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When you go straight from salespeople to proposals: You tend to get a lot of waste if the sales function doesn't pay for each proposal they request out of their own budget. When this is the case there’s no reason for them not to want to submit a proposal, no matter how low the win probability. When there is no cost, why not submit a proposal, because it might win? This approach comes at a win-rate destroying cost that sucks the life out of a company’s future potential. If salespeo

Most companies have regular business development meetings to discuss the leads they are tracking. These meetings usually do very little to increase the company’s win rate, but give everyone a chance to convince themselves that “they’ve done everything they should.” The reality is that the meetings have been subverted and are doing more harm than good. How did that happen? It happens when you allow your business development meetings to focus on the wrong things:  How many leads you

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 objectiv

Instead of being well-oiled intimidating machines, most large companies are a collection of political territories that often don’t know what resources are available to them and don’t cooperate very well anyway. They don’t have an abundance of staff because all those bodies are all already committed and their proposals are just as understaffed as the ones at small companies. And even though they have billions in revenue, they can only spend what’s in their budget on the proposal. But they do have

Everyone contributes to proposals. When it's required of them. If they can make themselves available. But no one seems to own the outcome… Who owns the win? Even the proposal manager is often just producing what other people came up with and passing it along. So whose job is it to win? Everybody wants to win. At least that's what they say. But who has it as their top priority? You’d be surprised at how many companies have no one who has winning proposals as their primary responsibility

Selling in writing is about influencing the decision process and the decision maker with what you put on paper. When the customer will make their decision based on the proposal you submit, you need to sell in writing to influence the sale. 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 influence in writing To sell in writing, the salesperson must discover how

We tend to obsess over the technical approach and treat the management plan as if it's routine. Yet companies have won major proposals by focusing on the management plan instead of the technical approach. How do you know when the management plan is more important? It depends on: The evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria sometimes favor either the technical or the management section. When they do, it is an indicator of which the customer thinks is more important. Since the evaluati

I’ll give you three hints: It’s the most frequent cause of the proposal death spiral, that cycle of endless rewrites that are never good enough and only end because there’s a deadline, resulting in delivering the proposal you have instead of the proposal you wanted to submit. Usually typified by trying to fit in one re-write too many and having a train wreck at the end where errors are likely to be introduced, but no time is left for quality assurance. It’s a major reason why the pr

The more proposals the customer has to read, the harder it will be to get their attention and keep it. This is especially true when the customer defines the outline and has a page limit so tight you can’t use layout design. How to get the customer's attention in a proposal Give them a path to get their goals fulfilled (instead of your own). When the customer reacts with “That’s what I want,” you’ve got their attention. But complex proposals require more than just saying something benef

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 f

Just because your proposals are produced by a group of people doesn’t mean that you have an organizational approach to winning business. Just because you call them a team doesn’t mean that they aren’t really just a collection of individuals sharing the work.  An organizational approach to winning is different from spreading the work to more individuals and keeping track of the pieces. An organizational approach is more than the sum of its parts because the work that each participant does re

People make the mistake of thinking that proposals are about promotion. They promote in the way they see all around them. Advertisements are full of claims. But their purpose is to get the customer to enquire to find out what they need to know. Proposals happen after the customer has expressed their interest. When the customer asks for a proposal, it’s the last step before they agree to sign a contract. They need all the information required to examine, consider, analyze, and decide whether

Almost every proposal we review has the same problems, whether it was written by a billion dollar company or by a single person company. They are ordinary. They all sound the same. Some are more detailed than others. Some show promise and pique my interest. But I almost never get surprised and see one that’s great from cover to cover. What that really means is that you have an opportunity to consistently beat your competitors. All you have to do is make the leap from writing an ordinar

Solutioning is figuring out what to offer the customer to solve their problem or address their need. However, in practice, it really involves incorporating subject matter expertise to figure out what to propose. While the term implies creating the solution for proposals that address customer problems, it is similar to systems architecting or offering design. We’re using the term solutioning to cover all of them just to keep it simple. Solutioning may not be needed in every proposal. Sometim

A management approach is a document that explains to the customer what you will do to ensure that they get what you’ve promised. It is not simply a set of operational plans.  A lot of people find writing the management approach for a proposal to be boring and uninspiring. They even routinely recycle their boring management approaches, as if the customer doesn’t care. I love to compete against them because the management approach is often a great opportunity to win proposals. Management

Over time, best practices become simply the way things should be done. They become ordinary. Best practices are not competitive. Everyone claims to follow them. The use of the term “best practices” no longer adds value or conveys meaning. Proposing to follow the best practices is certainly not a differentiator. However, best practices are a good starting point — if you go beyond them. The more your proposal is better than the “best” practices, the more competitive it will be.  Here are

Writing an RFP is harder than writing a proposal. And it’s even harder when you are not the expert in what you need to buy or are missing information. When customers and vendors work together, they can mitigate issues like these:  How to get the right vendors to bid. Who out there could add value or bring better solutions? How do they find them? Would they bid? Who will ultimately bid? If they put out an RFP, what are they going to get back? Should they get more vendors just to have “com

Most proposal assignments come with failure built in. They are essentially a plea for proposal writers to figure out how to win the proposal on their own. This is not a winning strategy. To avoid this, you need to give proposal assignments that are less about tasking and more about guidance. Start by giving better instructions Proposal assignments should cover not just what to write, but also how to write it. And all proposal assignments should come with quality criteria that let t

A proposal describes your offering, but writing a proposal requires having an offering to describe. Instead of being problems with your proposal process, many of the problems that occur during proposal development are really problems with your offering design process. The two easily get tangled up. Showing up with a non-compliant or merely compliant offering isn't going to maximize your win probability. Trying to figure out your offering in writing and then fix it by re-writing is a recipe for p

Proposal content planning is scalable. You can go into great detail, but even just a little can be a big help. Use this form to plan the depth, breadth, size, and complexity of the effort to put into your content plan.