Articles

Ingredients What safety precautions may be required on this project? Who will be responsible for ensuring safety? What is your record for ensuring safety? How you will recognize safety hazards and respond to any incidents? What safety standards or procedures will you comply with? Do you have any safety related certifications, awards, or credentials?

Quality is an abstract concept and what matters to customers about it can vary greatly. In a proposal, quality is really about trust. The customer has to trust that you will deliver as promised. And like trust, claiming to be of top quality or being committed to it is not enough. Customers look at quality in different ways: Sometimes it’s just a check box.  Do you have a Quality Control Plan?  Are you ISO 9001:2000 certified? Are you CMM Level 5? When this is the

We work primarily with business development, proposal, marketing, and sales consultants. Sometimes consultants work for us and sometimes we work for them. We prefer relationships that are mutual and well-balanced. We don't simply place people like a temp service.  We help the consultants we work with grow their practice by maximizing the value they offer to their customers. Together we offer a whole range of capability that if properly positioned enables you to ma

Ingredients Describe your organization, staffing, tools, and resources for: Human Resources Accounting/Finance Payroll Contracts Legal Information Technology Call center Shipping/Receiving How will the customer benefit from the suppor

Ingredients What is your approach to risk analysis? What risks do you anticipate?  For example: human resources, legal, financial, economic, technological, facilities, safety, strategic, organizational, process, and completion risks. How do you identify, categorize, and prioritize sources of risk? How you will mitigate the risks? Do you have any relevant historical data regarding risks?

Ingredients What aspects of the project will be performed on-site and which will be performed off-site? Which existing locations (if any) will be involved in the project? What (if any) new locations will be established for the project?  Include an explanation of their selection and resource allocation. If the customer has multiple locations, how will you support them? Will you need to cond

Ingredients How important is staffing to the overall success of the project? What depth and breadth of staffing is available from your company? What skills are required for the project and how you will allocate your firm’s skills sets across the project scope of work? What qualifications are required for each position or role on the project? What are the responsibilities and level of effor

Ingredients Who are the subcontractors you plan to use? Do you have any plans for outsourcing? What selection process did/will you use to choose those particular subcontractors and the factors involved: the quality of their work, their reliability, strength of resources, and any established working relationships you may already have in place – joint, successful past performance is a strong factor you’ll want to emphasize?

Ingredients The following list of ingredients is intended to inspire. Select the ingredients that are most relevant to your needs in this particular proposal, or add your own: How is your company or project organized? Is it organized functionally, by client, or some other way? Do you wish to show all the parts or just the relevant ones? What do you want to emphasize, titles or names? Do you know the names or will

What is PropLIBRARY?   For each step in the proposal, people go to PropLIBRARY and look up what they need to know and download forms, checklists, templates, and recipes that will help them. The material in the Knowledgebase includes the MustWin Process, something CapturePlanning.com first released in 2008 and has been refining ever since. It is broken down into 1-2 page topics that cover everything from lead identification to award, so tha

There are several ways to approach using the PropLIBRARY and the MustWin Process to capture a specific pursuit. You can use it: As a formal process, to guide your actions from start to finish. To fill gaps in your current process and add additional guidance to help you win. As a collection of forms, checklists, and information that you can use in an informal way to provide inspiration and acceleration.

We’re big fans of coaching. It’s a great way to have high levels of expertise available without breaking the bank. It’s also a great way to start a new proposal group and get it up to speed. One way we found success with coaching is with weekly meetings (usually by phone, but also online, and occasionally in person) where we discuss the status of pursuits and the process for capturing them with a team of 1-4 people who are fairly junior level and sometimes even en

PropLIBRARY will benefit any kind of business pursuit where a proposal is a critical part of the closing process. It helps small businesses compete with the big ones, and it helps the big ones perform like they should: Government Contractors (B2G). The MustWin Process featured in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase is designed to support the rigorous requirements of responding to government RFPs. We just avoid the jargon so that our materials are also applicable to Fed

  For Executives it is a strategic weapon that radically improves your competitiveness. It makes it clear what you can expect and what will be expected of those working on the pursuit. It turns the art of business development into a measurable, metrics-based science. It's also an incredibly cost-effective way to improve the business development skills of your entire organization. In fact, it’s much less expensive to use PropLIBRARY than it is to build something i

I've never seen a good WBS for the proposal process. I think the reason is that too much is conditional (sequence, duration, contents): You do the steps in the specified order, most of the time, unless you need to make an exception, which in reality happens all the time. Each step usually takes a certain amount of time and effort, but these vary with every proposal depending on circumstances too numerous to list. Which

CapturePlanning.com is the parent company of PropLIBRARY. CapturePlanning.com publishes information to help people win business. We are in our 11th year of operation and are stable, trusted, and well recognized. Thank you all for helping us get there. CapturePlanning.com was founded by Carl Dickson. He writes most of our content and continues to obsess over all of the customer facing elements of the business. Carl has helped companies win proposals for more than 2

While we designed the MustWin Process to stand on its own, we've found a lot of companies use various parts of it to supplement their existing processes. They use it to fill a gap or add detail to what they already have. We don't mind. In fact, the way it's designed makes that easy.

Our audience is huge and our materials have been thoroughly vetted by millions of readers. Over 65,000 subscribers get our newsletter on a weekly basis. Last time we counted, our paying customers included 97 of the Fortune 100 and were in 176 different countries. Our MustWin Process is used by several hundred companies and over 12,000 licensed users. They include a few billion dollar companies, and a mix of mid-sized companies, small businesses, and consultants. Our materials are even ref

PropLIBRARY is a great tool and we spend a lot of time talking about it. It's perfect for the "Do It Yourself" types. But when you need guidance from a real live person or some hands on help you need a consultant and not just a tool. Carl Dickson is the founder of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY. He is also a trainer and consultant. Here is a description of what he does as a consultant so you can see if we're a match. Feel free to download and send it to others you think could use some he

In 2013 we split our newsletter into two tracks and in most issues published two articles, one on business development and one on proposals. As a result, we hit our goal of publishing more than 100 new items and greatly expanded the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase with more checklists and detail. To celebrate the end of the year, while we plan more goodies for next year, here's a list of our Top 20 articles on business development. Hopefully they will help you have a more prosperous new year! Note: It