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This is part 4 of a 16-part blog series designed to help you win government oral presentations. In this blog, we’ll explore the five factors – and one non-factor – for picking your presentation team. To read the previous blogs, click here to find the index with individual blogs.

This blog provides a guide for assembling an oral presentation team for high-stakes proposal presentations. You will learn how to avoid common decision-making traps when choosing a team and adopt a methodical approach to comparing candidates. By the end, you will be able to assemble a motivated team with the right mix of experience and capabilities using a candidate decision matrix that puts all relevant information at your fingertips.

The Five Factors

The following are the most important factors for choosing an individual to be on the presentation team, listed in order of importance. I strongly recommend building a custom decision matrix of candidates to quickly identify gaps and issues. You will use this candidate pool to determine the final team composition.

Factor One: Meets or Exceeds the Required Education, Qualifications, and Experience

When choosing your presentation team, the first factor to consider is whether they meet the key personnel or labor category (LCAT) requirements given by the government. If there are no LCATs or requirements for the presentation team, you must consider the implied experience necessary to do the work.

I know this seems obvious, but teams get stuck on the importance of customer relationships and other qualities that their candidates have that make them “must-haves” for the presentation team.

I attribute this to familiarity bias (see below for a definition). The proposal manager and the capture manager have a tendency to think they know what the government actually wants and make critical decisions based on their assumptions. The problem with approaching team selection this way is that the government will compare its RFP requirement to the requested backgrounds. If you don’t meet the requirements, you will lose. Only after you've met their education, certification, and experience requirements will it work for you to add the extra information that makes their resume stand out from competitors.

This would be the first part of your decision matrix. This section gives you the ability to compare potential candidates and allows you to make “go/no go” decisions based on the actual or implied requirements. 

Factor Two: Are They Available for Training and the Presentation?

The second factor to consider is the availability of each candidate for the range of dates when the team is expected to be ready for training and the presentation day.

Vacations, critical client travel, and personal issues often conflict with the training calendar. I have learned from experience that candidates will not give up a paid-in-full vacation to Europe, a child’s wedding, a child’s graduation, or a Caribbean Cruise for a proposal presentation. I have encountered teams where critical players, including the program manager, had significant health issues (diagnosed with cancer), personal issues (death of a father and birth of a baby), or professional issues (resignation letter is written) that made it impossible to participate.

This is the second factor for a reason. This happens in the teams that I coach ALL THE TIME!

The main reason it is ALWAYS an issue is that the presentation date—and therefore the entire training plan—moves or gets pushed out as the proposal drags on.

Proposal leadership often ignores availability, thinking that everyone will consider the presentation their highest priority. Staff may not consider their availability or be too embarrassed or concerned about their career to tell anyone they have an issue. Often, they don’t think about it until confronted with the training schedule. Do not make these mistakes!

In the first couple of training sessions, everyone checks their calendars. I touched on this in the first blog, How to Analyze an RFP for Your Oral Presentation: Developing the Rules of Engagement (ROE). It is also smart to ask the following question: “Does anyone have anything going on in their personal or professional life that will make it difficult to focus on the training?”

Promise confidentiality and privacy and see what they say. As the coach or proposal manager, you might be the ONLY person they will confide in about their situation.

In your decision matrix, include a section for this factor that covers the person's availability and any issues that would prevent them from being available for both training and the actual government presentation.

Factor Three: Incumbency, Insider Knowledge, and TEB Relationships

High-performing incumbents love to shape their recompete contracts with Oral Presentations. Live proposal presentations create two wide moats to taking a contract from the incumbent.

First, it substantially increases the proposal’s costs. Increased cost reduces the competition. In one instance, my customer spent a full day of grueling scenario-based presentations, and NO ONE competed against them!

Second, a respected incumbent who has accomplished a lot during the last contract period has significant advantages in scoring. I’ll go into this in a moment.

As an experienced Proposal Presentation (aka Orals) coach with strong long-term client relationships, I am hired to coach teams who are defending their contracts against competitors. I love coaching incumbent or incumbent-like clients because we can set the bar high in the competition.

For newbies, the “incumbent” on the contract is the company or companies that currently hold the contract and perform the work today. This includes any subcontractors to the prime contractor.

“Pseudo-Incumbency” or “Incumbent-Like” knowledge usually comes from having held the contract in the past, working with the same client on a similar contract, working in the same spaces as the incumbent, or hiring away staff (or a subcontractor) that currently work on the contract.

Incumbent knowledge and strong government customer relationships give the team an advantage in developing a response to the government's questions. An incumbent will be able to use actual client examples in their responses. This hyper-relevance makes it easy to grade the response to their questions as “outstanding.” There is more to the story because of a phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again. I call it “incumbent bias.” Incumbent Bias is a specialized form of Familiarity Bias. 

Familiarity Bias and Incumbent Bias

We all have a negative bias toward anything new. When a perfect stranger gives an incomplete answer to a question, your automatic judgment will usually be that they don't know enough to answer the question. This negative bias is normal, comes naturally, and keeps us safe.

Familiarity bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when people prefer or place more trust in what they are familiar with, or have prior experience with, rather than new or unknown options. Incumbent bias is a stronger version of familiarity bias.

This automatic judgment changes radically based on how well the evaluator knows the person answering the questions. If an evaluator knows the presenter, they might recognize the presenter as an expert in the field and grade them outstanding even when given only half an answer.

I have seen full credit given to an accidental wrong answer! The evaluator “heard” the correct answer anyway. This bias is magnified when the evaluators have a vested personal or professional interest in having the presenter as a part of the team that does the work. That is why I always coach incumbent teams to include examples and stories that imply low switching costs and no transition risks in their presentations. These amp up the familiarity bias.

In your decision matrix, add criteria about incumbency. If you think you know who the evaluators will be, then add their names as well. Score each presentation candidate based on their incumbent knowledge and relationships.

Factor Four: An Individual’s “Skeletons in the Closet”

Another important consideration for team selection is whether an individual has something in their past that would cause the evaluation board to score them negatively, regardless of what the presenter says or does. A skeleton may be a bad reputation, a mistake on a contract, or a tense working relationship with a government employee (more common than you might think).

This factor is sometimes the hardest to determine effectively. In large, politically complex companies, everyone has a strong incentive to stay positive and avoid bringing up skeletons. In small companies, no one wants to throw their friends under the bus.

Every incumbent team I've coached has had something go wrong in the previous contract, where either a person was blamed or the company as a whole was considered at fault. At this point, you have to make a risk-mitigated trade-off. Incumbent knowledge traded for a skeleton can be a great trade. Just face the issue head-on and don’t make excuses. Most government evaluators will appreciate someone who owns their mistakes and learned from them.

Another place to look for skeletons is the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS). It is a system used by the U.S. Government to document the performance of contractors who provide services and products to the government. CPARS evaluations impact a contractor's ability to win future contracts.

If the prime or any of its subcontractors have a recent CPARS (usually within the last five years) that is less than Very Good, this is a skeleton. If they have anything less than Exceptional on their incumbent CPARS in the last two years, you need to evaluate that for issues as well.

Coaching Tip: You have to ask hard questions. For every team I coach, I facilitate a discovery session where we go deep into who will be on the evaluation board and what they care about personally and professionally. During that session, I close the door and let the team know that what is said will be kept confidential. Then I ask the hard questions about performance issues and relationship problems. After a few minutes of stand-off, the truth about the team comes out, but it typically does not include info about individuals on the team.

If my client’s organization has a skeleton, then it is very likely that someone on the presentation team bears the actual scar. You have to keep digging until you find out who is to blame and if anyone on the Technical Evaluation Board (TEB)/Source Selection Evaluation Board (SSEB) still holds a grudge.

Factor Five: Candidate Motivation

Most of my clients are prior military and maintain a culture of following “orders” and doing their best. This isn’t always the case, though. One consideration is the incentives and the person's desire to be on the presentation team. People are easier to coach when their intrinsic motivation is to do well in the oral presentation.

I'm not suggesting letting anyone off the hook because they don’t feel like doing it. Less-than-enthusiastic participants often shift into high gear and get into it once training starts. After presenting once or twice to the mock evaluation boards, they realize that the end result will be embarrassing if they don't get their act together.

Here is an example of how motivation and desire can play out even with professionals who work hard and care deeply.

I coached a team where the gentleman who bid as program manager on the contract was a ringer for the government customer and was liked and respected by his team. I found him to be smart and naturally charismatic, and I was looking forward to coaching him. Training started a few weeks later, and he was late for training and often found it difficult to concentrate. I caught him on his smartphone during training multiple times, checking texts (strictly prohibited in my training).

After pulling him aside twice to coach him, he finally disclosed to me that his wife had stage three cancer. His mindset, focus, and availability degraded to the point that he was unable to participate fully. After further discussion, I recommended that we replace him and then shift him to help me judge and provide feedback to the team. In this way, he was able to contribute without being locked into the grueling training.

Below are some indicators that a candidate will be excited to participate in the proposal presentation:

• Incumbents who keep their jobs when they win.

• The opportunity to move into a higher-level position and/or manage a larger team.

• The scope of work is interesting, exciting, and/or on the cutting edge.

• The customer has a higher relative authority or position in the government, so the contract looks like a way to “move up”.

• They want to learn how to be a better presenter.

Below are a few of the many “red flags” that impact motivation to work hard on a proposal presentation:

• Not wanting to work extra hours or after hours.

• The position represents a perceived or real career downgrade.

• No “skin in the game” / no plans to work on the contract.

• No career credit or improvement in standing in the company by participating.

• A full-time job that already takes up all their time and energy.

• Does not enjoy the work that they would be given if we win.

In your decision matrix, add qualitative criteria on motivation and ability to focus. Include things like why this person would benefit from participating from a work and career perspective, and any issues that might lower motivation. Have private and confidential conversations with candidates to find out more.

The NON-Factor: Individual Presentation Skills

About one in five proposal team leads pulls me aside with this request: “We didn’t want to say this in front of the group, but we are worried about having [NAME] on the presentation team. He is not a good presenter. We would like you to evaluate his presentation style to see if it is going to be a problem.”

Usually, the next thing they say is “We have [NAME] as a backup. She is an amazing speaker, but just doesn’t have the same level of experience/client relationship/incumbency/etc.”

Ugh…

I understand why they are asking. With YouTube and TED.com full of speakers with exceptional presentation skills, our business culture tends to value presentation skills as much, if not more than, expertise and accomplishment. Thinking this way can be a disaster when building a proposal presentation team.

My response is always to have them focus on the above factors to compose the best possible team. Give me the most experienced people, and I’ll take care of coaching them as a group to the best outcome. Individual presentation polish will break a tie, BUT there are way too many factors for it to be a tie. There is never a tie!

I don’t care if they stutter or get super nervous. I’ve coached both types of speakers many times with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake ... and won.

COACHING TIP: Always use an expert the client knows and trusts, and don’t worry about polished presentation skills.

Below are some reasons to ignore presentation skills when choosing your team:

• A presentation team full of professional presenters doesn’t come off as authentic. Instead, it comes across as overly rehearsed and unconvincing. The TEB wants to know that it will be working with normal people.

• Relevant experts are rarely great presenters, and I would much rather have the real expert in the room doing an okay job presenting than a professional presenter who is only moderately able to develop and articulate a solution.

You can’t fake deep expertise, relationships, experience, and knowledge, so why would you put any other criteria above these bedrock qualities? Needless to say, I’ve NEVER had to exclude someone because of presentation skills. I would never trade presentation capability for strong client relationships and relevant experience. It is priceless to have in the presentation room people who are friends and colleagues with the evaluator.

In your decision matrix, add these as a nice to have with the knowledge that this person can be trained.

Build a Team That's Engineered to Win

Selecting your presentation team is not a casual exercise. It requires a disciplined, criteria-driven approach that prioritizes credibility, coachability, and relevance above all else. A well-selected and well-trained team is your greatest asset in convincing the government that you are the lowest-risk, highest-value choice.

The difference between a winning team and a losing team often comes down to expert coaching and preparation. Our oral presentation coaches specialize in helping government contractors select and train teams that deliver clear, confident, and compelling performances. We provide the objective feedback and proven process needed to turn your experts into a winning presentation unit.

Don’t miss our next blog, blog 5: From Presenter to Expert: A Training Plan for Your Team

Original Content by Jeff Everage

Jeff is the President and Founder of Trident Proposal Management. As a GovCon Oral Presentation Coach for more than 15 years, Jeff has coached more than 100 teams to success. His insights into oral coaching, gained from the trenches of coaching, are designed to support you and your team in your efforts. As a Navy veteran, Jeff resides in Southern California and provides support to clients worldwide as part of our globally dispersed team.