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Recently I talked to a government employee who was transitioning to the private sector. He asked me if I could recommend any particular contractor because they all sound the same. I thought of all the articles I’ve written about good and bad proposal writing habits and the things I see over and over again when I review proposals for companies and realized it’s true. If the problems I see are in most companies' proposals, then to the customer, those companies must all sound the same.  Thinking ab

Obsessing over the deadline and resource pressure that defines most proposal efforts can make you forget about other important things and limit your ability to maximize your win rate — not to mention it can also lead to total burnout. It’s a curious dilemma and a bit counter-intuitive, but obsessing over getting your proposal done can help you lose. So take a moment and put away your deadline and resource pressures. Take a moment to think about the purpose of it all. Because the purpose is more

Definition: Proposal triage is a best practice for when you have too many proposals, get a late start, have an ineffective or immature proposal process, or have a proposal that is broken. It is similar to the concept of medical triage, in which doctors categorize patients to decide who gets treated first, based on factors such as the likelihood of recovery, the severity of their issue, and whether the patient can wait for treatment. Proposal triage is based on prioritizing corrective action base

When you can’t get the details to write what you want, you can still talk about things that are related in your proposal, and do it without any input. The following approaches are examples of how to do proposals, The Wrong Way. They are strategies for dealing with adverse circumstances where the best practices don’t apply.  Use them inappropriately and they can cause you to lose. But if you have no choice and will otherwise be unable to submit anything, they can potentially save the day. Or at l

Enough of all these best practices already. While we write a lot about them, it’s a lot more fun to write about how to cheat. What do you call it when the best practices no longer apply? Worst practices? That's not right. Best practices for adverse circumstances? That's too long. We call it cheating. But it's not the dishonest kind of cheating. It's the get out of your box and break the rules because that's the only way to survive kind of cheating. When you can't do proposals the right way, you

Once a request for proposals (RFP) is out, it may be too late to bid win a competitive advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP does not have to be hard, but it does take effort in advance and relationship marketing. Those that put the time and effort into getting ahead of the RFP are able to achieve an information advantage as well as a competitive advantage. Recompetes. Targeting recompetes is the easiest way to get ahead of the RFP. But it can take years to pay off. The day a contract is issued, y

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 follow

Proposal losses generally fall into these categories: Price. The is the safe excuse. But losing on price has more to do with getting either the scope or the price to win analysis wrong than with bill rates. Your proposal didn't score high enough against the evaluation criteria. Proposal writing has a much smaller impact on your score than your strategic choices and tradeoff decisions. Someone had an offering that the customer liked better. Did it score better because the offering was better or

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 objective to make

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

There are so many ingredients that go into winning a proposal that we developed a whole methodology to account for them all. But one stands out. It is an attribute that should be a part of every other ingredient. Everything about your strategies, approaches, qualifications, writing, aspirations, and goals should revolve around it. Understand it and you gain a key to unlocking the secret to winning in writing. Nothing else you do will have as much impact on winning as this one, crucial ingredient

Ghosting the competition is an advanced proposal skill. It involves explaining why the customer should not select your competitors. Here are some examples of the wording you can use to do that covering many proposal sections. Click here for an explanation of techniques for ghosting the competition. Use care when ghosting the competition and note how important it is to offer a differentiated solution that shows why the customer should select you before pointing out that it is also a reason why th

People think proposal management is a thing, but it’s not. Proposals are not even a thing. Proposals at different companies have more differences than similarities, even though we tell ourselves otherwise. Similarly, proposal managers come in many different types. Some are a better match for a given company than others. When you see a type that’s the opposite of yours, you might think it’s wrong for proposal management. But there is an environment out there where that style is a better fit than

What one company calls a proposal manager, another might call an administrative assistant. Or an editor. Or a coordinator. Or a production manager. Or a pursuit strategist. Or a capture manager. Is the proposal manager the person is charge of the proposal, in charge of producing what people give them, or just a proposal specialist assigned to support the proposal effort? Or, on occasion, just some unlikely person who happened to be available. A large portion of the conflict and difficulty relate

When people use the term proposal manager they often mean different things. When people use the title proposal manager they often give it to staff with varying capabilities. And even more variation in the level of authority. What one company expects from a proposal manager can be very different from what another company expects. When people think of a proposal manager as the person ultimately responsible for delivering the proposal, they sometimes make the mistake of rolling up all the possible

See also: Proposal Management 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

Most corporate cultures are a mixed bag. No real attention is given to it. As a result, it is defined as much by the personalities of key staff as it is by intent. They grow like weeds instead of being designed. If you are in charge, the odds are that your corporate culture is not what you think it is. The reality is different from your aspirations. And yet your corporate culture is as important to your company’s ability to grow as the steps in your business and proposal development processes. S

Most corporate cultures are a mixed bag. Other than aspirations, no real effort is put into it. As a result, it is defined as much by the personalities of key staff as it is by intent. Without nurturing, a corporate culture will grow like a weed instead of being designed. If you are in charge, the odds are that your corporate culture is not what you think it is. The reality is different from your aspirations. The reality is how people are behaving when you are not in the room. How your proposals

When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves. They ask questions like “What do we do better?” and “How can we exceed the requirements?” But they are missing that they do not matter. The customer who will be making the decision matters far more than you do. A much better way to find your competitive advantage is to focus on what they prefer. A competitive advantage is something that will make it more likely the customer will pick you ov

Proposal win themes should articulate why you are the customer's best alternative, and they must do that from the customer's perspective. If you just think of them as the key messages or benefits, your win themes will tend to get watered down into what you think makes your company good instead of what the customer needs to see in order for you to win. What makes proposal win themes so hard to write is that people show up unprepared to articulate why they are the customer's best alternative. When