Carl Dickson

Prompt background and instructions:This is background regarding how the prompt is designed to work. It is for the user and not the AI. Do not include this section in your prompt. The prompt is designed to look deeper at the root causes behind the failure. It is not as simple as giving the AI a single prompt and getting a single answer. It is an exploration. The prompt requires a description of what happened during the proposal. This description should be as observational and objective as possible. If this is long, then upload it as a file. If you have an existing lessons learned template to follow you could attach it and instruct the AI to put its response into your template. If you don't have one, you can use its output directly or ask it to design one for you. In addition to your description, you should upload: The notification regarding your loss Any customer debrief materials provided A copy of the solicitation You will get better results if it does not include your conclusions in the first prompt. The prompt will ask you questions. It will make recommendations. Then you can get conversational with it by asking "What if?" questions or others like "What would you recommend for..." Review the prompt below and make any changes needed to address your circumstances. Prompt:You are conducting a lessons-learned analysis after losing a proposal opportunity. Your objective is not simply to identify what the proposal team could have done better. Your objective is to understand why we ended up losing the opportunity and identify the lessons that could materially improve our future win rate. Do not assume the proposal process was the primary cause of the loss. In particular, distinguish between: What was within our control What was outside our control What happened before the proposal process that led to the loss What happened outside the proposal process that led to the loss What changes could be made before or outside the proposal process to prevent a future loss What changes could be made to the proposal process to prevent a future loss What we should understand but cannot or should not attempt to change Also discover: How was AI used during the proposal? How were processes defined? What was the scope or limitations of the processes used? How was quality defined and measured? If not attached, before you begin your assessment ask for any notification or communication from the customer about the loss, if the user has a lessons learned template it would like you to use (or to create one if they do not), and any debrief materials or other information provided by the customer explaining the loss. If you need to verify whether solicitation requirements were met, ask for a copy of the solicitation. If you have questions about how to proceed or would like more information about something, it is acceptable to pause and ask the user for input. Avoid doing this repetitively. First establish the facts.Start by reviewing the information provided by the user. You may inform the user that at this point, you are gathering relevant facts and details, and are not ready to draw conclusions or make recommendations. If the information provided does not answer these questions, ask the user: What do we know about why we lost? What did the customer tell us? What evidence do we have that supports that explanation? What are we assuming rather than knowing? What criteria actually determined the outcome? When was the outcome effectively determined? Did anything happen after that point that could realistically have changed the outcome? What happened before the proposal process that led to the loss? What happened outside the proposal process that led to the loss? Do not accept the stated reason for the loss as the complete explanation. Treat it as a starting point. Ignore or remove emotional content and avoid blaming individuals. The goal of this prompt is to design functional approaches to prevent future failures and not to correct people. How to perform the assessment.For each significant factor contributing to the loss, repeatedly ask: Why did this happen? Then: Why was that the situation at the time? Continue until you reach the underlying conditions, decisions, priorities, incentives, relationships, assumptions, knowledge, or circumstances that explain the outcome. Avoid stopping at answers such as: We should have started earlier. We needed a better proposal. We should have involved someone sooner. We should have responded faster. We should have done more customer engagement. We made mistakes. Instead ask: Why didn't we start earlier? Why wasn't the right person involved? Why wasn't the opportunity prioritized? Why did we believe the customer wanted something different? Why did we have the resources we had? Why were those decisions made? Were failures the result of something else, like a lack of getting the right information to the right people or a failure to define quality criteria that could have prevented a failure? What prior failure(s) or chain of failure(s) may have led to the reported failure? Examine the forces outside the proposal processExplore the factors that shaped the opportunity before and around the proposal. Other peopleWho influenced the opportunity? Who had decision-making authority? Who influenced the customer? Who influenced our company's decisions? Who was involved too late? Who was not involved at all? What priorities or motivations did these people have? AI usageCould AI have been used more or better? Did AI make mistakes? Why didn't using AI result in a winning proposal? Other prioritiesWhat competing opportunities or company priorities affected us? How much attention and resources did this opportunity actually receive? Why did it receive that level of attention? Were we treating the opportunity as more important than the organization actually considered it? The organization around the proposalWhat organizational conditions affected our ability to win? What resources, incentives, structures, or competing demands influenced our behavior? What did the organization make easy? What did the organization make difficult? Were people making locally rational decisions that collectively hurt our chances? Decisions outside the proposal processWhat important decisions were made before or outside the formal proposal process? What information influenced those decisions? Were we aware of those decisions? What could have changed them? How did those decisions impact the proposal? Examine the customerDo not treat the customer's behavior simply as "customer whims." Ask: What did the customer actually care about? What were their underlying business objectives? Who were the real decision-makers and influencers? What changed during the opportunity? What did the customer say they wanted? What did their actions indicate they wanted? What internal pressures were affecting their decision? Were there political, budgetary, organizational, incumbent, or relationship factors? Did the customer already have a preferred outcome before the RFP or proposal? When did that preference form? What evidence do we have? Examine our assumptionsIdentify the assumptions that influenced our decisions. For each important assumption, ask: What did we believe? Why did we believe it? What evidence supported it? What evidence contradicted it? When could we have known it was wrong? Did we have information that we failed to recognize? Should we have gathered more information before responding? If so, what information? Was the assumption reasonable given what we knew at the time? Do not judge an assumption solely because it turned out to be wrong. Determine whether it was reasonable at the time and whether there was an opportunity to challenge it. Separate causes from symptomsFor each identified issue, determine whether it was: A root cause — materially contributed to the loss. A contributing factor — influenced the outcome but was not decisive. A symptom — something that went wrong because of a deeper issue. A consequence — something that happened because the opportunity was already being lost. Noise — something that is interesting but unlikely to have affected the outcome. Do not turn every imperfection in the proposal into a lesson. Determine what we can actually learnFor each significant finding, ask: Did this materially contribute to the loss? Could we reasonably have recognized it before the loss? Could we have influenced it? Should we change something because of it? Would changing it materially improve our chances in future opportunities? This prevents the analysis from becoming a list of things the team wishes it had done differently. Only after the analysis: identify lessonsFor each meaningful lesson, complete: We lost this opportunity in part because... The underlying reason was... The evidence supporting this conclusion is... What we initially thought was the problem was... What we now believe was actually driving the outcome is... The lesson for future opportunities is... What we should change is... What we should continue doing is... What is outside our control and should not become a process change is... How can we systematize our lessons learned so that instead of being a one-time correction, we implement an improvement that becomes part of the way we do things? Final testBefore accepting a proposed lesson, ask: If the answer is no, ask: The goal is to leave the review with a small number of meaningful lessons about why we lost, rather than a long list of procedural improvements that may have little effect on future outcomes.

A proposal process is not enough to maximize growth, no matter how good the process is. A good proposal process will mostly lose. A great proposal process will make you competitive, but even that doesn't mean winning most of what you bid. Consistently producing winning proposals and doing it in volume requires more than just a process. In fact, being at the top of the competition depends more on going beyond your process than perfecting your process. What is beyond your process?A shared set of goals and expectations. How can people possibly manage competing priorities if they don’t share the same goals and expectations? Being a company that is designed to win at all levels. If your company is like many, the majority of staff at headquarters do not participate in growth. Most don’t even understand growth. Any contribution they make to winning is an indirect abstraction at a level they never consider. They have their jobs, and growth is not a part of them. Usually, they will participate if specifically asked. They have their own goals to achieve and processes to follow, and that is where their attention goes. The multitude of uncertainties related to proposal development are anathema to them. And then there's the project or operations staff. Unless they are managers, they often exist blissfully unaware of the importance of growth to them personally or of the proposal development that's required to achieve it. A culture that defines and is based on ROI. If decisions aren’t being made based on how well proposal activity impacts ROI, then people are just rationalizing their opinions about what should be done and making it up as they go along. Make sure everyone understands the personal impact that small changes in your win rate can have on people in the company. Teach them to speak the language of ROI. A mission that includes how people show up for proposals. Most government contractor mission statements do more harm than good. They don’t reflect reality. They don’t even reflect real aspirations, let alone what has to be done to fulfill them. If you want people to perform like they are on a mission when working on proposals, you've got to give them a mission and understanding of their role in achieving it. "We really, really want to win" isn't going to do that. tl;dr: A company’s ability and preparation to implement a process contributes more to winning than having the process itself does. The list above is crucial for your company to successfully implement the proposal process. Any proposal process. It’s foundational. If the company cares about winning proposals, it needs to address these things first, instead of assuming that a proposal savior with the right process can somehow win them all. Remember, most companies lose more proposals than they win. By a lot. A 30% win rate is generally considered good, even though that means you lose 70% of your proposals. It doesn’t help that most companies have similar processes, with relatively minor tweaks. In a competitive environment, the so-called “best practices” are not enough to win. But just in case you're getting the impression that a good proposal process isn't important, it's what gets companies to a 30% win rate. I've seen companies with immature processes (no one admits to not having any process) fall below a 10% win rate. A good process could triple their win rate. That's important. But it takes more to maximize your win rate and stay at the top. If you really want to win, you need to go beyond the best practices. You need to design the company to win. This means: Making sure that all staff in the company understand the nature of growth, their personal role in it, and how much good it brings to other people and the world. This is key to having a winning culture that is based on more than just making money, going to work, and doing what you're supposed to do. Give them a mission that is critical to growth. The real mission of your company is to win more contracts so that you can develop as people and serve your stakeholders better. All that fluff about quality and performance becomes real when you realize that top past performance scores are critical to fulfilling this mission. You don’t have quality just to have it. You have quality to ensure top past performance scores. You can even add explainers that turn this mission statement into great marketing copy. It’s better than that fluff that no one reads or believes. Turn proposal development into something that helps people win instead of an administrative function that removes the burden from people who have better things to do. Bring a company that is invested in winning to the start of every proposal. If you are making it up as you go along, you didn’t invest enough in preparing. If people don’t understand how to contribute or what to contribute, you didn’t invest enough in preparing your people. And if people don’t agree on what a quality proposal is, how to achieve it, what the goals should be during proposal development, or what people should be able to expect from each other during a proposal, you aren’t even trying to win. You're just showing up and the following steps that get you to submission. When the company goes beyond the process, the process stops being a struggle. It stops being something extra to do. Instead, the proposal process becomes something that facilitates working together to do the things everyone is aware needs to be done. Proposals remain challenging. But the challenge is less of a struggle when everyone understands how and why to work together. Simply having a process doesn't provide that.

Capability statements and white papers are so common, customers hardly notice them. When a customer gets one, what do they actually do with them? Do you really think yours is so special that it’s going to be any different? If you want it to be special, it has to be more. It has to be exceptional. And to be those things it has to start by being different. It has to be more than merely the same but better. Replace the idea that you want to tell the customer about you and your offerings with a purpose that delivers value to the customer: Build trust Teach, guide, or inform Support decision making Support for taking the next steps Support for the procurement process Fear reduction Demonstration of capability, capacity, resourcefulness, and insight Here are 85 ideas to help you start down a path that will get you noticed by turning your company into an asset instead of a distraction. Strategic / Thought Leadership Documents1. Research reports 2. Industry reports 3. Benchmark studies 4. Trend reports 5. Position papers 6. Point-of-view (POV) papers 7. Insight briefs 8. Executive briefs 9. Playbooks 10. Analyst reports 11. Technical studies 12. Engineering briefs 13. Innovation reports 14. Economic impact studies 15. Feasibility studies 16. Comparative analyses Buyer’s guides1. Solution guides 2. Framework documents 3. Methodology overviews 4. Best-practice guides 5. Governance guides 6. Maturity models 7. Alternatives assessments Credibility / Proof Documents1. Case studies 2. Success stories 3. Client spotlights 4. Customer stories 5. Testimonials 6. Reference sheets 7. Reference accounts 8. Before-and-after studies 9. ROI studies 10. ROI calculators 11. Total cost of ownership (TCO) analyses 12. Validation reports 13. Pilot program summaries 14. Proof-of-concept summaries 15. Audit summaries 16. Performance scorecards 17. Compliance reports 18. Certification summaries Product / Technical Marketing Documents1. Spec sheets 2. Technical specifications 3. Architecture diagrams 4. System overviews 5. Integration guides 6. Implementation guides 7. Deployment guides 8. Quick-start guides 9. Feature comparison charts 10. Product roadmaps 11. Compatibility matrices 12. Cybersecurity posture summaries 13. Disaster recovery summaries 14. Service descriptions 15. SLA documents 16. Value proposition documents 17. Differentiation matrices 18. Competitive positioning documents 19. Origin stories 20. Capability matrices Government / Enterprise Contracting Documents1. CPARS summaries 2. Supplier depth and breadth statements 3. Certification impact statements 4. Team capability and qualification packets 5. Contract performance summaries 6. Project staffing readiness plans 7. Contract transition readiness summaries 8. Risk identification guides 9. Risk assessments Educational / Demand Generation Assets1. E-books 2. Guides 3. Handbooks 4. Checklists 5. Worksheets 6. Templates 7. Webinar summaries 8. Workshop materials 9. Training manuals 10. FAQ documents 11. Infographics 12. Cheat sheets 13. Resource libraries 14. Knowledge base articles 15. Learning modules Just don’t give them a brochure. A brochure is about you. Give them something that will help them. Give them something of value that will be appreciated and not just tossed into the trash. And don’t just give them something and run away. Offer to discuss it, answer questions, give demonstrations, talk about what it all means and how it could change the future. Follow up with the customer. Gauge their interest. Use these documents to start conversations. Make them a starting point or an opener, and not a dead end.

Most corporate cultures are a mixed bag. Other than aspirations, no real effort is put into it. As a result, it is defined as much by the personalities of key staff as it is by intent. Without nurturing, a corporate culture will grow like a weed instead of being designed. If you are in charge, the odds are that your corporate culture is not what you think it is. The reality is different from your aspirations. The reality is how people are behaving when you are not in the room. How your proposals go tells you a lot about your real corporate culture. The decisions they make, how they engage, how they cooperate, and how they disagree all surface. Their real priorities, goals, and agendas also surface as they deal with conflicting priorities. You can see whether people reflect or ignore the stated corporate values. The result is how well they perform and that directly impacts the company's ability to win new business. Your corporate culture is as important to your company’s ability to grow as the steps in your business and proposal development processes. So what do you do about it?How do you go about changing a culture? It’s not just about speeches. It’s not just about how people treat each other. It’s about changing behaviors. But behaviors don’t change just because the boss says they should. It helps to model behaviors. People tend to emulate their leaders. It also helps to synchronize how people do things with the results you want to achieve. Unfortunately, when the leaders behave in a negative way, that tends to get emulated as well. When the leaders describe the culture in a certain way but model different behaviors, the culture will not actually become what they describe. Here are nine examples of things you can do to change the culture in your organization to one that encourages behaviors that support winning: Require all levels to focus on ROI. The economics of resource allocation and priority setting should be based on ROI and not cost control. That should become part of the culture, encouraging people to track ROI and make decisions accordingly. Focusing on ROI shifts the debate from what is the least expensive way to win contracts to what is the most effective way to win contracts. This is where I like to start with companies, since understanding their pipeline and how to calculate the ROI of business development and proposal efforts drives so many other decisions. Focusing on ROI helps companies pay more attention to their win rate. Require achieving top performance measures. For Federal contractors, having a top past performance score is critical for being competitive. Instead of making "the highest levels of customer satisfaction" a "value," I recommend making it a mandate. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the top score, the company's expectation should be that all projects will score a 5. Scoring below a 5 shows a disconnect between the customer and the company, and should be corrected immediately. You can't be a winning, high-growth company if you are disconnected from your customers. You need your project managers to advocate for the customer and help the company understand the customer’s expectations. Make evidence-based decisions. Bid/no bid decisions should be evidence based, with the burden of proof on why leads are worth bidding based on ROI. Having the evidence means tracking metrics and measurements to provide the data required. Arguments should be over what the data means and how to get more of it, instead of about opinions. A company focused on evidence of performance and quantifying ROI will make better decisions, win more business, and be more profitable. Define accountability properly. If your approach to accountability is based on authority or a chain of command, it will reduce the quality of your proposals. Great proposals are not written in fear. That's how you get merely compliant proposals. Maybe. Go back to the root of the word and think about the practice of accounting. Accountability should be based on information accuracy and feedback loops. Accountability should not ensure that every step is precisely followed. It should ensure that goals are accomplished by informing those responsible. Accountability should enable people to do the right things and inform them when they have deviated. You don't want people spending so much time accounting for their responsibilities that they don't have enough time to excel at them. Also, it's good to remember that most innovations come from deviations. When people avoid innovation because they are too busy establishing accountability or are afraid that being accountable means being subject to being punished, you get well-executed proposals that are not competitive. You can flip the script on this by focusing on accomplishing goals and being tolerant of how they are achieved. Make accountability about accounting for the information people need and what to do with it so they can better achieve their goals. Validate quality. Quality should be validated and not simply claimed. If your company values "the highest levels of quality" no one will pay it any attention. But if it values the validation of quality, then action is required. And validating quality will start by defining it. Making this part of your culture means that everything people do should be checked to make sure it got done in the correct way. It means every assignment should be defined and have a means to verify that it was properly completed. Most proposal assignments are defined, but no one has anything more than a feeling about whether they were successfully completed. Give them the means to validate successful completion. When this is part of your culture, it becomes simply the way people work. And it is a much better way of working than trying to satisfy whims. Implementing this requires completely changing how most companies conduct their proposal reviews. Cherish customer insight. The best competitive advantage is an information advantage. Gaining an information advantage requires customer insight. If growth is your top priority, then every single customer interaction by every single person who has customer contact should be part of a coordinated effort to gain customer insight. This should not simply be a standard operating procedure, it should be part of your culture. Gaining customer insight should be part of what you do, at all levels and in all departments. This is a key step toward ensuring that all of your proposals reflect customer insight. It takes more than a salesperson or a capture manager. Throw the whole organization behind it to create a culture of winning. Most operations staff can't explain what customer insight is, let alone how to get it. If your organization is like that, try teaching them about gaining customer insight to get better results. Value perspective. Your entire proposal should be written from the customer's perspective and not your own. You need to train your organization to see things through your customer's eyes. When you achieve that, your staff will also be able to see things through each other's eyes as well, and better understand how to work together. When winning is determined by someone else, perspective becomes a key ingredient. Perspective avoids the stovepipe mentality, departmental walls, and excessive bureaucracy. Perspective facilitates teamwork and collaboration. Perspective across the organization is needed for being a winning organization. Advocate creative destruction. You can claim to value "innovation" all day long, but how do you actually make innovation happen within a company? When you advocate creative destruction, you encourage looking for ways to obsolete the status quo. You might prefer to call it reengineering. Or continuous improvement. But the key to it is continuously obsoleting the status quo. This should inform staff looking for what offerings to develop or solutions to propose. It also directly contradicts people who have a fear of doing something new that might cannibalize an existing business line. It sets the stage for disruptive marketing. It's about competing by changing the rules, instead of following the pack and trying to work your way to the front. Institutionalize clarity of expectations. Failure to manage expectations leads to friction. Sometimes lots of friction. Win rate killing friction. Assignments that shouldn't have been accepted go unfulfilled. People meet deadlines with substandard work. People are asked to complete assignments without being told how or by what definition of quality until they hand in their completed assignment and find out it's wrong. Achieving clarity of expectations works in both directions. Not only must assignments be clearly given, they must also be accepted. Or not. Or discussed. Anything but passive acceptance leading to predictable failure. Availability, capability, and progress reporting also depend on clarity of expectations in both directions. All proposal expectations should be discussed, reviewed, verified, and confirmed by all parties. When expectations flow in both directions we get collaboration instead of rework and substandard submissions. The difference between tasking and cultureMandating reports to track performance is not the same thing as building a culture based on evidence-based decisions. When you mandate reports, people will do what is required. When you have an evidence-based culture, people will think differently. Complaining about quality is different from having a culture that prevents quality issues by validating everything habitually. Making understanding the customer the salesperson’s job puts all your eggs in one basket and doesn’t ensure that insight makes it into the document that closes the sale. Imagine how your work environment changes when leadership models ROI-based thinking based on evidence-based decisions, translated into a clarity of expectations during collaboration, and implemented with quality validation driven by customer insight that leads to an awareness of the customer's perspective, which is then translated into solutions that go beyond the status quo and result in top past performance scores. Let that run-on sentence seep into your culture, not as a mandate, but as simply the way you do all the things. When it becomes habit and becomes part of the way things are done in your company, it has become your culture. WhyBecause you want people to do these things without being told to. Because your corporate culture is as important to increasing your win rate as the steps in your process. Because win rate is critical for growth. And growth is the source of all opportunity.

What can you expect?You can expect more. We’ve added a community on top of the massive amount of content we’ve created. We’re also opening up our platform to other authors. So over time you’ll see a lot more online training and events posted. Service providers, consultants, and trainers will be available to you. All of it is delivered in an updated, easier to use interface. This was a massive refresh. The online training has also been updated, and the downloads are more accessible. An all-new events calendar has been added. PropLIBRARY is now far more engaging, with discussion and networking features wrapped around our content. You can discuss our articles or start discussions of your own. You’ll want to become a member. Here’s why:How do you beat AI-written proposals? Bring insight and intelligence that isn't available online. We’re bringing nearly all of our content inside the paywall so that AI bots can’t steal it and to give you a competitive advantage. Access to our exclusive content is not going to be available via web searching or AI. Becoming a PropLIBRARY Insider will help you create AI-written proposals that will beat all the other AI-written proposals. To help you make this transition, we’ve created a low-cost subscription option that’s 80% lower than anything we’ve ever offered before. It gets you inside the paywall so we can engage further. We even have a way that you can get your subscription free of charge by making referrals... What's the first thing you should try once you’re inside?I couldn’t narrow it down to just one. Meet other professionals, share insights, and learn from each other. Network. Find resources. Get hands-on help with your pursuits. Try commenting on your favorite articles. Or asking a question about one. If you have a topic or question of your own, try starting a discussion. When you see an article of interest, try clicking on one of the tags below the description. They immediately filter our content down to the topic of the tag you clicked on. This is great for focus and relevance. The second thing you should try after posting is all the new Activity Stream options you have. They make following conversations and staying in touch with other people much easier. Remember, if you don’t send messages, you won’t receive any. Here’s the easy way to post: Ask questions Make observations Tell a story Share an insight Reply to someone else’s post If you are a consultant, let’s talk…You can now publish on our platform and get in front of our huge audience. You can post your events. You can create and sell online training. You can tap into our audience collective. Reach out to us for more details. How we’re celebratingWe’re going to throw a party. It’s a virtual thing. It’s going to be a posting party. We’re going to get to know each other and interact as people while posting questions and comments about mostly professional things. Let’s have fun with this! We might make it a regular thing. Here’s the format: We’ll be hosting it on Zoom webinars, but it’s not going to be a presentation. It’s going to be casual. Bring cocktails, snacks, or whatever makes you comfortable. We’ll have our cameras off, so we can be real. We’re going to have a series of topics that we’ll post on. Everyone will be expected to post something. And then we’ll reply to each other’s posts. All while talking and keyboard chatting in a casual way with a low-key party vibe, about anything besides work. The topics will be: Networking so people think we’re being professional. We’ll post about what kinds of people you’d like to network with and where we work. We’ll get to know each other and meet new people without it having to be a big deal. What kind of stupid things have you caught AIs doing? This will be a fun take on a hot topic. Comparing and contrasting B2G, B2B, and International proposals so we can all get out of our box and risk learning from someone who does things completely differently. Service providers, consultants, trainers, products, tools, and associations. They are resources. They also happen to be people too. The party will be in the evening (7:30pm GMT-5) in North America, and the rest of the world will probably be sleeping. We’re thinking about scheduling something on another date and a better time for people on other continents so you don’t miss out on the fun. Register for the Posting Party! If you can't make it, you can still subscribe, become an insider, and post when you are available.

The new PropLIBRARY will go live in a week or two. We're not going to announce it right away after it goes live, because there are some content migration issues that we have to address on the live server. In the meantime, these images will give you a peek behind the curtain. The new menu for PropLIBRARY is a lot more functional than the old menu. It's not just about content. There is a lot more that you can do. If you look closely, you'll see, just from the menu, some of the features and functionality the new site will have. The new site is all about engagement. You can do things and engage with other people. It's not just about reading articles. You can participate in discussions and network with other users. You'll also be able to engage with other users directly and through events (virtual, in-person, or hybrid). The new site opens up the interactions to everyone. Everyone can be content contributors. Everyone can have a voice. We can all learn from each other. Networking with others on the new PropLIBRARY can have tangible real-world results. The new site will be easier to keep up to date with discussions and content additions because you'll have a feed. You can access content through the menus or through your feed. Check out all the different ways you can view your feed by clicking on the image of the menu. We're also going to be inviting other authors to contribute on our platform and help build an audience collective. The more people in the community, the more valuable the community will be to everyone in it. Think about all the different roles people play in our industry. Some are employees and some are consultants. PropLIBRARY has members from every type of company, from the smallest to the largest. Think about all the different perspectives they bring on growing their businesses. On the new PropLIBRARY site, our articles will become discussions and our discussions can inspire articles. And all that new content won't all be written by PropLIBRARY. We have a huge audience and now everyone can play a part. And the more who do, the more each PropLIBRARY user will get out of the experience. The new site will have a lot more online training, with many different instructors. Here's a peek at the new online training interface: Here's an example of how some of the training materials can look. There will be also quizzes, exercises, collaborative projects, and interaction between students and the instructor: We have thousands of items in our content libraries. The new content libraries can be filtered simply by clicking on tag names, making it easier to get to the content that interests you in that moment: By the way, our most popular article has 83,085 views. Let me know when you find out which one it is. Here's a peek at the download library where you'll be able to download different kinds of files. We're not done migrating our current content, but you can get a feel for it from this screen shot: The search tools are also much improved so that you can better find what you are looking for: These screen shots really don't do it justice. The new PropLIBRARY is an interactive place. I look forward to meeting you all there. But first I've got thousands on content items to migrate and review, formatting issues to fix, and so on. When it first goes live, it will do so quietly because I'll still have some work to do. But if you're eager to see it, just start checking in about a week. When it goes live, you'll see the differences right away.

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

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