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People don’t flourish on their own. People are the most successful at winning business when they understand what is expected of them and know how to define success for their tasks. A little motivation helps, but it’s not the only thing required. Every assignment should be wrapped with guidance and tools that enable your people to know whether they are doing things correctly. And this should not simply take the form of other people. The model of people telling people what to do and then subjectiv

If you get this one step right, everything else will fall into place. And it's not what you think it is. It's not the preparing, the planning, the writing, or the reviewing of the draft proposal. It’s not that those things aren’t important. It’s just that there is one moment in time that pretty much seals your proposal's fate. Most companies don’t even do it. And those that do often fail to make the most of it. All other steps in your proposal management process depend on getting this one rig

Judgment calls are almost always required when building a compliance matrix from an RFP. Either the RFP is not structurally consistent, or the language is subject to interpretation. Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out how the customer wants you to structure your proposal. I advise people to try to anticipate the customer's scoring forms, but sometimes the RFP makes that challenging. Sometimes reality gets in the way I just finished helping a customer respond to an RFP that contain

A sound proposal process not only increases efficiency and improves win rates, it is also one of the few things that can give people working on a proposal hope that the next proposal won't be so bad. Proposal specialists make everything about the process. And that's a good thing. But you have to get the process effectively implemented. And this is where proposal specialists struggle. It's also where non-proposal specialists struggle, because they too often recognize the need for a proposal

We're adding a compliance matrix builder to our MustWin Performance Support Tool. Here are a couple of screenshots as a teaser. Hiding behind them is a bunch of capability. Even though the code is nearly complete, there's a lot that goes into a launch after that and we don't want to post everything until it's ready for you to use. What you see on the left is the RFP. What you see on the right is the proposal outline being built.  Now, imagine linking the RFP to the proposal using drag

Congratulations. You are a skilled technical professional. You have enough experience to know what works well and what doesn’t. But is that enough to be the best? Do you truly aspire to be the best anymore? Can you even define what the "best" is?  Just what exactly does being the "best" really mean? More knowledge? More capability? More experience? Better insight? Faster? More capacity? The most certified? What about more relevance? What about better results? What does better results mean?

Most proposals do not start with the information people need to write a winning proposal. It can be… frustrating. A lot of effort goes into things that somehow don't translate into a better proposal. It’s really easy for companies to fall into the habit of submitting bids and hoping instead of doing what it will take to win. They show a lot of activity and say they are preparing for the RFP. But they somehow arrive at RFP release unprepared. They say they do a lot of stuff. But it's stuff that d

The CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process is an opportunity pursuit process that starts as soon as a lead is identified so that the way intelligence is gathered supports the closing of the sale with the submission of a proposal.  Most “Must Wins” are already lost when the RFP comes out. Even companies who start early often find that time slips by and end up feeling unprepared when the RFP is released.  The CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process provides you with a way to track and measure progress so

This is a framework we've developed for building a goal driven proposal processes, as opposed to a procedural driven process. It maps the major components of the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process to the process goals. When people agree to a set of goals like these, the process becomes a way of making the goals easier to achieve instead of a mandated set of procedures.

The entire Federal acquisition process runs on content. Either you're influencing it or responding to it. At. Every. Single. Step. Long before there is an RFP, the customer has to get motivated to initiate a procurement. Content can explain the vision. When the customer is ready to initiate a procurement, they’ll have to justify it. They need content to complete it. Once they decide they’d like to move forward they’ll need: To know how to specify what to procure. Content ca

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Most proposals go bad in the introduction. Right from the start they are not written well. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you fix this, you can improve your proposal writing throughout the entire proposal. You don’t need to spend years studying every aspect of proposal writing. If you just learn how to write a great proposal introduction, you can write a great proposal. From learning how to write the proposal introduction, I learned to: Frame the entire proposal as fu

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The MustWin Performance Support Tool enables you to quickly define your quality criteria and put them in front of your proposal writers before they start writing. This produces much better outcomes than waiting for a draft and then figuring out whether you like it or not, all while skipping that part about defining your quality criteria.  Entering quality criteria You have two options for adding quality criteria to your proposal plan. The first is to type them in. When you click on the “A

Take a moment and ask yourself why you're interested in reducing the amount of proposal writing. It could be because you're out of time. Or have strict page limits. Or have other priorities and want to reduce the effort required by a proposal. This is where I'd normally jump in with an ROI calculation that shows that the impact on your win rate of doing a proposal well makes it mathematically worth it. However, today I'm going to skip that and take an unjudgmental look at what it takes to r

When you sign into PropLIBRARY, you see your Dashboard and it replaces the home page. If you surf away, then simply going to the home page by clicking on our logo will bring you back to the Dashboard. Here's what's there and some of the ways to use it. See your statistics and your Score! At the top, just under your name are some statistics about your utilization. It shows the number of times you've visited, how many items you've viewed, and course activity.  It also shows your Score!

Ingredients What types of training will you offer? Who are the target audiences for the training? What is the training medium: instructor-led sessions, computer-based training, exercises, or simulations, or something else? Where will training be provided? What materials/courseware will be used? How will you develop the curriculum? What certification(s) will students receive? What accreditation does your organization and/or instructors have?

You’re pleased to submit your proposal. So what? You care about quality. So what? You’ve got great experience. So what? You’ve got top-in-class, state-of-the-art solutions. So what? You’re fast growing. So what? You’ve won awards. So what?  Why should the customer care? How do you know if you’ve said something the customer cares about? Ask yourself if it passes the “So what?” test.  People often say things in their proposals that do not pass the “So What?” test. They start their propos