Articles

Proposal reviews are notoriously difficult to optimize. Part of the problem is that no matter how mature your process, it's difficult to keep your proposal reviewers in sync with it. The nature of the problem I've found that at a lot of companies, it can be difficult just getting your reviewers to show up prepared. When reviewers show up without having read the RFP, the results of their review will be more subjective and less relevant to increasing win probability. Reviewers tend t

That's not a typo. I said how to tell if your win rate is too high. I obsess over improving win rates. I do everything possible to increase them. And yes, it is possible for them to get too high. The highest sustained win rate I've seen a contractor have was 87%. It was a company that had a huge software advantage in a tiny niche with repeat customers. And they stayed in it. They had discipline. They did not bid things at a disadvantage. Their win rate was too high. It limited their gr

Proposals are where you often conceptualize new approaches before you put them into operational use. This is true for customer-facing projects, company-wide best practices, use of information technology, and more. Every proposal essentially is a research and development effort. Everything has to be figured out. This applies equally to the proposal itself and the work being proposed: You have to figure out what it will take to win and how to build a proposal around that. And si

These are the articles that you liked the most in 2024. Collectively they were viewed 244,083 times. Thank you for all that love and attention. I find it interesting how wide the areas of interest were this year. They are difficult to categorize. One major theme does seem to emerge: Greatness. All of them relate to preparing great proposals. But they also address it from many different angles. This makes sense to me, since proposals are complex and nuanced creations. It makes sense that the

what matters to the customer.

Doing a proposal is easy. Doing a proposal with other people is hard. What makes it hard is that everyone has different expectations. Expectation conflict is the biggest source of proposal friction. What is proposal friction? Proposal friction is energy lost in the form of heat generated when people do not move through your proposal process smoothly. When people don't do what they are supposed to, have to work without the information they need, are assigned tasks they can't complete, h

Proposal writers and proposal managers do not do their best work in isolation. They need: The company to be qualified and capable of complying with all of the RFP requirements. A rapid decision whether to bid that doesn't waste time with the deadline clock ticking. An information advantage related to the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Winning strategies that provide differentiators related to what to bid, how to price it, and how to position it

Planning before writing your proposals is challenging. Getting everyone on the same page to do it as a team is even more challenging. It's one thing to have a methodology. It's another to successfully implement it. You can use the list below to determine whether you are getting the results you should from the way you are planning your proposal content. Whether you follow the envision the proposal before it is even written and determine whether it's going to be the proposal you want before you in

It means people want to be a part of the proposals you lead. It means you inspire the reader so much with your proposal that they dance, sing, and feel the music. If you want to be a proposal rockstar, you need to make your proposal mean something that matters. It means you've opened them up to the raw beauty of what you are creating and they can feel its importance. It means you love what you create, and who cares whether anyone else does. Those who matter will get it. If yo

If you begin by asking “Should you use AI on proposals?” you are at risk of using AI to create losing proposals. It's the wrong question to start with. The issues with using AI on proposals are not whether to use it, or even whether AI or human writers are better. The main issue with using AI is not just how to use it, but how to use it competitively. It gets to the heart of what it takes to win proposals. If you think about it, the number of losing proposals prepared by AI will be ab

Imagine two AI written proposals. Which one wins? Now think about how the customer will use AI. I'm betting that an AI will score the proposals and a human will make the final decision. This matters a lot because it determines who will win and who will lose. The company that will win the bid will be the company that best trains its AI. All future AIs will have been trained on the entire world wide web and probably every book ever printed. All of the publicly available portion of P

Establishing proposal accountability sounds like something you should do. However, good luck with that. Try not to throw out the baby with the bath water. For accountability, you need direct responsibility. That's hard to find in proposal work. Proposal development is closer to research and development than it is to project management. The proposal process is a process to figure out the process instead of a set of procedures. And when the proposal is bigger than one person, nearly every tas

I'm working on a new offering and have decided to take a different approach than I have in the past. Instead of waiting until everything is final and announcing it for sale, I'm reaching out to potential customers for discussion so that they can share their thoughts before things are set in stone. I have tons of course materials and over a hundred slide decks, exercises, and quizzes on dozens of topics relevant to BD, capture, and proposals. I'm thinking about creating a subscription add-on

The things that bother me the most when working on proposals are mostly avoidable. And yet they often occur. Even being the proposal manager and being aware of them may not be enough to be able to always prevent them. That makes them doubly annoying. While I love working on proposals, these are the kinds of things that lead to bad experiences: Unresolved competing priorities. There will always be competing priorities. That's not the problem. The problem is when there is so much money a

For most folks, a job is a job. It can't be like that with proposals. You'll burn out in just a few years. I've been doing them for more than 30. These are the things that help me find meaning in proposals and that have kept me going during the worst, most high stress proposals I've had to suffer through: Creating opportunity. When you win proposals, you win jobs. Sometimes you even get to define those jobs. Sometimes you get to define what people will do and how, and you might even g

The proposal management process flows information to proposal writers who assess and transform that information into a presentation of that information that helps the customer reach a decision. The first place people often start from to create their proposal management process is often by looking for sequential steps or milestones. Instead, start with inquiry. Inquiry Instead of trying to flow chart intelligence gathering and the flow of information, try building your intelligence

See the companion article that describes how to build a goal-driven proposal process around questions like these. To redefine roles To encourage business development to play a larger role in writing the proposal, or to contribute more customer insight into the proposal: Does the Executive Summary reflect what we discovered from talking to the customer? What should we say in the proposal based on our customer interactions? How can we translate our customer insights into

Here is a low-risk way to try our services and training. You can use it to take a class, get our feedback on one of your proposals, and more. If you are thinking about reaching out to us about something more strategic like a continuously win rate improvement program, ongoing support, fractional VP services to provide affordable but top leadership, you can use this simple approach to test the waters. You can pick any item below, either service or training, for a fixed price. This keeps it ni

Nobody wants a burdensome proposal process. Proposal specialists don't want one because they want people to be efficient and they want people to buy in to working on the proposal. Proposal contributors don't want one because they may not want to work on the proposal at all, let alone have to jump through hoops to do it. Executives don't want it because they don't want people complaining about having to work on proposals. How do you get the balance right between making sure you do all the th

Success requires more than just identifying the steps in your proposal process. It's a good start, but it's just a start. You can follow the same steps with very different results on different days. One day those steps will help you win. And on another day you'll still lose even though you followed the steps. Here are some things that will help you transform your ordinary, challenging proposal process into something that will make things easier and be seen as an asset: Anticipate needs