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It’s good to use quality criteria at the back end to review your proposals. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to only use quality criteria after the proposal is written. Or to create your quality criteria after the proposal has been written. It’s much better to put the effort into creating your quality criteria at the very beginning so that proposal contributors receive the quality criteria when they receive their writing assignments. This enables them to create a first draft that meets the qua

Proposal quality criteria give you the means to measure the quality of your proposal. Before you can create quality criteria for your proposals, you must define proposal quality. Your proposal quality criteria tell you what you must accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Defining proposal quality and creating quality criteria are critical parts of achieving Proposal Quality Validation. While this is easy to understand, creating your proposal quality crit

The proposal death spiral happens when you get to the proposal review and things are so bad that you have to have another review to make sure they’re better, only to find more things to change, and you enter an infinite loop that’s only broken when the deadline comes and you have to submit whatever you have at that moment. When it’s bad, the draft you end up with isn’t much better than the first one. When it’s really bad, people push the changes so close to the deadlines that even the illusion o

Going straight from sales to a proposal is problematical in a way that can lower your revenue. When a salesperson spends time working on a proposal, they are not finding and qualifying more leads. This can cause peaks and valleys in your growth. When the salesperson does not spend time working on the proposal, who is going to apply the customer, opportunity, and competitive insights discovered to winning the proposal? Without those insights, your win probability will suffer. Having a propos

When you go straight from salespeople to proposals: You tend to get a lot of waste if the sales function doesn't pay for each proposal they request out of their own budget. When this is the case there’s no reason for them not to want to submit a proposal, no matter how low the win probability. When there is no cost, why not submit a proposal, because it might win? This approach comes at a win-rate destroying cost that sucks the life out of a company’s future potential. If salespeo

Most companies have regular business development meetings to discuss the leads they are tracking. These meetings usually do very little to increase the company’s win rate, but give everyone a chance to convince themselves that “they’ve done everything they should.” The reality is that the meetings have been subverted and are doing more harm than good. How did that happen? It happens when you allow your business development meetings to focus on the wrong things:  How many leads you

There are lines you should not cross. If you do, your proposal will never recover. Cross them and the only way you can win is if all of your competitors mess up worse than you did. That is not a winning proposal strategy. The purpose of this list is to help keep you from crossing any of these lines. I challenge you to identify anything below that can safely be deleted without jeopardizing your ability to win. The following are things you should never do. They are all clear and objectiv

Most people calculate proposal efficiency the wrong way. They calculate it based on how much effort they put into their proposals. This is based on the assumption that less effort always makes things more efficient. And it happens to be a wrong assumption. Efficiency is defined by maximizing productivity with the least amount of wasted effort. Measuring proposal efficiency The productivity of proposal effort is best measured by the amount or percentage won. This means that the efficienc

Proposal management is needed when you want to go after contracts that are bigger than yourself and you have to work through difference between managing a small proposal and managing a large proposal. Proposal management means answering questions like:  Who issues proposal assignments and who is responsible for fulfilling them? Where do you draw the lines? On the organization chart? Between one person's role and another? How do you allocate proposal resources and perfo

Instead of being well-oiled intimidating machines, most large companies are a collection of political territories that often don’t know what resources are available to them and don’t cooperate very well anyway. They don’t have an abundance of staff because all those bodies are all already committed and their proposals are just as understaffed as the ones at small companies. And even though they have billions in revenue, they can only spend what’s in their budget on the proposal. But they do have

Everyone contributes to proposals. When it's required of them. If they can make themselves available. But no one seems to own the outcome… Who owns the win? Even the proposal manager is often just producing what other people came up with and passing it along. So whose job is it to win? Everybody wants to win. At least that's what they say. But who has it as their top priority? You’d be surprised at how many companies have no one who has winning proposals as their primary responsibility

It would be really great to know if you're going to win a pursuit, or even just have a decent chance at it, before you put all that effort into it. We are driven to really want to quantify our chances of winning a pursuit. We want to make it a science. Really badly. There are several reasons why people need to estimate the probability of win (pwin). It helps to: Determine whether a lead is worth pursuing at all Figure out how much to budget on the pursuit Assign the right

Selling in writing is about influencing the decision process and the decision maker with what you put on paper. When the customer will make their decision based on the proposal you submit, you need to sell in writing to influence the sale. A salesperson has influence in person, but if they don’t carry that over to what gets put in writing they have no influence over closing the actual sale. Influence in person vs influence in writing To sell in writing, the salesperson must discover how

We tend to obsess over the technical approach and treat the management plan as if it's routine. Yet companies have won major proposals by focusing on the management plan instead of the technical approach. How do you know when the management plan is more important? It depends on: The evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria sometimes favor either the technical or the management section. When they do, it is an indicator of which the customer thinks is more important. Since the evaluati

I’ll give you three hints: It’s the most frequent cause of the proposal death spiral, that cycle of endless rewrites that are never good enough and only end because there’s a deadline, resulting in delivering the proposal you have instead of the proposal you wanted to submit. Usually typified by trying to fit in one re-write too many and having a train wreck at the end where errors are likely to be introduced, but no time is left for quality assurance. It’s a major reason why the pr

The more proposals the customer has to read, the harder it will be to get their attention and keep it. This is especially true when the customer defines the outline and has a page limit so tight you can’t use layout design. How to get the customer's attention in a proposal Give them a path to get their goals fulfilled (instead of your own). When the customer reacts with “That’s what I want,” you’ve got their attention. But complex proposals require more than just saying something benef

There are a number of ways to look at the size of a proposal, but one is more helpful than the others. Page count doesn’t necessarily translate into difficulty or effort. Nor does the number of items being proposed or the dollar value. You could focus on the difference between the way large companies do proposals and the way small companies do proposals, but that’s an illusion. The things you do to win a proposal remains the same regardless of the size. Large companies and small proposals f

Just because your proposals are produced by a group of people doesn’t mean that you have an organizational approach to winning business. Just because you call them a team doesn’t mean that they aren’t really just a collection of individuals sharing the work.  An organizational approach to winning is different from spreading the work to more individuals and keeping track of the pieces. An organizational approach is more than the sum of its parts because the work that each participant does re

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