Carl Dickson

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: See also: Dealing with adversity Unresolved competing priorities. There will always be competing priorities. That’s not the problem. The problem is when there is so much money at stake and The Powers That Be are aware of the conflicting priorities and do nothing to resolve them. It’s hard to put so much effort into a proposal that has its probability of winning crippled. We can’t risk offending the customer we don’t know. Every compelling offer is polarizing. The odds of winning favor being bold and polarizing with an offer that matters, over watering down your message so that it can’t offend anyone. It holds you back from being able to write a great proposal and limits you to just cranking out a proposal that is merely acceptable. pWin. This one is both love and hate. It’s vital but false at the same time. The moment you try to pin a percentage on your pWin, you’re lying to yourself. It's amazing, and not in a good way, how many proposals that shouldn't have been bid started off with a high pWin assessment. I have a 99% win rate. All win rates are cherry picked. You must determine what is included or excluded just to calculate a win rate. But the incentive is to make those decisions in your favor. Be skeptical of someone who cites their win rate without telling you about the bids they left out of the calculation, because the odds of it being deceptive are high. This is true within a company, between companies, and when cited by individuals. When people think that by submitting their assignment by the deadline, they have done what needed to be done. Winning proposals is not about filling out the pages. It’s about winning. Every part of a proposal requires planning, executing, reviewing, and recovering. If you’re in it, be in it to win. It's a lot harder to do proposals with people who just want to do the minimum and run away. Making the RFP the beginning and end of it. The RFP is just the beginning. A lot more goes into winning than just the RFP. If you think your work on a proposal ends when you’ve addressed what’s in the RFP, you’re not trying hard enough to win. This shows up at the beginning, when you discover that the proposal is starting with sufficient customer insight and people are working exclusively from the RFP, and it happens in the middle when people want to take the easy route and not do any research beyond the RFP. It’s better to write something quickly so that you have something to work with. This is the start of the proposal death spiral, where you write iteration after iteration in search of something that can win until you run out of time and submit what you have without finding what you were searching for. Winning consistently requires that you think through what it will take to win first and then write it. I can’t tell you what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it. This is the worst sin in proposals. Telling people to burn the time available trying to guess at what the proposal should be instead of thinking it through, validating it, and then proceeding to execute it. Imagine flying in an airplane built that way. A proposal process is based on having steps that people should follow. This flies in the face of reality. In most fields, every RFP in the door presents exceptions and deviations to your steps. Having a process that is mostly accurate is a contradiction in terms. The proposal process should be based on goals and not steps. This shows up when companies say they have a process, but really don't. Proposal automation saves money and time. Think about what the return is on a small increase in your win rate. Usually it’s a rough order of magnitude more than the effort it takes to increase your win rate. The same is true in reverse. Proposal automation gets in the way of the things you need to do to increase your win rate. This creates a reduction in ROI instead of an increase. It is better to create your proposals like your business depends on them than it is to minimize them. I love working on proposals and the reasons for it are more compelling than the things I occasionally hate about it. But stressful and recurring problems like these definitely detract from the experience. Take another look at the list above and ask yourself how many of these are people problems. And how many of those are mismatches in expectations. And how many are part of human nature and not going away anytime soon. I also see that I have written articles related to almost all of them. That’s an indicator that I’ve given it some thought in the past and will continue to do so until the problems go away for good. I just hope I don’t have to wait for human nature to change for that to happen. 😉

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: See also: Great Proposals 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 get to define how people will interact. You get to set people up for growth and promotion. If you are lucky, you might be able to set someone up with their dream job. With a career in proposals, you will potentially create opportunities for (tens of) thousands of people. When I’m working extra hard against a deadline, I try to keep this in mind. It helps make it feel worthwhile. Growth is the source of all opportunity and you get to be in the middle of nurturing it. Helping people to realize the significance of what they do. When I interview people about what they do or how to do a job, they often do not realize how significant it is. They might routinely be impacting the health, safety, income, or wellness of millions of people. But to them, their job is just their daily grind. Sometimes when I draw it out of them and they see what they do described in a way that makes the benefits clear, it’s a big eye opener for them. Working at all levels of the chain of command. On my very first job in proposals, I was regularly working with everyone from the CEO down. That has been true at every proposal job I’ve ever had, even for gigs I’ve taken with billion-dollar companies. What matters about this isn’t the glory, it’s the insight and perspective you gain. Being able to cut through the bureaucracy. If something is needed to complete a high value proposal and you’re up against the deadline, it’s a lot easier to get cooperation. And it’s a lot easier to go over people’s heads if you don’t get it. Procedures can be expedited when the need is important enough. Proposals can be that important. Clear, unambiguous goals. What do I need to do? Win. That’s not easy and there are a lot of challenges between here and there, but the goal is clear. Success matters. Your daily routine working in proposals has huge ups and downs. It’s not the same every day. For most jobs, if you are a little better or a little worse, it won’t matter. You can be better or worse again tomorrow and it probably won’t matter either. This is not true for proposals. You’ll spend your career trying to get better so you can win more instead of punching a clock. After some time, getting better at winning proposals will take you to places beyond the proposal. You’ll never stop learning and growing. Solving unsolvable problems against a deadline. You must submit a winnable proposal by the deadline. Every time. No matter what problems come up. In many ways, proposal management is nothing but problem solving. When you have a big, fat, ugly problem and the deadline clock is ticking, you can find great satisfaction in finding a solution. And if you can’t find a solution, you will find a workaround. Because that’s just who we are. The adrenaline rush. I once heard a theory that proposal specialists are simply adrenaline junkies. I believe it more now than when I first heard it. I find when I’m high on a proposal, it’s because the adrenaline is pumping. How many office jobs are like that? Collaborating with people who have strategic vision. Give me solid win strategies that demonstrate customer insight and I can create a great proposal. Give me someone with strategic vision and insight, and we can have great conversations on what would make the greatest imaginable proposal and go from there into how to change the world. And then make it happen for real. They end. Whether it’s a good proposal or a bad proposal, it has a due date. No matter how many times they extend it, there will be a due date that’s final. All proposals end. On a bad day, that’s the best thing about them. But it can be enough to keep you going. The next one will be another chance to make it better. So long as you have confidence that you can make future proposals better, you have hope. And hope is a good thing to have. The next article I write will be 10 things I hate about working on proposals…

Proposal work requires people to use judgment and not just blindly follow procedures. Wherever possible, it is better to define the proposal process as a series of questions instead of a series of steps. The beauty of using questions is that: You can easily tailor them for your corporate culture and issues. A list of questions is also easy to change over time. This makes them a great way to ease process in and to continuously raise the bar by periodically changing the questions. They convert into cheat sheets and checklists very easily. People react differently when you ask them to follow a process vs giving them a checklist to make things easier for them. But the wording of the questions matters. How you ask the questions has a major impact on how well things get done. There are an infinite number of ways to phrase the same question. Sometimes you can be direct. Sometimes you need to be very indirect. It depends on your audience and the proposal environment you are working in. The people trying to answer the questions will react differently depending on how you word them and this will produce different results. This is a good thing. It’s far easier to fix than a flow chart that no one is following. Here are some examples of ways that you can use questions to frame your process: See also: Proposal Process Improvement Redefine roles. Instead of telling people what their roles are and then expecting them to just comply, try asking them who should be responsible for something or what role they play in it. Select very carefully. For example, instead of telling them to write something and provide finished copy by the deadline, consider asking them who is responsible for completing the writing by the deadline. Even if they answer someone else, it provides an opening for discussion about the topic instead of passive aggressive silence on it. You can also ask questions without addressing “who” that result in their acceptance. For example you could ask them if they have the proposal quality criteria and understand how to fulfill them. If you are having trouble getting sales or operations to participate in the proposal, you could ask “Does the proposal content plan reflect our full awareness of the customer?” or “Does our proposed approach have sufficient detail to provide a foundation for an acceptable project plan that you might be responsible for executing?” Change assumptions. Ask what else is possible or should be considered. Ask if there are any alternatives or better ways to do things. Ask people to achieve a goal instead of following a procedure. Include the assumption in the question and then ask for something else. Use comparison and contrast. Ask “What if…” Change how people do things. You can ask questions that stretch people out of their comfort zones and into other areas that are needed. Ask about whether they’ve considered doing certain things or various options. Ask if they’ve completed something needed. Ask questions about the customer, opportunity, or offering for them to answer. Ask them to assess something and turn it into something else. Ask them to draw a picture of it. You can also be indirect and ask whether they have what they need to complete something, where the answer provides acceptance without directly asking them to complete it. Getting people to show up prepared. What do you need before you can start? Do you have enough time to get ready? Did you bring…? Have you read the RFP? Apply lessons learned. Instead of telling people about lessons learned from the past, just simply change your list of questions to reflect them. You can anticipate and prevent questions, add detail, add new questions, remove or replace old questions, or even embed the lesson learned in a question. Meet expectations. You can use questions to surface expectations, inform people of expectations, prepare them to fulfill expectations, track or report on progress, confirm fulfillment, discover issues related to expectations, and more. Plan before they write. What needs to be written? How should it be written? How should it be presented? What should be included or considered? What do they need to know before they can start? The entire Proposal Content Planning process can be articulated as a series of questions. Apply proposal quality criteria. Proposal quality criteria are best presented as questions. Describing your quality standards as statements tends to make them more subjective and easier to ignore. Describing them as questions requires consideration (of whether they meet the standard) in order to answer the question. And it’s harder to move on without having an answer. Change behavior. What do you want people to do more of, less of, or do differently? Then ask them a question that either prompts the desired action or confirms its completion. Indirect questions work best for changing behavior. For 43 more examples, see the companion article written for PropLIBRARY subscribers.

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 differentiators for use in the proposal? To encourage technical staff to improve their ability to write persuasively: What technical trade-offs are involved in doing this work? How is our approach to resolving them better than anyone else’s? What should the customer know about it? To change assumptions To encourage people to move away from an assumption that “Proposals always have a train wreck at the end,” during a proposal review ask: Is your section complete so the proposal can meet the deadline, or will it contribute to a train wreck at the end of the proposal? Has your review done everything possible to prevent a train wreck at the end of the proposal? To change how people do things When staff have a habit of not doing something they should, remind them: Did you address what differentiates our approach in what you wrote? Did you resolve all comments and issues related to your section? When staff are submitting incomplete responses, ask questions like: Did you complete your section without leaving any holes? What impediments do you have to completing your section(s)? Did you get the help you needed to complete your section? If your proposal section is not complete, who is going to complete it and when? To get people to show up prepared In general: Have you read the RFP and the capture plan? Have you cleared your schedule to work on the proposal? Do you have any issues you need to raise at the beginning? When reviewers are showing up unprepared at the start of a proposal review: What have you done to prepare for this review? Have you cleared your schedule to focus on the review? When your reviewers are executives with competing priorities but outside your control: Can you clear your schedule sufficiently to thoroughly review the proposal? If you can't thoroughly perform the proposal review, who can? To apply lessons learned When the last proposal involved staff with competing priorities completing their assignments late, consider questions like: What is your plan for dealing with expected competing priorities? Who else might have relevant knowledge and be able to help with completing your section? To meet expectationsWhen people aren't fulfilling expectations during the proposal, you should do everything possible to ensure that the expectations are clear. Questions like these can help: Have you discussed your expectations related to your proposal assignment? Do you have any exceptions or require any clarifications about the expectations for your proposal assignment? Are there any issues related to completing your proposal assignment? To plan before they write When Proposal Content Planning is formalized, then it is an assignment of its own. But you can subtly remind people of its importance with questions like: Are your Proposal Content Plan contributions sufficient to prevent revisions later? Do your Proposal Content Plan contributions add up to the proposal the company would like to submit? Do your Proposal Content Plan contributions describe a proposal that is competitive enough to win? When Proposal Content Planning is informal or new to a company, you can coach people through it by asking questions like: What do you plan to make your section about? What points do you plan to prove? What differentiators will you highlight? What options are you considering? What steps, details, or components do you plan to include? What do you need to say beyond RFP compliance to win? To apply proposal quality criteria To remind writers about the proposal quality criteria: Before writing, have you reviewed the proposal quality criteria? After drafting your section, have your reviewed the proposal quality criteria before submitting it and calling it complete? To remind reviewers about the proposal quality criteria: Before reviewing the proposal, have you read the proposal quality criteria? Have you used the proposal quality criteria to ensure that nothing has been overlooked and that you achieve the goals of the review? To change behavior During proposal, people sometimes do, say, act, or behave in ways that are counterproductive. If this is showing up habitually in a lot of proposals, you can use the questions you ask to try to minimize the behavior by asking questions like: Are you bringing issues up at the proposal meetings quickly enough to prevent them from becoming major problems? Have you reviewed and discussed your expectations related to the proposal? Have you made sure that other people’s expectations related to the proposal are accurate? Are you fulfilling other people’s expectations during the proposal? Implementing this approach In writing this, it occurred to me how many of these are conversational. Some are questions I would have asked in person. You can build those into your process. If you create before/during/after events for achieving each goal in your proposal process, you can pre-write emails with reminders and subsets of questions delivered at the moment of need. You can use them for conversational questions, or even to trigger real conversations. Smaller lists of highly relevant, just in time questions will get much better attention than large comprehensive lists delivered at the beginning of the proposal.

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 nice, simple, and low risk. If you pick just one, the price is $2500 and it comes with a free 1-year subscription to PropLIBRARY. If you already have a PropLIBRARY subscription, you get $500 off. It may be hard to just pick one. If that's the case, we can create a package and quote you a price. We can also help you understand the options and figure out which is best for your needs. What kind of challenges are you facing? Where do you need the most help? What are you trying to improve? The list below provides plenty of opportunities to raise your win rate and do it in ways with a positive ROI that more than covers the cost. Sometimes by orders of magnitude. Scroll through the list below and pick a few to talk about. Then click the button and schedule a conversation. We’ll share the details and you can tell us about your company and your goals. Services Pre-RFP Proposal Preparation Getting the proposal input you need Proposal compliance matrix and outline building Proposal content planning Reducing proposal friction Proposal Review Proposal Process Assessment Pre-RFP and bid/no bid process assessment Maximizing ROI Assessment Training Courses Proposal writing from the customer’s perspective Successfully collecting the proposal input you need to win Implementing a goal-driven proposal process Creating communication templates to streamline proposal management Alternative proposal reuse strategies Good proposal writing vs great proposal writing Writing proposals to use the words in the RFP Fixing bad proposal habits Refreshing your proposal writing techniques Defining and communicating proposal expectations Defining quality and quality criteria 10 different ways to conduct proposal reviews Implementing Proposal Quality Validation instead of antiquated draft reviews Proposal review leadership and logistics Building a proposal compliance matrix and outline Proposal content planning Everything I needed to know about proposal writing, I learned from writing the introduction paragraph

You are going to need something to apply the expectation formula to, so start by gathering the following information to make it easy: Proposal Stakeholders. First, identify all of the proposal stakeholders, either by name or role. Proposal expectations flow between stakeholders in every direction, so you need to consider all of their different perspectives. Goals. Next, identify the goals you have for your proposal process. Action Items. Finally, identify what people will need to do in order to achieve the goals of the process. If you do not have a goal-driven proposal process and are still trying to get people to follow your steps, this is a good time to reconsider. But if you have to, you can use your steps instead of goals and action items. Organizing the expectations into a matrix See also: Assignments The first column should be for Stakeholders. Then create additional columns for each goal and each action item within them. Use the Stakeholders column to label each row with the people who will be involved in or impacted by the proposal process. In each cell, identify the expectations for your Stakeholders. This is where the formula will help. The simple formula for clarifying proposal expectations When I teach proposal writing, I commonly ask people to memorize the following as if it is a mantra: Who, what, where, how, when, and why I have written before about how this simple formula can be used to exceed RFP compliance. Now we’re going to use it to clarify proposal expectations. Here are some examples of how to use it to surface expectations: Who. Who is expected to do what? What. What are they expected to provide or do? Where. Where do things need to be done? Where can you get what you need? Where should they be put when complete? How. How should things be done? Are there procedures to follow or methodologies to employ? When. When should they start? When should they complete? When should they check in or meet? Why. Why do you expect that? Why them? Why that way? The people you are depending on will do a better job of fulfilling your expectations if they understand why they are being asked. You should do this twice: What the proposal effort expects from people contributing What people can expect from the proposal effort It’s also a good idea to ask: What can people expect from the customer? What can the customer expect from the proposal? However, these apply to the proposal as a whole and you’ll run into challenges trying to apply them to every action item. Nonetheless, since an important goal is to create a proposal that reflects the customer’s perspective, you might consider creating expectations for proposal contributors to discover and apply the customer’s perspective in achieving the goals of your process. Implementation The big challenge implementing this approach is granularity. If the number of expectations you create is overwhelming, it totally defeats the purpose. Consider dropping expectations that are obvious, patronizing, not a high priority, or address issues that are exceedingly rare. Do you really need an expectation set that people should be on time? You might. But you probably don’t. The result will change your life (as well as those of your stakeholders) Instead of going from kickoff to outline to assignments, imagine going from goals to expectations to assignments. Which do you think will get better results from proposal contributors? How will people perform when you’ve had an open discussion about what you expect from them, and what they can expect from you? Just make sure that you discuss expectations and don’t unilaterally declare them. Your expectations are meaningless if people don’t buy in to them. But if you get their buy-in and they feel confident that you can be trusted to fulfill their expectations in turn, then imagine the proposal you can create together and how it can go. Imagine facing the inevitable challenges with people who know how to be clear about expectations and how to resolve expectation conflicts.

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? See also: Improving Win Rates 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, have to work around issues because they can't get them resolved, won’t cooperate, receive review feedback that's arbitrary or unexpected, or have priority conflicts, people are experiencing proposal friction. Proposal friction produces distractions, delays, hard feelings, conflict, and confusion that disrupts the smooth, efficient, and flawless execution of the proposal process. Proposal friction results in work taking more energy than it should. Proposal quality is directly dependent on the motivation of the people contributing. Proposal friction reduces quality and lowers your win probability. It is also a big part of what makes people hate working on proposals. Nearly all of the friction encountered by people working on proposals comes from mismatches in expectations. If you want a better process that leads to a better proposal experience and a higher win rate, you should focus on discovering, articulating, and refining expectations instead of on steps or deadline enforcement. If you don’t achieve agreement on expectations when you issue an assignment, the resulting friction will cause the assignment to not achieve the results you’re hoping for. Reducing proposal friction Reducing proposal friction requires expectations to be thoroughly communicated and agreed on. Consider spelling out the expectations in writing for every stakeholder at every step. Make sure you give them a chance to object to your expectations and to share their expectations. The goal is clarity that reduces friction and not imposition. Keep at it until everyone has explicitly agreed to accept the expectations. It helps to have a structured approach for communicating expectations. The way you document the expectations and how you communicate with people throughout the proposal directly impacts the amount of proposal friction that the proposal will encounter. Goals, expectations, and communications can be integrated and turned into communication templates so that you are constantly working to keep everything clear. Proposal friction can’t be eliminated by the unilateral declaration of expectations. Telling people what you expect of them is less effective than discussing it, because expectations run in both directions. A boss can actually create more friction by declaring expectations, if they diverge too much from the expectations that their stakeholders have. Only if the judicious use of authority brings clarity that the stakeholders buy into, will it reduce friction. People accept different types and amount of authority in different cultures. Things change During execution people run into problems and external matters come up that can impact the proposal effort. This can create proposal friction as it can create a conflict between an accepted expectation and reality. This is a big reason why people can be commitment shy and not want to buy into expectations. The closer you get to your deadline, the higher the risk of these unexpected issues can be. It helps to create an environment that surfaces issues quickly. Make issues easy to report and encourage and support people who have problems instead of projecting disappointment to them. Then clearly communicate how the expectations have changed to everyone impacted. Apply lubrication Proposal friction adds up and can make a proposal grind to a halt. Even if it doesn’t, it wears away at quality. Think of everything you do as adding either friction or lubricant to other people’s efforts. Apply lubrication and make the proposal run smoother by reducing or eliminating all points of friction. What you may find is that your efforts to reduce friction also increase productivity and effectiveness such that instead of proposal friction killing your win rate, your efforts to lubricate the points of friction result in producing better proposals by happier people who then achieve a much higher win rate.

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 proposal to benefits and differentiators tend to become watered down beneficial sounding claims without proof. They become ideas and attributes instead of statements that matter. They become unsubstantiated claims. However, we’re all taught in school to prove a thesis. A thesis provides better guidance for achieving writing that make proposals compelling. Why don’t a lot of proposals have a thesis? See also: Themes Because it’s hard to pick just one. The point of most proposals is really just Pick me! Pick me!” and that’s not very persuasive. If your thesis is “We have the most experience” or “We have the best qualifications” what you are really saying is “Pick me! Pick me! I’m the best!” because the customer doesn’t get anything from the fact that you have experience or qualifications. It’s hard to know what the customer really wants and to address it better than any other alternative without doing a lot of research. You have to put effort into writing a good thesis, and do it before you write anything else. So instead, companies pile on all the reasons they think they are great. These claims tend to be shallow and unsubstantiated. And when they aren’t, they are rarely differentiated or say anything that is significantly different from the pile of claims made by their competitors. The result of doing this is a proposal that is not competitive and easy to beat. It results in proposals written about your company instead of proposals that are about the customer. What should a proposal thesis be? The central claim for a proposal should be: How does what you are offering address the customer’s needs in a way that is better than every other alternative? The best thesis will be about things that matter to the customer, like what they are going to get. From the customer’s perspective, this is more important than a description of your company and how great it is. The greatness of your company becomes relevant when you write to prove that what you are offering is better than every other alternative. A simple formula for your proposal thesis Fill in the blanks: [Company name] offers [what you will do or deliver] that will [fulfill a key requirement or goal] by [differentiated approach]. This is a simple example to help you visualize the concept. There are many other ways to formulate a thesis for a proposal. Your thesis should go before you introduce yourself. It should be the very first thing the customer reads. It’s that important. You only matter to the customer as a vehicle for getting their needs and goals fulfilled. Make yourself part of the proof that they’ll get what the proposal promises instead of the point and focus of your proposal. How does a proposal thesis like this drive better proposal writing? A thesis must be proven. Claims of greatness from a vendor fail against proof. Every. Time. A good thesis will force you to prove that you are the best alternative for the customer. It forces you to make the proposal about the customer. Give every proposal section a thesis of its own In the RFP, the customer may have asked you to describe something or tell them how you’ll do something. But what you should write is a proof of what you are describing. The customer may have used the word “describe” but what they really want is relevance to their needs and goals. The customer has asked you to describe it because they want to assess if your ability to deliver is credible. What they really want is proof. A thesis for your proposal sets you up to deliver it. A thesis forces you to plan your content You can’t just spew words and end up with a proof that is better than all alternatives. You certainly can’t have section level thesis statements that add up to proving your top level thesis without some planning. Simply adding the thesis for each section to your outline before you start writing makes a huge difference in what you will get out of your proposal writers. If you take it a step deeper and itemize some of what they’ll need to say in order to prove each thesis, you’ll be able to quickly and easily produce a full content plan for your proposal. A thesis delivers focus Proposals should not be exercises in creative writing. They should be structured like a proof. Instead of teaching and elaborating this to proposal writers who just want to complete their contributions and go back to their normal jobs, try giving them a proposal thesis to prove. And then watch as they slip into better proposal writing without even thinking about it. Watch as the proposal gains focus. Watch as what gets written matters more than when proposals are written without a thesis. Then watch what that does to your win rate.

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 not a trivial problem. How do you know which ones aren’t worth it? How do you get all of the stakeholders on board with that? Most companies have a bid/no bid process, but a lot of bid/no bid processes are watered down, routine, and not something that makes the proposal phase more effective. Solve the bid/no bid process problem effectively and everything else will be easier and your win rate will go up. The content problem. Where are you going to get the content you need? What are you going to do with the content once you’ve got it? Do you even know what you need? Handing people an RFP and asking them to write something relevant is not a very good way to achieve great proposal writing. Solve how to figure how what content you need before writing starts and you'll not only accelerate writing, smooth out your proposal reviews, but your win rate will go up and you'll also reduce the struggles that come as you approach your proposal deadlines. The quality problem. Is the content you have to work with any good? Does it reflect what it will take to win? How do you avoid assessing proposal quality subjectively? What do you assess? When do you assess it? Do you even have a written definition for what proposal quality is? Just getting some folks to read it and give their opinions is not an effective quality management process. Solve how to validate proposal quality objectively and thoroughly and not only will you create better proposals based on what it will take to win, but you'll also be able to better inform writers of what they need to accomplish. The other people problem. How do you work through other people successfully? How do you manage expectations that flow in every direction? If you think your proposal management process is already effective, then why are you still struggling with other people? Solve how to work with other people and creating a proposal becomes just another collaboration, and consistently creating winning proposals become much more likely. The customer awareness problem. How do you read the customer’s mind? How do you persuade the decision maker(s)? What do they really want? What do they care about? These are critical problems and should be the focus on your proposals, and yet if you go pick up a past proposal and read who it is about, you'll likely find the proposal is about you instead of being about the customer. How can you ever write a proposal that is about the customer if you haven't solved the customer awareness problem? The RFP problem. While the customer thinks they have told you all of their requirements in the RFP, the truth is more likely to be that they've written about their requirements in ways that are subject to interpretation and it's difficult to tell which interpretation was what the customer intended. The customer thinks they've described their evaluation process, but the truth is you have very little idea how the scoring will actually be done. They've given you an outline, but cross-referencing everything in the RFP to the outline requires dozens if not hundreds of interpretations. And the customer tells you that compliance with the RFP is vital, but what does it even mean when the number of pages of requirements exceeds the page limit they've given you? Solving the problem of how to respond to the RFP can be the difference between whether you get the top score or not. The time problem. How do you maximize your chances of winning in the time available? How do you get it all done in time? How do you pace yourself? How do you keep everyone in synch? The deadline clock is ticking. If you haven't solved the other problems on this list, you'll spend the time available herding cats. If you do solve them, you'll be in a much better position to properly manage the time available and do that with other people involved. The resource problem. What resources do you need? How do you get enough of them? How can you best use the resources you have? You're never going to have enough resources. How do you win using the resources you have? Solving the resource problem will have a big impact on every item on this list. The issue tracking and resolution problem. How do you surface and resolve problems? Everyone submitting will encounter problems. Your ability to resolve proposal issues can be a competitive advantage. The competition problem. It's not enough to solve the problems. How do you do everything in this list better than all potential competitors? You can do a good job and not be competitive. You have to do all the things better than anyone else possibly can. There are no points for effort. Problems in the real world overlap. In the real world, they get tangled up like spaghetti and can be just as difficult to untangle. The good news is that the harder something is to do, the more competitive it makes you when you do it successfully. Every proposal has them. Every proposal is a new opportunity to solve them. Focus less on the steps in your process. Focus more on your progress toward solving the fundamental problems.

It looks like the themes for this year's selections are not messing up, lessons learned, dealing with resource constraints, taking your proposal process to the next level, AI, and myth busting. But the common thread woven into all of them is that they all can help you maximize your win rate. It pleases me to see it work out that way. Anti-Differentiators: Don't say these things unless you want your proposals to sound ordinary I was today years old when I learned what proposal management should really focus on Writing (and winning!) a proposal with the staff you have instead of the staff you need Perfecting your proposal process by eliminating the need for people to ask questions about it 11 lessons learned about life from a career spent working on proposals 9 ways to upgrade your proposal process The not-so-obvious truth about using AI on proposals Time management for proposals How branding can hurt your proposals Applying AI to business development, capture management, proposal management, and proposal writing It also pleases me to see that traffic to PropLIBRARY continues to grow by double-digit percentages, as it has every year since I founded it. Thank you for continuing to find value in the information we publish.

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 has the opposite effect? So let's look below the surface and see what's at the root of proposal stress: See also: Dealing with Adversity People, expectations, and trust. 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. Repeated expectation conflict is what produces trust issues. When people on a proposal don’t trust their coworkers or The Powers That Be, it’s because they have had too many expectation conflicts with them. Friction related to mismatched expectations causes some stress. But a lack of trust causes a lot more stress. It also eats away at the organization’s culture. The way to prevent this isn’t to focus on everybody being “trustworthy,” but rather to focus on expectation management. Everyone has expectations and they flow in all directions. Bringing them to the surface is critical. They can’t be declared or imposed, but they absolutely must be articulated. Uncertainty. Subjective reviews have arbitrary outcomes. Not knowing what it will take to pass proposal reviews causes stress for the people responsible for submitting content that passes the review. Not knowing what to write about causes stress for proposal writers. Combining the two causes paralysis. Add in a touch of not knowing when the customer will answer questions, how much the RFP might change, and whether the deadline will be extended. Finally not knowing what to expect from other people you are dependent on or how to define “done” and it’s no wonder that proposals seem stressful! Underlying it all is simple uncertainty. For a better proposal experience, focus less on whether you have done everything “you are supposed to do” and focus more on reducing uncertainty for everyone (including yourself) at all levels. Time. The deadline is the deadline. The clock is ticking. The closer you are to the deadline, the higher the risk of any issues that occur. This also applies to expectation mismatches. The closer the deadline, the more risk, and the more stress caused by any previously unknown expectation mismatches. The entire proposal process can be thought of as an exercise in time and expectation management. Decision fatigue. A typical proposal involves hundreds of trade-off decisions regarding what to propose and how to present it. Sometimes I wonder if the irrational desire to automate proposals stems more from decision fatigue than it does the desire to make proposal work go faster. Streamlining proposal decisions by making them criteria based and mapping contingencies can do far more to improve your proposals than turning them into an assembly line. Fear and blame. A culture of fear is by far the largest contributor to proposal stress. And the number one symptom that an organization has a culture of fear is that the people working on proposals obsess over CYA. It also shows up in people avoiding decisions, avoiding working on proposals, seeking permission to do routine things, and seeing authority as the most important thing required to get proposals done. Focusing on expectations is a good approach because it works for both consensus-driven and authoritative environments. It also reduces arbitrary and random interactions. Interpretation. The RFP rules all, but they can be woefully unclear and require interpretation that comes with inherent risk. The same is true, hopefully to a lesser degree, in your proposal process documentation, assignments, and even the things people say. The more emotionalism that seeps into people’s interpretations, the more stress will result. In extreme cases, interpretation can lead to catastrophizing. Encouraging people to look past interpretation to what is objectively real can help. Personality. I wasn’t going to mention this as a source of stress, but even when expectations are clear, the proposal process reduces uncertainty, and people aren’t working in fear of being blamed, some people are easier to be around than others. Protocols and procedures for how people interact can help. The way we talk to each other can either act as a lubricant or as an impediment to working together. And while you can’t change another person’s personality, you can set an example. Most attempts to reduce the stress in the proposal environment involve not showing the stress. Pushing it down doesn’t resolve the stress and may actually make it worse. Fortunately, there are some things you can do. They are not quick or easy, and won’t produce immediate results. But providing a light at the end of the tunnel, or the possibility of a better future, can have the biggest impact on reducing stress.

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 See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques Instead of trying to flow chart intelligence gathering and the flow of information, try building your intelligence gathering process around the questions that relate to the information you need. What does the customer need to see in order to reach a decision in your favor? Who at the customer will be involved in making the decision? What matters to the evaluator? Etc. Your questions need to be investigated and the intelligence discovered assessed so it can be transformed into what people will need in order to do proposal writing. Then it will need to be delivered and presented to the right people at the right time. Which people? When? How and in what form? Instead of trying to turn the proposal process into a sequence of steps, turn it into a system of discovery, assessment, and implementation. A good way to go about this is to apply the "who, what, where, how, when, and why" technique we use for writing to the process itself. Inquiry is more powerful than you realize. It is how you separate your assumptions and beliefs about a pursuit from the reality. Done properly, it will lead to better lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions, as well as providing better pursuit intelligence to your writers to work with. Perspective Large proposals are created by teams. This means working through other people. If you create a proposal process based on production steps alone, you will not only encounter resistance to the process, but even if followed the process will not maximize your win probably because it will not adequately consider the perspectives of the people you must work through. People bring their expectations to the proposal. And during the proposal those expectations can clash with each other. Most of the friction you encounter working with other people on a proposal is the direct result of expectation mismatch. Instead of trying to build your proposal process around production steps, try building around the fulfillment of everyone’s expectations. This requires perspective. What does a proposal writer need to write a winning proposal? What does a proposal writer who is overloaded with billable work need? What will your reviewers want to see in the draft? What level of effort are contributors expecting to make? Not only does this surface the need for additional steps to make your process more effective at working through other people, but it also will surface the need for additional steps to discover stakeholder expectations and reduce friction between them. Integration Inquiry and perspective are not steps. They are something that should be integrated into every step. It is better that this be done explicitly than subconsciously. Keeping them in mind is not enough to ensure that they are being constantly used to improve process execution. And yet, they’ll rarely be called out by name. They become how we discover, assess, and implement everything we do. In this, they have much broader applicability than just to the proposal process. One of the more challenging problems that come up during proposals is that we never have all the information we would like. Even when we practice inquiry and ask all the right questions, we’ll get answers that are vague, missing, or subject to interpretation. Interpretation problems are also a major contributor to problems working through other people. Inquiry and perspective are excellent tools for diagnosing an interpretation issue. Think about how many interpretation problems we encounter in a single day. Advanced proposal management Anyone can think through the steps and accomplish submitting a proposal. Unfortunately, submitting a proposal is not the goal. Winning proposals is the goal. And not just winning a proposal, but winning all of the proposals. This requires going beyond the steps. It requires inquiry to both discover and get the most out of the information that will be transformed into a proposal. It requires doing this through other people, whose expectations and interpretations will differ from yours. It will require helping them see past the assumptions they bring to the proposal. It will require helping yourself to see past the assumptions you bring to the proposal. Advanced proposal management is less about creating an assembly line of steps and more about creating effective people with a process that supports them instead of trying to turn them into a machine.

People working on a proposal often ask themselves what they should do when instead they should be asking other questions. Asking the right questions will tell you what you need to do, what you should say, and how you should present It. It’s important to realize that working around the questions you can’t answer informs your bid strategies just as much as the questions you can answer. One of the secrets to asking good questions is to have a sense of perspective. Questions can help you see things from other points of view. Winning proposals requires being able to see things from the customer’s perspective. But there are always other stakeholders who matter as well. Their perspective can impact the customer’s decisions. The following list of questions is a combination of inquiry to get the information needed to write a great proposal, and perspective to account for the impact other people’s perceptions, motivations, and needs might have on whether you win or lose. See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques What matters to the customer? Do they realize everything that should matter regarding what you are proposing? What matters to the customer’s stakeholders? Do the stakeholders’ goals and the customer’s goals align? How much accommodation does the customer give to the needs of its stakeholders? How does what you’re proposing align with the customer’s goals? How does the customer make decisions? Who will be involved in making the customer’s decision? What challenges does the customer face? What challenges will you face if you win? What assumptions has the customer made? What does the customer not know? What other alternatives does the customer have? What would I do if I was the customer? What would the customer do differently if they could? What makes the customer feel comfortable? What level of detail do they need? What information does the customer need to make their decision? What do their stakeholders want from their decision? How would you make the decision if you were them? What is driving the customer’s schedule? Is the schedule realistic? How does that impact what you propose? Should you be concerned about schedule risk and how can you mitigate it? What do you want to know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment? What do you already know? What can you find out? How do you work around the things you don’t know? How does that impact what you recommend to the customer? How will the customer perceive what you are proposing? Are there any conflicts between what the customer does and what they say? Can you believe what the customer has said, even (especially?) if it was with good intentions? Are there any conflicts between what you do and what you say? Can the customer believe what you say, even (especially?) if it is with good intentions? Can the customer believe what your competitors say, even (especially?) if it is with good intentions? How should the conflicts impact what you are proposing? What are the various opinions about each feature that you are proposing? What is the customer’s opinion about the features you are proposing? What are the customer’s limits? What are your limits? What is the price to win? How does the customer perceive value? What does the customer consider to be strengths and weaknesses? How does what you are planning to propose align with their perception of strengths and weaknesses? How many different ways are there to interpret the RFP requirements? Which one is the customer’s interpretation? What is the customer’s tolerance for risk? How many different voices and agendas does the customer have? What will it take for the customer to trust you? What are you saying or proposing that could work against the customer trusting you? How could you change what you are proposing to make it more trustworthy? Do you trust the customer? Which does the customer rely on more, people, processes, or tools? What do you rely on more, people, processes, or tools? What would Chat GPT say? What will your competitors say? Inquiry gathers information. Perspective ensures you gather all of the relevant information. To fully engage both you must integrate them into your proposal efforts. Proposal writing isn’t a simple process of picking words. Or even about picking the right words. Proposal writing is a process of understanding other perspectives so well that you can fulfill someone else’s needs through your words well enough for them to make a decision in favor of what you are recommending.

People who have worked in proposals long enough start seeing the lessons learned from proposals in everyday life. I suppose people in all careers experience this. Just as one of many possible examples, writing from the customer’s perspective not only requires a nuts and bolts process to discover intel, assess it, and deliver it to the proposal ready to articulate into messaging, it also fundamentally requires empathy. You have to be able to see things and articulate them the way the customer needs to see them. See also: Improving win rates Once you develop this skill, you start seeing how perspective is behind all communication, not only at your company, but at home and in all of your relationships. You’ll even see that perspective is vital to making decisions, gaining a greater understanding of both tangible and intangible things, and for separating the truth for non-truths. You start off in proposals and you end up someplace deep. But again, the same is true in other careers. You start off as a software developer and you can end up seeing how we program our own thought forms. Etc. In addition to applying proposals to everyday life, we can also apply everyday life to proposals. By doing so we can gain insights that can boost our win rate in ways we wouldn’t normally think of. Normally when we primarily think of proposals we think of proposal management, proposal writing, and the proposal process. One of the things people struggle with in life is identity issues. Labelling yourself creates a box that you put yourself into. Then they bring their identity issues to the proposal in ways that can reduce your win rate. Here's an example: “I’m a software developer,” “I’m in sales,” “I’m a recruiter,” or “I’m an engineer,” etc., “and I don’t know anything about proposals.” While that may be true, it’s also a way of not saying “and I’d prefer to stay in my box.” And what about “I’m not a writer,” or “I only do…”? The chosen identity is fine until it becomes a barrier. It can even devolve into “us” vs. “them” thinking. And it definitely works in both directions. As a limit, it turns cooperative people into people with limits. And it’s bigger than just self-labelling. Entire departments go from simply having a name and a mission, to having a box that they stay in. It’s an understandable response since time and resources are limited. But over time it can be limiting. And if you are trying to create a growth-oriented culture, it can create a hard barrier in people’s ability to conceive of how to operate in a different way. Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. And maximizing your win rate means leveraging all of the customer awareness, capacity for innovation, and expertise that exist throughout the organization. Identity issues that create barriers to this end up harming your win rate. You’ve probably run into these issues many times although you might not have thought about the root cause in the same way. The real challenge is what to do about them. Here are some things you can do to prevent identity issues from getting in the way of your win rate: Go beyond the language of the proposal process. This starts by learning the language of Return on Investment (ROI) and growth. It is tremendously helpful to be able to describe how individuals and organizations are impacted by growth, how proposal work should be measured by ROI instead of volume, and how proposal contributors also contribute to growth for themselves and others. Use language that breaks down identity stovepipes. Since it will be impossible to change how every individual processes the concept of identity, it will also help to become able to communicate past the labels that individuals and departments assign to themselves. If you can speak the language of ROI and growth, it will become easier to speak in terms of goals and accomplishment that go beyond people simply getting words on paper on schedule. It will also help to learn the language of your subject matter experts, whether it is engineering, software development, science, or another specialty. Something as simple as referring to “RFP requirements” as “specifications” or understanding what the customer wants as part of “requirements analysis” can help connect the dots between their chosen identity and what is needed to produce the proposal. Expand your concept of proposal training. It should be about more than just steps. It should also be about expectations and how individuals interact with each other during the process. The lines can be fine between communication, collaboration techniques, the roles people play, what people should expect during the process, how they personally will be impacted or contribute, and how they see themselves. Make sure that your training recognizes that people who rarely participate in proposals will be working outside their comfort zone. Drop the steps and become goal driven. Change your concept of the proposal process from organizing around steps to organizing around goals. People who share goals share more understanding than people who are just following someone else’s steps. When people accept goals, those goals more easily become part of their identity. But someone else’s steps will always remain something they have to do. Surprisingly, you may find some resistance to this. It’s easier to follow steps than it is to integrate things with your identity. Focus on both the individual and organizational levels. Go beyond defining organizational boundaries to defining collaborative goals and places where missions overlap and where teams can help each other. Keep at this and you’ll end up changing the corporate culture. But that won’t happen overnight. Help people get past the fear. When individuals use identity to define a comfort zone they can stay inside of, or organizations use identity to prevent their resources from getting overextended by getting too involved in helping others, doing things that are inherently collaborative across organizational boundaries like proposals can make them feel insecure. Resistance follows insecurity. If you want people to become goal driven, you have to make them feel secure. And in proposal work, this means making the chaotic yet deadline driven environment feel like a nice, neat, well controlled, and solvable problem even when it’s anything but and their identity wants to stay away from it. Clarity of expectations to achieve a common purpose that everyone will benefit from needs to become something that is clearly feasible. No one wants to be responsible for something they are not sure is even feasible. Well, no one that is except for proposal specialists of questionable sanity. Proposal mechanics, like the flow of information and the proposal process, are vital for maximizing your win rate. But they are not the only thing that can give it a boost. The process is performed by people and people show up in all different kinds of ways. Some of those ways make the process more effective, and some of them get in the way. You can improve your process if you can anticipate how people will show up and modify your process to help them get into better alignment with it. Another way to say it is that you can help people improve their win rate on proposals if you can help them identify with the proposal process.

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 rules of thumb and personal opinion instead of what it will take to win this particular proposal. Proposal Review Need #2 See also: Proposal Quality Validation I need people who understand how to win in writing and how to validate its presence to participate in proposal reviews. I don’t need subjective opinions about how the proposal sounds. Proposals are not read. They are evaluated. I need reviewers who will focus on whether the proposal has the information the customer will need to give the proposal the top score. I need reviewers who know what the customer will need to see in order to perform their evaluation of the proposal. Proposal Review Need #3 I need reviewers who understand that proposal quality should be defined in writing and assessed against written proposal quality criteria. If they can help define those criteria, that will be very much appreciated! If they don’t I’ll still need them to stick to the criteria. I need reviewers who can determine whether the customer will see what they are looking for and be able to make a decision in your favor over all the other alternatives that will be presented for them. The most senior people in your company may or may not be capable of these things. Reviewers who show up without having already read the RFP are definitely not capable of it. All they can do is sight read and render opinions. The goal of the proposal process is not to please internal staff, even if they run the company. The goal of the proposal process is to lead the customer to make decisions in your favor. No one at your company, not even the person in charge, is the final authority on whether your proposal is any good. The only person who gets to make that determination is the customer. I need reviewers who understand how the customer makes their decisions and can read the proposal from the customer’s perspective. Proposal Review Need #4 I need this so badly, I want training for the proposal reviewers. They need more than just experience. And I don’t mean some proposal class they took back in the day. I want them trained within the last year on review team procedures and achieving proposal quality that’s based on what it will take to win. I want them to be able to review at the professional level and not just assume their decades of experience means they already know. Proposal Review Need #5 I need reviewers whose experience and expertise enables them to perform the validation required: If we’re validating that we have the right solution to propose, I need reviewers with the subject matter expertise and customer awareness to validate that. If we’re validating RFP compliance, I need people who understand what “compliance” is and may need subject matter experts who can validate that what we are proposing meets the specifications required. If we’re validating that the proposal reflects what it will take to win, then I need pursuit strategists with customer awareness that includes understanding the customer’s evaluation process. If we’re validating that our proposal is good enough to beat the competitors, I need people who understand the competitive environment. In most reviews this will mean having reviewers who can cover most or all of these. Proposal Review Need #6 If you want all of this, don’t dump it all on the proposal manager to implement. Assign a review team lead. Have the review team lead recruit the members, implement the procedures, provide the training, and oversee that the reviews provide the validation needed. If you have your proposal manager do all the review setup, they won’t be managing the proposal, they’ll be managing the reviews. How important is it that these needs get fulfilled? Is reviewing your proposals deliberately and professionally worth the commitment and time? Is this too much to ask? If it is, then I kindly ask how much the increase in win rate that results is worth? I suspect that it is worth a couple of orders of magnitude more than the effort costs. I might also humbly inquire whether we are seeking a review that is good enough or whether we’re willing to invest in winning. If we’re not going to try that hard, I might also be wondering why we are bidding.

The skills you need on your proposal team depend on the expectations of your company and the nature of what you are offering. What you need to write a proposal for complex services and unique solutions is different from what you need for engineering, which also is different from what you need for construction, product proposals, operations and maintenance, logistics, etc. Here’s what I like to have in the people on my proposal teams, which are mostly mid to high value US Government proposals, with some state and local proposals. See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques I need people who can read an RFP. The proposals I do are measured by what’s in the RFP. People who need someone else to parse the RFP for them are at a disadvantage. Sometimes it’s okay if they just read the statement of work and respond to it point by point. But sometimes responding to an RFP can be a lot more complicated than that. And that’s when I need something more than just the ability to read the RFP. I want people who understand how a cross-reference matrix works. I don’t need them to build the cross-reference matrix or even know how to build it. But I do need them to understand how to integrate different sets of requirements into a single written response. For example, can they hold the instructions, the evaluation criteria, and the performance requirements, along with any customer and competitive intelligence, in their heads all at the same time and write a single, cohesive response? A team of people who can do that can achieve far more than a proposal team with only a chosen few who get it. When people understand the cross-referencing involved in proposal writing, they’ll be able to figure what to do with the input you give them regarding what it will take to win in writing. This is key. It’s not just that proposal cross-referencing is an important skill. It is a skill that opens up all the other skills related to winning in writing, like writing from the customer's perspective instead of your own. All the other skills and considerations just get factored in as something else to cross-reference. I routinely guide people who have never done this through their contributions to the proposal, but the people who do the best proposal writing are the ones who show up already understanding this. People who rely solely on the proposal manager to cross-reference everything for them lack a critical understanding of what’s involved in successful proposal writing. It also streamlines things if I can trust writers to take a section down to a more granular level on their own. Some RFPs are so straightforward that they really don’t need a cross-reference matrix. But they still need people who understand them to make sure what gets written addresses everything it should. Give me someone who understands how to cross-reference everything that goes into winning a proposal, and then when I create the cross-reference matrix and we work on the proposal content plan, they’ll understand how it all fits together. Their expectations for what’s involved in proposal writing will better match mine (and the proposal reviewers and most importantly the customer’s proposal evaluators). People who show up expecting to be spoon-fed what to write so they can write it and get back to what they were previously doing are literally doing the least they possibly can to help the proposal win. When people who show up not knowing what to expect, I am willing to invest in explaining everything today so they can make better contributions on future proposals. Usually, the choices are limited and we work with the resources made available to us and it feels like you are working for the underdog. When I have a team that understands how to cross-reference everything that will go into winning the proposal, it makes me excited about the prospects for winning. One thing I don’t care about is proposal certifications. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I prefer demonstratable talent over documented certification. HR loves them because they are easy to check in the hiring process. And people want to please HR. However, the knowledge and skills required to produce proposals are really pretty basic. What is advanced is the depth of understanding and insight into how to apply that knowledge and skills required to win proposals, and certification doesn’t deliver that if the talent wasn’t already there. A proposal certification may improve awareness, but it does not deliver the ability to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. I want a team of people with the talent for winning in writing. In my experience this talent has more to do with the individual’s sense of perspective and does not correlate at all with proposal certifications. If those on the team lack knowledge about proposal writing I can happily give them that. But if they lack perspective, it can be like pulling teeth. It doesn’t help that everyone thinks they have perspective — until you ask them to prove it by writing from the customer’s perspective. Some won’t understand what you are asking for and never will. And some will take naturally to it, even though they lack knowledge and experience, and are not certified. I could write a list with hundreds of skills and techniques that are good to have during proposals. But you will never get them all and teams always have gaps. All I need to be happy is a team of people who understand proposal cross-referencing and have a wide sense of perspective. Give me that and we can fill in any other gaps on our way to winning proposal after proposal.

This is an example of four different approaches you can take to learning about proposal writing from the customer’s perspective. What you see also applies to our other training topics like improving proposal quality and proposal communications and expectations. You can see how our training scales from immediate solutions to challenges to complete process guidance to continuous improvement programs. Click here for more details on how the training works. See also: Enterprise training topics Learn about proposal writing from the customer’s perspective. One session. Quick learning. Leaves you with a new awareness that will impact your proposal writing. Price of one learning session: $1200. You can have as many people listening in on the session as you need. Use this approach to address a key challenge quickly and inexpensively. Develop your team's skills at writing from the customer’s perspective. One learning session plus one practice session. Leaves you knowing how to apply what you’ve learned. Price of one learning session ($1200) and one practice session ($1800): $3000. You can have as many people participating as you need. Use this approach where you want skills development in addition to awareness. Train your organization to collect the right input and use it to write from the customer’s perspective. One session to learn about creating and using proposal input forms, one session on writing from the customer’s perspective, and one practice session. What you’ll learn is that writing from the customer’s perspective requires an understanding of the customer’s perspective. Price of two learning and one practice sessions: $4200. You can’t just make it up, you have to go get the input you need. Learning how to collect what you need from the people who have customer contacts is a necessary part of writing from the customer’s perspective. Combine the three sessions and your people will see how that plays out and what to do about it. Train your organization in the process of collecting the right input, using it to write from the customer’s perspective, and validating that people didn’t slip back into old habits. One session to learn about creating and using proposal input forms, one practice session to tailor proposal input forms to your particular needs, one session to learn about using that input to write from the customer’s perspective, and one session to practice writing from the customer’s perspective. Price of four combined sessions: $6000. Use this approach when you want to institutionalize writing from the customer’s perspective in a way that incorporates it into your proposal process. Remember, writing from the customer's perspective is only one of dozens of possible topics. Not only can each be taught in isolation or scaled up like the example above, but topics can also be combined to broaden the coverage of the training. Continuous win rate improvement You can also change how the training rolls out over time, because of how flexible the deployment model is. For example, you could: Do one or two proposal writing topics a week for a month in preparation for an RFP release. Do a single proposal writing topic with the practice session once per month for a year and have continuous skills improvement. Do a single proposal process topic each month for a year and have meaningful continuous process improvement. Repeat it the following year and revisit topics to improve them even more. You could use a similar approach to roll out your proposal process, starting from scratch or improving what you have as a starting point. Combine a few key proposal quality topics into an intensive series over a week to prepare review teams to do a better, less subjective job of proposal review for a critical must win. Start by asking yourself what challenges you need to address over what period of time. Then scale the training to fit what you are trying to accomplish. You can also scale the depth according to your budget, simply by how many sessions you select.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Proposal quality training topics See also: Enterprise training topics It takes more than just asking people to review a proposal to achieve quality. It takes more than just a single review to achieve proposal quality. These course topics take you on a deep dive into what it really takes to achieve proposal quality and the options you have to build quality into your proposals. 4.1) Defining quality and quality criteria. With all the attention given to measuring performance, it’s hard to believe that most proposal reviews are completely subjective, without even having a written definition for what proposal quality is. If you can’t do that, you can’t possibly be measuring proposal quality. This topic starts by defining proposal quality and then showing you how to use written quality criteria to achieve it. Add in an exercise review session and we’ll help you tailor our standard proposal quality criteria to solve your challenges and help you win your proposals. 4.2) 10 different ways to conduct proposal reviews. There are more ways to review proposals than most people realize. There are more ways to review a proposal than sitting around a table and asking people their opinions, or asking them to comment on your files. Should you use forms? Should you hold your reviews at milestones? Should they be highly structured or loosely structured? Should everyone be colocated or are remote reviews okay? What instructions should you give your review teams? This session will address all these topics and more. Add in an exercise review session and you can tailor the forms we use during reviews to meet your needs. 4.3) Proposal quality validation instead of draft reviews. Proposal quality validation requires defining the things you want your reviewers to assess. Proposal quality validation requires organizing the reviews around what you need to validate instead of days on a calendar. Proposal quality validation is a methodology for assessing proposal quality and not just simply collecting opinions. It is the methodology we created for the MustWin Process. Select this topic and we’ll teach it to you. Add in an exercise review session and we’ll help you tailor the materials you’ll need to implement it so you can get started immediately. 4.4) Proposal review leadership and logistics. If you want quality reviews, they should be led by someone who, separate from the proposal manager, manages the logistics and trains the reviewers. Quality management is separate from project management for good reasons. In order to achieve something similar with your proposals, you’ll need training for your review team. This session can be used to train your review team or as a train-the-trainer session to train your review team leadership. Add an exercise review session and together we’ll tailor the review planning documents that you’ll be able to use to guide your efforts.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage of a topic, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could be a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Adding in the exercise session for proposal writing is even more important to encourage skills development and not just awareness. Training Topics See also: Enterprise training topics 2.1) Good vs. great proposal writing. Good proposal writing loses to great proposal writing every time. In this session you'll learn how to increase the competitiveness of your proposal writing. Add in an exercise review session and your writers will practice how to get from good to great with their proposal writing. 2.2) Writing using the words in the RFP. To maximize your win probability, you need to use the language of the RFP, since that is what the evaluators will be looking for. It can be challenging for people to write using someone else’s words. This session will explain how to use the words from the RFP to optimize your proposal’s chances of winning. Add an exercise review session and your writers will get valuable practice and feedback. 2.3) Fixing bad proposal writing habits. When we review proposals, we see the same problems over and over. A lot of people have picked up bad habits like unsubstantiated claims, patronizing the customer, telling the customer about themselves, talking about your commitment instead of what you will do, claiming instead of proving, stating universal truths that don’t differentiate your offering, and more. In this session we’ll discuss bad proposal writing habits and how they weaken your proposals. Add an exercise review session and your writers will gain experience recognizing and correcting their bad habits. 2.4) Writing from the customer’s perspective. How do you write your proposals based on what the customer is looking for, instead of what you want to say? This starts with learning how to see your proposal through your customer’s eyes. Proposals shouldn’t be about you. They should be about how the customer will be better off if they accept your proposal. Adding an exercise review is even more important for this topic, because it requires writing from someone else's perspective and this does not come naturally. 2.5) Refreshing your proposal writing techniques. This session is for both proposal writer newcomers and experienced proposal writers who want to improve their skills. It covers techniques like how to cross reference everything and use that to drive sentence construction, how to exceed RFP compliance, the right way to demonstrate understanding, proof instead of claims, and how proposal writing changes based on what it will take to win. Add in an exercise session to practice what you learn so that you'll be ready to apply it all on your next proposal. 2.6) Everything I needed to know about proposal writing, I learned from writing the introduction paragraph. A proposal introduction paragraph should provide a thesis that makes the rest of the section easier to write. If you can write a great introduction paragraph, you can write a great proposal. But writing a great introduction paragraph is harder than you might think it is. It requires all of the proposal writing skills and techniques to come together into a cohesive whole. This session is about combining everything that you know about proposal writing into the paragraph that becomes the section that becomes the proposal. Add in an exercise review session because you'll definitely need the practice and the feedback will directly impact your future proposal writing.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Defining and communicating proposal expectations Most proposal issues have at their root the fact that we have to work with other people, with different needs, agendas, and expectations. We come together for a proposal and bring our expectations. When those expectations go unfulfilled or conflict, problems result. And those problems ultimately hurt your win rate. This course provides a structured approach to define and communicate proposal expectations so that we can work more smoothly together and maximize our win rate. See also: Enterprise training topics The presentation sessions below will look at expectations during each phase of proposal activity. Because expectations flow in all directions, it involves considering the expectations of all proposal stakeholders. In addition to helping you to prevent disasters due to expectation mismatches, this course will enable you to reduce friction, improve teamwork, ensure participants better understand how to make their contributions, and improve your win rate. This course is for companies with RFP-based proposals large enough to require a team of people to contribute. It is equally relevant to large government contractors as it is to small businesses trying to make the leap from one person who's done all of their proposals to an environment with multiple contributors. For each of the presentation topics below, you can also add a corresponding exercise review session where you will tailor our expectations matrix to match your environment and create a tool that people can reference to understand expectations throughout the process and better work together on winning. List of proposal expectation training topics to choose from: 3.1) Expectations during proposal startup 3.2) Expectations during proposal content planning 3.3) Expectations during proposal writing 3.4) Expectations during proposal reviews 3.5) Expectations during final production and submission

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Training Topics See also: Enterprise training topics 1.1) Starting your proposals with the input you need. In this session we’ll discuss what information you need to write a winning proposal and explain how to use proposal input forms to assess whether you’ve got it. You’ll never have all the information you’d like to have, but by quickly figuring out what you do have to work to with, you can build your proposal strategies around it. Add an exercise review session and we’ll end the first session with a sample set of proposal input forms that your staff can customize and we’ll review them together in the second session to make sure you are ready to implement them. 1.2) Implementing a goal driven proposal process. The proposal process should not be about the steps. It should be about accomplishing goals. When the goals are clear, the procedures can be quite flexible. In this session we’ll throw away the flow chart and replace the proposal process with a series of goals. When you combine the goals with your procedures for doing things, you’ll change the proposal process from an imposition into something that helps people achieve their goals. Add in an exercise review session and you can map the goals to how you are currently doing things and get feedback to help reposition how you approach your proposals. 1.3) Modular communication templates. If you have a mature proposal process, you can use our modular approach to communication templates to improve performance by delivering the right information before, during, and after each activity. If you don’t have a mature proposal process, you can use our modular approach to communication templates to fill the gap by coordinating all of the activity and work as effectively as if you had a mature process. Add in an exercise review session and you can tailor the templates we’ll provide and then get our feedback prior to implementation. 1.4) Alternative proposal reuse strategies. Recycling narratives is far more expensive than people realize and has the potential to do far more harm than good. But there are other reuse strategies that can provide inspiration and acceleration for your proposals. In this session, we’ll cover three: Proposal Recipes, Content Plan Libraries, and Inspiration Libraries. Add in an exercise review session and you can experiment with all three, get feedback, and better decide which approach is best for your company.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course covering the topics. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. In person or remote See also: Enterprise training topics Before the pandemic, in person training was already in decline because it is more expensive. All of the course topics below can be taken remotely. If you want training in person, we will be happy to give you a quote for that. Each session is 1-1.5 hours followed by up to a half-hour of Q&A, for a total of two hours. Ready to implement We have also set things up so that the training delivers tangible benefits. For each topic, you can choose whether to include a corresponding exercise session. When you do, that topic will be taught in two parts. One is the presentation, which will end with an exercise assignment, and the next session will be a review of the completed exercises so that you get feedback. The exercises for our process related topics involve creating or tailoring the process artifacts needed to implement what you have learned. The exercises for our winning in writing related topics involve written exercises to practice what you have learned and develop your skills. Some of the other topics involve tailoring checklists, forms, or other items that will help with implementation and ensure understanding of how to apply what you’ve learned. However, you decide which topics you want exercises to go with. If you just want discussion and Q&A, you can skip the exercises. It all depends on what challenges you are facing and what your goals are. Our approach is extremely flexible so that it adapts to you instead of the other way around. Flexible scheduling Scheduling is flexible as well. Modules can be combined back to back for a few long days, or spread out on the calendar. You can have a couple of sessions per week, or one per week until they are done. You could even do one a month all year long for continuous improvement. We find a session or two per week to be a pace that works for most companies with billable staff. Dates and times will be at our mutual convenience. If you prefer mornings, lunch-time, or even evenings we can probably find a way to accommodate your preferences. Normally we can get you on the schedule with 2-4 weeks' notice. Easy registration Use the online contact buttons below or set up a date/time for a call and we'll walk you through it. Then we can send you an invoice so you can pay by card, you can send us a purchase order, or we can work something else out. It will help if you already select the topics from the list below and whether you want the corresponding exercise sessions. But if you're not sure which best meet your needs we can discuss it. We've made it easy to calculate the total cost. We don't count heads. You can have as many people participating as you'd like. To manage course time, if you have more than a handful of people participating in an exercise session, we may have to aggregate responses when providing feedback instead of addressing every individual response. Topic presentation sessions are $1200 and exercise review sessions are $1800. We'll confirm the total with you to make sure there are no surprises. PropLIBRARY Subscribers get a $100 discount for each session they take. With just three topics including exercise sessions, you can save more than a subscription costs!

AI won’t enable you to win a proposal simply by asking the AI to create it for you. But it can give you ideas that could give you a competitive edge. First you have to know what to ask for. And the way you figure that out using AI is remarkably similar to following the same process you already use, only including AI as a participant. AI will not replace the process, it will just become a contributor instead of a replacement. AI makes it even more important to have an effective process in place, instead of allowing you to skip all that process stuff. Those who have a strong process that includes AI contributions will have an overwhelming advantage over those who don’t, even if they use AI. Here are five examples of how you can include AI as a contributor during proposal content planning: Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say. You are aware of things that require reading between the lines of the RFP and of other things that simply aren’t published anywhere. An AI is not aware of these things. In addition human SMEs usually struggle at combining all the different topics that need to be incorporated into proposal writing. Instead of using AI to write the proposal, try using it to help you write the content plan. Ask it to pretend it is helping someone else write a proposal and then ask it what instructions it would provide to someone writing a proposal based on the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, and SOW. Pull out specific fragments from the RFP and consider them one at a time for the best results. Then take any intelligence you have about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, as well as your win strategies and insights, and ask it to update its recommendations based on them. Don’t expect to use the list of recommendations directly. Cherry-pick it’s suggestions, just like you would from a human contributor, to create the most effective content plan possible. Provide instructions to guide others to figure out what to offer or say. If the RFP is for a solution, requires the bidder to figure out what to offer, or does not specify exactly what to propose, then you will need to guide the proposal writers to not only figure out what to offer, but how to present it based on the RFP and the evaluation process. AI can’t figure this out for you. And even if it could, you wouldn’t want it to, since winning the proposal requires a differentiated offering at the price to win based on as much unpublished information as possible. But what AI can do is help you think of questions to ask your SMEs that will guide them to do these things. AI can also think of things the offering and your approaches should include and things about them that matter. AI can take your input regarding the competitive environment or what your competitors will likely offer and make recommendations for things that are better. Using AI this way can greatly accelerate your offering design efforts. Remember to coach the AI to articulate things as instructions so that it provides a set of specifications for the next steps after the content plan. These steps may be human led, or may also involve AI some more. An AI will do better proposal writing taking a content plan as input than it will just taking the RFP as input. Provide the details to the writers. If you know the details (who, what, where, how, when, and why) for each instruction, you should include them in the content plan. If you don’t know the details, maybe you can ask an AI to provide at least some of them. The more details you provide, the more it will accelerate proposal writing. Think of this as using the AI for inspiration. If you have basic instructions for what to write and how to present it, then you can use AI for ideas regarding how to improve them. Once you have the details, you can also use AI to rewrite the instructions you have including them. Provide instructions that identify the details others should find and include. Sometimes the details will require knowledge of things that aren’t published and are things an AI can’t provide. What an AI can do is help you identify the questions that need to be answered so that a solution can be developed or so that the proposal writing can reflect your goals. Proposal writers can work more quickly when provided with a list of questions to answer instead of open-ended problems that have to be conceptualized first, then resolved, and then written about. Interview the AI like it’s an SME. Think of AI as a partner. It’s sitting next to you and each time you have a question or an issue to resolve you can ask it. If you need information, you can ask it. If you want to shift a list from being suggestions into being questions, it can do that. If you need to know what the steps in an approach you know nothing about should be, it can provide some steps. Getting ideas that will enable you to win is gold. Compared to that getting writing done is trivial. Using AI to provide winning ideas will make you more competitive than simply using AI to put words on paper. Ask yourself what you can do without and still win. Can you do without cross-referencing the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, SOW, win strategies, customer insight, competitive intelligence, solutioning, price to win assessment, and knowledge about what matters? Delete everything you can from that list, and then ask yourself whether you’ve given the AI all of what’s left as input. Whoever gives their AI the best input has a huge competitive advantage. The proposal content plan is that input. Whether you use humans, AI, or a combination to put your final words on paper is a minor consideration that should come after you use AI to help you figure out how to win. Try discussing that with your AI. Once you have that and turn it into a set of specifications, which is effectively what a proposal content plan is, then you’ll have the input you need regardless of who does the writing. Just don’t forget to review the content plan before you ask humans or AI to write something based on it. Reviewing the specifications before you build something based on them is key to preventing things from failing after they are built. You can also use AI to help with this review. But that’s a topic for another article.

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 MustWin Process approach to Proposal Content Planning, some other approach, or if you just prepare annotated outlines, here’s how to tell if what you are doing before you start writing is everything it should be: See also: Content Planning Box Does it account for everything you want people to write about? A proposal content plan should itemize everything you want to talk about in your proposal. It should turn proposal writing into a process of elimination. Does it inform people how to present what they are writing about? A proposal content plan should provide guidance regarding how to present your offering in a way that reflects what it will take to win. It should explain how to position your offering against the RFP and the competitive environment. It should explain what points to make and what strategies to take in presenting your offering. Does it streamline proposal writing? Proposal content planning saves time. A few hours or even a few days of time spent on proposal content planning should save more than that in reduced revisions. If it’s making proposal writing take longer, you’re doing it wrong. Start by asking why the writing is taking longer when the plan should spell things out and make proposal writing a process of elimination. Does it help the proposal writers get closer to getting it right on the very first draft? Does it act like a proposal prototype? When you look at the proposal content plan, can you envision the proposal before it is even written and determine whether it’s going to be the proposal you want before you invest time in proposal writing? Does it help people with time management? Sometimes you have very little time to plan. Sometimes you have more. Your approach to proposal content planning should scale to the time available. It should make time management easier and not harder. The things that most affect your win probability should come first. This will put you in a position of being able to find the right balance for time management. Putting more time into your content plan will improve your win probability. But even doing the minimum amount of content planning should improve your win probability some. Does it support training and collaboration? If you have staff with less experience, does your content plan include everything your proposal writers need to know in order to complete their assignments? Does it point out how to find out more information they might need? Does it adapt between centralized and decentralized approaches? Sometimes you need an experienced person to do all the planning. Sometimes you need a team to collaborate on figuring out what should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Can your approach work either way? Does it need a specific person to create it or can it be successfully implemented without any specific person in charge? Does it adapt to your circumstances and needs? Does it make having proposal graphics easier? Does it prompt people to think about where graphics would be useful? Sometimes you can start with the graphics and use them to drive the text. Does your proposal content plan enable people to describe the graphics using text and start building the proposal around the graphics before they are even rendered? Does it prevent potential points of failure? Does your approach to content planning surface issues related to proposal writing early and prevent the proposal from going down the wrong path, or does it wait for a draft review to discover that things went wrong? Does it anticipate and prevent potential issues from becoming real? Does it reflect your company’s lessons learned? Does it maximize the value of your information advantage? Do you have meetings that talk about the proposal only to discover later that the things discussed didn’t make it into the document? Do your proposal writers know what to do in their sections with any customer, opportunity, or competitive intelligence you’ve gathered? Do you spell out what should be said about the information advantage you have, or do you rely on individuals to figure it out? Somehow. Does it drive your win strategies into the proposal? Are all your aspirations for the proposal making it into the proposal? Are your strategies and key points disappearing along the way? Does your proposal content plan identify them all and explain how to best address them? Does it show how the entire proposal should be built around substantiating them? Does it help you avoid the Death Spiral? Does your proposal content plan prevent people from having to discover what to offer through infinite writing revisions? Are you submitting the proposal you have at the deadline instead of a proposal that reflects everything you wanted it to become? Does it think things through in order to prevent you from falling into the proposal Death Spiral? Does it produce what it will take to win? You can’t build your proposal around what it will take to win unless you first articulate what it will take to win. Results matter. Does the way you are preparing your proposal content plans improve your win rate? Does the review of the content plan become more important than the review of the draft proposal? Sometimes companies are still thinking things through when they review the draft proposal instead of thinking them through before they start writing. Sometimes they think things through by doing infinite revisions (See #12 regarding avoiding the death spiral). Proposals are so important that you should think them through first in the form of a content plan. Then review the content plan and revise it. Only when you are satisfied that your proposal plan accomplishes the things on this list that you need the most should you start writing. If you can’t think things through and still have enough time to write, you’re thinking too slowly or chasing something you weren’t prepared to bid. Skipping the content plan won’t solve those problems. If you are doing proposal content planning well, the review of your content plan will become more important to your success than the review of the draft proposal. With a solid content plan, the review of the draft proposal will just be follow-through to ensure the plan was properly executed. In many ways, proposal content planning becomes the proposal process. People tend to obsess over proposal reviews. But if instead you focus on getting your proposal content planning right, everything else will be easier.