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Validating your Content Plan before you start to write: Prevents re-writing and editing cycles. Enables you to confirm that the approaches are correct before you start writing. Provides you with a reliable baseline to measure the draft text against. Validating the Content Plan is more important than validating the draft text. It is important to confirm that the Content Plan contains everything that it should, and that the instruct

Proposal Content Planning is a methodology that is part of the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process. The full methodology is part of what comes with a PropLIBRARY Subscription. Here is an introduction to Proposal Content Planning. When you are just getting started with preparing Content Plans for your proposals, you can put anything in them that’s helpful. You don’t need to get hung up on the wording. Anything you put in them will be better than nothing. As your experience and skills im

The PropLIBRARY Course System uses just a handful of content types for all of the course content: Articles. Use this for text with graphics and links. It can used for a textbook topic or it can be a description and a link. We use it for repurposing the content from the PropLIBRARY website. The target for this content type is 500-1500 words, but it will support much longer lengths. Formatting is limited to what the web-based editor supports. Tables can be created, but are a pain. Fi

You can accelerate your proposal quality validation efforts by identifying the quality criteria you want to apply to all proposals ahead of time. You can even turn them into checklists. If you provide an opportunity to create additional quality criteria that are specific to the pursuit, you can accelerate without watering down your criteria. This requires thinking through your standard quality criteria before you start your proposal. If you start a proposal without already having prepared y

To facilitate your Proposal Quality Validation planning, we have prepared a set of sample quality criteria, allocated to key proposal milestones. Make sure you customize this list to reflect the specifics of the opportunity, your type of business, and the market. 1.    Pre-RFP If you implement Readiness Reviews, then these items have already been validated. 1.1    The opportunity is worth pursuing 1.2    We know what evaluation criteria to anticipate 1.3    We have collected th

This guide is organized like a cookbook, providing over 180 items divided into 20 topics. It will help you answer your customer's questions regarding how the work will be done, who will do it, what resources will be required, how to mitigate the risks, and what you will do to ensure quality. It will help you prove to your customer that you can successfully manage the project and deserve to win the contract.

It is so much easier to talk about your experience than to plan approaches or develop differentiators. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the value of your experience answers all requirements. Your experience has no value and does not matter. Unless you articulate that value and bring meaning to it. The following example is loosely based on proposal content that was actually submitted to the customer, with some changes to hide the identity of the company that submitted it. The compan

Describing your own company is a mistake, even when the RFP uses the word “describe.” The customer doesn’t care about your company, they care about what they are going to get and whether you can deliver as promised. They ask for the description because they want to assess that ability.  The following example is loosely based on proposal content that was actually submitted to the customer, with some changes to hide the identity of the company that submitted it. The company was not one of our

Describing your own company is a mistake, even when the RFP uses the word “describe.” The customer doesn’t care about your company, they care about what they are going to get and whether you can deliver as promised. They ask for the description because they want to assess that ability.  The following example is loosely based on proposal content that was actually submitted to the customer, with some changes to hide the identity of the company that submitted it. The company was not one of our

A lot of proposal writing follows common patterns. When we review proposals for companies we see new examples of the mistakes below all the time. If you take a step back from the details, the patterns are quite simple. If you learn to recognize the patterns, you can avoid writing like this: First I’m going to tell you what you need. Then I’m going to say that I’ll provide it. Before example: XYZ agency needs to update its website. Our approach to building websites is based on compli

Separating how you figure out what to offer from writing about it is critical to avoid endless draft cycles that only end when you run out of time and you submit the proposal you have instead of the proposal you want. But you still have the problem of how to design your offering. Designing your offering is an engineering problem. And the engineering approach depends on the nature of what you offer. There is no single engineering methodology that is best for all. But there are some things th

When the RFP forces everyone to bid the exact same thing, the ways people differentiate their bids tend to be intangible. This makes it difficult for the customer to evaluate. How, other than price, do they rank the bids based on intangible differences? How do they justify selecting a winner that costs more when the difference in value can't be quantified? It's difficult, but if your proposal is full of unsubstantiated claims, you don't have a chance. Consider each of the following ways com

Proposal writing like these examples can turn a great proposal into one that is merely ordinary. You might not get fired for sounding just like everyone else, but it's also no way to win your proposals. I see these issues so frequently when I review proposals for companies that they are like clichés. The good news is that the opposite is also true. Learning how not to write like this can turn your good proposals into great proposals. Correcting bad habits like these can help your proposals stand

Win probability is the likelihood that you'll win your pursuit. It would be so nice to be able to predict the probability of winning a bid. It would be really nice to know what percentage your chances are. It would so help with resource allocation and making decisions. But there are just two problems with expressing win probability as a percentage: None of the algorithms that make the attempt to calculate your percentage chance of winning have statistically significant data to base the

read a description of the other RFP sections here. Some may have things that you must respond to, like Section K, where they put the “Certifications and Representations” (where you may have to “Certify” or “Represent” things like whether you are a U.S. firm, a minority firm, that you haven't defaulted on previous contracts, etc.). But the others are part of the legal form or contract boilerplate, and you won’t have to read them the same way you will the Statement of Work and Evaluation Criteria.

With a complicated Request for Proposals (RFP), it can be hard to figure out what the customer wants. You can create a compliance matrix to allocate the requirements to your proposal outline, but with a complicated RFP there can be a combination of broad items that apply to whole sections, ridiculously specific items that are hard to integrate, contradictory items, ambiguous items, poorly explained items, items that use questionable vocabulary, etc. No amount of questions you can ask, even if yo

We get tons of inspiration for our articles from participating in discussions in our group on LinkedIn. We were thinking about something we posted there recently on the topic of what to do when you get an RFP. We realized that some people set themselves up for failure right from the beginning. When you get an RFP, do you do the things that lead to winning or the things that lead to losing? Do you assume you are going to bid and start work on the proposal or do you look for reasons not to b

Is it the statement of work? The evaluation criteria? The pricing model? Those are all important, but if you want to win there is something about an RFP that is even more important. The problem is that it’s not even in the RFP itself. Anyone can write a proposal that responds to what it says in the RFP, and certainly your competitors can do so. But when you try to write a great proposal, you’ll quickly start asking questions about the RFP, and you won’t find those answers in the document.

The release of the RFP is the moment of truth. Either you are prepared or you are not. You will either be ready to issue assignments, or trying to figure everything out. The first thing to do is to distribute copies of the RFP to those who will be involved. Here is a sample RFP distribution list to speed this up. Then you should follow a checklist to make sure you quickly consider everything you should, without overlooking anything. The deadline for asking questions about the RFP

Understanding the content and structure of a Government RFP, as shown below, enables you to write better proposals. The content of a U.S. Federal Government RFP is mandated by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). The FAR is a very lengthy and detailed set of rules that defines what must go into a Federal RFP and how it must be structured, as well as the acquisition and RFP process. Government RFPs that are based on the FAR are broken down into sections that are identified by letter (A - M).