Why you can't just follow the steps to create a great proposal

You can't follow the steps to create a great proposal, because the steps are different every time. They aren't even steps. At best we talk about phases. But even those change, overlap, or get redefined every time. That's why most companies really just have a way of doing their proposals that isn't legitimately a process. If a process requires a certain person to run it, it's not really a process.

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Great proposals

Writing a winning proposal is really based on a flow of information, from lead to submission. Unfortunately, the information required for a proposal does not arrive in sequence. And you can never get all the information you’d like to have, or know when you'll find out something new that changes what you need to do. Consider:

• Your proposal strategies are often built as much on what you don’t know as on what you do know.

• Because the customer rules all, you do a lot of reacting to their whims. They have more control over the flow of information needed to prepare the proposal than you do.

• Your primary management tool is expectation management so you can attempt to keep everyone on the same page, even though they all have different priorities.

• You spend most of your time solving problems, which occur unpredictably.

• You try to compensate with planning, but that's really just figuring out what needs to be done about all the things that are different on this proposal.

• Proposal writing usually involves different people, writing about different things, with different strategies, on a different schedule, under different circumstances, often for a different customer with different needs, preferences, and approaches to decision making.

• You hold reviews for quality assurance, where you seek quality with a moving target and mostly subjective quality criteria that you learn about after writing instead of before it.

• You go into formatting and production where the input you need is always late and everything breaks in ways that are different from last time. 

Meanwhile, you're competing where being number two is just being the first loser and winning is a higher priority than following the same procedures you did last time. 

Just because there is a pattern to how your proposals go, does not mean that it can be reduced to repeatable procedures. You can't impose order on something that is inherently not sequential. Steps get repeated an uncertain number of times. Routine steps might not be applicable on a given day. New steps frequently have to be invented. 

The proposal process is not really about the steps, and if your process is based on sequential steps it is likely to fail and even more likely to be ignored. This is a major reason why companies don’t follow their own process. If your proposal process is based on steps, you should think about reengineering it into something that guides people to winning a proposal instead of something they are expected to follow like an assembly line.

Goals are better than steps

What you need is a process based on goals instead of steps. Your needs and what you have to work with change from proposal to proposal. But what you are trying to accomplish doesn’t change. This means you can build your process around your goals for what you are trying to accomplish. Accomplishing the things you need to do to win is far more important than having repeatable steps. You can arrange your goals so that achieving the first goal sets up what you need to begin work on the logical follow-on goal. You can do things in whatever sequence makes sense in order to achieve the ultimate goal of submitting a winning proposal.

For example, you don’t need a cross-reference matrix to win a proposal. Sometimes you need a cross-reference matrix. It depends on how well the RFP is written and whether the various sections are in synch. And yet many processes mandate a cross-reference matrix be created just after RFP release. What you really need is a proposal outline that reflects the customer’s expectations and that addresses RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them addressed. The very specific and labor-intensive way you create a proposal cross-reference matrix may get left behind when you have an RFP that has an unusual structure that breaks your cross-reference template. Nonetheless, the goal of having "an outline that reflects the customer's expectations and that addresses RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them" remains the same. Achieving the goal is what matters and not whether or not, or what format you use, or how you might or might not prepare a cross-reference matrix. A cross-reference matrix might remain the preferred way to accomplish the goal, but there is room for deviation or improvement so long as the goal is met.

Having the right goal helps you decide what you should do when the steps written into the process do not apply. It’s how you know when your steps are applicable and when you need to be innovative.

How do you know when you have the right goals?

You should add to or change the way you’ve articulated your goals if:

• You find yourself in a circumstance that none of your goals addresses

• A problem disrupts your ability to achieve a goal

• A previous goal was followed, but didn’t deliver what is needed for the current goal

• Participants couldn’t figure out how to achieve the goal

• A goal is telling people how to do things instead of what to accomplish

Careful wording of your goals can imply what needs to be done and even imply how to know when you’ve done something correctly.

A good way to test your proposal process goals is to ask if you can delete or combine any of them, without reducing the quality of the proposal. You want your list of goals to be as short as possible. Likewise, you want to minimize the number of goals that have sub-goals.

Achieving the right goals keeps you heading on the right path. Being goal-driven is more important than being process-driven. Having a goal-driven process gives you the best of both worlds.