Carl Dickson

When you go straight from salespeople to proposals: See also: Capture Management You tend to get a lot of waste if the sales function doesn't pay for each proposal they request out of their own budget. When this is the case there’s no reason for them not to want to submit a proposal, no matter how low the win probability. When there is no cost, why not submit a proposal, because it might win? This approach comes at a win-rate destroying cost that sucks the life out of a company’s future potential. If salespeople participate in the proposal effort, they are not prospecting. Lead generation stops when the proposal starts. If salespeople are not participating in the proposal effort, your win rate will suffer from a lack of customer and opportunity insight. If salespeople are participating in the proposal, they’re no longer actively developing customer and opportunity insight. Sales is not enough for success. Having capture management between sales and the proposal keeps sales focused on prospecting while providing an improved approach to drive customer awareness into the proposal in order to maximize your win probability. Capture management provides dedicated resources to win a pursuit in between sales and proposals. But introducing capture management requires more than just hiring someone to fill the role. A lot more. Introducing capture management requires a coordinated effort across the company Capture management is the hardest job in the company. It requires knowing everything, which of course is impossible. To be successful, it requires a great deal of coordination with subject matter experts in every part of your company. And this requires an executive mandate as well as the ability to anticipate what capture will require over the life of the pursuit, awareness of how to access those resources, and knowledge about what information they need to get the answers needed. Oh, and it needs a budget. And oversight. And participation in bid/no bid decisions, plus the ability to get the input required from sales. In addition, the capture manager has to know how to build a proposal based on what it will take to win. This requires the capture manager to know the proposal process and what input to bring to the proposal about what it will take to win. And to herd all the cats to get everyone on board and keep them all on the same page (mixing several metaphors at once on purpose). A professional is better than a hero You can’t just flip a switch and have successful capture management. Even if you parachute in an experience capture management consultant, they will not be as effective as a capture manager can be in an organization that understands how to best implement and take advantage of the role. Don’t try to hire a hero. Do things professionally. A consultant might be an excellent part of the mix. But don’t expect any one person to make it all better just by showing up. Sales is about prospecting and qualifying. Capture management is about closing in an environment where every part of the company potentially contributes to that sale closing. Capture management is for companies that bid as if their companies depend on winning, because they do. It’s all about winning Who is responsible for the win? Is the salesperson responsible for finding leads or closing them? If it's both, go back to the top and re-read the bullets. Is the proposal manager responsible for the win? If so, then do they participate in the bid/no bid decision? What authority do they have over sales to provide the information required for winning? What authority do they have over the bid strategies? Adding a capture manager gives you one person responsible for the win that works with both sales and proposals. Adding capture management to a company is a far bigger change than simply hiring another set of hands. Companies adding capture management should take a moment to make sure they’re ready to take a big step towards becoming mature. Adding capture management is about adding deliberate, dedicated, focus in order to maximize your win rate. It often comes when companies realize they can double their win rate without chasing any more leads than they already have, simply by raising their win rate. Maximizing your win rate requires a host of other improvements, ranging from lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions, to formalizing the flow of information to the proposal and the process for preparing your proposals. If you don’t address all of those issues when you add capture management to your company, then you’re just throwing bodies at the problem instead of trying to win.

You’ve got to start somewhere. So companies often start by responding to as many RFPs as possible, hoping to win a few to get the company established. Once they are established, they can reassess and start doing things strategically. When should they reassess and begin to change? That day is now. How do I know? Because your win rate is so low that you can double your revenue by increasing your win rate without chasing any more leads. Your win rate is low because you’re bidding without a competitive advantage. Even though you’re getting by and it’s become your comfort zone, that approach will cause your business to plateau early and go into decline. The truth is you’re leaving money on the table and it’s time to reconsider. It only requires one small change to start maturing as a company: bid every opportunity where you have an information advantage. That’s it. You still get to bid everything you can find. It just has to be everything where you have an information advantage. If you don't have an information advantage then you are relying on luck or low-balling the price. Neither approach is sustainable. You don’t have to worry about having to drop most of the bids in your pipeline and starting over. The change will be gradual. A small change in win rate can return more than 30% growth in a single year. It’s actually quite profitable. See also: ROI You don’t become a mature company by flipping a switch and changing everything all at once. Instead of dropping opportunities, you’ll gradually replace them with opportunities that have higher win probabilities. Our Pursuit and Capture Program eases you into it a little bit at a time over a few months. We start by developing an understanding of the mix of opportunities in your pipeline and designating one or two future customers to start practicing relationship marketing with. We'll show you how to build an information advantage and use it to win what you pursue. How do you pick the customers to develop relationships with ahead of the RFP? Strategically based on publicly accessible data about who buys what you sell. Our Pursuit and Capture Program covers that. How do you get to know them? By being helpful and practicing relationship marketing. Our Pursuit and Capture Program also covers that. What techniques do you learn? We’ll show you how to initiate opportunities instead of just finding them. We’ll show you what you have to do to influence the RFP. We’ll tell you what questions to ask so that you can develop an information advantage. And an information advantage is the best customer advantage. Success requires more than simple techniques There is no secret technique that will enable you to go from a being a company that is driven by ad hoc approaches and people trying to make up for it by working really hard into a company that makes informed decisions, follows deliberate approaches that are proven to increase win probability, and consistently develops an information advantage for all of its bids. Instead of some non-existent secret technique, we’ll show you how doing a few small things differently can end up transforming your company over time into a highly effective engine for growth. How you approach the implementation of these things is more important than the techniques that get you in the door early. You can’t beat mature processes by trying harder to do ad hoc things. No matter how skilled your staff are, they will perform better when supported by mature processes. You probably realize this and just haven’t seen a practical way to implement this shift. This may be the only thing that’s been holding you back. That and the temptation to stay in your comfort zone. What makes our Pursuit and Capture Program special is that our approach to implementation is more practical than anything you’ve ever seen and will get you to a better comfort zone. Visualize your leads as a series of pie charts. For some you are the prime and some you are the sub. Some are with existing customers and some are new. But if nearly all were discovered from public announcements and databases, you're not being as competitive as you could be. Improving your ability to pursue and capture See also: Pursuit and Capture Program Our Pursuit and Capture Program shows you how to start initiating opportunities instead of finding them, how to influence the solicitation before it’s even a solicitation, and how to discover things no one else knows about the customer and the opportunity. Then we’ll work together to set targets so we can make sure it happens. Gradually that approach will take over until you’re bidding all of your opportunities with a competitive advantage and your win rate is much higher than it is now. Our Pursuit and Capture Program starts by assessing your pipeline and setting targets. Then we teach you how to pursue and capture those targets. By starting with a pipeline assessment, we can set metrics and measure progress to ensure that every single step contributes to making you more profitable. We’ve designed the program so that it’s easy to leave if the targets aren’t being met. If what we do together is profitable, you’ll want to double down and continue in order to maximize your returns. If it’s not, you’ll simply drop the program. Take a look at the program details and then we can have a conversation about the challenges you face and what we can do about them.

Let’s start with the end result we’d like to achieve. A winning proposal. Now let's work backwards. In order to win the proposal we need the top score. In order to get the top score we need to build the proposal around what it will take to win: See also: Organizational Development A proposal that reflects what matters to the customer in a form that follows the RFP’s instructions, is compliant with all requirements, and is optimized against the evaluation criteria, with no weaknesses A differentiated offering that the customer perceives to be stronger than the alternatives An offering that is delivered at the price required to win In order to prepare a proposal that reflects what it will take to win, you should start the proposal with: Insight into what matters to the customer Understanding of the customer’s evaluation process and scoring methodology Insight into the price to win to drive your pricing strategies Enough competitive awareness to offer compelling differentiators and more strengths than your competitors The right offering An information advantage that enables you to address the requirements from the customer’s perspective How many of these things can you discover after RFP release, while working on the proposal, without any substantive customer interaction? Give or take, it’s probably none. Maybe you’ll guess well. But guessing is not much of a win strategy. Winning without insight generally means winning with a low price and margins that continue to fall over time. Winning with a low price instead of insight into the performance requirements beyond what’s in the RFP is a recipe for destroying your past performance record. This effectively ruins the future of your company. I’ve seen what happens when a company kills its past performance record. It’s not pretty. They never recovered. Better lead qualification produces better proposals that close more sales In order to get this level of insight, you need to qualify your leads. In order to qualify your leads, you need: Lead qualification criteria Intel that provides the insight required to win How do you assess whether you have the required insight? Most companies tell themselves how insightful they are without really assessing their insight. You assess your insight by asking the right questions. If you never write down those questions, you’ll end up just making them up as you go along. If you do this, you probably won’t end up with answers to the questions your proposal writers need to write a proposal based on what it will take to win. You should think through those questions ahead of time. You should involve your proposal staff so that the questions anticipate what they’ll need to know to put the response to the requirements into a winning context. Better lead qualification also leads to better process and performance Then you should do two things with those questions: Use them to train your business development and capture management staff. You can't get the answers if they don’t know what questions to ask. Use those questions to assess whether you are developing an information advantage and will be ready to write the winning proposal at RFP release. When you do this, you are integrating business development, capture management, and proposal management. When you do this, each of them reinforces and improves the other. This will improve your win rate significantly over treating them as stovepipes. So questions flow back to business developers and capture managers while the information they gather flows forward. Along the way, progress can be measured and bid/no bid decisions can be reached. Simply documenting the questions that drive this forms the basis for: Training Intelligence gathering Offering development Differentiation and positioning Oversight Smoothing the transition from capture to the proposal Proposal content planning Proposal quality validation Writing the questions down gives you the foundation of a successful process, both for the pre-RFP pursuit and for the proposal. Okay, I get it. Writing the questions down sounds too much like work. If you don’t want to figure out what the questions should be and how to articulate them for maximum effect, then just become a PropLIBRARY Subscriber and use ours. We’ve created hundreds of them. And built them into MustWin Now to make answering them and using them to drive your messaging into the proposal even easier.

Most proposal writing is good. But not great. Good proposal writing is not competitive. If you want to win consistently you need to write better than good, you need to write better than everyone else. Most proposal writing sounds beneficial. It attempts to make whatever you've got to work with sound good. Most proposal writing shows that the vendor is fully qualified and meets all the requirements. It’s positive. It's good. Unfortunately, good proposal writing is not competitive. Making your company sound good may please The Powers that Be within your own company, but it's not what the customer wants to hear. And that's why it's not competitive. Every company that will make it into the competitive range will have written a proposal that is fully qualified, meets all the requirements, and has a competitive price. They will all be good proposals. But the winner will be the one that pleases the customer the most. To make your proposal writing great enough to win over all competitors, instead of aspiring to create a proposal that sounds good, you should set the standard for your proposal writing to be based on what it will take to win. Doing that requires discovering what pleases the customer the most and what they need to see in order to conclude that your proposal is their best alternative. This usually involves saying less about yourself and more about what they are going to get as a result. Achieving this requires more than just having a lead to bid. A good lead is one where you have enough insight into what matters to the customer that you have an information advantage, combined with a great offering and enough insight to present it from the customer's perspective. A good lead is one where you can define what it will take to win and write a proposal based on it. A lead without this is really just a cold lead. What percentage of your bids are cold leads? See also: Great Proposals Believe in yourself. But not too much. Everyone who submits a proposal believes they have the best offering. But they often deceive themselves about how much insight they have. They don’t see that as a disqualifier and the result is they lose far more than they win. Winning over all competitors is easier when you don’t deceive yourself about how much insight you have into the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment. But even those with real insight often fail to drive it into the document that closes the sale. What to do about it To raise the bar on your competitiveness: Take your customer insight and use it to write a proposal from the customer’s perspective. Don't make your proposal sound "good." Make your proposal sound like what the customer needs to hear in order to decide that your proposal is their best alternative. Instead of filling your proposals with things you think sound good, fill it with things that will help them make a decision in your favor and get it approved by their management. Prove that your offering is not only superior and meets the requirements, but that it matters in ways that make it the customer’s best alternative. Instead of making your proposal sound "good," make it matter. Write your proposal based on the customer's decision making and evaluation process. Instead of writing your proposal to sound "good," write it to get the maximum score against the evaluation criteria. It turns out that proposal writing has less to do with writing and more to do with: Understanding the customer’s perspective Knowing what matters to the customer Having a superior offering to present Understanding the mechanics of how the customer evaluates proposals Having insights into how the customer makes decisions Hardly any proposal writers know all these things or even how to write about them at the start of the proposal. It is unfortunate that most companies start their proposals without providing this insight and input to their proposal writers. Whether your proposal staff come from an editorial, technical writing, engineering, marketing, or other background, they need input and guidance. If your proposal writers are not informed in all these things, how do you expect them to capture the win with only an outline to guide them? Your competitiveness depends on how well you provide this information to your proposal writers. Filling these gaps is the secret to achieving great proposal writing. Proposal writing is a process The proposal process should be designed to bring this information to the proposal writers. If proposal writing starts with just an outline, you are not going to get a draft that achieves all of these goals. Your proposal writing will not be competitive. Your win rate will suffer. Proposal writing must be based on an understanding of what it will take to capture that win. If you’re not talking about how to build the proposal around your insights, a plan for what to write based on what it will take to win, and how the writing will be presented before the proposal writing even starts, you’re just not trying to win. Making a submission is not the same as trying to win. Even if you think the proposal is "good." Exercise-based training for proposal writing. The online training that comes with a subscription to PropLIBRARY addresses topics like the fundamentals of proposal writing and how to respond to an RFP with the right words. This is in addition to the MustWin Process documentation that can help make sure you deliver the information proposal writers need to win, and MustWin Now, our online tool with forms for automating how you collect this information and turn it into guidance for proposal writers. Want to know what the founder of PropLIBRARY would recommend? Just ask me.... We can talk about reengineering how you go about winning business and come out of this better than you ever were before. Use the widget below to grab any open spot on my calendar before they’re filled and we can discuss your challenges.

I’m passing some of my time in isolation talking to people free of charge and assessing how to improve their pursuit and capture processes in the new world we find ourselves in. We can talk about reengineering how you go about winning business and come out of this better than you ever were before. Want to know what Carl would recommend? Just ask me. Click here to send me a question Or use the widget below to grab any open spot on my calendar before they’re filled and I’ll do a free assessment with you.

You’ve successfully conducted business virtually for some weeks now. But are you good at it, or have you just modified your old ways of working so that you can get by without co-presence? If you’ve got some weeks of mandatory virtualness still to go, maybe you do a little reengineering. A vaccine is 12-18 months away. Maybe even after some people go back to work it won’t be completely over. Maybe things will never be completely like they were. Maybe it’s time to give virtual just as much priority in your processes as physical. For example, a key requirement for working virtual is being able to work asynchronously. Sometimes everybody has to be synched to the same clock. But usually they don’t. And it’s better when they don’t. A good example of this is the telephone vs texting. Sometimes it’s better to call with both people interacting in real time. Sometimes it’s better to send a text and let them answer when it’s convenient. Neither is the right answer for every circumstance. But lots of business that used to be conducted by telephone is easier to manage via texting. Or email. Or Slack. Or whatever. Instead of taking the same process you used when people were collocated, how might the process change if everyone used something like Slack? Or Microsoft Teams? Or whatever? What I’ve found is that the process changes in unintuitive ways, but you have to change your perspective to how things could work instead of how you’ve done them in the past. Try looking at things functionally. Only think about how that functionality might play out virtually. Assignment issuance, task tracking, and expectation management. How do people find out about their assignments? How do they find out about other people’s assignments? Think beyond the form. Think beyond paper. Information exchange. How will people get the information they need, when they need it? Think beyond email. Think beyond files. Think about information flowing automagically. Can you make that happen? Progress and other reporting. How will you know what progress is being made? Can that also happen automagically, so that no human action is required for updates to happen? Problem and issue reporting. Stuff happens. How will issues be surfaced? How will they be aggregated and responded to? How will you prevent things from slipping through the cracks? Think beyond email. But think minimal or people will avoid reporting. Risk awareness, tracking, and mitigation. What about things that might become an issue but haven’t yet? People used to waste endless hours discussing these. You still need to surface them if you’re going to do any contingency planning. How can you do that in a virtual context? Think beyond meetings. Quality definition and validation. How will people know if they properly completed their assignments? How will reviewers know? How will reviews be performed (and that includes planned, coordinated, reported, and completed)? Think beyond paper, markups, and comments. Think about how quality criteria inform performance and improve reviews. Then think about how to communicate your quality criteria and turn them into work assets. Notification and coordination. When working asynchronously, you often need to know when something is ready for the next step. Think about smart phone notifications and automagically generated text messages. Think about them occurring without human intervention so that sending them isn’t a burden. Training, knowledge, and skills development. This is a new way of working. It won’t be what people are used to. They’ll need to learn about new ways of doing things and what the new expectations are. Only they’ll need to be able to learn remotely and asynchronously. So think recordings instead of meetings. Think online training. Think about micro-training. Think about training that can be linked to assignments or issues for quick consumption. Think about training that’s built right into assignments. Status awareness. How are things? What is the status of all the moving parts through every one of these bullets? Can you see the status in a single picture? Can you drill down? Think dashboards instead of whiteboards. Think about data aggregation that doesn’t require human collating. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to these items. The right solution for you depends on your IT infrastructure, the capabilities of your proposal group, and the skills and reliability of those contributing to your proposals. There are too many tools to count that address these areas individually. But what you need is an integrated solution that is low touch. You want a user-friendly learning curve that doesn’t distract people from making their proposal contributions or increase the effort of making their contributions. You want the opposite. You want to come out of this with a proposal process and a tool set that make things easier than ever. You don't want to convert a process designed for shuffling paper with participants who are co-located. You want to reengineer your process for this brave new world. Just keep your eye on your win rate. Tools that make things easier but lower your win rate are tempting but destructive. Look for tools that make it easier to do the things that increase your win rate instead. Schedule a free assessment. I’m passing some of my time in isolation talking to people and assessing how to improve their pursuit and capture processes in the new world we find ourselves in. We can talk about reengineering how you go about winning business and come out of this better than you ever were before. Use the widget below to grab any open spot on my calendar before they’re filled and I’ll do a free assessment with you.

Pursuit and capture set the stage for the proposal. But while the proposal process gets a lot of attention, pursuit and capture are often left to someone to just figure out. The roles are commonly referred to as sales, business development, or capture. Without much process or at least guidance, the entire pre-RFP phase can devolve into an exercise in lead tracking instead of lead pursuit and capture. This table implies what you should accomplish during pursuit and capture. You can build a process around it. But even if you don't have much of a process, you can improve performance simply by using it as a checklist. Many of these problems can't be solved by the people responsible for pursuit and capture on their own. Each of the layers has a different set of stakeholders. The strategic layer acts as input to pursuit and capture and should be addressed before it even begins. The executive layer contains decisions that are usually made higher up in the organization's hierarchy. The systems layer are things that you should address if you want to win all of your pursuits and not just the one you're chasing in this moment. The pursuit layer is specific to this opportunity, and curiously it's only a small portion of the issues faced. The offering layer requires partnership with the technical and operations side of the company. The proposal layer does not define the proposal effort, but merely what you want to deliver to the start of the proposal. One additional thing that this table can help you realize is how much of a disadvantage you are at if you start your proposal without having solved these problems. If your proposal win rate is low, the first place to start improving it is making sure you've addressed these issues before the proposal even starts.

This program is for people who want to build organizations that reliably win contracts. No. Let me rephrase. This program is for people who want to build their entire company around reliably winning contracts. This program is for people who want to grow by capturing the leads they chase, instead of chasing as many leads as they possibly can until they win something. Convenient format for applied learning and continuous improvement Each month there will be a new topic to focus on: Week 1: Online training in that month's topic. Week 2: Virtual meeting to answer questions, verify understanding, and introduce the assignment. Week 3: More online training and working on the assignment. Week 4: Assignment review and topic discussion. With only one scheduled meeting every two weeks, it's easy to work the course around your schedule. The assignments are designed to produce items of lasting value that are customized to your company. They are not repetitive drills. Each month the exercises will produce one or more checklists, forms, templates, etc. The goal is to demonstrate understanding while implementing things needed for your company to grow. It's applied learning with tangible takeaways and not just instruction.

Instead of looking at preparing proposals as a process, try looking at it as solving problems. A "process" implies steps. Proposal development is reactive, so processes based on steps tend to fail. But solving the problems you will face in preparing a proposal implies the process. The problems you face also imply the goals you should have. Most companies that think they have a proposal process still spend their time solving problems. So looking at those problems in an organized way can help you be better prepared to create your proposal. Here are a dozen proposal problems that are fundamental. There are hundreds of administrivia problems that come up. But they tend to fall under one of these. Solve these problems and you will be able to prepare great proposals. Of course, I have never seen any company, no matter how large, capable, or experienced, solve them all. But there is a clear difference between companies that have solutions in place for most of them and companies that do not. To help you along your journey, I have included links to the solutions and tips related to these problems that you'll find on PropLIBRARY. See also: Proposal Management How should you prepare before the RFP is released? If you think you know what’s in the RFP before you see it, you’re probably just enough wrong to lose. Starting your proposal before the RFP is released is both risky and necessary. The challenge is to understand those risks and mitigate them. Solving how to prepare for your proposal ahead of RFP release is important. It is the only way to make it happen. How many resources do you need, and how should you organize and manage them? How much should you invest in your proposal? What management style and techniques should you use to manage the effort. There is no one-size fits-all approach that works for everyone. So solving how many people you need at your company for your proposals is key to being able to successfully prepare them. How should you manage risk and the inevitable issues that arise? You will make hundreds of trade-off decisions during your proposal. Each one represents a risk. Each one that you don’t make still represents a risk. What should you do to prevent the risks from causing your proposal to lose? Many of those risks will become issues. What will you do to track and resolve those issues? Is writing them down in a notebook really enough? What should happen immediately upon RFP release? Do you know what you'll do as soon as the RFP comes out? Or will you be making it up on the spot? Will you have a kickoff meeting? Do you have your resources and logistics ready to go? How long will it take to get your bid decision made? How much time will you lose before you even start? How do you get the inputs you need for the proposal? How many people will contribute to the proposal? How will you get their proposal input? When will you get their input? In what format do you need their input? Do you know what input you need? Will they be able to supply it? Can you ask for it ahead of time so they have time to gather what you need? How do you produce an outline that fulfills everyone’s expectations and survives without being changed? Whose expectations matter the most? Is it the customer? What are the customer’s expectations? Or does someone at your company think they have a better idea? Do they? Should the writers be in control of the outline or should it be provided to them? Should the outline be based on an RFP compliance matrix? Don’t assume everyone sees the answers to these important questions the same way you do. Once you’ve got the answers then how do you get everyone to agree on the outline before they start writing? If you proceed without a formal decision regarding the outline that is difficult to change, the entire proposal is at risk of a disruptive outline change after writing starts. That kind of makes it important to get everyone on the same page regarding the outline. How do you figure out what to write before you start writing? An outline is not enough to guide the proposal writers to reliably produce a winning proposal. You need a plan for the content of the proposal, and you need it before the writing starts. Herding the cats into doing this is such a challenge that on most proposals people don’t even do it. There is no formal quality methodology on Earth that is based on “then smart people work really hard and just get it right.” If winning matters, you’ll put your heads together, overcome your resistance, and solve how you should plan the content of your proposal before you start writing it. How do you incorporate graphics and visual communication? Not only do you expect people to write something, but you want them to contribute to illustrating it as well? Don’t worry, you only need to include a lot of graphics and make your proposal visual if you want to win. You can create your graphics first and build the text around them, or you can write it and then illustrate it, so long as you end up with an effective message communicated visually. How do you incorporate contracts, pricing, and other stakeholder inputs? If the answer is that you write the proposal and then sprinkle them in, you can do better. If you are planning your content before you write it, that’s the best opportunity to solicit the maximum stakeholder input in a way that will not be disruptive. Pricing inputs can be so important to the text of the proposal, that some companies can build the proposal process around their pricing instead of the text. How do you validate the quality of your draft proposal? How do you know if the draft proposal is good enough? Is that just a matter of opinion? Whose? More importantly, how does the writer know whether it’s any good before it even gets to a review? What criteria define whether it’s good? What should the proposal writers be guided by? How you define quality matters. You can’t seek it or validate it if you can’t first define it. The procedures you use for validating the presence of proposal quality are less important than your ability to define it. How will you produce and submit the final proposal? Whether you are submitting electronic files or hardcopies, it has to get to the customer by their deadline. And because you don’t want to put all that effort into creating a great proposal only to lose in the last step, you should put some effort into it. So, making your final changes and packaging the proposal for delivery. Should you let that be a last minute rush, or force production to go according to plan with quality validation? What is your delivery plan? How many contingencies will you prepare for? How many backups will you have? When you spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in time preparing a proposal, it doesn’t make sense to sweat a couple of grand for duplicate or even triplicate deliveries. How should you use lessons learned, metrics, and measurements to improve your proposals? If you want to get better over time and increase your win rate, you have to change. Instead of being about reporting, brainstorming, or sharing, lessons learned meetings must be about change or they will have no impact. Do your meetings focus on the wrong lessons learned? So how is each stakeholder going to change to improve the next proposal? The best answers to that question will be data driven. What changes have the most impact on your win rate? You can’t rely on the experience of experts for this because your circumstances will be different from their experience. Instead, you should track the correlation between changes and your win rate over time. Try calculating what the impact of a 10% win rate improvement would be to your company. Then put that much effort into metrics, measurements, and win rate analytics.

Mark Amtower and I go back over a decade. That's Mark on the left and me on the right above. We have over 530 mutual connections on LinkedIn. I've been interviewed by Mark for his radio show at least seven times. But on the March 16th show we really got into it and explored the lies that contractors tell in their proposals as well as the huge insights about the proposal process I've had from building MustWin Now. Here are all the times I've been interviewed by Mark for Federal News Network that I could track down: Keys to winning government contracts, March 16, 2020 ‘Playing to win’ in the GovCon market, August 30, 2018 Winning proposals, March 3, 2017 Business development, capture & more, July 2, 2016 Content marketing and RFPs, November 16, 2015 Content marketing in business to government, December 22, 2014 Business development, FSSI, and more, January 15, 2013

Our instincts betray us. Playing it safe will lower your chances of winning. In our regular life, sometimes playing it safe is necessary for continued survival. But in order to have a superior, winning proposal, it must first be different. Different in a way that no one else can match. You don’t get there playing it safe. See also: Proposal Management Anticipation and research. What professionals do is try to anticipate the issues, conduct research, and start the proposal already informed with your mitigations and strategies. Yeah, doing your homework is always best. The strategies below are mainly for procrastinators, outsiders, and underdogs. Make assumptions and document them. This is a classic engineering response. It’s not very accommodating and inflexible. Those traits can lower your chances of winning. If you had an extended amount of time you could try experimenting with different sets of assumptions. But the challenge here is to make winning decisions with the information you have now. Avoid rules. As humans, we like the simple certainty of rules. We like to know exactly what to do and what will happen. But this requires knowledge in full. We may not like it when things are uncertain, but we often live in an uncertain world. The problems caused by rules being applied to circumstances they didn’t anticipate can be major problems. When you don’t know what you need to know, look for solutions based on criteria and incentives over hard inflexible rules. But keep them simple because people crave certainty, even when it's irrational. Identify your risks and prioritize mitigation based on severity. If an analytic approach is the way to go, you can itemize your issues so they can be tracked and resolved. Otherwise, you’re just frantically reacting instead of moving forward deliberately. Seek options. If you can do it more than one way, then offer the options. Explain the pros and cons and let the customer choose. Better yet, arrange the options to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Start with the foundation and build on it. Manage decisions over time. The reason Agile and Spiral methodologies caught on was that customers recognized that they often don’t know all the details on day one. For projects where decisions get made over time, your approach to managing those decisions can be as important as the technical details for implementation. Under some circumstances, a quick decision that might be wrong but can be corrected is better than waiting for certainty. Let the circumstances of the customer’s environment and the nature of the project determine how you will manage those decisions, and use your proposal to demonstrate your insight regarding how to make them. Incentivize the customer. If you have a preference, or concerns like scalability, offer a business and pricing model that incentivizes the outcome you desire while giving the customer flexibility. This is only possible when the customer gives you flexibility in how you construct your pricing model. But for some bids, offering a superior pricing model can matter more than the technical details of your offering. Positioning. Position your approach against the possible customer preferences and concerns so that you show insight into the possibilities while covering them all. Many offerings can be applied in different ways, with different outcomes and characteristics. If it’s all the same to you, then offer the customer choices and help them make those choices. Along the way, you’ll not only be showing flexibility, but also insight. Profiling. If you don’t know the customer or what they prefer, perhaps you can envision what someone like the customer might prefer. You might create multiple possible profiles. And then design your offering and pitch to appeal to each of them. It’s bad when profiling is used in a restrictive way. But if you can use it to enhance the support you offer to someone new, it can be beneficial to them. Empathy. What would you care about if you were the customer? If all else fails, write to that. What would matter to you if you were in their shoes and dealing with their issues? What kind of help and support would you find beneficial? Alternative visions. What do you think should matter to the customer? If you really, really don’t know what the customer cares about, offer them your own vision and see if they go for it. It’s a high-risk strategy, but it can work. Think about how often you are indecisive or under what circumstances you might appreciate a suggestion for a completely different approach. If your vision is that good, it might just be worth ignoring the customer. Avoid muddying the waters. Overlapping issues and unknown variables compound the problem. Try to achieve clarity on as many as possible so you only have to guess about one unknown at a time. For example, if you are dealing with uncertain staffing, aren’t sure about your priorities, don’t know what the customer wants, and haven’t given any thought to what your win strategies should be, you’re going to have difficulty untangling all that. If you had answers to all of it except knowing what the customer wants you’d have a fighting chance at coming up with an approach that has a chance of working. Differentiate. Get out of the box. Be a contrarian. Go where the other competitors won’t. If there is something better, it will be hiding there. Don’t fear what you don’t know. Don’t retreat into your comfort zone because you are afraid of getting things wrong. What you don’t know might be an opportunity to come up with something better than what those who think they do know will put on the table. They might be more in the dark than they realize. A solution that addresses the challenges you face has a good chance of being a better solution than one that didn’t recognize the challenges at all. The last thing you want to do is to defer to authority. This is replacing strategy with CYA. The real problem with it is that the only authority that matters is the customer. They will decide whether you win or lose. So they are who you need to appeal to. And if you don’t know what will appeal to them the most, you need a strategy to maximize your chances. And if you do lose, it’s better to have given the customer a strong proposal that made them think about it than it is to have given the customer an ordinary, forgettable proposal that took no risks and held back because of what you didn’t know.

If you suddenly have to do your proposals with everyone working remotely, we want to help. From now until the end of April, we're going well beyond normal technical support and providing all the free hand-holding we can to help you keep your proposal efforts on track using MustWin Now. We'll walk you through getting your RFP online, creating your compliance matrix, and preparing your proposal content plans. You still need to subscribe to get access, but we won't charge you anything for the extra help. MustWin Now is a great tool for working on proposals remotely because it is 100% web-based and designed for winning. MustWin Now is built to provide what people need to know and then help them figure out what should go in their proposals to maximize their chances of winning. MustWin Now is very different from how people use generic tools like SharePoint on their proposals. It's not a simple file management tool built with no awareness of the proposal process. In fact, MustWin Now doesn't do file management. Instead it helps people collaborate, gather, and assess the information that they need and turn it into a blueprint for winning. If you have SharePoint, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or even good ol' FTP, you can use them to manage the files while you use MustWin Now to figure out what should go in those files and do it smoothly even though everyone is remote. MustWin Now makes it easier to collect the information you need from remote participants You can use Pursuit Capture Forms or Proposal Input Forms to distribute a list of questions, figure out what to do about the answers, and then map the action items to the proposal outline so that they show up in your proposal section plans. This flows the information to where it's needed and puts it right in front of proposal writers while they are working. They are easy to use and can be customized. Understanding Pursuit Capture Forms | How to use proposal input forms to improve your win rates Working with subject matter experts remotely See also: About MustWin Now I like to have MustWin Now onscreen when I'm interviewing subject matter experts on the telephone. I also use it during proposal strategy meetings or to get the input of multiple stakeholders. When people say things that can help win the proposal, I use MustWin Now to instantly capture them as an instruction in the relevant proposal section(s). All it takes is one click. I use them to build out the section plan and load it up with highly relevant insight before any writing begins. Interviewing subject matter experts using MustWin Now focuses participants onto turning what they know into what should go on paper in the proposal, making it much more efficient than trying to take notes during open-ended interviews. If you end the discussion with a review of the instructions you plan to give the section writer, you get a preliminary assessment of whether the section plan covers everything the subject matter expert and you think it needs to. With MustWin Now, you may not even have to interview your subject matter experts. You can just give them access to MustWin Now and ask them to enter some instructions for what they think the section should address. That way you don't even have to synch up on the phone at the same time. They don't have to write the entire section and articulate everything to make a contribution. If they just itemize a few things in a list it can be a huge help to whoever does the writing. You may choose to edit their entries to incorporate and fine tune the presentation, win strategies, and other elements. It can be an online tool for collaboration about what to write before you write it. Then you only have to write it once. And you can do it all remotely. The instructions you capture can also work like a checklist to verify that the draft addressed everything it was supposed to. Instead of some talking with some notes followed by some writing followed by a subjective review with many chances for information loss or changing goalposts along the way, with MustWin Now you get a list of instructions and quality criteria. They can be reviewed by stakeholders before you write. They can be used to verify that what got written followed the instructions. You have traceability of the flow of information into and out of the draft. Helping people figure out what to write while working remotely MustWin Now enables you to capture input and contributions and put them in front of proposal writers while they work, along with the relevant RFP requirements. They get constant guidance no matter where they are. And it's not just what to write. It's how to write it. Writers not only get the full text of the RFP requirements onscreen next to them as they write, but they also get guidance from the instructions you added. And when they are uncertain, they can ask other people and capture what to do as new instructions. This is key to reducing proposal risk. When working remotely, talking in circles and then turning to a blank page to write increases the risk of failure even more than when people are co-located. But the best part is that your instructions can go beyond just what to write about and help them realize how they should present it. If you want certain things emphasized, points made, or themes substantiated, with MustWin Now you can do that in a format that provides inspiration and reminders while writers are working. Wherever they happen to be. See some examples of proposal content planning using MustWin Now Improving the quality of what people write MustWin Now enables you to get a much better quality first draft from writers, even though you may never see or meet them in person. In addition to the RFP and instructions, MustWin Now enables you to put your quality criteria in front of proposal writers while they are working. This enables you to inform your writers about what they need to accomplish in order to pass their proposal reviews. It's better to verify and write once than to manage infinite rewrites when working on proposals remotely MustWin Now makes it easy to create a Proposal Content Plan that can be validated before the writing starts. During writing MustWin Now makes it easy for proposal writers to self-assess their work, using the same quality criteria that reviewers will use. And the reviewers get more guidance than a copy of the RFP. They can use the Proposal Content Plan to verify that the draft addressed everything it was supposed to, in the ways it was supposed to. MustWin Now can keep a proposal from becoming an exercise in writing draft after draft in the vain hope of stumbling over a great proposal. If you think managing draft after draft without losing track of something is hard, it's much more difficult and far more risky when doing a proposal remotely. The result is a better first draft and much, much lower odds of a proposal restart at the review stage. Instead of infinite rewrites until you run out of time and submit what you have and trying to manage that while working remotely, you get a solid baseline while there's still time to fine tune it. Plus some new things that will help even more We're adding some new features to MustWin Now that will make it even more useful when working remotely. Think assignment management and issue tracking. Think built-in proposal coordination and real-time reporting. If proposal management is really nothing but problem solving, then think about what the perfect tool for dealing with everything might be, and make it remotely accessible while everyone is working. We might even add file storage for those who don't have an IT infrastructure that supports working on proposals remotely. If you want to know more, reach out and we'll tell you what we're up to.

It can be very disruptive to proposals if you aren't prepared to do them with everyone working remotely. We're doing two big things to help those of you who suddenly find you have to do your proposals with everyone working from home. We want to hear from both providers and companies who may need help. If you need help from people with experience and resources for working on remote proposals, you should check back here frequently. We'll be adding providers to this page. If you are a relevant provider, we want to add you to the directory we're creating. Please recommend resources that you have experience with. Use the green button below to message us and help us all help each other. The first thing we're doing to help is this page It's going to become a resource directory. Anyone who can help companies with getting set up to do their pursuits remotely can use the button below to let me know and I'll add you to this page. I'm not interested in people who just are willing to work remotely, because that's going to be everyone. I am interested in people or companies that host remote working solutions, can set them up, or can advise companies on how to set up and conduct a proposal where all of the participants are remote. For example, providers that either host, develop for, or help companies implement proposal-specific SharePoints or other platforms would be a good match. If you have experience setting up and directing remote proposal teams, you'd also be a match. If you are a provider, copy the format of our directory listing below and use the green button to send us your information. The second thing we're doing to help is adding file management to MustWin Now I use MustWin Now for remote proposal management and subject matter expert collaboration right now. With file management, it becomes an instant remote proposal writing platform for companies that don't have anything ready to use. This is a new feature and pretty basic. MustWin Now already supports planning your pursuit, turning capture intel into action, planning what to write, and conducting reviews. Being able to also manage the files will enable proposal teams to take a proposal all the way to final production in MustWin Now while working remotely. Being cloud-based mean you can have your team working within the hour. See our directory entry below for more information. Directory of remote proposal resources We're just getting started and still collecting info from providers. Check back often since we'll be updating this as frequently as we can. Provider: CapturePlanning.com, LLC Remote capabilities and resources: CapturePlanning.com, LLC is the parent company of PropLIBRARY and MustWin Now. PropLIBRARY is a web-based proposal training resource. MustWin Now is an online tool for pursuit, capture, and proposal planning. You can use MustWin Now to gather pursuit intel, turn it into action items, prepare your compliance matrix and proposal outline, create section plans for proposal writers, and support proposal reviews. You can use it to gather information from subject matter experts and figure out how to incorporate it in the proposal. Because they are web-based tools, they are ready for immediate use by remote proposal teams. We can provide consulting support including pursuit strategy, proposal management, proposal writing, and quality assurance reviews. We can help you get your team onto MustWin Now, train them as needed, and fill gaps in your proposal staffing. URLs: https://proplibrary.com https://proplibrary.com/proplibrary/item/833-mustwin-now-everything-you-need-to-know/ Provider: MichaelEdits.com Remote capabilities and resources: I am a resource you can use remotely to help you maintain proposal quality. Email your bids and proposals to michael@michaeledits.com for prompt, meticulous proofreading and editing. I typically work with Word documents or Google Docs. I bring experience editing proposals. Let me know your deadline. If we set things up ahead of time, your writers can email their files straight to me on the way to final production with minimal impact on your schedule. URL: http://michaeledits.com http://www.michaeledits.com/proofreading-strategies.html

If you have an RFP coming out soon and want our help to get into position and win the proposal, you should reach out to us below so we can discuss options. We can use MustWin Now if you want, or we can use your existing corporate assets and we'll show you what we've learned about turning your insights into action.

The first time I decided to throw out the proposal process and start over was in 2003, when something quite unexpected happened while I was giving a presentation at a conference to a group of my peers. I was talking about improving proposal red team reviews and I had some good tips that I was proud of. In the middle of talking I realized that all my tips, and anything I had ever heard anyone else ever say about proposal reviews, was simply coping with a broken process and none of it would actually fix anything. This somewhat terrifying moment led to me thinking about what it would really require to achieve proposal quality. I threw out the color team approach to proposal reviews and instead built a review methodology based on being able to define actual quality criteria for your proposals. Then I realized it needed a way to plan the proposal content around those criteria. After that I realized that the pre-RFP process also needed some structure in order to deliver the information that people need, which was now fully itemized. And thus, the MustWin Process was born in 2004. I spent the next 14 years expanding and improving the MustWin Process. I found ways to tweak it, but never found a structural problem with it. In fact, in 14 years I never found a better way to structure the proposal process. It's not like I set out to do this... In 2018, I was doing what amounted to some research and development related to doing the MustWin Process online. I was not creating proposal software. I didn’t even want to create proposal software. I had a mild interest in creating some online tools for implementing the MustWin Process. But I found a way to do a drag and drop compliance matrix online. And while the geek in me thought that was really cool technology, it doesn’t actually change the process. I was wrong. In fact, it changes everything about the process. Over the next year, I had many surprise discoveries about how changing user interaction can change the process itself. What I learned became MustWin Now, a tool that brought the goals of the MustWin Process online but didn't try to do things the same way we have to do them on paper. Once the compliance matrix is online, everything can be related to the proposal outline. Even the work you do before the RFP is released can get mapped to the proposal outline when it is created. Quality criteria, assignments, instructions for writers, issues, resources, and more. Not only is it all related to the outline, but it changes the process completely. It all goes from being a sequence to just being part of what goes into creating proposal sections. See also: About MustWin Now People don’t really follow steps to create a proposal. What they do is add value to the proposal as it grows from being an outline and becomes a document. They follow the RFP. They figure out how to articulate what it will take to win. They write to incorporate not only the RFP requirements, but a huge list of considerations that include things like differentiators, evaluation criteria, offering design, reasons for the customer to select you, features, benefits, proof points, win strategies, and more. Once the writing is done, proposal reviews should not be subjective opinion-fests, but should validate that everything that was supposed to go into the proposal made it in and fulfills the proposal quality criteria. Doing this on paper is a nightmare. Nobody wants to create paper in order to create more paper called a proposal. When they resist, the cost is that the people working on the proposal don’t get the information they need to create a proposal that reliably reflects what it will take to win. But doing it online makes it feel like you’re just answering the same questions people would ask gathered around a table discussing it. It’s not like doing paperwork in order to write. You’re just getting your thoughts and the information you need in order. It turns out that it's really about thinking and not producing paper. Paper is the last step. Not the first. The proposal process is about gathering the information you need, figuring out what to do about it, and validating that what you're doing reflects what it will take to win. Then you use what you figured out to put it on paper. The result is a huge improvement to your first draft. As much as we can preach about the perils of figuring out what your proposal should be by writing endless drafts, with the hope of somehow tripping over it before you run out of time, people keep doing just that. But when you move it online people’s behavior changes in surprising ways. Doing a proposal online properly is nothing like just moving your paper-based process into the cloud. It changes what doing a proposal means. Of course, people don’t immediately begin doing everything properly just the way they should every time. But even a little bit of better planning and better thinking makes a huge difference in the outcome. The ability to drive even just a few win strategies into the proposal with a few suggestions for maximizing the evaluation score makes a huge difference in the first draft. When people sit around a table talking about these things it usually has little or no impact on what gets on paper. But when they create a section plan that they can have onscreen next to the windows they are writing in, the very first draft they produce reflects what it should. Reviews can validate whether anything got left out, but really they end up focusing on improvement instead of whether the proposal missed the mark. And the best part is, they aren’t following a process. They are just doing what feels natural --- getting their thoughts together and then writing against what amounts to a checklist. So I find myself reengineering the proposal process for the second time I’m reengineering the process in a way that doesn’t start from paper-based procedures. I'm doing it in a way that never would have occurred to me without a happy accident that led to me rethinking it all. Again. I’m reengineering it to support thinking, writing, and validation instead of moving paper. I’m not starting from “steps.” I’m not even starting by looking at what is needed to create a “proposal.” I’m starting from the user interface. What is the ideal user interface for winning in writing? My second effort at reengineering is more about user interface design than it is about process design. Maybe that’s why proposal development hasn’t significantly changed in 30 years. Maybe it’s because it should have never been about the process. Maybe it should have been about user interaction from the beginning. We're looking for a company that wants help getting ready for an RFP that is coming out, and who wants to do the best possible job of getting into position to win it. Then we want to help them create the winning proposal. We can use MustWin Now if you want, or we can use your existing corporate assets and we'll show you what we've learned about turning your insights into action. Reach out to us below and we can discuss options.

If you tell lies like those below, you hurt your credibility. Even when you tell them with good intent they still hurt your credibility. Yet it seems like everyone does it. And if you tell the same lies that they do, your proposal will lack differentiators. Even though people know that customers only buy from people they trust, they still say things like these that the customer can see straight through. The point here isn’t to hold a trial over the offense of lying, degrees of untruth, or whether it's true when you tell them. The point here is to realize that there are better ways to articulate why the customer should select you than to say things with such glaring credibility issues like: See also: Great Proposals We’re better because we have experience. The fact that your company has experience is not the lie. But whether it makes you better probably is. None of the people who had that experience are still with the company, and even if they are they probably won’t be working on this project. Besides, the odds are that nothing tangible was created from that experience that the company owns or will use on projects for other customers. Experience proves what a company did, and not what it can or will do. We can staff this project because we have [#] employees. But because they are all working on other projects, we’ll have to do just as much recruiting as smaller companies. Contractors can’t carry staff who are not assigned to projects for very long, if at all. Since those staff are all working on other projects full time, the idea that they could somehow consult with or involve them is unlikely. For all practical purposes, a company’s total staffing count has approximately zero impact on their ability to staff new projects. Your project will be of the utmost importance to us. Just like all of the other projects and competing priorities we have. “Utmost” in this context has no meaning. The importance of a project to a company has more to do with its revenue, profitability, and impact on past performance. We are fully committed to the success of this project. We’ll only pull our punches if that’s what we need to do to make this project we underbid profitable. We say we’re committed because we’re not at all sure how we’re going to or if we’re going to be able to achieve success on this project. If we knew, we’d say that instead. But we are really hopeful. We intend to be successful, whether we are or not. Customer satisfaction is our highest priority. So long as we're not distracted by all those other priorities that are actually higher. Quality is our highest priority. We do great work, except when we don’t. We have good reasons when we don’t. But it’s not like other things were higher priorities. We will comply with all the requirements in the RFP. Unless it would not be profitable to do so. Or we can’t figure out how. Or things take longer than we expect. Or… As a small business we are more nimble than larger companies. We’re all wearing 10 different hats, but we can turn on a dime. As a large business we have all the resources needed. They are all fully committed to other projects and you’ll never see them. But we do have them. We are ready to start on Day One of the contract. We’ll start by signing the contract. After that, we’ve got some recruiting to do, some credentialing, a project management office to get set up, and a bunch more action items before we can actually do productive work. As the incumbent we can start immediately. Never mind those pesky contract, staffing changes that require onboarding and training, and requirement changes. They won’t slow us down one bit! We have a successful track record. When you only look at the successes, it’s quite a record! How is it that companies with successful track records who prioritize customer service and quality don’t have perfect past performance scores? Just sayin’. We have a [insert your preferred lie] turnover rate. Just don’t ask how we calculated it or if we included incumbent contracts, voluntary or involuntary terminations, contract loss terminations, staff reassigned to other contracts, promoted staff who have to be replaced, medical leaves or disabilities, recently added positions, closed positions, etc… We bring capabilities in every aspect of the statement of work. We’ve even done some of them before. Technically this one is not a lie, because we have infinite capabilities because we can do anything we can hire people to do. And we always deliver on time. Oops. That one may not be true. Our staff have a combined total of [insert large number] years of experience. If you have 10 staff who worked for one year on something, is that the same as having 10 years of experience? So while the math is accurate, it’s a lie because it’s a substitution of something that’s not the same. Most of our business comes from repeat customers. If this is not true, it’s a sign that you’re losing most of your recompetes. In other words, every contractor does most of their business with repeat customers. So a better claim would be that we have never lost a recompete. But that probably would be a lie. Our mission is to [fill in the blank]. Your mission is really to win new contracts. Contract growth is the source of all opportunities in a company. Maintaining a high past performance score is a more powerful motivator than a mission statement. You only get to do the things you have in your current mission statement if you win new contracts. Nobody in your company is held accountable for mission statement fulfillment. But if you don’t win new contracts, heads will roll. We understand… When we found out about your needs because you released an RFP, we immediately checked out your website after deciding to bid and now feel so confident that we understand your needs that we’ve copied and pasted your mission statement into our proposal to prove it. We understand you so well that we’ll fully comply with all RFP requirements in our proposal even though our project team won’t even read it before starting the project. Well, maybe the project manager will. We're so good and understand so deeply we don’t even have to prove it, we can just state it. Do you think your customers don't realize any of this? What might they be thinking when they read your proposal? Behind each of my snarky comments is a hint at what to say instead of the lie. Every negative can be rephrased as a positive. So dump the lies that hurt your credibility and say something direct and authentic. Acknowledge the issues that make these statements lies and tell the customer what you do about them. And have fun ghosting your competition who are still saying these tired clichés. If you need help taking your proposals to a higher level, just let me know. I promise you will be my highest priority as I will achieve the utmost in customer satisfaction while delivering the best quality to my repeat customers through my amazing capabilities of being committed to the success of your proposal. If any one of those is good to use, then why isn't it better to use them all? Check out your past proposals. If you find you’ve made these mistakes in the past, reach out to me and I’ll show you how to write a much better proposal. And if your competition continues to make the same mistakes, your win rate will go way up.

This module is a chance to finalize the work from the previous exercises and prepare them for implementation. The course materials for this module provide an opportunity to reflect on what you have created so far, look at it from several perspectives, and ensure it is ready for real-world use. During this module you should review and make any improvements needed to the process items you have created. You should also apply final formatting and production to them (logos, headers, footers, usage statements, instructions, notices, etc.). Make whatever changes you think should be made so that people will be able to successfully implement the items you have created. Add new items if you think they are needed. Delete any items that aren't relevant or won't be used. When this module is complete, you should have a set of items for the pre-proposal process that are ready for use on live pursuits.

This module takes the approach to building lists of questions from the last module and applies it proposals that start at RFP release. The difference is subtle but important. Proposal inputs forms must ask questions that can be answered immediately and probably without being able to conduct much research. They are about discovering what you already know and articulating it in a way that proposal writers can use. They can have a big impact. Having some information to work with is a lot better than having none. Building a proposal around win strategies formed based on what you think or assume is better than makes them up based on the RFP. There is another benefit. It forces proposal writers to think through what they really need in terms of input. You can't train your organization to bring you the right input if you can't explain to them what that is. When those responsible for gathering intel have proposal input forms, they can begin to anticipate the needs of the proposal writers. This module has less new material to read and will require more time working on the exercise. It will require more time in introspection, thinking about what to ask for in order to put your response to the RFP requirements into context. When you combine proposal input forms with pursuit capture forms, you get materials to provide guidance whether the pursuit starts well in advance or suddenly.

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Here is an example of proposal writing for you to consider. I review a lot of proposals and see this style of writing all the time. In fact, a lot of people try to emulate it. How does this sound to you? Our company is based on the belief that our customers' needs are of the utmost importance. Our entire team is committed to meeting those needs. As a result, a high percentage of our business is from repeat customers and referrals. We would welcome the opportunity to earn your trust and deliver you the best service in the industry. It sounds perfectly ordinary. Lots of business documents sound like this. Actually, it sucks. Any one of those sentences is bad. Together it could be the worst proposal paragraph I have ever seen. The big problem with it is that it doesn't actually say anything credible. Well actually there are a quite a few problems with it. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the whole thing is a problem. There is nothing redeemable about it. And yes, it's that bad. And it is way too common. Consider: See also: Customer Perspective No one cares what your company "is based on." They care about what your company will do or deliver. If being based on something increases your ability to do or deliver, they care about how and not the fact that it was based on something. No one cares about your "beliefs." They care about what you will do. If there are reasons about your beliefs that produce better results or make your offering a better alternative, then they care about those reasons. Of course the "customers’ needs are of utmost importance." The very first sentence is not only a statement of the obvious, it’s also true of every other company bidding and does nothing to differentiate you. No one cares about your commitment. Or believes it. If you really are committed, let that show in what you do. If your commitment doesn’t lead to you doing things differently or better, then what good is it? You don’t need to say you are committed. You do need to be the best alternative. "...meeting those needs." Is that the best you can offer? Meeting their needs? Won’t everyone bidding be meeting the customer’s needs? Or at least claiming it with equal enthusiasm? "A high percentage of our business..." Does the customer really care about how you make your money? If they did, they would have asked about it in the RFP. If this was an important point, you’d quantify it. A percentage of repeat customers (as opposed to percentage of your revenue) might be a good thing, but it’s not going to impact your evaluation one bit. And oh by the way, if you are a government contractor the percentage of repeat customers had better be pretty darn high or you’re losing your recompetes. In the unlikely event that the customer does bother to think about it, it’s probably also true for all of your competitors. "We would welcome the opportunity..." This is not only a statement of the obvious, but it’s a self-serving one. Of course you welcome any viable business opportunity. "...to earn your trust." You’ve already missed one opportunity. Your introduction actually hurts your creditability. A promise from a vendor to earn the customer’s trust has very little value. But the actions you take to prove that you are trustworthy don’t. Transparency, oversight, accountability, quality assurance, past performance, testimonials, and more count. But this statement doesn’t. "...best service in the industry." Not only is this an unsubstantiated claim, it’s not believable. It’s a big industry. I question whether the firm writing this, or any of their competitors, has the best service in the industry. They might be pretty good. They might even have happy customers. But promising something that you probably can’t deliver does not help your credibility. If you think the quality of your service is something worth bragging about, then provide proof. Don’t brag. But do cite the evidence. And don’t make it about you, make it about what the customer will get as a result of selecting you. Take those parts out and there is nothing left. This paragraph is written to please the writer. It is not written to please the customer. It’s about how the writer wants to see their company and not about what the customer needs to see in order to make their decision. Lots of people write about how they’d like to be seen rather than what the customer cares about. Just so you know, I’ve written most of those sentences or their equivalents at one time or another. But never all at once. And not in the last decade or two. Learn faster than I did. How would I rewrite it? I wouldn’t. I’d delete it and start over. There is nothing in the example above that I’d bring forward. It says nothing of substance about the customer, company, or offering. How I'd structure the replacement introduction would depend on the RFP, customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. But typically, I would: Write an opening sentence about what the customer will get by selecting my company. Write a sentence introducing my company in terms of its most significant differentiators. Write one or more sentences linking our differentiators to the most significant evaluation criteria. Possibly reference proof points in the following paragraphs, if it can be done without being redundant. Think about what the customer needs to see in order to make a decision regarding what their best alternative is. Then help them make that decision with substance that goes beyond beliefs, commitments, statements of the obvious (no matter how grandiose), and unsubstantiated claims. Don’t write your proposal to sound good. Write your proposal to help the evaluator make a decision.

We publish our newsletter weekly. You will receive the next one when it comes out. Please make sure to put it on your email white list or move it to your priority tab so that your email software doesn't hide it from you. Here is the link for downloading your copy of our eBook: Turning Your Proposals Into a Competitive Advantage Here are some other useful links: Beginners should start here PropLIBRARY Subscription information But really, all you need to do is explore the menu at the top and follow your nose. Try the "Best Practice Library" menu. Finally, here are links to the online versions of the articles referenced in the eBook above: Why your good proposal is going to lose What is the simplest, easiest proposal process to get started with? Bid/no bid decisions: 6 approaches to making them and 10 things the process must get right How do you win before the RFP is even released? How to write a better technical approach To write better proposals, first learn how to read them like a customer How to tell if a proposal is well written The problem with proposal re-use repositories What is more important to your business than lead generation? 9 places you should invest to increase your proposal win rate Go back to the previous page

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