Articles

Proposals usually require effort that crosses organizational boundaries. People who are used to owning things have to share. People who are impacted by decisions want to own them. If you base your proposal staffing on titles, you are asking for trouble. You are creating territories, and people will begin to identify with them. They won’t want to leave their territories and they may want to grow them.  Plan Draft Decide/approve Support/contribute Review

Holding a lessons learned meeting after the conclusion of a proposal is a good idea.  But only if it results in change, and ideally a set of action items. It's not a place to vent. It's a place to turn experience into inspiration. Some lessons learned can be addressed by changing the process.  Others can be addressed by providing training.  Ideally, any training required can be incorporated into the process, instead of being treated as a one-time event. With each issue that you face, i

Here are some things you can communicate visually using graphics: Arrangements Components Parts Lists Alignment Direction Contacts Collage Limits Boundaries Foundation Comparisons Relationships Hierarchies Ratios Matrices Tables Associations Change Sequence Process/Steps Construction Conversion Initiation Transition Completion Answers Who What Where How

For each item, who does it and what comes next? Sometimes it’s not about the step, but how you set up the next one that determines your success. Clarifying who does what, and what each person involved can expect from each other, is as important as having enough people.  One company might have lots of small customers. Another may have a few large customers. One company might have lots of different offerings. Another may only have a few. One might offer custom solutions. Another might sell co

You need to do this, you need to do that. Everyone already seems to know what they should be doing to increase their win rates. But they have many excuses reasons for why they are not. Those reasons usually boil down to other people not doing what they should. Improving your win rate requires changing other people’s behavior. Instead of creating a process based on steps and then using carrots and sticks to get other people to change, try building your process around asking questions. You ca

If you want to win, you should replace as much text with graphics as is possible The hardest part of enhancing your proposal with graphics is identifying them. Once identified, the actual illustration is straightforward. Conceptualizing graphics and rendering them are two different things.  They are often handled by different people. Identifying graphics for proposals requires no creativity whatsoever.  Rather than looking at a section and tryin

RFPs are often ambiguous and fail to provide the information that you need. Even worse, sometimes they contradict themselves. It’s hard enough to come up with good estimates when you have all the information you need. When you need information that’s not in the RFP, sometimes you can ask questions. But sometimes you have to figure out how to make your submission based on the information that you do have. Here are some techniques for dealing with numbers when you aren’t sure how to quantify your

The best way to write a great proposal is to get inside the mind of the evaluator and make it easy for them to reach the desired conclusions. It helps to be able to read the proposal like an evaluator. This can be challenging when you don’t know who the evaluators are. But you can still anticipate what an evaluator has to go through and how they’ll approach looking at your proposal. You might also consider the culture of the customer’s organization and the nature of what they are procuring. 

Will your business grow, shrink, or stay the same next year? Are you chasing enough leads? Should you focus on finding more leads or on winning the ones you have? How many people will you need to chase your leads and prepare proposals? Will your win rate go up or down? How many leads can you “no bid” and still hit your numbers? There is a tool you can use to answer these questions and it’s not a crystal ball… We call this tool your pipeline. Others call it a funnel. The basic concept is eas

It’s not just what people do. It’s more than process. When people do things together, sometimes they can’t change how they do things on their own. When they do things as an organization, they must change as an organization.  This applies to business and proposal development. Sometimes making a process change isn't going to be enough to start winning consistently. Sometimes becoming a winning organization requires organizational change.  Achieving change at an organizational level requi

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

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