Carl Dickson

I am still getting surprised by discovering new ways that using MustWin Now changes how I approach doing proposals. Sometimes it’s actually being able to do things that everyone knows they should but can never quite make happen. Other times, it’s being able to do things quicker. More often it’s being able to do things better because of the way it makes it easier to think through what you need to put on paper before you start writing. A big surprise was seeing the proposal process, at least as it is traditionally practiced, disappear as people just started doing what needed to be done but doing it in a structured way. It was an even bigger surprise to see people just doing what needed to be done to create a great proposal instead of resisting The Process. Creating an outline manually isn’t that hard. But creating a proposal outline that follows the RFP instructions, reflects the RFP evaluation criteria, and accounts for all of the RFP compliance requirements, and doing it all while correctly interpreting the RFP, is definitely a challenge. MustWin Now helps you build an RFP compliance matrix and proposal outline. It does this so that you can not only create an outline that puts everything where the customer expects to find it, but it also provides you with review tools to help you make sure that the interpretations and judgment calls you made are the correct ones. Putting your responses to everything in the RFP where the customer expects to find them and labeling them the way the customer will look for them is critical for maximizing your proposal evaluation score. A traditional compliance matrix is prepared as a spreadsheet that shows all of the requirements that are relevant to a given proposal section. Creating a compliance matrix helps you to create a proposal outline that is RFP compliant. Unfortunately, it takes as long to validate the accuracy of a spreadsheet-based compliance matrix as it does to create it in the first place. Working on a compliance matrix in a spreadsheet is an exercise in page flipping and wearing out your cursor keys. But what’s even worse is that in the rush to write, most companies skip validating their compliance matrix, even though this often comes back to haunt them. MustWin Now uses drag and drop features to create the compliance matrix, linking RFP requirements to the proposal sections where they will be addressed. And it makes validating your compliance matrix go as quickly as you can check boxes on online forms. Once you’ve reviewed and validated your outline in MustWin Now, only those with the right access permission can change the outline. This helps avoid having writers ignore the outline. Or having people change the outline after writing starts. I’ve lived through too many traumatic proposal experiences that were the result of trying to fix a broken outline. But the real payoff is that having your proposal outline in MustWin Now makes content planning so easy people actually do it. MustWin Now automatically creates the shell for the content plan. The outline basically is the plan. You fill it by clicking buttons and typing instructions for things you want to remember to include when you are writing, how to present things, things to emphasize, points to be made, etc. I’ve completed a proposal content plan during a strategy session meeting, just by listening to people talk and clicking the button to insert instructions into the plan whenever they said something important. I’ve walked away from the meeting with the plan complete. I’ve also helped companies figure out what to write and put it in MustWin Now so they could take it from there. When you’ve used MustWin Now to collect your bid intel, content planning is even easier because you’ve got the insights to work with. Preparing a content plan is simply a matter of reading the intel and adding instructions based on it. MustWin Now makes it quick and easy to drive win strategies based on your customer, opportunity, and competitive awareness into the document. When you create your outline and plan your proposal content manually, getting the input from others that you need can be a big problem. People don’t want to manually complete a mess of forms before writing. The original version of the MustWin Process was the most streamlined paper-based proposal planning process I've ever encountered. But the idea of writing proposal instructions in a document and then using the content plan document to guide writing the proposal document was too much structure for a lot of people. Doing the same thing in MustWin Now doesn’t seem like work. It’s just getting your thoughts together and clarifying assignments. MustWin Now makes it easier to get everyone “on the same page” than the traditional paper-based process ever did! See also: About MustWin Now This is important because proposal planning usually requires collaboration. No one person knows everything from customer awareness to win strategies to technical details. Content plans require input. People often come to a proposal wanting to help, within reason. They become resistant when they feel like The Process is creating more work than the task requires. When manual proposal planning efforts require creating orphaned process artifacts and the effort is only indirectly related to completing their proposal section assignments, the planning efforts tend to wither from a lack of enthusiasm. Using MustWin Now to collect the input is much easier than trying to do it on paper. You’re not asking people to complete a separate task from the writing, you’re asking them to put a couple of hours into preparing to write by clarifying the assignment and making sure everyone, including the proposal reviewers, is onboard with what’s going to be created. People are far more willing to do this with simple clicks and adding reminders and instructions than they are when creating a plan requires creating a document before they create a document. When you have a validated proposal plan, you are also far more likely to be able to get the proposal right on the very first draft. People are far more enthusiastic about contributing to proposals when they believe their efforts are not going to be wasted in endless rewrites. Writing a great proposal requires having more insight than your competitors and delivering that insight in a document that scores better than theirs. One reason that most companies have such a low win rate is that they try to accomplish this without thinking things through before writing. And a big part of the reason they do that is that their manual, paper-based processes simply aren’t followed. Struggling to overcome this challenge has been around for as long as people have been writing proposals. That’s why I’ve been surprised so many times at seeing how much better and easier things go when working in MustWin Now.

Summary You need information to determine how to properly position your offering. The information you need depends on the nature of your offering. To discover what it will take to win, your process should target the correct information to position your offering. What you need to know to offer a unique solution and win against all competitors is different from what you need to know to offer a commodity and win against all competitors. Which matters more, price or value? This largely depends on what the customer is buying. The items in the middle can lean toward the corners and be positioned very differently. For example, how you should differentiate a product is different from how to differentiate your services. Both are different when your offering leans towards being a commodity vs being a unique solution. Since winning depends on anticipating what matters to the customer, your process should be designed to discover that. How you discover what it will take to win depends on what you offer The information you need to discover in order to win depends on what you offer If you sell products, your offering consists largely of matching your products to customer needs and dealing with any gaps. But if you sell services, your offering consists of tailoring your approaches to match the customer's needs, while making you have the staffing resources to cover the level of effort required. Both of these require very different information, not only to know what to offer, but also to know how to position it in order to win. The information you need will also be different if you are selling your products or services as a commodity or as a unique solution. How the customer will make their decision depends on what they are buying Will the customer buy on price or value? Should you offer quality or quantity? Is capability more important than experience? You will need to anticipate and answer questions like these in order to write a winning proposal. But what questions should you ask? What information should you attempt to gather? Your process should guide people to collect the right information. But how do you know what guidance to build into your process? A good place to start is by assessing the nature of what you offer. You will need to know: What information will the customer need to make their decision? What matters to the customer that might impact their decision? What information will you need in order to calculate the estimates for what you intend to offer? What topics and details are you going to need to address in your proposal? You can use this model to help anticipate what you will need to know and gather it in a way that supports addressing what matters to the customer. Discussion topic: To design your process, you need to honestly assess what your company offers so that you can implement a process that guides people to the information needed to prepare a winning proposal. What matters to the customer about what you offer? What do you need to prepare estimates and write the proposal? Use the chart to get conversations started, but feel free to go beyond the chart when identifying what people will need to know.

Summary What the customer cares about depends on what they are buying. The closer things get to a commodity, the less the vendor matters and the more that price matters. The closer you get to a unique solution, the more trust and risk matter. Products and services can be either unique solutions or commodities, but what matters to the customer about products and services is different. How the customer perceives their need in relation to this chart matters. If it does not match what you offer, then your positioning will be wrong. Perceptions may not be clear and range over an area instead of point, and may be subject to change, although this can be a tough sale. How to correctly position your offering depends on having the right information about the customer and their needs. The items in the middle can lean towards the corners. For example, what matters about "risk" can depend on the nature of the offering. See also: Customer perspective What is the nature of what your company's offering? Where is your offering in the mix? If a company is not highly focused, they all may seem to apply. Sometimes company's have multiple offering that might not group together on the chart. This might appeal to a broader group of customers, or require different approaches to market. The goal of thinking about this is to see if you can: Anticipate what will matter to the customer? Gain better customer insight by bringing some structure to your customer interactions? Implement a process or model that makes it easier to figure out what to do about it, once you've discovered what matters to the customer. Convert a structured like this into a process that drives customer awareness into the written proposal? You can use this model to connect the dots and streamline the transition from sales to the proposal. You can also use it to increase win probability, by bringing a little structure to your message development instead of making it up during proposal writing. Discussion topic: To design your process, you need to honestly assess what your company offers so that you can implement a process that guides people to discover the customer's concerns and address them with the correct positioning. Different people in your company may have a different perception of your offerings, making the discussion itself a valuable exercise, separate from the process considerations. Also, your current offerings may different from past or future intended offerings. Ultimately it is not even your perceptions that matter. Use the chart to discover what matters to the customer and how to position accordingly.

2019 adds up to some big numbers Since we started in 2001, we have had over 8 million visitors. That's nearly half a million visitors a year, on average. Over 71,000 have requested to join our newsletter. Over 3,500 became PropLIBRARY Subscribers. A lot of people who need to win proposals for their business to succeed give us their attention and we appreciate it so much. I remember when I started down this path and could remember all their names. I still try to respond to nearly all the support requests myself. The topics we published in 2019 covered a mixture of business development, capture, and proposals, with preparing to win as a common theme. The best free articles we published in 2019 Are you one of these 11 kinds of proposal manager? How to make better proposal decisions by using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Why you can’t just follow the steps to create a great proposal Examples of proposal content planning using MustWin Now 47 questions that tell you if the way you are preparing your proposals is any good Improving your win rate by asking the right questions Proposal writing: 10 before and after examples 16 things that need to happen long before proposal writing starts How to get ready to win before the RFP is released 6 examples of bad proposal writing and how to fix them In 2019 we released MustWin Now as a free benefit for PropLIBRARY Subscribers MustWin Now takes our recommendations related to how to win your pursuits, and turns them into a tool. Instead of learning about the MustWin Process via online training and written materials, and then implementing and following it, you simply use MustWin Now. The "process" simply becomes what you do, and what you do makes sense and delivers immediate gratification. And all of our online training and content becomes guidance available within the tool to inspire and accelerate everything people do to win your proposals. We thought about packaging it as a separate product, but instead we chose to add it on top of all the other benefits of subscribing to PropLIBRARY. We didn't even raise the price. If subscribing to our online training and content library and using it to supercharge your company's growth was worth it before, it is now doubly so. The best of the premium content we published for PropLIBRARY Subscribers in 2019 Our premium content is far more practical and detailed than the free articles listed above and provides information that is ready to use as checklists, templates, forms, etc. In 2019, we focused on a combination of process tools and and practical resources that can help solve key problems. The MustWin Process Architecture Assessing the impact of the organizational layer on your process Assessing the impact of the input layer on your process Assessing the impact of the performance layer on your process 6 targets for relationship marketing and 5 ways to reach out to potential customers How to build quality into every step of your proposal What's the difference between capabilities and corporate experience? A simple formula for influencing the RFP Why all proposal reviewers need training before every review Proposal Quality Validation Implementation FAQs Looking forward to 2020 Next year, our development efforts will focus on MustWin Now, while our content efforts will focus on integration. By integration, I not only mean integrating content with MustWin Now, but also integrating the articles themselves with how they are used. Think of the titles above organized through a user interface that enables people working on a pursuit to drill down to whatever detail they need in that moment, while using MustWin Now to take action on the recommendations. That's where we're heading. We're actually already there when it comes to topic coverage. But I want it to be more streamlined and intuitive, and that means reorganizing the content to better fit the new workflow. That ends up being quite a bit more work than it sounds. Don't expect a lot of fireworks and flash. The more intuitive we make things, the less things will stand out. PropLIBRARY and MustWin Now will just be there with what you need, when you need it, and it won't be as hard for you to produce great proposals. What you will notice is your win rate going up while your stress levels go down.

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Slow down. Take your time. Get comfortable. Ponder the meaning of it all. These topic hubs lead to hundreds of links with over a thousand pages worth of material. Don't try to consume it all in one sitting. Study them like a book that can change the future of your company and the direction of your career. Or maybe just give you an occasional smile. Before the proposal: business development and capture Relationship marketing Making effective bid/no bid decisions Preparing for proposals ahead of RFP release How to respond to Request for Proposals (RFP) and win How to design an offering your customer will love How to plan your proposal content so it meets everyone's expectations Articulating bid strategies and proposal themes Writing proposals from the customer's perspective Making proposal writing faster and easier Making proposals simple Recycling proposals, creating proposal templates, boilerplate, and re-use libraries How to validate the quality of your proposal Successful proposal process implementation Winning vs. Losing Proposal win rates and how to improve them Doing proposals the wrong way Now. What are you going to do about it all?

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When you recycle proposal content, you can’t rely on people to simply tailor it. You can’t rely on them because you can’t count on them to be aware of everything that has changed. Unless you tell them. Re-using proposal content requires more than just updating it. It requires changing the context to reflect everything that has changed about the customer, your company, your offering, the competitive environment, and the external world. See also: Reuse People often think nothing has changed. Sometimes this is because the work that they will do on the project really will be the same as what they did before. However, while the work may be the same, the words required to win it likely will have changed far more than anyone realizes. I challenge you to find out. I challenge you to do a before and after comparison. The challenge is to compare your current circumstances with the previous circumstances to determine what has changed in the environment that should also change the writing. It’s a simple before and after comparison. Only it’s not so simple. There are a lot of considerations. After reviewing them you may confidently conclude that nothing has changed. Or you might discover that it will take longer to edit what you have than to create something fresh. I’m betting that re-use will only save you time if you do not properly assess what needs to change. But take the challenge and find out. If you have or intend to build a proposal re-use library, you should build in procedures for doing this assessment every single time your content is recycled. You should challenge your users to prove that re-use is safe and that it will save time. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers we’ve turned the following considerations into a form for quick implementation. PropLIBRARY subscribers can also use MustWin Now to guide your proposal contributors to make considerations like these and write your proposals based on them. Consider each of the following to determine what is different about the circumstances for this proposal that should be used to tailor your re-use material: Who will perform the activities described? Who will receive the results described? Who will be impacted? Who will interact? Who will oversee performance? What RFP requirements are new? What is required to achieve compliance under the new RFP? What RFP contract terms and pricing requirements have changed? What RFP formatting and submission requirements have changed? What RFP terminology is different? What matters to this customer? What points should be made? What results need to be achieved? What approaches, procedures, methods, etc., need to change? What tools, assets, resources, etc., are needed? What subcontractors or teammates will be used? What needs to be updated? What differentiates our offering? What is required to get the highest score under the new evaluation criteria? What risks are anticipated? Where will work be performed? Where will deliveries be made? Where will work products be used? Where will resources be obtained from? How will schedules change? How will the customer be impacted? How will risks be mitigated? How will quality assurance be achieved? How will roles and responsibilities be defined? When will performance start and end? When will interactions occur? When will decisions be made? When will customer participation and input be required? Why were these options selected and these trade-offs chosen? Why does what we’re proposing matter? Why is what we’re proposing this customer’s best alternative? We prefer to use questions like these in MustWin Now to drive people to write a great proposal that is a perfect match for the new circumstances and is optimized to win. Writing to win is profitable. Recycling to avoid writing may enable you to complete the document but is less profitable. The increase in your win rate easily pays for doing your proposal well compared to taking an easier approach that produces a less competitive proposal. Instead of accelerating your efforts and helping you get ahead, recycling proposal content means starting from behind. Instead of thinking it through and moving forward, recycling proposal content means you think it through and then go back and have to think some more about how to fix what was done before. You may actually have more work to do because you started from something already written. But often the only way to get people to realize that is to have them try. So challenge them!

This program is a hybrid. It blends training with process development. It blends online self-study with instructor-led training. It blends course materials with real world tools and performance. It blends learning with implementation. It produces change. It is about implementing the tools, processes, and things you need to improve your win rate. At the end of each term, if you start another, you have a continuous improvement program for about a thousand dollars a month that will constantly increase your win rate and generate a positive ROI! For small businesses, you can develop without having to wait until you can afford to hire an expert. For large businesses, you can improve with expert advice without having to spend an FTE to achieve it. Here is the list of topics you can choose from. Do you want to emphasize strategic planning, business development and capture, or proposals? Business development and capture Proposals Strategic planning Roles and stakeholders Who to talk to: Customer roles and points of contact Data driven targeting for Federal procurement Lead qualification and bid/no bid processes Ensuring you are ready to win at RFP release Offering design Teaming Pre-RFP proposal preparation Starting at RFP release Proposal management and staffing models RFP release: Now what? Getting your proposal off to a great start. Creating the proposal outline the customer expects to see Understanding and improving RFP compliance Proposal content planning Proposal writing: good, better, best Proposal quality validation Production and submission Lessons learned, metrics, and measurements Identifying who buys what you sell Strategically developing your capabilities and offerings Pipeline modeling: What do you need to hit your targets? Selecting strategic targets and allocating resources Strategically targeting relevant contract vehicles and channels Strategic teaming Positioning for the future Estimating resource requirements to hit your targets Achieving ROI positive continuous improvement If you're having trouble picking just three, focus on your immediate needs and think about continuing in the program and addressing the other topics next. Go beyond training and turn it into a repeatable process for winning that is tailored for your company Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to process, our Win Rate Improvement Program focuses on understanding how to adapt process to each participating company’s size, type of offering, maturity, staff availability, etc. It leverages our complete proposal content library that we’ve spent 20 years building. Participants will have access to it all, and will be directed to specific items based on the topics we're covering. The Pursuit and Capture Program comes with a free subscription to PropLIBRARY and use of MustWin Now Up to 5 students will get a free PropLIBRARY subscription during the course, including MustWin Now. This alone is a $1,200 value. If you decide not to continue with the program, you may continue your PropLIBRARY subscription for as little as $20 per month. Lock in your discount before February 29th The Win Rate Improvement Program costs $1,000 per month. For 3 months, the total is $3,000. You are welcome to sign up for 12 months, but we anticipate most people will want to try it for 3 months before making a longer commitment. If you sign up for our 3-month Win Rate Improvement program before the end of February, we'll give you a $500 discount. You will only pay $2,500. Not only that, but we'll continue that discount for as long as you stay in the program. If you stay in for a year, you could save $2,000. Just for signing up by the end of this month. You have an extra day because it's a leap year! Let's do this You probably have questions. We'd like to find out more about you and your goals, and share how this program provides a structured way to achieve them. You can ask questions online or you can schedule a conversation below. When you're ready, I'll send you an invoice through PropLIBRARY. As soon as it's paid, we'll get started.

In January we're going to launch the largest, most detailed training program we've ever offered. It's going to be a lot more than just training. It's going to be project based learning. It's going to be a 6-month program that will start with an identified lead and cover everything through to proposal submission. Instead of teaching procedures, this program will teach what you need to know to implement effective processes or improve what you have in each goal and phase. It will show you how to win more of what you bid. And that will make it all worthwhile. Go beyond learning about pursuit and capture and turn it into a repeatable process for winning that is tailored for your company Takeaway materials for you to tailor and use in your process include: A guide explaining 11 ways to get ahead of the RFP A checklist with 24 ways to influence the RFP A cheat sheet providing 101 ways to earn goodwill and help a potential customer in writing A checklist for conducting site visits Pre-proposal process option guides: Are these the right goals? Mapping activities and information gathering to your goals Lists of process quality criteria, activities, and deliverables Over 140 pursuit capture form items to customize Guide: Readiness reviews and gate decisions eBook: 509 Questions to Answer in Your Proposals Sample bid/no bid decision and review criteria to customize 7 topic-driven proposal input forms eBook: Proposal start-up information checklist with 135 questions in 9 categories Pursuit and proposal staffing model guide Proposal kickoff process option guide Proposal logistics planning worksheet Proposal production process option guide Proposal submission considerations Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to process, our Pursuit and Capture Program will focus on understanding how to adapt process to each participating company’s size, type of offering, maturity, staff availability, etc. If students stay on track with the bi-weekly topics and homework assignments, by the end they’ll have a complete process tailored to their company’s needs. The depth and breadth of coverage is huge. So is the amount of takeaway materials. The course leverages our complete proposal content library that we’ve spent 20 years building. Every other week we’ll open a new course module. In between, Carl Dickson, Founder of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY, will have a private session with each participating company. During the private sessions we'll focus on the decisions you need to make and the challenges you need to overcome to maximize your win probability and capture what you pursue. You'll get personalized guidance for how to tailor the course topics to your particular circumstances. Each course module should only take 1-3 hours to go through, and you can study on your own schedule. But the emphasis will be on application and not studying. Each week you’ll have options to consider, decisions to make, and assignments to customize and improve your own process. You'll spend more time applying what you learn to improving your company's ability to pursue and capture its leads. The Pursuit and Capture Program comes with a free subscription to PropLIBRARY and use of MustWin Now Each student will get a free PropLIBRARY subscription during the course, including MustWin Now. Each company can have up to 5 students participating. The course will be conducted remotely, and the schedule will be flexible enough to adapt to competing priorities. If you are already a PropLIBRARY Subscriber, you’ll get full credit for your subscription. If your subscription is a single user subscription, you’ll get an upgrade to a 5-user subscription during the course. At the end of the course, the cost to continue the 5-user subscription will only be $95 per month. More details and pricing This Pursuit and Capture Program is for both small businesses who need to compete with more mature companies and large businesses who want to increase their win rate and improve their competitiveness. It is a 6-month program for up to 5 participants, alternating between a course module and a personalized session each week. The price is $9,600, which is the equivalent of just $400 per week. And you can come out of it with a capture and proposal process that companies have spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars developing. If you just bought the subscription to PropLIBRARY separately, it would cost you $1,370, and it’s included. You’ll also get all the takeaway goodies shown in the gray box on the right. [Video] [Video]

Most proposals are won or lost before they begin. Either you go into the proposal with an information advantage, or you are trying to fake your way through the proposal without one. Even though this is true, most companies don't have a mature process for pursuing a lead before the proposal starts. Their process amounts to: Hire a good salesperson, whatever that means, to dig up some information. Create the illusion of process by having bid/no bid reviews. As a company matures, bid/no bid criteria tend to become more sophisticated. However, believing you have a chance at winning is not the same thing as having the information you need to write the winning proposal. Having a standard for whether to bid a pursuit is not the same thing as having a process for lead pursuit and capture. When most companies start thinking about formalizing their pursuit and capture process, they often only think about activities, like meetings, events, and contacts. And because they don't know what sequence the events will occur in, they can't imagine how to turn it into a process. They create bid/no bid criteria and often just make the rest up as they go along. What they need are goals for pursuit and capture. Goals inform people about what they should accomplish. And goals can be used to prepare to close the sale with a winning proposal. 1. Establish that you have an acceptable lead See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit When your prospecting efforts appear to have found something, you need to establish that it's an acceptable lead. Some companies track every lead they consider. Some companies only track leads they intend to pursue. Some companies incentivize lead discovery. It’s not a lead until it has been accepted as such. Note that an acceptable lead still needs to be qualified as worth investing in pursuit. An acceptable lead is generally one worth looking into so you can determine whether it is a potential match for your company. What is required to identify a lead as acceptable at your company? 2. Qualify that the lead is worth the expense of pursuit Once you have a lead, the next goal is to qualify the lead and prove that it is worth pursuing. This goal is an investment decision, because capturing a pursuit is expensive. Some companies have rigorous requirements for qualifying a lead, while other companies merely need to know if they can do the work. The level of effort put into lead qualification is usually proportionate to the cost of closing the sale with a winning proposal. If you sell commodities and crank out lots of proposals, lead qualification might be a simple checklist. If you sell complex services or unique solutions in a competitive environment with large, complex proposal efforts, you should put more effort into proving your leads are worth the cost of pursuit. The criteria used for lead qualification are often similar, if not identical, to what you use for making bid/no bid decisions. A company with an ineffective bid/no bid process will also usually have an ineffective lead qualification process. In an effective bid/no bid decision process, each goal, step, or review is another bid/no bid decision gate. Each one is an opportunity to cancel a pursuit that is a bad investment. When you limit each decision to whether to take the pursuit to the next phase, the decision criteria can be more specific. You don’t have to do a detailed win probability assessment in the early stages. But in later stages that would certainly be one of the considerations. In early stages you will be operating with less information and what is acceptable then may not be acceptable for bid decisions in later stages. 3. Pursue with the intent to capture Once you have qualified that a lead is worth pursuing, the next goal is to prepare to capture the pursuit. This requires achieving several goals all at once: Discover what it will take to win Develop an information advantage Respond to customer requests (requests for information, sources sought notices, draft RFPs, etc.) Determine what to offer This phase might take 80% of the pre-proposal capture level of effort. It will require regular (weekly or monthly) progress reviews. 8. Prepare proposal input If the sale closes with a winning proposal, then it's critical that the pursuit process delivers the information needed to write a winning proposal, in the form that proposal writers will need it in. Otherwise, all that effort may not do anything to impact the award decision. What good is having an information advantage, if you don't take action on the information you have? What good is having an information advantage, if the proposal writers are unaware of its significance, or what to do with that information in the particular sections of the proposal where it is relevant? If all you do is gather information and wait until RFP release, you will not achieve the highest win rate possible. What about relationship marketing? Having a customer relationship is not the goal. A customer relationship is a means to achieving your goals. Every one of these goals will be more easily accomplished with a strong customer relationship. None of these goals may be possible to achieve without a strong customer relationship. The strength of your customer relationship is often a good lead qualification and bid/no bid decision criterion. The strength of your customer relationship can be measured by how well it produces an information advantage. Turning your goals into a process Each goal will have activities to accomplish. Each will also have process deliverables to complete. And each will have quality criteria that define whether the goal has been successfully accomplished. You should articulate your goals and design your process deliverables so that the result produces the information advantage required to close the sale with a winning proposal. That is what having a pursuit and capture process look like. It requires more than just holding progress meetings. The Goldilocks pursuit and capture process Introducing too much structure all at once can be overwhelming. A goal-driven process can be introduced a little at a time. Achieving the goals is far more important than the procedures used in achieving them. If all you do is define your goals and nothing more, you will improve performance. As an organization matures, it can introduce things that make achieving the goals easier. This is the real reason to have quality criteria. Quality criteria are better used to enable people to know when they’ve accomplished a goal, rather than simply using them to catch defects in performance. A goal-driven process is less about procedures and forcing people to do things in a particular way, and more about helping people accomplish their goals. Setting up pre-proposal goals enables you to seek a Goldilocks solution. You don’t want too little structure. You don’t want too much structure. You want just the right amount of structure. Just the right amount of structure makes performance easier for people while maximizing your win rate.

The things you need to know to determine if a lead is worth pursuing are different from what you need to know to close the sale with a winning proposal. A sales process that qualifies your leads is important. It is also not enough to win. If you are addressing "Should we pursue this" and "Should we bid this" as if they are the same thing in a single meeting, it's a bad sign. Lead qualification is a determination of whether it is worth investing in the pursuit of a business lead. A qualified lead is worth pursuing. A lead that is not qualified is not worth the time or expense. Sometimes companies try to base their lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions on their probability of winning the pursuit. But if we’re being honest, this is just a guessing game. You may be using a carefully concocted algorithm and going for a SWAG instead of a WAG (look them up), but it’s still a WAG. Instead of trying to calculate probability, you will get better information by considering whether the lead meets criteria like: See also: Bid/No Bid Decisions Size, scope, and complexity Staffing, resource, and qualification requirements Anticipated release schedule Risk Your ability to bid competitively (the best you can achieve by trying to predict win probability) Strengths and weaknesses relative to your competitors Relevance to the company’s strategic plans and target markets Acceptable terms and conditions Any information advantage or other advantages you might have Your differentiators Most companies include information like the above in their lead tracking or CRM systems. However, most companies miss other important considerations that include whether you have an information advantage and your readiness to write a great proposal (this is not the same as willingness to try). Whether you have an information advantage, how strong your information advantage is, and whether your information advantage provides what is needed to write a great proposal can all be quantified. Whether the customer will pick your bid to win can’t be quantified. Whether you are ready to write a great proposal is determined by whether you can answer the questions your proposal writers will have when writing the proposal. Most companies rely on salespeople to supply the right information based on their experience alone and their proposals end up being based on: The random nuggets of insight their salespeople dig up Whether those random nuggets get articulated and delivered in a form the proposal writers can use, which is usually not the case While it is clearly better than nothing to work with and can sometimes be decisive, it is also clear that people are fallible and perform better as part of a process that provides inspiration, guidance, and reminders. No matter how good your proposal writers are at wording around the information they don’t have, they can’t write as strongly as they could if they had the right information. See also: Information Advantage Proposal writers have lots of questions. On PropLIBRARY you will find hundreds of examples of the questions that proposal writers typically have so they can write a better proposal. Your ability to anticipate these questions determines your success at developing an information advantage. Training your salespeople to answer these questions and giving them the tools that integrate these questions into the pursuit enable your salespeople to operate at a higher level. It’s the difference between sending them out into the field on their own, and sending them out with the tools and support they need to play an active role in gathering the information needed to close the sale with a win. All people do better work when they have quality checklists, guidance, and tools to work with. One of the reasons that companies have capture managers is because going from lead qualification to developing an information advantage requires different goals and customer interactions. It also requires knowing what questions to ask, which in turn requires understanding the nature of what your company offers, what it will take to be competitive, what goes into a winning offering, and what will be required to write the winning proposal. Capture managers specialize in going beyond lead qualification and preparing for a proposal. But even capture managers perform better with checklists and tools to guide them. Instead of trying to build it all into your CRM, you might want to consider developing a capture platform in between the lead tracking system or CRM you use for lead qualification and the document management tools you use during proposal development. This is where we’ve positioned MustWin Now. In our experience using MustWin Now during the capture phase, we find that very little information in most CRMs needs to be transferred into MustWin Now. And the information gathered in MustWin Now is far more relevant to winning the proposal than what is found in most CRMs. Plus, MustWin Now helps you drive your insights into the proposal in ways that no CRM systems can do. In fact, most proposal departments don’t have access to their company’s CRM system. Most proposal staff don’t need access to their CRM, because it doesn’t contain the information they need.

Companies that want to get better at doing proposals often struggle with their proposal process. They struggle with the steps. They struggle meeting deadlines. They struggle with time management. But mostly, they just struggle. Part of the reason for the all the struggles is their process. It’s not that it needs improvement. It needs replacing. And it’s not just the process that needs replacing. It’s the whole way you look at the proposal process. Proposals are not completed in steps It would be more accurate to describe proposals as a flow of information. Information flows from the customer to people in your company where it gets transformed, travels through the RFP, gets filtered into sections according to the outline, and ultimately put on paper. But the information does not flow in a straight line. It meanders. It flows back on itself. It goes in circles. It builds. It changes. The proposal “process” should not be thought of as steps. That’s how you end up with one step called “writing” that never ends, and another step called “reviewing” that endlessly repeats. The proposal “process” is really a collection of things you do to guide an unpredictable amount of information, from unpredictable sources, in unpredictable forms, from whatever it is at the beginning to what it needs to become in order to win the proposal. Here are five alternative ways to look at the proposal process that can help you find more success at channeling and guiding this information into what it needs to become: See also: Steps Training. If you work with different people on every proposal, then you can think of the entire effort as training. The final exam is the proposal. Or maybe it’s better to think of the proposal as a dissertation with a team of authors. Each thing that you need people to do is an assignment. Sometimes you need to teach how to complete the assignment. You should have rubrics that tell people what is required for successful assignment completion. Tutoring should be available for people who fall behind. You’re showing them how to win a proposal instead of mandating a process for them to follow. Questions and answers. Questions are a great way to gather the information you need. Questions can also be used to inquire whether the information is in the right format or whether it’s been transformed in the way needed. Questions can make suggestions or offer considerations. You can script the entire “process” as a series of questions. If you do, there will be a lot of questions. A whole lot of questions. But if you set them up as checklists, they aren’t perceived as a burden. Picture a checklist of questions to determine whether you are ready to start something. Another checklist of questions for what you need to consider when doing it. And another checklist of questions for how to tell when you’ve completed it successfully. Questions can do a lot more to help people contribute to the flow of information than a process diagram. Goals. A goal-driven proposal process can leave the steps up to the participants to figure out. A goal-driven process can also improve people’s willingness to follow the process, by giving them an easy way to achieve their goals. After all, following something called The Proposal Process really isn’t important. It’s fulfilling the goals that lead to winning that’s important. Quality validation. Can you define success? Can you define success for every activity? Then why not give contributors the success criteria at the beginning? When each activity is wrapped with success criteria, it’s as good as having a “process.” Thinking through and being able to put your success criteria in writing may do more to achieve the desired results than have a “process.” Issue tracking. Everything is an issue. Literally. A proposal assignment is an issue to be resolved. A lack of information or resources is an issue. Show stoppers are issues. But so are simple questions. Accounting for what needs to be written and writing to incorporate all of the ingredients that need to go into the section are also issues. Instead of tasking assignments and then dealing with the issues that come up, just track issues. A contributor’s role on the proposal is not to write something that crosses off an item on the outline. A contributor’s role on the proposal is to resolve issues. Individuals can have issues directed to them. But as a team, the goal is to resolve all of the issues that might get in the way of submitting a winning proposal. Here’s a bonus item that combines them all: MustWin Now Our new proposal tool is built around gathering information, transforming it, and validating the results. It is structured around accomplishing key goals like being ready to win at RFP release, creating an outline that meets the customer’s expectation, and discovering what it will take to win and building your proposal around it. Before the proposal starts, it uses questions and answers to gather the information proposal writers need. During the proposal it wraps the workspace with training and guidance to help contributors with completing their assignments. When people use it, the process disappears, and people simply do the work using the tool. I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised by how it’s completely changed the way I view the proposal process.

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Your proposal process is broken. But don’t feel bad. Everyone’s proposal process is broken. And while it might be easier to accept that the proposal process can always be improved, it's better to be honest about just how broken it is. I have worked on countless proposals at a few hundred different companies. Some proposal process implementations are better than others. But all of them have serious defects and people are usually in denial about it. This doesn’t get their proposal process fixed. In fact, it makes their proposal win rates lower than they could be. This might be the single biggest thing keeping companies from maximizing their win rate. When people don’t know how to fix their proposal process, they sometimes conclude that it’s the environment that’s broken and not the process. The truth is they’re both broken, and while you might not be able to change the environment, you can change the process. And maybe fixing your process will improve the environment. When problems appear unsolvable, people stop paying attention to them. They stop thinking of them as problems. Many of the issues on this list are tolerated by most companies, because they don’t believe they can fix them. Rather than evangelize about our process recommendations, this article is about how to recognize when your proposal process is broken but solvable. See also: Proposal Management People talk about the proposal instead of creating a tangible plan for the proposal People bring information to the proposal instead of what to do about it Any research done before the RFP is released doesn’t end up being useful for preparing the proposal Intelligence gathering is based on whatever people are able to find instead of discovering what it will take to win The top reasons given for bidding include “we can do the work,” “we have the experience” or “the opportunity is perfect for us” The compliance matrix isn’t validated before proposal writing starts The proposal outline is reviewed at Red Team The top goal after receiving the RFP is to start writing People think it’s easier to skip the process than follow it Proposal writers don’t know what the reviewers expect Self-assessment tools aren’t provided to proposal writers Proposal writing starts from copy recycled from a past proposal Proposal writers can’t tell you how to achieve RFP compliance Proposal writers can’t tell you how their sections will be scored or what they need to do to achieve a top score Proposal writers either don’t start from the points they are trying to prove, or don’t know what points they should be proving Proposal writers have questions that could have been answered, but no one asked the questions Win strategies are developed after proposal writing starts Win strategies aren’t validated until the Red Team Your plan for what to say in your proposal doesn’t go any further than a compliance matrix, outline, and occasionally some attachments like a list of themes People figure out what to propose by writing about it Key documents don’t make it to the proposal writers Key documents are ignored by the proposal writers The highest priority for proposal writers is completing their assignments and not getting the top score The highest priority for proposal writers is their other work Single points of failure Color team labels are used and no two people define them the same way Reviewers arrive without having read the RFP Reviewers decide what to look for on their own No two reviewers define proposal quality the same way Reviews don’t start until the proposal is in finished form or “the way the customer will see it” The most important person changes everything when they finally get around to looking at it There are no written proposal quality criteria Priorities and decisions aren’t based on the potential impact to the score of the proposal Decisions are based on what you think, instead of what the customer thinks Someone thinks there’s a better way than what it says in the RFP How many of these occurred during your last proposal? Rather than trying to solve them one at a time, look for common root causes. If you solve the root cause, you can fix many problems at once. For example, most of the items related to the proposal review process are a result of not defining proposal quality or having written proposal quality criteria. Many of the items related to proposal writing are a result of giving up on finding a way to plan the proposal before you start writing it. Solving some of them will require you to look at things differently. The proposal process is not about paper. Sure, it ends up on paper, but how it gets there is the result of a flow of information. Information must be sought, recorded, transformed, validated, and guided into a winning proposal. If you start by asking yourself how to create the document, you’ll end up with problems like those above. However, if you start by asking what information you need, where it comes from, and what guidance the other people you work with need to gather, then record, transform, and validate that information, you will see much better results. Our first transformative moment came in 2001, when we used this way of looking at things to create the MustWin Process. That’s how we know the problems above are solvable. We not only wrote the process, but we’ve had nearly two decades to test it in practice. See also: About MustWin Now The MustWin Process, however, is still document-based. Working with teams of people to create a document is like herding cats, even with a well-documented process. In 2018, we had our second transformative moment when we did some proposal software research and development based on information gathering, transformation, and validation and tripped across a completely different way of doing things. The result was MustWin Now. Instead of focusing on document assembly, MustWin Now focuses on solving problems like those above. It's not a tool for automation, it's a tool for winning. Along the way, we discovered a curious thing. Instead of thinking about the process, people using MustWin Now think about working with the information in front of them as it becomes the proposal. They stop trying to jump straight into writing. They do proposal content planning without thinking much about it, because they don't have to create a document called a "plan" before they create the document that is the proposal. Content planning in MustWin Now feels more like getting ready to write. And when they do start proposal writing, they have specifications to self-assess against. When proposal reviewers look at the draft, they have the same specifications to work with instead of making it up as they go along. It’s as if the “process” disappears and people just start working on the proposal using the tool. Whatever approach you take, and whether you take it online or offline, the problems above are solvable. Don’t stop trying. But also, don’t keep doing the same things and expect them to suddenly start working. Feel free to reach out to us with your questions, or to get our hands-on help on implementing the solutions we’ve discovered.

Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. Prices are locked in for the duration of the contract. Even when you account for pricing escalations, that usually just covers inflation, and not promotions, new hires, new tools, etc. Without growth, most contractors can’t even tread water for very long. Without growth, rising costs will force them to cut overhead expenses. Investing for the future almost always comes from growth. See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Everybody in the company benefits from its growth. If you got a raise and it wasn’t offset by cutting somewhere else, it came from growth. If you’re sitting on a new chair, it was probably paid for by growth. If you can’t get a new chair approved, there probably isn’t enough growth. If you want a promotion, you need the company to grow enough to grant it. A growing company is a happy place. A company that is treading water can be stifling. A contractor that is shrinking is a fearful place. The same, by the way, is true of people. People need growth to prosper. Most growth for a contractor comes through winning proposals. You don’t have to work on proposals. You get to work on proposals. You get to grow. You get to bring growth to the others you work with. Whatever you think your job or corporate mission is, it's really about growth. Growth Hack #1 Proposals are an investment and not an expense. People minimize expenses. When an investment is paying off, you go all in. But you have to know when an investment is generating a positive return. Win rate is a proxy for ROI. Carefully track what things are impacting your win rate (it can be counterintuitive and rules of thumb aren’t). If you want to grow by winning proposals, then instead of minimizing your proposal efforts you should invest in doing your proposals better. Growth Hack #2 Growth comes from winning and not from chasing leads. At a 30% win rate, a 10% increase is mathematically the same as adding 30% more leads. How much would a company invest in gaining 30% more leads? But increasing your win rate is better because you don’t have to chase 30% more leads to achieve it. Increasing your win rate is also more profitable than chasing more leads. On top of all that, increasing your win rate will pay off again next year, but you'll have to find new leads to chase. So invest as much as you would in getting 30% more leads into increasing your win rate and you’ll be better off. Hoping for more leads is not the same as winning. It's time to get serious about winning business. Growth Hack #3 Winning easily pays for more winning. What is 1% of your proposal submissions last year? Now multiply that by 10. That is what a 10% win rate improvement would have returned. It’s typically many times what it would cost to do your proposals well. Doesn’t that make the effort a worthwhile investment? Shouldn't you respond to RFPs like you're trying to get good at it? Growth Hack #4 Shortcuts kill your ability to grow. Do you think that it’s too hard to get ahead of the RFP? Or that you can’t make your subject matter experts available to adequately support proposals? Or that executives are too important to read the RFP before participating in a proposal review? Or that it makes financial sense to stretch the people trying to win as thinly as possible? Shortcuts like these reduce your win rate, and the cost of them is far more than it saves. It’s penny wise and pound foolish. See Growth Hack #3 and run the numbers in the other direction. Is it worth a few hours of cost reduction if it produces a 1% reduction in win rate? A reduction in win rate typically costs you far more than the “cost savings” of trying to get by on the cheap. Most companies lose before they even start their proposals. Growth Hack #5 Growth requires everyone to participate. Proposals need subject matter expertise. They need customer awareness. They need competitive intelligence. They need a price to win. They need appropriate terms and conditions. They need staffing. They need facilities. They absolutely depend on having great past performance. Not only does everyone in the company benefit from growth, but everyone in the company has something to contribute to achieving that growth. If you want to do proposals bigger than yourself, you've got to make contributing to growth the normal routine and not an exception. Growth Hack #6 Beware the hand-offs. Now that you’ve got everyone contributing, you’ve got a problem. Are people worked in silos, or are their efforts integrated? Is sales delivering the information needed to write a winning proposal to the people writing the proposal? Is sales even participating in the proposal? Are the project staff who have customer contact providing insight? What about the hand-off to pricing? Is pricing working in isolation from your win strategies? Is pricing introducing strategies that aren’t reflected in your proposal narrative? Every hand-off is a chance for things to get watered down. Here's a list of 90 things someone needs to do to win proposals and who is usually responsible. Growth Hack #7 Work backwards from the goal. What will it take to win? How do know whether the draft proposal reflects it? How do you build your proposal around it? How do you discover what it will take to win? The goal that you are trying to achieve informs each prior step required to fulfill it. Your proposal process shouldn’t start from a blank sheet of paper. It should start from a winning proposal and reverse engineer it. Your proposal process should be goal-driven and not steps that people can ignore or skip. Growth Hack #8 Small companies can’t put off growth. You’re pulled in many different directions. You wear many hats. The only thing that will make it better is growth. Prioritize what you must do to achieve that growth. Only bid what you can win, and do what it takes to win what you bid. Growth Hack #9 Don’t be afraid of losing. One thing that holds companies back from investing in improving their win rate is that they worry about not actually achieving an increase in their win rate. This is partially a result of not knowing how to improve their win rate. It's also partially because they still view proposals as creative expression based on people just trying hard, instead of a deliberate process based on quality validation. But it’s funny how they never avoid investing in sales just because it might not bring in the business or they haven’t already identified the leads they intend to pursue. Growth Hack #10 If you can’t follow your proposal process, you have the wrong proposal process. Most companies don’t follow their own proposal process. It’s usually not because they aren’t capable or dedicated. Or because the process isn't enforced. It’s because their proposal process is based on common but flawed ideas. Don’t beat your head against a wall. Throw your broken process out and start over. It's worth the investment. Proposals can be a lot of work, but they shouldn’t be a struggle every time. If you accept that a chaotic train wreck is normal for proposals, then you will never achieve the highest win rate possible for your organization. Growth Hack #11 Healthy growth requires developing and maintaining an information advantage. Maximizing your proposal win rate requires having an information advantage about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. When writing proposals, an information advantage is a competitive advantage. All of your customer interactions, whether sales, technical, or otherwise, should be part of developing and maintaining your information advantage.

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Winning government contracts requires knowing how to succeed at every step throughout a ridiculously long sales cycle. Winning government contracts requires attention and doing your homework. The good news is that most companies really aren’t that good at it. Most companies who are registered to do business with the government end up doing little or none. And most established companies merely do well enough. Most government contractors lose more contract bids than they win. They are vulnerable and can be beat by anyone who puts more focus and effort into accomplishing the things on this list. Government contractors with experience should already know every one of the steps below. And yet on any given pursuit they’ll fail to accomplish nearly half of them. If you have experience with winning government contracts, you should read this list with two goals: Be honest with yourself. Your first reaction may be denial. But knowing about something and achieving it are two different things. Trying and accomplishing are also two different things. Be honest with yourself about what you actually accomplish. Figure out how to accomplish all of them. It will involve working through other people. It will likely involve systematizing or institutionalizing how you accomplish them. That in turn involves pushing against organizational inertia. Being a big company only makes this harder. If you are new to government contracts: This is a list of what to accomplish. It is not enough to know how to accomplish each step. This is where you start understanding how to win government contracts, but not where you should stop. There is plenty more information on PropLIBRARY for each one and of course other sources of information about them. Your growth and competitiveness will depend on whether you can accomplish all of them better than your competitors. Quit telling yourself that you don’t have enough people to do what you should. What must be done has nothing to do with your head count. How much time you spend on each might. Put at least some attention into all of them. Don’t just pick the easy ones. Whether you are experienced or not, accomplishing these 14 steps will make you more competitive: Discover who buys what you sell. There is a ton of historical data about what government agencies buy, and it’s available from many sources. Some are even free. Essentially all government contract actions are recorded. This can help you understand where in the government they have the most interest in what you sell. It will help you realize who to reach out to, build relationships with, and learn more about. Understand the procurement process. Government procurement can be a very long process. It is governed by lots of complex rules. And yet, once you learn them, those rules can help you navigate the system. At any moment, you should know what the next step the customer must take, what their decisions will be based on, and be prepared to provide information that can help them. To do that, you need to know their procurement process. Since it’s all publicly available, there’s really no excuse not to. Understand the roles government staff play in a procurement. When you reach out to contact government staff, be aware that different people play different roles and bring different perspectives to the procurement. Contract officers, contracting officer's technical representatives, agency executives, and program staff all have different interests and involvement in the procurement process. If you understand their roles it will help you figure out who is capable, or at least interested, in answering your questions. Pro tip: Make contact with the people playing each of these roles, but do it in ways that are relevant to their roles to gain the full picture of a procurement. Understand the realities of teaming. There are companies that do a lot of business through subcontracting instead of prime contracting. There are many more companies that only get a small portion of what they thought had been agreed to as a subcontractor. There are many other issues. Learn everything you can about the realities of teaming if you want to be successful. Network and build relationships. Networking is important for finding teaming partners who are trustworthy. It’s also important for gaining customer, opportunity, and competitive insight. You can also network to meet customer staff. The larger you network, the more opportunities you'll have to practice relationship marketing. Be seen as a helpful, credible asset. When you land customer meetings, don’t be the vendor that nobody wants to spend time with. Be the vendor with useful information that helps them do their job even before they start working with you. Be the vendor that helps them understand and inspires them about future possibilities. And above all, be credible. Nobody wants to work with a vendor who is not credible. Most vendors wouldn't even accept their own proposals. If you want follow-up meetings, be seen as an asset and not a needy salesperson. Show up qualified. You think you’re qualified. But are you? Do you have the past performance, registrations, certifications, insurance, size standards, locations, and anything else that will be required to bid? It makes no sense to bid if they can’t award to you. So learn what qualifications will be required and show up with them all covered. Show up on the right contract vehicles. Government customers have different ways to buy things. They call them contract vehicles. Sometimes you respond to RFPs. Sometimes you respond to task orders. And sometimes they can put it on the equivalent of a government credit card. Each way they buy things has very specific rules and limits. Each agency will have preferences regarding how they buy things. Learn what their preferences are and make sure you are registered with or accepted on their preferred contract vehicles before you start selling to them, or else you may not be able to close any sales. Initiate, inspire, and define. Instead of waiting for public solicitation announcements, try initiating procurements. Get ahead of the RFP. Help potential government customers recognize and define their needs. Along the way, develop deep insight into their needs. Think in terms of initiating procurements instead of finding them. Help potential customers recognize their needs and what to do about them. Gain some influence over the RFP. Establish your credibility and insight before they even see your proposal. Understand how the customer will score your proposal. If your sales close with a proposal, then understand your customer's evaluation process. Learn to read your proposals like they do. If the highest scoring proposal will win, then discover how their scoring process works so instead of writing a proposal that you think sounds good, you can write a proposal that gets the highest score. Reading the evaluation criteria in the RFP is often not enough to be able to interpret how their scoring process will be applied. Anticipate the questions that proposal writers will have. If your sales close with a proposal, learn to anticipate the questions your proposal writers will have. Show up with the answers. When the RFP comes out and proposal writers start asking whether the customer would prefer this or that, or they should position something this way or that way, it’s too late to get the answers. Develop an information advantage. In services proposals, the best competitive advantage is often an information advantage. If you know more about what matters about the customer, opportunity, and competitive advantage, you can write a proposal that matters more than your competitors. Build your proposals around what it will take to win. Simple to say. Hard to do. It’s not the proposal writing that’s hard. It’s discovering what it will take to win. Hint: You need more than the RFP to puzzle it out. Perform. Hooray! You won a contract. Now what? There’s this thing call “past performance.” Look it up. If you blow it in performance, this could also be your last contract. Going forward, having exceptional performance can also be a huge advantage for winning more contracts. It's worth the investment. I have seen bad performance cause contractors to crash and burn. Even a slip to a neutral rating is the kiss of death because you can’t be competitive. Do whatever it takes to have exceptional performance. Plus a bonus tip: Getting ahead of the RFP is not easy, but here’s a hint: target recompetes. You can be aware of them five years in advance. If you are not ahead of the RFP and don’t go into the recompetes you target with a customer relationship that produces real insight, then you’re just not trying. What you do to capture recompete contracts is good way to catch what you’ve given up on and stopped trying to achieve.

The products and services we offer give you flexible options for supporting the growth of your company and improving your win rate. See also: Proposal support services PropLIBRARY. You're on PropLIBRARY right now. Take a look around. PropLIBRARY is self-service, subscription based, and something you can get started with in minutes. MustWin Now. MustWin Now is our new proposal software. It comes with a PropLIBRARY subscription at no extra charge. Here's what MustWin Now does at a glance. Training and consulting services. If you need help winning contracts and growing your business, let's talk about what we can do to help. Tell us about the size, scope, complexity, and deadline for what you have in mind so we have enough information to make estimates. We provide strategic consulting, can offer hands-on help, deliver training, and do public speaking. We can work at your site or remotely. The MustWin Federal Growth Program. This highly strategic program comes in a version that is scaled for small businesses and a version for companies that need to reengineer how they win new business. Both are based on achieving a quantifiable return on investment. Both have a fixed quarterly price. When you combine these, you get a combination of options that provide a tailored solution for your needs.

The customer is more than one person. And different people have different perspectives. Developing a reliable relationship with the customer means interacting with as many levels and stakeholders as you possibly can. Here are some areas to focus on. Who to reach out to Each of these requires a different strategy. Each has different needs, priorities, and expectations. Each has a different perspective and can be a source for different information. All are worth contacting and getting to know. See also: Pre-Rfp pursuit Executive level. If you can’t get face time, then pay attention to what they say when giving presentations and talking to the media. Your customer's leaders can be a good source for learning about the long-term trends impacting their organization and what might be pressuring them to change. Contracting officers (COs). COs are concerned with following proper procurement procedures. They are not there to help you. They also may not understand what they are buying and probably don’t need to. But they are the authority on how the customer buys. Understanding their needs can help you interact with the procurement process that they will implement. Contracting Officer's Technical Representatives (COTRs): COTRs often play a key role in writing the statement of work. After award they play a key role in monitoring performance and compliance. Make their life easier. Help them with their paperwork. Help them translate technical issues into the requirements language they will need to resolve those issues and fulfill their organization's needs. Operations staff. The end users who need what is being procured are only one group of people involved in the procurement. They tend to be mission oriented and care the most about the technical requirements. They often don't understand their organization's procurement procedures, and they may or may not play a role in proposal evaluation. They may control the budget that will be used to make the purchase. The recognition of needs and initiation of the procurement process often starts with them. Internal stakeholders (other departments that interact with your targets). The group that is doing the buying may not be the only ones at the customer impacted by the procurement. Internal stakeholders may or may not have a competing agenda. They may or may not be collaborative. But they probably have another perspective if you can get them to share. External stakeholders (outside groups or organizations impacted by or interacting with your targets). Your customer might serve, collaborate with, or get input from outside organizations and people. The happiness of external stakeholders may or may not be critical to the buyer. While they probably won’t have insider insight, you never know… Ways to research and make contact Finding out who to contact is a solvable problem. Actually making contact is hard. Remember, it's not about your needs. It's about their needs. So reach out in a way that's helpful to them and you have a better chance of holding their attention. Here are some ways you can try to reach out to them. Telephone. Cold calling is sometimes worth it. Warm calling, where you have an introduction or are following up on something relevant, is even better. Make it worth their time to talk to you. Or at least return your call. Email. It's a great way to share info of value to your customers. Try sharing highly relevant and useful website links. LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides multiple ways to research and contact people, including groups and direct messaging. You may be able to gain an understanding of the customer's organization just from studying their LinkedIn profiles. In his 2019 LinkedIn Federal Employee Census, Mark Amtower reports there are over 2 million civilian Federal Government and DoD members on LinkedIn. Conferences. Conferences are a great way to meet and greet, present, watch, etc. They are a great chance to quickly show some depth beyond selling. Make your outreach of value to them, instead of the other way around like most vendors so they’ll respond back to you in the future. Don't go in blind or fish for random contacts. It's worth putting some effort into learning which conferences your potential customers attend so you can get in front of them. Meetings. Can you land a meeting? The odds go up if you make them about the customer and not about yourself.

What you need to win a proposal depends on what happened before the RFP was released and the proposal effort kicked off. This means that winning proposals can depend on what you did before the proposal even started. So let’s take a look at what happens before the proposal starts: What the customer does before the RFP is released This is what the customer has to do, starting from RFP release and working backwards: See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit The RFP is released. But before that: The customer announces there will be an RFP. But before that: The customer decides what will go in the RFP. But before that: The customer decides whether to release an RFP. But before that: The customer decides they have a need and can allocate funds to fulfill that need. You might want to know the exact steps your customer follows, and all of the little details that fall in between these generalizations. What you do before the RFP is released This is what you do, or at least should do, working backwards from RFP release: The RFP is released. You are ready to bid at a high win probability because you have an information advantage. But before that: You find out there’s an RFP coming and begin preparing. But before that: You (should) help the customer figure out what should go in the RFP. But before that: You (should) help the customer determine whether to release an RFP. But before that: You (should) help the customer determine what they need and how much it will cost to fulfill that need. But before that: You (should) have developed a relationship with the customer. But before that: You decide which potential customers to target. Most companies aren’t able to complete the “shoulds” because they never formed a relationship with the customer, which is critical to gaining the information advantage. They are left trying to win by being a little better at responding to the RFP requirements. They are at a serious disadvantage to anyone bidding with an information advantage. What comes before targeting customers for relationship marketing and prospecting? There are things you need to do before you even have customer targets. So starting from customer targeting and working backwards: You begin reaching out to your customer targets. But before that: You must identify points of contact at each. But before that: You must determine which customers buy what you sell. But before that: You need strategic planning to identify what to offer, how to position it, and what markets to explore. If you find yourself looking for RFPs to bid, it’s because you haven’t been reaching out to enough of the right customer targets to fill your pipeline. You’ve gone from bad (no information advantage at RFP release) to worse (no customer insight at all against competitors who do have it). You’re trying to fill your pipeline anonymously because you don’t have the targets and contacts you need. You’re trying to make up the deficit at the back end instead of fixing it from the front end. And your win probability will suffer as a result. Play it all back in reverse Start from the bottom of each list and work your way up. That’s what you need to do to achieve a high win probability. Judy Bradt of Summit Insight says that “People who start from databases and websites are starting in the middle and at a disadvantage.” The key is knowing who buys what you sell so you can form relationships with potential customers and fill your pipeline with high win probability leads. Judy shows companies how to get into position to explore their customers’ needs and gain an information advantage as they work towards releasing an RFP. Do this before the proposal starts and the proposal becomes a simple exercise of turning your information advantage into a competitive advantage by having the right win strategies and driving them into the text. This makes figuring out what to write in your proposal a solvable problem and leads to a high proposal win rate. If you don’t know what your win strategies should be, what to say in your proposals, or have a low proposal win rate, making sure that you are starting with an information advantage is the first thing you should improve.

The best competitive advantage in service proposals is an information advantage. An information advantage enables you to write a better proposal, even though everyone is responding to the same RFP. You don't achieve an information advantage by randomly fishing for information. You gain an information advantage by knowing what information to seek, gaining more of it than your competitors, and then doing the best job of converting what you learned into a better proposal. MustWin Now guides you to the right information, how to best make use of it in your proposal, and then builds it into your proposal section plans. Pursuit Capture Forms for when you start before the RFP is released MustWin Now uses Pursuit Capture Forms to collect information before the RFP is released. For each topic, MustWin Now has a simple question and answer form to complete. This prompts you to seek the information and provides a place to collect the answers. Pursuit Capture Form Topics Topic for building an information advantage MustWin Now Pursuit Capture Form What customer insights do you have? Customer: Insight (5) What are the steps customer’s procurement process? Customer: Procurement Process (13) What do you know about the opportunity? Opportunity: Awareness (14) What will it take to design the winning offering? Opportunity: Offering Design (14) What is the competitive environment? Competitive: Environment (7) Is there an incumbent? Competitive: Incumbent Contract (4) What will it take to design the winning offering? Competitive: Teaming (3) The number of questions on each form is shown in parenthesis. There are a total of 60 questions. You will never get all of the answers you'd like to have. That is not the point. The point is that the answers you do get form the basis of your information advantage. The forms and the questions asked can be customized, so you can make them reflect the specifics of your business. You accumulate answers in the Pursuit Capture Forms until the RFP is released. Proposal Input Forms for when you start at RFP release See also: About mustwin now If you are starting at RFP release, there is a separate set of forms to use to collect proposal input. They are different because instead of initiating research, they are designed to assess what you already know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. The proposal input forms enable you to document what you know so you can map it to the proposal. The topics for the proposal input forms include: Proposal Input: Change (5) Proposal Input: Data Calls (6) Proposal Input: Graphics (12) Proposal Input: Insight about what matters (11) Proposal Input: Proposal sections and approaches (8) Proposal Input: Teaming (7) Proposal Input: Transition (12) Self-Awareness (6) You know stuff. So what? Once you have answers to the questions on the forms, you are ready to assess: How does what you know impact what it will take to win? How does what you know impact what you should say in the proposal? MustWin Now makes this easy by providing a quick way to turn the answers in the Pursuit Capture Forms into instructions for proposal writers. Once the RFP is released, you map the instructions to the proposal outline, just like you cross-reference the RFP requirements to the outline. The result is that you not only have an outline with all the relevant RFP requirements mapped to it, you also have instructions for proposal writers that are based on what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. So first MustWin Now guides you to develop an information advantage. Then it prompts you to assess the impact of what you know on the proposal and convert your raw intelligence into instructions for proposal writers. The result is that it helps you drive your information advantage into the proposal where it must end up if it's going to help you win.

MustWin Now is a toolbox with a lot of depth and breadth and many options. It streamlines the process while providing both inspiration and guidance for participants. All of the online training and helpful information in PropLIBRARY is just-in-time linked to the steps within MustWin Now. This helps people who are new to proposals as well as experienced professionals. MustWin Now supports both the pre-RFP and proposal phases of pursuit with these tools: See also: About MustWin Now Pursuit Capture Forms. Can be used to provide a little bit of structure for the pre-RFP phase and to ensure you gather the information you will need to win. If you elect not to use it during the pre-RFP phase, you can still use it at RFP release as a way to assess what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. You can use it to drive your win strategies into the proposal. RFP Compliance Matrix Builder. Cross-references the RFP requirements and enables you to build a proposal outline based on what the customer expects and how they perform proposal evaluation. This greatly streamlines creating the shell for the Proposal Content Plan and automatically puts only the relevant RFP requirements in front of proposal writers. Proposal Content Planning. The fastest tool in existence for creating a proposal writer's instruction package that addresses what to write and how to present it, and also provides quality criteria so they can tell when they've done a good job. This improves the quality of the very first draft so much that proposal reviews can become an opportunity to improve the proposal instead of focusing on finding all the defects and figuring out what to do about them in the time remaining. If you use the Pursuit Capture Forms, then MustWin Now enables you to drive your win strategies based on pre-RFP intelligence about what it will take to win to the proposal document.

The difference between marketing, business development, sales, and capture has nothing to do with titles. The difference is purely functional and it matters. People misuse the labels all the time because there is a lot of overlap and they prefer one title over the other. But you need some of each, even if you are short staffed and the titles people have don’t match. See also: Roles The goal of marketing is to attract customers so that you can sell to them. There are many approaches to attracting customers. Some involve outreach. Some involve making your company and its offerings more attractive. Outbound vs. inbound, push vs. pull. Some involve technology and some involve relationships. The more the complexity and pricing of your offering goes up, the more important having a relationship with your customers will become. The more your offering resembles a commodity, the less important relationships will be and the more important outreach will become. The goal of business development is to open new markets or to expand existing ones, either by developing new solutions or through partnerships. If you want to develop a solution that reaches new customers, expand an existing customer relationship into new areas, or combine your offering with someone else’s offering to reach new customers, that’s business development. Business development and product management are closely related, with product managers tending to focus more on creating the offering and business developers focusing more on what offering to have, where to market it, and how to sell it. The goal of sales is to qualify and pursue as many leads as possible. Sales can get its leads from marketing, business development, or find them on their own. They shepherd those leads to the closing process. They may overlap with marketing when they develop relationships with potential customers. They may overlap with business development when they open new territories. They may overlap with capture management if they participate in closing the sale. Capture management provides dedicated attention to closing a sale. Capture management is usually only required by complex or highly priced offerings. Having dedicated capture management means sales focuses on identifying and qualifying the maximum number of leads. Capture closes the sales, typically with a written proposal. Overlapping confusion Expectation management, role definitions, and of course clarity of incentives are critical to getting the right mix of these important functions. Marketing overlaps with everything because it comes first and sets the stage. Who is responsible for positioning? Who is responsible for identifying potential markets and customers? Who determines which new markets to enter? Business development overlaps with everything because it is cross-functional. It overlaps with marketing before, during, and after opening a new market. If it is successful, it results in sales. And if those sales are long lead, complex, and high value, it likely overlaps with capture management. Sales overlaps with everything because it sits smack in the middle of it all. Where does lead identification end and lead qualification begin? And who is responsible for each? Where does lead qualification end and closing begin? And who is responsible for each? Capture management overlaps with everything because it closes the sales. It depends on everything that came before. But it also adapts, changes, and finalizes everything that came before. Where does lead qualification end and closing begin? Who determines when, where, and how to close the sale? GovCon marketing expert Mark Amtower says, "These functions merge under what is now called social selling. Leveraging social media to find key influencers, get on their radar, share information and otherwise remind them of your presence at key points in the procurement process." He explains this in an article in Washington Technology. Marketing uses social media as a key messaging platform. Business development, sales, and capture management all use it for both research and relationship building. One person can do marketing, develop business, sell, and capture. One person probably can’t do all four well. In a small business, people wear multiple hats. In a large business there can be a department for each of these, with handoffs, confusion, and gaps the result. Every one of your sales will require elements of each of these areas. Very few companies do all of them well. Most companies ignore at least one of them. Which one does your company ignore? What are the consequences? Which require specialists? And perhaps most importantly, when do you want to go from having the problems that small businesses have covering everything to having the problems large businesses have with flawed handoffs, confusion, and gaps?