS, and any additional information you put in there is gonna help match you to opportunities, talk about your capabilities in a stronger way, give you a lot more metrics. It's it's really up to you. Right? So you just wanna make sure whatever you put in that contract cloud represents your past performance accurately. Great. Well, that is, everything I had today. Thank you guys so much for, bearing with me. Sorry about the the screen share issue at the end here, but we will get you guys a video here at the end. After this, we'll send it out via email. Thank you again for your time, and I hope we have the opportunity to work with many of you after this. Thanks so.