Carl Dickson

Congratulations. You have a good proposal. Too bad you’re probably going to lose. If your proposals have a win rate under 50%, then mathematically you are probably going to lose your next one. Wishful thinking won't change that. If you want to win, you need to submit a great proposal. The good news is that you may not have to rewrite the entire thing to get there. If you have a good proposal, here are some things you can do to improve it and make it great: Have you maximized your evaluation score? If your customer will have a formal proposal evaluation, then the place to start is whether you have maximized your evaluation score. When proposals are scored and not read, an ordinary proposal might score well, but a great proposal is designed to achieve the highest possible score. Can you make it easier for the customer to complete their scoring sheets by using the same words that they use in the evaluation criteria? When you assess your proposal against those criteria, is it clear that you will not simply score well, but that you will get a great score? Can you better guide the customer to the reasons they can use to justify giving you the highest score? Is your proposal easy to navigate and easy to evaluate? Can you include references to the evaluation criteria in the text? Can you use tables that show how you stack up against the evaluation criteria? Are you filling your gaps with wishful thinking? Have you matched every requirement to a proof point? Or are you responding with claims? Are you responding to requests for experience with approaches, and responding to requests for approaches without details? Are you telling yourself that you should bid because you can do the work, even though you do not currently have the staff or any referenceable experience? Have you responded to a requirement for a plan with a plan to have a plan instead of actually providing a plan? Are you responding to requirements with commitment and promises instead of results? Is your primary qualification that you can hire the incumbent staff and they'll know what to do? What are you filling the gap with? Have you shown real insight? Or did you just copy some text from the customer’s website? Have you talked about what matters and what impacts success? Have you gone beyond what’s in the RFP? Can you show a depth of knowledge that makes you an asset to the customer? Instead of merely claiming to be innovative, have you shown ideas that are perceptive and clever? Have you explained the reasons why you do things? Have you incorporated all the intelligence you’ve gathered about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment? Or are you merely compliant? A compliant proposal is good. But if that's all your proposal is, it's not great. Have you differentiated? Have you claimed the same things that everyone else will claim? Have you proposed the same approaches, but only a little bit better? Or can you offer something different and better? You can’t produce a great proposal if it’s the same as everyone else’s. Great proposals are more than just a little better. Great proposals go beyond the same best practices that everyone else will bid. Great proposals change the rules. Great proposals give the customer a real alternative to choose from, and that requires them to be different. What do you do that’s special? Why do you do things the way you do? What does it add up to that’s great? Have you taken risks? If you don’t take risks, you can’t be exceptional. If you aren’t exceptional, you can’t be great. A great proposal is not normal. It is not safe. Competition is not safe. A great proposal may lose. But the odds of losing with a good proposal that plays it safe are actually worse. Good proposals can safely count on being #2 behind a great proposal. A good proposal can become great by taking strategic risks to differentiate or show insight that no one else would ever dream of. This is how you become the only alternative the customer even considers. Have you written your proposal from the customer’s perspective? You do not decide whether your proposal is worthy of winning. The customer does. Your attributes do not matter. What the customer gets as a result of your attributes matters. A great proposal is not about you. It is about the customer. A great proposal is not you telling your story. A great proposal is the customer reading your proposal and getting excited about their future. Can you read your proposal the way the customer will and say things that reflect the customer’s perspective instead of your own? Can you make the proposal about the customer and make them excited about what they will get if they select you instead of how important winning is to you? Did you get the context right? An ordinary proposal has all the right details. A great proposal puts the details in context. Putting things in context brings meaning to them. Can you explain to the customer what it all adds up to? Can you show insight about why the details matter? Can you make it clear why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative? To do these properly, every item above requires doing your homework before the proposal even starts. If you don’t start already having the information you need, you may not be able to achieve it during the proposal. Proposal writers can’t make up greatness. They can’t fake it. But you can make sure that you’ve fully leveraged all that you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. In the rush to get to a draft, companies often fall back on descriptive writing and sticking to the RFP. They focus on submitting instead of winning. Often, the people with knowledge about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment aren’t even the ones doing the writing. So if you can achieve a good proposal with some time remaining before your deadline, you might be able to turn it into a great proposal. If you can't achieve a good proposal with enough time left to make it great, then fixing that is a great place to start if you want to be competitive.

Understanding how to set your priorities is key to winning proposals. There are far too many things you want to do before the deadline than are possible to achieve. If you do not have the right priorities, you will waste time and effort on things that have a lesser impact on your probability of winning. Ideally, your priorities will perfectly match the impact of each item on your win probability. But calculating win probability is not always possible. That’s where Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes in. While it was intended as an assessment tool in psychology, it can be repurposed for proposals. When applied to proposals, it provides a framework of considerations that you can use to better guide your priorities. It also helps you be decisive by informing you what you must do, and what you should sacrifice. Because sometimes sacrifices are necessary in order to submit by the deadline. Sometimes proposal management is as much about what you’re not going to do as it is about what you are going to do. For all the bravado we have about not being willing to make any sacrifices and being willing to do anything to win, reality forces us to make and understand our priorities. Give me a proposal professional with clear priorities over a proposal hero any day. When Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is applied to proposals, the base level of consideration is RFP compliance. If you are preparing a US Government proposal, RFP compliance is absolutely necessary to even get considered. Non-compliant proposals are often thrown out before being fully evaluated. RFP compliance is the foundation that everything else can be built on. However, it is not enough to win. But without RFP compliance, you are not even in the game. If you are not preparing a US Government proposal, then RFP compliance is still the foundation of your proposal strategies and offering design because it defines what the customer wants. If your RFP contains evaluation criteria, then the very next consideration is how to achieve the maximum score. When the customer provides written evaluation criteria, it's a signal that the proposals may be scored and not read. In a formal evaluation, getting the top score is the only path to winning. In an informal evaluation, the evaluation criteria still inform your win strategies, making them a priority ahead of most others. The next level of consideration is your implementation of your win strategies. Once you have thought through the RFP compliance and evaluation criteria considerations, how well you choose and implement your win strategies will have the biggest impact on your win probability. Before you put effort into any of the higher levels of consideration, you need a base that addresses these three areas. Another way to say this is that you can’t rely on the higher levels to win the proposal for you if you don’t have this base underneath them. Once you have this base, you should consider visual communication and presentation. If you aren’t compliant with the RFP, don’t score the highest against the evaluation criteria, and have inadequate or poorly implemented win strategies, great visuals and presentation aren’t going to win it for you. On the other hand, if you do have those things, you are well positioned to create great visuals and know not only what to present, but what your presentation needs to achieve. People process information through visual communication better than they do through written communication. Make it a priority to turn this into an advantage for your proposal. Beyond these considerations, if you can get there, comes editing and proofreading. While a proposal full of typos can lose, a typographically perfect proposal is not enough to win. Most customers will tolerate some typos. It’s a risk. But is it better to take the risk of typos or the risk that your bid strategies are inadequate? The priority for this is challenged. If your proposal management is successful, you'll be able to carve out the time for it. If it is not, it may lose out to other priorities that have a greater impact on win probability. The highest level is style. Proposals against tight deadlines rarely make it to this level. You might want a proposal with multiple writers to read like there was one author. But is that the first thing to discuss or build your plans around? Is it your top priority? Or should it come up after you’ve successfully achieved the other levels in Maslow's Hierarchy? We want to achieve all the levels. But we do not want to achieve a low impact item at the expense of a high impact item. We do not want to lose because we focused on the wrong priorities. We want to eliminate all risks. But we don’t want to play it so safe we end up losing. You don’t have to give up on creating the perfect proposal. Maybe you’ll have the time and resources to address all the levels in Maslow’s Hierarchy of (proposal) Needs. Some day. Maybe. It's an excellent goal to have. The priorities you choose to focus on directly impact your win rate. If you have the time and resources to address the things that impact your win probability the most, then go for perfection. Proposals are a competitive sport. If you are competing against companies that will submit compliant, high scoring, proposals based on sound win strategies, then the higher levels might become the difference between winning and losing. But first you need to achieve a compliant, high scoring, and competitive proposal.

Most proposal assignments come with failure built in. They are essentially a plea for proposal writers to figure out how to win the proposal on their own. This is not a winning strategy. To avoid this, you need to give proposal assignments that are less about tasking and more about guidance. Start by giving better instructions Proposal assignments should cover not just what to write, but also how to write it. And all proposal assignments should come with quality criteria that let the writer know when they have completed the assignment correctly. Is that too much to ask? If the goal is a high win probability, is there any alternative? Quality criteria can be simple checklists, as long as they are reliable. Following your instructions and passing the quality criteria should not result in negative proposal reviews. Writers need to know how to fulfill expectations before they start writing. You should also supplement your proposal assignments with helpful suggestions, things to consider, and questions writers need to answer. Good proposal instructions: Save people time Provide reminders Point them in the right direction Deliver inspiration If your proposal assignments don’t address your win strategies and the points you want proposal writers to make, what do you think the impact will be on your win probability? If on the other hand, you provide assignments that explain what to write, how to write it, what points to make, and criteria they can use to assess when they’ve completed their assignment successfully what do you think the impact of that will be on your win probability? Focus on goals instead of steps It is far more important that proposal writers achieve your goals than it is to submit something on time that won’t win. So what are your proposal writing goals? These should shape your proposal assignments. Proposal assignments are not simply fulfilling outline items. They are fulfilling a vision based on what it will take to win. If you goal is to win, then can proposal writers realistically achieve that on their own in isolation? If your goal is RFP compliance, that is an achievable goal. But is it enough? And do your quality criteria enable writers to know when they’ve achieved it? The same applies to any particular style, results, or preferences regarding the proposal. Without proposal quality criteria defining success, you are assuming the writers know what you are thinking and waiting until after they’ve completed their drafts and the deadline is near to find out whether that is true. This is very risky. This is another reason why I prefer to do a thorough job of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Sure, you want everything on your wish list. But what are your must haves vs nice to haves? What are your priorities? The instructions and assignments you give set the priorities. Do so wisely. What’s in your writers' packages? What are you giving your proposal writers other than a section title and a copy of the RFP? Is it what they need to be successful? Is it even based on what it will take to win? Does it explain to your writers what the customer needs to make a decision in your favor, or are the writers supposed to figure that out? What you give to your proposal writers has a direct impact on your win rate. If you prepare a Proposal Content Plan, it essentially is your writers' package. It’s a tool for achieving all these goals.

Obsessing over the deadline and resource pressure that defines most proposal efforts can make you forget about other important things and limit your ability to maximize your win rate — not to mention it can also lead to total burnout. It’s a curious dilemma and a bit counter-intuitive but obsessing over getting your proposal done can help you lose. So take a moment and put away your deadline and resource pressures. Take a moment to think about the purpose of it all. Because the purpose is more than making your deadlines and surviving the experience. It’s more than simply winning. Proposal writing should have meaning. Purposeful proposal writing Do you write to fulfill, complete, and comply, or do you write with a purpose that gives what you are writing meaning? If so, what is that purpose? Proposal writing requires fulfilling requirements and compliance, but those should just be things you write about, and not why you write. Why you write proposals should involve considerations like these: Do you write proposals to solve problems? Do you write proposals to help people? Do you write proposals to achieve growth for you, your company, and your customer? Are you creating jobs so that people can prosper? Do you write proposals to achieve a mission? Do you write proposals to make your tiny part of the world better off? If so, then how do you do that? How do you write proposals with a purpose? The answer is one sentence at a time. One paragraph at a time. One section, one solution, one proposal at a time. But start with a sentence. What is the point of that sentence? Is your goal in writing that sentence simply to comply with the RFP and complete your assignment? Is that all your customer wants? Or do you write to make a point that supports your broader purpose? Even if your purpose is simply to win, writing to make a meaningful point can make your proposal far more compelling. It can turn proposal writing from a task into something with purpose. The opposite of writing to make a point is to literally write something that is pointless. It is entirely possible to write a fully compliant proposal that is completely pointless. It turns proposal writing into nothing more than a transaction. The only way you are likely to win by writing a proposal like that is if all the customer cares about is the price. Writing with purpose is part of competing on something other than price. So start writing with the intention of making a point. Then another. Then another. Just make the points add up to something that matters to the customer. And yourself. Does it matter? If you choose a shallow purpose, you will make points that do not matter. For example, you might make the point that your company specializes in something. But this does not matter. It's a skill. It's a qualification. But it is not an outcome. It is a claim with no impact on the customer. If your purpose is to be whatever you need to be or say whatever you need to say to win, then what you have to say won't matter. The customer doesn't care about how great you think you are. And obsessing over how great you are can fill you with pride (good or bad), but it won't give you meaning. If you choose a purpose that does have an impact, then the points you make in your proposal will have a similar impact. The amount of impact your point has determines how much it matters. It's good to matter. But it's even better when it matters in a way that fulfills your purpose in writing. If your purpose is to change the world, help organizations fulfill their missions, create jobs, or anything else you find worthy, then write proposals that matter in ways that fulfill your purpose. Write proposals that have a major impact. But what impact should you have? If you don’t know what major impact would interest the customer, you’ve got a problem. Most companies water their impact down if they think there might be any risk at all of anyone along the way not agreeing with something they said. And when they do this, they water down their purpose until they do not matter. Doing this ignores the fact that customers want they money they are spending to result in something that has a major impact on what matters to them. [Video] Finding meaning What do you do that has an impact? What matters, both now and in the future? How will all of the stakeholders be impacted? Having an impact brings meaning to a proposal. It doesn't have to be the most important thing to you as an individual. It just has to be worthy. It doesn't even have to be a single thing, although that makes it easier to communicate. People rally around worthy causes. Doing this brings meaning and purpose for your company. It brings meaning and purpose for the staff who will work on their project. It brings meaning and impact for the customer and their stakeholders. It brings meaning and impact for each individual proposal writer. Proposal writing is not just fulfillment, compliance, and a search for the magic words that can persuade. Proposal writing is about meaning something. Proposal writing with a team of contributors is about finding meaning for everyone involved. Proposal writing is not just about making a submission with something that can win. It is a chance to actually matter and have an impact.

Just like a great chef can only do so much without great ingredients, great proposal writing requires great input. A great proposal writer can’t win it for you on their own. But you don’t need a mountain of raw input. Collecting customer documents and gathering whole conversations will not necessarily do the proposal any good. In between what you’ve gathered and the proposal, you need to do an assessment. You need to turn what you have into what you should do about it and what you should say as a result of it. When the input gets to the proposal writers, it needs to explain how to position the things they’ll be writing about and how it should impact the decisions they will make about the writing. For proposal writers, it’s all about context. It’s not simply about describing your offering, your approaches, and fulfillment of RFP requirements. Great proposal writing requires making points that matter to the customer, while responding to the RFP. Great proposal writing requires showing that the points you’ve made add up to making you the best alternative for the customer. It’s about helping the customer make their decision and not simply describing your company and your offering. To write a great proposal, proposal writers need great input. So instead of random tidbits of intel that you happened to stumble over, here is how you should inform your proposal writers: What it will take to win. You can’t build a proposal based on it if you don’t know. Proposal writers don't discover or make up what it will take to win. They start from someone else being able to articulate it. It’s the most important ingredient. If you think you know what it will take to win, but you haven’t talked to the customer, then you’re really just guessing. Then again, a good guess is better than nothing. Starting your proposal writers without any input other than the RFP is a recipe for a low win rate. What the customer will find compelling about what you are offering. If you figure out what to offer by talking to people in your own company, you’re really just guessing. To find out what the customer finds compelling, you have to talk to the customer about what matters. If you want to write a proposal that’s meaningful, then you have to know what matters to the customer about what they are procuring. If you don't know this, then all you can do is let the RFP be your guide and hope none of your competitors have better insight. Hope is not a strategy that leads to high win rates. The right features and the right benefits. Making up the features and benefits of your offering based on the RFP will not get you to a great proposal. You need the right features and the right benefits, based on the customer’s perspective. Most features can have multiple benefits: speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness, etc. Which matters the most to this customer? Did the customer tell you or are you guessing? If you're going solely by the evaluation criteria in the RFP, then you can't write a great proposal. You can only write an ordinary proposal like everyone else who has the same RFP. You need differentiated features and benefits that the customer finds compelling in order to write a great proposal with a high win probability. How the customer makes decisions. Is the customer's decision-making process consensus driven or authoritarian? Who is involved? Is it formal or informal? Is it a rigid point scoring evaluation system with a lot of paperwork? Or is it personal? If you are going to write a document that influences the customer’s decisions, you need to know. Who is the customer? Is it the buyer, the users, the decision maker, or another stakeholder? Just how many stakeholders are there and how much influence do they have? Is the customer one person? Does the customer have a consensus or are there multiple agendas? Is any one department or group in control? Who should the proposal be talking to or about? Make sure you have the full perspective. If you are talking to the customer's programs, operations, or technical staff, do they have any influence over contract types, vehicles, or the evaluation process? Do they even know anything about how their organization handles the procurement process? If you are talking to a contracts specialist, do they know anything about the technical subject matter? Do either the programs staff or contracts staff know what their organization’s future plans and priorities are? Have you talked to an executive at a high enough level to know how this procurement fits into the bigger picture? If you’ve only talked to one person at the customer, the answer is “no.” If you want to maximize your win probability with a great proposal, you need to understand the procurement process, organizational trends and goals, and what the program staff need to fulfill their mission. Why should the customer select you? Start by considering what makes you different. What makes you better? Combine that with what the customer finds compelling. Then add in what you know about how they make decisions and what their proposal evaluation process is. Just remember: why the customer should select you shouldn't be based on what you think is great about you, it should be based on what the customer thinks would make a great provider and a great offering. How should you interpret what the customer said in the RFP? Can you interpret what is in the RFP the same way the customer interprets it? If the RFP is well written, then every competitor has it and knows what to write to be compliant. So what is your information advantage? If the RFP is broken, then every competitor has it and no one is sure about what to write. So what is your information advantage? What is the customer expecting to see in response to the RFP they wrote? Optimal positioning, how to differentiate what you are offering, customer insight, and competitive assessment are all things that your proposal writers can help you articulate, but they can't make them up on their own. Instead of the phrase software developers like to use "garbage in, garbage out," with proposal writing it is more like "nothing in, garbage out." If you don't know or don't tell them the things they need to know, your proposal writers will still try to sound compelling. They'll just be faking it and the customer won't be fooled. That's not a great strategy for being competitive. Guessing is not necessarily bad. If you haven’t talked to the customer, guess and guess well. Be aggressive and take risks. Because that is all you can do. But if you are guessing and someone else knows, you are at a competitive disadvantage. So don’t fool yourself into thinking you know something when you are really just guessing.

How do you go about influencing the customer’s RFP to give your company an advantage? When you start thinking about it and peeling back all the layers, it can seem quite complex. There's a lot to consider. And where should you start? Here is a simple formula that’s easy to memorize and can help you cover all the important aspects of the problem. Who. Who is the customer? Who is the decision maker? Who needs help? Who can make changes to the RFP? Who is playing the contracts role? Who is in charge of the technical requirements? Who are the other stakeholders? Who has what concerns that can be addressed by inserting language into the RFP? Whose need is the reason behind the procurement? What. What would you like to see in the RFP? What would you like changed? What will give you an advantage? What will make things difficult for your competitors? Instead of trying to make responding to the RFP easier, consider how to make it incredibly difficult for everyone except your company. Is there a qualification or certification that you have that most or all of your competitors do not? Wouldn't it be nice if the customer made it a requirement? Where. Where in the RFP would you like to have some influence? There is more to think about than just the technical requirements. What about terms and conditions? Contract type? Pricing model? Instructions? Evaluation criteria? Go for all of the above. How. How do you identify and make contact with the right people? LinkedIn can be very helpful for this. Does the customer have a staff directory? How will you suggest the language you'd like to see in the RFP? Being the customer and writing an RFP that gets what you need is even harder than writing a proposal. You can’t write the RFP for the customer. But you can write a whitepaper using language that they can simply copy and paste, if they are so inclined. You can make recommendations for the customer to consider about any possible future RFP. Or even just what's important about things that the customer is interested in and how to select them. But what will motivate them? Do they need some help because they don’t know the subject matter? Or maybe they’re just not sure how to articulate their needs. If writing the RFP is a lot of work, maybe they could use some suggestions. If they are risk averse, they might be concerned and willing to listen to some advice. Maybe they just want to make sure that when the complicated procurement is complete, they actually get what they wanted at the beginning. When. When should you make your suggestions? When are their decision points, approvals, and other milestones? When should you make your suggestions to a contract specialist and when to a technical program specialist? Suggesting a contract vehicle after the acquisition strategy has been approved won’t do you any good. It’s easier to suggest language for the RFP before it has been written. It’s even easier before the decision has been made to issue an RFP. In order to be in synch with the customer's procurement process, you have to know it in detail. Timing matters. Getting there at the wrong time, when you can't have much influence, might even be a reason not to bid if someone else was there at the right time. Why. “Why” is by far the most important question. Why should the customer accept your suggestions? Why should the customer trust your suggestions? Why will they get better results if they do? If you leave out any of the “who, what, where, how, when, and why” topics, you will be far less effective at influencing the RFP. And while the model starts off as questions, you can turn it around and convert it into a pursuit plan. But instead of conducting a strategic influence campaign, you might be better off just helping the customer get what they need. Being seen as a helpful asset is usually a good position to be in. Trust matters.

Most proposal software fits one (and sometimes more) of these seven categories. Some are a better fit for winning proposals than others. Your needs depend partly on the nature of what you offer and partly on your corporate culture. It may very well be that what you need the most isn't proposal software at all... Automating proposal assembly. The only time you should automate the assembly of your proposals from reusable parts is when you sell a commodity, compete primarily on price, and don’t have sufficient profit margin to invest into increasing your win rate. For most companies, you will gain far more revenue by customizing your proposals to maximize your win rate, than you can possibly save from recycling narratives. Often the difference is two or three orders of magnitude. Since I rarely work with companies that sell low-margin commodities, I never use automated proposal assembly. I create custom proposals to maximize win probability and don’t create proposals the same way people create brochures. Your best alternative to automating proposal assembly is to streamline how you plan the content of your proposals. Inspiring proposal writers. By far, people spend more time thinking and talking about the proposal than they do writing it. The best way to make proposals more efficient is to decrease the amount of time people need to figure out what to offer and how to write a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. While recycling narratives does more harm than good for most people, what you can do is provide suggestions, topics, strategies, and more at the bullet level. We take all those ingredients and turn them into Proposal Recipes. When they are designed well, they will often inspire ideas that weren’t found in the Recipe Library. The goal is to get people thinking more quickly so that they can come up with the right answer for the particular bid they are working on, and not to feed them the same answer every time. Incidentally, you do not necessarily need special software to provide an inspiration library. Guiding proposal writers. The proposal process is not sequential. It is best to think of it in terms of goals instead of steps. But there are high level phases you can guide people through. And there are options you can help them consider. You can help them assess when they’ve done things correctly. A little bit of guidance at the moment of need can make a big difference. Other than creating the guidance itself, the trick to making it effective is to pay attention to the user interface. Wrap your tasks in what people need to know to guide them through it. It must not be out of sight, but it also must not get in the way. Collaboration. The more that you need to figure out what to offer and how to present it in the proposal, the more you will benefit from collaboration software. Collaboration software should help you think better and faster as a team. The real challenge, however, is making decisions. Software can get people talking, but you still need an organizational culture that’s decisive or it won’t amount to much and indecision will eat up valuable time instead of saving it. I’ve never settled on any particular software package for collaboration. It’s not the software that matters most to me, it’s how you use it, whether everyone has it, if it’s a pain to install, and whether you can turn discussion into action. Proposal planning. There is so little software available that’s effective for proposal planning, that I had to go and build my own. Planning the content of a proposal and integrating it with quality validation is not as simple as building an outline and grabbing document fragments from a library. At least not if winning matters. Planning the content of a winning proposal involves first identifying what it will take to win, planning that proposal, managing the creation of what is needed to achieve it, and validating that what got created fulfills what it will take to win. What I’ve found is that using software to help with the planning, validation, and guidance of staff has a much larger return on investment than software to manage or assemble the files you submit. In fact, if you took the tens of thousands of dollars you might spend on proposal software and put it into rolling out a manual process for planning the content of your proposals and validating the quality instead, you’ll probably be better off. Effectively planning to win pays for itself many times over because it increases your win rate. Software for proposal production has a questionable ROI. Reviewing proposals. Proposal quality validation can be greatly streamlined when performed online. Instead of reviews that require paper-based production and putting everything on hold while people read and comment, when the validation of proposal quality criteria is done online it becomes a checklist driven exercise that goes as quickly as you can click through the proposal. If you are stuck in the purgatory of ineffective traditional review approaches, you might be able to use a tool like PleaseReview to relieve some of the administrivia burden and make better sense of the comments. Search and retrieval. If you have libraries of files for research or reuse, you’ll need to be able to search them. The search tool hardly matters. How you organize and maintain the libraries matters a whole lot. The cost of the hours and hours you will put into organization and maintenance will likely not only exceed the cost of the search tool, it will likely exceed the value of what people find using the search tool. File library maintenance is so much easier when you quit trying to find and reuse narratives, and abstract them into Proposal Recipes. Is winning or cost reduction your highest priority? It’s good to make things easier, reduce effort, and ultimately reduce costs. But automating proposals without building them around what it will take to win will reduce your win rate more than you save. On the other hand, proposal software that guides your staff to plan and execute a proposal based on what it takes to win and does it better than they can do on their own manually, pays for itself many times over. The middle ground is software for collaboration and process. You can implement collaboration tools with little or no cost. You can improve your process for planning and executing by investing nothing more than your time. How do you decide what to do? Ask yourself what is holding back your win rate. I’m willing to bet that not getting the input you need to know what it will take to win and an ineffective review process that doesn’t provide actual quality validation have a bigger impact than being able to look up past proposals or reduce the time it takes to assemble proposal files. I’m willing to bet that flaws in your corporate decision making culture have a bigger impact than being limited to phones and email for collaboration. Sometimes people turn to software because they think there’s nothing they can do about the real problems. And they’re usually wrong about that. But then again, it may be easier to get the Powers That Be to write a check for tens of thousands of dollars than it is to get them to make quick and consistent decisions based on well-defined quality criteria.

The proposal process is not about efficient repetition. It is not even primarily about managing the steps that go into creating a proposal. The proposal process is about problem solving, starting with figuring out what will it take to win. It is about solving the problems that can reduce your chances of winning. Each time you execute the proposal process you will encounter new, unanticipated problems that mostly result from the customer asking for things in different ways. This is where you should focus. This is what you must obsess on and get good at. If you base your proposal process on rigid repeatable steps, it will break because customers and RFPs are wildly inconsistent. Even small differences will break most processes. Even though it is our nature to want to make proposals routine, they are not. Proposals are a series of problems within problems to be solved in a competitive environment. A certain amount of repeatability can help set expectations and keep everyone on the same page. However, achieving repeatability is not the path to maximizing your win rate. Solving the problems and variations better than your competitors is the key to maximizing your win rate. Your proposal process should be based on problem solving and not on task repetition. And problem solving means being flexible about how you fulfill your goals. A goal-driven proposal process is much better than a procedure-based proposal process for solving problems that can't be anticipated. To transform your process into one that achieves your goals and maximizes your win rate, instead of mechanical steps, try focusing on: Improving proposal contributor performance and proposal quality. Before reengineering your proposal review process, try simply supplementing it with questions for people to address during reviews. Questions can set the foundation you need to start moving reviews from subjective opinion-fests to quality criteria based validation. Proposal quality criteria are simply questions that assess whether quality standards have been met. When people are used to a question-driven process, then reengineering your process by changing the questions becomes a simple incremental step instead of a revolution. You can also synch the questions that both the proposal writers and the proposal reviewers use for guidance. This helps the writers to know what to write to pass the review and it helps the proposal validate whether what was supposed to be done by the proposal writers was actually accomplished. Gaining proposal process acceptance. A key part of gaining proposal process acceptance is to make it easier to follow the process than it is to make it up as people go along. Instead of creating questions that are a burden, create questions that deliver what people need to accomplish their goals and questions that enable them to think things through more quickly. When you do this well, people will naturally pick up the lists of questions, which you might encourage them to call "checklists" or "cheat sheets" because they make doing the proposal easy. People covet checklist driven proposals and always love a cheat sheet. Passing the proposal process minimization challenge. Encourage people to point out anything in the process that is unnecessary or that won't matter. You should challenge them to point out anything that can be dropped from the process without lowering your win rate. This will not only make the process more reliable, but it will also increase acceptance. Setting and accomplishing goals. Instead of mandating procedures, focus on what you need to accomplish. Then move on to "What do you need to make that happen?" and "How will people know if they've done what is needed?" With just these questions you can start to see how the combination of goals and the right questions shapes the process better than boxes on a flow chart. Questions can get people thinking about how to accomplish things and meet standards instead of going through the motions with steps. I’d much rather work on a proposal with people who are defining goals and thinking about the best way to accomplish them, than with people who are simply following and only doing what they are told. The right questions can inspire thinking. Sometimes I don’t even care what the answers are. I just care that they are well thought through and position us to win. Streamlining the flow of information. Answering questions carries information from one person to the next. Questions can transform information from one format to another. Questions can be used to assess, consider, and validate information. Questions can make sure that the next person has what they need to accomplish their goal, while simultaneously communicating what that goal is. When the information is uncertain and what to do with it depends on a lot of factors, like we typically encounter in preparing proposals, the flow of information is better managed through questions than procedures. Accumulate metrics you didn’t even know were possible. Did people skip questions? Which ones? Did they give any shallow non-answers? Over a series of proposals, what can you learn from the way people answered the questions? How do the answers correlate with your win rate? You can gain insights you otherwise would have missed that unlock win rate improvements that make it all worthwhile. Filling your gaps and addressing your weaknesses. If people answer all the questions but the proposal still runs into difficulties you can add questions that prevent the problems from recurring. You can write questions that force people to change procedures. Or even behaviors. You can write questions that change styles and approaches. You can write questions that change results. Lessons learned and continuous win rate improvement. You can implement a continuous win rate improvement program simply by improving the questions that define your process regularly and raise the bar every time. It helps when you encourage people to use the lists of questions as checklists. It makes it easy to check in with people after each proposal, get feedback (formal or informal), and tweak the questions for next time. Just don't let the lists grow too long or you'll start to see resistance. You can even have business line or customer specific sets of questions. Anticipating and solving problems. You can write questions that prompt people to be on the lookout for indicators of problems. You can write questions that simply prompt people to consider the risks. You can write questions that ask if people have taken mitigation actions. You can write questions that ask whether certain people have been notified about unpredictable problems. You can write questions that keep people informed, on the lookout, and guide them to the right response. Since proposals are about problem solving, you can use this to shape the entire development effort. Changing behaviors over time. The right question at the right time can set expectations, be a reminder, and prompt action. The right question at the right time forces a choice. Very few people will intentionally do things to harm a proposal, if they are aware and don’t have conflicting priorities. The right questions can address both of these. Building in expectation management and communication. Everything you do on a proposal comes with expectations that flow in every direction. Ignore them at your peril as they are the number one source of proposal friction. Instead build in clarity. Everything you do should come with communication before, during, and after. And every communication should clarify expectations. Instead of focusing on proposal reuse, try creating communication templates so that this becomes easy to do. Timing matters Ask the right question at the wrong time and it will have no impact. The right time to ask a question depends on what has been done, what comes next, what resources are available, and the person being asked. Focus less on dates and deadlines, and more on goals and dependencies. Also, since far more time is spent thinking and talking about a proposal than actually writing it, you can use questions to accelerate thinking and discussion. You can use questions to greatly reduce open-ended circular discussion and rumination that never ends. But you have to anticipate what and why people ruminate, so that your questions can eliminate the need before it occurs.

You need to do this, you need to do that. Everyone already seems to know what they should be doing to increase their win rates. But they have many excuses reasons for why they are not. Those reasons usually boil down to other people not doing what they should. Improving your win rate requires changing other people’s behavior. Instead of creating a process based on steps and then using carrots and sticks to get other people to change, try building your process around asking questions. You can change people’s behavior simply through the questions you ask. Pre-RFP examples Instead of telling people to establish customer intimacy, try asking them, “What is your information advantage over your competitors?” If they don’t have customer intimacy, they’ll have difficulty answering. If they get caught unable to answer, they’ll have some incentive to gain customer intimacy on the next bid. Instead of telling people to describe your win strategies or prepare some (usually watered down) themes, ask them, “What differentiates our offer?” If they are struggling to identify your differentiators, they’ll start strategizing how to position your company on the next bid to have some real differentiators. If people aren’t discovering pursuits early enough ask them, “What have you done to influence the RFP?” If they are finding pursuits by looking for RFP releases, they will not have done anything to influence the RFP. If people are chasing any pursuit they find ask them, “How does the pursuit relate to the company’s strategic plans?” This is a double whammy. First, the company has to do some actual strategic planning. Then the folks chasing bids have to actually pay attention to it. Proposal examples Instead of telling people to plan their proposal, try asking them, “Has your Proposal Content Plan been reviewed?” It’s kind of hard to review something that doesn’t exist. Instead of telling people to create an RFP compliant outline ask them, “Will your outline meet the customer’s expectations?” This subtly forces people to make their own opinion secondary to what they think the customer wants, such as what they itemized in the RFP instructions. It also can force the use of a compliance matrix. This is also a great example of how you can use questions to not only get people to do things, but to change their behavior. Instead of telling people to follow the style guide that they usually ignore, try asking something like, “Is the proposal written from the customer’s perspective?” To answer this, they have to know what “writing from the customer’s perspective” means. You can do this with any writing style or preference that you feel strongly about. Getting people to change their writing style can be challenging. Telling them to do it has a low probability of success. But asking them a question that forces them to assess what they’ve done may just work. Instead of talking about an opportunity at the kickoff meeting, try working through a script of questions. Anticipate what your proposal writers will need to know and turn it into a proposal input form. Then see what those pursuing the lead can answer. Correlate their answers with your win rate and you’ll be able to quantify the importance of starting proposals with an information advantage. By using the same script every time, you can train the business development function regarding what information you need to write a winning proposal. See if you can get them to give out a copy of your script at the beginning, when they decide to pursue a lead. If nothing else, this approach will dramatically improve your company’s ability to weasel word around questions it can’t answer. If you win rate is really low, this alone might improve it! Seriously folks, I’ve seen how lots of companies weasel word things, and the quality of the weasel wording could be greatly improved. Of course, it might be easier just to find answers to the questions.

Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the performance layer into the following areas: proposal management, proposal writing, and quality validation. The performance layer is where the proposal document gets created. It is what is traditionally thought of as the proposal process, only it is organized architecturally instead of sequentially. This is because we are addressing functionality and not sequence, and functionally proposal development consists of the actual writing and production of the proposal, managed according to the proposal process, with completion validated by quality assurance. Proposal Management: Implementation of the proposal process How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Preparations and input processing. What do you need to do to get ready for proposal development? How will you collect the required inputs? How will you assess them for use in the document? Assignments and progress tracking. What resources will you require? How will they be assigned? Once assigned, how will you track progress toward assignment completion? Process implementation. How will you implement your proposal process? Do you have a process to implement? Will this pursuit require exceptions or changes to your process? Issue management. What issues can you anticipate and prevent or mitigate? What responses should you have for contingencies? Tools/resource development. What tools should you have or build? These can range from simple checklists to major systems. What needs do contributors have that might be addressed by having a tool? Training and performance support. What skill or capability gaps do you anticipate that might be filled with training? What can you do to improve the performance of contributors during proposal efforts? Proposal Writing: Creation of the document How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Assignment completion and goal accomplishment. How will assignments be issued? How will you track progress towards completion? How will you validate the quality of completion? Will assignment completion fulfill the process goals? Expectation management. What do proposal contributors expect? What should you do to address those expectations? Are you communicating your expectations? Are everyone’s expectations being agreed to? Execution. Are things getting done as they need to? Pricing. Is pricing being completed on schedule according to RFP specifications? Is pricing competitive? Is pricing being done in isolation? Is pricing part of offering design or completed after the proposal is complete? Produce deliverables. Are required proposal deliverables (such as the proposal, forms, pricing, certifications and representations, etc.) being produced on time without defects? How is the quality of proposal deliverables being validated? Quality Validation: How do you know if you are doing a good job? How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Definition of proposal quality. Is proposal quality defined? How should it be defined? If it is defined, how is it impacting performance during proposal development? Development of quality criteria. Do you have quality criteria that can be used to measure how well you are fulfilling your definition of proposal quality? Are you experiencing issues that could be resolved or mitigated by changing your quality criteria? Self-assessment. How are people checking their work? Are your proposal quality criteria being used for self-assessment as people complete their proposal assignments? Implementation of quality validation. What is your review process? Does it fulfill your definition of proposal quality and your quality criteria? Is it consistently effective?

Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the input layer into the following areas: information, strategy, and offering design. In many companies, the scope of the proposal process begins with RFP release. However, proposals require input, and that input often must be gathered before the RFP is released. Regardless of how you define the scope of the proposal process, you should define the inputs a proposal requires to maximize your win rate. The input layer defines those input requirements so that they can guide pre-RFP efforts. When pre-RFP efforts are either not possible or out-of-scope, the input layer is still necessary to facilitate a rapid start to the proposal. The probability of winning a proposal depends on the delivery of information, regardless of when you start collecting that information. The input layer informs proposal writers with not only what to write about, but what points to make. Without the necessary inputs proposals tend to end up being self-descriptive, watered down, and literally pointless. Information: What will it take to win and what matters to the customer? What information do you need in this area, where will you get it, what will you do with it, and how does that impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? What it will take to win. You can’t write a proposal based on it, if you can’t articulate it. Is this awareness delivered to the proposal, or discovered during the proposal? Is it discovered before writing starts or by writing and rewriting? Are the information requirements for articulating what it will take to win itemized? Does it anticipate and answer the questions that proposal writers have? Does it enable proposal writers to substantiate the points you need to make in order to win? Customer insight. What matters to the customer? What are their preferences? How do they make decisions? How does their procurement process work? What do they want? What do they need? Do you have an information advantage? Can you write a proposal that shows insight? Can you write a proposal from the customer’s perspective? Or will you be limited to describing yourself? Strategy: What are your proposal win strategies? What information do you need in this area, where will you get it, what will you do with it, and how does that impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Differentiation. You can’t be superior to your competitors without being different from your competitors. What makes you and your offering the customer’s best alternative? You can’t prove this with your proposal writing if you don’t know what it is before you start writing. Competitive advantage. If you can’t be different from your competitors, and some RFPs make this difficult, you can still be better. What gives you an advantage? How should that impact the proposal? Positioning. How will you position against the competition, customer, and opportunity? Will you do this strategically or will you make this up during proposal writing? Evaluation optimization. What will it take to win the proposal evaluation? What do you need to do to get the winning score? Risk mitigation. How will you mitigate and balance the risks related to bidding, winning, and performing? Do you know what those risks are? What matters to the customer about risk? Price to win. What price reflects the winning cost/value trade-off? Can you deliver at that price? Offering Design: What will the winning offer be? What information do you need in this area, where will you get it, what will you do with it, and how does that impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? What information do you need to design the winning offering? You can’t write a proposal about the winning offering until it’s been designed. You can’t design the winning offering without knowing the scope, requirements, and desired outcomes. Do you even know what information you need? Approaches. What technical and management approaches will you propose? Will you propose any other approaches (staffing, risk mitigation, quality, etc.)? What differentiates your approaches and makes them the customer’s best alternative? Can you describe the key features and benefits of your approaches so they can be validated ahead of writing about them in detail? Cost/value trade-offs. What are the cost/value trade-offs to be made? How do you propose making them? Will they enable you to hit the price to win? Why did you make the trade-offs that you made? What advantages or benefits are there for the customer? Requirements fulfillment. Will your offering fulfill all of the customer's wants, needs, and requirements? Have you itemized them? RFP compliance. Will your offering be fully compliant with the RFP? Basis of estimate. What will the basis of your estimates be? How will your estimates be calculated? Bill of materials. What materials will you need to obtain and price in order to deliver your offering? How will you source them? What are the advantages and customer benefits of your materials? Work breakdown structure. How will you break down the services you will provide?

Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the organizational layer into the following areas: Executive, Approaches, and Resources. The organizational layer forms a context that impacts your ability to win bids. But it can’t necessarily be accounted for as inputs to the process. It’s not part of the process flow, but it impacts every step of the process flow. It is roughly analogous to style in writing, only it’s the management style of the environment your process operates in. Your win rate depends on adapting your process to this environment. Instead of steps and procedures, this will often take the form of communication and guidance to help stakeholders address these considerations. A simple checklist or table may be all it takes. However, failing to anticipate these considerations will likely mean win rate reducing delays, ad hoc decisions, and unnecessary conflict made against your proposal deadline. Executive: Decisions, oversight, and authorityHow do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Decisions and approvals. Where are decisions required in the process? Who may make which decisions? Who participates? Under what circumstances? Are there any circumstances in which decision making is not communicating, managing, and monitoring expectations? Expectations exist in all directions. What should people expect from their stakeholders? What do the stakeholders expect? How are expectations communicated and managed? What happens when expectations aren’t met? Every step in every process should address expectation management. Strategic planning, positioning, and messaging. How are the organization's strategies articulated and how does this impact the pursuit and proposal processes? Defining quality standards. Is proposal quality defined? What is sufficient regarding quality? How is quality validated? How to assess the quality of completion should be built into every goal and every step of the process. Priority setting. What priorities impact processes and stakeholders? How should competing priorities be resolved? Conflict resolution. Can conflicts in resources, approach, policy, goals, or procedures be anticipated? Culture. What values, both declared and undeclared, impact the process and stakeholders? Is the organization risk averse or risk tolerant? Is quality really the priority people think it is? Is the organization mission focused? How will the organization’s culture impact the process and stakeholders, and how can the process impact the organization’s culture? Approaches: Processes and procedures that cross boundaries, set organizational standards, or are strategic in natureHow do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Bid/no bid decisions. Which pursuits will be bid, which will be canceled, and why? Insource vs outsource. Does the organization have a preference? How does that impact staffing the pursuit? Centralization vs decentralization. Where are decisions made? Where are resources located? Consistent and planned vs reactive and ad hoc. Does the organization do things carefully, predictably, or chaotically? Are processes defined or made up as people go along? Authoritarian vs collaborative. Are things done by individual assignment, decision, and approval, or are they done by groups and consensus? Structure, hierarchy, escalation, delegation. How the organization is structured is different from how it makes decisions. However, escalations and delegations are ways of mapping decision making to the organizational structure. They define an approach to decision making that is often absent but is incredibly helpful for resolving issues against a deadline. Remote vs collocation. Does the organization have preferences regarding how or when work is performed remotely vs being performed with staff collocated? Resources: Ensuring that the organization has the people, facilities, and equipment needed to functionHow do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Oversight of logistics. Think of the resources requirements for winning the pursuit as a supply chain. How will the organization identify and supply the resources required? What stakeholders will be involved and what will they be required to do? What will happen as resource requirements change during the pursuit? Sourcing and strategic relationships. Once you know what resources you need, where will you find them? How will you source them? This often depends on strategic relationships, both inside and outside an organization. Budgets and finance. All resources have costs, although they may be accounted for in different ways. Within your organization, how are resource budgets defined and managed? This will impact the procedures you need to follow, not only to launch a pursuit, but also to make changes during a pursuit. Procedures for allocating resources. Once resources are identified and accounted for, they have to be assigned. But nearly all pursuits require support outside of the organization that controls the pursuit. The procedures required to allocate the resources that have been authorized impact your ability to staff and manage the pursuit.

Some companies are built on formal hierarchies, with decisions made by someone in charge. Other companies are consensus driven and work through collaboration. Neither approach is right or wrong. Depending on the circumstances, one can be a better fit. However, picking an approach that does not match the culture of the company is doomed to failure. Rather than deliberate over how to determine which approach will work in a given environment, there is a much simpler approach. If you have to ask, then you don’t have the authority. If you don’t have the authority, you have to manage by other means. If you can’t use the stick, then get good at using carrots. To the people you have to work with, fighting for control that you don’t have is both uncooperative and unsupportive. Not only does it not add value, but when it distracts you from adding enough value to make your approach easier than the alternative of ignoring it, control dramas can actually make your efforts a net negative. They add to the friction of doing proposals. I have never seen fighting for control work. Ever. Even in authoritative companies. If you win a battle today, you have to start over tomorrow. It creates a constant struggle. Either a person is recognized as the authority or they are not. And you do not become the authority by gaining a title or even simply by the blessing of The Powers That Be. If you are in a culture that is driven by authority, who has what authority will be clear. Or there will be constant struggles. Trying to be the authority when you are not is just annoying. And a little sad. If you can’t force people to do what you think they should, you should try getting them to want to do what you need. How do you do that when nobody wants to work on a proposal? Start by thinking about what they do want. Here are 5 things that proposal contributors often desire: To complete their assignments quickly. Focus on providing inspiration and guidance for how to complete their proposal assignments. Avoid orphaned work (anything that does not go into the delivered proposal). Make file management clear and easy. Focus on goals instead of procedures. Make your process an easier way to achieve their goals than figuring it all out on their own. To not get stuck in a situation where they don’t know what to do. People feel fear when they get assignments they don't know how to fulfill. Make your process self-explanatory. Help them understand what the RFP means. Help them figure out what to offer. Help them figure out what to write. Prevent them from ever getting stuck. To not waste their time and effort. Proposal contributors do not want to reinvent the wheel. This is what they think they are doing when they are asked to start writing from scratch on a topic they think has been addressed in previous proposals. But don’t recycle proposal text. Instead, convert past proposal copy into recipes that will enable writers to go from inventing what to write to applying what has been previously written to what it will take to win this proposal. Proposal contributors also hate to be told to start over. You should provide expectation management and guidance to prevent this. Providing writers with the same quality criteria that reviewers will use is a good way to achieve this. Proposal contributors also hate bidding a loser. They’ll go the extra mile for something they feel they can win. But they’ll burn out quickly on something they think shouldn’t be bid. Either make the bid rationale clear, or take it as input that your bid/no bid process filter needs to be changed. To have control over their own destiny. Get everyone to agree on the goals before moving forward. How those goals are achieved is secondary, so you can afford to be flexible about that. People want to be able to choose the approach they’ll take and juggle their priorities so long as they achieve the goal. Managing priorities becomes an issue when people know what they need to do but they can’t manage their time. Transparency, coordination, and helpful alternatives work better than pressure. Things slip when people haven't bought into the goal and are just paying it lip service because it's easier than complaining. To create a better future. A proposal creates opportunities for future work. The approaches proposed impact that future work environment. Writing the proposal is writing the future. Also, seeing a continuously improving proposal environment helps people accept today’s challenges if they can trust that tomorrow will be better. Guide them to a better future in order to give them a reason to care. Every instance I can remember of people being resistant to working on a proposal involved one or more of these items. If you feel like people need to be forced it’s probably because your process isn’t meeting their needs. So flip that around. How can you change your process to better address these five things? What if you threw your process out and started over making these five things your top priority? What would that process look like? This is what we did when we wrote the MustWin Process. It’s goal driven. It provides options. It anticipates things that lead to wasted effort and seeks to resolve them early. It prevents users from getting stuck by ensuring that the information required to complete each task is delivered to the person performing that task. It manages expectations so people know what they are getting into. It provides new ways to monitor progress. But most importantly of all, it adapts so you can get just the right balance between authority and collaboration for your environment.

In a past life I helped a company create a new proposal department. The company was part of a billion dollar government contractor. They had a history of business units not accepting process guidance from the proposal group. It’s not an uncommon problem. Does it sound familiar? The old proposal group kept saying things like, “If they’d only submit their drafts on time” or “if they’d only listen to us.” What they meant was “If they’d only do what they’re told.” They thought the solution was for someone to force contributors to meet the deadlines they set. They didn’t realize that they were just creating a control drama that they were always going to lose. Their response was to try to fight harder for control. It didn’t work. And while it took years, they ended up losing their jobs over it because they came to be seen as uncooperative instead of being value-added. I was asked to create a replacement for the old, uncooperative proposal group. There was so much negative history that people had lost perspective. I looked at it as an expectation management problem. The business units had the wrong expectations for what it takes to win a proposal, and the proposal group had the wrong expectations for their role as a value-added support function. The first thing I addressed was what the business units could expect from the proposal group. This is different from what the proposal group expects from the business units. As I made notes, the list grew beyond what I could fit on a sheet of paper. It was important to me to keep it to one page since I knew it would be difficult to get their attention. So I turned it into a poster. I could present it during meetings and I posted it in the proposal department. One day we were discussing an important proposal that was coming up and how we should approach it. I decided to give the executive sponsor a choice: We can work together in collaboration, with everybody giving their best efforts and treat the process as a set of recommendations. Or: We can ensure that you know what to expect at every step. You will know what each person is expected to do, including when and how, and who will make every decision. If you select this option you will be committing, both personally and for your staff, to following the process. And we will be committing to meeting the expectations it defines. We will do things by the book. Please examine it before you decide whether to commit to it. Whichever way you decide, we’ll work just as hard to win the proposal. What I learned from studying people's reactions to this approach is that executives desperately want to know what to expect. They’re used to being let down and constantly having to fight fires. When you communicate clear choices like “If you want this, here is how to get it” and then don’t try to force them, they no longer react as if in a confrontation or a power struggle. Taking this approach requires that you organize and document your process differently from the way most people have theirs. Instead of a flow chart of activity or a data flow diagram, the process needs to show expectations and fulfillment. You can’t get away with merely having a way of doing things. You not only must create the book in order to do things by the book, but you must be able to follow your own book. And they must be able to follow it as well. When you commit to fulfilling expectations, you want them documented and you really don’t want to have to walk back your commitment. This experience was very helpful when I wrote the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process. Every activity that it defines addresses who has the lead responsibility, who plays supporting roles, and what needs to be accomplished. It is goal driven and goal fulfillment can be validated. When you look at it as a whole, it becomes easy to say “If we do it this way, you know what you are going to get.” It is designed so the process itself can start with review and acceptance by the Executive Sponsor of the pursuit. By giving people a chance to opt out you really don’t stand to lose much. If they opt out, it just means doing things the same way you are doing now. Only you have explicitly told them that all they can count on is your best efforts. But when they opt in, then they have committed to following the process formally and you start the proposal with half of the battle for process acceptance already won. And while that doesn’t guarantee they won’t change their minds, it’s the fighting chance you need to be successful. Just make sure that they have a positive experience following your process, so they choose it again the next time. Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it…

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What makes a great proposal process isn’t the steps. It’s not even the functionality. It’s the ability to anticipate problems and maximize the effectiveness of contributors. The questions below won’t tell you what steps you should have. They won’t even tell you what to do. But they will point out when you need to change because you have problems that aren’t being addressed by your process. If a particular individual is required to execute the process, you do not have a process. You have a personalized way of doing things. Do people show up prepared? Do you agree on who is responsible for winning and who is responsible for producing? Do all stakeholders agree on what it will take to win? Are all stakeholders aware of the bid decision rationale? Is everyone on the same page regarding how proposal quality is defined? Do all participants and stakeholders articulate the same priorities? Are bid strategies and the design of your offering completed and validated separately from writing? Do you discover whether what you intend to offer is affordable and competitive before you start writing? Do you ever have to go back and change the writing because of what you discovered when putting together the final pricing? Can you articulate what it will take to win before you start writing? Are people spending more time talking or writing? Why? Do writers know what they need to do to pass the draft review? Do bid strategies change after writing starts? Does what you are offering change after writing starts? Do teaming partners complete assignments on time and with sufficient quality? Do people get stuck? Are review comments based on written quality criteria? Do reviews typically discover the same problems? Do you routinely ignore review comments? Do you have the right balance between authoritarian and collaborative management for this environment? Do all contributors have the information they need? Do all contributors have the skills they need? Are risks identified and mitigated, or ignored? Do problems linger? Is it clear who should make which decisions? When a problem occurs, do you have to figure out who can make any decisions needed? Are behaviors negatively impacted by budgets and accounting? Do you manage your proposals like an investment? Are assignments self-explanatory? Are you filling gaps? Why are there any gaps? Are things snowballing towards the back end? Do you focus on goals or procedures? Can contributors articulate the goal of every step? Is it clear what contributions need to be made and by whom? Do people know how to make their contributions? Is it easy for people to make their contributions? Do your staff resources cover your functional requirements with sufficient depth? Has the amount of change been minimized? Has the amount of effort required to achieve the goals been minimized? Are proposal staff resisting change more than your stakeholders? Are you providing the right options to match the circumstances you face? Are you looking for tools to get people to buy in instead of adapting to achieve buy-in? Are you sacrificing win rate to lower costs or effort? Are you introducing more risk than you are mitigating, especially at the back end? Do you have a planned mechanism for incorporating debrief feedback and lessons learned? How do you know when the proposal is complete? Are you making decisions based on the impact to your win rate? Now, take this list and add any recurring problems that you should look out for and solve. Just be careful. The solution to “people won’t meet their deadlines” might be “do a better job of content planning” or “design the offering before you start writing.” Similarly, problems during draft reviews might be a result of not validating your bid strategies prior to writing. If people won’t participate in planning before writing, you might be making planning too difficult. What’s the least you need in your plan, and can you script it or turn it into a checklist? The MustWin Process Architecture can also help give you a 360-degree view of how everything from culture to resources to management fits together. The model helps you to make sure that you are addressing everything that will contribute to your success and maximize your win rate. It may also help to focus on rolling out small bite-sized changes. Instead of reengineering your entire process at once, try solving specific problems by delivering the information needed to achieve your process goals and helping stakeholders to maximize their effectiveness. The steps will work themselves out. We help companies make process improvements that pay for themselves by increasing your win rate. Get our insights, make sure you haven't overlooked anything, solve problems you thought you had to live with, and win more of what you bid. Sometimes we just provide an outside opinion on what you have, sometimes we help you plan the changes with you doing all the work, and sometimes we play an active role. It all depends on your needs. Click here to get on our calendar so we can discuss your needs.

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Process implementation is only one part of one component of everything that goes into enabling an organization to maximize its win rate. The chart above provides an architecture that can help you put the proposal process into context. This architecture matches the environment proposals operate in better then by grouping things by organizational boundaries like business development, capture, and proposal management. The issues shown in the chart have as much impact on your success as how you conduct business development, capture, and proposal management. This architecture looks at things functionally instead of sequentially or politically. Instead of helping you define departments, it helps you develop an integrated approach to addressing the issues, regardless of how your company structures its org chart or labels its staff. Context matters. Proposals are created in a complex environment. Proposals need management. Proposals need input that comes from outside the proposal function. Proposals need an entire organization as a foundation. But where do you start? How does it all fit together? We group these things into three layers: The organizational layer. This layer has an executive component, an approach component, and a resources component. They define the environment you must operate in to manage your proposals. The input layer. The components of this layer include information, strategy, and offering design to categorize the things you need to know before you can start writing your proposal. The performance layer. The components of this layer include proposal management, proposal writing, and quality validation. This is where the proposal is developed. These layers put the issues that impact your win rate into context. They require an organizational response. Many of them simply can’t be resolved by someone operating in the proposal management box. But if you are in the proposal management box, this chart can point you to where you need to interface, and what you need other people to address, so that the proposals that come out of the performance layer have a much better chance of winning.

One of the things that I’ve learned by authoring the MustWin Process and having personally been involved with countless process implementations at companies reengineering their proposal processes is that context matters. Much of what goes into winning proposals occurs outside of the process. Consider how decisions get made and what expectations people have outside of the proposal. How is the proposal impacted by the company’s strategic planning and positioning efforts? Who sets quality standards? Who manages priorities? Is the company centralized or decentralized? Authoritarian or collaborative? How is authority delegated to proposal stakeholders? How much work is performed remotely vs. colocation? How much effort is internal vs. outsourced? What roles do teaming partners play? What should we bid and what should we not bid? The myth that there is only one proposal process or that we all follow the same one is simply not true. Issues like these not only impact how your process gets implemented, they also impact your win rate. If you focus on your proposal process without also focusing on organizational issues like these, you not only can’t maximize your chances of a successful implementation, you can’t maximize your win rate. And if your company depends on its proposals for its growth, your win rate is one of the most important measures in the entire company. In addition to the organizational issues, a successful proposal effort requires input. Quite a lot of it. What will it take to win? What insight do we have about the customer? What should we offer? What cost/value trade-offs will we strike? What differentiates our offering? How should we position against the competitive environment? What risks do we face and how will we mitigate them? People working on the proposal need these answers before they can start writing. These questions need to be asked and answered before the proposal process starts, not after. You can't build a proposal around the answers if you don't have them, and you can't do it by pasting in answers after it's written. Then there’s the proposal performance layer. Process is only one component. What about your management model? Preparations before you start? Assignments and progress tracking? Expectation management? Issue management? Tools, libraries, and resources? Training? Self-assessment tools? Quality validation? Proposal management requires an organization and not just one person with a title. If the organizational layer and information input layer are as important as the performance layer, and if process is only one component of the performance layer, then could you be putting too much emphasis on process? This is a strange thing for a process geek like me to say. However, I’m not advocating ignoring process. I’m advocating giving attention to the organizational and input layers as well so that the proposal process has what it needs to be successful. It’s easy for proposal specialists to retreat into an area they have some control over. But proposal success depends on getting outside the proposal and making sure the organization can deliver the information needed for proposal efforts to succeed. It’s all about win rate. Who at the CxO level is primarily responsible for your company’s win rate? If it’s not at the top of the priority stack for someone at that level, then it’s not a priority for your company. Pawning it off to the VP of Business Development makes it a sales issue and not an organizational priority. If all of your revenue comes from proposals, then win rate is an organizational issue. If you are a lowly proposal specialist with no voice at the CxO level, you may focus on production instead of winning and end up being a low-value asset to the company. Or you can delve into the mathematics of win rate analysis and begin educating The Powers That Be on how their success depends on those numbers and tie your value to the company's revenue and success. If all you do is evangelize process, you won’t get very far. Evangelizing about process is basically telling other people what to do. However, educating people about win rate analysis and how their growth potential depends on winning enables you to have a far more profound impact on the entire company. After that, everything else falls into place. This is so important that I’m building a performance improvement model for integrating the organizational, input, and performance layers. Take all those considerations above. Now draw a picture showing how they are related. That’s what your company needs in order to make sense of it all and maximize your probability of winning. It’s what your company needs to have an integrated approach to the proposal process. And it’s being added to the MustWin Process documentation that PropLIBRARY Subscribers have access to.

You can build quality into every activity that’s part of producing a proposal. But you can’t do it with milestone based reviews. With Proposal Quality Validation the emphasis changes from when to review, to what you review. You can apply quality validation to more than just the document. Try taking a deep look at the risks and issues you face in every activity related to producing the proposal. Don’t just think in terms of checklists. Think in terms of what needs to be done correctly to win. Then think about how to validate every action and outcome to increase your probability of winning. Creating quality criteria to validate these activities formalizes your approach to proposal management. Instead of relying on people to just know what to do and to remember all the details, by creating quality criteria for activities and outcomes, you gain several benefits: Reliability Lower risk Higher probability of winning Lower costs In the same way that giving your proposal quality criteria to your writers helps them achieve success with the first draft, having quality criteria for your pursuit activities and outcomes helps the people engaged in the pursuit be successful. This is much better than finding out later that things weren’t done well and trying to recover before you lose. Start by dividing your activities into activities that produce an outcome or a deliverable. Then consider what must happen for each to be successful. Activity before the RFP is released Think about the issues you face pursuing a lead before the RFP is released. What needs to happen to be ready to win at RFP release? Can you validate that your preparations are putting you in position to win the proposal? Here are some questions that can drive your pre-RFP quality criteria: Do you know what information you need to write the winning proposal? Do you know what constitutes a qualified lead? Under what circumstances should you cancel a pursuit? Are you making sufficient progress to be ready to win at RFP release? Do you have the right pursuit strategies? Do you know what it will take to win the pursuit? What should you offer? What issues could reduce your probability of winning? Are the risks mitigated? You can use criteria like these to validate whether you will be prepared to win at RFP release. Activity during proposal startup Proposal startup is mostly about quickly implementing plans. But doing it quickly does no good if the plans are not valid. Validation during proposal startup is how you make sure you’re not going down the wrong path. Is everything that will be needed to start the proposal ready? Have all issues that arose during the pre-RFP phase been resolved? Do you know what it will take to win? Do you have the plans you need? Do your plans address everything they should? Do your resources match your requirements? Do the plans strike the right balance between thoroughness and speed? What issues could reduce your probability of winning? Are the risks mitigated? Does the intended approach to managing the proposal meet the needs of all stakeholders? You need criteria like these to ensure your plans are validated before you implement them. Otherwise you are following invalid plans and your win rate will suffer. Activity during Proposal Content Planning Creating a Proposal Content Plan is necessary if you want to make creating a proposal based on what it will take to win an intentional act instead of guesswork. Think about what is necessary to achieve what it will take to win in writing: Will the outline meet the customer’s expectations? Does the content plan make it clear where all of the customer’s requirements should be addressed? Does the content plan sufficiently address what it will take to win? If followed, will the content plan produce the desired proposal? Will the content plan meet the needs of both writers and reviewers? Are the quality criteria for the proposal sufficient? Has the time for planning been properly balanced against the time to write the proposal? What issues during proposal writing could impact your probability of winning? Do the instructions in the Proposal Content Plan mitigate those risks? You need quality criteria like these to validate that you have the right Proposal Content Plan. Activity during proposal writing During proposal writing, quality validation can be applied both to tracking progress and to assessing whether the goal of writing a proposal that reflects what it will take to win has been accomplished. This phase is where your plans get executed. Making sure that you follow through on great planning with great execution requires oversight. And oversight can be validated. When you go from planning to writing, think about what you can do to make sure that writing is successful. Is the writing making sufficient progress to meet the deadline? Which Proposal Content Plan instructions have been completed and which remain? Have the writers self-assessed their sections against the proposal quality criteria? Were the instructions in the Proposal Content Plan followed? Does what was written fulfill the proposal quality criteria? You need quality criteria like these to prevent writing from being a big unknown until you see the draft. Activity during final production and submission The big challenge during final proposal production is to complete the proposal by the deadline without introducing any mistakes. A high level of quality surveillance is needed to ensure that no mistakes are introduced. How do you know if you have enough quality surveillance to mitigate your risks during final production? Here are some quality criteria that can be used to assess your efforts: What is required for the proposal to be ready to submit? Have all issues from prior phases been resolved? Is the plan for finalizing the proposal sufficient? How will the proposal be completed without introducing errors? What risks can be anticipated during final production and submission? How will they be mitigated? Quality criteria like these help you assess whether your quality surveillance methods are sufficient. The draft proposal is not the only thing that needs quality validation Quality criteria help you determine whether the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win and get everyone on the same page regarding what a quality proposal is. But what about your plans for how you are going to prepare the proposal? Quality criteria can also be applied to those plans and provide a way for stakeholders to validate that the approaches that will be used to manage the proposal are the right approaches. This is how you avoid getting into the middle of a proposal and finding out that the management methods are not a match for your organization or this pursuit. And avoiding that is well worth the effort. Think of applying Proposal Quality Validation to your proposal management model as an insurance policy. Having insurance that you have the right management model can really pay off for both the company and the people involved in the proposal.

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About this file This file is free. As in beer. It contains a wealth of lessons learned the hard way. It contains things I wish I'd understood about proposal quality at the start of my career. It contains the key insights you need to reengineer how you review your proposals. It will enable you to take a step back from how things are usually done and discover what proposal quality really is, so you can change how you do things to properly achieve it. I'm passing it on to you in the hope that we can finally shift the way people do proposals out of the Stone Age. Take what's here, put it to work, and let me know how it improves your win rate. And if you add to it, enhance it, or find better ways, please share those as well. This page is for downloading the PDF file. It's a large file, at 7.7Mb. You can see the file without downloading it here. From the introduction Since 2001, I have published over a thousand articles on business and proposal development. This document is not like any of them. If you want process, methodology, structure and training, you should visit PropLIBRARY and read those articles. If you want deep insight to ponder that?s a little too honest and bordering on insubordinate, keep reading. I?m going to share what I?ve learned about what matters the most from doing all that writing. And it?s not the procedures we follow. Key excerpts from the license page You are free to give this file to as many people as you'd like. Share it with your whole company. Or other companies. Use part or all of it in your training materials. ? Current version of this file: 1.0

You can't follow the steps to create a great proposal, because the steps are different every time. They aren't even steps. At best we talk about phases. But even those change, overlap, or get redefined every time. That's why most companies really just have a way of doing their proposals that isn't legitimately a process. If a process requires a certain person to run it, it's not really a process. See also: Great proposals Writing a winning proposal is really based on a flow of information, from lead to submission. Unfortunately, the information required for a proposal does not arrive in sequence. And you can never get all the information you’d like to have, or know when you'll find out something new that changes what you need to do. Consider: Your proposal strategies are often built as much on what you don’t know as on what you do know. Because the customer rules all, you do a lot of reacting to their whims. They have more control over the flow of information needed to prepare the proposal than you do. Your primary management tool is expectation management so you can attempt to keep everyone on the same page, even though they all have different priorities. You spend most of your time solving problems, which occur unpredictably. You try to compensate with planning, but that's really just figuring out what needs to be done about all the things that are different on this proposal. Proposal writing usually involves different people, writing about different things, with different strategies, on a different schedule, under different circumstances, often for a different customer with different needs, preferences, and approaches to decision making. You hold reviews for quality assurance, where you seek quality with a moving target and mostly subjective quality criteria that you learn about after writing instead of before it. You go into formatting and production where the input you need is always late and everything breaks in ways that are different from last time. Meanwhile, you're competing where being number two is just being the first loser and winning is a higher priority than following the same procedures you did last time. Just because there is a pattern to how your proposals go, does not mean that it can be reduced to repeatable procedures. You can't impose order on something that is inherently not sequential. Steps get repeated an uncertain number of times. Routine steps might not be applicable on a given day. New steps frequently have to be invented. The proposal process is not really about the steps, and if your process is based on sequential steps it is likely to fail and even more likely to be ignored. This is a major reason why companies don’t follow their own process. If your proposal process is based on steps, you should think about reengineering it into something that guides people to winning a proposal instead of something they are expected to follow like an assembly line. Goals are better than stepsWhat you need is a process based on goals instead of steps. Your needs and what you have to work with change from proposal to proposal. But what you are trying to accomplish doesn’t change. This means you can build your process around your goals for what you are trying to accomplish. Accomplishing the things you need to do to win is far more important than having repeatable steps. You can arrange your goals so that achieving the first goal sets up what you need to begin work on the logical follow-on goal. You can do things in whatever sequence makes sense in order to achieve the ultimate goal of submitting a winning proposal. For example, you don’t need a cross-reference matrix to win a proposal. Sometimes you need a cross-reference matrix. It depends on how well the RFP is written and whether the various sections are in synch. And yet many processes mandate a cross-reference matrix be created just after RFP release. What you really need is a proposal outline that reflects the customer’s expectations and that addresses RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them addressed. The very specific and labor-intensive way you create a proposal cross-reference matrix may get left behind when you have an RFP that has an unusual structure that breaks your cross-reference template. Nonetheless, the goal of having "an outline that reflects the customer's expectations and that addresses RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them" remains the same. Achieving the goal is what matters and not whether or not, or what format you use, or how you might or might not prepare a cross-reference matrix. A cross-reference matrix might remain the preferred way to accomplish the goal, but there is room for deviation or improvement so long as the goal is met. Having the right goal helps you decide what you should do when the steps written into the process do not apply. It’s how you know when your steps are applicable and when you need to be innovative. How do you know when you have the right goals?You should add to or change the way you’ve articulated your goals if: You find yourself in a circumstance that none of your goals addresses A problem disrupts your ability to achieve a goal A previous goal was followed, but didn’t deliver what is needed for the current goal Participants couldn’t figure out how to achieve the goal A goal is telling people how to do things instead of what to accomplish Careful wording of your goals can imply what needs to be done and even imply how to know when you’ve done something correctly. A good way to test your proposal process goals is to ask if you can delete or combine any of them, without reducing the quality of the proposal. You want your list of goals to be as short as possible. Likewise, you want to minimize the number of goals that have sub-goals. Achieving the right goals keeps you heading on the right path. Being goal-driven is more important than being process-driven. Having a goal-driven process gives you the best of both worlds.

Proposals really aren’t about management. Managers operate defined processes with resources and tools to achieve a defined outcome. Proposals are about adapting against a deadline and figuring things out. Proposals require leaders. If you hand me a document and ask me to format it according the RFP specifications and give me sufficient resources and time, I can manage that. But if you hand me an RFP with structural and interpretation problems and tell me to figure out how to create something that will beat all competitors using resources that are not trained and only partially available with no customer insight, no one can manage that. It requires leadership. It requires reinventing how you do things in order to fill the gaps and solve the problems you face. One big reason why companies don’t usually have a documented proposal process that they follow, is that no one in the company has figured out how to document a process that survives the real world. You probably don’t actually follow most of what you’ve been taught about proposal management for the same reason. As much as they may try, proposal managers do not usually start from having set procedures and overseeing their implementation. They start by looking for gaps, asking questions, and assessing risks so they figure out what procedures are applicable: Can you figure out how to interpret the RFP's instructions? You can’t create the outline the customer expects if you can’t figure out how to cross-reference the things they’ve said in the RFP. Most RFPs make this somewhere between difficult and impossible. Can you figure out the customer’s approach to making a selection? You can’t help them see why your proposal is their best alternative if you don’t understand how they’ll make that assessment. Can you figure out the customer’s preferences? You need this to interpret the RFP. You need this to know what to offer. You need this to know how to present what you are offering. You can’t write from the customer’s perspective if you don’t know what that is. What kind of proposal manager do you need to be? Collaborative or authoritarian? Process driven or adaptive? Administrative or innovative? Manager or leader? Teacher or overseer? Producer or strategic visionary? Producer or winner? Different companies need different things from their proposal managers. Where are your resource gaps? You never have enough resources or the right kinds. But which problems are solvable? What should you do about those gaps? This applies to staffing, facilities, equipment, budget, and other resources. What are your stakeholders' expectations? Are there any disconnects between what you think needs to be done and what your stakeholders expect? Do you want to implement a collaborative review process? Or written quality criteria? Plan before you write? Will your stakeholders go along with that? Do they have needs that you need to incorporate in your plans? How do decisions get made? There are hundreds of decisions and trade-offs made on a typical proposal. Who will be involved in those decisions and how do you get them made quickly? How will deadlines be enforced? This is a simple question to ask. But the answers are so very complicated. Can you replace underperforming staff working on the proposal? Can you balance competing priorities for them? How are you going to track, mitigate, monitor, and respond to risks during the proposal? Will you do it formally? Informally? Make it up as you go along? Are you going to get involved in the writing? This corresponds with whether you will have or take responsibility for winning. Are you pushing paper or setting the standards for quality? Can you manage the proposal and take a writing assignment? Sometimes the proposal function is organized so that there is someone, typically a capture manager, focused on winning. And a review process that determines quality. And sometimes a company just says “we need you to manage the proposal for us.” Being a proposal manager is not a role until it’s defined. It’s probably several roles. But they can vary. It’s one more thing to figure out. Now. Add those up and create an outline, schedule, and list of assignments that survives for more than a few days. You might have 24 hours to figure this all out. Then people will start changing their minds. Or the customer will change the RFP. Or you’ll learn something new that changes strategies or approaches. Or people will underperform. Can you anticipate these things? Or do you just have to react when they occur? When we think of improving our win rates, we usually think in terms of improving our procedures, information, and techniques. Another thing you can do to improve your win rate is to make sure that problems are solvable. Huge amounts of time and money are wasted on proposals by not addressing problems quickly or effectively. Sooner or later your proposal manager is going to hit a brick wall and not have permission, resources, or the knowledge to solve a problem. Those tend to be the problems that are the most important to solve.