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People make the mistake of thinking that proposals are about promotion. They promote in the way they see all around them. Advertisements are full of claims. But their purpose is to get the customer to enquire to find out what they need to know. Proposals happen after the customer has expressed their interest. When the customer asks for a proposal, it’s the last step before they agree to sign a contract. They need all the information required to examine, consider, analyze, and decide whether

Almost every proposal we review has the same problems, whether it was written by a billion dollar company or by a single person company. They are ordinary. They all sound the same. Some are more detailed than others. Some show promise and pique my interest. But I almost never get surprised and see one that’s great from cover to cover. What that really means is that you have an opportunity to consistently beat your competitors. All you have to do is make the leap from writing an ordinar

Solutioning is figuring out what to offer the customer to solve their problem or address their need. However, in practice, it really involves incorporating subject matter expertise to figure out what to propose. While the term implies creating the solution for proposals that address customer problems, it is similar to systems architecting or offering design. We’re using the term solutioning to cover all of them just to keep it simple. Solutioning may not be needed in every proposal. Sometim

A management approach is a document that explains to the customer what you will do to ensure that they get what you’ve promised. It is not simply a set of operational plans.  A lot of people find writing the management approach for a proposal to be boring and uninspiring. They even routinely recycle their boring management approaches, as if the customer doesn’t care. I love to compete against them because the management approach is often a great opportunity to win proposals. Management

Over time, best practices become simply the way things should be done. They become ordinary. Best practices are not competitive. Everyone claims to follow them. The use of the term “best practices” no longer adds value or conveys meaning. Proposing to follow the best practices is certainly not a differentiator. However, best practices are a good starting point — if you go beyond them. The more your proposal is better than the “best” practices, the more competitive it will be.  Here are

Writing an RFP is harder than writing a proposal. And it’s even harder when you are not the expert in what you need to buy or are missing information. When customers and vendors work together, they can mitigate issues like these:  How to get the right vendors to bid. Who out there could add value or bring better solutions? How do they find them? Would they bid? Who will ultimately bid? If they put out an RFP, what are they going to get back? Should they get more vendors just to have “com

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Proposal Content Planning tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the go

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Proposal Writers tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal is to

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Requirement Cross-Referencing tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since th

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Proposal Outline Editor tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Import RFP Requirements tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal

Customers do wacky things when they format their RFPs. They are difficult for people to interpret. If we tried to automatically parse them, you'd spend as much time verifying the software did it correctly as it would have taken to do it yourself. So we use a hybrid approach. You mark the headings and MustWin does the rest. It's the fastest and easiest way we've ever seen to do this. And yet it's still the most complicated tool on the platform. Before we walk through importing the RFP, let

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Win Strategy Development tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goa

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Pre-Proposal Capture tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal is

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Proposal Input tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal is to tr

Here is a list of all the tools in MustWin Now and the features you can use in them. They can be combined in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it all works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. The scripts below are organized to go tool by tool, with the collaboration features last. In reality, the collaboration and proposa

Intro... Use the left sidebar to select which proposal section to view. You can change which proposal sections appear in the sidebar by clicking the green "Show me..." button and selecting either all proposal sections in sequence, only proposal sections with notes, or only unlinked proposal sections. When you select a proposal section, you will see any instructions for proposal writers as well as the RFP requirements so you know what you should be writing about.

Proposal content planning is where you really start to see a payoff from using MustWin Now. Because you used it to import the RFP and create your proposal outline, it can now greatly accelerate figuring out what to write about to address the requirements and how to best present it. The first thing it does is create the content plan shell for you. In the column on the left, you'll see all the proposal sections. Click one. If you used the Cross-Reference Tool to map the RFP requirements

Before something can go into your proposal, you have to decide where in your outline it should go. MustWin Now provides several ways to connect RFP requirement to the proposal outline. You can even drag and drop RFP requirements onto the landing zone for each proposal section. Once the association is made, MustWin Now remembers all the RFP requirements that are relevant to each section.  If you want, you can use this to generate a very traditional looking compliance matrix and download it

Before you can start working on the content plan for your proposal, you need an outline. If you are responding to an RFP, your outline should be based on the instructions in the RFP. If this applies to you, you should import the RFP first, before you create your proposal outline. However, the outline editor in MustWin Now does not force you to do this, and it can even be used to create a proposal outline when there is no RFP. Here is what the outline editor in MustWin Now looks like. From h