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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

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

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

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.

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