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Here are 8 simple things a non-specialist can do to dramatically improve their proposal writing. Use this list to go through what you have written sentence by sentence. Doing so can transform your proposal writing into something compelling and persuasive and significantly improve your chances of winning: Is it written to achieve the highest score based on the evaluation criteria? If you are writing a proposal in response to an RFP that has written evaluation criteria, this is the most im

I remember early in my career working on a proposal with someone who was complaining that it “didn’t sell!” Unfortunately, he couldn’t say why. It turns out that what drives selling in writing is how well your writing reflects the right win strategies and themes, and whether they are written from the customer’s perspective. There are a lot of things to consider and approaches to take when thinking about which themes you should use in a particular proposal. We’ve taken those considerations and tu

If you think doing too many proposals with too few people is about working faster or trying harder, you're deceiving yourself. Doing too many proposals with too few people is about what you’re going to give up. You can be forced into giving things up when you run out of time, you can do things halfway and get by, or you can plan exactly what you intend to give up and do it on purpose. Be clear about your priorities. Every decision should be based on an assessment of how it will impact yo

Strategic issues and how well a proposal reflects customer concerns beyond what it says in the RFP usually have more to do with whether a proposal wins or not than the quality of the writing itself. However, when two proposals offer the roughly the same thing, the quality of the proposal writing can determine whether you win. So how do you know whether a proposal is well written? A lot of things go into a winning proposal. It must be RFP compliant, reflect your win strategies, present your

Incredible amounts of time and energy are wasted in proposal arguments that are basically pointless. They cause delays. They create extra work. They make people dread working on proposals. And they probably do more to lower your win rate than raise it. The right things are worth arguing about. Arguing about the right things can make the difference between winning and losing. But how do you get people to focus on the right things and channel all that energy into productive debates? Ne

I love talking about proposal win rates. They are vitally important and complete B.S. all at the same time. Because they are so important, proposal specialists talk a lot about win rates. They usually obfuscate the numbers because the numbers are B.S. We need to be concerned with win rates, but we just can't get around the problem of comparing apples and oranges. Your win rate is vitally important because: A small improvement in your RFP win rate makes a huge difference in your profit

Even though it’s what everyone seeks, finding more leads to bid may not be the best way to grow your business. There’s a good chance it will produce a low return on investment. The reason is simple math. When you understand the math, you can make better decisions about how to grow. Unfortunately most companies leave a key variable out of their win rate analyses, which leads to poor decisions and lower growth. Let’s start with the basics. If you submit 20 proposals and win 6, you have a 30

Winning more business this year is not as simple as submitting more bids or trying harder. There are so many things you could improve that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. So instead of making the longest list we could think of, we’ve prepared the shortest. There is nothing on this list that you can safely ignore. And anything we can think of to add is arguably just a subset of something already here. While we wrote the list with an entire company or business unit in mind, there should b

There is a place for short-term thinking. You've got to start somewhere. But there are also risks. And it's easy to become sidetracked along the way. This creates an opportunity to beat your competitors by continuing to evolve when they get stuck. Short-term proposal thinking Short-term thinking can trick you out of having an investment mentality. You’re not thinking about investing in your proposal capability. You may not even be investing in the win. You thi

The easiest corporate strategy for growth is to bid everything. Proposal professionals hate this strategy because it results in a low win rate that they expect to get blamed for. It also increases their workload for little gain. But the undeniable fact is that you can win business by bidding opportunistically. That’s what makes it so tempting. The result is a certain… tension…  Whether you should bid opportunistically or strategically is a simple return on investment calculation. Add up y

The keywords that some use when searching for opportunities produce a lot more false hits that the keywords that other companies use. The suggestions below can help you reduce the number of pages of irrelevant opportunities you have to wade through to get to the good ones.  But even when you do have to manually read them to determine whether they are relevant, if you have clarity about what leads you don’t want, you can greatly accelerate things. You can establish a process based on reading

When you've been asked to help write themes and you're stuck, decide which of these types bests matches what you need and then formulate some themes based on that type. Strengths and advantages. This is particularly useful when the evaluation criteria are based on strengths and weaknesses. Pointing out your strengths and competitive advantages is good to do, but only if they pass the “So what?” test. Being merely compliant with the RFP is not a strength. Your strengths and advantages onl

The reasons why tables help reduce the page count are: RFPs usually allow for a smaller font size in tables The text that goes in a table can be succinct, use fewer words, and not to be complete sentences Table text can be repetitive, but tables also help you eliminate the repetitive parts Tables enable you to show relationships without explaining them Tables can show required data without having to talk about it. Just don't fill your tables with whitespace

I know it’s fun to complain about the boss, but if you want to get things done, you need to think like the boss. There are reasons why you are encountering friction. It’s not as simple as they are micro-managers or ignoring you. You can use this list to anticipate their concerns and improve the chances that they’ll listen to your concerns. Why your executives won’t list to you: You’re not thinking in terms of Return on Investment (ROI). Executives spend money and allocate resources in

A dozen versions of the same paragraph, with more than 50 things done wrong and how to correct them.

Don't look at filling your pipeline as one big monumental task. Divide and conquer. Do this based on defining categories for your leads and setting targets. People often look for “a” source of leads, when they should be looking for all of the potential sources of leads.  But what percent of your leads should come from each? This varies a great deal, company by company. What you don’t want to do is chase them all with the results being random, because then your company will grow like a weed.

When your proposal is going to be formally evaluated, the customer staff participating in the evaluation will read your Executive Summary differently. They may not even read it all. They may just use it to start deciding how to score your proposal. Obviously, they can’t score your entire proposal in detail from the Executive Summary. But what will they see? Will they conclude that your proposal is going to be easy to score? Will it be a bunch of happy-sounding words that have

What’s the point of it all? What does the customer want to hear from you? What do they need to complete their paperwork? What makes you their best alternative? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking as you prepare to write an Executive Summary for a proposal. To answer them, you need these four things: A winning solution or offering design. You can’t articulate why the customer should care about what you are offering, if you yourself don’t know what you are offering. You n

The things you need to communicate, your priorities, and the best sequence for presenting them should change from proposal to proposal, based on what it will take to win. If you always write your Executive Summary in the same sequence with the same topics in the same order, you should reexamine your priorities. Start with two simple questions: What does the customer want to see? What do you need to say? What you want to say should match what the customer wants to see. Usua

This is the electronic version of the tutorial we publish. It addresses: It also includes and a sample to show how the pieces come together. Writing different types of Executive Summaries Why an Executive Summary might not actually contain a summary How to introduce yourself in writing Multiple strategies for preparing to write an Executive Summary How to incorporate your win strategies into writing the Executive Summary Advice for how to format your E