Most firms treat federal contracts and federal grants as two different worlds with two vocabularies, and hire different people for each. The instincts are the same; the mechanics differ in five places. If you know where, one team can pursue both.
What is being bought
A contract buys a thing or a service the government needs for itself: a road, a system, a study, a year of support. A grant funds a public purpose the government wants to see happen, carried out by someone else: research, a program, a service to a community. That single difference explains everything that follows. A contract asks whether you can deliver; a grant asks whether your project deserves to exist and whether you can be trusted with the money.
Who may apply
Contract eligibility is about the firm: its size, its set-aside status, its registration. Grant eligibility is about the applicant type: a state or local government, a nonprofit with or without tax-exempt status, an institution of higher education, a small business, an individual. A grant notice lists the eligible types, and a firm that is not one of them cannot apply no matter how good the project. Read that list before the abstract.
What the money is
A contract has a price: what you will charge, built from your costs, your rates and your margin, and judged against other prices or against what the government expects to pay. A grant has a budget: what the project will cost, laid out by federal category, personnel, fringe, travel, equipment, supplies, contractual, other, and indirect, and judged against whether each line is allowable, allocable and reasonable under the federal cost rules. Cost share, where required, is the part you bring yourself.
A contract price says what you will charge. A grant budget says what the project will cost. They are built from the same numbers and judged by different rules.
How it is judged
A contract proposal is scored against the evaluation factors in the solicitation, by a panel that reads it the way the solicitation says it will. A grant application is scored against published review criteria, usually with points attached, by reviewers who are often experts in the field rather than in procurement. The discipline is the same: write to the criteria, in their order, with their words. The tone is not: a contract proposal proves capability; a grant application makes a case.
What you submit
A contract offer is volumes: technical, management, past performance, price, in the format the instructions demand. A grant application is a narrative, a budget and a set of standard federal forms, submitted through the government's grant system, with each form filled and signed there. The forms are not optional and the deadline is not soft; an application that is incomplete at the deadline is not reviewed.
One team, both
The firm that can do both is the firm that treats them as one skill with two rulebooks: find the opportunity, confirm eligibility, size it, write to the criteria, check every requirement, submit on time. Crafteny is built on exactly that idea. It matches you to contracts and grants alike, reads the eligibility of each by its own rules, builds a price for one and a budget for the other, writes each to its own criteria, and lists every federal form with its door. One board, one pursuit, whichever kind it is.