Articles

It saves so much time to write a short proposal than writing a long one and editing it down. It also involves a lot less risk. However, it does require you to think about what you are going to write before you start. But you should be doing that anyway. Skip the introductions You don’t need a page to introduce your company. You don’t need half a page to introduce each section. Just say what matters — to the customer. Just because something matters to you does not mean it will matter to

You will not achieve the maximum ROI by staffing business development, capture, and proposals based on using the minimum number of staff to crank out the maximum number of proposals. To maximize your ROI you need to staff according to the things that most impact your win rate. Increases in win rate return orders of magnitude more than the staffing required to achieve them. Here are seven things you should staff your proposals to achieve: RFP Compliance. Achieving compliance is critical.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Nobody has found a way to make working remotely be like working colocated. I recommend that you don't even try. Treat it as an opportunity to reengineer the way you do things. You’re probably overdue anyway. This is a good time to think about what people need to complete their proposal goals. It’s not just about incorporating some new tools. Note, I did not say what people need to complete their assignments. Since you can’t just make a little change and g

A lot of companies make the mistake of treating a customer request for information as an opportunity to start selling them and end up sending them a mini-proposal. This is not the best way to position your company when the customer issues a request for information or makes a sources sought announcement. 5 things you should NOT do in your RFI or sources sought response Sell. It’s the wrong time. Selling at the wrong time makes you look pushy and out of touch. Don’t be that kind of sal

Art is in the eye of the beholder. This is mine. Proposals are more mechanical than art. They are more scientific. They are quantifiable. They are competitive. They are capitalistic. And they are art. There is a depth to doing proposals that most people don't understand and it holds them back. But the art in proposals is not where most people expect to find it. The art is not in the construction, the presentation, or the style of the words. The art is in the solution. And n

We published 98 new content items last year. But it's not the quantity that counts, it's the quality. We published some of the most useful articles ever this year. We've split them into two groups, one for everyone and one just for subscribers. Just take a look and think about how they can help improve your win rate: 12 fundamental problems you have to solve to prepare great proposals The best example of bad proposal writing I've ever seen 14 examples of proposal writing that

What drives the efficiency of the proposal process is not what you think.  It’s not how quickly you can crank out your proposals It’s not how much time you put into producing the document It’s not what causes a train wreck at the end of the proposal, or what can fix it It’s not how easily you can recycle your previous proposal content It’s not any of the things people complain about when working on proposals Losing efficiently is counter-productive. Put

The secret to business success is not to find as many leads and submit as many proposals as possible. You will not become prosperous by producing lots of cheap, low win rate proposals.  While you may catch a fish by randomly casting your line over and over, you will not feed a village that way. The solution is not to cast as many lines as you can. You need to become smarter about fishing and invest in your gear. Maybe buy a net and a boat. You need to put some effort into it. Fishing at ran

Each time you start writing without a plan for what you are going to write, I’m going to start with the points my writers are going to prove.  Every time you try to figure out what to offer by writing about it, puts me several drafts ahead of you. Every time you start your proposal without input puts you another draft behind me. Every day one of your people misses a deadline is a day added to my schedule. Each time you start without customer insights puts my score ahead of yo

When given an opportunity to network with their peers, talk to experts, and forge relationships with potential customers, why do some many people simply go on LinkedIn to post ads? What percentage of LinkedIn posts start off with "We are so excited to announce..." And why do so many of them write their proposals the same way? It's like they all follow the same template. Here's what it looks like when you inject a little too much honesty into it: We are so pleased to submit the followin

If you can articulate a repeatable proposal process and successfully implement it in the real world, congratulations! You are a proposal manager. Your education, however, is just beginning. Proposal development is not really about the process. Or said another way, the proposal process is just one tool for accomplishing the goal of winning in writing using a team of people working against a deadline to respond to customer requirements better than your competitors. The process is only part of

A lot of RFPs assess proposals in terms of strengths and weaknesses. But they usually don’t tell you what a strength is. While you will find some customers that will define a strength as meeting the requirements, that is not a safe assumption. Some customers believe a strength is something that goes beyond merely meeting the requirements.  Weaknesses are easy to define. It’s when the customer can’t find something they think you should have talked about. Note: that’s not quite the same thing

Some people write like they are proposal narcissists. Their proposals are all about how great they are. They claim this. They claim that. They describe themselves in such grandiose terms. When they explain their approaches they say  “We will…” after “We will…” after “We will…” as opposed to focusing on what the customer will get. But your customer doesn’t believe that noise. So why are you even writing it? You wouldn’t represent yourself in person with someone you just met. But when we don’

  If winning proposals is a mission critical function for your company, then you can’t treat the proposal management process as a support or document production function. The goal of the proposal management process is to guide the people working on a proposal and enable them to be successful by accounting for the information, planning, and quality assurance needed. But this doesn’t really capture the importance of it. The proposal management process requires going beyond document producti

What happens when you start writing as soon as you have an outline… An outline is where you start. But it’s a long, long way from the finish line. If you start proposal writing from an outline, you will be giving your proposal writers zero guidance beyond a heading. And maybe an RFP. If they read it. You are expecting the writers to figure it all out. Even the best proposal writers need input and to think things through before they start writing. And less experienced writers tend to write

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

Our tangible training programs are all based on exercises that create the tools you’ll need to be successful. Instead of just talking about process, we’ll create the checklists you can use to improve your process. Instead of focusing on steps and procedures, we’ll focus on goals and accomplishments. We’ll help you understand how to approach each topic, how to define success, and how to measure your progress toward achieving it. These are private sessions. Only staff from your company will p

It's true that the odds of winning a proposal when you have never even talked to the customer go down so much that it may not be worth bidding. But the fact is that sometimes companies win them, so let's look at when it's possible to win and what you can do to increase your chances. Occasionally, in some markets, no one gets to know the customer before they surprise the world with an RFP. It largely depends on the nature of what they are procuring. Bidding blind is not worth it. Except when

Early in my career, after a terrible proposal experience, I’d focus on improving the proposal process because that is what I had control over. I thought with the right procedures and enough dedication to them we could fix any problem. There are a couple of problems with that: The proposal process is not sequential. It is goal driven. You won’t be successful focusing exclusively on the steps. There is more to success than following procedures. Over time I discovered that wha

Don’t start your proposal by thinking up everything that’s good about yourself that you should tell the customer. This can actually lead to bad proposal writing. Instead, start your proposal by think about what the customer needs to hear. But before you can do that, you have to know the customer. And before that, which person at the customer will be reading? Will it be the one receiving the services? The one who understands what is being procured? The one who runs the procurement