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Everyone acknowledges the importance of having proposal reviews if you want to win. What most people don’t realize is that reviews are not the most important thing you can do if you want to improve your proposal quality and your win probability. How well you plan the content before you start writing has more to do with whether you win than having proposal reviews. Planning the content of your proposal before you write it is about preventing mistakes in the first place. Reviews are about cat

By using a Proposal Content Plan: You reduce the number of changes after people start writing by providing a means to ensure that instructions are complete and correct. You greatly reduce writing time by reducing how long it takes to figure out what to write. You eliminate the endless cycle of rewrites that occurs when writers and reviewers can’t agree on what should be written. Instead of being something difficult and mysterious, you turn prop

A Business Development manager's job is to find as many qualified leads as possible. If you make Business Development cover lead identification through closing, Business Development will have to stop chasing leads when the proposal starts if they make it their job to win. Your company will see-saw between having leads to chase yesterday but none tomorrow because Business Development got sucked into capture or a proposal. If you want a continuous flow of leads, you need continuous lead identifica

Lead qualification is the process of determining whether an “opportunity” is a valid lead. To be valid, it must be worth the cost of pursuing the lead. This should be calculated in steps with qualification criteria to be reviewed at each step to determine if the lead is still worth continued investment. These steps are often referred to as “gates” that must be passed to gain approval to pursue an opporunity. Most lead qualification criteria look for show-stoppers, or things that would make

All proposals are won or lost based on whether the proposal writers have the right input. All. Of. Them. The right input can’t be somehow made up by proposal writers during the proposal. Either it’s brought to them so they can present it or they build a presentation without substance. And it’s best to bring this input at the very beginning, while there is time to do something about it. And this in turn usually means gathering the right input before the RFP hits the street and the proposal s

Starting the proposal outline The initial proposal outline should be based on the RFP. However, a complex RFP may need a Compliance Matrix to map the requirements to the outline. Ultimately, the outline is just part of what you need in order to be ready to start writing the proposal. The outline needs to reflect the structure that the customer expects and incorporate everything that the customer wants you to address.  If the RFP is complex, th

The purpose of proposal planning is to enable you to get it right the first time and to validate that you have prepared the right proposal. While the Proposal Manager is responsible for proposal planning, it is a good idea for those impacted to also read and understand the parts of the process those plans are based on. Proposal planning forces you to make decisions and think things through before you write, instead of writing and then re-writing until you figure it ou

Your kickoff meeting agenda depends on your goals Some kickoff meetings are held to announce the implementation of existing plans and some are held to announce the start of the planning efforts. The Proposal Manager should make sure that the agenda matches the goals you wish to accomplish at the kickoff meeting. The following items should be considered for the Kickoff Meeting Agenda: Introduce the opportunity Introduce the team members

If you are obsessed with speeding up your proposal writing, the first thing you might want to think about are the things that slow it down. They may not be what you think… To slow down proposal writing: Start proposal writing before you have your basis of estimate (BOE) figured out. One way to look at your proposal is simply as proof of your basis of estimate. It’s kinda hard to prove your BOE if you don’t have one. Without the BOE already figured out, people will tend to write abou

More tips for implementing Content Plans Centralized vs. decentralized models for Content Planning What to put into your Content Plan Content Planning for quick turnaround proposals and task orders Using Content Plans to improve proposal writing quality Using Content Plans with proposal recipes How to incorporate boilerplate/re-use into your Content Plans Checklist for using boilerplate/re-use material

Sometimes you know can guide the authors by telling them what to include and sometimes you just don’t know and need them to figure that out. You get to decide what level of detail and what form the instructions should take, based on your knowledge, the capabilities of your writers, and the circumstances surrounding your proposal. Think of Content Planning as a toolbox with many different techniques that can be used to solve particular problems. Sometimes the instructions will tell the aut

Content Plans are containers.  They hold ideas, instructions, and other forms of communication between proposal planners, authors, and reviewers. It’s okay if they get a little messy because you don’t want to invest too much time in making them look good when you still have to do the actual proposal. What matters is whether they set the right expectations and are helpful.  This depends on who your authors are. If you are doing a Content Plan for yourself, then you’ll know what you meant (bu

The two main approaches for creating Proposal Content Plans: The best approach depends on your organization's culture, your management style, and the availability of resources. Collaborative.  The Proposal Manager uses the Content Planning approach to solicit and capture input from a variety of sources in order to gather everything that should go into the proposal.  You can also use the Content Plan to build consensus and facilitate decision making. In other words, the wr

A finished Content Plan looks like a proposal But it is just a shell, with headings from your outline. It has bullets instead of paragraphs of text, and empty tables and placeholders for graphics. Each page of the Content Plan represents a page of the proposal. When writing starts, each instruction and placeholder gets replaced with the real response. The success of your Content Plan depends on what you put into it.  It starts empty

Building a Proposal Content Plan through an iterative process: The 8 iterations can be implemented one at a time in sequence or used like a checklist to expedite figuring out what to write: Create the initial shell. Insert instructions for addressing RFP requirements. Add instructions for incorporating win strategies and themes, and to optimize the proposal against the evaluation criteria. Add instructions for incorporating your cust

The CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process and Content Planning are both designed with proposals based on written RFPs in mind.  However, if your customer isn’t going to issue a written RFP you can still adapt the approaches.  All you need to do is formally identify the customer’s requirements.   The challenge will be identifying the customer’s requirements.  Your sales process and other customer contacts should incorporate questions designed to solicit this information from the customer.  T

When you have completed your proposal outline, you can use the following checklist to validate it: ❏   Does the outline comply with the RFP instructions for the outline? ❏   Does the outline provide one place where the customer will expect to find the response to each and every requirement? ❏   Will it be easy for the customer to evaluate? ❏   Will it be easy to navigate? ❏   Are there any topics missing that should be added to the outline? ❏   Is there any redundancy or ambiguity

It takes more than just good wording for themes to be effective. Do they add up to a winning evaluation score? For your proposal to win, it must achieve the winning score.  Your themes should not only be scoreable, but should achieve a winning score.  They should reflect the wording of the evaluation criteria and should reflect what it takes to get a winning score instead of an unsubstantiated statement about being the best solution for the customer’s needs. Do they reflect your co

When you receive a proposal, what information do you need in order to decide whether to approve it? The decision maker starts with questions and looks for answers. They don’t read your proposal. They look for answers. When you are the decision maker, your questions might include: What am I going to get or what will the results be? What do you want (from me)? How much is it going to cost and is it worth it? What will it take to make it happen? What could g

If there is no RFP, then it’s up to you to figure out how to organize your proposal. When there is an RFP, it sets the customer's expectations regarding how you should organize your proposal. But it may only do so at a high level, leaving you to organize things at the detail level (provided you remain compliant with the RFP). Here are some ways to organize your outline when it is up to you: Expectations.  By far, the most important consideration in organizing your proposal is to ful