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One of the key goals of the MustWin Process is to design your proposal around what it will take to win. It starts with Readiness Reviews to help you collect intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Then you need to assess the intelligence you've gathered to determine what it will take to win. This assessment gives you what you need to incorporate what it takes to win into your Content Plan and to turn it into criteria that can be used to validate that the finish

Getting everyone on the same pageWhen people working on proposals are pulled in multiple directions and all have different goals and different approaches to achieving them, you’re not going to maximize your win rate. Getting everyone on the same page involves more than defining roles and responsibilities, steps in the process, and having good assignment management. It requires having expectation management throughout the process. It requires that all these things be integrated into the process s

Our normal advice for beginners about how to format their proposals is to not make things worse by exceeding their capabilities. An overly ambitious layout can slow you down, introduce errors, and distract you from perfecting your message. We generally recommend that your goal should be a simple and elegant layout. But that’s our advice for beginners. If you are capable of reliably and efficiently producing advanced layouts, then you still need to give it some thought. The point of the pr

Use the following as inspiration for your questions.  The exact wording will depend on your circumstances and who your customer is. And don't forget... you can also ask for a debrief for a proposal that you won! Basic questions: Who won? How many bids were received? What was your overall score? Was your score close to the top or close to the bottom? What was the winner’s score? Did the winner have the lowest price? Did the winner have the highe

All proposals represent change for the organization considering them. This is true even if you are the incumbent and aren’t really proposing any significant changes in approach. There will still be incremental changes to account for.  All proposals can add value through change management practices. This is true whether the changes are explicit, with the customer expecting change, or if the customer either hasn’t considered or isn’t concerned with change. They may not think the project needs

One of my favorite techniques for writing proposals is the “who, what, where, how, when, and why” approach. It helps you answer all the customer’s questions, including the ones they forgot to ask. It helps you exceed the RFP’s requirements, often without adding any cost. It’s easy to memorize and repeat like a mantra. But it can be used for more than just improving your writing. It turns out to be a powerful proposal management technique as well. Expectation management One of the b

Most of the wasted effort that occurs during proposals occurs as a result of poor decisions or the failure to be ready at three critical moments in time during the development of the proposal. A little bit of effort applied at those moments can prevent a ton of waste later. 1. The Bid/No Bid Decision First, the obvious: If you decide to bid something you can’t win, the entire effort is a waste. While true, that’s usually not very helpful. Companies don’t bid things they can’t win wh

Companies have different issues that impact what is the best approach for achieving proposal quality. For example, if you only have a few people capable of performing quality reviews and you use them on every proposal, the best approach will be different from an organization where the participants on the reviews are different for every proposal. Here are some other considerations: The level of training and expertise in available reviewers. Untrained reviewers, even if experienced, may n

Circumstance What are you going to offer to beat your competition? Sometimes the RFP forces you to bid the exact same thing as everyone else. Or so it seems. The customer wants to be able to compare apples to apples when they have to make a selection. However, you need to stand out from the other bidders in order to get selected. Approaches So what should you bid? It seems that you only have two choices: Offer the same thing as your competitors or offer something different. But is t

Most companies consider a proposal review to be reading a draft document. This is the least effective of proposal reviews and makes the smallest contribution to proposal quality and winning. Yet people cling to it. I blame the obsolete color team model for getting in the way of proposals using the same quality assurance methodologies that have improved so many other things people do. This is especially true when the color team model degrades down to a single “red team” review.   Most compan

Uncertainty works against creating a winning culture because it breeds trust issues. But the solution is counter-intuitive. To fix the trust issues related to uncertainty, you should build a proposal process that does not trust anyone ever. You need to eliminate the need for trust. When your process functions without trust, then trust will flourish. I told you it's counter-intuitive.   It's not that your people aren't trustworthy. Or that they are fallible. But they have multiple competing p

It can be difficult to find the right person to talk to at big Government Agencies and companies. That’s a major reason why people don’t do pre-RFP pursuit. It’s also why many companies are in perpetual sales mode, with no real inbound marketing.  Before you can influence the RFP or gain pre-RFP customer insight, you have to make contact with the right people at the customer. Here are some ways to do that: Past contracts. Sometimes the best source of data about future purchases starts

Strategic plans are vital. But they can’t be the kind of strategic plans that sit on a shelf. Instead, your strategic plan should help your staff by telling them what they need to know to successfully identify leads, pursue them, and grow your business. Your strategic plan should be a tool that explains: What kind of capabilities and offerings to develop Who their target customers are Where to target marketing and build relationships When, where, and how teaming rel

Improving your win rate has the potential to double your revenue from the exact same number of leads. But improving your win rate is easier said than done. Most of the things that will have the greatest impact occur before you even start the proposal. Here are 14 ways to get into position to win so that you can increase your win rate: Gain an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. The more you know about what matters to the customer and about the opportunity and competitive en

In our continuing series on how to do proposals The Wrong Way, we’ve seen the power that comes from doing the opposite of what the best practices say you should do. In the webinar we did last week on the topic, we showed 20 different techniques for doing proposals The Wrong Way. These techniques are for dealing with adverse circumstances where the best practices don’t apply. Use them inappropriately and they can cause you to lose. But if you have no choice and may otherwise be unable to submit a

Circumstance If your goal is to provide reasons for the customer to select you (what themes are supposed to provide), then maybe you should think less about your strengths and what you offer,  and think more about what matters to the customer... Approaches What is the nature of your offering? Is a commodity (whether a product or a service? Or is it a unique or specialty offering, like a customized product, professional service, or solution/integration? What will the type

How do you know when it's time to take on the sacred cows, break old habits, and go through the effort required to change how everyone at your company reviews proposals? 10 signs that it’s time to reengineer your approach to reviewing proposals Ask yourself if you see your company in any of the following, because you can't maximize your win rate if: You don’t have a written definition of what proposal quality is Your proposal process consists of writi

The habits that companies need to develop are different from the personal habits that people develop. Companies focus on things like policies and procedures, but habits usually don’t make the list. As a result, the habits they develop are usually the bad kind — the ones you fall into in the absence of having good habits. So we thought we’d take a look at what the good habits should be. The habits that a company needs relate to the things they need to do and achieve, but are different from t

Does your proposal even have a point? Is it a meandering response to what was in the RFP, shifting from requirement to requirement, with the only point being that you'll do whatever they want? Is the point how great your company is? Does it scream “Pick me! Pick me!” If it does have a point, is it the same point other companies bidding will make? For example, is the point that your company has experience or that you can do the work? If your proposal doesn’t have a point, then what exactly

If your company matters to the customer receiving your proposal, it’s because the results of what you offer matter to them. To win the proposal, what you propose must matter more than any other alternative available to them, and this can include doing nothing. None of the things you say in your proposal will make a difference if the customer doesn’t think what you’ve said matters to them. We’ve all experienced this... When a salesperson approaches you and says “I know all about you and