Carl Dickson

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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Most proposals are lost before the RFP is released. When you haven’t discovered what it will take to win and all you have to go by is what’s in the RFP, you are starting from a competitive disadvantage. You want to be the other company. The one that is starting from a competitive advantage. But even when you have staff “looking into it,” “researching it,” “chasing the lead,” “marketing the customer,” or whatever else you want to call it and doing it ahead of RFP release, most companies fail because their efforts don’t deliver what is needed to write a winning proposal. They try hard to gather what they think will be useful, but it turns out to be mostly disconnected from the proposal. The handoff from business development to the proposal often takes place in meetings. Sometimes there is no tangible handoff. It's all talk. With a very low signal to noise ratio. Sometimes you get slides from progress meetings. When you do have a dedicated capture effort, the handoff is often a report or a capture plan. Putting together a list of high-level theme statements that aren’t tied to anything that impacts the evaluation criteria and calling it a day is not going to help you win. Pre-RFP briefing slides and capture plans are usually not prepared for winning the proposal. They are prepared to justify the pursuit. That subtle distinction becomes important when you sit down to write the proposal. And while most capture plans address why we think we can win, they often skip how to build the proposal around it. Most business development and capture efforts amount to we think we can win and the proposal team will figure out how. In isolation. I know because I’ve parachuted in to try to rescue companies in this position way too many times. What’s missing? See also: Information Advantage The reasons most information gathered before the proposal starts never impacts the proposal are because: The information you gather before the RFP is released is not mapped to the proposal outline. When you don't do this, your message will tend to be at too high a level and it will leave gaps. You think you’ve identified hot buttons. But they amount to “the customer isn’t happy with quality” or “the customer likes us” and oh by the way, there is no section in the RFP to specifically address what you have, no evaluation criteria relevant to it, and the proposal team has no idea what to do about any of it. Should they make things up or ignore them? If it’s not tied to the outline, it’s not clear where to talk about it or what to say about it. You gather information but you don't provide instructions for proposal writers on what to say and do about it. Most companies assume that proposal writers can take some raw intel and win a proposal with it. If the proposal writers can find the right place to work it in and know why it matters, that might be true. But usually it’s just not that clear. That may explain why most companies have such a low win rate. They think they are trying really hard, and they are. They just aren’t working effectively. Without both of these, your win rate drops. Gathering information is not enough. It’s understandable how this happens There is no outline or evaluation criteria during the pre-RFP business development and capture phases. People have to gather intel and do their work without knowing what the outline will be. They have little control over what intel they’ll be able to find. Their mission is to prospect for that intel and not to work within the proposal structure that doesn’t even exist yet. But if they don’t roll their sleeves up and map their contributions to the outline after RFP release, then they haven’t completed what is needed from them to close the sale with a win. The people who have direct insight about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment must explain how to use those insights and not assume that writers can take high-level ambiguous statements not specifically related to anything in the proposal and somehow create a winning proposal out of them. They must map their insights to specific proposal sections in the context of the evaluation criteria for their efforts to impact whether they win. It can be done Doing all this is not easy. I didn’t even realize how important it is until I built MustWin Now and integrated pre-RFP intelligence with the compliance matrix function. In MustWin Now customer, opportunity, and competitive insights are easy to gather in a useful form. With just a few clicks users convert the raw intel into instructions for proposal writers that explain what to say or do about the intel. Then, as soon as the RFP hits the street, the instructions get added to the compliance matrix. The result is that when writers first see their sections they not only see the RFP requirements, but they also see the intel that’s relevant to their section along with what they should do about it. It makes it look easy to create proposals based on effective, validated pre-RFP intel and win strategies. But try doing it manually. Try doing it on paper. It’s not so easy. It’s just necessary. You can and should manually convert your intel into instructions for proposal writers. You can and should manually map it all to the proposal as part of building your compliance matrix. You can and should create section plans for writers so that they know what they are supposed to write before they write it. But you probably won’t. Even though you already know you should. My favorite part about using MustWin Now is watching people just figure out their win strategies and incorporate them into their sections without realizing what a huge accomplishment it is. They probably don’t even realize that their competitors are struggling with it, trying really hard, and ultimately not being that effective. That sounds kind of negative. But look at their win rates…

Normally to get MustWin Now you have to get a subscription to PropLIBRARY and pay per user. We’ve come up with an alternative approach that will enable you to try it on a single proposal before committing to a subscription. Because we’re talking about a live proposal, we’re offering this with a concierge service. We have three goals... Make sure you have a great proposal experience even though you’re trying a new approach, while providing a safety net to ensure that introducing a new tool into a live proposal doesn’t cause problems Eliminate the learning curve and make sure that you get the most benefit out of using MustWin Now Show you how to maximize your win probability using MustWin Now We want you to decide to continue using MustWin Now to increase your win probability on all your future pursuits. Your access to MustWin Now will be limited to a single pursuit and will last until the proposal is submitted. We can start before the RFP is released, and you can use the Pursuit Capture Forms to prepare for the proposal. Your staff will be users of MustWin Now, and will: Answer the Pursuit Capture and Proposal Input Form questions Validate the compliance matrix and outline Contribute to and validate the proposal content plan Determine what to offer and how to price it Be responsible for reading and understanding all of the terms, conditions, and requirements in the RFP Write the proposal based on the plan Manage the entire proposal process So basically, your staff will be doing a proposal using MustWin Now, and we’ll be helping you get up to speed on how to best use it. What we’ll do to help you get up to speed using MustWin Now: Provide orientations for your stakeholders to provide training and guidance as needed Set the pursuit up for you in MustWin Now and configure all the options. Set up your users. You can have as many users as you need for your proposal. Enter the RFP into MustWin Now for you and build the draft compliance matrix and proposal outline. We’ll guide you through validating your compliance matrix. Provide advice and support to help you win that goes beyond just technical support. Assist with preparing and validating the proposal content plan. When proposal writing starts, we fade out. Unless you want to retain us as consultants. To do these things we’ll participate in up to 8 online meetings. This give us the flexibility to respond to your needs while setting expectations so we can deliver all this for a fixed price. The meetings may include orientations, strategy discussions, content planning sessions, reviews, etc. Typically we’ll do an orientation session for the pre-RFP pursuit, compliance matrix, and proposal content plan. You might want us to attend your kickoff meeting, brief reviewers or executives, etc. We’ll have working sessions with the staff completing the Pursuit Capture Forms, validating the compliance matrix, contributing to the proposal content plan, and validating that it’s ready for proposal writing. And we’ll have some tasks that we’ll do in between calls and meetings, like entering the RFP, user account management, working on the compliance matrix and proposal outline, and our own contributions to the Proposal Content Plan. How much does it cost? Because it's tied to using MustWin Now, we can do this for a simple fixed price of $2,500, including all the subscription-level access your team needs during the proposal. What comes after the proposal is submitted? If you continue to use PropLIBRARY after the proposal ends, you'll pay the low monthly cost based on the number of users and we’ll deduct the upfront portion of the cost. At 15 users, you’ll be getting $2,395 in up-front costs waived and only paying $215 per month for your users to continue having access to PropLIBRARY and MustWin Now. If you want even more support, we can provide it We do offer consulting services and can provide expertise or fill gaps to help finish your proposal. We’ll have to discuss the level of effort and how much it will cost. For example, we can: Participate in the review of the draft proposal. How many reviews? What is the scope of the review? Help write the proposal. Because we set up the compliance matrix and content plan, we'll have precise information about the size and complexity of what needs to be written and will need fewer hours than we'd normally estimate for this task. Ask for a quote. Manage and lead the proposal process. This usually requires a high level of effort. Let’s talk about it. How do we move forward? Let’s have a conversation so we can answer your questions and get to know each other. If you decide you want to move forward, we'll send an invoice through PropLIBRARY. When you pay it online, we can get started immediately. Use the calendar below to let us know when you'd like to talk about it. If you just have a quick question, click the green button and send it to us. A quick note for consultants… If you want to do something similar for your customers, with you providing the concierge services, click the button to set up a conversation and I'll explain how that can work.

I review a lot of proposals for companies, and one thing that I frequently see is that what they tell me about their customer, opportunity, and competitive insights didn’t make it onto paper. There are a few reasons for this. When you create a single list of “themes” for your proposal, they tend to be at too high of a level and they don’t map to the proposal outline. There are redundancies and gaps. They also don’t map to the RFP. So when people respond to the requirements, they don’t do it in the context of your themes. What they tend to do is write a merely compliant proposal and then go to the list and see where they can sprinkle in the too high-level themes. The result is that while you think you're pressing the customer’s “hot buttons,” the reality is they have little or no impact on your proposal score. But the worst part is that by watering down your insights into high level theme statements, you lose the insights. You talk about them for hours in meetings, but they never make it onto paper in the proposal where they can impact your win probability. You need to take action. You need to take action on your insights. All that intel you’ve spent so much time gathering… you need to take action on it or it is meaningless. First, you need to itemize your insights. What do you know that matters? What is your information advantage? Then for each insight, ask yourself, “What should the proposal writers do about it?” Should they use the insight to: See also: About MustWin Now Make a point in the proposal? Improve your evaluation score? Be the benefit or result of your approach? Subtly ghost the competition by positioning your offering against their weakness? Address unwritten requirements? Show a real depth of understanding by showing insight beyond what others know? Anticipate and mitigate customer concerns? Show that by selecting your proposal they will not only get RFP compliance, but will also get what your insight tells you they also want? Properly interpret customer terminology? Design a better offering? Provide guidance for making estimates, especially regarding any difference between RFP estimates and reality? Position what’s going to be written against something in addition to the RFP? You can’t count on any of these things happening if you don’t identify the actions to be taken based on your insights. A list of themes will not do this for you. A list of themes is merely putting the ball in the proposal writers' hands and hoping they’ll discover a play that you didn’t. To do this manually, you can create a matrix of insights and map it to proposal sections and RFP items like the evaluation criteria. You can do this in a spreadsheet. The way I prefer to do it is using MustWin Now. In MustWin Now, insights are gathered using Pursuit Capture Forms that: Provide questions that help contributors get to the insights on what they know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment Enable each insight to be quickly converted into instructions that proposal writers can take action on Enable those insights to be shown to proposal reviewers who can confirm that the design actions were taken and are effective This is how MustWin Now drives win strategies into the proposal to improve your chances of winning.

Put the RFP aside, just for a moment. Meditate or ponder on the following before you start typing. Ask yourself, "Why should the customer select my offering over their other alternatives." Reach beyond your company's experience and qualifications. Reach all the way to why the customer will be better off if they select you, and how what they will get will be superior if they select you. Consider what matters or should matter to the customer about what you are going to write about. See also: Great Proposals Now look at it through the lens of differentiation. What are the reasons why the customer should select you that no one else can offer? How will what the customer gets by selecting you be different and better than what anyone else can offer? Take all of that and consolidate it into the points you want to make. Everything you write should make a point. You don't want to write a pointless proposal. When you know what points you want to make you are ready to start organizing your proposal sections. In what sequence should you address your points? How should you group them? It’s time to go back to the RFP. Look at the instructions in the RFP before you look at the performance requirements. Build your organization around what the instructions ask for. Be very literal and use their words and headings. Figure out how to reorganize the points you want to make within the RFP's instructions. Do not get too attached to how you want to organize things. Organize them so that everything is where the customer expects to find them. And that will be where the RFP asks for them. Next look at the evaluation criteria in the RFP. What do they need to see for you to get the maximum score? Again, be very literal and use their words. Rewrite the points you want to make so that they maximize your score against the RFP. You want the customer to be able to easily give you the highest score because of the points you made. You want the customer to be able to find the evaluation criteria by keyword searching for them. Now look at the performance requirements in the RFP. Whatever you do, don't try to figure out your approaches by writing about them. Figure out your approaches first, and do it separately from proposal writing. The last thing to do before proposal writing is to bring it all together. Organize your responses to the performance requirements according to the points you want to make (which follow the instructions have you have optimized to score highly). Writing to fulfill the RFP requirements is good, but it is not good enough to win. To write a winning proposal, you must write your response to the performance requirements to prove the points that will persuade the customer that you are their best alternative and give you the highest score. This is your goal, and not merely describing your company or your offering. If you get to this point and are struggling, try looking at it in reverse. Each of your responses to the RFP performance requirements should make a point, and that point is not simply "here's what you asked for." That point should differentiate your offering and get to the heart of what the customer really wants. But it should also be worded to maximize your score against the RFP evaluation criteria. And it must be organized and presented to comply with the RFP instructions. Every time you are in doubt about what to write or find yourself struggling to edit something into what it needs to be, go back and reflect on what points you should be making. Focus on proving the points you need to make and the words will follow. Premium content exclusively for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: Online training courses in proposal writing: Fundamentals of proposal writing How to respond to an RFP with the right words How to create a compliance matrix Creating a Proposal Outline Premium content from the MustWin Process library: Introduction to proposal writing What to do when you receive a proposal assignment How contributors can help manage expectations during a proposal Setting priorities while writing How to go beyond RFP compliance A simple formula for proposal writing Proposal style and editorial issues Identifying graphics Inspiration for graphics Six things to do when you don’t have the input you need to write the winning proposal

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This module takes us from foundation-building into process building. It takes the pre-RFP pursuit from activities and relationship building into win strategy, message development, and positioning to close the sale with a winning proposal. From here on, you'll be reading the course materials not only to learn but also to identify things you'd like to discuss implementing. This module identifies different elements that bring structure to the pre-RFP pursuit, without forcing you into a particular structure by focusing on the flow of information. During this module we'll discuss how to structure collecting the information you need. Readiness Reviews are presented as an example of one way to identify the information needed and implement reviews to track the progress of information collection. We'll also introduce MustWin Now as an online approach to intelligence gathering. During our online meetings we'll discuss different approaches for the pre-RFP pursuit, as well as any current reviews your company already has. Along the way, this module discusses the roles that people play in pre-RFP pursuit and the transitions when one role hands off to another. Your company might define these roles differently, but likely faces similar transitions and hand-offs. In addition to progress tracking and oversight, a major reasons for having a pre-RFP pursuit process is to streamline these transitions. When reviewing these materials, take notes on transition issues you face and look to the materials for ideas to use in your process to resolve those issues, and discuss these issues during our online meetings. This module also provides reference materials to help you itemize the information needed from the pre-RFP phase. When reading these materials, focus on which information process participants need to close the sale with a winning proposal. If you think of items that are specific to your business lines or company, take notes so we can make sure your process addresses them.

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Companies start to embrace a proposal process when the number of people involved grows large enough to become difficult to coordinate. It would be better if they began to embrace process as soon as they start caring about their win rate. The MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY enables a team of people to work together to maximize the company’s win rate. That’s great, but what if there’s no team? What if you are the team? Then doesn’t a proposal process designed to support large teams become overkill? Are you really alone? Sure, you might be the last one to touch the proposal. You might be the only one producing it. But if you have stakeholders, you are not alone. If you need input, you are not really alone. If people depend on your output, you are not really alone. If you are not really alone, you need to coordinate with the others who are involved or impacted. And that coordination can become a need for a proposal process. Even if you are truly the only one working on proposals you still need to do things in a repeatable way that can be optimized, both for efficiency and for effectiveness. But your process needs do change in some key ways. See also: Process Implementation Instead of steps and procedures, build your proposal process around goals, reminders, and checklists. You don’t want to forget things, and it’s quicker to not have to figure things out every time. Sometimes checklists function as reminders, being lists of things you don’t want to forget, but sometimes reminders are simply that. And sometimes checklists are quality assurance or planning tools. You can accelerate thinking about your proposal by including things that aren’t always relevant but are worth considering on your checklists. When you’re under volume pressure and near your maximum capacity, sometimes it’s good to not have to remember and think through everything. Checklists can not only speed things up and improve quality, but they can also inspire you to create better proposals. You may not need written procedures for coordination, but you still need stakeholder reporting and communication. Instead of communicating to coordinate the production of many moving parts, you need to be prepared to communicate with the people who are impacted by what you do. Instead of thinking of it as “communication,” it may be better to think of it as expectation management. The best way to streamline communication is to build it in, make it automatic, and eliminate the need for communication as a separate or ad hoc activity. If people can see the status or automatically get updates, they won’t have to interrupt you to ask about things as often. Document the inputs you require and whether you got them. Don’t expect other people to just “do their jobs.” You must itemize the information you need or they may not reliably get it for you. Once you itemize the information you need, you can track whether you get it and correlate this with your company’s win rate. This can be used to help them realize the importance of getting the information to you. Quality validation is necessary to maximize win probability. On your own, it’s easier get by with informal quality assurance and you may not need a formal proposal review process. But you still need to check your own work. Being careful does not count as quality assurance, even if you’re really good at it. Knowing what you need to validate and turning that into quality criteria will help you ensure that everything gets validated. Using written quality criteria will not only increase the reliability of your efforts, but can also be turned into checklists to accelerate things. Even people on their own need a plan. However, the plans that people need when doing things themselves are different from the plans that a team needs to get everyone on the same page. Individuals often call their plan a “to do” list. Instead of making your “to do” lists an ad hoc batch of reminders, make them deliberately considered lists of items required to effectively perform the necessary tasks. “To do” lists can also be turned into checklists, and you can also save, reuse, and improve them over time. Your history is defined by the records you keep. Under deadline pressure, it would be understandable if you gave up on keeping orderly files that weren’t directly needed as part of your workflow. But you need to keep track of your history. Don’t keep records just for the sake of doing it. Keep records so that when you need to look back you’ll have the data you need. Evidence of win rate and ROI. If you want to be more than just a production resource, you must prove your value. If you want to prove your value, you must do it quantitatively. You must prove that you deliver a positive ROI. The good news is that this shouldn’t be too hard. If you are the only proposal resource and you increase your company’s win rate by as little as 1%, you will likely bring in more revenue than you get paid. Learn the mathematics of win rate calculations so you can prove this. And gather the data. At a 20% win rate, increasing you company’s win rate by 10% is the same as finding 50% more leads. What would your company be willing to invest to get 50% more leads? You need to be able to get past hypotheticals and talk real numbers. Otherwise, you risk being seen as just a production resource that the accounting system classifies as an expense. The truth is you should be treated like a profit center, with as much impact on the company’s bottom line as its best salesperson. But that won’t happen until you prove it. With numbers. Notice how much of The Process can become simple checklists when you’re on your own? Just don’t think of them all as checklists. Divide your checklists into categories like plan, act, communicate, and review. Then your checklists will align with your process needs. You will have a proposal process, but it will be the kind of process that is useful even when it’s just you. This approach also creates a foundation so that when things grow and the proposal function no longer is just you, you can easily provide guidance to the newcomers.

Companies generally start to embrace a proposal process when the number of people involved grows large enough to become difficult to coordinate. It would be better if they began to embrace a process as soon as they start caring about their win rate. The MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY enables a team of people to work together to maximize the company’s win rate. That’s great, but what if there’s no team? What if you are the team? Then doesn’t a proposal process designed to support large teams become overkill? Are you really alone? Sure, you might be the only one producing it. But if you have stakeholders, you are not alone. If you need input, you are not really alone. If people depend on your output, you are not really alone. If you are not really alone, you need to coordinate with the others who are involved or impacted. And that coordination indicates a need for a proposal process. Having a way of doing things is not the same as having a process, and people perform better when supported by a process instead of making it up as they go along. Even if you are truly the only one working on proposals you still need to do things in a repeatable way that can be optimized, both for efficiency and for effectiveness. But your process needs are different in some key ways. See also: Proposal Management Instead of steps and procedures, build your proposal process around goals, reminders, and checklists. You don’t want to forget things, and it’s quicker not having to figure things out every time. Sometimes checklists function as reminders, being lists of things you don’t want to forget, but sometimes reminders are simply that. And sometimes checklists are quality assurance or planning tools. You can accelerate thinking about your proposal including things that aren’t always relevant but are worth considering on your checklists. When you’re under volume pressure and near your maximum capacity, sometimes it’s good to not have to remember and think through everything. Checklists can not only speed things up and improve quality, but they can also inspire you to create better proposals. You may not need written procedures for coordination, but you do need stakeholder reporting and communication. Instead of ad hoc emails to coordinate the production of many moving parts, you need to be prepared to communicate with the people who are impacted by what you do. Instead of thinking of it as “communication,” it may be better to think of it as expectation management. The best way to streamline communication is to build it in, make it automatic, and eliminate the need for communication as a separate or ad hoc activity. If people can see the status or automatically get updates, they won’t have to interrupt you to ask about things as often. Document the inputs you require and whether you got them. Don’t expect other people to just “do their jobs.” You must itemize the information you need or they may not reliably get it for you. Once you itemize the information you need, you can track whether you get it and correlate this with your company’s win rate. This can be used to help them realize the importance of getting the information to you. Quality validation is necessary to maximize win probability. On your own, it’s easier to get by with informal quality assurance and you may not need a formal proposal review process. But you still need to check your own work. Being careful does not count as quality assurance, even if you’re really good at it. Knowing what you need to validate and turning that into quality criteria will help you ensure that everything gets validated. Using written quality criteria will not only increase the reliability of your efforts, but can also be turned into checklists to accelerate things. Even people on their own need a plan. However, the plans that people need when doing things themselves are different from the plans that a team needs to get everyone on the same page. Individuals often call their plan a “to do” list. Instead of making your “to do” lists an ad hoc batch of reminders, make them deliberately considered lists of items required to effectively perform the necessary tasks. “To do” lists can also be turned into checklists, and you can also save, reuse, and improve them over time. This form of reuse can have a bigger impact than trying to recycle proposal content. Your history is defined by the records you keep. Under deadline pressure, it would be understandable if you gave up on keeping orderly files that weren’t directly needed as part of your workflow. But you need to keep track of your history. Don’t keep records just for the sake of doing it. Keep records so that when you need to look back you’ll have the data you need. Evidence of win rate and ROI. If you want to be more than just a production resource, you must prove your value. If you want to prove your value, you must do it quantitatively. You must prove that you deliver a positive ROI. The good news is that this shouldn’t be too hard. If you are the only proposal resource and you increase your company’s win rate by as little as 1%, you will likely bring in more revenue than you get paid. Learn the mathematics of win rate calculations so you can prove this. And gather the data. At a 20% win rate, increasing your company’s win rate by 10% is the same as finding 50% more leads. What would your company be willing to invest to get 50% more leads? You need to be able to get past hypotheticals and talk real numbers. Otherwise, you risk being seen as just a production resource that the accounting system classifies as an expense. The truth is you should be treated like a profit center, with as much impact on the company’s bottom line as its best salesperson. But that won’t happen until you prove it. With numbers. Notice how much of The Process can become simple checklists when you’re on your own? Just don’t think of them all as checklists. Divide your checklists into categories like plan, act, communicate, and review. Then your checklists will align with your process needs. You will have a proposal process, but it will be the kind of process that is useful even when it’s just you. This approach also creates a foundation so that when things grow and the proposal function no longer is just you, you can easily provide guidance to the newcomers.

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This course divides the pre-RFP pursuit into these modules: Activities that occur during pre-RFP pursuit (this module) Bringing structure to the pre-RFP phase (next module) Preparing to transition from pre-RFP pursuit to the proposal Starting at RFP release (because it happens) This module is primary about setting the stage for customer interaction in anticipation of a proposal. In this module we'll document the activities that occur in a pursuit before the RFP is released and create checklists for some of them. We'll also work on the foundation for intelligence collection and building an information advantage. We need this foundation before we can start working on bringing structure to how these activities are conducted in the next module.

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The first module is about defining the scope of what we're going to create together. Are we enhancing your existing process or building a new one? Are focusing on the pre-RFP phase or the proposal phase? We'll cover both, but how will we apply the material? That's why the first module focuses on discovery and discussion with stakeholders. The material in the first module is designed to be thought-provoking. The topics provide some background and context that will help once the introduction is complete and we start looking at pursuit and capture topic by topic and applying the material. When we meet to discuss this module bring your thoughts about what you would like to come out of this course with, both in terms of takeaways and in terms of what you'd like to build during the course to help achieve your goals. We'll share our thoughts, discuss it together, and spend the rest of the course applying future modules to fulfilling those goals.

When you are alone you have to work within your own limitations. What you know is all you know. What you can write is all that’s going into the proposal. What you can do before the deadline defines your standard of quality. It’s not about winning or creating a great proposal. It’s about whether you can complete the proposal at all. Here are some tips that won’t help you win, but they might help you get your proposals submitted. See also: Dealing with adversity What is the minimally viable proposal submission? The gap between the minimally viable proposal submission and a great proposal is a concern for another day. Right now, you have to focus on the gaps between where you are and what constitutes the minimally viable submission. The minimally viable proposal submission is usually whatever won’t get your proposal thrown out. Perform triage. Only try to save the ones that can survive, because trying to save them all will only result in greater loss. Use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals to help you make decisions about priorities. Focus on filling your gaps. Since you’re on your own, you have no one to write the missing pieces. It’s just you and Google. You may have to cheat. You may have to do the proposal The Wrong Way. Yeah, it’s ugly. But it may be all you’ve got to work with... Write to what a customer like this one might want instead of what you know this customer wants. Describe what goes into your plans instead of providing an actual plan. Avoid commitment. Use numbers that aren’t precise. Think “more than” or “almost.” Streamline the formatting. Don’t use elaborate formats. Minimize keystrokes and clicks. Go for simple elegance instead of a work of art. Make sure the formatting is within your skill set. If you don’t have any win strategies, differentiators, value proposition, and reasons for the customer to select you to work with, then base them on what it will take to win. If you can’t be great and prove it, then simply be what the customer wants. Who, what, where, how, when, and why. Repeat that until you’ve got it memorized. Then whenever you need more detail, answer the ones you can. If you need an approach for something and you have no idea what it should be, you can talk all around it by addressing who, what, where, how, when, and why. Be prepared to do less. Peel it back like an onion. Do only the things that impact winning the most. And if that fails, do only the things needed for a minimally viable submission. Everything is a trade-off. Make your trade-off decisions based on what requires the least effort. Go up a level in granularity. Make this proposal a learning experience for your stakeholders. If this proposal isn’t going to be great, can you use it as a demonstration so things go better on the next one? Separate what changes from what doesn’t. Don’t mix the details that don’t change with the win strategies and customer insights that have to be tailored every time. Use a question and answer format, even when they don’t ask for it. You can organize reuse material around questions and answers. Questions and answers already make a point and have a defined context, reducing the editing required. Questions and answers stand alone and lend themselves to being interchangeable parts. If you find you’re working on proposals that don’t have a chance of winning, identify the criteria that can be used to decide when not to bid a pursuit. Complaining about having to work on low probability pursuits sounds like resistance. But providing a set of lead qualification criteria is something that people can take action on. Avoid using names. It waters things down, but the more you can avoid using customer, company, personnel and other names, the less editing you’ll have to do. For example, try to refer to people by their role. Be a big picture thinker. When you don’t even know the details, stick to the big picture. Avoid procedures and specifications. Embrace missions, goals, and intentions. Rely on what you do know. If all you know are your company’s qualifications, then make everything about them. Have research tools handy. Invest in relevant textbooks. Get a bookmark tool for your web browser. Make some friends. Why are you alone? Learn the language of return on investment. How much would your win rate need to increase to pay for some help? If you don’t know the numbers, learn them. The odds are that a small increase in win rate will more than pay for the help you need. I’ve talked to companies that bid everything they could find and had win rates as low as 7%. At 15% they’d double their revenue. It would be like doubling the number of leads they have. What would they invest to double the number of leads they have? That’s what they should be investing in improving their win rate. They need you to quantify and explain it to them. Note to companies reading this: If you don’t want your proposals written like this, don’t leave people alone. Get them the information they need. Every once in a while, give them a little help. If you see these things in your proposals, it’s a good indicator you’ve overloaded your staff, those who know the details aren’t providing them, or no one knows the details. Note to proposal staff: If you’re doing these things because you didn’t know any better, change now. If you understand the relationship between win rate, lead identification, and revenue, you’ll never let this happen. But we see it all the time. If you find yourself here and don’t know how to escape, reach out. We can help.