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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

There is one thing that if mastered will enable you to win every proposal, no matter what. The good news is that it is a simple thing. The bad news is that the implications are deep and achieving it can be challenging. The one thing you need to do is to get the customer to want you to win more than any competing priority. Keep in mind that it’s just a proposal. Your customer is not going to go to jail or lose their job just so you can win. They have other priorities that matt

Click the "Add New Proposal" button and give it name. That's basically it. But here's some background and things that are good to know... When you first arrive, it looks blank. That's because you have defined any proposals to work on. When you add a new proposal, you should also give your proposal a description. We recommend including the solicitation number (if any). You might also want to include the client name, either in the proposal name or in the description. What you

When we realized just how much of the MustWin Process already consisted of checklists we decided to create something new that would consist only of checklists, without all the extra process language. Instead of thinking of it as a process checklist, it's more like the checklists are the process. We’re transforming what we have into a Checklist-Driven Proposal. We're creating something you can just pick up and use to win an RFP response. Here’s how it’s going to work… Our Readiness Revie

The proposal manager role at one company can be very different from the role of a proposal manager at another company. This is often because the organization leaves it ambiguous. Position descriptions are often contradictory or too long to be feasible. The result is that sometimes the role is frequently defined by force of will of the person in it, sometimes by necessity, and sometimes by the organization’s culture. The differences end up being significant. Here are 9 factors that drive tho

Throughout my entire career, business and proposal development specialists have argued that bidding everything results in lower profitability than bidding less and winning more. While this happens to be true, throughout my entire career I have never seen this argument win over anyone who didn’t already believe it. It’s time to change the dialog. Bidding less to win more sounds too much like bidding less. It’s time to drop that phrase from our vocabularies. Instead we should be advocat

Key responsibilites include: Capture Managers must not only sell to the customer, but also must sell internally to gain support and resources for the pursuit. A Capture Manager must know about the customer, the opportunity, the scope of work, project management, budgeting, pricing, contracting, proposal writing, and how to obtain, allocate, and steal resources within the company. Congratulations!  You have the most challenging job in winning new business.  It is also

It seems counterintuitive. It sounds like something your boss would never go for. But there is a better way to ensure proposal quality than by having reviews. What do you really get from having a proposal review anyway? Especially if it’s one of those big fat sit around a table reviews? In the name of “making sure it’s correct,” they usually end up rethinking the message. That’s another way of saying they wait until after the proposal is written to figure out the best strategy. Huh? Does th

On a day to day basis people have to make decisions about resources like: How many people do I need for BD? How many do I need in my proposal department? Should I insource or outsource? How many project managers and other operations staff will I need? Can I afford to hire the staff I need? The answer isn’t some generic metric. The answer can be found in your business development pipeline. Your pipeline isn’t just how many leads you are tracking. It should

There’s a gap between what you do to identify leads and winning. Once you identify a lead, then what? That’s where things get challenging. If you are going to get past the gap between identifying a lead and capturing the win, you’re going to need to build a bridge. To build a bridge you need to know things like: The size of the gap and what’s in it How to design a bridge to get you there How to validate your bridge design so it doesn’t fail after it’s built What

Even though the bad business development habits of B2B and B2G companies are different, in many cases the cure is the same. Some of the bad habits that B2B companies tend to fall into include: Thinking that if they just build a great product, customers will happen. This is especially true of startups, who have a tendency to think about what they want to do or build instead of who is going to buy it. More businesses fail for this reason than because they had bad products. Not de

You’re probably getting swamped with advice about all the things you need to do to develop business and win proposals. There are so many things you need do, but where should you start? You’re probably hearing that: You need more leads You should be selective in what you pursue You need more process You should enforce the process you have You should practice relationship marketing You need better software The proposal should start before the RF