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You can’t write a great proposal unless you have a great offering. Trying to write about something in a great way when you haven’t figured out what that something even is, is just a recipe for failure. You need to start the writing already knowing what your great offering is going to be.  In fact, making up a great offering by writing about it is a great way to ensure that you end up with a poor offering that is poorly explained. That’s a major way that companies end up with a low win rate, and

It's not enough to track your leads. You need to know what they add up to. You need to know how many resources you'll need to win the pursuit. And at each step along the way, you'll drop some leads. Either they fail to qualify, the customer cancels them, or they all land at the same time and you can't pursue them all. Pipeline analysis blends lead tracking with analytics. A pipeline model is a spreadsheet that shows your leads over time, status, source, and other attributes. The formulas contain

If you don’t put a ton of thought into your proposal strategies or if you leave it until the end, after you’ve got the proposal written as if it’s some kind of icing on the cake, then you need to understand why your good proposal is going to lose. To end up with a great proposal instead of a merely good one, you need the right strategies. Before you can develop the right strategies, you’ll need to have developed an information advantage. And once you have your strategies, you’ll need to art

Winning as an organization isn't just about business development. Or proposals. Or capture. It takes a village to develop business. When an organization decides it's time to get good at winning new contracts, it often focuses on developing its proposal process. This is a good thing. But it is also not enough. It is merely a starting point. Winning as an organization requires more than just a process. There are staff issues, leadership issues, culture, management practices, strategies, colla

Your good proposal is going to lose. You can’t charm your way into a sale in writing because selling in writing is different than selling in person. In fact, winning in writing is more like cooking than speaking. Don't fear proposal writing just because you are not a writer. It helps to have all the ingredients. You have to have done your pre-proposal homework and be prepared with an information advantage. But you don't need to feel overwhelmed.  You won't write a great proposal by usi

Most training for proposal writers focuses on the mechanics of identifying what to write, and provides very little help for how to write it. I see a lot of well-trained proposal teams struggle with how to address things when they have a problem. I’ve also watched a lot of technical staff and proposal writers struggle with how to say things in writing. They may know that benefits are more important than features or they may know that writing proposals from the customer’s perspective is bette

The difference between marketing, business development, sales, and capture has nothing to do with titles. The difference is purely functional and it matters. People misuse the labels all the time because there is a lot of overlap and they prefer one title over the other. But you need some of each, even if you are short staffed and the titles people have don’t match. The goal of marketing is to attract customers so that you can sell to them. There are many approaches to attracting custo

Price always matter. But some customers define price as value. They are willing to pay more to get more. Other customers want the lowest possible price. And the lowest possible price depends on what is the minimum they will accept. One term for this kind of evaluation is low price, technically acceptable (LPTA). In an LPTA evaluation, no matter what you say or do that's better than the minimum acceptable, the customer will not care. It looks like all the customer cares about is the price. And wh

Not everyone can write. And people who write well in other areas may not write great proposal copy. The law of averages means that not even every proposal specialist is exceptional. So how do you win using people who are not great proposals writers? First, you should start thinking in terms of contributions instead of sections. Just as there are many ingredients that go into a winning proposal, there can be many contributors. And a contribution to the proposal doesn’t necessarily have to in

Most people write their proposals by doing things that add up to nothing. Instead of thinking through what it will take to win, they just start piling on positive-sounding attributes. They might even be legitimately positive, but if they don’t fit the way the customer makes their decision, they won’t add up to much at all. Probably nothing. The problem is that a collection of positive attributes, even if the attributes are relevant, is not what a customer really wants. They want results.

If your proposal is about giving the customer what they asked for, it's just not... special. It might be a little better, maybe, but that’s not special. That’s just being the same only a little bit more. You may have claimed to be special and probably believe it, but who cares about that noise? What the customer sees is marginal. Meh. Your proposal is not special, because you haven’t proposed giving the customer anything that’s special. You haven’t proposed anything they can only get if the

Some people talk a good game, are full of charisma, and can be very persuasive. But their proposal win rates are often ordinary because they think all they need to do is sit down at a keyboard and hook the customer with the same pitch they'd use in person. Unfortunately. winning in writing has nothing to do with talking a good game. The problem isn't the pitch. The problem is that people process written words differently than they do spoken words. While a conversational style in proposal

In business development, companies often have one person managing the customer relationship. All relationships are personal, so companies tend not to think about making them process driven. But this causes problems in business development because over the life of the pursuit, many people will get involved. Relationship marketing is not about having relationships. It’s about winning because of your relationships. For relationships to lead to business, they must be productive. The goal of the

When you sit down to write a proposal, you start asking questions so that you know what to write. Inevitably you ask questions that can’t be answered, but that could have been answered had they occurred to you earlier. At the tail end of the process, proposals tell you what you should have been doing all along. When you sit down and write the proposal, you describe your approaches and what you will do if you are selected. This is where one little writer, often at a junior level, can change

Sometimes people think they are making more of a contribution by writing theme statements than they really are… Sometimes it goes a bit like this: We wrote some themes. They make us sound really good. What else do you want from us?   It's not our fault they don't match what's in the RFP. You want a theme for everything in the outline? But that's so... artificial. And the outline, like the RFP, is redundant, has gaps, and isn't built around our "story."    The reason our themes are s

Two days before the proposal is due, just as final production is about to begin, the proposal hero looks at the document and is aghast. “It’s all wrong!” he declares. Pandemonium ensues. Papers fly. And the re-writing begins. For the next 48 hours, nobody sleeps. They are fed pizza intravenously. With no time for further review, they hand things in to final production an hour before it’s due. With less than a minute to go they click the button to submit the proposal. By some miracle, nothing goe

If every one of your proposals does not pass its reviews, then you are conducting your reviews the wrong way. It's a sign that you are figuring out what your proposals should be after they are written. It's a sign that you are waiting until after something is broken to do something about it. The way most proposal reviews are conducted is like putting a blindfold on someone, asking them to hit a target, and then finding fault with them when they miss. They are somehow just supposed to know

Within a company, the staff that do business development and the operational business units that serve your customers often don’t get along. It’s not surprising, given that they’ve been set up to fail and organized to be in direct opposition to each other. It’s strange because they should have so much in common. If business development and proposal success require relationship marketing, then you would expect both to want to work together to grow the customer relationship. Business developm

When people think about tools for proposals, they usually make the mistake of thinking about automation. What they should be thinking about instead is performance. When you think of automation, you think of reducing effort and cost. Let the computer do it for you. Go right ahead — if you want to produce proposals that are easy to beat.   But when you think of supporting performance, other things that become important. Like the fact that many people who get involved in proposals are inex

Some companies are opportunistic and bid every lead they find. They think business development consists of looking for leads in databases and bidding everything they can. These companies aren’t selective, waste resources, have little or no process, and try to cram everything they can into their proposals at the last minute. They sometimes get just enough business to reinforce their bad habits. Most opportunistic companies are in wide niches where they don’t have to worry about whether enoug