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I know it’s fun to complain about the boss, but if you want to get things done, you need to think like the boss. There are reasons why you are encountering friction. It’s not as simple as they are micro-managers or ignoring you. You can use this list to anticipate their concerns and improve the chances that they’ll listen to your concerns. Think of it like a proposal. You need to translate why what you want is in alignment with their goals. Here's why your executives won’t list to you: You’re no

Most people are a mix of all three perspectives. This is especially true in organizations that don’t have someone assigned to each level. You will substantially improve your value if you can at least look at every issue from all three perspectives. People who like the comfort and security of staying within the box of their chosen level are not people needed to drive the organization to win. So what we’ve done is start with the Executive, Manager, and Worker’s perspectives, and then applied them

Congratulations! Either you got promoted or have started your own company. You’re an executive with profit and loss responsibility now, and must grow your business. You probably have some experience with business development, sales, or proposals, but being in charge of it is another matter. That’s okay, because like most executives, you’re confident you can make the stretch. My goal in writing this is to help you avoid falling into traps that look rational, but will weaken your competitiveness.

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,

When your proposal is going to be formally evaluated, the customer's evaluators will read your Executive Summary differently. They read it as an introduction to put things in context. Read it to form a first impression regarding how to score your proposal. Read it just to understand how your proposal is organized. And they read it for motivation and most of all, justification. If the decision maker has delegated the administration of the proposal evaluation, the Executive Summary may be the only

To write a proposal from the customer’s perspective requires not only responding to the RFP, but also understanding how the customer will evaluate your response. How will they read it? Will they read it, or will they simply score it per their evaluation criteria? And if they do score it, what is their process? If the customer has a formal RFP evaluation process, like they do with government proposals, the RFP evaluation criteria can give you clues about their process. Are the evaluation criteria

The best way to write a great proposal is to get inside the mind of the evaluator and make it easy for them to reach the desired conclusions. It helps to be able to read the proposal like an evaluator. This can be challenging when you don’t know who the evaluators are. But you can still anticipate what an evaluator has to go through and how they’ll approach looking at your proposal. You might also consider the culture of the customer’s organization and the nature of what they are procuring.  The

Sometimes people get stuck writing a technical proposal about something in which they are not an expert. Sometimes the subject matter experts aren’t available or don’t exist within your organization. You can do research, but you can’t become an expert in a week or even a month. So how do you write a technical proposal that competes against real experts, proves your credibility, and earns your customer’s trust? If you’re the stuckee, we have good news for you. We have a little trick that may work

The RFP is just one source of requirements that drive what you should offer in your proposal. If all you do is design an offering that responds to what is in the RFP, it will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to a proposal submitted by someone with a deeper understanding of the customer and their requirements. To prepare the winning offer, in addition to the RFP, you need to consider: What matters to the customer? The customer will make their selection not only on what “meets their needs

The reason that very few writers can do both technical writing and proposal writing well is that they have different goals, methods, expectations, and processes. All writing is not the same. Having experience with one set of goals, methods, expectations, and processes does not guarantee success at the other. In fact, it may increase the odds of failure.  Technical writers value clarity and accuracy. People must be able to not only understand their instructions, but follow them. Technical writers

Instead of looking at preparing proposals as a process, try looking at it as solving problems. A "process" implies steps. Proposal development is reactive, so processes based on mandated steps tend to fail. But solving the problems you will face in preparing a proposal implies the process. The problems you face also imply the goals you should have. Most companies that think they have a proposal process still spend their time solving problems. So looking at those problems in an organized way can

I like to think of it as the “other people” problem. Proposals would be so much easier if you didn’t have to work with other people. If they would just do what you need them to do…   At work we tend to think that working with other people is just a matter of management and leadership. But proposal specialists often (usually?) work with people that they have no direct supervision of. Proposals borrow people. And those people have other priorities.  If the only techniques you have are management a

PropLIBRARY contains a ton of information that can help you solve common business development, lead capture, and proposal problems. We give many solutions away. And some are part of our premium content. The list below is a mixture of links to free content and premium content that's only available with  a finding leads before the RFP is released If you need to fix a broken proposal If you need to be more selective in what you bid If you are writing a proposal even though you don't know the cust

People bring their expectations to work with them. People form expectations while at work. Expectations run in every direction, between every stakeholder. Humans generally do a poor job of communicating them, and an arguably worse job of fulfilling them. It is a wonder that anything ever gets done. We can do better.  What if expectations were communicated more clearly? And accepted? What could we accomplish if we fulfilled all of our expectations for each other? What stands in the way of this? P

Visual communication is more effective than text. Studies show that graphics get read first and lead to faster and better message comprehension. Most proposal specialists know that and seek to use a lot of graphics. They usually start by asking questions like “How many graphics should I have in my proposal and where should they go?” Some don’t get any further because if you don't have the skills needed to create the graphics, it seems difficult and time consuming. Plus it's hard to make it high

Creating proposal graphics can be thought of in two parts. My friend Mike Parkinson of the 24hr Company refers to them as: •    Conceptualization. Figuring out what to communicate visually and what the graphic needs to communicate. •    Rendering. Drawing the graphic. Rendering is where all the artistic skills are required. But conceptualization is where you figure out what should go into the graphic and what the graphic should accomplish. Conceptualization does not require any artistic abilitie

The things you do to win proposals come naturally when you have an effective corporate culture. But if you're encountering win rate stealing friction while doing proposals, it's a sign that your corporate culture is broken. Fixing your corporate culture can help you win proposals. But most companies don't understand what a corporate culture is, let alone how to cultivate an effective one. The good news is that if your leadership focuses on what it takes to win proposals, it can create the founda

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

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