Carl Dickson

Creating proposal graphics can be thought of in two parts. My friend Mike Parkinson of the 24hr Company refers to them as: • Conceptualization. Figuring out what to communicate visually and what the graphic needs to communicate. • Rendering. Drawing the graphic. Rendering is where all the artistic skills are required. But conceptualization is where you figure out what should go into the graphic and what the graphic should accomplish. Conceptualization does not require any artistic abilities. Conceptualization can include drawing a rough sketch or PowerPoint, but it doesn’t have to. You can conceptualize a graphic using nothing but text. Many artists, while capable of doing the rendering, are not capable of doing the conceptualization. Conceptualization requires subject matter expertise, knowledge of the intended offering, awareness of your bid strategies, and insight into your audience. Conceptualization does not require the ability to draw or use Adobe Illustrator. Conceptualization also requires identifying what topics in your proposal would be best communicated graphically instead of with words. But this turns out to be incredibly easy. The following things commonly appear in writing, and are always potential graphics: See also: Winning Processes and approaches Lists Comparisons Relationships But it’s really even easier than this. Rather than looking at a section and trying to picture it, instead simply look for bullets. Anything that can be written as bullets is a potential graphic. The reason is that most proposal graphics illustrate a relationship or a process. Bullets often contain a series of steps, a list of ingredients, or a list of examples. The best graphics are ones that reduce the word count. If you can provide a graphic of a process instead of explaining every single step with words in a narrative, the customer will more quickly understand your process. And it probably won’t take up any more space in a page-limited proposal. Start with a placeholder Sometimes all you need to do is to recognize when something would be better communicated with a graphic. Here’s a hint: If you’re having trouble figuring out what your approach is, so will your customer. Maybe you would be better off creating the graphic first. Or maybe, you don’t even need to. Maybe all you need to do is insert a placeholder saying that a graphic should go there. If you are working with others, conceptualizing the graphic could be a collaborative exercise. Moving beyond the placeholder So you’ve decided to have a graphic. Now what? There are things an artist will need to know to render your graphic. What’s going to be in it? What details should be shown. What's the point? What are you trying to communicate? What questions should the graphic answer? What is important about the subject matter? What do you want the reader to conclude after seeing the graphic? Who is the reader? What is their culture? What are the proposal evaluation criteria? What are your bid strategies? Write down these questions and the answers. Maybe throw in a hand-drawn wire frame or a PowerPoint mock-up. Then let your artist figure out the best way to visually communicate it all. An example of specifying a graphic using text Take a look at the instructions and evaluation criteria for this proposal section on Recruiting and Retention in MustWin Now. Notice in the instructions it says, "Explain the methods..." and "how your recruiting and placement plan will..." They want to know your approach. Your process. All processes can be graphics. Now look at the evaluation criteria. Notice "illustrated capability..." Do you think they might prefer to see your process than read about it? In just a few seconds, we can create a quick placeholder simply by typing an instruction like this: But the RFP gives us some clues about what needs to be in your recruiting process. From the instructions we know they want a process that results in "full coverage." And that it should have "verification procedures" of the qualifications and certifications of potential staff. They want tracking of credentials and a clear accounting of qualifications by labor category. They want to see how it will meet required time frames, and for you to prove you can handle "difficult labor markets and undesirable geographic locations." Recruiting connects to onboarding, and since they want "procedures for ensuring new employees are provided with required training and meet pre-employment screen requirements" they probably want to see that. The references to "pre-employment screen requirements" is a pre-employment step. So at a minimum we have: Before recruiting even starts, account for all required qualifications, certifications, and other credentials for each labor category. Pre-screen applicants against this list. Recruiting on schedule. Select candidate(s). Verify candidates meet the credentialing requirements. Store and track credentials. Maybe add expiration monitoring as a value added. Onboarding that includes training. Your recruiting process can add steps and detail, but it must address these items, using the terminology of the RFP. We can go beyond a simple placeholder by creating an instruction more like this: There, that took me about a minute. Now I can have my recruiter, a subject matter expert, take a look at it later and advise how the process could be improved. I could even get some images. Maybe a photograph to go with each step. I can attach them to the instruction. Then I can get a PowerPoint wiz or a graphic artist to render the actual graphic. You could also add the graphic title, caption, exhibit number, etc., since whoever makes the graphic will probably ask for that information. In MustWin Now you can go through each section in your proposal outline, and look for the processes, lists, comparisons, and relationships. Then just take a couple of seconds to insert a placeholder. Keep in mind that one of the instruction types in MustWin Now is "Things to consider." You can make a recommendation to consider a graphic, and if they find it problematical, they can decide not to produce it. But doing this will get people thinking about using graphics. Thinking about the graphics can drive figuring out what your offering should be and how to present it.

Getting input from subject matter experts is vital for winning proposals. However, the instincts of the people who do the work are often all wrong. Writing documents for proposals is different from writing project documents. See also: Reuse It’s easy to get fooled. RFPs ask for documents related to projects in the proposals. They ask for things like: Quality control plans Risk mitigation plans Staffing plans Project management plans Security plans Safety plans Implementation plans Transition plans And more... Projects often require deliverables with the same titles. However, what goes into a proposal is different than what you would submit as a project deliverable. In fact, submitting something based on the project deliverable in a proposal can cause the proposal to lose. This can be true even when they say the document is to be used on the project. How can this be? The proposal and the project have a different audience with different needs. The evaluator of the proposal is not reviewing the document to determine if it is a good document for use on the project. They are evaluating the document to score it against the evaluation criteria and select a vendor based on that score. To serve this purpose, a document for the proposal must be easy to score. This generally means that it is organized per the RFP instructions and that it is optimized to fulfill the evaluation criteria. Doing this is more important than reflecting good project management practices. If you are lucky, the instructions and evaluation criteria will not be too far different from what a project document would typically consist of. However, you should organize, sequence, and use the terminology of the RFP and not organize it or articulate it according to your personal or industry preferences. In addition, a proposal is primarily used to make a selection and the plans or specifications it contains are secondary in function and importance. This means the first priority for proposal contributions is to explain why your approach is the best. The first priority is to differentiate your approach and not to explain your approach. The benefits of your approach are more important than the details of your approach. Why you have selected that approach may be more important than what your approach is. This remains true even when the RFP asks you to describe your approach, because of the way the evaluator uses the information. All contributions to a proposal are contributions to how the proposal scores. The evaluators do not score your contribution based on whether it is a good quality control plan or a good project management plan. They score it based on the evaluation criteria. Whether or not your contribution is any good depends on how well it scores. Scoring well is not some mysterious black art Proposal scores are only partially subjective. Actually, proposal evaluation is a fairly mechanical, forms-driven process. You should study the evaluation criteria and prepare a contribution that stacks up well against them. You should try to envision the forms they use to do their evaluation scoring and make it easy for them to do so. Don’t write something primarily based on your expertise doing the work. Don’t write something based exclusively on the statement of work. But please, oh please, bring all your experience and expertise doing the work to improve how the proposal stacks up against the evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria will typically ask you to demonstrate that you know what you are doing, but the words they use to do that are critically important. The RFP may also ask you to demonstrate that you’re innovative, without risk, full of strengths and without weaknesses, compliant, responsive, prepared, flexible, or any other attribute or qualification. And when this is the case, the purpose of your contribution is to prove that you are the customer’s best alternative for achieving the attributes or criteria they are looking for, whether you are contributing a quality control plan, a communication plan, or something else. The difference between an approach that demonstrates risk mitigation vs availability of resources vs flexibility and does so using techniques that differentiate you from the competition to enable the customer to itemize your strengths while also reflecting this customer's preferences, establishing RFP compliance, and not providing any weaknesses vs a plan that serves the needs of a project are huge. Form follows function. The function of your proposal contribution is different from the function of your project documentation. When you realize this, your experience and expertise can make you a hero by providing the insight and details needed for the proposal to prove that your company really is the customer’s best alternative.

What matters about products and commodities is different from what matters about complex services and solutions. What matters about your offering also depends on whether the customer has told you exactly what to bid or whether you have to figure that out. In both cases, figuring out what to offer by writing about it leads to the proposal death spiral. It’s best not to go there. Figuring out what to offer should be done separately from writing about it. Once you have validated that you’ve got the right offering, then you can move on to presentation. Only then is it safe to merge your offering design with proposal writing. MustWin Now makes that integration much easier. You can do content planning manually, but most companies do it poorly or not at all. Why write a content plan when you could be writing the proposal? Never mind that’s what causes the death spiral. By moving content planning online and using software, MustWin Now greatly lowers the effort of content planning and makes it seem natural to get your thoughts together before you start writing. Figuring out what to offer depends on the nature of what you sell When you sell solutions, you need to architect a solution in order to be able to write about it. If you sell complex services, you need to know the elements of your approaches. So first, figure out what you should offer and why. Don’t worry about how to articulate it in writing. Just architect your solution. Then: See also: About MustWin Now Prepare a list that summarizes the features or components of what you’ll offer. Extra credit if you prepare graphics to illustrate your solution. Add instructions in MustWin Now that guide your proposal writers regarding not only what to describe or explain about your offering, but also how to present it and how to make it add up to being the customer’s best alternative. Commodities are a little different. Commodities can be products, productized services, or when the customer specifies exactly what you are to do or provide. With commodities, which vendor provides things doesn’t matter so long as the specifications are fulfilled. For commodities: Offering design is simplified when you sell commodities, but not eliminated. First, before you start writing, figure out any product selections, options, approaches, etc. Since pricing is more important when you sell a commodity, you should also figure out your pricing strategies early. Make note of why you made the choices you did. They may be your only differentiators. Add instructions in MustWin Now that tell the proposal writers which options you have selected, what your approaches are, why you chose what you did and how that differentiates you, how to establish credibility that you will meet the specifications, etc. In both cases: You should resist the temptation to write about what you are planning. You should just insert placeholders, suggestions, considerations, guidance, and itemize ingredients you don’t want left out. You are thinking it through. Thinking it through is hard but worth it, and better done with lists than with a lengthy narrative. Writing a proposal without thinking it through is a big, fat, ugly mistake. Entering instructions and quality criteria in MustWin Now while you’re thinking it through goes remarkably quickly. Add instructions in MustWin Now that guide proposal writers on how to explain what the customer will get, what the results will be, what value you have added, how the customer will benefit from your offering, what makes your solution the customer’s best alternative, etc. Add quality criteria in MustWin Now so that writers and reviewers can tell if the draft proposal fulfills everyone’s expectations. You don’t have enough graphics in your proposal. No one does. So insert instructions to drive the proposal to become more visual. You don’t even have to draw the graphic at this stage --- just insert an instruction identifying what graphic needs to be created. Instructions can either identify what to write, or what needs to be figured out. If the person preparing the content plan does not know something, like what your differentiators are, they can insert instructions for those who do know to identify them. Here's an example of an online Proposal Content Plan. Click on the image to expand it. You can see that not only can the proposal writer see all the relevant RFP requirements, but also what to do about those requirements, any pursuit intelligence you've collected, your proposal win strategies, and other guidance. Each instruction and quality criterion took one click and less than a minute to type, so maybe 15 minutes for this section. Those 15 minutes may save hours of thinking, talking, reviewing, and rewriting. The proposal writer has a fighting chance of getting it all right in the first draft. Winning your proposal depends on whether the customer concludes that you are their best alternative and gives you the highest evaluation score. A little time spent dropping instructions into the MustWin Now content plan tool can make a huge difference in how your proposal scores. This is especially true if your writers are not proposal specialists. But proposal specialists need input too, and MustWin Now can help get everyone on the same page. It’s not the writing that wins proposals. It’s the thinking that goes before the writing. Use MustWin Now to connect your winning thoughts to what gets put in writing.

Proposal software that focuses on assembling documents from reusable parts may just help you to lose faster. Instead, proposal software should help you discover what it will take to win and build a proposal around that. Proposal automation will get a bad proposal done more quickly, but you will achieve a better ROI by winning more of what you bid than you will by taking shortcuts to complete your proposals. Win more of what you bid by using proposal software to better understand the RFP MustWin Now is an online RFP tool that enables you to make sense of the requirements so you can focus on winning your proposals. Instead of spending hours page flipping through the RFP and clicking on hundreds of spreadsheet cells while you look for where to put the RFP requirements to build your compliance matrix, MustWin Now enables you to build your compliance matrix online using drag and drop. See also: Proposal Software The RFP tools in MustWin Now enable you to: Build a proposal outline with all the RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them Quickly cross-reference RFP requirements to your proposal outline Add, delete, and move things by clicking buttons or just dragging and dropping them. No more RFP page flipping or constantly clicking cursor keys Split long requirements into pieces that can be separately mapped to your proposal outline See any requirements that haven’t been linked to the proposal outline Categorize RFP requirements by type Take notes regarding issues Validate your compliance matrix quickly with a checklist-driven interface Proposal contributors often don’t know how to read and use a compliance matrix, and sometimes simply ignore it. Even if they do, the compliance matrix is a spreadsheet — all the proposal writing is done in Word and has to be cross-checked. With the RFP tools in MustWin Now, the relevant RFP requirements just show up in the proposal content plan sections, so proposal contributors might never have to see the matrix. Without having to study the arrangement of cells in the compliance matrix, MustWin Now simply tells you which requirements are relevant. You can still download the matrix as a spreadsheet if you want, but you might not need to anymore. Win more of what you bid by using proposal software to figure out what you should say in your proposal Once you’ve got the RFP requirements linked to your outline, the next thing MustWin Now does is make it easy to capture what to do about the RFP by entering instructions for your proposal writers. In the same way you can put the RFP requirements in front of proposal contributors while they write, you can put in all of your ideas, strategies, and ingredients for winning the proposal. Instead of waiting for a draft of the proposal and then trying to edit and rewrite your proposal over and over until you run out of time and submit what you’ve got, you can shape the proposal before the writing even starts. And then you can see whether any reuse material you have is still applicable, and how it needs to be tailored. MustWin Now saves you time because people spend far more time thinking about a proposal than actually writing it. When people jump into proposal writing or start from something already written, they spend all of the time available working furiously to try to turn it into what it will take to win. MustWin Now reverses that so you start knowing what it will take to win and can nail your proposal on the first draft. Although most of you will spend some time making it even better. The point is that MustWin Now helps you win more of what you bid, which is what you need to make the effort worthwhile.

A goal-driven proposal process is far superior to one based on steps or milestones because it is more adaptable and is easier to tailor to your company's specific needs. You can see how this works with a framework based on accomplishing 6 goals and with 49 questions that point you in the right direction for how to accomplish the goals that you can tailor to your circumstances. The challenge with a goal-driven proposal process is determining the best way to achieve your goals. The questions below lead you to that. The result is a process that can adapt as needed to maximize your win probability. Following the same steps over and over doesn't enable you to do that. When you read the questions below, make sure that you answer them with the best way of achieving the goal in mind. In a goal-driven process, you don't do things just because you're "supposed to," you do them to achieve the goal. Achieving the goal is more important than the procedures used. Goal 1: Discover what it will take to win See also: Successful Process Implementation Before you can build a proposal around what it will take to win, you must be able to articulate what that is. Then you must also understand what to do about it. The questions below will help inform you of these. How will leads be qualified? What gates or milestones do you need to prepare for? How will you make bid/no bid decisions? How will you itemize what it will take to win? How will you track and report progress towards being ready to win at RFP release? What do you anticipate needing to know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment in order to prepare the winning proposal? How will you accumulate an information advantage for use in the proposal? What format should information be kept in during the pursuit for future use in the proposal? How will the pursuit budget be managed? Who will be involved and in what capacities? Goal 2: Design the offering based on what it will take to win What you should offer in your proposal is a separate consideration from you should write in your proposal. Designing your offering by writing about it is not an effective engineering approach. The questions below will help you design an offering based on what it will take to win. How will you determine what to offer? Who will need to be involved? What form will your pre-RFP offering design take? How will your offering design be documented for use in the proposal? What will differentiate your offering? How should your offering be positioned? How will you assess its competitiveness? How will you assess the price to win? How will you validate that you have the right offering? Does the design of your offering sufficiently reflect your win strategies? Goal 3: Prepare a proposal content plan that defines quality and addresses what it will take to win In order to write a proposal based on what it will take to win, you must account for what it will take to win in a form that is organized according to the document structure. This is not likely to happen if you just start writing and try to figure it out as you go. A proposal content plan should also enable writers to validate that they have fulfilled the plan. This means it should incorporate your proposal quality criteria so that fulfilling the proposal content plan achieves what it will take to win. This enables proposal reviews to be based on something intentional and validated instead of opinions about what sounds good. The questions below can help guide you to create an effective proposal content plan. Will you use a compliance matrix to create your proposal outline? If not, then how will you account for the customer's instructions/expectations, evaluation criteria, and requirements in the proposal content plan? How do you define proposal quality? What are your proposal quality criteria? Are there criteria specific to each bid? What do you need to be able to articulate before the proposal writers start writing? What questions do you anticipate the proposal writers might have, and can you answer them? What must be accomplished in between having an outline and being prepared to start writing? If the writers follow the instructions you are giving them and fulfill the quality criteria, will it produce a proposal that fulfills what it will take to win and meets everyone’s expectations? What do you expect the proposal writers to figure out on their own, and what do you need to provide them? How will you communicate and document not only what to write, but how to present it? How will the writers know if they have properly completed their assignments, before they turn in their assignments? Goal 4: Write to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria in the Proposal Content Plan Proposal writing is not primarily an exercise in creativity or in proving how great you are. Proposal writing is the act of offering something that fulfills the customer's needs in a way that proves you are their best alternative. In practice, this takes the form of fulfilling the proposal content plan, where the customer's needs and all other considerations have been accounted for in the context of what it will take to win. Doing this needs to be managed, with the schedule, assignments, resources, issues, and other aspects of project management being addressed. The questions below will help you ensure that the writing phase of the proposal accomplishes this. How will you track and report progress during proposal development, and in particular during proposal writing? How will you identify and resolve issues encountered during proposal development, and in particular during proposal writing? How will writers self-assess whether they’ve not only fulfilled the proposal content plan, but have written a section that reflects what it will take to win? How will proposal files be managed? How will stakeholder expectations be coordinated and managed? How will access control be managed? (Don’t forget your teammates!) Goal 5: Validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria To consistently be effective and improve your win probability, your proposal reviews need to be based on something more than the RFP and the reviewers' personal opinions regarding proposal writing. If quality is defined based on written quality criteria, then quality can be assessed far more thoroughly and objectively. The questions below will help you transform your proposal reviews into assessments that validate quality instead of the collection of opinions. How will you use the instructions given to proposal writers and the quality criteria you have defined during proposal reviews for proposal quality validation? How many reviews do you need to validate all of your proposal quality criteria? How long will the reviews take? When should the reviews be scheduled? How will you monitor review readiness and schedule? How should each of these reviews be conducted? Which will be formal and which will be informal? Who will participate in these reviews? What orientation and training should be provided to reviewers? What is the production impact, if any, of each review? Goal 6: Produce a final copy without any defects for an on-time submission The last thing you want is to lose because of a mistake made in the final rush to submit the proposal. The final production and submission of the proposal should be a careful, deliberate act with detailed quality control checks to ensure there are no defects. This is completely different from making sure you've said everything in the best way possible. That must happen before final production. The questions below can help guide you to what to focus on during final production. How will you manage and track proposal completion? How will the submission copy be prepared? When and how will you inspect the final copy for defects prior to submission? How will the submission be conducted? Who will perform the submission? What could possibly go wrong and how do you prevent it?

It's great to have a relationship with the customer before the RFP comes out. But that only makes a difference if it leads to having an information advantage. And an information advantage only matters if it impacts what you say in the proposal. If the sale closes through the award of a proposal, then a customer relationship needs to enable you to write a better proposal in order to matter. During the pre-RFP pursuit, it's not enough to simply fish for information about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. You have to anticipate the questions that proposal writers will have in each of their individual sections in order to impact what goes in the proposal. When proposal writers ask what the customer prefers, or whether to make this choice or that choice, you need to have anticipated that and have the answer. In the paper-based version of the MustWin Process we did this with lists of questions. We even built the Readiness Review methodology around them. In MustWin Now, the online version of Readiness Reviews is a lot more flexible and the answers can be directly mapped to the proposal outline. MustWin Now uses pursuit capture question and answer forms for various aspects of pre-RFP pursuit to gather information based on those questions. They are part of the Pursuit Capture Form tool, and you can select which forms you want to use. You can use the Pursuit Capture Forms tool to guide your efforts and collect the information that proposal writers will need. You can measure your progress towards being ready to win at RFP release by setting up reviews. In the MustWin Readiness Review methodology we recommend four reviews. But with MustWin Now online you can set up as many reviews as you want, and use them to match the milestones in your existing business development and capture process. You can even drag and drop the questions to the review that focuses on that topic. If you schedule your reviews, then your business development and capture managers can see the questions organized according to the review schedule: Ok, but what if you start after RFP release? One of my favorite features is that it's even easier than the paper-based process to convert the questions into proposal input forms for use after RFP release. Simply start answering the questions when you start the proposal. Why? Because of what comes after you answer the questions... What happens after you answer the questions? To really begin proposal planning, you need the proposal outline. But you can't create the proposal outline until the RFP is released. But what you can do is take what you've learned about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment to make decisions about the proposal. When you've completed answering questions, MustWin Now will prompt you to convert them into instructions for proposal writers. Here's an example where we took some competitive intelligence and used it to decide how to position what we say in the proposal. When the RFP comes out, you use MustWin Now to create your compliance matrix, proposal outline, and proposal content plan. The first step in creating the proposal content plan is to link any answers from the pursuit capture forms to your outline, which enables you to convert the intelligence you've gathered into instructions for proposal writers. After you drop it into a proposal section, it becomes part of the content plan for that section. As part of the content planning phase, you can add as many instructions as you wish to inform the proposal writers about not only what to write, but how to best present it. MustWin Now enables you to connect what you learned about what it will take to win directly to how the proposal gets written. Just don't call it a CRM MustWin Now is not a sales funnel or contact management tool. If anything it is something to use with a CRM. And any CRM vendors reading this who want to integrate with us as a way to enable your CRM to better impact the proposal and the close of all those leads you are tracking should reach out to us. One additional thing that MustWin Now does is help guide your business development and capture staff. Instead of fishing for random intel, they have specific questions to try to answer. The results See also: MustWin Now The impact of business development on the proposal should not be random. A traditional paper-based process gets you better information, but getting it into the proposal is still a challenge. And most paper-based processes are really just all talk. Talk about what should go into the proposal, most of which never has much impact on proposal assignments. When you move online, all the information carries forward and transforms from raw intelligence into instructions for how to use it to win the proposal. At the same time, MustWin Now: Provides some guidance to your business development and capture managers regarding what information to collect Streamlines how you store relevant information and does it in a way that's easier to carry forward into the proposal Enables you to track your progress towards developing an information advantage Provides a much improved way to review what you've collected and take action on it Enables you to quickly assess and make the most of what you do know when you start a proposal at RFP release When the proposal starts, MustWin Now informs your proposal writers on what to do with the things you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. It also enables you to validate that the draft proposal reflects your full awareness. You can literally click back from the proposal to what you discovered about what it will take to win. MustWin Now enables you to provide your proposal writers with: One click access to the full text of the RFP requirements that are relevant to their sections Quality criteria that tell them when they've done things correctly Instructions for not only what to write about, but how to present it Access to all of the questions you were able to answer, enabling them to go beyond mere RFP compliance

Sometimes you have all the advantages. Sometimes a proposal is yours to lose. And while you can easily lose if you make mistakes, it takes more than a good defense to win. Playing defense in a proposal means focusing on compliance. It means giving the customer exactly what they asked for. It requires understanding the RFP and not making mistakes. I have seen proposals lose after spending a great deal of time scrutinizing the text, only to accidentally leave out a copy of one form. A simple oversight, right where you weren’t expecting one, can ruin all the care you put into everything else. It’s enough to make a production manager paranoid. Playing proposal defense means mitigating all the risks. But compliance also means addressing everything the customer expects to see, in the language they expect to see it in. Compliance means mentioning everything, even when the RFP is 300 pages and the proposal is limited to 25 pages. That’s enough to make a proposal manager even more paranoid. It doesn't help that compliance can be subjective and open to interpretation. You need detailed, disciplined quality assurance procedures to avoid losing due to noncompliance: See also: ROI You need to make sure that everything the customer requires has a place in your proposal, and make sure that place is where the customer expects to find it. Your best guide for this is the RFP. However, RFPs can be complicated and subject to interpretation. Creating a compliance matrix is crucial. Just make sure that your compliance matrix is valid. It doubles the effort to have someone thoroughly review and validate your compliance matrix. That effort is worth it if you don't want to lose. You also need to create a production checklist. A compliance matrix alone is not enough. While the issues are similar from RFP to RFP, you can’t recycle this checklist. It must reflect the particular RFP precisely. Every document that must be included should be itemized. Every production requirement for every document should be detailed. It should be impossible to overlook anything if you follow your production checklist. Don’t forget to validate your production checklist. Again, the value is worth it if you don't want to lose. Don’t forget to prepare a production checklist for the pricing and business volume. Last minute pricing changes happen. If you don’t already have the checklist to accelerate quality assurance, mistakes can happen. Mistakes in the pricing volume have a very high risk of proposal failure. For the written portion of the proposal, to avoid mistakes you need quality validation instead of subjective reviews. You need to validate against defined quality criteria instead of relying on opinions. Those quality criteria should itemize and validate everything that puts you at risk of losing. Be careful to construct your quality criteria to catch mistakes. If there are a lot of things that could go wrong, you'll have a lot of quality criteria. This is a good thing and not a hassle — if you don't want to lose. You should also review more than just the document. You should also review your decisions. You make dozens, if not hundreds, of judgment calls and trade-off decisions in preparing a proposal. If you’re playing defense and trying to avoid mistakes, each and every one of them should be double checked. Playing proposal defense vs. proposal offense You can avoid losing due to mistakes. But that may not be enough to win. RFP compliance alone is not enough to win. Playing defense only can prevent you from doing the things you need to get the highest score. That will result in a loss. Sometimes the things that could maximize your score may require taking risks. If the opportunity is yours to lose, that’s only true if your advantages make it into the proposal. It's only true if what you put into your proposal outscores your competition. Even though you may think the opportunity is yours to lose, if your proposal doesn't establish your advantages in the document, then your proposal is not better than any other proposal submitted. If you can’t articulate your advantages in the proposal in a way that maximizes your evaluation score, then no matter how important you think they are, your advantages literally amount to nothing. If you only play defense, you can end up with a fully compliant proposal with no mistakes and lose because someone else scored better. If an opportunity is yours to lose, you need to turn your advantages into the highest score in writing. The good news is that if your advantages are real, this should be relatively straightforward. If the opportunity is yours to lose, your strategy might be to avoid risks while articulating your advantages without making any mistakes. This is how you avoid losing. However, if you are bidding at a disadvantage you might have to take risks in order to achieve the highest score. If you are bidding at a disadvantage, your best (only?) chance of winning might include taking on risks that could cause you to lose. Taking the risk of losing could be the only way to have a chance at winning. This is because companies with an advantage won't take those risks, they'll play it safe, stay on defense, and create an opportunity for you that might just pay off. If the opportunity is yours to lose, everyone else will be taking risks to overcome your advantages. If they make a mistake, well, the odds were against them anyway. So even if you're writing a low-risk, defensive proposal, with a high win probability you need to defend against high-risk attempts to steal your win away from you. One way of doing this is to identify what the high-risk attempts at winning might be and defensively ghost against them in your proposal. In the end, there is very little difference between bidding to not lose and bidding to win. The real difference is the amount of risk you're willing to embrace and where you put your focus. The nature of risk is that it can’t be eliminated. It can only be managed. All proposals have risk. Even the ones that you think are yours to lose.

THIS. This is what proposal content planning is all about. Shaping the proposal. Designing it before it is written. Creating a set of specifications for the document so that writers know what they are supposed to accomplish and reviewers have something to validate the draft against. This is how you win before it is written and succeed on your first draft. This is what got me excited when developing MustWin Now. I'm going to walk through a simple example of what is normally an extremely dry and boring proposal section, and show just how much of a difference you can make. I'm going to pick the key personnel section from a real RFP. The first thing I did was build an RFP compliance matrix. I walked through the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, and performance requirements to build my proposal outline. BTW, you don't have to hurt yourself trying to read the tiny type, I'll expand the key parts below. What the screenshot shows is the RFP headings on the far left, the proposal outline next to it, and the RFP text in the main column. All cross-referenced and linked. From this, MustWin Now automagically generates the proposal content plan shell, complete with RFP references already loaded. You can see the RFP requirement headings in colored banners under the section name. With a single click, we can see the full text of every relevant requirement in the RFP, right from inside the content plan. No page flipping of the RFP needed to find it. Hey, this part looks important. If you can't read this one, the text below explains it. For more information about MustWin Now, see also: MustWin Now After seeing this in the RFP, maybe I should add a quality criterion to my content plan saying that "Resume must include all content showing in Section L, Appendix L4." Maybe I should also include an instruction to create a summary table based on leadership, education, technical expertise, and relevant experience for my key personnel. And maybe another table matching how the experience of the key personnel maps to the contract scope and "the individual's capability to function effectively." I should probably add another quality criterion to my content plan to specify that "Resumes shall not exceed four (4) pages in length, including the commitment statement." I can add as many instructions and quality criteria as needed to tell the proposal writers what we need to do to win. These are just a few examples. Oh, and I'd better look up what the clause in "Section I entitled, DEAR" is. Even if it's an external reference, I could copy and paste the key part into MustWin Now and cross-reference it to my outline. Then it will show up just like the RFP requirements. When I say "I" what I really mean is our whole team. I can use MustWin Now as a single user, but it really shines when I have the whole proposal team using it. Then subject matter experts, proposal contributors, executives, and others can add instructions and quality criteria related to win strategies, offering design, themes, customer intelligence, and more. Everyone you need to make a contribution can get at the part of the proposal they need to contribute to. There are more RFP requirements than just the blurb above in this section. I can turn all the relevant requirements into quality criteria and instructions. I'm designing the proposal not only to be RFP compliant, but also to be easy to evaluate and maximize our evaluation score. The instructions you enter can draw the proposal writers' attention to the key words that the evaluators are looking for. Speaking of which, let's look at the RFP evaluation criteria (click). For more information about Proposal Content Planning, see also: Content Planning Box There's an oral presentation required. But right now, I'm working on the proposal. I can also use MustWin Now to plan the oral presentation. But what I'm looking for in this moment is what's important to the customer's evaluation. I see key phrases like: Roles in the accomplishment of the PWS Whether these qualifications and roles bring value to the customer Whether these qualifications and roles will have positive impacts on the offer's ability to overcome barriers and challenges affecting accomplishment of the work Length of commitment to the contract Consistency with the oral presentation How the leadership team, as a unit and as an organization, will enhance the ability to overcome barriers and challenges affecting accomplishment of the PWS So if I want to get the top score in this section, I'm not simply going to talk about how great my key personnel or their qualifications are. Simply describing them will not be competitive. Everything in this section needs to be in the context of overcoming barriers and challenges affecting accomplishment of the work/PWS. If you want to win, you'll know what those barriers and challenges are, and you won't merely talk about your capabilities to overcome them, you'll offer a comprehensive solution that defeats all challenges with complete assurance. After all, the incumbent will. So it turns out, this section isn't simply a resume section after all. It's a solution section. It's providing a solution to overcoming specific barriers and challenges using key personnel as the primary resource. That will teach me to think that the "resume" section is boring. I'm sure everyone who bids and makes the competitive range will have qualified personnel and will submit resumes that score well. The evaluation criteria tell you that the winner will be the one that offers key personnel that add up to a solution to the barriers and challenges that the customer is concerned about. You can use MustWin Now to turn this insight into a combination of instructions and quality criteria. Your instructions should cover not only what to write, but how to present it. Your quality criteria should let the writers know what they need to accomplish to create a section that reflects what it will take to win, and let the reviewers know what to look for when reading the draft. All those key words you see in the RFP should drive your instructions and quality criteria. What excites me about MustWin Now is how easy it is to create a content plan that does these things. MustWin Now automagically creates the content plan shell. Then go to each section and click the instructions button. Type things like "Explain how the qualifications of our key personnel bring value to the customer." Click the quality criteria button and type things like "Do we cite the length of commitment for each of our key personnel and does it add up to something competitive?" In just a few minutes you can create a set of specifications that defines what the winning section will be. When you are done, your writers will see everything they need to know to make a top-scoring contribution to this proposal. They'll have this in one window guiding what they write in Microsoft Word in another window. You can do this on paper and without MustWin Now. But hardly anyone does, because doing it on paper is such a major pain. Most companies just hand an outline to their proposal writers, sometimes with a few annotations. MustWin Now eliminates all the administrivia so that as you read and begin to understand the RFP, you can quickly insert instructions and quality criteria that tell your proposal writers what to do to win. If your competitors are just using an outline, it will be very difficult for them to create a proposal that scores better than yours does. And if you're going to take down an incumbent, you'd better bring your best proposal.

Proposal specialists talk a lot about the importance of planning before you write your proposal. Then reality sets in: See also: MustWin Now If the RFP forces you into it, you complete a compliance matrix in a complicated spreadsheet so that you can create the proposal outline that the customer expects. You make judgment calls to create the outline because RFPs are inconsistent, ambiguous, and contradictory. Once you have the outline and assignments, writing starts. The compliance matrix and outline never get validated. Because there are judgment calls, other people start taking exception to the outline and making changes to it. Unanticipated re-writing cycles begin to remap things to the outline changes. The more struggles there are over the outline, the more delays and re-writing. When the draft is produced, ready or not, it gets reviewed. Nobody reviews it against the compliance matrix. They review it to see whether it sounds good. Whatever that means. They make more changes to the outline because it no longer matches the RFP. Instead of a great proposal, they submit whatever they have when they run out of time rewriting the proposal. In 2004 I created the MustWin Process and published it as a workbook. It provided innovations that addressed these issues. It was a huge improvement over the way things were being done. But it was still a document-based approach to the proposal process. Documenting a proposal content plan seems like work and people conclude they might as well be writing. They also incorrectly conclude that recycling proposal text would be a faster way of planning and writing the proposal. Over the last year, my primary focus has been on what amounts to a huge research and development project. It started out as experimental tools that move parts of the MustWin Process online. It became MustWin Now. The biggest thing I have learned from all this R&D is that an online process is very different from a document-based process. It’s like the difference between having a big complicated spreadsheet to maintain, and having a relational database with linked forms to fill in. Only instead of building the proposal text, it helps you do what you need to do to win. And then something surprising happened... The R&D we did started with seeing if we could build a web-based drag and drop compliance matrix. We did. But as cool as that is, what blew me away was the impact on the content plan. It just happened. Click a button after you build your compliance matrix and the shell for your content plan magically appears. And it's pre-loaded with the RFP requirements. That's several steps that just disappear. But not only that, dropping instructions into your content plan just requires a click and some typing. All the resistance that goes along with creating a plan as document evaporates. Here's what it looks like when you move your process online: You create a compliance matrix using drag and drop. As you step through the RFP, you create a matching outline. It may not be faster, but it is more intuitive. You flag your judgment calls with a click. Before you publish your outline, you validate it. This is checklist-driven and very much accelerated. You can resolve your judgment calls before you publish the outline. Publishing the outline automagically gets up your proposal content plan. You click on proposal sections and simply drop in everything you want to talk about and how you want things to be addressed. The RFP requirements are linked back to the full text. You’ve got one super-convenient place to go to figure out what to write and plan your proposal. All of your stakeholders can contribute to your content plan and review it to make sure it reflects what you want your proposal to end up being. It’s not like asking them to create a plan. It’s more like asking for ideas and comments. It goes as quickly as you can think through what it will take to win. There is no paper to produce or formatting to be done. At the same time you’re adding to your content plan, you’re dropping in quality criteria that reviews will use to assess what gets written. When writing starts, it’s with MS Word open in one window and MustWin Now open in another. Writers see the instructions and quality criteria in MustWin Now, and write something to fulfill them in the other window. The instructions give guidance so they know not only what to write about, but how it should be presented. While you can still have people sit around a table and render subjective opinions about the draft proposal, you can also have people quickly scan what was in the content plan to validate that it all made it into the draft. You can validate against quality criteria and skip subjective reviews altogether. Arguments go from being about what people like to what the proposal quality criteria should be and whether they’ve been fulfilled. Reviews are much more effective. You get to the review with a draft that mostly fulfills the quality criteria everyone agreed to. You spend the time remaining making improvements to get the maximum score. Process isn’t really a thing. The tool is the thing. People follow the process without realizing it. They still complain. Only it’s about improvements they’d like made to the user interface. Winning proposals result. The point here isn’t that MustWin Now is great and you should subscribe to PropLIBRARY so you can use it. The point is that when you move the process online, the process disappears. People start doing what they need to do to win without thinking about it. You just have to avoid recreating a document-based process or proposal assembly tool. It’s something that I don’t think I could have created on purpose. It took a lot of experimenting to see what could be done and how things might work. And the R&D may never end. Because once we’re done with the whole compliance matrix, outline, content plan, and quality validation workflow, we’ll add pursuit capture information collection, customizable recipes and content options, and expanded and more granular training options. Just about every new article I write triggers new experiments for how to implement the recommendations in the article as part of MustWin Now. If you want to try your next proposal using MustWin Now, let me know.

People think proposal management is a thing, but it’s not. Proposals are not even a thing. Proposals at different companies have more differences than similarities, even though we tell ourselves otherwise. Proposal managers come in many different types. Some are a better match for a given company than others. When you see a type that’s the opposite of yours, you might think it’s wrong for proposal management. But there is an environment out there where that style is a better fit than yours. So don’t judge. See also: Proposal Management The owner of the win. You think it’s your job to win above all else. You drive the development of the win strategies and themes. Your top goal is to submit the highest possible scoring proposal. Depending on your management style you might lead, beg, borrow, steal, or bully your way to a proposal that meets your standards. You may be filling a void or stepping into capture manager territory. The producer of what people give you. Your goal is to turn what people do into a ready to submit document. You apply your document expertise to making sure that all the parts come together well. You are constantly confounded by people not submitting what you need or not having enough of the right people. You may have played a support role in a past life. The leader who works through others to get what is needed. You’re the conductor of the orchestra. You provide the guidance and coordination that people need to work as a team to create the proposal. Process and tools are good and fine, but it’s people that get things done, so you work to get the most out of the people. The hands-on manager. You’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves and write what needs to be written or do what it takes to create the proposal. You may have come up through the ranks, have some skills, and have difficulty letting go. The technician. You see yourself as best supporting the people working on the proposal by refining the process and improving the tools. You manage people by process instead of relationships. You find this works best in the highly stressful environment of proposals, where people can be difficult but process is reliable. You may have been an introverted techie who worked in isolation in a past life. You might still be. The perfectionist. The idea of submitting a proposal with any kind of defect runs counter to the way the world should work. You demand time for proper editing. You focus on the reviews and double checking more than you do on coaching the writers or defining the message. You just want to make sure that what gets submitted is perfect. You may have been an editor in a past life. You also may be at risk of overemphasizing CYA. The pleaser. You are a people person who defines successful support as pleasing The Powers That Be. You derive your concept of proposal quality from what will please the reviewers. After all, they have the experience. If they are happy, the proposal must be in good shape. You may have been an administrative support specialist in a past life. The know-it-all. You handle the stress of getting everyone on the same page regarding the proposal, by force of will based on your expertise. You define the standards and expectations and make everyone else conform to them. Without this, you fear chaos will reign. You may have been an only child in a past life. The artist. Proposals are a form of creative expression. Process fails. Your creativity enhances the work of the subject matter experts and results in a proposal that is far better than they could achieve on their own. Proposal quality can’t be defined. Art rules. You may have actually been an artist in a past life. But now you are an artist with a job. The improvisationist. There is no time “in between” proposals, so you make it up as you go along. You’ve got an idea of how it should go. So you improvise. You don’t build. You create. You flit around like a butterfly. Or a busy bee. You are always so busy. It’s lucky you are so good at improvising or things would never get done or done as well. You may have played jazz in a past life. The enforcer. The chaos of proposals requires a firm hand. Rules must be made. And enforced. Most proposal failures are a result of people not following the rules. If you don’t have actual authority, you may get by on your force of will. Or just complain a lot. You may have been a policy supervisor in a past life. Or are you a blend? Speaking for myself, I’m a “1” with some “5” in me and maybe some “8” that I’m in denial about. Luckily I can usually channel the others when needed. Over time, I’ve become much better at recognizing which environments I’m a match for, and which I’m not. Over time, I’ve met all of these. And often been critical of them as being The Wrong Way to go about things, when it was just the circumstance. If you are a blend, you are easier to work with. If you are an archetype of one of them, if you are in your element you’ll flourish. Outside of that, your lack of perspective will create friction that will impact your proposals. Which ones are you? Which ones are you in denial about? What does your company need? How readily do you switch points of view based on the circumstances? Have fun with this, but give it some real thought…

A compliance matrix helps you untangle a complicated RFP and build a proposal outline that meets your customer’s expectations. But RFPs are inconsistent. This is a polite way of saying that sometimes they are broken and it can be very difficult to figure out what the customer expects. Sometimes you have to make judgment calls. Unfortunately, it’s critically important that the proposal outline and compliance matrix be reliable. You really don’t want to have to change them after writing starts. Changing the outline and compliance matrix after proposal writing has started will at least be disruptive and may even be disastrous. To help you ensure that your outline and compliance matrix are reliable, MustWin Now walks you through the steps needed to validate your outline and compliance matrix. Traditionally, this takes as long as it did to create the compliance matrix in the first place, and often companies cave in to the pressure to start writing without validating their matrix. MustWin Now makes it go as quickly as you can diligently click. And it guides you through the steps. The first step is a self-assessment. Before you turn your matrix over to others who will review it, MustWin Now prompts you with a list of things to double check. This is an informal review to encourage you to check your own work. MustWin Now has reports that can help you make sure that you have not overlooked anything when building your compliance matrix. These include: See also: About mustwin now Unlinked RFP Requirements. Are there any RFP requirements that are not linked to a proposal section? This might be okay. Or it might mean that an RFP requirement has been overlooked. Unlinked Proposal Sections. Are there any proposal sections that are not linked to any RFP requirements? Again, this might be okay. You can have proposal sections that go beyond what’s required by the RFP. But it could also mean that a proposal section that should have been linked to an RFP requirement got overlooked. Items with no written response required. MustWin Now lets you flag items in the RFP that do not require a written response. Sometimes RFP items are just informative. But you might want to double check this… To go beyond self-assessment, MustWin Now enables you to assign one or more reviewers from the pursuit dashboard. This provides a fresh set of eyes to more formally review your outline and compliance matrix. MustWin Now handles this in two steps. The first is to validate the RFP requirement cross-referencing, and the second is to validate your proposal outline. For each of these steps, MustWin Now asks a set of questions for each and every item. To validate your matrix, MustWin Now brings you to each RFP item one at a time, and asks you to click through the checklist. If anything fails or is a concern, it prompts you to explain why. Click, click, click, you work your way through the RFP. Then it does the same thing to validate the proposal outline, with a different checklist. Click, click, click, you validate your proposal outline. If you do this with diligence, every single item in your outline and compliance matrix will be double checked by at least one other person. You can have as many reviewers as you deem appropriate. Once you work through the formal reviews, MustWin Now will prompt you to incorporate the review comments and finalize any changes needed. MustWin Now will display any concerns the reviewers had as a list and you can work through it as a process of elimination. When you’ve made your final changes, MustWin Now will prompt you to do one last check. One last probably unnecessary but just to be super careful last check. Yeah, making sure your outline and compliance matrix is reliable is important enough to build in a pause to reflect on it one more time before publishing it for use. There are nine steps in the MustWin Now compliance matrix tool. The draft matrix is complete after the third step. The rest is the quality validation before publishing that many companies skip, resulting in many unnecessarily lost proposals. We want to help yours to win.

You can use MustWin Now to follow the classical method of building your compliance matrix by following the RFP instructions, and then incorporating the evaluation criteria and other sections. See also: Compliance matrix Once the RFP has been entered into MustWin Now and is online, you can click on each instruction in the RFP and decide what to do with it. You can add a new proposal section for it in the proposal outline column, or if you have an existing outline item that is relevant you can add a new section under it. You can decide whether to create a single outline item to address that part of the RFP, or break it into several proposal sections. As you click through the RFP instructions, you can build a fully compliant proposal outline. When you are done with the instructions, you can move on to the evaluation criteria. As you click through the evaluation criteria, you can decide whether your outline already has an appropriate place to address each item that will impact your evaluation score. You can link each evaluation criterion to an existing proposal section, or you can add a new proposal section to provide a place to address it. You can craft your proposal outline to maximize your evaluation score. Finally, you can do the same thing with the RFP performance requirements. You should also review the rest of the RFP to determine whether it contains any requirements that should also be addressed in your proposal outline. Remember, you can always add items to your proposal outline that go beyond what the RFP has asked for. You can also add subsections. You can start building your proposal outline by focusing on RFP compliance, and then expand on it to meet your preferences and strategic goals. This makes cross-referencing the RFP almost as simple as clicking through the RFP and building your outline as you go. Once you’ve clicked through the RFP, you should also click through your proposal outline to ensure that each proposal section links to all of the relevant RFP requirements. What you should end up with is a proposal outline that provides a place for everything in the RFP, right where the customer expects to find it. When your outline is complete, you can decide whether to export your compliance matrix as a Microsoft Excel file and whether to take the next step and automagically convert it into a proposal content plan, complete with full text RFP references. But before you do that, you should validate your compliance matrix.

We're inching closer to the public launch of MustWin Now, our new proposal software. We're using it internally already. PropLIBRARY Subscribers are taking training in it. We're ready to put it to work. So if your company becomes a Corporate Subscriber, we'll use it to create a compliance matrix and proposal outline for you. We'll use it to help you create a Proposal Content Plan. You'll get our expert help getting your proposal off to a great start! We'll create them for you. Or you can take the lead and we'll show you how to do it using MustWin Now, back you up, and provide quality assurance. It's your choice. You're essentially getting the subscription free of charge, since the cost is what you could expect to spend on having a professional consultant prepare your compliance matrix, proposal outline, and proposal content plan. Actually it's a bit less than what we would normally charge. A Corporate Subscription costs $6,000 for up to 50 users. If you are already a single user subscriber to PropLIBRARY, you'll get double credit for the cost of your subscription and save $1,000 automatically at checkout. All your users will get full access to PropLIBRARY including the online training, access to the MustWin Process, and access to MustWin Now. More information about our subscription offerings is available here. Click to purchase a Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY

See also: About mustwin now We created the MustWin Now proposal software to make it easier to implement the MustWin Process. Both the MustWin Process and MustWin Now come with a PropLIBRARY Subscription. We also offer online training to help PropLIBRARY Subscribers learn how to best use MustWin Now.

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This is just to provide a quick link into MustWin Now. URL: https://proplibrary.com/rfp/

Win probability is the likelihood that you'll win your pursuit. It would be so nice to be able to predict the probability of winning a bid. It would be really nice to know what percentage your chances are. It would so help with resource allocation and making decisions. But there are just two problems with expressing win probability as a percentage: See also: Information Advantage None of the algorithms that make the attempt to calculate your percentage chance of winning have statistically significant data to base their calculations on. They have no basis to claim accuracy. How many leads, comparing apples to apples, have you run through your algorithm and correlated with winning? Dozens? It’s probably not enough to establish statistical significance for a single variable let alone all the factors that could impact award. You can get more data by considering more companies, but then you also decrease the likelihood of having an apples to apples comparison. Even within the same company it’s hard to compare apples to apples when the customer, offering, evaluation criteria, and other circumstances can be so different. You don’t have enough data for it to average out. Garbage in, garbage out. All algorithms that make the attempt to calculate a percentage are guesses piled on top of guesses. Since the chances of the customer accepting your proposal are not numerically calculable, we use proxies. Instead of quantified events we use indicators and guess at some numerical value. Some of these indicators are quite subjective. What is your level of customer intimacy? What past performance score will you get? What are your strengths and weaknesses? If you try to quantify these, you at best have guesses. But what weight will you give each of them? How much do your indicators matter when compared to each other? Which will impact the customer's decision more? Converting the indicator into a number with a guess and using a guess for the weight means multiplying your guesses as well as your margin of error. Garbage in, exponential garbage out. Combine a statistically unreliable result with a huge margin of error and you get something not worth considering. Using guesses as input for guesses with no statistical significance can’t be made scientific. Even if you use the word “probability” and assign it a number. Does anyone ever go back and compare their predicted win probability with their win rate to see if it’s accurate? By expressing win probability as a percentage, you may actually reduce your ability to guess your win probability accurately. It’s not just that you have a fake probability. You potentially have a misleading probability. You really don’t need a number. Sure, it’s nice to allocate your resources by percentages. And maybe a guess is the only way to do that. But when it comes to making decisions, you don’t need win probability to be expressed as a percentage. What you need are the indicators. You need good quality indicators, so that when you guess it’s based on the best quality input possible. What things impact your win rate the most? See also: Bid/No Bid Decisions Start with what you think impacts the likelihood of winning your pursuit. Go ahead and guess. Guess a lot. Collect as many potential indicators as you can possibly think of. Include both the good and the bad. Then track those indicators over all of your bids. You might not have enough bids to achieve statistical significance, but using some data to test your beliefs about win probability is better than just going on your beliefs alone. You'll find that some are better indicators than others. You will likely find some of the results to be counter-intuitive and not at all what you expected. Over time you might even approach statistical significance if you control your variables. Just use the data to establish the correlations between potential indicators and winning instead of calculating a probability percentage. Knowing what actions correlate with winning is more valuable than being able to claim a percentage as your “win probability.” See also: Pre-RFP Questions Just don’t trust people who say they know what it takes to win. Rules of thumb aren’t. Your customers, your relationship with them, the nature of your offering, your ability to turn information into a winning proposal, and your circumstances, add up to a unique context. I have seen the way hundreds of companies conduct their pursuits. Most of them are guessing. Some have convinced themselves that they are experts even though they are guessing. Be data driven. Put effort into finding indicators that are objective, so that the results aren’t as influenced by wishful thinking, misapplied incentives, and the convenience of the moment. And use a little logic. Knowing the customer for a long time has no impact on your likelihood of winning something new. But having an information advantage, calculated by the number of questions you can answer, is a potential indicator. In fact, if you only had to choose one indicator, having an information advantage would be a great guess. But still, confirm that by correlating with your win rate. Just look out for apples, oranges, and statistical significance. And laugh at win probability numbers. PS: I considered the following alternatives for the title for this article: The ugly truth about win probability that no one talks about Lies, damn lies, and win probability Your carefully calculated win probability is wrong Calculating win probability is like intentionally following a mirage Your win probability comes with certainty of being wrong Don't count on your win probability What are the chances that your win probability is correct?

When your bids win or lose based on how well your proposals help the customer reach their decision, the best competitive advantage is often an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. Knowing how the customer makes their decisions, what matters to them, and what they need to see in the proposal can give you an edge in how you respond. Gaining an information advantage is why relationship marketing is so important. The relationship is the goal. Your goal is the result of the relationship. And that goal is an information advantage that you can use to win the proposal. You can measure the strength of your customer relationship based on how well it helps you develop an information advantage. The extent of your information advantage can be measured by your ability to answer the questions that proposal writers have when trying to write a winning proposal. An ordinary proposal is self-descriptive and can be completed without a lot of insight simply by responding to the RFP. Unfortunately, an ordinary proposal is not going to be competitive. To be competitive, you want to prepare a great proposal. A great proposal requires insight to provide what the customer needs to see to reach a decision in your favor. Creating an insightful proposal requires an information advantage. All the great ideas you have on your own are no match for insight into what matters to the customer. The strength of your information advantage can be measured by its ability to answer your questions. Now, you just need to know what questions you need answers to in order to write a great proposal. On your next bid, try providing insightful answers to questions like these: To learn more about developing an information advantage, see also: Information Advantage What will it take to win this pursuit? What are the customer’s preferences? What are their goals? What is their management style? What matters to the customer? What is the price required to win? What should you offer? Do you have any gaps in your offering? How would the customer prefer you to handle the inevitable tradeoffs? What will make you a better alternative than your competitors? How does the customer make decisions? What information do proposal writers need to close the sale? The answers to these questions determine: Whether you should bid What you should offer How you should position, differentiate, and present your offering What your win strategies should be What points you should make when writing the proposal How to get the best evaluation score How you should price your offering How to make bid and tradeoff decisions The secret to consistently winning competitive bids is to go into each bid knowing the answers to these questions. Discovering the answers requires a customer who is willing to discuss them with you. This means that you need a relationship in which the customer feels comfortable talking to you. And this in turn means developing that relationship before the customer’s acquisition process reaches the point where they limit communications. This impacts which customers you should target, which you should avoid, and which bids you should invest in pursuing. You will never get all the answers you want and you should always consider far more questions than you will ever be able to answer. You won't get any answers if you won't know which questions to ask. If you can learn more than your competitors and turn that into writing a better proposal, you have turned an information advantage into a competitive advantage. Bidding without an information advantage means you are either gambling on your ability to guess better than your competitors, or you are betting that all you need is to offer the lowest price. Overconfidence in either of these will result in a low win rate as well as low profit margins. This is why we made pre-RFP Readiness Reviews part of the MustWin Process that is available to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. It provide a structure for developing an information advantage and a starting point for the questions you should ask. It includes our method for quantifying the answers to questions that you can use to quantify the strength of your customer relationships, correlate answers with your win rate, and identify trends in the effectiveness of your business development efforts. Not only can you measure the strength of your customer relationships by how well they produce an information advantage, you can measure the profitability of relationship marketing by how well it improves your win rate. An improvement to your win rate means increasing your revenue without having to chase more leads. When your company is new, it's hard to commit a large level of effort to relationship marketing. But when you do the math, you’ll find that it’s worth the effort to build customer relationships that provide the information advantage you need to win. Losing proposals are expensive. Winning pays for the cost of pursuit and then some. Companies that consistently win and generate positive returns know what "ROI" stands for…

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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: See also: Great Proposals 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.

See also: Proposal Management 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 For better proposal assignments, see also: Assignments 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 Proposal Content Planning. It makes the goal fulfilling the plan. And that is measurable. A Proposal Content Plan helps in many ways, by informing writers, accelerating writing, and giving you a way to measure progress and results. Get your priorities straight I have seen too many proposal kickoff meetings focus on writers complying with a 30 plus page style manual. Style manuals are usually designed to smooth out production but not only have little or no impact on winning. They can actually reduce your win probability by taking attention away from other things with a greater impact. If you are under resourced, as most proposals are, you should very carefully focus writers' attention on the things that will impact winning the most. Think in terms 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.

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The MustWin Process was developed in 2004 by thinking about how to discover what it will take to win a proposal and then create a proposal around it. It was goal-driven in nature, focusing on what has to happen in order to win and less on how you do things. This makes it very flexible in implementation. MustWin Now is an online tool that started off tackling just one part of the process: Proposal Content Planning. How you figure out what should go into your proposal is the crux of the problem. It's also the foundation for quality validation. And it defines the needs for the entire pre-RFP pursuit. What we've discovered is that moving your proposal planning online changes things. Potentially everything. It makes it easier to do the things you know you should be doing, but find problematical using traditional approaches. This course is about exploring that. But in order to explore Proposal Content Planning, we need an outline. In order to have an outline, we need to build a compliance matrix. So that is where we'll start. And we'll use MustWin Now to create them. Read the instructions contained in the course items below. View the videos to see how MustWin Now works. Participate in the office hour sessions to ask any questions you have. Or just email them to: carl.dickson@capturplanning.com We'll enter the RFP, create the proposal outline based on it, cross-reference and link the RFP to the outline to create a compliance matrix, then we'll start content planning. One step per week. After all the questions are answered during the office hour sessions, we'll look at how to use these features to achieve your proposal management 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. It’s a curious dilemma, 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 For more information about creating great proposals: Great Proposals 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? 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? 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 and complete? 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. 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. 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. And make them add up to something that matters to the customer. [Video] 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 is a claim with no impact on the customer. If it does have an impact, that is what the point should be. The amount of impact your point has determines how much it matters. Is your purpose to write proposals that matter? Then propose having 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 in it. And when they do this, they water down their purpose until they do not matter. Finding meaning What do you do that has an impact? What matters? Now and in the future. How will all of the stakeholders be impacted? Having an impact brings meaning to a proposal. It 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 talking about what matters. It is a chance to matter.