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More goes into selecting someone for a proposal-related position than most people realize. The normal titles, like proposal manager, bid manager, proposal writer, editor, or capture manager only tell part of the story. What can really impact your needs may never show on a position description. You need someone who is going to be compatible with the way your organization approaches its proposals, and someone whose personal approach is compatible with your needs. How do you find someone who is the

If we had to pick one thing to change that would have the most impact on an organization’s ability to win, it would be how they approach bid/no bid decisions. If you think of them as just being about deciding whether to bid, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity, because they can have a much greater impact on how you bid, than just on if you bid. Do you know what percentage of bids you drop at each stage or do you never drop anything? Do the things you bid reinforce your strategi

Proposal teams are great at filling voids and getting things done without proper direction. They’ll complete the proposal no matter what. And that’s part of the problem. If they have to, they’ll water things down to gain acceptance. If they have no choice, they may even fake it. They are quite good at making the most of their circumstances, but they can’t read minds, and their authority is limited. Make things clear and your people will work more quickly and be better focused on winning ins

One of the most important things to realize about proposal writing is that it is not about you, your company, or even your offering. It’s not about telling the customer anything. It’s about the customer, their decision, and what they need to hear to make it. It’s hard to turn your brain inside out and backwards to articulate things that the reader wants to hear instead of what you are trying to say. It is impossible to do this if you don’t know your audience. To better understand your

What will a 1% change in your win rate return? If you don’t know, you really need to gather the data to calculate it. Because small increases in win rate are often worth considerable effort. In fact, increasing your win rate will often net a better ROI than chasing more leads.  Once you’ve done the math and found your motivation, then you have to figure out what to do to improve your win rate and reap the promised ROI. To help you out, here are nine places to consider investing in to increa

The best way to accelerate a proposal is to lay the groundwork for winning in each step, so that the next step has what it needs. It does not come from automating or accelerating doing the ordinary. The goal is not to submit a “good enough” proposal, it’s to win them all and turn proposal writing into a profitable activity instead of a necessary evil. To achieve this, each step has to add value that the next step can build on. Here are eight examples:  You can improve the efficiency of your

Proposals should be meaningful. But what does that mean? The best practices say that proposals should address all of the customer’s “hot buttons,” but what exactly are they? And about those win strategies and themes… where are they supposed to come from? We’ve been working for a couple of years to bring structure to helping you figure out what to focus on in your proposals. We generally advise people to focus on what matters to the customer. That’s bit easier to define than “hot buttons.” B

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when thinking about all the things you could do to try to improve your win rate. Where should you start? What makes this complicated is that the answer is different for every single company. Your strengths, weaknesses, and issues are different from others. The nature of your offering and who your customers are is different. What you should focus on to increase your win rate will be different from everyone else.  But there are some issues that most companies

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