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PositioningPositioning yourself is about making a comparison that establishes why you are better than either a specific alternative or all alternatives.  Customers always have alternatives. What makes yours better? It depends on the customer, what you have to offer, the circumstances, and any number of additional things.  To figure out how to position yourself, it helps to have an infinite sense of perspective. There are many, many ways to turn things around and differen

Ingredients What is your plan for quality control and quality assurance? Who is responsible for quality oversight? What standard operating procedures will you put into place? What standards you will use to assess and improve quality? What is the role quality planning in each phase of the project? How will the customer benefit from your approach to quality?

Yes, it's designed to be customized. Because you can download the Microsoft Word source files, you can make our process address the specifics of your business. If you already have a process, you can extract individual forms, checklists, and techniques from our process to use in yours.

The Score program is a way for people to demonstrate their business development and proposal capabilities. Participants in the Score program get points for taking exercises that prove what they can do. Each exercise you complete adds points to your Score. The Score website builds an electronic transcript that shows what you are actually capable of doing, because the exercises reflect real life skills you need to develop business and write proposals. Participants c

Most of you know us as the company behind PropLIBRARY that publishes a newsletter that some of you have subscribed to for 10 years. We had a couple of conversations last week with potential customers that made us realize that we've also worked on quite a few projects, usually with some twists that made them interesting. We’d like to share them with you because they really show the variety of challenges that companies face and provide some creative ideas for how to overcome them. As always

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This privacy notice discloses the privacy practices for CapturePlanning.com. This privacy notice applies solely to information collected by this web site. It will notify you of the following: What personally identifiable information is collected from you through the web site, how it is used and with whom it may be shared. What choices are available to you regarding the use of your data. The security procedures in place

How you get people in the habit of following a process depends on how you roll out or introduce the process to them. Most people like change to be incremental. Focusing on one problem at a time is easier to swallow then changing how you do everything from start to finish. Here are five ways that companies can begin implementing PropLIBRARY, based on where they see their biggest needs for improvement. You don't have to start at the beginning, you can start with any one of the following:

I had a discussion about an upcoming implementation of the MustWin Process at a large company that is one of our Corporate Members. The company has multiple divisions and well over 10,000 employees. It’s a non-trivial rollout. But we have their head of business development and head of proposals as sponsors. The biggest problem you face in a process rollout like this is user acceptance. It’s even worse when there are multiple divisions involved that over time have

Throwing out an existing process and starting over may be too traumatic for some people to contemplate. Because we designed the MustWin Process for customization, you can also selectively use certain parts. You can use it to cover a part of your process that either isn’t sufficiently documented or isn’t working as well as you’d like. Here are some of the ways this can work: Make sure your team is ready at RFP release. Most proposal processes start at RFP release.

Planning graphics: There is a difference between specifying a graphic and drawing it. You don’t have to be able to draw in order to identify and specify graphics. Graphics should be identified and specified as part of your Content Planning efforts. Graphics can be created from written instructions in a Content Plan, or can be created first and used to drive the

The following scoring sheet summarizes the questions to be answered, action items to be accomplished, and goals to be achieved for this review. Each one should be assessed to determine if the pursuit is on track to be ready to win at RFP release.   Question, Action Item, or Goal Guidance Score Opportunity Intel Do you know the final

Description Strategic plans are vital. But they can’t be the kind of strategic plans that sit on a shelf. Instead, they should set your staff up with what they need to know to successfully identify leads, pursue them, and grow your business. Your strategic plan should be a tool that tells your staff: What kind of capabilities and offerings to develop Who their target customers are Where to target marketing and build rel

The following links provide references and additional information relevant to our white paper Radically Improving the Efficiency of Business Development. Products Mentioned Creating a bid strategy re-use library Should you purchase a database for business development? Winning By Asking The Right Questions, With 9 Sets of Examples How do you get the most out of inexperienced

One of our better ideas has been to replace recycling previous proposals with a win strategy library. A win strategy library can inspire people to prepare more strategic proposals and accelerate their efforts. Recycling previous proposals makes it easy to create proposals that are written for the wrong context. We got the idea when we experienced déjà vu helping a customer plan their proposal. We had done proposals for companies in similar circumstances and were s

Customers clearly think that price matters. They are also concerned about risk. If the price is too low, the risk goes up. What they want are the features, but what they need is compliance with the specifications and anything they are required to comply with. Your best clue as to which of these matter the most is the evaluation criteria in the RFP. Look at how they evaluate each item and how much weight they give it. Then make sure that your offering and the point

This is a sample of a Federal Market Essentials Report created by isiFederal. The Federal Marketing Essentials Report is a comprehensive analysis of the federal market as it applies to a company. It breaks down the Federal Government market and shows you how the Feds buy what you sell and who you need to talk to. It is for Government Contractors, either brand new or experienced, who are looking to expand the number of leads they are pursuing. You can request that isiFederal prepare a full

Here on the slides from the Pipeline Assessment webinar we hosted on Wednesday, April 15, 2015.

Copy of the presentation Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com gave at the American Express OPEN DC Summit for Success

Slides from the Understanding What It Takes to Win course