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Congratulations! Either you got promoted or have started your own company. You’re an executive with profit and loss responsibility now, and must grow your business. You probably have some experience with business development, sales, or proposals, but being in charge of it is another matter. That’s okay, because like most executives, you’re confident you can make the stretch. My goal in writing this is to help you avoid falling into traps that look rational, but will weaken your competitiven

At most companies, the proposal management role is not well defined. What you are managing is not well defined. The processes you are supposed to implement are neither written nor well defined. Who you are managing is not well defined. The resources at your disposal are not well defined, and they're usually minimal. Your responsibilities are all-encompassing.  In larger companies, there are multiple roles (business development, capture, subject matter experts, writers, proposal specialists,

Effective proposal management requires thorough expectation management. But while some expectations will be the same for every proposal, many will change. Many will need to be determined, figured out, or updated as things change during the proposal. But with a little structure, you can improve how you communicate expectations and do a better job of making sure everything is covered. Remember: If you overwhelm people with too much information about expectations, they will not absorb it

You know things about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. But what do you know and what do you do about it? Must people just ponder it hoping lightning strikes. But here is a more organized way to leverage what you know into winning your proposals. It starts by making lists. It’s really nice when the customer does that for you. For example, if they give you a list of goals, a list of evaluation criteria, and a list of requirements. But not everything comes packaged in ne

Companies often put more emphasis on making proposals easier than they do on winning them, while at the same time trying to do as many as possible. If they calculated the ROI, they'd realize that the investment in doing proposals right is tiny compared to the huge returns it delivers. Instead of trying to find twice as many leads, mathematically they'd be better off trying to win twice as many. But instead, they try to minimize what they spend on proposals so they can afford to pursue as ma

Customer intimacy sounds so much cooler than customer awareness. No company is going to say that they’re not interested in achieving customer intimacy. It’s pretty easy to convince the executives that customer intimacy is something you just have to have. But then you have a problem. How do you get it? Customer intimacy is about trust and sharing. You have to earn trust and be willing to share before you are even a candidate for achieving customer intimacy. And some customers are reluctant

Sometimes you know you have an opportunity coming up and you want to get a head start on the proposal. Unfortunately, what a lot of people do to prepare for the proposal actually does more harm than good. So here are 3 things people do to prepare for an upcoming proposal that are counterproductive, 3 ways to prepare that can help you win, and 3 that can go either way. 3 Ways to prepare for a proposal that are counterproductive Writing the proposal in advance. If you write the proposal

The number one reason why proposals lose is price. It is also a lie. It seems like every proposal that loses, loses "on price." It's politically safe. No one is to blame when you lose because of the price. The other company must have “low balled” it, or bid below their costs. They played dirty. It’s not fair. The client must be dumb to award it at a price so low. There’s no way they’ll be able to perform. The truth is that most price losses are due to scoping the project wrong. It’s ju

What if I told you that on a 50-page proposal for services provided worldwide, due in just 7 days, we scheduled not one but two major reviews, and that we had the Red Team draft ready in less than 36 hours with only three writers... Want to know how we pulled that off and delivered an outstanding proposal? We started by using the Proposal Content Planning methodology we've been recommending and refining for two decades. The size and complexity of this proposal has convinced me once and fo

Summary   What the customer cares about depends on what they are buying. The closer things get to a commodity, the less the vendor matters and the more that price matters. The closer you get to a unique solution, the more trust and risk matter. Products and services can be either unique solutions or commodities, but what matters to the customer about products and services is different. How the customer perceives their need in relation to this chart matter

The reason that very few writers can do both technical writing and proposal writing well is that they have different goals, methods, expectations, and processes. All writing is not the same. Having experience with one set of goals, methods, expectations, and processes does not guarantee success at the other. In fact, it may increase the odds of failure.  Technical writers value clarity and accuracy. People must be able to not only understand their instructions, but follow them. Technical wr

Most of the examples of proposal outlines we see on the internet are bad. Really bad. And many of them are used in textbooks and taught as best practice! Here is a typical example: Title Summary/Abstract Introduction/Background Statement of the Project Problem Recommendation/Solution Objectives Scope Methods Schedule Budget/Pricing Resources/Staffing Conclusion References Now, forget you ever saw it and never use any of these headings. While this outline may g

Visual communication is more effective than text. Studies show that graphics get read first and lead to faster and better message comprehension. Most proposal specialists know that and seek to use a lot of graphics. They usually start by asking questions like “How many graphics should I have in my proposal and where should they go?” Some don’t get any further because if you don't have the skills needed to create the graphics, it seems difficult and time consuming. Plus it's hard to make it high

The primary missions of business development, capture management, and proposal management are all very different. And yet, they share the same goal: winning proposals. Unfortunately, the way they are normally practiced is as a series of hand-offs, with each contributing towards the goal of submitting a winning proposal. They can be so much more, when they aren't trying to be islands unto themselves. Working together, they add up to more than the sum of the parts: Business development i

To build your proposal around what it will take to win, you must: Gather intelligence.  Use the Readiness Reviews to gather intelligence about the opportunity, customer, and competitive environment.   Assess what you learned.  Based on the intelligence you gathered, articulate what it will take to win in the forms of lists so that you can base your win strategies and themes on it. Incorporate it into your Content Plan.  To ensure that the proposal text reflects what it will t

When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves.  They ask questions like “What do we do better?” and “How can we exceed the requirements?” But they are missing a much better way to find their competitive advantages. A competitive advantage is something that will make it more likely the customer will pick you over your competitors. The best way to find a competitive advantage is to discover your customer’s preferences. When the custo

What one company calls a proposal manager, another might call an administrative assistant. Or an editor. Or a coordinator. Or a production manager. Or a pursuit strategist. Or a capture manager. Is the proposal manager the person is charge of the proposal, in charge of producing what people give them, or just a proposal specialist assigned to support the proposal effort? Or, on occasion, just some unlikely person who happened to be available. A large portion of the conflict and difficu

Before you begin proposal writing, you should prepare a proposal content plan that accounts for everything that should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Here is some inspiration for writing the instructions that should go into your proposal content plan. Decide what type of guidance you can provide Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say Provide instructions to guide the writers to figure out what to offer or say Provide det

Before you begin proposal writing, you should prepare a proposal content plan that accounts for everything that should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Here is some inspiration for writing the instructions that should go into your proposal content plan. Decide what type of guidance you can provide Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say Provide instructions to guide the writers to figure out what to offer or say Provide det

When it’s time to begin working on a proposal, most people start by thinking about what they should write in their proposal. Then they begin creating an outline. And that’s where they go wrong... A proposal outline tells you the structure of the document and not what goes into it or how it should be presented. While you can annotate an outline, that approach can't hold everything that needs to go into a proposal and still be manageable. When you use an outline as your sole planning tool, yo