Articles
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I was recently asked about what’s changed in the proposal industry over my career. My response was that what strikes me far more is how little has changed. It’s not just that we have the same problems we had decades ago, it’s that there are viable solutions just waiting to be implemented. Every other part of the companies that depend on winning proposals for their revenue have developed and matured their practices. Except the proposal function. Please read the following as motivation and f- 0 comments
- 2,175 views
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It may seem a bit counterintuitive, but streamlining your proposal management process starts by writing down your proposal quality criteria. In fact, it’s the quickest and easiest way to launch your process. It works better than starting at the kickoff meeting and trying to chart the steps. Just simply having proposal quality criteria gives you a way to: Provide guidance to your proposal writers Enable reviewers to validate the quality of what your writers produce I- 0 comments
- 415 views
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A great way to fill your pipeline is through divide and conquer. It's easier to eat the pie one slice at a time. Don't think of the total number of leads you need to find to hit your numbers. Instead, think of how many leads you need in each slice. Then strategically consider how big each slice should be. Is one dominant? Should you avoid having all of your eggs in one basket? Which ones are required to maintain your revenue, and which are the targets for growth? Here are some ideas for how to d- 0 comments
- 2,488 views
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Differentiation is vital. And yet, sometimes people really struggle to find differentiators. For example, when the RFP tells you exactly what to bid, how many to bid, how to structure your pricing, and what the terms and conditions must be, it seems like there isn’t a lot of room to differentiate your offering. But the truth is, you’re just not trying hard enough. You can always differentiate. Here are four approaches to differentiation you can consider when you're struggling: Differenti- 0 comments
- 14,359 views
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Even when you can’t think of any differentiators, you can still show insight. And if you can’t do that, all you have left is to win based on a lower price. If you have no insight and your competitors do, maybe you shouldn’t bid. What is insight and why does it matter in proposals? Insights are the realizations you have that show the customer you not only have a deeper understanding than your competitors, but that you know how to deliver better results. Your insights can lead to a b- 0 comments
- 3,317 views
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This document provides a set of criteria can be used in several ways to assess the quality of a proposal. They can be used to: Assess a past proposal to establish a benchmark to measure progress by. Assess a collection of past proposals for benchmarking purposes. Collect metrics on proposal quality (by establishing numerical grades for each criteria). Identify areas of concern and focus for future improvement. Assess the trend towards improved or diminished qualit- 0 comments
- 753 views
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About this file This file is free. As in beer. It contains a wealth of lessons learned the hard way. It contains things I wish I'd understood about proposal quality at the start of my career. It contains the key insights you need to reengineer how you review your proposals. It will enable you to take a step back from how things are usually done and discover what proposal quality really is, so you can change how you do things to properly achieve it. I'm passing it on to you in the- 0 comments
- 2,573 views
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Should your quality criteria be few and broad or numerous and detailed? Should they specify exactly what to write, or should they verify that things were considered? The depth of your quality criteria depends on a number of factors, including the consistency of your proposals and the level and variety of subject matter expertise required to figure out what to write. Are you trying to identify criteria based on areas of potential issues, or the issues themselves? Is your goal to verify that
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- 111 views
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It’s good to use quality criteria at the back end to review your proposals. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to only use quality criteria after the proposal is written. Or to create your quality criteria after the proposal has been written. It’s much better to put the effort into creating your quality criteria at the very beginning so that proposal contributors receive the quality criteria when they receive their writing assignments. This enables them to create a first draft that meets the qua- 0 comments
- 222 views
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Proposal quality criteria give you the means to measure the quality of your proposal. Before you can create quality criteria for your proposals, you must define proposal quality. Your proposal quality criteria tell you what you must accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Defining proposal quality and creating quality criteria are critical parts of achieving Proposal Quality Validation. While this is easy to understand, creating your proposal quality crit- 0 comments
- 1,254 views
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The proposal death spiral happens when you get to the proposal review and things are so bad that you have to have another review to make sure they’re better, only to find more things to change, and you enter an infinite loop that’s only broken when the deadline comes and you have to submit whatever you have at that moment. When it’s bad, the draft you end up with isn’t much better than the first one. When it’s really bad, people push the changes so close to the deadlines that even the illusion o- 0 comments
- 6,376 views
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Going straight from sales to a proposal is problematical in a way that can lower your revenue. When a salesperson spends time working on a proposal, they are not finding and qualifying more leads. This can cause peaks and valleys in your growth. When the salesperson does not spend time working on the proposal, who is going to apply the customer, opportunity, and competitive insights discovered to winning the proposal? Without those insights, your win probability will suffer. Having a propos- 0 comments
- 2,223 views
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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- 0 comments
- 1,328 views
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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- 0 comments
- 9,254 views
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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- 0 comments
- 6,477 views
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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- 0 comments
- 1,552 views
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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- 0 comments
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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- 0 comments
- 11,541 views
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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- 0 comments
- 2,194 views
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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- 0 comments
- 5,677 views
