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I tend to focus on winning proposals instead of efficiency. One more win can produce enough revenue to cover the inefficiency of many proposals. If you want more revenue, you are better off focusing on winning than reducing proposal effort. Unfortunately, many organizations treat proposals as a cost instead of as an investment (let alone the core competency of the organization). Proposal costs are covered out of the overhead portion of the budget, and that’s always under pressure for reduction.

Submitting low quality proposals and making it up in volume is a bad strategy. A better strategy is to target doing the least costly things that return the most revenue. When it comes to proposals, the things that generate the most revenue may not be what you think they are. A key lesson for companies that depend on proposals Preparing a proposal can be costly. But preparing a winning proposal returns a large amount of revenue. The problem is that not every proposal wins. When you increase your

AI-written proposals can be beat. It’s not any harder than beating a proposal written by humans. AIs do some things extremely well. But raising the bar on what it means to be competitive is not one of them. AI can produce a good proposal. But it can’t produce a proposal that will reliably beat all competitors. Here is why: Pricing decisions. An AI can tell you what to factor into your basis of estimate, but it doesn’t have the data to calculate it accurately. And it certainly doesn’t have the da

A lot of companies do exactly the wrong thing when faced with a must win opportunity. They try to make sure they don’t lose. They give the customer exactly what they ask for in the RFP. They may even make improvements here or there, if they can do it within the boundaries of the instructions. They try to be exactly what the RFP says the customer wants. They never realize that they are setting themselves up to lose. When your goal is to write a good proposal, here is what you get: Meeting (probab

All proposals are competitive. Even if the RFP is completely wired to give the advantage to one preferred company and no one else bids, that company is competing against themselves. They can still blow it. And a naïve upstart can always come in and steal it away because they don’t know they can’t win. It may be rare, but it does happen. And customers are sometimes ready for something new. Which will the customer select? You should go into every proposal assuming it’s competitive and pushing to b

Uncertainty works against creating a winning culture because it breeds trust issues. But the solution is counter-intuitive. To fix the trust issues related to uncertainty, you should build a proposal process that does not trust anyone ever. You need to eliminate the need for trust. When your process functions without trust, then trust will flourish. I told you it's counter-intuitive. It's not that your people aren't trustworthy. Or that they are fallible. But they have multiple competing priori

Although I see this mistake made frequently, getting more out of the people working on proposals does not mean getting more proposals written with the same number of people. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but the reality is that winning pays for the effort. And then some. And then a whole lot more. You want people to win proposals and not just work hard at submitting a bunch of losers. And if they are winning, hiring people to do more proposals is easy. If you leave people on their own expecting

Creating a proposal is easy. Working with other people is hard. Combine the two and you’ve got trouble. A big part of the problem is that other people have opinions. They have their own ways of doing things. When you’re trying to do your proposal a certain way or say things in a certain way, it often doesn't work out that way when other people are involved. It would be great if you could just tell them how you want things done and have them do it that way. Unfortunately, other people don’t work

Sometimes it seems like the proposal schedule is a work of fiction or a plan that has failed before it has even begun. Sometimes you know the moment you give a proposal assignment that it will not be met.  Sometimes you and the person getting the assignment both know it is going to be ignored and no one is going to enforce the deadline. When this happens routinely, it can make being a proposal manager discouraging and feel pointless. The trap you should avoid falling into is to assume that if on

If your company matters to the customer receiving your proposal, it’s because the results of what you offer matter to them. To win the proposal, what you propose must matter more than any other alternative available to them, and this can include doing nothing. None of the things you say in your proposal will make a difference if the customer doesn’t think what you’ve said matters to them. We’ve all experienced this... When a salesperson approaches you and says “I know all about you and know exac

Fight! Fight! Fight! Not really. But sometimes you do have to decide which to focus on first. Or how much to budget for each.  Keep in mind that companies often define things differently. They often blur the lines between roles. If you have a slash in your title (i.e. BD/capture, capture/proposal) then you are neither. You stop prospecting the moment you start doing capture. You stop doing capture the moment you get in the weeds of document production.  What matters depends on several things The

Summary   What the customer cares about depends on what they are buying. The closer things get to a commodity, the less the vendor matters and the more that price matters. The closer you get to a unique solution, the more trust and risk matter. Products and services can be either unique solutions or commodities, but what matters to the customer about products and services is different. How the customer perceives their need in relation to this chart matters. If it does not match what you offer

It would be really great to know if you're going to win a pursuit, or even just have a decent chance at it, before you put all that effort into it. We are driven to really want to quantify our chances of winning a pursuit. We want to make it a science. Really badly. There are several reasons why people need to estimate the probability of win (pwin). It helps to: Determine whether a lead is worth pursuing at all Figure out how much to budget on the pursuit Assign the right staff Have a better

Take a step back from proposal mechanics. Becoming a better proposal manager has more to do with understanding the goals and what’s required for people to improve their performance than it does with making the trains run on time. A conductor doesn’t just keep the musicians in synch. A conductor helps them be more than the sum of their individual parts. Here’s how to apply that to proposal management:  Decide on what kind of proposal manager you want to be. You may not realize it, but there are m

A proposal process is not enough to maximize growth, no matter how good the process is. A good proposal process will mostly lose. A great proposal process will make you competitive, but even that doesn't mean winning most of what you bid. Consistently producing winning proposals and doing it in volume requires more than just a process. In fact, being at the top of the competition depends more on going beyond your process than perfecting your process. What is beyond your process? A shared set of

In most companies, proposal development is the most immature part of the company. But they don’t realize it because they’ve bought into myths that enable them to think all that work they’ve put in amounts to more sophistication than it really does. Often what they do is different from what they say they do. Because of the myths that people have bought into, management practices that would not be tolerated in any other part of the company become expected as the norm in proposal management. These

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. Writing a winning proposal is really based on a flow of information, from lead to submission. Unfort

People bring their expectations to work with them. People form expectations while at work. Expectations run in every direction, between every stakeholder. Humans generally do a poor job of communicating them, and an arguably worse job of fulfilling them. It is a wonder that anything ever gets done. We can do better.  What if expectations were communicated more clearly? And accepted? What could we accomplish if we fulfilled all of our expectations for each other? What stands in the way of this? P

If you are a contractor, I’m willing to bet that not only is your mission statement ignored, it’s probably just plain wrong. Take a look at these mission/vision statements from three of the largest U.S. Government contractors: We solve complex challenges, advance scientific discovery and deliver innovative solutions to help our customers keep people safe. Connect, Protect, Explore and Inspire the World through Aerospace Innovation. One global team creating trusted, innovative solutions to mak

If your goal is to provide reasons for the customer to select you (what themes are supposed to provide), then maybe you should think less about the features in what you offer and think more about what matters to the customer. What should drive your win strategies are not simply the advantages you think you have, but rather the advantages that matter to the customer and affect your evaluation score. Here are 11 customer-centric theme that should drive your win strategies: What is the nature of yo