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Companies generally start to embrace a proposal process when the number of people involved grows large enough to become difficult to coordinate. It would be better if they begin to embrace a process as soon as they start caring about their win rate.  The primary benefit of a proposal process isn't improved coordination. It's an improved win rate. A process that doesn't improve your win rate is a bad process. A process that improves your win rate but fails in every other way is a good process tha

What if I told you that on a 50-page proposal for services provided worldwide, due in just 7 days, we scheduled not one but two major reviews, and that we had the Red Team draft ready in less than 36 hours with only three writers... Want to know how we pulled that off and delivered an outstanding proposal? We started by using the Proposal Content Planning methodology we've been recommending and refining for two decades. The size and complexity of this proposal has convinced me once and for all t

We all dream of winning it big. If you want your business to win it big, there is something you need to master that’s more important that finding big leads. You have to create an organization that can do things bigger than yourself. What separates a large proposal from a small proposal is not the value or the size of the project. It’s the number of people involved in preparing the proposal. A proposal with one author is a straightforward production. A proposal with multiple contributors is a cha

When you are alone you have to work within your own limitations. What you know is all you know.  What you can write is all that’s going into the proposal. What you can do before the deadline defines your standard of quality. It’s not about winning or creating a great proposal. It’s about whether you can complete the proposal at all. Here are some tips that won’t help you win, but they might help you get your proposals submitted. What is the minimally viable proposal submission? The gap between t

Selling in writing is about influencing the decision process and the decision maker with what you put on paper. Procurements that require a proposal are not impulse purchases. When the customer will make their decision based on the proposal you submit, you need to sell in writing to influence the outcome in your favor. A salesperson has influence in person, but if they don’t carry that over to what gets put in writing they have no influence over closing the actual sale. Influence in person vs in

Proposal themes are defined in many different and not very helpful ways. Try googling it. How does someone new to proposals write a “concept” that gets “woven throughout the proposal” to “call attention to the benefits” you offer? Definitions like that can't be acted upon. Because themes are defined in such a nebulous way, they often end up being overly-broad claims of greatness that do nothing to persuade the customer. When I review proposals I often see unsubstantiated slogans that sound like

I remember early in my career working on a proposal with someone who was complaining that it “didn’t sell!” Unfortunately, he couldn’t say why. It turns out that what drives selling in writing is how well your writing reflects the right win strategies and themes, and whether they are written from the customer’s perspective. There are a lot of things to consider and approaches to take when thinking about which themes you should use in a particular proposal. We’ve taken those considerations and tu

If you tell lies like those below, you hurt your credibility. Even when you tell them with good intent, they still hurt your credibility. Even if you believe them, they hurt your credibility. Yet it seems like everyone does it. And if you tell the same lies that they do, your proposal will lack differentiators. You'll all be the same, lacking credibility while feeling superior. Even though people know that customers only buy from people they trust, they tell lies like these that the customer can

In most companies, proposal development is the most immature part of the company. But they don’t realize it because they’ve bought into myths that enable them to think all that work they’ve put in amounts to more sophistication than it really does. Often what they do is different from what they say they do. Because of the myths that people have bought into, management practices that would not be tolerated in any other part of the company become expected as the norm in proposal management. These

Recently I talked to a government employee who was transitioning to the private sector. He asked me if I could recommend any particular contractor because they all sound the same. I thought of all the articles I’ve written about good and bad proposal writing habits and the things I see over and over again when I review proposals for companies and realized it’s true. If the problems I see are in most companies' proposals, then to the customer, those companies must all sound the same.  Thinking ab

Obsessing over the deadline and resource pressure that defines most proposal efforts can make you forget about other important things and limit your ability to maximize your win rate — not to mention it can also lead to total burnout. It’s a curious dilemma and a bit counter-intuitive, but obsessing over getting your proposal done can help you lose. So take a moment and put away your deadline and resource pressures. Take a moment to think about the purpose of it all. Because the purpose is more

Definition: Proposal triage is a best practice for when you have too many proposals, get a late start, have an ineffective or immature proposal process, or have a proposal that is broken. It is similar to the concept of medical triage, in which doctors categorize patients to decide who gets treated first, based on factors such as the likelihood of recovery, the severity of their issue, and whether the patient can wait for treatment. Proposal triage is based on prioritizing corrective action base

When you can’t get the details to write what you want, you can still talk about things that are related in your proposal, and do it without any input. The following approaches are examples of how to do proposals, The Wrong Way. They are strategies for dealing with adverse circumstances where the best practices don’t apply.  Use them inappropriately and they can cause you to lose. But if you have no choice and will otherwise be unable to submit anything, they can potentially save the day. Or at l

Enough of all these best practices already. While we write a lot about them, it’s a lot more fun to write about how to cheat. What do you call it when the best practices no longer apply? Worst practices? That's not right. Best practices for adverse circumstances? That's too long. We call it cheating. But it's not the dishonest kind of cheating. It's the get out of your box and break the rules because that's the only way to survive kind of cheating. When you can't do proposals the right way, you

Once a request for proposals (RFP) is out, it may be too late to bid win a competitive advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP does not have to be hard, but it does take effort in advance and relationship marketing. Those that put the time and effort into getting ahead of the RFP are able to achieve an information advantage as well as a competitive advantage. Recompetes. Targeting recompetes is the easiest way to get ahead of the RFP. But it can take years to pay off. The day a contract is issued, y

The MustWin Process is an approach for capturing leads that require the submission of a proposal. It makes proposal development more efficient, sets expectations, enables progress and quality to be measured, and increases your chances of winning. It focuses on getting the right information and going through the steps to turn it into a winning proposal. The MustWin Process is for those who want to win and realize that a one-size-fits-all fill-in-the-blanks template is not the best way to go about

There are a number of ways to look at the size of a proposal, but one is more helpful than the others. Page count doesn’t necessarily translate into difficulty or effort. Nor does the number of items being proposed or the dollar value. You could focus on the difference between the way large companies do proposals and the way small companies do proposals, but that’s an illusion. The things you do to win a proposal remains the same regardless of the size. Large companies and small proposals follow

Proposal losses generally fall into these categories: Price. The is the safe excuse. But losing on price has more to do with getting either the scope or the price to win analysis wrong than with bill rates. Your proposal didn't score high enough against the evaluation criteria. Proposal writing has a much smaller impact on your score than your strategic choices and tradeoff decisions. Someone had an offering that the customer liked better. Did it score better because the offering was better or

There are lines you should not cross. If you do, your proposal will never recover. Cross them and the only way you can win is if all of your competitors mess up worse than you did. That is not a winning proposal strategy. The purpose of this list is to help keep you from crossing any of these lines. I challenge you to identify anything below that can safely be deleted without jeopardizing your ability to win. The following are things you should never do. They are all clear and objective to make

All proposals are competitive. Even if the RFP is completely wired to give the advantage to one preferred company and no one else bids, that company is competing against themselves. They can still blow it. And a naïve upstart can always come in and steal it away because they don’t know they can’t win. It may be rare, but it does happen. And customers are sometimes ready for something new. Which will the customer select? You should go into every proposal assuming it’s competitive and pushing to b