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2019 adds up to some big numbers Since we started in 2001, we have had over 8 million visitors. That's nearly half a million visitors a year, on average. Over 71,000 have requested to join our newsletter. Over 3,500 became PropLIBRARY Subscribers. A lot of people who need to win proposals for their business to succeed give us their attention and we appreciate it so much. I remember when I started down this path and could remember all their names. I still try to respond to nearly all the

Getting ahead of the RFP is critical for relationship marketing and obtaining an information advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP does not have to be hard, but it can take a long time. Those that put the time and effort into it are able to achieve an information advantage as well as a competitive advantage. This is a PDF handout, suitable for printing. It includes a cheat sheet you can print and posts on your wall as a constant reminder. ?

Slow down. Take your time. Get comfortable. Ponder the meaning of it all. These topic hubs lead to hundreds of links with over a thousand pages worth of material. Don't try to consume it all in one sitting. Study them like a book that can change the future of your company and the direction of your career. Or maybe just give you an occasional smile. Before the proposal: business development and capture Relationship marketing Making effective bid/no bid decisions

Obsessing over the deadline and resource pressure that defines most proposal efforts can make you forget about other important things and limit your ability to maximize your win rate — not to mention it can also lead to total burnout. It’s a curious dilemma and a bit counter-intuitive but obsessing over getting your proposal done can help you lose. So take a moment and put away your deadline and resource pressures. Take a moment to think about the purpose of it all. Because the purpose is m

Form for implementing our recommendations from the article, 36 ways to tailor proposal re-use content before using it. Use it to assess proposal re-use material against the current environment to enable you to determine how to best tailor it.

Companies that want to get better at doing proposals often struggle with their proposal process. They struggle with the steps. They struggle meeting deadlines. They struggle with time management. But mostly, they just struggle. Part of the reason for the all the struggles is their process. It’s not that it needs improvement. It needs replacing. And it’s not just the process that needs replacing. It’s the whole way you look at the proposal process. Proposals are not completed in steps

Here's the problem with proposal re-use repositories. Imagine two customers who both want the same system, application, product, service, solution or whatever you offer. The specs are the same. However... One customer is decentralized, another is centralized. One customer has a formal culture, one is informal. One wants innovation, another is risk averse. One wants to manage the staff on the project, another doesn't want to be bothered. One is value conscious, the other is price fixated. One has

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A lot of well-meaning people give really bad advice on marketing. Instead of saying "what has worked for me is…" they say things like "the only way to be successful is to…" Marketing rules of thumb aren't. Your goals, circumstances, resources, customer preferences, strategies, positioning, ability to execute, and so much more makes one person's marketing success another person's marketing failure. Everything depends on the nature of what you offer. The “rules” are very different if:

What you need to win a proposal depends on what happened before the RFP was released and the proposal effort kicked off. This means that winning proposals can depend on what you did before the proposal even started. So let’s take a look at what happens before the proposal starts: What the customer does before the RFP is released This is what the customer has to do, starting from RFP release and working backwards: The RFP is released.  But before that: The customer announc

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Winning government contracts requires knowing how to succeed at every step throughout a ridiculously long sales cycle. Winning government contracts requires attention and doing your homework. The good news is that most companies really aren’t that good at it. Most companies who are registered to do business with the government end up doing little or none. And most established companies merely do well enough. Most government contractors lose more contract bids than they win. They are vulnerable a

People think proposal management is a thing, but it’s not. Proposals are not even a thing. Proposals at different companies have more differences than similarities, even though we tell ourselves otherwise. Proposal managers come in many different types. Some are a better match for a given company than others. When you see a type that’s the opposite of yours, you might think it’s wrong for proposal management. But there is an environment out there where that style is a better fit than yours. So d

What matters about products and commodities is different from what matters about complex services and solutions. What matters about your offering also depends on whether the customer has told you exactly what to bid or whether you have to figure that out.  In both cases, figuring out what to offer by writing about it leads to the proposal death spiral. It’s best not to go there. Figuring out what to offer should be done separately from writing about it. Once you have validated that you’ve g

Having the best offering is a key part of what it takes to win. Another way to say this is that the most important ingredient in your proposal is what you are going to propose. When it comes to planning the content of your proposal, we advocate planning your offering and planning the writing of your proposal separately. When you do both at the same time, the risk compounds itself, and changes in the writing that result from a change in what you want to offer can cause a cascade effect that

MustWin Now is a toolbox with a lot of depth and breadth and many options. It streamlines the process while providing both inspiration and guidance for participants. All of the online training and helpful information in PropLIBRARY is just-in-time linked to the steps within MustWin Now. This helps people who are new to proposals as well as experienced professionals. MustWin Now supports both the pre-RFP and proposal phases of pursuit with these tools: Pursuit Capture Forms. Can be

Each of these will be similar to the way we do our webinars. Only we’re going straight to the recording because going through registration and being available at the right day and time is becoming more and more difficult. And unnecessary. So these will be recorded. But they’ll also take advantage of other features in our online training capability. They’ll have exercises and quizzes. They’ll reference content from our library. You’ll earn points for taking them and they’ll show up on your transc

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When you’re a small business that’s stretched thin, can’t afford specialized resources, and everyone is wearing multiple hats, it’s easy to be intimidated by larger competitors with more employees and assets. But if you match your strengths against their weaknesses, you can consistently beat them. Here’s how: Have Stronger Relationships. Sure, big companies have a lot of staff, but they also have to be everywhere at once. If relationships are key to your line of business, then focus on

Most corporate cultures are a mixed bag. No real attention is given to it. As a result, it is defined as much by the personalities of key staff as it is by intent. They grow like weeds instead of being designed. If you are in charge, the odds are that your corporate culture is not what you think it is. The reality is different from your aspirations. And yet your corporate culture is as important to your company’s ability to grow as the steps in your business and proposal development process