Articles

Instead of reinventing the wheel every proposal and having every team start from scratch figuring out what their win strategies should be, you can create a cheat sheet that helps them figure it out faster. If you do enough proposals, you start to see the same themes coming up in similar circumstances. If you think about categorizing those circumstances, you can create a win strategy playbook. The goal is not to identify the wording or control future responses. The goal is to help people more qui

Sometimes you have to bid when you don’t have a previous relationship with the customer. So how do you write from their perspective, when you don’t even know what that is? While you may not know them directly, you may know people like them. You can ask yourself questions like: What matters to people in their environment and circumstances? What goals have they stated publicly? What would they find useful, helpful, or beneficial? What is their culture like? What are their characteristics? The

An Executive Summary for a proposal is not really a summary at all. If you are the customer receiving a proposal, do you really want to read a redundant summary before reading the proposal? Or do you want to find out what you’re going to get if you accept the proposal? An Executive Summary is a tool to help the reader make their decision and the evaluator to score the proposal. Extra and unnecessary reading that gets in the way and tends to annoy customers. Writing an Executive Summary that is r

Prompt background and instructions: This is background regarding how the prompt is designed to work. It is for the user and not the AI. Do not include this section in your prompt. This prompt takes a customer name and procurement name as input. Then it generates a 20-page report full of information and insight about the customer, what they really want, how you should position to win, and how to turn the insights it provides into instructions for proposal writers. It is based on this article: How

If your goal is to provide reasons for the customer to select you (what themes are supposed to provide), then maybe you should think less about the features in what you offer and think more about what matters to the customer. What should drive your win strategies are not simply the advantages you think you have, but rather the advantages that matter to the customer and affect your evaluation score. Here are 11 customer-centric theme that should drive your win strategies: What is the nature of yo

Prompt background and instructions: This is background regarding how the prompt is designed to work. It is for the user and not the AI. Do not include this section in your prompt. This prompt takes a proposal (or a section of a proposal) and the RFP as input. Then it generates an Excel file with a dashboard, summary tables, and charts that make the thousands of data elements it processes meaningful. It is based on this article: A checklist for quantifying the quality of your proposal writing How

People tend to stray by writing about their company, its solution, trying to sell, or just trying to provide helpful information when they should be trying to help the customer evaluate the proposal. You can actually measure the quality of your proposal writing, based on how many of these appear in your proposal sentences and in what percentages. You can also use this list as a place to start planning what you are going to write or as a way to check your draft. Every single sentence of your prop

Turning the art of winning proposals into a quantifiable science is more possible than most people realize. It requires making data driven decisions. And to do that you have to thoroughly embrace performance measurement for the pursuit process. As Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The trick to it is to have a process that gives you the data you need without it becoming extra work. One of the things we find when implementing the MustWin Process on PropLIBRAR

Prompt background and instructions: This is background regarding how the prompt is designed to work. It is for the user and not the AI. Do not include this section in your prompt. The prompt is designed to look deeper at the root causes behind the failure. It is not as simple as giving the AI a single prompt and getting a single answer. It is an exploration. The prompt requires a description of what happened during the proposal. This description should be as observational and objective as possib

If your proposal lessons learned focus on steps in your process or specific things you should have done differently, you may be missing the big picture. Instead of asking “what can we realistically do to make things better next time” you should try asking “why did we end up where we did.” If you dig deep, you’ll probably find the cause happened long before the proposal even started. Whenever you have more than a few people working on a proposal, you have grown to the point where it takes more th

Imagine that when the RFP is released, the customer already knows you, and they trust you and your capabilities because you've demonstrated that you have insight into what can help them. You've shown them how to get what they need. Along the way, you’ve made recommendations to ensure the RFP doesn’t contain anything that would be a problem for you, as well as inserting some things that give you an advantage. Most importantly, you’ve gained some insight into the outcomes they are trying to achiev

The purpose of this article isn’t to tell you how to be an executive. You already know that. And if you don’t, you’ll be hearing soon from all the needy voices. The purpose of this article is to share some insights and lessons learned related to business development, capture, and proposals that can help you grow your organization and be more prosperous. This article is not about the details of those functions, but what those functions need from their executive sponsor. This isn’t obvious stuff,

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

Persuasion is personal. What you require to be persuaded is different from what I require. Because of that, persuasion is not one thing. But it helps to understand the things that drive persuasion so that you can discover which combination of things will be required to persuade your customers. Persuasion is Part Differentiation If you are not different from the other alternatives the customer has, the customer won’t have a reason to select you. If you don’t point out the things that differentiat

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

Improving your win rate has the potential to double your revenue from the exact same number of leads. But improving your win rate is easier said than done. Most of the things that will have the greatest impact occur before you even start the proposal. Here are 14 ways to get into position to win so that you can increase your win rate: Gain an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. The more you know about what matters to the customer and about the opportunity and competitive environmen

It sounds so obvious that few companies bother to define it. But if you want to maximize your win rate, it’s worth giving some attention to how you define proposal success. You can't intentionally seek proposal success or consistently achieve it if you're just guessing at what it is. Let's start by looking at some common but counterproductive ways that people try to define proposal success: Anything that wins! During the proposal phase you haven't won or lost, so it doesn't help you any to use t

Congratulations! You've reached the point where you always have proposal reviews. You may even recognize that only having one review can be worse than having none, and have several reviews. But while your reviews make clear improvements, reviews alone are not enough to achieve quality proposals. It all comes down to how you define your proposal quality criteria. The odds are you don’t have any. Most companies don't have written quality criteria (and there is no other kind). Most reviews are perf

Most companies consider a proposal review to consist of reading a draft document. This is the least effective of proposal reviews and makes the smallest contribution to proposal quality and winning. Yet people cling to it. I blame the obsolete color team model for getting in the way of proposals using the same quality assurance methodologies that have improved so many other things people do. This is especially true when the color team model degrades down to a single “red team” review.   Most com

When I want to sound like a process guru, I refer to proposal “quality criteria.” When I want users to go along with my recommendations, I call them “checklists.” Either way, you have to figure out what they should be. This list can help you make sure your proposal quality criteria actually deliver the quality you are seeking. What it will take to win. This is the standard that defines proposal quality. You should never decide to bid a pursuit if you can’t define what it will take to win. Once y