Carl Dickson

People don’t flourish on their own. People are the most successful at winning business when they understand what is expected of them and know how to define success for their tasks. A little motivation helps, but it’s not the only thing required. Every assignment should be wrapped with guidance and tools that enable your people to know whether they are doing things correctly. And this should not simply take the form of other people. The model of people telling people what to do and then subjectively judging whether they did it right is not the best way to maximize your win rates. Instead of building your company around people, try building it around performance support for those people. Of course, this requires institutional knowledge of what is required for success. And investment in how to do tasks well instead of just throwing people at problems. This is what building a company really is. It's not just hiring some talented folks. It's about everything you need to surround those people with in order for them to flourish. And that's more than an office, a desk, and a chair. It's also the knowledge and awareness of how to accomplish new tasks as individuals and how to best work together to perform successfully. People don't show up knowing these things. Good people will show up willing. They'll show up with ideas of their own. But they'll show up as individuals and you'll be asking them to do some things they've never done before, with people who are new to them, and no institutional knowledge about your company. They need clarity of expectations, channels for collaboration, guidance, resources and a definition of what success is and quality criteria to measure it by. You should build your company around what is required for successful performance, and not just people or process. Like most proposal specialists, I was taught to obsess on implementing a solid proposal process. Process is vital for both efficiency and effectiveness. I’ve learned that it is also not enough to maximize performance. People try to supplement process with training, and mostly fail. People try to tack on some reviews at the back end of a proposal and call it “quality assurance.” And mostly fail. If you want people to mostly succeed, you need to combine process, training, and quality assurance into one thing. Every step, every task, every assignment should include all three. You should build around what is required for successful performance, and not just people or process. It doesn’t have to be that hard: Build the process around goals instead of tasks. Make the process self-explanatory. Build in discovery where the process needs to adapt. Link the process to the templates, tools, and resources people need to accomplish it. Link the process to just-in-time training available for those who need it, at the moment of need. Create checklists to be used by both the people performing the process and the people reviewing the work produced. Make it easy to track issues, keep track of information, and get input from others. Make proposal assignments about fulfilling goals and quality criteria instead of simply about creating deliverables. When we first built PropLIBRARY, we built it to expand the MustWin Process we developed for pursuing and capturing leads. Originally, we published it as a workbook. I really liked the workbook we published. But on PropLIBRARY we started linking in ways that just can’t be done on paper. We started creating online courses that were interlinked with the process documentation. And now we’re creating performance support software that makes it easier to accomplish the goals for each phase of the process, wrapping each step with guidance and quality assurance checklists. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things. The first eye opener was discovering how much more natural it is to work in an environment where the things you need or need to do are all one click away. The process is no longer linear. It’s… available. Every task has explanation, guidance, training, and quality criteria. It fulfills the needs of the people executing the process instead of asking people to do what the process demands. Reviews are less like milestones, and more like checking your own work, or having someone check it for you. On demand. Issues and problems become something that’s itemized and can be eliminated, instead of fodder for endless meetings. If you are clever, you may not need software to support performance like this. It does make things easier, and the software we’ve developed has opened our eyes to a different way of working. But it’s software that’s not about automation, but rather software that’s more like a concierge, a coach, and a coordinator. If you address what people need to be able to successfully perform, they can flourish. If you hire them, task them, leave them on their own, and criticize them when they fail, they will try. But you want better than that. You want to win. Every proposal. People matter. But support for their performance matters more. That’s what you should build your company around.

Topics might include... Developing capabilities that differentiate your company and give customers a reason to care about you Building growth into your corporate culture Improving your competitiveness How your approach to risk can save or hurt your company Using oversight to improve your customer relations and protect your past performance Organizing to improve collaboration and decision making Competing with the big dogs Winning more of what you bid Lead qualification Developing your proposal organization Designing the winning offering I’m looking for a group of government contractor executives to participate in one online meeting a month that will address strategic planning and issues critical for growth and success. We’ll be taking about the topics typically addressed in a strategic plan, but instead of treating it as an annual exercise that creates a document that sits on a shelf collecting dust, each month we’ll delve into a topic that you can use to drive your entire company to think about and make improvements. What really makes it work is the selection of topics. I’ve done strategic planning this way before and it’s a game changer. It gets you out of fire-fighting mode and gives you a manageable way to think, take action, and shape your business. It’s a great way to start building the right structures and culture, without putting it off until it’s too late and limits your growth. By doing this as a group, you’ll be able to share the costs. Exactly how low we can drive them will depend on the number of companies participating, but I think it could be around $2,400 per company. For the full year. Compared to hiring an executive level consultant directly, this could cut costs by 70%! And just to add value ($2,000 worth of added value), I’ll throw in a 5-user Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY. And on top of the group sessions, I’ll offer one free call per company per month so we can talk in private about whatever’s causing you pain, something you’d like an outside opinion on, or whatever information or advice I can humbly offer. That sounds like a pretty compelling package to me, and just the sort of thing that can make getting the kind of expert advice your small business needs a lot more affordable. How to find out more about participating Use the button below to declare your interest. You can include a message with any questions and introduce your company. I’ll get in touch and when the group moves forward we’ll finalize the topics, vote on the best date/time each month, and set a start date. If we get an overwhelming response, we’ll set up multiple groups so that each doesn’t get too big for individual attention. Our target audience is the executive level because this will be geared to decision makers, change agents, and leaders. We don't care about actual titles or who you might have on the speakerphone with you. I'm interested. Tell me more...

Proposal Content Planning can be implemented with different management models. Should the content plan be given to writers or should the writers participate in creating the content plan? This will vary according to your corporate culture and the complexity of your offering. Should all stakeholders be involved? Is your company centralized or decentralized? How are decisions made at your company? What is the balance between consensus and authority? Content planning can be done with each of these approaches to management. Implementing Proposal Content Planning requires you to determine what management model is the best fit for your organization. You need to address not only who will participate, but who will decide, and what approaches will be used to gather the required information and review the content plan prior to using it to write the proposal. The key questions you should ask to develop your management model for content planning are: See also: Content Planning Best Practices Who will write the instructions? Who will contribute information? Who will review the content plan? If the management model is up to you, consider: Is your goal to deliver a plan that’s ready for writers to implement, or is it to involve people with the necessary subject matter expertise and authority to figure out and discover what should go into the proposal and how it should be presented? Do you have the information you need to do it centrally? Do the stakeholders have the knowledge and skills to contribute? Who makes decisions regarding the approaches to be proposed and how it will be presented? There are often multiple groups involved, such as specialists in sales, technical, executive, and proposals. Stakeholders can participate in content planning in multiple ways. They can participate directly by creating or editing the instructions. Or they can be interviewed by someone else who will create the instructions. Once you have a management model and are clear about your goals, the next step is to consider what form will the instructions should take. The way you write your instructions can direct, inform, teach, or ask. They can facilitate collaboration regarding what to write or specifically direct what to write. The content planning methodology enables you to guide participants through what they need to do to figure out what should be written and how. How much and what kind of guidance do they need? How should you use content plans to improve the quality of your proposals? Once you have chosen your management model and begun creating your content plan, remember that part of the methodology involves creating the quality criteria that will be used for Proposal Quality Validation. Can you do this on your own? How will reviewers be introduced to the quality criteria and be taught how to perform a review using them? Who will review the content plan itself to ensure it contains the right quality criteria and instructions? Proposal Content Planning also provides the potential to implement interesting metrics and gain insight into progress and success drivers across multiple proposals. Who should be involved in inserting the instructions needed, tracking the metrics, performing analytics based on them, and using the results to provide feedback and continuous improvement? At this level, Proposal Content Planning becomes about more than just the current proposal and gives you a tool for objective organizational improvement. If you aspire to operate at this level, the management model you use to implement Proposal Content Planning should reflect this.

Most companies obsess over lead generation, when it's their win rate that ultimately determines their success. If your company lives or dies on its ability to win proposals, then everything depends on your win rate. Very few companies understand it, and even fewer build their companies around it. The ones that do are successful. The ones that don't aren't really in business, they are just gambling. Once you realize the importance of your win rate on your ROI, then the fun really starts. That's when you have to figure out what do to about it. What impacts your win rate the most? How does that impact your priorities? What separates consistently winning from usually losing? See also: Improving win rates Setting your priorities and improving your win rate Your priorities should be determined by your ROI. All opportunity in a company comes from growth. And growth is directly dependent on your win rate. Here are nine places you should consider investing to increase your proposal win rate. Depending on your role, people tend to look at what needs to be done to win business differently. One thing you should quickly learn is that bidding everything can destroy your company before you even realize it. Not only do bad bid decisions destroy your win rate, they turn your future into something random and weak instead of something planned and strong. Learning how to make effective bid decisions is critical for your future. But once you've made the decision you need to properly prepare for your proposals before they start so that you can build them around what it will take to win. This will have a greater impact on your win rate than attempting proposal heroism at the last minute. It's easy to get caught up in the hysteria over lead generation when you need new business right away. But you have to master the balance between short term vs. long term thinking if you want a prosperous future for your company. To maximize your win rate, you need to get into position to win. Keep in mind Keep in mind that what will increase win rate at one company, may cause it to fall at another. For example, if you do a high volume of proposals, your approaches will be different from a company that has a low volume. Likewise, if you are in a low-margin business, you may not be able to afford to approach things the same way that other companies do. Finally, you should also keep in mind that the win rate at other companies, or claims of high win rates by consultants, are completely meaningless. Everybody measures differently. Everybody cherry-picks. Your own win rate must be consistently measured to have any meaning. And yet, win rates are vital. They are the key metric you need to transform into a winning organization.

All proposals are won or lost based on whether the proposal writers have the right input. All. Of. Them. The right input can’t be somehow made up by proposal writers during the proposal. Either it’s brought to them so they can present it or they build a presentation without substance. And it’s best to bring this input at the very beginning, while there is time to do something about it. And this in turn usually means gathering the right input before the RFP hits the street and the proposal starts. This means that being a great proposal writer requires being able to ask for the right input before the proposal event starts. This means that being a company that's good at winning proposals requires getting good at gathering the right inputs before you start your proposals. These inputs fall into four areas: Do you know the price to win? Price is important, even in a best value evaluation. But how important is it? What spread between the lowest price and yours can still win? What will the lowest price submitted be? You might not be able to know these answers with precision. But how well you know (or even guess) can determine whether you win or lose. Do you know what it will take to win? What is the customer looking for? How will they pick the winner? How do they make decisions and trade-offs? What are their preferences? What do they need? What do they like? Everything in proposal writing is about positioning and differentiation. Nothing gets simply described. Everything gets put in context. Everything in proposal writing needs to add up to making you the customer’s best alternative, from their perspective. Your proposal writers simply can’t write a proposal from the customer’s perspective unless they have the input that enables them to see things the way the customer does and to know what information they need to reach a decision in your favor. Can you put it in writing? Most companies know something about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Most companies fail at getting that into their proposals effectively. This most often happens because of poor communication from business development and capture to the proposal writers, or through a lack of planning before writing. The problem usually isn’t the writer’s ability to get it on paper, it’s the lack of input. Do you have the right offering? A good price with great proposal writing will still fail unless you deliver the offering the customer wants. Actually, having the customer want your offering is only part of it. Your offering needs to be the customer’s best alternative. Your writers can’t fake that by adding beneficial sounding words while saying they’ll do whatever the RFP asked for. They need the right input regarding what the company intends to propose. What do you do with the input once you’ve got it? How you accumulate and stage the information prior to writing is critical. How do you allocate what you know to the proposal outline? How should it be presented? How do you validate whether it made it into the proposal? Once you collect the right input, you should put it into a proposal content plan, so that the writers can account for it and your proposal reviewers can validate that it was properly addressed. Are you guessing at winning or are you working at winning? At a 30% win rate, a 10% increase in your win rate can be the same as having 40% more leads. It’s worth the work to do more than guess at what should go into your proposals. All you need to do is show up with a great offering design that can be delivered at the right price, with knowledge about the customer’s perspective, how they will make their selection, and how things should be positioned and differentiated. Take that information and put it into a proposal content plan that provides guidance regarding what to write and how. Do this and you can write a great proposal every time. Do this and you will maximize your win rate. Great proposal writing really is this simple.

Balancing the time to plan with the time to write against a deadline is more of an art than a science. The more you can do to accelerate the planning, the more time there is for writing. But don't forget that you have to think things through. If you rush through content planning without thinking things through, which is what an approach based on recycling proposals leads to, you can do more harm than good. Recycling narratives can also hurt because editing text to change the context can take longer than it does to write text that is optimized for the current context. Content Planning provides ways around the problems that you inevitably encounter when trying to recycle proposal narratives. Proposal Content Planning can be combined with reuse. In fact, reusing your plans can make more sense than reusing the narratives. When you combine the two, in addition to reusing text you can use questions, placeholders, instructions, options, and things to consider. You can provide examples, while helping people think things through more quickly. Here are five options for combining reuse and Proposal Content Planning: In addition to reusing text you can use questions, placeholders, instructions, options, and things to consider... See also: Content Planning Best Practices If you have topics which are the same from proposal to proposal, and not merely similar, it is safe to reuse narrative. But people often think their proposals are the same when they are merely similar, and way underestimate the level of effort required to do the tailoring. A proposal that is optimized to win for one customer, opportunity, and competitive environment is definitely not optimized to win the next unless everything really is the same. If you do not optimize your proposal to win for this customer, this opportunity, and this competitive environment your win rate will suffer. If you have topics which are similar, instead of providing reuse text you can provide instructions for how to do the tailoring. You can also provide placeholders for new or specific things that will need to be created. If you can separate the portions that will not change from the portions that will, you can make the tailoring very efficient and as simple as answering questions. For example, you might have instructions that say “If you are the incumbent, talk about already having the resources. But if you are not the incumbent, explain where you will get the resources.” If what needs to be written depends on circumstances that are always different, you can provide options. You can even use an If-Then-Else structure for your instructions. Options can also be open ended. Even if none of the options is correct for the circumstances of the bid, the options provided can inspire the author to create something that is a perfect match for the current bid. And if you don’t know what will need to be written, possibly because you can’t anticipate what the RFP will require, then you can provide things to consider. Like options, these can provide inspiration, only they are more open ended. They point to areas and not to specifics. You can use considerations to give the writers some things to think about. You can provide lists of possibilities and details that might apply. You don’t have to be certain. The writers can decide what’s applicable. Maybe they’ll think of something else that wasn’t even suggested. But they won’t have to start from scratch. Help them prepare their plans. It’s difficult to prepare a plan in advance for a set of unknown requirements. But you can address what should go into a plan. Your instructions to the proposal writers can suggest things to include in their plans. Maybe reusing content is not the problem Sometimes it’s not the details. Sometimes the writers just need to know what points to make and then they can supply the details. The points you should be trying to make might include: Address strategies as well as approaches. When your company wants to position as the lowest risk, highest quality, better, stronger, or faster, do you have positioning and proof points to suggest? Or do you want to leave it to the writers to figure out? What about your differentiators? Sometimes you follow the same strategies in certain circumstances (incumbent, not the incumbent, introducing new technology, reducing cost, etc.). Sometimes providing strategic options and considerations that match common circumstances is more useful than trying to anticipate or recycle approach details. Proof points that match circumstances. In addition to strategies and approaches, some things like qualifications do not change frequently. Metrics can be very useful as proof points, but difficult to gather. Keeping track of data and proof points relevant to certain circumstances can be very helpful. The same applies to creating quality criteria for your proposals Now apply all of that to your proposal quality criteria: Which are the same from proposal to proposal? Which are conditional? Which are optional? What should be considered? With a good script, you can very quickly assemble bid-specific quality criteria. Instead of reuse of proposal content, consider simply creating proposal quality criteria and making it easy to tailor by explaining what to tailor and how. Giving writers the same quality criteria that your reviewers will use can be even more helpful than giving them some content to recycle when the reviewers will pick it apart and question its applicability. TL;DR Faster proposals do not come from quick copying of something that’s similar and not the same. At least not if you want to be competitive. Faster proposals that don’t compromise your competitiveness come from faster thinking about your strategies, deciding on your approaches, making your points, and having the right quality criteria. And these come from faster Proposal Content Planning instead of recycling narrative. Recycling narrative may not be all bad in the right context. But by the time you do the things that have a bigger impact, the amount of content recycling that makes sense gets smaller and smaller. Recycling proposal narratives becomes a small addition only applicable to a few minor parts of the proposal that you can consider at the end instead of being a place to start.

Proposal Content Plan Quality To do its job, a Proposal Content Plan must achieve certain objectives. It is not simply a summary of what you might write or a collection of placeholders. It should be far more than a simple annotated outline. For example, it should provide instructions for writers and quality criteria for reviewing the proposal. The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the Proposal Content Plan and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the content plan is correct. See also: PQV quality criteria Do the proposal design, strategies, or offering need to be reconsidered? Do the instructions contain enough information about the approaches that will be written so that the approaches themselves can be validated? Do the instructions leave any gaps or RFP compliance issues? Do the instructions identify all of the customer/ RFP requirements that should be addressed in each section? Do the instructions explain how to maximize your score against the evaluation criteria? Do the instructions advise the writers regarding how to handle any assumptions, limits, boundaries, trade-offs, or risks in your offering? Do the instructions advise the writers regarding any ambiguities or problems in the RFP? Do the instructions provide information about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that goes beyond what is given in the RFP? Do the instructions explain where and how to add value and show insight? Do the instructions provide sufficient guidance for writers to get everything correct on the first draft? Do the instructions identify the points that should be emphasized or proven in each section? Do the instructions contain references to any helpful data or information that should be incorporated or consulted? Will the content plan produce the right proposal if followed? Do the instructions identify where projects, experience, proof points, or examples should be cited? Does the content plan also provide sufficient quality criteria so that writers and reviewers will be able to assess whether the sections have been properly completed? Do the quality criteria provide a sufficient definition for what proposal quality is and reflect what it will take to win this proposal?

Proposal Outline Quality The proposal outline should be fully validated prior to writing the proposal based on it. Changes in the proposal outline after writing starts can be very disruptive and should be avoided by thoroughly reviewing the proposal outline. The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the proposal outline and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the outline is correct. Is the outline organized according to the RFP instructions? See also: PQV quality criteria Will the customer be able to find things where they expect to find them, based on the RFP? Does the outline also address any evaluation criteria? Will the customer find it clear where to find things relevant to their scoring of your proposal and completion of their evaluation forms? Have your organized your response to the technical requirements according to the RFP so that the customer will be able to find where in your proposal you have responded to each requirement? Do all proposal headings match their corresponding RFP requirements so that customers can find things using keyword searches? Are you at risk of the customer not finding something because it is not organized or labelled the same way as in the RFP? If the customer evaluates by following the RFP instead of your outline, will they be able to find everything they are looking for?

Compliance Matrix Quality A compliance matrix should be fully validated prior to writing the proposal based on it. Changes in the outline or allocation of RFP requirements to the proposal after writing starts can be very disruptive. Reviewing a compliance matrix can take as long as it did to create the compliance matrix in the first place. Nonetheless, ensuring the compliance matrix is accurate is absolutely vital to proposal success. See also: Compliance matrix The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the compliance matrix and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the compliance matrix is correct. These criteria should be applied to every row in your compliance matrix. Does the compliance matrix reflect all relevant RFP requirements? Are any RFP requirements that require a written response missing from the matrix? Do any RFP requirements in the matrix need to be parsed into separate items so they may be allocated to proposal sections individually? Is each RFP requirement in the matrix linked to the correct proposal sections? Is each proposal section linked to all RFP requirements that should be written to in that section? Are all judgment calls and RFP interpretations valid and do they reflect what the customer intended? Will the proposal produced by following the compliance matrix reflect what the customer wants to see in the proposal?

How do you know if your proposal is any good? How do you know if it reflects what it will take to win? Is it just a matter of opinion? Whose opinion? How you do break the cycle of inconsistent and ineffective reviews that do more harm than good? Introducing Proposal Quality Validation Online training for Proposal Quality Validation:: Understanding proposal quality (43 minutes) Implementing Proposal Quality Validation (52 minutes) Proposal quality validation is a methodology for formally assessing proposal quality instead of simply reading drafts and providing subjective comments. It is for companies that are serious about increasing their win rates by increasing the quality of their proposals. Unfortunately, the way most companies do their proposal reviews is broken. Proposal Quality Validation can help you increase your competitiveness and win what you submit, by improving the way you assess proposal quality. The benefits of using Proposal Quality Validation: Writers don't have to guess at what reviewers want. Reviews are not subjective opinion-fests that do more harm than good. You can consider all the different things you need to consider when reviewing a proposal, without overloading your reviewers and asking them to look at more issues in one sitting than is humanly possible. Everyone gets on the same page regarding what a quality proposal is. How to achieve this goal The foundation of a consistently effective review process is something that almost every company lacks: a written definition of proposal quality that can be turned into criteria to be used during proposal reviews. It is such a simple and obvious thing, but almost every company we encounter still uses outdated, subjective, unscoped review practices. Proposal Quality Validation separates what you review from how you review it. What you review matters more than how you review it. Your proposal process should surface the criteria you need to define quality based on what it will take to win. Then you have as many reviews, conducted in whatever ways make sense, at whatever times make sense, to validate that the proposal fulfills the criteria. Proposal Quality Validation requires you to: Define proposal quality in writing. If you can't define it, you can't validate it. If it isn't written down, you can't get everyone on the same page regarding what proposal quality is. Create quality criteria to use during proposal reviews. This is usually done during Proposal Content Planning. But the quality criteria are what you use to determine whether you've fulfilled your definition of proposal quality. Use the quality criteria during writing as well as during reviews. Give the quality criteria to the proposal writers when they receive their assignments so they can self-review their work. Plan your validation reviews and validate the plan itself. Think through and document the number of proposal reviews you need to validate all your quality criteria and how many proposal reviewers should participate. Then hold a review of the plan prior to implementation to ensure that it will meet standards and expectations for this pursuit. Train reviewers to validate against quality criteria instead of rendering opinions. They can still make comments, but that should come after the quality criteria have been validated. Achieving consistently effective proposal reviews requires that proposal writers and reviewers work from the same expectations regarding proposal quality. Achieving this in turn requires defining the criteria your reviewers will use to assess proposal quality before the writing starts, so that the writers know what they need to deliver. Those criteria should reflect what it takes to win. When you put all that together, it not only defines your proposal process, it enables you to make achieving consistently effective proposal reviews checklist simple. Having a review team leader to implement Proposal Quality Validation can be a big help. Options for implementing Proposal Quality Validation: The best approach for you will depend on your circumstances and the nature of your bids. Completely customize your validation approach. Define all criteria specifically for a given pursuit. Complete a form for each review to allocate criteria to phases and reviewers. Best for unique solutions bids or situations where you need Proposal Quality Validation, but there it has never been tried before in that organization. This is a high level of effort for the maximum possible improvement approach to proposal quality. Checklist-driven. You can accelerate Proposal Quality Validation without watering down your quality criteria. But it takes some investment ahead of time to make your reviews go quicker and easier. Collaborative validation. It's not always possible to have an objective review by people not involved in the proposal. Maybe that's not what you really need. Maybe instead of draft reviews what you really need is to validate the decisions you make about what you are proposing. Maybe instead of open-ended editing and comments looking for defects, reviewers should provide instructions to the proposal team. Instead of finding fault, maybe reviews should be a teaching moment. Focus on self-assessment instead of reviews. Rely on proposal contributors to meet the quality criteria. While there is no "validation" of successful criteria fulfillment, in small organizations, there might not be any people not working on the proposal to provide a separate review. Self-assessment may be the only option. So do it right by providing quality criteria. Proposal risks and issue tracking. If you lose, the odds are extremely high that it will be because of a risk or issue that you knew about but did not sufficiently mitigate. Hybrids. You can mix and match the various options for implementing Proposal Quality Validation. You can have checklist-driven collaborative validation. Or you can use a completely customized approach, but supplement and accelerate it using checklists. How you implement the procedures is less important than that you achieve the level of validation you need. Contract these approaches with the one approach that most companies use. We call it proposal sight reading. While sight reading a proposal can provide quick feedback when needed, it does not maximize your chances of winning as much as Proposal Quality Validation. Sight reading can be improved by introducing simple criteria and learning how to tell if a proposal is well-written to form a watered down version of Proposal Quality Validation for when you haven't properly defined your proposal quality criteria. Alternatives approaches to reviewing your proposals To better understand proposal reviews, see also: Should your reviews be objective? Is that even possible? Can you cancel your reviews and still improve your proposal quality? Once simple thing you can do to transform your proposal reviews The benefits of making proposal reviews about teaching instead of defects The break/fix model for quality control doesn’t work that well for proposal development. Having experienced people show up and look for problems is not the best way to achieve a great proposal. The comments are inconsistent and either come too little too late, or too many too late. And this type of review often requires a highly disruptive production effort. The idea that you need a team of people outside the proposal team to be objective is useful, but not always possible. And not as useful as you might think. You need input, guidance, and validation from your experienced staff all along the way and not just their help finding defects late in the game. One alternative is to make them part of the collaborative process and build your quality process around collaboration instead of proofreading. Another alternative is to cancel the reviews and focus on designing quality in from the beginning instead. You can use the quality criteria guidance from our Proposal Quality Validation methodology to help with this. If you are going to persist in having open-ended read the proposal and comment on it style reviews, at least get good at it. Call it what it is: sight reading. You can improve the results you get from sight reading by training your reviewers in what to look for. Take all of your quality criteria, and condense them into the 5 or so most important things or root causes of problems and turn it into a review checklist. Essentially it's a form of minimal preparation, watered down Proposal Quality Validation for when you just can't get people to define and focus on quality instead of reading. Also, we’ve found that when you make reviews about guidance instead of detecting defects you get better results. Proposal Reviews are a teaching moment. Take advantage of all the experience participating in your reviews and enlist them as teachers instead of critics. Of course that only reinforces the importance of doing the teaching, in the form of defining quality and quality criteria, before the writing even starts. But you have to start somewhere. Another alternative is the customer-emulation review. This is when you score the proposal against the evaluation criteria, doing so as closely to the way the customer will do it as possible. It is surprising how rarely this provides useful improvement. It is better to apply this line of thought to designing quality in at the beginning. Customer emulation reviews do not conflict with Proposal Quality Validation. If one (or more) of your quality criteria relate to achieving the highest possible evaluation score (and they probably should), then validating the fulfillment of that criteria by emulating the customer can be a very good thing. But you probably should validate more than just how it reads. You should validate whether the outline reflects the customer's expectations, whether the copy includes all of the relevant RFP keywords, how easy it is to find where to score each evaluation criteria, etc. A customer-emulation review is good, but quality validation is more reliable. The combination may be the best approach. Frequently Asked Questions about implementing Proposal Quality Validation After reviewing all of the material we've published, you might still have some of these questions and the answers might help guide your implementation. How do you know when you've achieved this goal? Here is a checklist you can use to assess whether your Proposal Quality Validation plan is sufficient to achieve your goals. One of the most important quality reviews you will perform on this proposal is the one that validates that this content plan will produce the desired proposal. If you start writing without performing this review, you put the entire proposal at risk. Proposal Content Planning is a necessary part of Proposal Quality Validation.

What you should write about? How should you present it? How do you know if it's correct? Before you jump into proposal writing, you need a plan. And you need to validate that plan to prevent rework. Why this goal is important To better understand, see also: Why an outline or even a compliance matrix is not enough to plan a proposal Are you making the colossal mistake of thinking in writing? If you think the best way to figure out what to write about in your proposal is to start writing, you may be making a colossal mistake. The mistake is that you’re skipping the part where you “figure it out.” You are thinking by writing about it. Responding to an RFP is not simply a matter of listing the requirements and responding to them one by one. There are many ingredients that go into your proposal, including what you are offering, how that fulfills the requirements, how it relates to the evaluation criteria, customer insight, differentiation, competitive positioning, win strategies, and much more. Before you can write your proposal, you have to identify all the ingredients and figure out how they impact what it is you need to say in your proposal. You need to start the proposal knowing not just what to say, but how to say it. Proposal Content Planning is a methodology for figuring all that out. It is a flexible approach that can be implemented in several different ways, with different management approaches that enable it to be tailored to your circumstances. The benefits of using a Proposal Content Plan: You reduce the number of changes after people start writing by providing a means to ensure that instructions are complete and correct. You greatly reduce writing time by reducing how long it takes to figure out what to write. You eliminate the endless cycle of rewrites that occurs when writers and reviewers can’t agree on what should be written. Instead of being something difficult and mysterious, you turn proposal writing into a process of elimination where authors convert each instruction into a narrative response. You avoid wasting effort on creating a planning document that is separate from the process of writing. In other words, because the files used to create a Content Plan become the draft proposal, they do not require extra effort or get ignored. You will get better results from inexperienced writers and more consistent results from all writers. How to achieve this goal You need an outline that meets the customer's expectations. If the RFP is complex, to create the outline you may need to create a compliance matrix first. Once you have the outline you have the structure you need to begin content planning. Proposal Content Planning will enable you to build your proposal around what it will take to win. Achieving this goal will require you to: Gather the input that is needed to identify what should go into your proposal. Identify everything that will go into your proposal in the form of instructions that provide guidance for proposal writers Define proposal quality by identifying the quality criteria that must be fulfilled by proposal writers. Validate that the plan is correct before you implement it. The actual plan can take several forms. Fulfilling the goal is more important than the procedures followed. So long as you create a plan that meets the quality criteria for what a Proposal Content Plan should accomplish, the form the plan takes matters little. This gives you options. Each of the approaches for implementing Proposal Content Planning described below can be thought of as a container. A proposal content plan is like a container that you put instructions for proposal writers into. The key to the methodology is making sure that you address everything you need to in your content plan. Recommended approaches for implementing Proposal Content Planning: The best approach for you will depend on your circumstances and the nature of your bids. Iterative content planning. This is the original, paper-based approach. It is thorough and comprehensive. While the other approaches require some preparation, iterative content planning can be implemented immediately. Template driven content planning. This approach collapses the iterative approach into a single step based on templates and checklists. It involves creating a set of content plan instructions and quality criteria that apply to all of your proposals, so that on any given proposal you just have to focus on the specifics of that pursuit. The amount that this accelerates things will depend on just how similar your customer, opportunity, and competitive environments are from bid to bid. Online content planning. The MustWin Performance Support Tool enables you to do Proposal Content Planning online instead of on paper. It converts the process from an iterative one into a dynamic one. It is less sequential, easier to collaborate, and much easier to validate. Managing Proposal Content Planning Implementation Proposal Content Planning can be implemented with different management models that vary according to your corporate culture, resources, and the complexity of your offering. Implementing Proposal Content Planning requires you to determine what content management model is the best fit for your organization. Can you accelerate proposal content planning? More proposal acceleration tips: How to plan your proposals faster What is the best way to accelerate proposals? How writing without thinking things through leads to disaster Balancing the time to plan with the time to write against a deadline is more of an art than a science. The more you can do to accelerate the planning, the more time there is for writing. But don't forget that you have to think things through. If you rush through content planning without thinking things through, you can do more harm than good. How do you know when you've achieved the goal? Here is a checklist you can use to assess whether your Proposal Content Plan was done properly. One of the most important quality reviews you will perform on this proposal is the one that validates that this content plan will produce the desired proposal. If you start writing without performing this review, you put the entire proposal at risk. Proposal Content Planning is a necessary part of Proposal Quality Validation.

It’s often over before it even starts. Except for the tragic part where people work long hours, struggle, argue, blame, and sometimes cry. Most proposals go bad right at the beginning, even if you don’t feel the pain until later. The reverse is also true. Proposals can be won before they start. They can be straightforward to produce, or they can be like pulling teeth. It comes down to whether you start with an information advantage, and if you can figure out what to do with it when you’ve got one. Will your proposal startup go smoothly? If you don’t start with an information advantage, you end up talking in circles around differentiation, without anything to base your decisions on. The worst is for it to be uneventful, because that means the issues haven’t surfaced and people are accepting without challenge. If you jump into writing a draft in these circumstances, you may find yourself underwhelmed with the proposal after burning 50-70% of the schedule. That’s when things get ugly and you have a bad proposal experience. And it is completely avoidable. You can make everyone’s life easier by sharing a little input before the proposal writing starts. To have a better proposal writing experience you need certain inputs before you start writing. These inputs enable you to figure out what you should write. If you have the right inputs, things go smoothly. Writing is straightforward. If you don’t have the right inputs and you start writing anyway, you’ll quickly find that the draft does not reflect what it will take to win. At this point, most companies go into an infinite number of rewriting loops trying to discover what it will take to win before they run out of time. They enter the proposal death spiral. The inputs you need to have a better proposal writing experience come from a combination of sources: Your customer’s preferences and evaluation criteria The opportunity and what the best solution is to win it The competitive environment and what you need to do to become the customer’s best alternative The problems the customer should anticipate, and why your approach to mitigating them is the best The right price to win. This can be either the lowest price or the best value, depending on what matters to the customer When you combine these, you get a formula for determining what it will take to win: What offering will be the customer’s best alternative and solution to potential problems, and how do you present it in a way that supports how they make decisions, including how they assess value? The best way to contribute to a proposal pre-RFP and have a better proposal writing experience isn’t to try to write the proposal in advance of the RFP. It’s simply to gather these inputs. If you can shed insight related to any of the bullets above, you can make everyone’s life easier by sharing that input before proposal writing starts. This will put you in the position of knowing what points to make when writing. It brings meaning to proposal writing and keeps the experience from being literally pointless. It will keep people from wasting time and effort by talking in circles and give them the points they should have made while writing the proposal. When you have this input, figuring out what to write about is straightforward and the hardest part of proposal writing becomes deciding what level of detail to go into. You will never have all the input you'd like to have. But whatever insight you do have and whatever information advantage it can give you forms the core of your win strategies and determines your probability of winning. The rest is just writing and pricing. You also need to make sure that everyone at your company agrees with the inputs and what it will take to win. Fighting about the points you should be making after the proposal has been written is a tragic waste. Especially when reviewing input at the bullet level before you start writing is fairly simple. It’s a much better experience when you gather the right input and think through how you’re going to articulate things. It sure beats endless rewrites trying to discover what the proposal should be until you run out of time without ever finding it. And oh, by the way, a PropLIBRARY Subscription gives you hundreds of proposal recipes and the questions you can use to guide people to collect just the right inputs so that you can not only have better proposal experiences, but increase your win rate as well.

Understanding what matters about proposal costs The first thing to understand is the economics of proposals. Usually, a small increase in win rate generates so much additional revenue that it is smarter to focus on proposal ROI than it is on proposal cost. Do the math. An increase from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate returns (on average) 50% more revenue. For each single percentage increase in win rate that’s 5% more revenue. It’s worth investing in improving your win rate, and it can be foolish to cut proposal costs if it means lowering your win rate. But revenue is not everything. If your margins are extremely low, and especially if your average bid value is also low, it’s possible that investing to achieve a high win rate can turn profit negative. High revenue with negative margins is not a good thing. If you have low margins, you may need to focus on volume instead of win rate. High-volume low-margin proposals are run completely differently from proposals that are individually optimized to win. The biggest cost for doing a proposal is the effort it takes The best way to lower proposal costs in a high-volume low-margin environment is to eliminate effort. And most effort on a proposal is spent thinking and talking about it. Relatively little effort is spent writing. Recycling proposal text without cutting all the chit chat doesn’t really save much effort. But the chit chat is how people normally think things through. The problem is that when they do this by talking about it, they usually talk in circles. If you want to lower the effort required to produce a proposal you need to accelerate how quickly people think through what should go into the proposal. Instead of recycling proposal text, the best way to do this is to ask leading questions about the things writers should consider. Your goal is to get them to consider everything quickly. This is much faster than writing and rewriting until you either stumble across what you want to say (rarely) or run out of time (usually). You can also save significant effort by eliminating ineffective proposal reviews. These are last minute subjective opinion fests that produce changes that should have been suggested at the beginning. Ineffective proposal reviews or proposals that fail their reviews can increase the cost of the proposal by 50% or more. The solution: Get the proposal right on the first draft. Getting the proposal right on the first draft See also: Improving win rates Getting the proposal right on the first draft means getting the proposal right before you start writing. This in turn means knowing what to write about and knowing that it fulfills your quality criteria. And this means having quality criteria for your proposal. It also means getting all of the proposal stakeholders on board. If the organization is serious about reducing proposal efforts and doing business in a low-margin field, then getting everyone on board about this should be a strategic priority. Having explicit quality criteria for your proposals is a game changer. It enables writers to know what they need to do to get the proposal right on the first draft. It provides a rallying point around which stakeholders can agree about what standards the proposal should meet, before it is even written. And the best part is that for low-margin proposals, quality criteria can be (mostly) standardized and turned into checklists. Instead of focusing on recycling text, focus on creating a goal-driven checklist validated proposal process that gets it right on the first draft. When it makes sense to reuse proposal text You should only reuse proposal text when you don’t know any better. This is not a flippant statement. If you don’t have the information you need to tailor your boilerplate, you might as well recycle the text. If you don’t know the customer or your competitors, and you don’t have any insight into what it will take to win the opportunity, you have two choices: not bid or bid based on assumptions. If your boilerplate reflects your strategic positioning for your company and your offering, then you might as well use that if you don’t have insight into the best positioning for this bid. If you are doing low-margin bids, the odds are high that you lack insight because your budget for relationship marketing is probably insufficient. If you are bidding in volume then your proposals are essentially brochures. Instead of building them from the ground up around what it will take to win a given bid, they are built around what it will take to win bids like this one to customers like this one. The amount of high-volume low-margin bids you win will be based on the percentage of time your assessment of bids like this one and customers like this one is better than someone else’s assessment. If they have the insight you lack, you will be bidding at a disadvantage. If you are recycling your proposal text because you don’t know any better, you will be bidding at a disadvantage. But if all of your competitors face the same high-volume low-margin issues that you do, it becomes a game of percentages where if your assessments are a little better you will do a little better. Putting it all together and turning it into a high-volume low-margin bid machine Instead of templates, start by writing recipe scripts that help people think faster. Your scripts should guide proposal writers to quickly figure out: Which circumstances apply What strategies they should consider in those circumstances What topics they should address in those circumstances What quality criteria they should fulfill so they will know when they’ve achieved what they should For circumstances where you don’t have any customer, opportunity, or competitive insight, you can create boilerplate that addresses: The parts of the proposal that do not need to change Your standard win strategies and positioning language Your goal should not be to have a proposal pre-written or to start from recycled proposal text. Your goal is to accelerate how quickly people can agree on what the proposal should be so you can get it right on the very first draft. Any fragments that you can recycle are just a bonus and only come after you’ve determined what is applicable to your circumstances and what your quality criteria are. You know things are working well when you really do get it right on the first draft and stop making last minute changes. For low-margin bids, this tells you that: You're not working inefficiently or putting more effort into your bids than necessary You are ready for high-volume bidding because proposal effort is now a finite, scalable quantity But your actual success will be determined by the assumptions you are making about your customers, opportunities, and the competitive environment.

Your high-volume proposal issues are not the same as everyone else’s issues. And a generic proposal template can do more harm than good. So what should you do? Start by understanding who you are and the nature of the problem. Is what you offer: A commodity that the customer can get from any supplier? Determined by the customer and you’re just supplying the labor? Customization on top of what would otherwise be a commodity? A proprietary product? A unique solution or service offering? Each one of these has different issues at high volume. Because the issues are different, the amount of reuse and subject matter expert (SME) participation varies. This in turn changes where your bottlenecks are and what you do about them. And what about your RFPs? Are they the same? And by that I do not mean, “Do they ask for the same thing?” I mean, “Do they ask for the same thing using the same words in the same sequence?” Similar RFPs are not the same. This impacts the level of effort required to respond. Finally, are the customers' concerns and evaluation criteria the same? Do all your customers have the same issues and preferences? The odds are they don’t, but for certain narrowly defined lines of business it can be true. This is important because it determines what you need to say about your offering in order to win. If it changes in every proposal, then what you need to write in every proposal changes. This can become an issue at high volume. Peaks and valleys or steady state? The strategies for coping with an occasional or seasonal surge are different from the strategies that work for a continuous high volume of proposals. To get through a surge, you might try to push through by working harder. Or you might bring in staff augmentation consultants. The challenge is to identify and understand your bottlenecks. Is the problem that production resources are stretched too thin, or is it that you don’t have enough SMEs to design the offering? Hiring production support is a lot easier than hiring someone who knows your customer, this particular area, the right technology, and your company’s capabilities. What can you do to streamline adding resources? Can you add production skills or subject matter expertise through temporary assignments or using consultants? To quickly add resources you need to streamline how you: Select the resources. This helps if you establish provider relationships ahead of time. Keep in mind that future consultant availability is always an issue. Budget and procure. Line up your approvals, have provider agreements already in place, and try to make it as simple as placing a pre-approved order. Onboard and train. Once you’ve got the help, then what? How do you get the badges, IT accounts, and how do they learn what your proposal procedures are? This stuff can take a surprising amount of non-productive time, so try to make it checklist simple and self-explanatory. You need the new resources to be able to follow a script because your current staff can’t hold their hands in a high-volume environment. Think about functional support requirements instead of roles See also: Dealing with adversity You may not be able to quickly assign someone new and have them efficiently produce an entire proposal in your environment. Don’t think in terms of the roles people normally play on your proposals like proposal managers, coordinators, writers. Try to think functionally: What information do you need provided, what form can you work with it in, and how can you specify it? How can you frame providing information as a task for someone new? What deliverables do you need from one person or step to another? Which of these can someone new create or contribute to? What formats do you need things in? When, where, and how should formatting be done? Can you either bring in someone to do the formatting, or exclude formatting from what someone needs to do and have someone who specializes in the formatting do it? Do you need finished writing, draft writing, inputs for others to write, or what? Can someone do the writing from simple inputs to lower the burden on your SMEs? Or can someone provide the inputs for one of your writers? If your surge support writers are merely good enough, can they do drafts while your rock stars do finished copy? Or if only your internal staff know all the necessary details, maybe they should do the drafts and you can bring in surge support to clean them up? What are the flows of information and deliverables, points of contact, and methods of coordination? Can you make it self-explanatory so that newcomers will know who to contact and how to obtain or exchange information and files? The less you have to tell the newcomers what to do and the more they can follow a script, the less of a burden they will be. If you can’t bring in someone to take over a role, you might be able to carve up the tasks so that people focus only on what they absolutely have to do, and someone else can help with the secondary parts. This is a good strategy for dealing with limited SME resources. You need information from them, but you don’t necessarily need it to be in a finished form. Job carving can be very effective, but it must be thought through in advance. You have to organize to take advantage of it. Trying to figure it out in the middle of a surge will make getting help take more effort than the help it delivers. Centralized vs Decentralized In some companies, you can centralize functions like formatting and editing. In some companies, things are so decentralized you can’t even get everyone to agree on processes or techniques that could enable things to be streamlined. Centralization works great for standardization and standardization is important for maximizing efficiency against a high volume of proposals. If your organization is decentralized, then instead of focusing on task assignment and resource allocation efficiency, focus on providing guidance to achieve efficiency. Guidance can take the form of just-in-time training, checklists, forms, templates, and more. Margin matters too If you have a sustained high volume at a sufficient profit margin, you should invest to maximize your win rate. Focus on calculating ROI, understanding how win rate impacts it, and tracking how what you do impacts your win rate. But if you have a sustained high volume of low-margin bids, you must focus on efficiency. But what does proposal efficiency mean? And when does reducing proposal costs in a way that also lowers your win rate produce a negative ROI? Instead of focusing on proposal reuse, it may be better to focus on creating proposal recipes that help people more quickly figure out what they should write and how they should write it. Don’t forget about quality assurance Most companies do an awful, inefficient, and inconsistently effective job of reviewing their proposals. This is largely a result of reviewing proposals without even defining what proposal quality is! If you standardize your proposal quality criteria, then proposal quality validation reviews can become as simple as checklists. In a high-volume environment, you might: Centralize proposal quality validation Outsource proposal quality validation Outsource everything except proposal quality validation Standardize quality validation to the point of making it checklist simple Your approach to quality is critical to not only achieving a high volume, but also achieving a high win rate. Work the gaps Similar is not the same. Templates and reuse should only be used for the parts of a proposal that are the same across bids. Streamlining proposal development depends on understanding the gaps you have between what you have and what you need: What is new? What is different? What is the same? What is different might require a little rewording, or it may require a lot of rewording. A simple change in emphasis, such as a differently worded evaluation criterion can have a huge impact on the amount of editing required. Even changing "just a few words" can take as long as it did to write the sentence in the first place. It helps to realize that most of the time spent on a proposal is not spent writing. It is spent talking about what to write. It is spent thinking through what it will take to win and how to achieve that in writing. This is where you have your best opportunity to streamline. If you can create recipes, decision trees, or scripts that help people quickly figure out what the strategies are and what points to make in the document, it can be a bigger accelerator than having a template. You should also look for gaps in capability, capacity, and availability. Do you have enough people, with the right knowledge and expertise, who are available when you need them and to the extent you need them? Or do you have gaps you need to fill? When creating proposal assignments, it may help to identify all the functional requirements or activities that need to be covered, and not just think about the proposal outline. A RACI (Responsibility Accountability Consulted and Informed) matrix can help you quickly identify gaps in coverage. What about tools? Software won’t help as much as you might think. Proposal automation is more myth than substance. What matters is how well thought through your procedures are. If you have solid procedures, then office applications can be very effective. Proposal automation gives you someone else's procedures and tends to focus on document assembly, which is not where you lose the most time. Proposal automation can hurt your win rate unless you are bidding commodities with no RFPs involved. Think about where you have gaps and where you spend your time. The best software for proposals is often collaboration software. Speeding up the ability to communicate, exchange, and manage files is often more helpful than trying to speed up document assembly. And workflow automation software tends to break in the messy real world of proposal development. Plus it takes a ton of time to learn and configure. Another fruitful but overlooked area is to use software that facilitates proposal reviews. Proposal reviews can be a huge time sink. Also, software that facilitates delivering just-in-time training or supports onboarding of resources can be helpful. Succeeding with a high volume of proposals: TL;DR Reduce decision time. Reduce the time it takes to figure out what to say, but do it without trying to recycle narratives. Be ready to add resources. Make everything self-explanatory so no time is lost not knowing what to do or having to be a teacher. Streamline how you discover your gaps and fill them. Divide and conquer your bottlenecks. Don't automate. Instead facilitate.

If you get this one step right, everything else will fall into place. And it's not what you think it is. It's not the preparing, the planning, the writing, or the reviewing of the draft proposal. It’s not that those things aren’t important. It’s just that there is one moment in time that pretty much seals your proposal's fate. Most companies don’t even do it. And those that do often fail to make the most of it. All other steps in your proposal management process depend on getting this one right See also: Successful process implementation It turns out that the most important step in preparation development is reviewing and validating your proposal content plan before you start writing. This is not the review of your draft proposal, but rather a review of the plan for what you are going to write and how you are going to present it. It turns out that reviewing this plan has more to do with your success than reviewing the draft. To pass the proposal content plan review, you need success at everything that should have come before: If you haven’t discovered what it will take to win, the proposal content plan will contain nothing but RFP compliance and self-descriptive bragging, and will be based almost exclusively on the evaluation criteria and your qualifications. The content plan will fail a review for lack of a strategy that demonstrates why you should win beyond your aspirational claims to greatness. Once you've discovered what it will take to win, a review of the content plan will ensure that you have a solid plan for winning and enable you to building your proposal around it, instead of hoping that it somehow just shows up during (unplanned) writing. If you do have an information advantage, it will show up in the content plan as instructions related to the customer, opportunity, or competitive environment. These instructions should be reviewed to determine whether they are the win strategies you need in order to win. If you have figured out what to offer separately from writing about it, it will show up as instructions related to the points you should make about your offering. It will describe an offering that matters and is differentiated from your competitors' offerings instead of simply giving the customer what they asked for (just like everyone else). Trying to figure out your offering by writing a narrative about it is bad engineering and leads to the Proposal Death Spiral. If you haven’t accounted for everything that should be addressed or go into your proposal before you start writing about it, guess what? It will be obvious during your proposal content plan review whether the attempt was made. And perhaps this is the key. When you review the written proposal, you have no idea how it got that way. But when you review the content plan, you can see whether people have done their homework and thought things through. They are far more likely to get it right on the first draft if everything they should write and how it should be presented has been accounted for. It is also far easier to correct at the content plan stage than it is to correct after a draft has been written. What success looks like Once you succeed at planning your proposal prior to writing it, proposal writing becomes a straightforward, finite problem. And you can verify that the writers fulfilled the instructions and the quality criteria. If you haven’t defined quality criteria, it’s a good sign that you either skipped content planning, you made it up as you went along, or you’re trying to get away with presenting an annotated outline as if it is a content plan. If you want people to start actually planning what they write, don't just talk it up. Make it the entire focus of your process. If you don't review the content plan to ensure it describes the proposal you want to create before you start writing, you are in for some nasty surprises. The review of the proposal content plan is more than the review of the draft. A solid proposal content plan can turn the review of the draft into simple follow-through and tweaking. When you approach the proposal management process this way, you don’t have to specify the procedures or be the task master forcing people to comply. You just set the standards for what a good proposal content plan will show and schedule the review. Let passing the content plan review be their motivation. When you put all the attention on the draft review instead of the content plan review, then no one focuses on planning and all they want to do is spit out the quickest possible unplanned draft that fills the pages. Focusing on the content plan review lets you become a teacher and a guide instead of a nag. If you can implement a full proposal management process with all the procedures needed for your company, congratulations. If you are struggling to get any process acceptance, you might have better luck focusing on just one simple thing. It just so happens that this one simple thing can help all the others to fall into place.

Judgment calls are almost always required when building a compliance matrix from an RFP. Either the RFP is not structurally consistent, or the language is subject to interpretation. Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out how the customer wants you to structure your proposal. I advise people to try to anticipate the customer's scoring forms, but sometimes the RFP makes that challenging. Sometimes reality gets in the way I just finished helping a customer respond to an RFP that contained one section with a list of 3 topic instructions, followed by a list of 5 more requirements, followed by a paragraph listing 3 more topics, followed by a list of 8 bullets. They were not meant to be addressed in sequence. They overlapped in subject matter. They did not map to each other. Some had multiple relations and some had none. So what headings and subheadings should this section have? Which of the lists specified the headings? Unfortunately, the answer was "several." It was impossible to figure out what the customer intended. Somehow a proposal manager has to allocate these to headings and requirements linked to the headings. It won’t do the writers any good if you map the whole thing to every subheading. How do you guide the writers regarding which they should address and where? Whether you build your compliance matrix in a spreadsheet or with a tool like we're building, you still have to face judgment calls. A little validation goes a long way One thing we do to help is we provide better options for validating your matrix. At most companies, the proposal manager creates the compliance matrix in isolation, judgment calls and all. In a small percentage they swap with another proposal manager to do a peer review that is often just a skim. This is both unbelievable and understandable, since it can take as long to properly review a compliance matrix as it did to create it in the first place. For one thing, simply having the RFP online makes it easy to look things up without page flipping. But we've also found some clever ways to accelerate the review of the compliance matrix. We don't want the proposal manager to be isolated. We want the entire team involved, if needed, so that the entire team possesses a deeper understanding of the RFP and the outline that results from it. We give the proposal manager the ability to document their judgment calls. Not only that, but we enable the reviewers to quickly double check them. We make building the compliance matrix collaborative, so that people can discuss the issues. And by bringing it online, this discussion occurs in real time. It doesn't have to wait for a scheduled meeting. It is what it is We can't make creating a compliance matrix easy. It's a hard problem. But we can enable you to more reliably achieve better results, that ultimately make you more competitive. And we can provide a lot of guidance to help you figure things out. I'm enjoying torture testing our platform on the worst RFPs I can find, because I keep finding unexpected benefits. We're creating a tool that enables you to do a better job of what you know you should be doing. We're creating a tool that will help you win. And we haven't even described for you how we use the cross-referencing engine to link pre-RFP pursuit with post-RFP content planning. Yes, our tool will spit out a compliance matrix. But it will also enable you to plan what should go into a winning proposal in ways that go beyond mere RFP compliance. I'll post more in the upcoming weeks.

When I want to sound like a process guru, I refer to proposal “quality criteria.” When I want users to go along with my recommendations, I call them “checklists.” Either way, you have to figure out what they should be. This list can help you make sure your proposal quality criteria actually deliver the quality you are seeking. See also: PQV quality criteria What it will take to win. This is the standard that defines proposal quality. You should never decide to bid a pursuit if you can’t define what it will take to win. Once you have done that, you should create quality criteria to assess whether your proposal fulfills it. Ideally it will be based on customer, opportunity, and competitive insight. And the RFP evaluation criteria. And your win strategies. And anything else that impacts whether you win or lose. But it has to be based on something or you have no direction for how to win your proposal and no means to measure whether you are successful in fulfilling that direction. What went wrong last time. Or what went right that you want to keep doing. Either way, lessons learned should factor into your quality criteria. What do you want to achieve, and how do you want to measure or assess performance to ensure it happens? You can use your proposal quality criteria to replicate success and avoid failures. Just make sure you are focusing on the right lessons learned. How do you want behavior to change? Creating proposals with other people is often like herding cats. But it's important to get good at it if you want to win proposals that are bigger than yourself. If you give people quality criteria and they use them to assess their own efforts, it can increase the effectiveness of the team, help keep them from wandering off on tangents, and keep everyone on the same page regarding what they should be trying to accomplish. So what behaviors need to change? How will people know if they are doing the right thing in the right way? Be very careful here. You might think that the behavior that needs to change is that people should start meeting their deadlines, when in reality the problem might be that they aren’t planning their content before they start writing. To successfully change behavior, you have to properly understand it. What defines success or completion of a deliverable or a step? If you want them do it right, then tell them what that looks like. Create the criteria that defines it. And make sure you not only give the criteria to the reviewers, but also to the writers. Your review process should be driven by your quality criteria, since a review process without quality criteria is like wandering aimlessly trying to stumble over quality. What do you want to double check? What do you want to trust people to get right, and what do you need to verify? Don’t think of proposal reviews as reading a draft. Think of them as double checking everything that’s an important part of winning. This can be decisions and actions, as well as drafts or deliverables. Make it checklist simple. Some of your criteria will apply to all proposals. Some will apply to this specific pursuit. Separate the two. Those that apply to all proposals can take the form of checklists. Those that apply to a specific pursuit can also become checklists, but a new one must be created for every pursuit. You can build that into your process so that it becomes checklist simple. Assessing your quality criteria If you simply have three criteria for each one of these, you’ll have almost 20 quality criteria. And you’ll just be getting started. For each item on your list, ask yourself “Does it matter?” Will a given criterion impact whether you win or lose? You could have quite a long list of criteria if you give space to ones that only have a remote indirect chance of impacting the award, in addition to the ones that make a material difference. How important is whether the proposal “is written like it has one voice” compared to “is it optimized to achieve the highest evaluation score?” Think of this as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Do you think you’ll have a more effective review with 100 quality criteria or with a dozen? The goal is not to identify every little thing that might improve the proposal and then check for it. The goal is to have an effective review that contributes to winning. Pick your criteria carefully.

We're adding a compliance matrix builder to our MustWin Performance Support Tool. Here are a couple of screenshots as a teaser. Hiding behind them is a bunch of capability. Even though the code is nearly complete, there's a lot that goes into a launch after that and we don't want to post everything until it's ready for you to use. What you see on the left is the RFP. What you see on the right is the proposal outline being built. Now, imagine linking the RFP to the proposal using drag and drop. Drag an RFP requirement to a proposal item. Then when you are in a proposal section, you see all the RFP requirements that are relevant to it. Along the way, imagine highlighting RFP requirements that haven't been linked to any proposal sections. That's what the gray items are in the screenshot. This helps you find potential non-compliance. When you click the "Show me" button you get several options that can help you make sense of and manage the RFP requirements. For example, you can sort the RFP requirements by whether they are instructions, evaluation criteria, or performance requirements. Other options including showing RFP requirements that have validation issues, discussions around the RFP requirements, and potential questions to submit about the RFP. The compliance matrix builder will be integrated into our MustWin Performance Support Tool so you can go seamlessly from the compliance matrix into proposal content planning. We'll post some more screenshots and tell you about some of the other features like the step-by-step guidance, support for validating the compliance matrix, issue tracking, RFP question gathering, and more, next week. It will be a free addition for our current subscribers, who will also be eligible to help us test it soon. Even though we've tested it on some wacky RFPs, customers are always finding new ways to make RFPs difficult to understand. When we launch we'll also be offering some free hand-holding for our Corporate Subscribers who want to try it, to make sure your proposals go smoothly. If you're not a subscriber and want to become one before we launch the new tool so you can get in on the fun, here is where you'll find more information on subscribing.

A sound proposal process not only increases efficiency and improves win rates, it is also one of the few things that can give people working on a proposal hope that the next proposal won't be so bad. Proposal specialists make everything about the process. And that's a good thing. But you have to get the process effectively implemented. And this is where proposal specialists struggle. It's also where non-proposal specialists struggle, because they too often recognize the need for a proposal process, but usually have even less insight on where to start implementing one or how to balance the inevitable trade-offs. See also: Making Proposals Simple Most people have the wrong instincts when it comes to putting a proposal process in place. This is true of proposal specialists and non-specialists alike. If you try to identify step one and work sequentially from there, you're already in trouble. If you try to identify all the steps between the start and the end, you're on the path to failure. Most often people hedge and speak in terms of "phases" to imply sequence while making up the details as they go. The proposal process is not sequential. A big part of it is reactionary, requiring you to adapt to what's in the next RFP, which is usually different in important ways from what was in the last RFP. The way the RFP reads can change the sequence of your process, the applicability of any step, or some or all of the details in your process. And yet, people often try to flowchart the proposal process. If you attempt to build a procedural proposal process that can be depicted by a flowchart, it will break in practice. It creates a process that can't actually be followed as written and requires someone to modify it on the fly. In reality, it degrades into people making it up as they go along, which, is typically what we see. Every company says it has a proposal process, when in reality they kind of have a way of doing things and sometimes parts of it are even written down and once in a while things play out the way they are supposed to. This creates a constant struggle as people try to reconcile when to ignore the process and when to follow it. It sets the precedent that the process is subject to interpretation. The clearest sign that you have too much proposal process or the wrong proposal process is when it is not achieving your goals. But you have to be honest about that. Clinging to your process because working without any process would be a disaster is not the same as having the best proposal process. Having a process does not mean you are doing everything you should to maximize your win rate. This is a big reason why we created the MustWin Process that is part of PropLIBRARY. We were tired of processes that couldn’t survive reality. So we created one that works in the real world, and isn’t based on procedures or flowcharts. What people should have instead of a flowchart is a set of goals. And each goal should have a scope definition and a set of criteria that define success for that goal. Take away the technical sounding jargon and the proposal process becomes a collection of goals with a description and checklist for each. Just to be helpful, you might create resources and job aids for each goal as well. This is more jargon for adding some forms and templates to make it easier for people to achieve their goals during the process. This flips the script. People do not serve the process. The process serves the goals that people have. Just keep in mind that it’s not the forms and templates that are the process. They are just tools to achieve goals. Also keep in mind that you are not creating a set of forms and templates that are required to be filled out in accordance with procedures. Instead, you are creating tools that help people achieve their goals. The process is defined by the goal and the success criteria checklist. The materials you have to help people achieve the goal are assets and not mandates. You have to resist the temptation to define the process as procedures and work products. That is assembly line thinking and actually gets in the way of the continuous problem solving that proposal development really is. The most important part is to have the right goals. The goals you choose will determine the behavior of the participants. Here's an example: Should the next goal be to start writing or to create a content plan that enables us to determine what the proposal should be? Is it to get something written so people can review it, or is it to create a set of criteria that can be used for quality validation and for writers to follow? How you write your goals will determine whether you get the desired results. Well-written goals are also more resilient than steps and procedures. Large proposals, small proposals, and even proposals for different markets all tend to have similar goals. RFPs tend to change the content, but not the goals. When you start explaining your proposal goals to a group of people, don't be surprised if they enthusiastically receive it and immediately start trying to create a flowchart for their goals and the activities needed to accomplish them. It's hard for them to overcome what they've been taught about processes. Their instincts push them towards policies and procedures instead of success criteria and assets to help achieve them. This doesn’t just apply to proposals. How many “Agile” software developers really follow a modified waterfall methodology and call it a "hybrid?" When implementing a goal-driven proposal process, too much detail is a problem. First, it will slow down your rollout. Second, it will break. Third, when people fall back on old habits for the proposal process, they create a bad proposal process. What you want is to be able to clearly articulate your goals and success criteria. You can actually start rolling out with just that. It’s simple and easy for people to understand and accept. When people know the goals and can measure whether they've accomplished them, they can figure out what they should do to accomplish the goals. And without waiting for the forms, templates, et al., your current proposals can benefit and your win rate can start improving. You can roll out your job aids over time as you create them. There are three things that I really like about this approach: Anyone can use it to begin implementing a proposal process. You don't have to be a proposal specialist, let alone a recognized proposal process geek like myself. There is no excuse for not having a working proposal process. You can't blame not having a flowcharting app. You can't blame not having enough time. You can't blame having an immature organization. You can have the start of a working process by the end of the day. Process acceptance does not require people to agree on a bunch of steps. All you need to do is get everyone to agree on a half-dozen or so goals. Then help them achieve the goals that they agreed to. With this one change, your process shifts from a burden you are assigning to others and becomes an asset that helps people. Once you have your goals and checklists, you're not done. You're only getting started. Eventually you will need to think through the flow of information and create job aids that gather information, assess it, and transform it into what is needed to accomplish each goal. But you can discover what that should be and how to create each form or template over time. You can evolve your process. A process that evolves is much better than a process that breaks.

Two days before the proposal is due, just as final production is about to begin, the proposal hero looks at the document and is aghast. “It’s all wrong!” he declares. Pandemonium ensues. Papers fly. And the re-writing begins. For the next 48 hours, nobody sleeps. They are fed pizza intravenously. With no time for further review, they hand things in to final production a few hours before it’s due. With less than a minute to go they click the button to submit the proposal. By some miracle, nothing goes wrong and the submission is made. Now the proposal hero leads the celebration of a job well done. Except that it wasn’t a job well done. It was a disaster. There was little or no quality assurance at the end. A submission was made, but nobody really knows what was in it. The proposal “hero” is really a villain in disguise. The only triumph that day was the proposal “hero’s” ego. But did the proposal “hero” fix the proposal? No. The proposal had been reviewed. If the reviewers did not do their job, the proposal “hero” did not fix the review process. But didn't the proposal hero make it "better?" What do you mean by “better?” How do you define proposal quality? If you’ve defined it, then that becomes the standard by which you measure change recommendations. If you haven’t defined it, that’s the real problem. Here are some better questions to ask… What do you mean by “better?” How do you define proposal quality? Why didn’t the proposal “hero” write the proposal that way to begin with? Oh, that’s right. The proposal "hero" was too “busy” to get involved with something as unimportant as a proposal. The proposal "hero" couldn’t be bothered with all that planning and reviewing. The proposal "hero" had plenty of time to cause a disaster at the end of the proposal. See also: Improving win rates Why wasn’t the proposal “hero” on the review team? If the proposal hero has such great insight and knowledge, why did he wait until after the review to make changes? There is a reason why one review is worse than none. There should be a series of reviews that validate proposal quality in steps. If someone’s opinion is vital, then it’s vital they participate along the way. Why didn’t the proposal “hero” engage earlier? It’s not like it was easier to wait and redo it. It’s not like skipping quality assurance leads to a more reliable result. It’s not like it cost less or took less time. Since when is the best way to do things to jump in without a plan, rely on one person’s judgment, rush things, skip quality assurance, and ship at the last minute? If your organization has done this more than once, the proposal process is not your problem. Look inward. And here is what a real proposal hero looks like… It’s really hard to avoid the temptation to just start writing, but the proposal hero starts by putting together a content plan for the proposal. It defines quality as well as what the proposal should focus on. The proposal hero holds a review and stresses how important it is to make sure the outline, plan, and quality criteria are correct before they start writing. The other proposal heroes pay attention and actively engage. They pick apart the plan. They disagree. They work it out. They rebuild the plan. Then the team of proposal hero writers go write it that way. Once. They hold another review for the draft. The proposal hero reviewers know they’ve already addressed the strategy issues, and instead focus on presentation and articulation. They make some wording changes. The team of proposal hero writers makes the changes and hands the document in for final production. The proposal hero production team takes their time to make sure everything is perfect. Then they submit it. They wait for the win, and then they celebrate. I’ll take a proposal professional over a proposal “hero” any day.

Most proposals do not start with the information people need to write a winning proposal. It can be… frustrating. A lot of effort goes into things that somehow don't translate into a better proposal. It’s really easy for companies to fall into the habit of submitting bids and hoping instead of doing what it will take to win. They show a lot of activity and say they are preparing for the RFP. But they somehow arrive at RFP release unprepared. They say they do a lot of stuff. But it's stuff that doesn’t matter. Bring me things that impact our ability to write a winning proposal and I care. A lot. You had a meeting with the customer. I don't care. I care about what you discovered. Your customer loves you. I don’t care. I care about whether they’ll give you a top past performance score. You know what the customer wants. I don’t care. I care about whether the others influencing the evaluation agree. There's an RFP coming out. I don't care. I care about what we know about it that others don't. The RFP just came out. I don’t care. I care about whether we can get the highest score and how we’ll go about doing it. We have an opportunity to submit a proposal. I don't care. I care about what we know about what the customer wants to see in the proposal. You just got back from a trade show and have all these customer email addresses. I don't care. I care about what you learned about them. You've got the qualifications to bid. I don't care. So does everyone else who makes the competitive range. I care about what differentiates your bid. You’ve got “the right” experience. I don’t care. I care about how that translates into a better offering and a higher score. You have a story to tell. I don't care. I care about the story the customer wants to hear. Now, let’s flip some of those around so we can be more positive. You learned about the customer's preferences. I care. A lot. I’m ready to write a proposal that reflects those preferences. You discovered something others don’t know about the customer or opportunity. I care. A lot. I’m ready to turn it into a better proposal.r You discovered what the customer needs to reach a decision. I care. A lot. I’m ready to build a proposal around it. You have experience that gives you enough insight to create a better offering. I care. A lot. I’m ready to write about a differentiated approach that’s credible. You know what the customer needs to see in the proposal. I care. A lot. I’m ready to write a proposal that matters, has meaning, and the customer cares about. I care about the things that help me write a winning proposal. Bring me things that impact our ability to write a winning proposal and I care. A lot. What you care about has a major impact on what you put into your proposal. If you need to win proposals to close sales, your organization needs to learn to care about the right things. Quit giving credit for effort. Quit giving credit for “meeting with the customer” and start giving credit for whether they came back with an information advantage. Learn to care about the things you need to win. A good place to start is by identifying what it will take to win. If your organization can’t uniformly articulate what it will take to win, it’s not going to happen consistently. Build an organization that doesn’t just check boxes and claim it's pursuing the win. Build an organization that knows what to care about.

The customer needs to know why they should select your proposal to win above all their other alternatives. You should help them figure that out. But be careful — if the reasons you provide are merely good and don’t do a great job of explaining why you should win, you might do more harm than good. The trick is to realize that what you want to write is not an explanation. It is a list of benefits that adds up to being the best alternative. The customer will select the list that they get the most value out of. But there’s a problem. They can’t just pick the list they like the most. They have to reach a decision. They have to get approvals. And if the evaluation is a formal one, they have to decide according to the evaluation criteria. Just make sure that the customer finds your reasons compelling. Being merely good or even beneficial is a recipe for losing. When this is the case, you will get the best results by showing them why you best align with the evaluation criteria and deserve the top score. But again, it’s not an explanation. You don’t want to patronize the customer by telling them how to do their scoring. But you do want to show that you deliver the most benefits in a way that maps to the evaluation criteria. This can be as simple as describing the benefits using the terms of the evaluation criteria. Or it can impact which benefits you choose to focus on. It may even impact what you choose to offer. When the top score wins, the only path to winning involves getting the top score. Everything about what you offer and how you present it should contribute to getting the highest score. See also: Winning One way to show your alignment with the evaluation criteria is to present them as subheadings or in a table. The idea is to break out each evaluation area or factor and show why you are their best alternative. Just make sure that instead of a list of positive sounding attributes, you give them a list of things that make you their best alternative. You want the customer to not only mechanically score your proposal, but to actually want what you are offering. The best way to do this is to focus on them and what they will get as a result of what you are offering. The customer is not likely to score your proposal from a proposal-wide summary list. But it can give them an overall context, show that you are responsive, and accelerate their ability to reach a conclusion in your favor. It can also help them justify their scoring and selection to The Powers That Be if they do select you. When you start trying to articulate why the customer should select you, you will very quickly discover whether you’ve done your homework or not. To show that your offering delivers something that matters to the customer, you have to first know what matters to the customer. If you find yourself trying to cleverly arrange the words of the evaluation criteria around a statement that basically says you’re going to give the customer what they asked for in the RFP, you’re probably doing that because you didn’t do your homework and have nothing better to say. If you find that your reasons why the customer should select you don’t offer any substantive differentiators, you definitely haven’t done your homework. And if your list contains things that are good and hopefully better than your competitors, instead of a list of things that are clearly the best, then your win strategies amount to hoping your competitors aren’t that good. It can be compelling to show your list of reasons why the customer should select you as an actual list. But you don’t have to. You can embed the reasons in the narrative. Or make them headings that get substantiated. If your reasons are strong and add up to clear superiority, they will make a great list. But if they are merely good sounding, then by presenting them as a list you might be showing that your offering is merely good and vulnerable to a competitor who tried harder and achieved better.

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This article focuses on winning U.S. Federal Government contracts. Many states and local governments also follow a process that is similar. Most government contractors aren’t that good at winning contracts. Their contract win rates are almost all lower than 50% and some are down near 20%. At 20% you are losing 4 contracts for every one that wins. If your approach to winning government is to bid in volume to make up for losses, you may get by but you won't be successful. If you are new to government contracting it’s really easy to develop bad habits. It’s also easy to assume that experience with one government contract or customer is applicable to all of them. Grand pronouncements that you hear about “what you need to do” are often right in one context and wrong in yours. Whether you are an existing contractor with a win rate below 50% or new to Federal government contracting, here are nine areas where we commonly see companies making mistakes that keep them from winning contracts. If you want to win government contracts like you’re trying to get good at it, they are a great place to focus your reengineering efforts. Are you taking winning seriously, or are you just taking a shot at it? See also: Pricing Everything revolves around the customer’s acquisition process. Understanding government procurement is important to positioning your company to be able to win Federal contracts. Are you even eligible to win? Of course, you think you’re capable, but that’s different. Do you meet all of the registration, certification, and qualification requirements? And even if you’re an experienced contractor, understanding the Federal Government’s acquisition process can help you influence what is being procured and even how. For example, what contract vehicle should be used? Should it be procured under the GSA Schedule, through an ID/IQ (Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract), or through an RFP of its own? Can they buy directly from you without an RFP? Or can they use a streamlined acquisition strategy? If you don’t understand how the customer uses their procurement terminology, you’re not taking winning seriously. Every pursuit should put some attention into learning how that customer approaches the acquisition process. Understanding the customer means understanding how they organize procurement. The staff at Government agencies play different roles in a procurement. They go by terms like Contracting Officer, Evaluators, Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative, Program Staff, Executives, and more. But this is about more than titles or terminology. This is about expectations, awareness, and priorities. Each role approaches procurement differently. When you seek information or influence, they all respond differently. What matters is different to each. You shouldn’t approach the customer’s staff as if they are all the same. Learn their different needs and expectations. Your mission is growth. Forget what it says about the company mission on that plaque in the lobby. Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. The opposite is also true. If the organization’s mission is really growth, this should change how everyone looks at their role in the organization. You need them to do this to get good at winning contracts because everyone is in business development, whether they realize it or not. And that turns out to be a good thing. Compliance is just the start. You must create proposals for submission to the Government by following the RFP instructions. Otherwise your proposal may get thrown out without even being read. Complying with the RFP means complying with a bunch of regulatory requirements that are incorporated by reference. So everything from your accounting system to human resource policies may need to be in compliance. You need to understand what requirements are applicable to you before you submit your first bid. Then if you win, you have another set of requirements that you must comply with during the performance of the project. To be a Federal government contractor is to obsess about compliance even more than the customer does. But compliance alone is not enough to win. Every bidder who makes the competitive range will be compliant. The bidders that make the competitive range are your real competition. They are who you must beat, and to do it you must offer a value that exceeds mere RFP compliance. All established Government contractors are capable of being compliant. But a surprisingly low percentage are good at exceeding compliance. They tend to get stuck at doing only what they’re told because they know they’re not supposed to do things that are not compliant. Exceeding compliance and offering the best value is the only path you have to competing on something other than price. Build your pursuit process around what it will take to win and not steps. If you're going to get good at winning Federal contracts, you’ll need to develop your pursuit process. But the process most companies have is based on doing tasks they think need to be done instead of discovering what it will take to win and figuring out the tasks that will be required to build a proposal around it. Define quality and your review process around it. The color team model for proposal reviews is like training wheels on a bicycle. You can get started that way, but it’s not going to deliver the best quality. And if you keep them on, if you don’t throw off the color team model, it will hold you back and make you less competitive. You should not define proposal quality based on the opinions of people sitting around a table. Once you’ve defined it, your proposal reviews should not consist of people reading the document to render more opinions. You should validate that the proposal reflects your quality criteria. Milestone or color team reviews do not deliver quality assurance. If you want a high win rate for government contracts you need a proposal review process that is based on real quality assurance. You must unravel the paradoxes surrounding past performance. How do you get a Federal contract without past performance? A neutral rating is the kiss of death. Neutral can’t win against even barely good. You have to think outside the box, try many things, and have patience. It can take years to break in. You don’t just show up and become a government contractor. And be careful about being overly aggressive on price in order to break in. When you finally get your contract, you'd better perform to exceed the customer’s expectations, because you’ll need a top past performance score to win more contracts. One of the quickest paths to failure for a Government contractor is a bad past performance score. It can be better to lose a Federal contract than to win it at a price you can’t support with excellent performance. Understand ROI and overhead math so you can manage your proposals based on ROI instead of treating them like an expense. The amount of your overhead will directly impact your competitiveness, since it adds to your price. But is it better to reduce overhead or increase revenue? The cost of the proposal function is counted as overhead, but your win rate also the single biggest determinant in your growth. Learn to invest in your win rate. But realize that it’s a mathematical problem and the only way to make informed decisions is to understand the math. When you treat your win rate as an investment, you’ll find that you’ll need to track the performance of everything that impacts your win rate and not just make it up as you go along. That’s what most people do and you want to beat them. The nature of your offering determines your path. Do you sell a commodity? Services can be a commodity. Does the customer care about you or the specifications of what you are providing? How much trust is required to buy what you are selling? How well does the customer understand what you are selling? The closer something is to a commodity, the more price matters. The more complex or risky something is, the more trust matters. The bigger the impact of the procurement on the customer, the more value matters. Rules of thumb about trust and price aren’t. It depends on the nature of what you sell. You need to understand that and the customer’s attitude towards it in order to put yourself on the right strategic path.

PropLIBRARY has started hosting bi-monthly Jam Sessions for our Corporate Subscribers. These virtual meetings are part training, part user support, part problem solving, and part continuous win rate improvement. We'll show you how to use PropLIBRARY features, talk about solving the challenges you're facing, do a little training on a topic you need addressed in that moment, or help you with your pursuit strategies. It's all about you and your needs. Each session is tailored for your company and will address the topics that you are struggling with to help maximize your PropLIBRARY ROI. You can invite up to 10 participants in addition to yourself. We can speak candidly and privately if needed. One month it can be with your executives. The next session could be with your proposal contributors. And the session after that it could be a private session with a proposal manager. Use the sessions how they'll do the most good. Every other month we can get together at a mutually convenient time in an online meeting for an hour or two, and make some real continuous improvement. If you are not a PropLIBRARY Corporate Subscriber, you can still ask us a question. But the Jam Sessions are a special perk for our Corporate Subscribers. Click here to schedule a PropLIBRARY Jam Session or ask us a question