Articles

Your proposal process is broken. But don’t feel bad. Everyone’s proposal process is broken. And while it might be easier to accept that the proposal process can always be improved, it's better to be honest about just how broken it is.  I have worked on countless proposals at a few hundred different companies. Some proposal process implementations are better than others. But all of them have serious defects and people are usually in denial about it. This doesn’t get their proposal process fixed.

I tend to focus on winning proposals instead of efficiency. One more win can produce enough revenue to cover the inefficiency of many proposals. If you want more revenue, you are better off focusing on winning than reducing proposal effort. Unfortunately, many organizations treat proposals as a cost instead of as an investment (let alone the core competency of the organization). Proposal costs are covered out of the overhead portion of the budget, and that’s always under pressure for reduction.

Unless your company sells a commodity, there can be great variations in the proposal process for every pursuit. It can be better to think of your proposal process as a series of goals than as a series of steps. It is not a procedure to be followed, it is a series of things to be achieved, with flexibility regarding how they are accomplished. Achieving the goals matters far more than the procedures used. Here are the six goals we use to drive everything we do, with links to the relevant portions

Before you can create proposal criteria, you have to understand what it will take to win Proposal Quality Validation starts with identifying what it will take to win.  This is the standard used to measure quality against. The MustWin Process facilitates identifying what it will take to win by collecting the intelligence you will need during the pre-RFP phase. The MustWin Process will also guide you through preparing a list to document what it will take to win.  This list is the first step in p

There are three competing interests when wording headings for a proposal, and they are listed in priority order: Making it easy for the customer to find things in your proposal.  Telling a story through your headings alone. Logically organizing what you have to say.   When constructing a proposal outline: You must give using the customer’s wording the highest priority.   If they have specified an outline, use their wording exactly so they can find what they will be looking for. Make it easy

The new PropLIBRARY will go live in a week or two. We're not going to announce it right away after it goes live, because there are some content migration issues that we have to address on the live server. In the meantime, these images will give you a peek behind the curtain. The new menu for PropLIBRARY is a lot more functional than the old menu. It's not just about content. There is a lot more that you can do. If you look closely, you'll see, just from the menu, s

Creating a compliance matrix sounds complicated in text. View this slide show to see how it works.

Cross-reference matrix creation sounds complicated in text. View this slide show to see how it works.

A presentation Carl Dickson, founder of PropLIBRARY gave on the topic of What defines proposal quality and how can you develop quality criteria to assess it.

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Great proposal writers often have to write about things they don't know anything about. How do they do it? Instead of thinking about what they can say, they: Start by figuring out what needs to be said Break down what the customer has asked about Consider what the customer needs to hear for each one Address how they prove their claims Finish with what would show the most value These are just some of what they need to figure out, and not the seque

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PropLIBRARY is evolving. 24 years ago, it started as an online content resource with practical information about proposal management, capture management, and business development to help people win proposals. PropLIBRARY has evolved many times to expand the ways it helps people win. For example, we added the MustWin Process as an off-the-shelf, customizable starting point. Then we added online training to help people succeed as they implemented the process. Then we automated the process, but bui

Instead of looking at your proposal process as a series of steps, try looking at the problems you need to solve for your process to be effective. You'll encounter problems, big and small, on every proposal you do. But some of the problems are more fundamental than others, and have a bigger impact on your win probability. Solving these problems will make your process far more effective. The bid/no bid problem. How do you avoid wasting time on proposals that aren't worth bidding? This is n

Everybody thinks they are trustworthy. And yet obviously, some of us are not. Even if you brand yourself as a “trustworthy partner” or a “trustworthy advisor” in all your materials, the first thing that half of the people who see or hear that are going to say to themselves is “how do I know that's true?” All those people have doubt and you just made them question whether they can trust you. You can't simply claim to be trustworthy. When we meet in person, trust has to be earned. But th

Proposal Review Need #1 I need people who show up having already read the RFP. It sounds like a small thing, but proposal reviews often rely on single staff with many things competing for their attention. Preparing ahead of time doesn't always happen. The reason this is important is that if you don't already understand the instructions, evaluation criteria, and contract, pricing, and performance requirements before you start to review the text, the review is more likely to be based on vague

Stress is unhealthy for your win rate — never mind it also being unhealthy for the people working on proposals. If you want to maximize your win rate, you can't ignore the things in your organization and environment that make proposals more stressful than they need to be. The benefit to your company's win rate is what should make reducing stress a corporate priority. However, you can't just reduce stress by telling everyone to calm down. Have you ever noticed that telling people to calm down h

If you are treating your pink team review as a progress review to see how the proposal writing is going, then you are doing them wrong. And you are setting yourself up for a bad experience at the red team review. You are missing a vital opportunity and will suffer a lower win probability than a company that has a better definition for what a pink team review should be. A pink team review should be a blueprint review prior to the construction of the proposal. The blueprint for a proposal i

A thesis is tremendously helpful for proposal writing because it gives you something to prove. A thesis is the central claim in a paper. When you try to write a thesis for a proposal, you'll probably struggle and that's a good thing. If you want to win, you should be putting some effort into figuring out what to write before you just throw words at the customer. The difference between a proposal thesis and a theme is that themes more easily degrade. Theme statements intended to link your p