Using MustWin Now for pre-proposal capture

MustWin Now has a tool for gathering pre-proposal capture questions and answers. It's flexible enough to be used simply to gather information or to prompt activity. It can be used instead of creating a document called a "Capture Plan." It can even be used if you have no capture management process and not capture managers.

What this tool does is gather the answers to key questions so that you can turn them into win strategies and proposal themes. You can do this long before the RFP is released. Or shortly before. Obviously it is better to start early when you can do more research and prepare better answers.

Related tools

If you are starting at RFP release, you might want to skip this tool and just start using the Proposal Input Forms. They are similar, but designed to be used at proposal startup, when there's no time for further research and they focus on what you need to know to prepare the document. You can use either tool, both, or neither depending on your circumstances and preferences. 

All the Pre-Proposal Capture Q&A and Proposal Input tools do is gather information. After you have the answers to the questions, you can use the Win Strategy Development tool to figure out what to do about the intelligence you've gathered. The Win Strategy Development tool is where you turn raw intelligence into themes and actions items in the form of instructions for proposal writers. When the RFP is released the RFP Requirements Cross-Referencing tool will see the themes and instructions and enable you to map them to the proposal outline, just like you do the RFP requirements. When you start using the Proposal Content Planning tool, you'll already have that part of the plan complete.

Expectations

There are far more questions than you can possibly answers. This is on purpose. We can never get answers to all of the pre-proposal questions we have, but we do a better job when we know what answers we should be seeking. It's okay to skip questions you don't have answers for. In fact, that's better than responding with something trivial. The goal isn't to have an answer to every question, the goal is to discover pieces of incredibly useful intelligence that will increase your win probability. 

Understanding the screens

When you click on the Pre-Proposal Capture Q&A tool, the first page you see will show you:

• A list of topics. Questions are grouped into topics you can think of as Q&A forms. You can decide which forms to add and use. Some forms may not be relevant to this proposal. And that's okay. 
• Your progress in completing them. While the goal is not to reach 100% completion for each form, at least you can see what's been started.
• Any issues related to them. If you are not working alone, you can do this collaboratively. You can involve others, ask them questions, get advice, hold reviews, etc., simply by using the collaboration panel on the right. Issues related to Q&A forms show up on the dashboard. You decide whether to focus on issue resolution or answering more questions.

Some features are just to enable you to speed things up or see what you need to see. You don't have to use them, but they may come in handy.

At the top, you will see which forms are completed, and which still need to be worked on:

At the bottom you will see any tasks/issues associated with the Pursuit Capture Forms. You can view them all, only view the ones assigned to you, or sort them.

On the left, you will see a list of forms. You can choose whether to look at all of them, or only ones that haven't been answered yet.

Each section can be collapsed or expanded by clicking the arrow to the right

Adding new topics and forms

To add more forms to the pursuit, make sure the "More questions you can add to this pursuit" menu is expanded and click the "+" next to the one you want to add.

Next, choose who you'd like to assign for answering and adding insights and click "continue".

Now this form will appear on the left. You can click on it to begin working on it.

To answer the questions in this form, simply type in your answer and click "save". You can also make changes to the form by clicking "Form Actions" in the top right corner.