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Ordinary proposal writing is about the steps in the nearly mechanical process of responding to an RFP. Ordinary proposal writing is about trying to win more points in evaluation and have the lowest price while competing against others who are doing the same thing. Ordinary proposal writing comes down to competing on price while telling yourself that you’re competing on points. Ordinary proposal writing results in companies whose strategies are based on what they happened to win in the past.

I’m sitting here working on a proposal and I just realized that the way I was first taught how to write an Executive Summary is backwards. When I first started writing proposals it was considered innovative to have a box or section titled “Why Us” at the end of your Executive Summary. It was intended to itemize and spell out the reasons why the customer should accept your proposal. But as I’m writing today I realize that it shouldn’t go at the end. It should go at the beginning. The ve

Companies misdiagnose their problems all the time. They often see a problem, they try to fix it, and end up struggling because they don't realize they are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause. Sometimes the real cause goes all the way back to their approach, or lack thereof, to strategic planning. It's easy to get caught up in the daily routine of doing what seems to make sense in the moment, following along with what you think should be done and what you see other people doing.

Are most of your interactions with potential customers these days in writing? Relationship marketing is about providing support and building trust. This is still true when your relationship is conducted by writing. When communicating with potential customers in writing, are you giving them value or just asking for things? What can you give in writing that helps a potential customer? They don’t even have to cost a thing to give, but can still have value to the customer. How about:

Developing customer relationships and growing customer intimacy is time consuming, and that makes it expensive. Many companies fall into the trap of believing they can’t afford to develop relationships with all their potential future customers. They trick themselves into thinking that if they can land a contract with a new customer, then they can develop a relationship with them. What they don’t realize is that by doing this they doom themselves to low win rates, low margins, and shallow custome

As companies grow, they go from figuring out how to close their sales as they go along to putting it in writing, to putting in writing in a more reliable way. They reach a point where their proposals are getting more and more complicated, the volume is increasing, and the value of the proposals is not only larger but more critical to the company. However, because they remain entrepreneurial they don't feel ready to slow down and focus on structure. Consider the following company as an examp

If you write a bad proposal introduction, you’ll probably also have a poorly written proposal. Unfortunately most of the proposal introductions I review are in bad shape. They don’t reflect the customer’s perspective or say anything that matters to the customer. Proposals often make common mistakes like saying the company is “pleased to submit” the proposal, stating universal truths, or making (often grandiose) unsubstantiated claims. Or they introduce the company submitting the proposal an

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

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 The bridge to long-term proposal thinking is usually your business development and proposal process. Companies seek to formalize their process when they want to start doing things consistently better in the futu

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