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Almost everything I learned about proposal writing early in my career turned out to be wrong. My success with proposal process and techniques started when I grew confident enough to abandon what I had been taught. But what has really advanced my career has been the subjects I learned about while writing proposals. If I had known about them at the start, my early proposals would have been much better. Here are six subjects that I learned about and how they impact the way I do proposals. As t

The way most companies go after new business is not based on what it will take to win. It’s based on the people they have. Even if they are good people working hard, we all have gaps in our expertise and experience. The way this plays out is that you’ll see companies where the proposal manager is really a production manager, the business development function treats the proposal as a simple hand-off, or where one person “does the proposals.” People tend to distribute the work based on their capab

From some of the BD databases I've seen, they go for around 10-20% of what you could hire a person for. But that's a single user. If you get a multiuser subscription, it could be a lot closer to the cost of hiring someone. With enough users, you'll exceed it. So what should you do, focus on hiring business development staff or purchase a database? A person and a database will always be better than either a person or a database alone, so it's no fun discussing which of those is better. But i

People often obsess over the wrong details on a proposal We recommend an approach based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you put effort into a level you haven’t reach yet, you may be taking resources away from a level that has a bigger impact on whether you win or lose. First, make sure you are compliant with the RFP’s requirements.  This gets you in the game. Then optimize your proposal against the evaluation criteria to maximize your score.  This g

The way most companies do it Most companies have one proposal review, which is often worse than having none. Some have more than one, but still base them on milestones making them more progress reviews than quality reviews. This is especially true since almost no one actually defines proposal quality. The result is that quality is not quantified and they commit the worst sin in proposal development. The way everyone aspires to do it Everyone loves the idea of reviewing and scoring th

Compliance Matrix Quality A compliance matrix should be fully validated prior to writing the proposal based on it. Changes in the outline or allocation of RFP requirements to the proposal after writing starts can be very disruptive. Reviewing a compliance matrix can take as long as it did to create the compliance matrix in the first place. Nonetheless, ensuring the compliance matrix is accurate is absolutely vital to proposal success. The following is intended to be used as

Proposal Outline Quality The proposal outline should be fully validated prior to writing the proposal based on it. Changes in the proposal outline after writing starts can be very disruptive and should be avoided by thoroughly reviewing the proposal outline. The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the proposal outline and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the outline is correct.    Is the outline organized according

This is an article for people who are not writers and don’t know what words to use when they write a proposal. They may know how to do the work and what to offer, but they often go blank when it comes to how to say that in words on paper. Ok, here it goes… Don’t describe. Just explain.  What does that mean? When you describe, you tell the customer the details about your approach, offering, or qualifications. But when you explain your approach, offering, or qualification, it shifts

The best way to get an early start is to prepare to articulate the strategies, points of emphasis, and context that should be incorporated into your response to the RFP requirements. Description  The best way to get an early start on the proposal is not to try writing to the anticipated requirements. In fact, the less narrative you produce before you see the RFP the better. You want the text of the proposal to be built from the ground up around what it will take to win, according to the R

Your opinion of style is not the one that matters This varies according to the expectations of the customer. The MustWin Process only addresses style where it is relevant to achieving this goal. It is important to find out if style matters to the evaluator, because when it does, you need to follow it precisely.  Most of the time, the customer will not be concerned with style.  If the customer has no style preference that you are aware of, you should write in

All of the risks, issues, and problems you consider during the early stages of proposal planning should be reflected in your proposal quality criteria. Your goal is to prompt reviewers to consider the risks and issues in addition to the draft so they can validate their resolution. You can use Proposal Quality Validation to achieve an integrated approach to proposal risk and issue management. Tracking problems by writing them down on paper or on a whiteboard can only take you so far. Imagine

After you do a few hundred proposal reviews, they can become like déjà vu. Here are 10 problems we see over and over: A lack of differentiators Poor strategic or competitive positioning Copy that isn’t written from the customer’s perspective, that focuses on your own company’s attributes (qualifications, approach, capabilities) instead of what the customer will get as a result of them Claiming understanding by stating it, instead of demonstrating it through results

From time to time we get asked to “take a look” at someone’s proposals and tell them whether they’re any good. With the MustWin Process, we can do better than simply give our opinion. The MustWin Process includes a methodology for Proposal Quality Validation that is based on criteria derived from what it will take to win. The details for implementing Proposal Quality Validation are provided in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. They include a baseline set of quality criteria that are intended t

Instructions Answer the following questions to provide the context for writing about Past Performance and Corporate Experience after the RFP is released. Keep your answers short. The less narrative the better.  After the RFP is released, your responses here will enable the Proposal Content Plan to be prepared more quickly and to contain better instructions for the authors who will write the proposal narrative. Past performance and corporate experience and usually evaluated as separ

Everything you do, from lead qualification through proposal submission, should be based on what it will take to win. To capture the leads you have in your business development pipeline, you should position your offering to give you the best chances of winning. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know how to do that when it can be different with every pursuit. Having an RFP is not enough because all of your competitors have the same RFP and the RFP will not say everything that is important to the cu

Is your company’s ability to develop business based on people or processes? Many companies assume that all they need to do is hire the right salesperson and then wait for the money to start pouring in. They think that if they hold monthly meetings for their sales staff to tell them what they’ve been up to, they have a process. They might even prepare an agenda for the meeting, use a standard PowerPoint template, and require reports to be submitted. But that is not a process. That is just tr

Proposal reviews typically result in dozens of comments from each reviewer. Multiply that by the size of your team, and it’s not unusual to have hundreds of comments. So not only do you invest time in preparing for the review and waiting for the participants to complete their review, you have to invest more time in processing all those comments. Most of the time you start off by eliminating all the comments that can’t be acted on. This is often a large percentage of what you’ve received. Th

Circumstance The RFP will be awarded to the lowest priced, technically acceptable offer.  This means that if an offer is compliant and meets the specifications, it will win if it has the lowest price.  Better quality offers will lose if their price is not the lowest.  Best value is not considered. Approaches When the standard is LPTA, you have no incentive to exceed the requirements if it is going to cost more.  In fact, the incentive is to keep your costs as low as possible, even i

Getting the most out of your lessons learned For a lesson to be truly “learned,” it must result in change. It is not enough to discuss and collect lessons learned. You must do something with what you find out. Issues should turn into action items that will lead to improvements on future proposals. Focus on how lessons learned apply to specific roles in the proposal process, not to individuals. The following questions can help elicit constructive f

In companies that sell services, there are far more people with customer contact than just the sales force. This is especially true for existing customers, where the project staff have far more contact with the customer than a sales person ever will. In these companies, all customer-facing staff play a role in “sales.” The trick is to enable them to contribute to sales without becoming sales people. Customer-facing staff can play a critical role by helping: The company understand the