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When your bids win or lose based on how well your proposals help the customer reach their decision, the best competitive advantage is often an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. Knowing how the customer makes their decisions, what matters to them, and what they need to see in the proposal can give you an edge in how you respond. Gaining an information advantage is why relationship marketing is so important. The relationship is the goal. Your goal is the result of the relation

Sometimes you have all the advantages. Sometimes a proposal is yours to lose. And while you can easily lose if you make mistakes, it takes more than a good defense to win. Playing defense in a proposal means focusing on compliance. It means giving the customer exactly what they asked for. It requires understanding the RFP and not making mistakes. I have seen proposals lose after spending a great deal of time scrutinizing the text, only to accidentally leave out a copy of one form. A simple

Q&A or point-by-point proposal formats are so easy. You don’t have to give much thought to the outline. But that’s not the reason to choose them. Easy is not always the best. What should drive your approach to creating the outline for your proposal is what the customer wants to see in your proposal and where they expect to find it. You do not want to lose just because the customer didn’t see things where they expected them and didn’t go looking for them. What information do they need to

I realized today when I was working on the specifications to support pre-RFP opportunity pursuit and capture, that nearly all of the functionality could be achieved right now using the current version of the MustWin Performance Support Tool. Sure, it would lack some of the automagic streamlining we're planning, but the core of what you need to use it during the pre-RFP phase is already there. I love it when things work out like that. It confirms that we're on the right track with how we've desig

The most frequent question we get asked is "what should my proposal look like?" This is closely followed by "can I see a sample of a proposal?" Even though we tell people that winning proposals are built from the ground up to meet the concerns of specific customers and not by following samples, people still crave them.

THIS. This is what proposal content planning is all about. Shaping the proposal. Designing it before it is written. Creating a set of specifications for the document so that writers know what they are supposed to accomplish and reviewers have something to validate the draft against. This is how you win before it is written and succeed on your first draft. This is what got me excited when developing MustWin Now. I'm going to walk through a simple example of what is normally an extremely dry

Proposal specialists talk a lot about the importance of planning before you write your proposal. Then reality sets in: If the RFP forces you into it, you complete a compliance matrix in a complicated spreadsheet so that you can create the proposal outline that the customer expects. You make judgment calls to create the outline because RFPs are inconsistent, ambiguous, and contradictory. Once you have the outline and assignments, writing starts. The compliance matrix

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Bringing the MustWin Process online and making it much, much easier to implement We developed the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process in 2001. It is at the heart of all the content on PropLIBRARY. The MustWin Performance Support Tool (MWPST) brings it online, but not as a process workflow tool and not as a way of automating cookie-cutter proposals. The MWPST improves the performance of the people who work on and contribute to proposals in order to maximize your win rate and ROI. The MWP

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This is just to provide a quick link into MustWin Now. URL: https://proplibrary.com/rfp/  

Weekly Modules: Weekly module links are live when they are red and bold. You cannot access a module until the link to it is live.  Week 1: Click here to access the Week 1 module Week 2: Click here to access the Week 2 module Week 3: Click here to access the Week 3 module Week 4: Click here to access the Week 4 module Week 5: Click here to access the Week 5 module Week 6: Click here to access the Week 6 module Week 7: Click here to access the W

Just like a great chef can only do so much without great ingredients, great proposal writing requires great input. A great proposal writer can’t win it for you on their own. But you don’t need a mountain of raw input. Collecting customer documents and gathering whole conversations will not necessarily do the proposal any good. In between what you’ve gathered and the proposal, you need to do an assessment. You need to turn what you have into what you should do about it and what you should sa

Get some serious inspiration for proposal authors at all levels. It's perfect for figuring out what to write, and for making sure you answer all of your customer's questions. We provide the questions, you supply the answers. While it may not be as sexy as a template that writes the proposal for you, it's actually one of our most useful documents. Highly recommended.

When we created the MustWin Process, we showed you how to make the most of the time before RFP release and get into position to be ready to win. But what if you are starting at RFP release and "no bid" is not an option? We've recommended that you combine the pre-RFP questions, goals, and action items into a single list to quickly assess what you know and what you don't. Now we've done all that work for you by creating a master checklist of proposal startup information. And we've turned it int

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