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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

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

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