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Since all of your competitors have the same RFP, you can expect them to at least be compliant.  If you want to win, you must be more than merely compliant. People who are new to proposal writing, especially technical staff, often don’t know how to word their responses to RFP requirements.  Even if they get advice like “make sure your response goes beyond mere compliance” they may not know how to proceed.  Figuring out what words to use can seem really hard.  Here is an example of how to res

The customer needs to know why they should select your proposal to win above all their other alternatives. You should help them figure that out. But be careful — if the reasons you provide are merely good and don’t do a great job of explaining why you should win, you might do more harm than good. The trick is to realize that what you want to write is not an explanation. It is a list of benefits that adds up to being the best alternative. The customer will select the list that they get the m

We all dream of winning it big. If you want your business to win it big, there is something you need to master that’s more important that finding big leads. You have to create an organization that can do things bigger than yourself. What separates a large proposal from a small proposal is not the value or the size of the project. It’s the number of people involved in preparing the proposal. A proposal with one author is a straightforward production. A proposal with multiple contributors is

Instead of reinventing the wheel every time and having every team start from scratch figuring out what their win strategies should be, you can create a cheat sheet that helps them figure it out faster. The goal is not to identify the wording or control future responses. The goal is to help people more quickly identify the strategy, the approach, or the positioning that fits their particular circumstances. They’ll have to come up with the wording based on the specific issues they need to res

Introduction You can't wire an RFP. But you can make recommendations that result in changes to an RFP that work in your favor. The customer is responsible for determining whether those recommendations meet their needs. Here are some recommendations you might consider making. Every one of the topics below has two perspectives that amount to the "haves" and "have nots." For simplicity and brevity, the items below are written from the perspective of the "haves." If on any particular bid

When you subtract the companies that don’t bother writing down their strategic plans and the companies that write them down but leave them sitting on a shelf, what you have left are the companies that usually win. Having an effective strategic plan won’t guarantee that you win, but it does mean that you will be more focused, better thought through, and as a result the odds will skew in your favor. Over the long run, having the odds in your favor leads to consistent growth. It's not a questi

The hardest part of proposal writing is not getting the words on paper, it’s figuring out what you need to say to persuade the customer. When you recycle the words, you submit something to your new customer that is persuasive to someone else. That’s not a good approach to winning. Instead, we recommend two things that when combined create a much better way to accelerate your proposal efforts. Use Content Planning to define what needs to be written. Content Planning is an iterative methodo

How much should you invest in your pursuits? How much time should you put into them? When should you hire more staff? When should you outsource? If you are deciding on a case-by-case basis, you are probably missing the big picture. With the right kind of analysis, you can make sure that you are putting the right resources into business development and proposals, improve your win rates, and maximize your return on investment. About eight years ago we created a spreadsheet model for one of ou

The best way to determine how many people you need to write the proposal and what skills they should have is to thoroughly plan the content before you start writing. Only when you know exactly what it is that you plan to write can you accurately determine how many people you need to write it. Unfortunately, you usually need to estimate the number of writers far in advance of having a Proposal Content Plan. The budget for a proposal is often submitted before the RFP is even out. That is

Most people are a mix of all three perspectives. This is especially true in organizations that don’t have someone assigned to each level. You will substantially improve your value if you can at least look at every issue from all three perspectives. People who like the comfort and security of staying within the box of their chosen level are not people needed to drive the organization to win. So what we’ve done is start with the Executive, Manager, and Worker’s perspectives, and then applied

Sometimes you have to bid when you don’t have a previous relationship with the customer. So how do you write from their perspective, when you don’t even know what that is? While you may not know them directly, you may know people like them. You can ask yourself questions like: What matters to people in their environment and circumstances? What would they find useful, helpful, or beneficial? What are their characteristics? Your goal is to build a profile that will he

Sometimes hiring more people, especially people with proven experience, is not an option. Sometimes you just have to work with the people who are available, even if they are inexperienced. Most people learn business and proposal development on the job, starting off without any experience. But you don’t want them to fail while they are still learning how to win. The first thing that comes to people’s minds when trying to improve the skills of their staff is training. But there are a lot of o

A company recently contacted me because they weren't winning any business from a new customer. The reason the customer gave them was that their task order responses were being evaluated as high risk. They asked me to review their proposal template and make recommendations to improve it. The proposal was limited to three pages. As I started reading, I started deleting everything that wasn’t vital. That was when I realized that this is a very useful technique for improving proposals. Simply

Contain a differentiator. When customers compare proposals, they look for the differences. Your proposal should call out the differences that make it the customer’s best alternative. Deliver a result or benefit from the feature. Features do not matter as much as what the customer gets from those features. Customers don’t just want features, they want their goals and desires fulfilled. What will they get out of what you have said? Matter. If what you just wrote doesn’t matter to the

The first step in Proposal Content Planning is to set up the document shell based on your proposal outline. Before you can get started in the MustWin Proposal Performance Support System, you must enter your outline. The MWPPSS does not create the outline for you. Once you have your outline, you enter it to set up the proposal sections for people to begin planning. Warning: You want your outline to be reliable. It is a pain to change the outline after you begin planning around it. It's a goo

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 d

The problem with best practices is the worst care scenario.  When the best practices don't apply or can't be used, they leave fail people by leaving them hanging. Don't worry. We're here to help. When you can't do proposals the right way, sometimes you have to do proposals The Wrong Way™. It's one of our favorite subjects to write about, because it's so diabolical and fun to do the opposite of what the best practices say you should do. But we have to give you fair warning: doing proposals T

If your proposal lessons learned focus on steps in your process or pursuitpspecific things you should have done differently, you may be missing the big picture. Instead of asking “what can we realistically do to make things better next time” you should try asking “why did we end up where we did.” If you dig deep, you’ll probably find the cause happened long before the proposal even started. Whenever you have more than a few people working on a proposal, you have grown to the point where it

Most proposal assignments are a plea for the writers to figure out how to win the proposal on their own. Is that realistic? Is that even possible? It probably depends on how much customer insight the writers have. But instead of hoping for someone to save the day at the tail end of the process, a proposal process designed to win should gather that information and give it to them up front. Instead of assignments or steps in your process, think about setting expectations. What do stakeholders

Is working on a proposal a necessary evil or an opportunity? Is it an assignment you have to complete to keep someone else happy or is it a chance to bring meaning to your work? Is it a chance to add to the corporate coffers or is it a chance to advance your career and expand the salary pool? Is it something you have to do to get a customer, or is it an opportunity to define a new relationship? Proposals have deadlines. This means everything that needs to be done needs to be assigned to som