Carl Dickson

All you need to do to produce a winning proposal is give the customer the information they need to decide in your favor. It really is that simple. And that totally hides how difficult it really is. While what you need to do is simple to understand, it is hard to achieve. Here are six top problems that get in the way of keeping proposals simple: You have to know what information the customer needs. It’s not about you or your offering. It’s all about them. It's their decision. What do they need to make it in your favor? You have to have the information the customer needs. If you know what you need to write about, but you don’t have the knowledge to write it, it’s a problem. When you don't have the subject matter and other knowledge you need, it's usually because you need someone else to provide it. See problem #5. You need to know how the customer will make their decision. You can’t give them the information they need to decide if you don’t know how they’ll reach their decision. If you’re lucky, they’ll tell you and it will be right there in the RFP. All you have to do is understand their process. Invest yourself in that. If they haven't told you, it's worth exploring and discovering what's important to them, what procedures they follow, what their preferences are, and who is involved. You have to say it from the customer’s perspective. You don't have to be able to write in any particular style to win a proposal. But it does help to be able to write from the customer's perspective instead of your own. And for some people this is a big challenge. Doing proposals bigger than yourself. It’s so much easier if you can do the whole proposal on your own. But you can’t. High-value pursuits tend to require more information than any one person possesses. What makes high-value proposals difficult isn't the size or the value. It's all those other people involved. Working on a document against a deadline with other people is hard. It shouldn't be, but it is. You have to recognize that and do something about it. It helps to have something the customer actually wants. If the customer thinks you aren't qualified, then you don't have what they want. While it’s good to believe in yourself and have confidence, selling your greatness despite not meeting the requirements is a contradiction. The customer sees it very differently than you do and their opinion matters more than yours. If you are selling what you’ve got and hoping to make the customer want it, you face an uphill battle. Now play them each back with a twist and you’ll see what you need to do to make your proposals as easy as they should be: Proposal writing is easy. Figuring out the customer is hard. Not knowing what information the customer needs. Proposal writing is easy. Figuring out the customer is hard and requires focus. It should be your highest priority during the pre-RFP phase. Not knowing the information that the customer needs is a major indicator that you shouldn’t bid. Put the majority of your effort into this and everything else will just fall into place. Not having the information you need to write a great proposal. If no one has it or knows where to get it, then this becomes an indicator that you shouldn’t bid. If you can get the information you need, then it’s just an execution issue. Once you’ve got it, the writing becomes easy. Not knowing how the customer will make their decision. When you don’t know how the customer makes their decisions, you only have two options: be everything to everybody or take a risk of being wrong. I’m comfortable taking risks, but most companies aren’t and make the mistake of trying to be everything to everybody. If you're watering down your positioning because you’re not sure what position to take, it’s another indicator that you shouldn’t be bidding. When you know how the customer will make their decision, it makes positioning and incorporating bid strategies in proposal writing easy. Not being able to write from the customer’s perspective. This is a skill that needs to be learned. Sadly, most proposal writing courses focus on process instead of how to assemble words the way the customer needs to see them. When you have the information you need, proposal writing becomes a simple matter of presenting it from the customer’s perspective. Other people. The primary reason companies implement a proposal process is to set expectations so that people can work together. But it is still more of a people problem than a process problem. It turns into a culture problem and an organizational development problem. Working with other people on a high-stakes document against a deadline is hard. If you resolve every other issue except the problem of working with other people, your proposals will still be hard. A case could be made that you have to solve this one first, before you can solve any of the other issues. When you solve how to write a proposal with other people involved, you may win the Nobel Peace Prize for being the first. But the closer you come to a solution, the easier your proposals will get. Having to sell something that’s not what the customer wants. Doing this forces you to write about what you think the customer should want, and that is not always the same as what they do want. Ignoring what the customer wants and presenting what you’ve got is a low-probability win strategy. That’s a nice way of saying it’s an indicator that maybe you shouldn’t bid at all. It’s much better to understand what the customer wants and then offer that to them. The next best strategy is to understand what the customer wants, show how what you’ve got relates to it, and then position any gaps as trade-offs that work in their favor. When what you are offering matches up perfectly with what the customer wants and how they’ll make their decision, proposal writing becomes a simple matter of telling them that and proving it. Note that I didn't include not having enough people to write the proposal. That's because it's probably not true. The reason you need more people is often that your company takes too long to make decisions, changes its mind after proposal writing starts, plays passive/aggressive games when people don't cooperate, and has to write in circles around the information you should have but don't. Fix these and you'll greatly reduce the number of hours it takes to produce your proposals. When you are in proposal crisis, remember that the problem is simple. All you need to do to produce a winning proposal is to give the customer the information they need to reach a decision in your favor. Being simple to describe does not make it easy to do. But it does help you gain some perspective on the problems. They are not inherent to proposals or insurmountable. All you have to do is figure out the customer and get people to cooperate and your proposals really will become easy. A little progress in these two areas will make a big difference. When you run into proposal drama, try thinking about which one of these is behind it. Then work on the real issue and you might be surprised at the progress you can make. How to use the MustWin Performance Support Tool to solve these problems Not knowing what information the customer needs. With the MustWin Performance Support Tool (MWPST) you still have to discover what information the customer needs to reach their decision, but the MWPST makes it easy to turn what you learn into instructions for writers to follow. And it gives you an easy means to validate that they did, helping to ensure that you end up with proposals that provide the information the customer needs. Not having the information you need for the proposal. The MWPST makes it easier for participants to contribute small pieces of information. Subject matter experts can answer questions or provide input without having to take on complete writing assignments. This makes it much easier to get input from many people without it slowing down the process. It helps ensure that when proposal writing starts, the information needed is there. Not knowing how the customer will make their decision. When you do know, you need to use that knowledge to drive the writing. The MWPST gives you the means to do that. When you don’t know, or there are multiple possibilities, the MWPST gives you the means to build your writing around the positioning and strategies you develop. You can build your proposal around intentional positioning based on what you think the hypothetical decision makers need, instead of just leaving it up to the writers to come up with something clever. This makes the writing much easier, by not expecting them to figure out something “clever” when they don’t have the information they need to do that. Not being able to write from the customer’s perspective. The MWPST enables you to remind people to write from the customer’s perspective while simultaneously prompting reviewers to check and make sure the draft was written that way. You can also include examples and explanations to help proposal contributors write from the customer’s perspective. And you can include links to online training for those who need it. Other people. The most important thing you can do to make it easier for people to work together on a document is to manage expectations. The MWPST gives you some new tools for doing that. If all you do is hand people an RFP and ask them to write something, you literally will get what you deserve. With the MWPST you can specify not only what should be written, but how it should be written. And you can include the quality criteria that will be used to assess whether it was written well. Not only that, but it enables people to discuss the instructions, seek clarifications, gather information, consider options, and more before setting it down in writing. Having to sell something that’s not what the customer wants. While the MWPST won’t design your offering for you, it will enable you to bridge the gap from what you are offering to what you need to say about it in the proposal.

In the same way that the MustWin Performance Support Tool (MWPST) helps you plan, collaborate, validate, inspire, and accelerate the Proposal Content Plan, it can also be used to help implement a goal-driven process by: The MustWin Performance Support Tool shifts the focus from proposal data management and assembly, to creating proposals with meaning. Instructing proposal contributors regarding what is required to achieve each goal Facilitating their ability to ask questions and discuss options Enabling proposal contributors to self assess whether they have done what they needed to for achieving the goal Enabling reviewers to validate that what was done achieves the goal Inspiring proposal contributors with what to do, consider, or write to achieve their goal Accelerating their ability to figure out what to do to achieve the goal and then proceed This makes it easy provide guidance for how people should go about achieving their goals. This, in turn, helps your process become an asset that helps people achieve their goals instead of a burdensome mandate. When you apply this to each of the six goals we recommend, you can use the MWPST to: Discover what it will take to win. Instruct people regarding what information to gather. Discuss how to get it. Implement Readiness Reviews. Design the offering based on what it will take to win. Instruct SMEs regarding the anticipated scope and customer requirements. Discuss platforms and approaches. Self-assess whether the offering design will meet the needs of the proposal. Assessment by reviewers of the offering design's readiness for use in the Proposal Content Plan. Prepare a plan for the proposal content that defines quality and integrates everything related to what it will take to win. This is where the MWPST excels. But you still need input from the first two goals. So guiding people to bring what you need helps you excel. Write to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria in the Proposal Content Plan. Instead of a blank page, the MWPST puts the plan next to Microsoft Word as people write, enabling self-assessment, progress tracking, and discussion. Validate that the draft reflects the quality criteria. The MWPST is the only tool I know of that enables proposal writers and quality reviewers to work from the same quality criteria and make it checklist simple. Produce a final copy without any defects for an on-time submission. By the time you get here, the planning is complete and you are doing final production in Microsoft Word or some other word processing or publishing package. But you can use the MWPST to provide instructions and specifications, and to perform the final quality control checks before submission. The trick to implementing a proposal process that optimizes the flow of information is to put information in a form that best suits the next step in the process, instead of just storing it. Documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and the like) turn out to be poor formats for acting as an information repository. Documents require putting a lot of effort into things that get orphaned. This is why we prefer articulating things as instructions and quality criteria. Instead of simply pointing proposal writers at a bunch of files with data buried in them so they can spend their time finding and figuring out what to do with them instead of writing, the MustWin Performance Support Tool makes it easy to just tell them. It puts everything in a form that is useful to proposal writers. It shifts the focus from proposal data management and assembly to creating proposals with meaning.

Most proposal processes, whether they realize it or not, are about the flow of information. You could create a proposal process just by looking at how information needs to be discovered, transformed, and handed off from one person or step to the next. It works even better if you start at the end, with a winning proposal, and work backwards to define the flow of information needed to arrive at it. But it can get pretty complicated, especially when you take the enormous amount of flexibility required into account. Most proposal processes break from the first curveball the customer throws at you. A goal-driven proposal process helps everyone agree on what needs to be done One of the ways that a goal-driven process is better is that it can make the flow of information obvious. In order to achieve each goal, there will be some inputs required, some research to do, some things to figure out, and then some way to document things that will help people achieve the goal that comes after. If you achieve the goal, you’ve done these things. If you are struggling with them, you'll be more open to getting help accomplishing them quickly and efficiently. Instead of charting a data-flow diagram of information throughout the process, all you need is to figure out what the deliverables are, and what you need as input. It’s also a good idea to provide a set of quality criteria that people can use to determine whether their deliverables are good enough. That’s a fancy term for a checklist. Take the input, produce the deliverable, and assess what you did with the checklist. Succeed at each goal and this simplistic sounding approach can win the proposal for you. See also: Successful process implementation You should keep the number of goals small. You want them to be memorable. You want people to know their goals without having to look them up. Here are some of the issues we are addressing with a set of goals that we are building the entire MustWin Process around: How do we get the information we need to win the proposal from the pre-RFP pursuit? How do we get an offer design early enough to factor it into proposal planning and keep people from engineering by writing about it? How do we get people to actually plan before they write? How do we get people to write the proposal correctly on the first draft? How do we achieve consistently effective reviews that actually result in a quality proposal? How do we complete the proposal without it being a train-wreck? It turns out these are all solvable problems. But when you rely on a process that is either poorly conceived or too complicated to survive implementation, they will seem impossible to solve. So turn each of them into a goal. If you articulate your goals well, when people do the things necessary to achieve the goals, the problems will not even arise. This is the best way to achieve quality. Instead of fixing your problems, prevent them from even occurring. Those of you are who inclined to build your own solutions can use this as a roadmap for achieving a goal-driven process. Those who want a solution now, might consider becoming a PropLIBRARY Subscriber and using the solution we’ve already built. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, we have defined and documented the six goals we recommend for producing a proposal based on what it will take to win. We've also mapped these goals to the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, and turned it into a framework you can download to turn the process into something that will help people achieve the goals.

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Unless your company sells a commodity, there can be great variations in the proposal process for every pursuit. It can be better to think of your proposal process as a series of goals than as a series of steps. It is not a procedure to be followed, it is a series of things to be achieved, with flexibility regarding how they are accomplished. Achieving the goals matters far more than the procedures used. Here are the six goals we use to drive everything we do, with links to the relevant portions of the MustWin Process that help people achieve them. 1. Discover what it will take to win You can't build a proposal around what it will take to win if you do not know what that is. Discovering what it will take to win informs what you should offer and what quality criteria you should use to guide and assess your proposal. Within the MustWin Process, we use Readiness Reviews to reliably ensure all bids are pursued with an information advantage. Your understanding of what it will take to win is necessary to achieve the next two goals. 2. Design the offering based on what it will take to win Engineering by writing about it is a mistake. Before it becomes tangled up with writing, you should figure out at a high level what to offer in your proposal and do it with enough detail that you will not change your mind about what you are offering later. This means, for example, being confident that you can price it competitively, but not necessarily knowing all of your costs in detail. Your high-level offering design will become an input that is vitally needed for the next goal to succeed. 3. Prepare a plan for the proposal content that defines quality and integrates everything related to what it will take to win There are too many ingredients that go into great proposal writing for you to be able to write a winning proposal just with what you have in your head when you sit down at the keyboard. This is exponentially true for proposals with multiple subject matter experts and writers involved. Proposal writing should start by figuring out what should go into the proposal in the form of a Proposal Content Plan that does double duty as a definition for proposal quality and a tool proposal reviewers can use to validate the quality of the proposal. Proposal success depends on achieving this goal. 4. Write to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria in the Proposal Content Plan Proposal writing is not a creative act without structure. It is not about discovering the magic words that will hypnotize the customer into accepting your proposal. Proposal writing is about fulfilling what it will take to win. If you discovered it in the first goal, prepared an offering based on it in the second goal, and used it to plan the writing of every section in the third goal, then proposal writing becomes about fulfilling your Proposal Content Plan and not just conceptualizing the proposal. Proposal writing becomes a process of elimination by incorporating all of the instructions and ingredients identified in your Proposal Content Plan and writing to fulfill your quality criteria. Instead of thinking about it as purely creative, try thinking about proposal writing as being like cooking. 5. Validate that the draft reflects the quality criteria Proposal reviews should be more than just a meeting where wise people share their opinions. Proposal quality should be validated for proposal reviews to be consistently effective. All four prior goals must be successful for proposal quality validation to be achieved. 6. Produce a final copy without any defects for an on-time submission Completing the proposal is always more difficult than it appears like it should be. This is because it comes at the end, and is impacted by the cumulative effect of schedule delays and issues that arise. This can turn the simple acts of not introducing any defects in the final formatting, production, and assembly and not running out of time into monumental challenges.

When you sign into PropLIBRARY, you see your Dashboard and it replaces the home page. If you surf away, then simply going to the home page by clicking on our logo will bring you back to the Dashboard. Here's what's there and some of the ways to use it. See your statistics and your Score! At the top, just under your name are some statistics about your utilization. It shows the number of times you've visited, how many items you've viewed, and course activity. It also shows your Score! Everything you do on PropLIBRARY earns you points. Your Score! gives a quick, quantified way of showing how much professional development you've participated in here. Try clicking on your Score! That will show your transcript, including everything you did that contributed to your Score! It also shows your percentile rank, which gives you an idea how your Score! compares to that of other PropLIBRARY users. From your transcript, you can also decide whether to make your transcript visible to other users. This enables people, such as a manager or potential employer, to look up your Score! This turns your PropLIBRARY Score! into an objective, third-party, verifiable assessment of your professional development. Keep track of the courses you are taking and your favorite content The top of the center column is where we give you a list of the online courses that you've started but haven't yet completed. If you start a course and then have to take care of other business before you've completed it, you can easily find your way back from here. When you find a page in PropLIBRARY that you want to be able to refer back to, subscribers can click on the bookmark symbol next to the item's title, and it will show up on your Dashboard. Easily find subscription and customer information links Your Dashboard takes the mystery out of managing your subscription and other details. You can see your expiration at any time in the upper right corner. You can also renew at any time. Below that is where you can go to look up or print out invoices, download files you've purchased, update your email address, change your password, review and change your settings, and more. View other tabs with specialized features There are actually several Dashboards divided into tabs. You only see the ones you have access to. Corporate Subscribers can assign people to manage their accounts. They will see the tabs for Corporate User Administration and Training Administration. Corporate User Administration Tab This is where you control who has access under your corporate subscription. But it also gives you insight into how your staff are using their subscription. You can sort your user list by any of the columns, to see who are the most recent visitors, who visits the most frequently, or who views the most items. You can also reverse sort to see who hasn't visited or who has viewed the least number of items. You can also easily add new users, simply by clicking the button and entering their email address and password. For your existing users, you can change their Display Name (email address) and password. You can also delete users who should no longer have access. Finally, you can promote people to become additional Corporate Administrators so they will also be able to see this tab and make similar changes. We recommend that you have at least two Corporate Administrators to help ensure that someone is always available to make any changes required. Training Administration Tab The Training Administration tab enables you to see who has taken which courses. It also shows the total amount of training received by all of your staff. Then you can see who has taken each course and see each user's transcript. If you click on the "View User Details" button, you can see a list of your users and how many courses each has started, completed, and what their PropLIBRARY Score! is. Use the Dashboards to help continuously improve your win rate For Corporate Subscribers, the Dashboard gives you the information you need to change your organization. It turns PropLIBRARY from a simple online training site into a tool for organizational improvement. You can monitor, guide, and assist your users to develop the skills needed to increase your organization's win rate.

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The MustWin Performance Support Tool enables you to quickly define your quality criteria and put them in front of your proposal writers before they start writing. This produces much better outcomes than waiting for a draft and then figuring out whether you like it or not, all while skipping that part about defining your quality criteria. Entering quality criteria You have two options for adding quality criteria to your proposal plan. The first is to type them in. When you click on the “Add” button, you’ll get a popup like this one. Select quality criteria and enter the instruction. This enables you to define what a “great” proposal is. All those attributes you think a great proposal should have can be typed as instructions so that proposal writers know not only what they are supposed to write about, but how they are supposed to write it and what will be considered acceptable. You can accelerate entering your quality criteria by using the ones we’ve already entered. When you click on the magnifying glass icon, you can view our Proposal Recipes and select “Quality Criteria.” Pick any that are relevant. You can customize them if you want to get them just right for your needs. But basically, it’s click-click-click and you’ve got quality criteria. Thinking things through The MustWin Performance Support Tool helps you think through what your proposal should contain. This includes all of the key topics that we divide the screen into. You can include questions in all the different types shown in the image above. How you guide your proposal writers determines what you’ll get back from them. Use the MustWin Performance Support Tool to put the right guidance in front of your proposal writers. Getting guidance to your proposal writers and having a quick and easy way to ensure it gets followed used to be hard. But the MustWin Performance Support Tool not only makes the mechanics of this easier, it makes the thinking part easier by prompting you with key topics and enables easy use of the hundreds of ingredients contained in our Proposal Recipe library. But what about the writing? Once you’ve articulated what the proposal should contain, your proposal writers now have a better idea of not only what to write, but how to write it. They know what they need to do to pass the review. They know what they need to do to get it right on the first draft. They are not faced with a moving target, which is what it’s like when your reviews aren’t based on written quality criteria and are full of surprises. They can ask questions if there’s anything they don’t understand, or if they need additional input. They can filter the instructions so they only see the quality criteria (or any of the other instruction types in the image above). They can approach the writing as a process of elimination, checking off each instruction fulfilled as they go. They can even report their progress with a simple click of the red/yellow/green indicator next to each instruction. Proposal writers can compare what they are writing to what it is supposed to be. By giving them instructions and quality criteria, you shape the proposal before it gets to the review. You enable proposal writers to self-assess. Get a little validation The MustWin Performance Support Tool not only enables you to put guidance in front of your proposal writers, it enables you to validate whether they followed the instructions. Reviews can assess whether each instruction was followed using the same quick and easy check of the red/yellow/green indicator. Not only do your writers get to see what is expected of them so they can get it right on the first draft, but your reviews can be more than just a subjective judgment and actually validate that the proposal is right, based on your quality criteria. This is what people who are serious about winning need to do.

While every proposal process has goals, most are procedure-driven. Their focus is on completing steps. Lately I've been having great success in challenging environments by implementing goal-driven processes instead of procedure-driven processes. In fact, I'm thinking about reorganizing the entire MustWin Process around it. A goal-driven process gives following the steps a lower priority than fulfilling the goals. Let that sink in. The steps in the process can be optional. A goal-driven proposal process turns things from a set of mandated procedures into something that helps people achieve their goals It is far easier to get people to agree on a handful of goals. Once everyone agrees on the goals, then we can talk steps. And what usually ends up happening is that people choose to follow the steps because they are the best way to achieve the goals. People resist procedures that are forced on them. But they'll choose the path of least resistance to achieve their goals. This has the effect of turning process from a burden into an asset. The right process accelerates people's ability to pursue their goals while increasing the reliability of achieving them. Once someone accepts a goal, if you offer them a faster, more reliable way to achieve it, they tend to go for it. See also: Successful process implementation The most important part is how you define the goals. "Writing a proposal" is not a good goal. A better goal would be "Writing a proposal that fulfills the instructions and quality criteria of the Proposal Content Plan." But remember, you only want a handful of goals. So you can't simply convert every step in your process to goals. But you can make all of your goals require success from the previous goal. This is not a trick. It accurately reflects the reality of what it takes to win a proposal. In many ways, all you are doing is defining what must be accomplished at a high level to win. When you do this successfully, it implies what people must do in order to achieve the goals and accomplish what it will take to win. Only instead of implementing that as a procedural mandate and trying to compel or cajole people to follow it, you implement it as a set of goals and offer some techniques to help them achieve their goals. If they fail to achieve their goals, it's their failure. It's not a contest over whether they followed orders or who has the authority to issue orders. That just leaves getting everyone to agree on the goals. That's why you only want a handful of them. Ideally, you want everyone to be able to memorize them. I like to preface each goal with a 1- to 2-word soundbite that people will remember. All you need to ask people to do is agree to the goals. You can even confidently challenge them to point out any goals that are not necessary to accomplish what it will take to win. It starts by asking "Can we all just agree on these six goals... ?" Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, we have documented the six goals we recommend for producing a proposal based on what it will take to win. We've also mapped these goals to the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, and turned it into a framework you can download to turn the process into something that will help people achieve the goals.

Most companies consider a proposal review to be reading a draft document. This is the least effective of proposal reviews and makes the smallest contribution to proposal quality and winning. Yet people cling to it. I blame the obsolete color team model for getting in the way of proposals using the same quality assurance methodologies that have improved so many other things people do. This is especially true when the color team model degrades down to a single “red team” review. Most companies also fail to define proposal quality. This sets them up to commit the greatest sin in proposal development. What about your company? How many of these reviews do you do on every proposal? Some of them can be performed by just one person, often the proposal manager. Some require a specialist. Some of them require representation by all stakeholders. And some may need a team of experienced professionals sitting around a table. How you do your reviews is far less important than what you review. This is the essence of proposal quality validation. 15 types of proposal reviews See also: Proposal quality validation Readiness. Will you be ready to win when the RFP is released? Have you figured out what to offer, obtained answers to the questions you anticipate your proposal writers having, determined what your think strategies are, and decided how to articulate your message? What about getting approval for your proposal budget and identifying who will participate? Do you have set criteria that define what being “ready” even means? Offering design. Figuring out what to offer should never be done by writing about it. You should bring an approved offering design to the proposal, because an unreliable design is not enough to start writing. This means you not only have to design the offering, but have a review to approve it before you can complete your content planning, let alone start writing. Logistics. Who is going to do what with which resources when? In other words, what is your schedule, assignments, and approach to developing and producing the proposal? And how will these be double-checked? Outline. No one ever gives enough scrutiny to the outline before they start writing against it. An unreliable outline can cause a world of proposal pain. It is worth holding up writing to spend the time and attention necessary to review the outline and make sure it is reliable before you start writing. Proposal Content Plan. Have you considered everything that should go into your Proposal Content Plan? Is the plan sufficient to guide your writers to creating a winning proposal? Once you’ve completed your content plan you should review it before putting it to work. By reviewing your content plan, you also review all of its components, like win strategies, use of graphics, and how you've incorporated customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence. Self-Assessment. Do you have a means for writers to self-assess their assignments before turning them in? Are the assessment criteria the same ones that future reviewers will use? RFP Compliance. If your proposal could get thrown out for non-compliance, it’s worth some effort to validate that you have a compliant response. This requires great attention to detail and slow, deliberate work. Reviews often skip it because of the effort. It is easier for them to get away with that when you combine checking RFP compliance with other reviews. Decisions and risk. Your offering is full of trade-offs. Price vs Quality, etc. If the page limitation is shorter than the number of pages of requirements, you can’t possibly be compliant with every little thing. Which RFP requirements are unclear or subject to interpretation? What decisions have you made and what risks have you taken? Have they been reviewed so that all stakeholders confirm those are the risks the company wishes to take? Quality criteria. Have you reviewed the proposal against a written definition of proposal quality? Has anyone assessed whether you have fulfilled your quality criteria? Evaluation emulation. If the proposal will be formally evaluated, you should review the proposal as if you are the customer, following their evaluation procedures and using their evaluation criteria. Presentation. How does the proposal read? This review is actually less important than most of the others. If you wait until you have a nearly complete proposal so you can see it “the way the customer will” and only then attempt to provide quality assurance, you are setting yourself up for backtracking and a rushed finish. Seeing the proposal “the way the customer will” is only useful for making sure the final assembly was performed correctly. You should only permit stakeholders who have participated in the reviews and decisions regarding what the proposal should be to see the proposal “the way the customer will.” Typography. Proofreading can save you from embarrassment. But then again, what percentage of proposals have lost due to typos? Close to zero? Where should you put your quality assurance time and effort? If you’ve done all the reviews above, you won’t have any glaring widespread typographical issues. But if the only review you do focuses on correcting the language, you’re missing out on all of the above. If you’ve done all of these reviews and can carve out the time for dedicated proofreading, then you may succeed at creating a perfect proposal! Pricing. If the only pricing review you do is at the tail end, you won’t create the most competitive proposal you are capable of. Is what you intend to offer price competitive? What is the price to win? Is your pricing model the best? There are trade-offs and decisions related to pricing that need to be considered and reviewed early, just like there are for your offering. Contracts. Just like with pricing, there are contractual issues that could shape the design of your offering. And understanding the customer’s contracts and acquisition procedures can help you design a better proposal. Contract reviews and participation should take place both early in the process as well as prior to submission. Submission. Is what you are about to submit acceptable to your company? That should be decided well in advance, and if you do all of these reviews it will be. All that will remain is a final check for defects and mistakes. I have seen proposals lose because of a missing page or file, or from a spreadsheet that didn’t work the same on the evaluator’s computer. Rushing to the finish can turn a winning proposal into a loss. How bad do you want to win? Do your proposal writers want to win bad enough to plan the proposal before they start writing? Do your reviewers want to win bad enough to prepare and focus? Does everyone want to win bad enough to consider everything that goes into proposal quality and validate that it’s be achieved? Reviews don’t all have to be formal events. What level of validation is your next proposal worth?

Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY is a frequent public speaker. It's one of his favorite things. Because he runs a web-based empire he doesn't get out enough. He'd love to speak at your event, but can't do them all. You are welcome to ask. Let us know when, where, about the audience, and the topics you think will excite them. You can call us at 1-800-848-1563 or contact him through our site.

Bringing the MustWin Process online and making it much, much easier to implement We developed the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process in 2001. It is at the heart of all the content on PropLIBRARY. The MustWin Performance Support Tool (MWPST) brings it online, but not as a process workflow tool and not as a way of automating cookie-cutter proposals. The MWPST improves the performance of the people who work on and contribute to proposals in order to maximize your win rate and ROI. The MWPST gives you the tool you need to make doing proposals the right way feasible. The MWPST makes it easy to build a proposal around what it will take to win by providing guidance to writers about not only what to write, but how to write it, and then validating that they did it right. It brings Proposal Content Planning online and provides an online storyboarding solution that's so easy it becomes feasible to plan your proposal before you write it. Then it puts the plan right next to the act of writing where it guides, inspires, and accelerates. Instead of replacing what you use to write the proposal, the MWPST supplements and guides the writing. It also adds progress tracking and makes Proposal Quality Validation checklist-simple. The MWPST makes it easier to deliberately build a winning proposal, instead of hoping something magical comes out of the mysterious art of writing. And it avoids the problem of recycling content that was written for a different context and will reduce your chances of winning your current proposal. It enables a team of people to shape the proposal into what it should be, instead of piling re-write on re-write until you run out of time. How does the MWPST work? A Proposal Content Plan works like a container where you put all of the instructions and other ingredients that should go into writing the proposal. Like writing, it was conceived as a paper-driven process. The MWPST gives you that container in an online tool. It makes it easy to put the right instructions into it. Then we wrap everything needed for successful performance around it and put it right next to you as you write: It provides a checklist for new types of instructions like quality criteria, RFP requirements, questions to answer, issues, and more. Plus we've added immediate filtering so you can focus. For example, you can switch from seeing everything to just seeing the quality criteria. You can use that to achieve clarity about goals, approaches, considerations, and what defines success. It helps everyone manage expectations. It gets writers and reviewers on the same page. This was also feasible with the Proposal Content Planning methodology. Now it can be realized with simple clicks. It links to recipes to inspire and accelerate inserting instructions. We invented Proposal Recipes to provide a means to inspire and accelerate without resorting to win rate destroying content recycling. But they too were conceived of as paper-driven. By making them part of our performance support tool, they can be viewed with a click and inserted with another. Create your own instructions, customize the recipes, or insert them as is to get just the results you want from your writers. It uses online Proposal Quality Validation to assess whether instructions were followed. Why is it that proposal reviewers almost never perform validation against a written set of proposal criteria? Does it seem like too much work to create and too difficult to get them to follow through with? What the MWPST does is enable reviewers to go down a list with each instruction, quality criterion, etc., and simply click an icon to record red/yellow/green and post any comments they have. You can still do a document mark-up style of review, if you want. But we've made it easier to get attention focused on the specific things you need validated in order to achieve a quality proposal. It supports users with just-in-time online training courses. Most of the people working on proposals are inexperienced. They need training, but there's no good way to get it to them. We've created a way to embed it into the process. If a writer shows up having never read an RFP before, they can learn how by taking a quick course. If you want to get reviewers on the same page and get more consistent, less subjective results, have them take a quick course on proposal reviews. The MWPST puts links to the right courses next to your content plan so they are available at the moment of need. It provides relevant help articles. We've curated the hundreds of articles we've published, so that a few, highly relevant ones will appear off to the side to help you out when you need it. Plus you can always go search our library to help solve a proposal issue that has come up. It even enables you to tap into support services. If you need some expert help planning, writing, or reviewing your proposal we can provide it. And if we're both using the tool we can do it remotely and burn fewer billable hours getting up to speed on your opportunity. The MWPST is designed for you to use on your own without having to use an outside expert. But we're here for you if you do need it. Make progress like never before The MWPST turns proposal writing into a process of elimination. Each time you write something that fulfills one of your instructions, you can click an icon to switch it from red to yellow to green. Instead of asking "how it's going?" progress can now be measured. With charts. But not with a whole lot of effort required. Just a click. But more importantly, as a writer you know when you've achieved everything that needed to be done. And the proposal reviewers use the same set of instructions and quality criteria during their review. They even use similar traffic light icons to assess whether you fulfilled the instructions and quality criteria. Picture it side by side If you have two monitors, you can put the MWPST on one and Microsoft Word on the other. Your proposal files stay your files and never leave the network. You don't have to learn and use something else to write in. If you don't have two monitors, you can have Word in one window and a browser with the MWPST in another. It's like having the specifications next to what you are creating. That's a simple innovation that makes a HUGE difference in the quality of your proposals. Solving the unsolvable Everyone who works on proposals knows they should do the following: • Start the proposal before the RFP is released • Plan your proposal’s content before you start writing it • Define proposal quality in writing • Base your proposal reviews on quality criteria • Train the people working on proposals And yet, these things hardly ever happen. Now that can change. The MWPST gives you the tool you need to make doing these things feasible. How to get started using the MWPST The MWPST is free for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. You can use it with a Single User Subscription, but you won't get nearly as much value from it as people working on proposals with multiple people involved. You can start out with a Single User Subscription and upgrade to a Corporate Subscription. If your subscription expired, then go here to reactivate it. Once you've got access you'll... Set up each proposal. This is easy and takes seconds. Enter the proposal outline. You'll need to bring this. Software can't figure it out for you. Not even an AI is up to interpreting an RFP. Begin figuring out what your proposal should say and how. The MWPST will prompt you to enter instructions on each topic so you don't overlook anything. You can write your own instructions or start from the ones in our recipe library. You can also create proposal quality criteria for each section and topic. Our recipe library has suggestions for those, too. The MWPST will enable you to provide your writers with a set of specifications for what they are supposed to accomplish. When your plan is ready, start writing. With the MWPST window next to the one with Microsoft Word, you'll know what to write, how to write it, and what quality criteria you need to fulfill. Not only will writing go much faster, but you'll have fewer edit cycles. When writers have questions, each instruction, citerion, strategy, etc., has a place for commenting and discussion. When the writers are ready, start reviewing. Writing doesn't necessarily have to pause. Reviewers can check the quality criteria while the writers continue working. They can revisit anything that scores "red" later. When they review the finished draft, they'll know that compliance, bid strategies, and the quality criteria have been fulfilled and can focus on presentation. Quality criteria based reviews return more consistent and more effective results. Streamlining what you need to do anyway The MWPST is the most efficient way of planning before you write in existence. Let the implications of that sink in. And think about what that can do to help your proposals reach a higher level of competitiveness. P.S.: If you are a PropLIBRARY Subscriber when the MustWin Performance Support Tool goes live, you'll get a $1,000 discount toward a Corporate Subscription. That's a credit worth TWICE what it costs to subscribe as a single user. You can try PropLIBRARY and the new MustWin Performance Support Tool, and if you think the others at your company should be on it, you can upgrade to the Corporate Subscription for $1,000 less. As a reward for being an early adopter, if you become a Corporate Subscriber before the end of January, we'll also give you 8 hours of consulting using the tool. We'll help you craft your content plans. We'll show you how to get the most out of it. To get ready, subscribe now.

Within the MWPPSS there are three roles people can play: Content Planner. Can add/change/delete the outline and planning items. Can control access. Writer. Can view the planning items, report their progress, and comment. Reviewer. Can review the planning items. Permissions are set section-by-section. You can have as many planners, writers, and reviewers as you need. So you can have someone planning one section and reviewing another. Or have someone doing all three in every section. How you allocate these functions to the resources you have is up to you. In order to be eligible for access, the user must be part of your Corporate Subscription. But even your subscribers won't have access until you give it to them. To do this, click on the "people" icon on the outline page. Then click on the "Add User Assignment" button. You should see this: Look up each user you want to have access and assign their role. Do this for each section. To revoke someone's access, click on the "x" floating next to their image/icon.

The first step in Proposal Content Planning is to set up the document shell based on your proposal outline. Before you can get started in the MustWin Proposal Performance Support System, you must enter your outline. The MWPPSS does not create the outline for you. Once you have your outline, you enter it to set up the proposal sections for people to begin planning. Warning: You want your outline to be reliable. It is a pain to change the outline after you begin planning around it. It's a good idea to create a compliance matrix and use it to build your outline. It is a good idea to intensively review your compliance matrix and outline before starting to plan the content of your proposal. The first time you enter your newly created proposal, you arrive at another page that looks empty. At the bottom of this page is a place to enter the section number and heading for each item in your outline. Click the "Add Another Section" button and it will appear in the list. It should only take a few minutes to enter most outlines. The list is sorted by the section number. When you are done, click on any section to begin planning it. That's where things get fun. To the right of each outline item is a set of icons. They look like this: The icons are for: See also: MWPST help getting started Reviewing the section (check mark) Controlling access to the section (people) Editing the section number and name (pencil) Deleting the section (x) To plan the content of the section, just click on the section name. The reason for the "warning" above is that to make changes to the outline, you will have to manually edit the section numbers and name, add new sections, and delete sections. For minor changes, it's manageable. You want to avoid major changes by making sure the outline is reliable before you start. In a future version, we will add the ability to import your compliance matrix straight from an excel file. While that will be a cool feature, it will only save you a few minutes. The hard part is validating your outline before planning and writing around it. Even with the import, you'll still want to make sure your outline is reliable.

Click the "Add New Proposal" button and give it name. That's basically it. But here's some background and things that are good to know... See also: MWPST Help getting started When you first arrive, it looks blank. That's because you have defined any proposals to work on. When you add a new proposal, you should also give your proposal a description. We recommend including the solicitation number (if any). You might also want to include the client name, either in the proposal name or in the description. What you put in the title and description is up to you. You have have a long description or a short one. You can edit it later. What you want them to do is enable people to be able to find and understand what they are working on.

Why does everyone assume every proposal should have a proposal manager? Before you respond, take a deep breath and contemplate that. There are alternatives to the traditional proposal manager-led hierarchy. If you think that proposal managers have all of the responsibility and none of the authority to do their jobs, maybe the problem is you have the wrong management model instead of a lack of authority. Most of the conflicts that are endemic to proposal development come from a lack of clarity regarding expectations. Do you need a proposal manager who: The point is to understand your needs. Because they are different from everyone else’s needs. Tells everyone what to do? Does this include deciding what everyone should write? Is a facilitator, who helps other people to make the decisions, including what to write and how? Runs the process and produces the document, but stays out of what’s getting written? Is a mentor? Who provides specialized experience and expertise so that your staff can function at a higher level? Is just one part of a package of support services that you can request? Do you do things differently based on what’s needed for a particular pursuit? Do you have a range of capabilities and offer to help or lead as needed? Who owns deciding what to offer? How to present it? What words to use? Defining the bid strategies? Setting deadlines? Enforcing deadlines? Who is responsible for doing what it will take to win? Deciding who does things usually requires participation by The Powers That Be. If you can decisively say it’s the proposal manager who should decide these things and everyone participating agrees, that’s great. But in most companies, these responsibilities get shared. And they often get muddy. And that means the model that has the proposal manager as the clear authority might be a bad fit for some companies. Here are some considerations for what type of proposal management will work best in your organization: See also: Successful process implementation What is your decision-making culture? Is it consensus-driven or authoritarian? Is it centralized or decentralized? Do you want one person with clear accountability for the proposal, or do you want other stakeholders involved? A proposal can impact a large number of people and require contributions that cross organizational boundaries. Do you want one person to force the issue or should everyone get a seat at the table? Your corporate culture matters here, because it will set an expectation regarding who gets to participate in making decisions. Do you need proposal development to be collaborative or controlled? Which is more important, enabling everyone to contribute, or ensuring that people do as directed? The best answer for you may be different from other companies. How much subject matter expertise do your proposals require? Depending on what you offer, you may need experts to write the proposal. Or at least contribute to it. Whether the subject matter experts (SMEs) write the proposal or not depends on the expertise required, the availability of staff, and the level of expertise that the customer’s evaluation possesses. Billability and economics are also considerations. There is no single right answer for whether SMEs should do the writing or make the decisions. But the answer you choose will impact what approach you should take for proposal management. How much proposal specialization do your proposals require? If the RFP instructions and evaluation criteria are complex and require background knowledge, like they do with government proposals, you may need someone to direct, facilitate, or guide your staff to do what it will take to win. Do you have large proposal teams or small proposal teams? And are they the same people every time or different? The amount of direction that a few people who do all the proposals need and that a few dozen people of varying skills and experience need are completely different. What are the size, scope, complexity, and deadline? Is it a big proposal effort? Is it complicated? Do you have enough time to pull it all together? Do you need precise coordination and discipline? Will the same people needed to make decisions be participating in the proposal reviews? You can’t have objective proposal reviews if the people who make decisions about approaches and bid strategies are also the reviewers. If that’s just the way it is in your organization, then embrace it. Go for a collaborative process that prevents defects instead of one that focuses on discovering defects after the fact. How mature is your proposal process? Is it fully documented, completely implemented, and proven? Or is it half-baked and more of a way of doing things than a process? Do you need someone to introduce a process or help guide you through it? Is one of your goals to help your staff develop their own skills and capability to do proposals in the future? How well trained is your staff? Do they have the skills needed? Do they have the knowledge needed? Just because they’ve worked on proposals in the past doesn’t mean they're good at it. Are your resources really available? Whether you have a proposal manager or not, if your pursuit is not adequately staffed, it is doomed to failure. You could put a lot of effort into figuring out the best approach for you, only to have it fail because it was staffed with resources who really aren’t available. How much do you want to win? If you can't afford to staff the proposal properly, including a proposal manager, you probably have other priorities that are more important than winning. Have you considered the ROI? If you are planning to just get by with the resources you have, will that result in the best ROI? Have you calculated how much investment in opportunity pursuit maximizes your return? Have you calculated where putting that investment maximizes your win rate? Why not? If you think you know it without looking at hard data, you're probably wrong. Rules of thumb aren't. Conflict resolution and strategic development The odds are that more than one of the above applies to you. Not only that, but there’s a good chance you have conflicting answers. What do you do when you have a complex proposal with lots of stakeholders against a tight deadline with people who have conflicting priorities and can’t be relied on, that seems to beg for direction, but also have a consensus-driven culture? Ask yourself what your strategic goals are. Do you want to centralize or decentralize the proposal function? Do you want to develop the skills of your staff, or make do until you can hire the expertise you need? Do you want the operating units to figure out their own needs, or do you want this to be a corporate support function? Is responding to RFPs critical to the growth of your company? What’s your real mission? To begin the long-term effort of resolving the conflicts, start today by taking a step toward your strategic goals. There will be problems with whatever decision you make. When that’s the case, it’s best to confront them strategically. Do you need a proposal manager at all? Not having a proposal manager does not necessarily mean that no one is accountable. Maybe whoever wants to pursue the opportunity should be responsible for the proposal. Or maybe whoever gets a proposal assignment should be responsible for the completion of it, without someone called a proposal manager with responsibility but no authority hovering over them. What if instead of someone leading the process, the process was self-administered? What if each phase had goals to be achieved by people playing certain roles? What if each goal had quality criteria mapped to it? What if instead of assignments being made against the outline, they were made against functional roles or activities? What if each person playing a role knew both the goals to be achieved, and the quality criteria that would be used to define success? Then it might be nice to provide a mentor people could consult if they need help fulfilling the quality criteria. If the quality criteria are done well, people could self-assess whether they are doing quality work, without waiting for a future review. Maybe instead of a process, people need a guide that explains the goals, quality criteria, and self-assessment. Maybe editing could be provided as a service. Maybe the proposal department becomes a service catalog instead of an organization competing for ownership of the proposal. Maybe people should ask for support services instead of being given a mandate to turn control over to someone else.What model is right for you? Or maybe you really do need a proposal manager and the above is heresy. That’s okay too. The point is to understand your needs. Because they are different from everyone else’s needs. The nature of what you offer and the answers to the questions above will determine what the right approach is for your company. There is no single approach that is right for everyone. There isn't even a single approach that is right for everyone in a given market. And perhaps more importantly, whether or not you decide you need a proposal manager, asking these questions will help you implement your decision better. Don't just go through the motions and do things the way you think you're supposed to. If you want to maximize your win rate, challenge yourself by asking questions and keep doing it until you have solid answers for all of them. If you can’t get people to follow your proposal process or complete their assignments, then maybe the problem isn’t a lack of cooperation. Maybe you have the wrong proposal management model. It’s a question worth asking.

Honestly, it's an approach I just stumbled upon. I wasn't really looking for it. If I say that it has the potential to radically change how people go about winning proposals, that might sound a bit grandiose. But that is exactly what I think it can do. Just not in a way that anyone expects. Imagine combining what you see below with all of our process guidance, online training, proposal recipes, etc., into a single integrated environment. If you do complex proposals with multiple people involved, imagine having all that support to get everyone on the same page and making it as simple as clicking on things. We're not trying to change how you write. Just enable you to write better. And faster. The MustWin Performance Support Tool enables you to figure out what it will take to win and build a proposal around that. It's not about document assembly. We're not trying to recycle document parts written for a different customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. We want to make it easy to beat people who do that. The MustWin Performance Support Tool assists you with proposal writing by putting instructions next to where almost all of you do your writing, in Microsoft Word. You can display it on a second monitor or in another window. As you write, it will be there to remind you of everything you are supposed to address and how. It brings all the iterations of Proposal Content Planning online. Accelerating Proposal Content Planning The number one excuse for not properly planning a proposal before writing is that you "don't have time." So we've made it faster. Much faster. And it's online. Another way to think of it is a way to have real online storyboards. Within each topic, you add instructions, define quality criteria, make suggestions, and more, all with a simple click. Here is how simple it is to add to your content plan... Providing guidance to your proposal writers that helps shape the proposal What kind of proposal do you want? What points should it make? How should it make them? If you know, you can instruct your proposal writers and their job can become proving them. If you don't, you can instructions for people to figure them out and then prove them. Inspiration as fast as you can click As you know if you've followed the articles I've published, I'm not a big fan of reusing past proposals. But I do see the value in providing acceleration and inspiration in the form of proposal recipes. Now we've made it easy to drop recipes into a Proposal Content Plan with the click of a button. We currently have 228 recipes for you to draw on. Not only that, but if you notice that little bookmark symbol in the portion that's grayed out... with the click of another button you can save an instruction you've written for use in other sections or proposals. If there are instructions you want to put in every proposal, all you have to do is pick them from a list like this. Tracking Progress Instead of asking a writer "how it's going?" we've enabled authors to self report their completion of each instruction with a simple click. This rolls up into section- and proposal-wide status views like this one: Real quality validation instead of just subjective reviews Reviewers can click the traffic light icon next to each proposal quality criterion in each section to "grade" it. It helps that the MustWin Performance Support Tool also makes it easy to define quality criteria. Reviewers can expand each criterion if they want to add more detail or an explanation. Writers can also ask reviewers for clarification. And the team can discuss issues. Release schedule Ready. Now. Take a look at the menu above. Want to see it in action, try the video. If you are already a PropLIBRARY Subscriber, we'll let you know when it's time to play. If you are not, you should become one so you can be part of it all. If your subscription expired, then go here to reactivate it. If you are a PropLIBRARY Subscriber when the MustWin Performance Support Tool goes live, you'll get a $1,000 discount toward a Corporate Subscription. That's a credit worth TWICE what it cost to subscribe as a single user. You can try PropLIBRARY and the new MustWin Performance Support Tool, and if you think the others at your company should be on it, you can upgrade to the Corporate Subscription for $1,000 less. As a reward for being an early adopter, if you become a Corporate Subscriber before the end of January, we'll also give you 8 hours of consulting using the tool. We'll help you craft your content plans. We'll show you how to get the most out of it. To get ready, subscribe now. Invitations to try it out will only be going out to subscribers, and will be going out soon.

When people think about tools for proposals, they usually make the mistake of thinking about automation. What they should be thinking about instead is performance. When you think of automation, you think of reducing effort and cost. Let the computer do it for you. Go right ahead — if you want to produce proposals that are easy to beat. But when you think of supporting performance, other things that become important. Like the fact that many people who get involved in proposals are inexperienced. Or how, unless you sell a commodity, increasing your win rate returns a much higher ROI than lowering your proposal costs. Increasing your win rate makes the effort worthwhile. And besides, automating proposal production doesn’t target where the most time is wasted on proposals. People spend far more time thinking about proposals than writing them. A performance support tool helps people think and not just assemble. The real problem To maximize your win rate and ROI, instead of automation you want a system that enables you to actually do the things you know you should to win your proposals, but somehow can’t seem to make happen. Here are some reminders of some of the things that everyone knows, but hardly anyone does: Ignore automating document assembly and solve these problems to increase your win rate • The proposal should start before the RFP is released • You should plan your proposal’s content before you start writing it • Proposal quality should be defined, in writing • Proposal reviews should be based on quality criteria • People working on proposals should be trained My vision for a proposal support system ignores automating document assembly in favor of solving these problems and increasing your win rate. It returns a huge ROI. PropLIBRARY started life as a collection of best practice articles. It grew into an end-to-end process that addressed the issues above, but required manual process implementation. Then it grew it into a cross-linked online training platform. And now it’s about to become a proposal performance support system. Here’s how See also: Proposal software We’re creating a single tool that will address Readiness Reviews, Content Planning, and Proposal Quality Validation by providing instructions, guidance, and quality criteria. It will be the easiest way to implement these methodologies the world has ever seen, because it will blend off-the-shelf guidance with proposal recipes. It will enable customization and an approach to re-use that accelerates without destroying your win rate. All it does is provide an online interface that integrates everything you need to do. It provides performance support. It doesn’t even bother with automating document assembly, since most companies are already pretty good at document assembly and it’s often less than 10% of the total effort that goes into a proposal. Integration is the key You can build your own performance support system. Just integrate these ingredients: Create a database for your Proposal Content Plans with your quality criteria definition. Make the content plans and proposal criteria easy to complete. Put your proposal recipes in another database and then integrate it with your content planning function. Provide proposal management support in the form of progress tracking and review reporting. Create bite-sized online training that works more like a proposal help system. Forget days-long courses that are taken separate from proposal development. Support collaboration because people will have questions and issues to discuss. Essentially what you are doing is integrating guidance, training, planning, reviewing, and collaboration. This is what your proposal team needs to be successful. Here are some goals to achieve along the way: Keep the focus on what to write and not on assembly. Shape the document with instructions and guidance about what to write. And not by bringing forward narratives that were written for the wrong context or are too generic to be competitive. Make content planning and quality validation checklist-simple. Make planning, writing, and reviewing a real-time collaborative effort instead of managing by draft cycles. Spend your time thinking about how to guide your team and about what defines quality instead of editing draft after draft. Eliminate the production of as many process artifacts and deliverables as you can by moving them online. Remember that raising your win rate is more important than saving proposal costs by reducing proposal quality. Eliminate wasted effort by focusing discovering and articulating what it will take to win in a way that enables you to drive it into the document. This is what PropLIBRARY is becoming.

Proposals usually require effort that crosses organizational boundaries. People who are used to owning things have to share. People who are impacted by decisions want to own them. If you base your proposal staffing on titles, you are asking for trouble. You are creating territories, and people will begin to identify with them. They won’t want to leave their territories and they may want to grow them. The list of things that need to be done to win the proposal is fixed. But who does what depends on what resources are available to you. Using titles to define roles and responsibilities also makes it difficult to change who does what from one proposal to another based on the circumstances. And worse, it makes it easy to default to position descriptions to define who does what. Position descriptions rarely reflect the functional needs of what it takes to win a proposal. So maybe you have to have titles. HR probably thinks so. But that doesn’t mean that you should use them to allocate effort or define roles on a proposal. Defining proposal responsibilities functionally instead of by using titles The list of things that need to be done to win a proposal is finite. You can and should create that list. It defines the functional requirements of proposal development. But for each thing you put on that list, there are multiple roles. And this is what using position descriptions disrupts. Does a proposal manager decide what words to use or draft them? Or does a subject matter expert? Or a proposal reviewer? What about the offering? Or the win strategies? There are no right answers that apply to every proposal. Instead, you need a way to define the role played for each functional requirement to win a proposal. The good news is that these roles usually fall into just six categories. Take your list of functional requirements, and put it in a table or worksheet with six more columns. Label these columns: See also: Roles Plan Draft Decide/approve Support/contribute Review Coach/mentor In each cell, put one or more names. Your proposal manager might plan the content, with support from subject matter experts, for someone else to draft. Or the subject matter experts might plan the content for writers to draft. Or a writer might plan and draft the content. A reviewer might also decide/approve the final draft. Or the proposal manager might decide/approve what changes to make with the reviewers making suggestions. The list of things that need to be done to win the proposal is fixed. But who does what depends on what resources are available to you. By using a worksheet like this, you set expectations in a way that is specific to the proposal being produced. You can change it up on the next proposal. During the proposal, people don’t have to fight for control. They become free to work together and collaborate. Resolving conflicts The fights will be over whose names go in which cells. And that is exactly what you want. You want it out in the open before you start. You don’t want the fights to be in the middle of the proposal. That’s how you get the passive/aggressive lack of cooperation that undermines many bids. So go ahead and fight over who gets which role. But once the worksheet is complete, everyone knows not only what to do, but who plays which role in every activity. And when availability changes or whether the next proposal is big or little, you can make assignment adjustments while keeping the clarity. It’s that clarity that will enable people to focus on winning the proposals, which will benefit every name on the worksheet.

The best way to accelerate a proposal is to lay the groundwork for winning in each step, so that the next step has what it needs. It does not come from automating or accelerating doing the ordinary. The goal is not to submit a “good enough” proposal, it’s to win them all and turn proposal writing into a profitable activity instead of a necessary evil. To achieve this, each step has to add value that the next step can build on. Here are eight examples: You can improve the efficiency of your proposals while improving your win rate Pre-RFP pursuit. Build your capture plans around answering questions. Those questions become a script that guides your sales force regarding what information to seek. They’ll never be able to uncover all the information you’d like to have, but if they know what to look for, they'll get more of it. You’ll be better able to assess your readiness to win the proposal, by looking at what answers you have and what you don’t. And even if you start at RFP release, the same list of questions helps you quickly assess what you do and don’t know. Within the MustWin Process, we use this approach to create Readiness Reviews that help ensure the company is ready to win at RFP release. Offering design. Also during the pre-RFP phase, you should begin designing your offering so that you can discuss it with the customer and validate your thoughts before presenting it in your proposal. Having an engineering methodology for designing your offering and validating it before you begin writing about it is important for avoiding a proposal disaster. Proposal startup. The hand-offs that occur when the proposal starts are usually not smooth. However, if your list of pre-RFP pursuit questions anticipates what your proposal writers will need to know to write a great proposal, the hand-off will clearly show what information you have and don’t have to work with. Our proposal startup checklist includes more than a hundred questions. Also during proposal startup, you need to read the RFP and prepare a compliance matrix. There is no shortcut for these, they simply must be done. And done well. One of the reasons to accelerate everything else is to carve out the time you need to do these critical tasks. Proposal logistics plans. Schedules, assignments, kickoff briefings, production plans, etc., can and should all be turned into templates. Completing a plan should be as simple as filling out a form. It should take minutes and not hours. Defining proposal quality and preparing a review plan. If you don’t define proposal quality, then you’ll waste tons of time between people not knowing what is expected of them and circular discussions about what a good proposal is. Having proposal reviews is not the same thing as having proposal quality criteria or proposal quality validation. Not only can you have written proposal criteria, you can accelerate putting them in place. Some criteria can be standardized. Others will depend on the business line, customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. You can turn creating your proposal quality criteria into a forms-driven process with parts standardized, and others to be filled in. By quickly preparing your quality criteria, you'll have time to review and validate them before moving forward. Proposal content planning. Several things can accelerate identifying what needs to be written so that writing can proceed. If your pre-RFP pursuit questions anticipate the information needed to write a great proposal, then you’ll be able to quickly bring the answers forward into your Proposal Content Plans. You’ll be able to turn them from general things you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment into specific instructions that proposal writers can use to properly position what they are writing about. You can also create proposal recipes that can be quickly copied and pasted into your proposal content plans to inspire your proposal writers with what to write about. You can also use proposal recipes to more quickly figure out your win strategies, and include them in the plan for writers to substantiate. Proposal recipes can also be used to inspire creating graphics, guide interviews of subject matter experts, help standardize approaches across business lines, and remind writers of corporate standards. Proposal writing. Proposal writing is accelerated by having a Proposal Content Plan that provides the information and guidance needed to write a great proposal. It tells writers what to do to fulfill the proposal quality criteria, so they don’t get surprised at the draft review. Done well, a Proposal Content Plan turns proposal writing into a process of elimination instead of guesswork. Proposal Quality Validation. Proposal reviews are accelerated by having a definition for proposal quality and criteria that can be used so reviewers know what to look for. You can also accelerate planning your reviews by turning them into a forms-driven process that allocates your quality criteria to specific reviews and addresses logistics issues (participants, location, schedule, etc.). You should be able to create a written review plan in about 15 minutes. When you have a written review plan, you can have the plan itself reviewed and validated to ensure that your approach is sufficient to meet the quality needs of the company. This forms a critical value chain: pre-RFP questions and offering design accelerate both the creation of your proposal quality criteria and the Proposal Content Plan, which in turn accelerates both writing and quality validation. Do not break this chain. Not only will things take longer if you do, but quality will suffer as well. You should also note that this does not rely on automation or reusing old proposals for acceleration. That is because it is based on the most efficient way to build your proposal around what it will take to win. The last thing you want to do is accelerate creating losing proposals. Instead, you want to improve the efficiency of creating better proposals, so you will raise your win rate. And raising your win rate leads to growth that pays for doing things right to achieve more growth. PropLIBRARY helps companies becoming winning organizations through a combination of online process guidance and training materials that are ready for immediate implementation. As the links above show, PropLIBRARY can help you win more business while also providing hours of online training to boost the skills and get everyone on the same page. You can start with a single user subscription and upgrade to a corporate subscription.

What will a 1% change in your win rate return? If you don’t know, you really need to gather the data to calculate it. Because small increases in win rate are often worth considerable effort. In fact, increasing your win rate will often net a better ROI than chasing more leads. Once you’ve done the math and found your motivation, then you have to figure out what to do to improve your win rate and reap the promised ROI. To help you out, here are nine places to consider investing in to increase your proposal win rate: See also: Improving win rates People. Hire for talent over experience. You’d be surprised how many experienced professionals write ordinary proposal copy. Doing this requires knowing talent when you see it. You are looking for the difference between good proposal writing, and great proposal writing. If RFP compliance is critical, it's worth it to pay for someone who knows how to make a compliance matrix. And make sure that the person who manages your proposals is on the same level as those contributing to the proposals. Junior staff can manage a good proposal, one that is as good as your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). But it takes someone with more gravitas to push senior SMEs to prepare great proposals. Processes. However good your people are, people alone are not enough to maximize your win rate. If it’s not documented and if it can't be implemented by someone other than the person who designed it, then it's not a process, it's merely a way of doing things. However, investing in process is not limited to documenting your process. It also includes taking the time to develop an effective process. Developing a process to produce proposals is straightforward. Developing a process that produces great proposals (video) is not. But it's worth the investment. Tools. Investing in tools for proposals is tricky. This is because proposal automation often leads to less expensive proposals that also have a lower win rate. A lower win rate will almost always cost far more than any labor saved. There are better ways to make proposals faster and easier. There are also better ways to make proposals less expensive. The tools you need to increase your win rate are ones that help you collaborate and think. Graphics. Graphics communicate better than words. Not only that, but the process of conceptualizing your graphics can help you better think through your proposal messages. Investing in graphics comes in two ways: investing in the time it takes to conceptualize graphics, and investing in an illustrator to render them. The illustrator may be the lesser of those two costs. But the return is a better message communicated more effectively, leading to a higher win rate that can dwarf both of those costs. Customer relationships. Customer relationships take time to develop. In government contracting, if you want to influence an RFP, you might have to start two years in advance of its release. One way to increase your win rate is to invest time against that long-term goal. Performance. Keeping the customer happy may be worth investing in if you care about winning your recompetes. You don't want to be in the position of trying to win in spite of bad past performance reviews. Having the highest possible past performance scores is worth some investment. Mathematically there is a sweet spot between maximizing profit margin and achieving ROI by investing in performance to increase your win rate. Calculate it. A small change in win rate will impact a lot of contract dollars. Information. One of the most important bid considerations is whether you have an information advantage. An information advantage requires time to build. Allocating that time is an investment. Information can also come from purchasing certain databases, but that is the same information everyone else has. Investing in databases may be necessary to keep up with your competition, but shouldn’t be counted on to provide an advantage. Metrics. The best metrics only require a minimal investment because they should flow naturally from doing what you need to do anyway. If you want to know how your investments are performing, you need to track the results. Metrics that help you track the ROI performance of your investment in improving your win rate and that enable data-driven decisions are worth investing in. Culture. Investing in developing a winning culture is the most expensive investment of them all. This is because it can’t be bought. It requires an investment in the form of time from those at the highest level. And yet, having a winning culture is as important as having an effective process. And most executives get it tragically wrong. Or worse, they assume that their corporate culture comes naturally from the things they do or their mission statement, effectively ignore their culture, and end up with whatever fills the void. This is usually a risk-averse daily grind that is the lowest common denominator of the results of turf battles. It’s not a coincidence that most corporate cultures are dysfunctional and most companies have low win rates. What’s not on the list? Re-use libraries. Unless you sell a commodity, proposal reuse libraries lower win rates more than they save in effort. Yet staff crave them because they see proposals as an expense and an imposition. See #9 about dysfunctional anti-growth corporate cultures. Luckily, there are alternatives. Where should you invest first? Invest where you will see the greatest ROI. This will likely be the one that you’ve ignored the most. If you are just getting started, it will most likely be people or process. If you do not have sufficient cashflow or budget to invest, consider focusing on culture and metrics since you may be able to improve them without spending any money. Investing time to develop the right metrics can help you justify the budget you need as an investment instead of as an expense.

Bid decisions are all about ROI. And your ROI is directly impacted by your win rate. Low win rates lead to a low ROI. High win rates make it all worthwhile. For some companies, a 10% increase in win rate is the same as a 40% increase in leads pursued. Bad bid decisions lead to a lower win rate. Bid decisions have a major impact on your ROI. If you care about ROI, then even though it's counter intuitive, you do not want to bid every opportunity you encounter. This isn’t about subjective preferences, rules of thumb, or even best practices. This is about the hard reality of math. If you don’t understand the mathematical relationship between your win rate, the number of leads you need to pursue to hit your numbers, and the way resource allocation impacts your win rate, then skip this article and instead learn the math. This article will make a lot more sense after that. If you’re not tracking the numbers to be able to do this, then you need to start if you want to get from subjective guessing at bid decisions and make them data driven. Signs that you are making bad bid decisions that are reducing your ROI You probably lowering your ROI and making bad bid decisions if you're bidding because: See also: Bid/No Bid Decisions We can write the proposal. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. This is true even if “you’re not bidding anything else right now.” When that's the case, you should improving your pursuit process to maximize your win rate. This includes identifying the criteria that make a pursuit worthy of bidding. Instead of chasing a pursuit with a low win probability just because you can, invest in increasing the win probability of all the future pursuits you have a realistic chance of winning. When this is given as a reason to pursue a bid, it can be an indicator that bid decisions are not criteria based, there is no formal lead qualification process, and the pipeline is running low. We can do the work. Your ability to do the work, and your ability to win the pursuit are two different things. Everybody bidding will be convinced they can do the work. Everyone who makes the competitive range will have convinced the customer that they can do the work. Bidding without a competitive advantage lowers your win rate and profit margins, because you only path to winning is to have the lowest price. Hope is not a strategy. If you have to pass on a bid where you can do the work but don’t have a competitive advantage, ask yourself what you need to do to better position for the future. That's where you should be investing, and not only a low probability proposal. Citing “we can do the work” to justify a pursuit is not only a sign that there are no bid decision criteria, it’s also a sign that strategic planning is weak. We'll just hire the incumbents. Just like everyone else bidding? If you bid without the resources required to win on the expectation that you can just hire the staff currently doing the work if you win is worse than bidding because you “can do the work" because you can’t actually do the work. You’re hoping that you can hire the staff who can. That is bidding at an intentional disadvantage hoping to make it up in other ways, usually by undercutting the price, which hurts the credibility of your being able to hire the incumbent staff. When you hear people say “we’ll just hire the incumbents” it not only indicates a willingness to bid without a competitive advantage, it could also be a sign that you're not doing your pre-RFP homework to recruit staff and at least have contingency hire agreements. We've got relevant past performance. This fails the “So what?” test, which curiously can be applied to making bid decisions. The simple fact of having experience does not matter. It’s the impact of that experience that matters. For a bid decision, what matters is whether the impact of that experience amounts to a competitive advantage. Keep in mind that everyone bidding will claim relevant experience and everyone in the competitive range will have it. It’s not the quantity of experience that matters the most. It’s the impact. How does whatever experience you have provide a better result or outcome for the customer? That is what matters to them. It’s not how much experience you have, it’s whether you can produce better results. When having experience is seen as the only or primary qualifier for bidding, it’s a sign that the company is not developing any real differentiators. We can win it by bidding low and making it profitable after we get the contract. Bidding below the level you can perform at is a recipe for killing your past performance record. And that means you can win this contract this way, but you’ll be doing it at the expense of your future win rate. It’s short term thinking at the expense of long term ROI. It’s often a sign of desperation. It's the same work we do for our current customer. See #4. “So what?” Should the customer care? If they do, then that’s the real reason to bid. Developing a core competency is a good thing, and this involves looking for similar works to build relevant capabilities. However, the fact that you want to build core competency does not matter to the customer. Having a core competency that gives you differentiators and advantages that offer benefits are what matters to the customer. If you can’t match the similarity in the scope of work with an information advantage about the customer and a competitive advantage in your offering, then the probability of winning will be low. The similarity is relevant in qualifying the lead as being worth learning more about. But by itself is not an indicator you should bid. Using it as a reason to bid is an indicator that your lead qualification and bid/no bid decision criteria are the same, and that can be an indicator that you are starting your pursuits at RFP release. The customer said we should bid. Customers do not always mean it. Sometimes they tell that to two companies in order to have three bids. Customers don’t care about your win rate, ROI, or proposal budget. They think everyone should bid. So if this is the only reason to bid, it’s not enough. You should respond with a lot of questions and gauge their willingness to discuss their needs. If the RFP is already out then it’s even less of an indicator they want you. Who did they talk to in order to know what to put into the RFP? If you can turn this contact into the start of a relationship, it can be a very good thing. If all they want is a bid, then not so much. It's similar to a proposal we've already written and we can just use that. No you can’t. Not if you care about win rate and ROI. And even if you try, you’re going to find out that reusing a previous proposal takes just as much effort, and sometimes more, to create an inferior new proposal. If you need to lowball the effort it takes to win the business, it’s a sign that the business is not worth pursuing. Lots of low probability bids do not translate into a high probability of winning. They translate into a certainty of a low win rate, which results in a low ROI. We can't win if we don't try. This is a total strawman. It goes along with “we need to bid more to win more.” You can lose more than just the bid by chasing low probability pursuits. The way to maximize your ROI is to skip them and invest in achieving a high win rate for pursuits that are worth chasing. Hear this is usually a sign that there aren’t enough strong leads in the pipeline. There's a better way to do it than what it says in the RFP. Then why didn’t you bring it up before the RFP was written? This is a sign that the pursuit started at RFP release. It’s also a huge risk if it’s a government bid or a commercial bid that requires compliance. A bid strategy based on non-compliance should be a no-bid indicator for these types of bids. We can price lower than they can. If your strategic plan is to be the lowest price provider and you are as good at it as Walmart, then this is a positive bid indicator. But for everyone else it’s a bad sign. Pricing competitively is a good tactic, but it’s a sketchy reason to bid. It indicates that you are relying on price instead of a competitive advantage. It also could indicate that you’re taking chances with your ability to perform, so that even if you win, you still lose. Bidding with no other differentiators or competitive advantages other than your price is an indicator that you started the pursuit at RFP release and are not thinking through your bid strategies. This may indicate a company that’s trying to make it up in volume, by submitting lots of low-priced proposals instead of bidding strategically. If this is the case, your ROI will suffer greatly. We have the right team. See #4. So what? A team must be more than a collection of impressive names. It must be a rationale. Why does your team matter? Why is it better than any alternatives? Relying on other companies to increase your win rate, which is what teaming is, is a questionable practice. If you question it and come up with answers that indicate it’s right for you, then those answers are what matter. Reliance on teaming as your primary differentiator is often an indicator that you’re also relying on experience as a differentiator. See #4 again. There is no incumbent. It’s good that there is no company currently doing the work with an information advantage. But that does not give you a competitive advantage. The lack of an incumbent may indicate a lead is worth exploring, but it’s not worth bidding unless you have a competitive advantage. See #6. This is an indicator that your qualification criteria and bid decision criteria are the same. Denial. Are you looking at these and saying “we don’t do that” based on some technicality or justifying that when you say it there’s a good reason? Do you say them so habitually that you don’t even notice you are saying them? Are you in denial about your organization? Do you have a strategic plan, lead qualification process, and bid decision process? If you do and you’re still saying these things, do you need to reengineer them? How important is ROI to you? It’s not that you should never say these things. Sometimes they are part of lead qualification. Sometimes they are a secondary point in a justification to bid. But if people question putting effort into a low probability bid and the first thing that someone says to justify it is on this list, it’s an indicator you have a problem. It’s an indicator that you are not achieving the best ROI you could be.

A lot of improvisation usually goes into proposal efforts. Proposal management is often an assignment to figure out how to do something while doing it. This can result in conflicts in expectations. Conflicts like these are best resolved before they manifest. Plus it’s good not to set yourself up for failure by going in with the wrong expectations. The list below is written from the proposal manager’s point of view. And it applies to consultants as well as employees. But you can also use it as an organization trying to figure out how to best win new business. Proposal development is something that the entire organization participates in. Expectations run in both directions. The more clarity the organization has regarding expectations, the better it will be at focusing on winning. Even if you can’t answer some of the questions below, you’ll be better off making the attempt and realizing where you have some issues to work through than trying to settle things as they come up. So, putting issues related to budget and pay rates aside, along with the specifics of a pursuit (like the deadline), here is a list of things I’d like to know before taking on a proposal management gig: See also: Proposal management Are you responsible for winning or just submitting what you’re given? If you’re responsible for winning, you need a say in everything that goes into what it will take to win right down to the bid/no bid decision. You also need to be involved in developing the pursuit strategies and the efforts that begin before the RFP is even released. If you’re just a part of a winning team, then you need to know, and only be responsible for, your part. This is an important discussion that should not go unspoken. And it should take place not only between the proposal manager and his or her supervisor, but between all of the executives because it relates to how the organization wins. Make sure everyone understands how the role will be defined before taking the job. Are you supposed to lead, write, run the process, or produce the document? Should you take ownership? And if so, of what? The document, the process, or the win? And how many hats can you reasonably be expected to wear? Should a leader also take a writing assignment? Or should the person responsible for winning also be responsible for editing? Where should a proposal manager focus and how should they prioritize things? This decision should be made while considering the impact on your win rate and ROI. Are expectations clear? You need to know what is expected of you, and your team needs to know what you expect of them. This applies to everyone involved. And it should not go unspoken. Most of the conflicts in proposal development come about as a result of differing expectations that go unresolved. Talk about expectations in both directions before you take the job. How will priority conflicts be handled? Proposals need contributions from people who have other things to do. How will that be managed? More important, who will be responsible for managing that? Usually it's just left for people to figure out. This creates all sorts of potential problems. It's hard to succeed in proposal management when you can't get the input you need. Before you take the job, it's good to know how priority conflicts will be handled. Who is responsible for achieving and validating RFP compliance? Are the writers, the proposal manager, or the review team responsible for validating that RFP compliance has been achieved? If the proposal is rejected or scores low because of a non-compliance, will that reflect on the proposal manager or someone else? This is important, because RFP compliance is not always objective. With strict page limitations, risks must be taken. Those decisions should be validated. But by who? Who is responsible if the proposal loses? Proposal development is a team sport. How will individuals be held accountable? You’d be surprised how much some companies' win rates are held back because their proposal teams are afraid of doing something wrong. Talk about what happens if you lose a proposal before you take the job. It will tell you a lot about the culture you're about to step into. Are you a process administrator or a process creator? Are you supposed to follow and implement a process (that exists), or are you supposed to (invent if necessary and) put in place a process? Are you supposed to invent and implement a process while producing a proposal? Or "between" proposals? And what does that mean? If you are supposed to implement a process, what about training (who is responsible for it and how will it be carried out?)? If you are just supposed to follow a process, what about the (inevitable) gaps? Who is responsible for the offering design? This is more complicated than you might think. If you are responsible for compliance, then what do you do about an offering that is non-compliant? Are those responsible for offering design also responsible for reading and understanding the RFP? What about the evaluation criteria and developing and implementing pursuit and pricing strategies? If you are responsible for winning, can you achieve that without being deeply involved in each of these? Are you responsible for production? Things need to move quickly at the end of a proposal. If you’re trying to process last-minute change iterations when you should be providing quality assurance, guess what you won’t be doing? If you are the bottleneck, then forget about accelerating the process by doing more than one thing at a time. Everything is a trade-off. But trade-offs should be made with everyone’s eyes open. See also “Are expectations clear?” above. Who is responsible for wording and editing? If you are responsible for editing, do you have the authority to make changes? If you are responsible for compliance or winning, do you have the authority to improve the wording? Or are you only responsible for submitting what you are given? Is there a contradiction between your goals and your authority? Do you really want to make subtle distinctions between proofreading and copyediting, which will inevitably lead to conflicts within the team? Settle who owns the words before you start. Are you responsible for identifying the staff to work on the proposal? This starts with the budget, because that limits the number of people involved. But once that’s settled, who is responsible for finding the right staff, deciding between employees and consultants, taking them away from other work, onboarding them to the proposal, and overseeing their performance once it starts? Since every proposal is always understaffed, it would be good to know. Are you responsible for filling gaps? No matter what your answers are to the above, there are going to be gaps. Sometimes it’s because an expectation went unfulfilled. Sometimes it’s because of a change. Or a curveball delivered by Murphy’s Law. Who is responsible for filling the gaps? In content, proposal staffing/assignments, process, reviews, information, etc.? Is the proposal manager responsible for getting the job done and the gap filler of last resort? Does the proposal manager have the authority to go with that responsibility? Who defines proposal quality? Is it the proposal manager, the review team, the executive sponsor, or someone else? Will whoever defines proposal quality also be responsible for articulating proposal quality criteria? Who is responsible for fulfillment? And how will proposal quality be validated? Not addressing this leads to the worst sin in proposal development. You want to know what the standards are, how they get defined, and how they are measured before you become responsible for meeting them. Are you responsible for review administration, leadership, and training? Are you responsible for planning proposal reviews? Defining the review process? Conducting reviews? Coordinating them? Will someone else be the review team leader? Who trains the reviewers? Defines the quality criteria they should validate? Since in many ways the review process often essentially is the proposal process and how proposal quality is defined, validated, and enforced, you don’t really know what you are doing until this is addressed. Who makes customer contacts? If additional information is needed, are you responsible for or permitted to pick up the phone and talk to the customer? If not you, then who? Who owns the customer relationship? Is the person responsible for making customer contact also responsible for obtaining the information needed to win? This becomes important when you have a time-critical need for information that only the customer can supply. What are your responsibilities for the teaming process? Who identifies teaming partners? Negotiates with them? Interacts with them? Makes sure they fulfill their proposal assignments? Replaces them when necessary? See also “Are expectations clear?” If the company always has teaming partners on its proposals, you will always be dependent on them. Who can compel proposal contributors to work late or on holidays? Sometimes it’s necessary. Who decides? And who has the authority to order food for people working late? As proposal manager, you will be responsible for meeting deadlines. No matter what.

For single users, you can browse and find information related to where you are in the pursuit process and what you are trying to do and learn how to do it better. You can get our process recommendations and use them to fill gaps in your existing process or implement a pursuit process from scratch. You can get immediate online training. You can improve your proposal writing by using our recipes. PropLIBRARY is so flexible because people arrive here at different points in time, play different roles, and have different needs. Everything from process documentation, articles, proposal recipes, and files to online training courses is cross-referenced so that from any key topic you can get to all of our content. PropLIBRARY is a tool for increasing your win rate and maximizing your ROI. For organizational development, we offer Corporate Subscriptions that bring all of the above to up to 50 users. A Corporate Subscription turns PropLIBRARY into an organization-wide process support and training tool. PropLIBRARY enables a company to implement internal certification and skills development programs. It enables small companies to compete against giants with a pursuit process just as sophisticated as theirs. It enables large companies to get everyone on the same page and continuously improve their win rate and ROI. Having a Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY gives you a competitive advantage over other organizations. For the most ambitious companies, we can customize the content and training and turn PropLIBRARY into an organizational development platform. We can convert lessons learned into just-in-time online training that you can painlessly embed into your pursuit process. We have shared hundreds of free content items covering every part of PropLIBRARY, which you may browse to assess the value for you and your organization. They explain the theory and foundation behind our recommendations. A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks the premium content that gives you all the details you need to immediately implement those recommendations and our MustWin Process. We can drill down into more detail if you share what your areas of interest are. Use the button below to start a conversation. Click here to ask us a question