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Persuasion is Part Differentiation If you are not different, the customer won’t have a reason to select you. If you don’t point out the things that differentiate your offering, then all the evaluator has to consider is the price. Everything can be differentiated, even when the customer forces everyone to bid the exact same thing. Differentiation is how you make your bid special. Persuasion is Part Positioning How will your proposal compare against the competition? Will it be stronger

These tips are not about doing the same things a little better or more efficiently. They are not about which steps you should follow or which steps you can leave out. These tips are about changing the fundamentals to maximize your chances of winning with the resources that you have. 1. Figuring out what to write takes longer when you do it by writing and re-writing. If you jump into writing your proposal and then review it, you’ll find you overlooked things. Or you’ll find that it’s

Most of the proposals companies ask us to review have one or more of these issues. This means that most proposal writers have one or more of these bad habits. Simply fix these bad habits and you will make a dramatic improvement in your proposal writing. Once you’ve broken the habit, you can flip each one around and find a best practice hiding inside. Don’t state a universal truth by way of introduction. Avoid the temptation of starting off by saying something that is obviously and univ

The following lists of proposal quality considerations have many uses. They can be used to replace review teams. They can be used to enhance review teams. They can be used as checklists by writers and reviewers. They can be used to define proposal quality. The checklists below are quality assurance checklists and not procedure checklists. Instead of telling you what to do, they ask whether you have achieved what you should have. They are intended to be used to assess whether what is created

The customer is more than one person. And different people have different perspectives. Developing a reliable relationship with the customer means interacting with as many levels and stakeholders as you possibly can. Here are some areas to focus on. Who to reach out to Each of these requires a different strategy. Each has different needs, priorities, and expectations. Each has a different perspective and can be a source for different information. All are worth contacting and getting to kn

I continue to be fascinated by how similar really bad proposals tend to be. They all make the same mistakes. And even if you follow good processes and do the right things, when the writing is that bad it can prevent you from winning. So I’m going to take a step back from writing about what it takes to submit a great proposal, and just focus on how to make sure your proposal writing is not awful. If you just stop doing these six things you can make a huge improvement in your proposals:

When your business is ready to become serious about winning, there are only a few things that you need to do. The problem is that you have to do them all, and won’t have the time or resources. If you understand what you are trying to grow into, you can formalize things over time. But what you can’t do is ignore them. Ignoring them creates a trap that may prevent you from ever being able to get good at winning business. Here are some things to focus on as soon as you are ready to get serious

It’s important to be able to define proposal quality if you want to make sure that the proposal you develop reflects it. We define it as a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. We define what it will take to win as part of our process, reaching all the way back before the RFP is released so that the questions we ask and information we gather enable us to say what it will take to win. We use Proposal Content Planning to bring what it will take to win together with the other things

A key part of winning in writing is having the ability to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. Not everybody can write from someone else’s perspective. It turns out that seeing things from other perspectives can also help with other parts of the process. Here are five different ways of looking at your pursuits and how they impact your ability to win: The forward perspective. Looking forward is about anticipating and preparing for what to do next. It is about startin

Sometimes the world is just too big. It’s full of customers, but finding them is like playing the game, “Where’s Waldo?” And just like in the game, you need a strategy for finding your customers. You only have so much time and resources to put into the search. But unlike the game, you have to capture sales from Waldo. And it’s competitive. You may find him, but that doesn’t mean he’ll become a customer. When the game is business development, it’s not just about finding as many Waldos as you

An effective proposal group is more than just process and tools. But how do you assess its effectiveness? There are techniques and best practices, but what are the issues that impact its effectiveness? Here are five focus areas that reveal when you have things holding you back from maximizing your effectiveness.  There are different ways to correct or improve things. But you must know what the issues are before you can select the right solution. Assuming the solution before you really under

What makes a great proposal process isn’t the steps. It’s not even the functionality. It’s the ability to anticipate problems and maximize the effectiveness of contributors. The questions below won’t tell you what steps you should have. They won’t even tell you what to do. But they will point out when you need to change because you have problems that aren’t being addressed by your process. If a particular individual is required to execute the process, you do not have a process. You have

One of the key goals of the MustWin Process is to design your proposal around what it will take to win. It starts with Readiness Reviews to help you collect intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Then you need to assess the intelligence you've gathered to determine what it will take to win. This assessment gives you what you need to incorporate what it takes to win into your Content Plan and to turn it into criteria that can be used to validate that the finish

Getting everyone on the same pageWhen people working on proposals are pulled in multiple directions and all have different goals and different approaches to achieving them, you’re not going to maximize your win rate. Getting everyone on the same page involves more than defining roles and responsibilities, steps in the process, and having good assignment management. It requires having expectation management throughout the process. It requires that all these things be integrated into the process s

Our normal advice for beginners about how to format their proposals is to not make things worse by exceeding their capabilities. An overly ambitious layout can slow you down, introduce errors, and distract you from perfecting your message. We generally recommend that your goal should be a simple and elegant layout. But that’s our advice for beginners. If you are capable of reliably and efficiently producing advanced layouts, then you still need to give it some thought. The point of the pr

Use the following as inspiration for your questions.  The exact wording will depend on your circumstances and who your customer is. And don't forget... you can also ask for a debrief for a proposal that you won! Basic questions: Who won? How many bids were received? What was your overall score? Was your score close to the top or close to the bottom? What was the winner’s score? Did the winner have the lowest price? Did the winner have the highe

All proposals represent change for the organization considering them. This is true even if you are the incumbent and aren’t really proposing any significant changes in approach. There will still be incremental changes to account for.  All proposals can add value through change management practices. This is true whether the changes are explicit, with the customer expecting change, or if the customer either hasn’t considered or isn’t concerned with change. They may not think the project needs

PropLIBRARY contains a ton of information that can help you solve common business development, lead capture, and proposal problems. We give many solutions away. And some are part of our premium content. The list below is a mixture of links to free content and premium content that's only available with  a finding leads before the RFP is released If you need to fix a broken proposal If you need to be more selective in what you bid If you are writing a proposal even though you

One of my favorite techniques for writing proposals is the “who, what, where, how, when, and why” approach. It helps you answer all the customer’s questions, including the ones they forgot to ask. It helps you exceed the RFP’s requirements, often without adding any cost. It’s easy to memorize and repeat like a mantra. But it can be used for more than just improving your writing. It turns out to be a powerful proposal management technique as well. Expectation management One of the b

Most of the wasted effort that occurs during proposals occurs as a result of poor decisions or the failure to be ready at three critical moments in time during the development of the proposal. A little bit of effort applied at those moments can prevent a ton of waste later. 1. The Bid/No Bid Decision First, the obvious: If you decide to bid something you can’t win, the entire effort is a waste. While true, that’s usually not very helpful. Companies don’t bid things they can’t win wh