Carl Dickson

An Executive Summary for a proposal is not really a summary at all. If you are the customer receiving a proposal, do you really want to read a redundant summary before reading the proposal? Or do you want to find out what you’re going to get if you accept the proposal? An Executive Summary is a tool to help the reader make their decision and the evaluator to score the proposal. Extra and unnecessary reading that gets in the way and tends to annoy customers. Writing an Executive Summary that is redundant but smaller is not helpful. Your Executive Summary should be written from the customer's perspective. To learn how to write your Executive Summary from the customer’s perspective you should learn how to read your proposal like the customer will. To write a proposal Executive Summary from the customer’s perspective, ask yourself: What is the first thing that a customer wants to see or find out from your proposal? What comes after that? And after that? And so on… What questions do they need answers to? The Executive Summary for a proposal should be written to provide quick answers to these questions so they don’t have to read your entire proposal to get them. One way that an Executive Summary is used is to tell the decision maker what they need to know about your proposal so that they don’t actually have to read the proposal. They may have staff read the fine print and evaluate the details, and then read just the Executive Summaries to confirm the recommendation made by their staff. Or they may read the Executive Summary to set context before reading the proposal to see if it supports your claims. Proposals are often scored and not read. An Executive Summary enables them to use your proposal as a reference to see the explanation for the things that interest them the most, without having to read the entire proposal cover to cover like a book. Your proposal may also need to cover a lot of detail that is routine, necessary, and not worth discussing or even thinking much about beyond whether it is present. Material like that does not need to be summarized. It just needs to be easy to find when they go looking for it. Summarizing it in the Executive Summary gets in the way of the reader discovering what matters about your proposal. From the customer’s perspective, the Executive Summary should answer these four questions. What am I going to get if I accept your proposal? See also: Executive Summary The first thing on the customer’s mind is often: What are you offering? Why should I care about it? Does it excite me? Is it worth reading further? They may need to see this before they bother to read your proposal. The very first sentence in your proposal should not be some valueless introduction letting the customer know that this is a proposal, but should instead be a statement about what they are going to get that differentiates your proposal. Why is your proposal my best alternative? Why should the customer accept your offer? They have alternatives. The customer always has alternatives to accepting your proposal. What makes a proposal their best alternative depends heavily on how they will make their decision. The Executive Summary should provide the information they need to reach a decision in your favor. If your proposal will be scored and not read, this means providing information that shows why you should receive the top score. Can I trust you to deliver as promised? If the customer likes what you’re offering, then the next thing they want to know is whether they can believe in your ability to deliver as promised. That’s when they ask questions like: Who are you? Do I know you? Are you qualified? And by “qualified,” they mean have you met the minimal requirements and completed any necessary paperwork for you to be able to do business with them. But what they really want to know is “Can I trust you?” And no, they won’t take your word for it, so they start wondering: Have you ever done it before? Do you have a successful and relevant history that I can check up on? Are your proposed approaches credible? Is the staff who will do the work capable and reliable? Do you have the resources required? Are your estimates credible? Your Executive Summary should establish your credibility for being able to deliver as promised. What do I have to do to get it? If the customer likes your offering and finds you credible, then they want to know what they have to do to get it: Can they afford it? Is it still the best alternative when cost is considered? What steps do they have to go through, including both yours and theirs? If they have a formal procurement process, then their ability to get what you are offering may depend on your ability to navigate their procurement process. Answering this may include providing the information they need to conduct their proposal evaluation. It is a good idea to understand their procurement process so that you can provide the information they need before they have to ask for it. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes If you get answers to these questions in the first few pages, then you already know what conclusion to reach. Sure, someone has to read the proposal and make sure everything that has to be in there is actually there and evaluate all the details compared to all the other bidders. If you don’t get these answers, you remain indecisive and unmotivated. If your Executive Summary is about what you want to say, instead of what the customer needs to hear, that’s where you will leave them.

You are not special, because your proposal is about giving the customer what they asked for. Just like everyone else. You might be a little better, maybe, but that’s not special. That’s just being the same only a little bit more. You may have claimed to be special and probably believe it, but who cares about that noise? You are not special, because you haven’t proposed giving the customer anything that’s special. You haven’t proposed anything they have to select you in order to get. What does it take to be special? Some real understanding is always a good start… Just not the kind that is simply claimed, that involves scraping from the customer’s website, or that is based solely on experience (as if merely being present results in any depth of understanding). Real understanding is shown by applying what you know to create an offering that is special. If you can’t do that, any understanding you think you have has no value to the customer. But you can still be special, even if you don’t know the customer well enough to show real understanding. Special means something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Special means rare. Special means something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Special means surprisingly effective or beneficial. If everyone does it or has it, it’s not special. You can pretty much count on everyone meeting the requirements of the RFP. Being RFP compliant is not special. It needs to be said, but it’s nothing to brag about. If you want to be special, try showing insight about things that matter or that could impact RFP compliance. Innovative ways of being RFP compliant that produce surprising benefits can be special. Doing things in an exceptional way that results in surprisingly better results, less risk, lower cost, or other benefits can be special. But they have to be extraordinary and not just a little better. They have to be things the customer will only get from you. Even when the RFP requires all vendors to do or deliver the exact same thing, you can still be special. If you can’t be special in what you do, be special in how you do it, or why you do it. Sometimes companies that are truly special are not recognized for it, simply because they failed to explain why their offering is special. Claims are not enough. Everyone claims to be special. The best way to be special See also: Technical approach The best way to be special is not for you to be special, but for the customer to get something from you that is special. Will they get better results, insight, fewer problems, better confidence, less effort, more reliability, etc.? Just keep in mind that, whatever it is, it has to be something they are not likely to get anywhere else for your offering to be special. In the Technical Approach, being special is usually achieved by being innovative. In the Management Plan being special is usually achieved by doing things more reliably. But the easiest way to achieve being special is to make sure that every single thing you say addresses why it matters. You can be special without being especially innovative by focusing less on what you do, and instead make how you do it more meaningful. Proposals about things that matter to the customer are always special. But only when they agree about what matters. Give the customer something special, and they have to select you in order to get it. Now you just have to hope that the way you are special is something they want. If it’s not, they’ll pick someone else who they think really is special. And if they can’t find anyone they think is special, they’ll just go with the lowest cost provider, or maybe someone just a little better.

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There is one thing that if mastered will enable you to win every proposal, no matter what. The good news is that it is a simple thing. The bad news is that the implications are deep and achieving it can be challenging. The one thing you need to do is to get the customer to want you to win more than any competing priority. Keep in mind that it’s just a proposal. Your customer is not going to go to jail or lose their job just so you can win. They have other priorities that matter more to them than whether you win. They also have alternatives that might better match their priorities. There is no such thing as magic words that win proposals. You can’t hypnotize them into going against their other priorities. Understanding the implications This means that winning proposals is about positioning what you offer to be more supportive of the customer’s priorities than any other alternative. Understanding this is the secret to winning. The implications of it tell you what you should do in order to win. Your chances of winning drop dramatically if you don’t understand the customer’s priorities. For starters, your chances of winning drop dramatically if you don’t understand the customer’s priorities. And you must understand the reality of their priorities, and not just their aspirations about them. Will they place a literal interpretation of their procurement process ahead of how you’d like them to consider your offering? Will they talk value but act on price? Is their priority to follow the RFP or is the RFP just a step along the way to a higher priority? When you sit down to write a proposal, everything is about positioning. Every single sentence makes a point, even if you don’t think about it. So what should the point of every single sentence be? Should it be “pick us?” “We’re the best?” “We’ll deliver the best value?” “We comply with everything in the RFP?” “Our strengths match your evaluation criteria?” You can’t answer what points to make unless you understand the customer’s priorities. What is the point? See also: Making proposals simple When you don’t know what points to make, you have three choices: 1. Guess and take a chance at being wrong 2. Water down your points so they can’t be wrong 3. Try to be everything to everybody None of those will win you every proposal. In fact, watering down your points and being everything to everybody is a great way to lose proposals. What most companies do to try to be the customer’s best alternative is to pile on the positive attributes. In reality, they usually pile on positive sounding claims that don’t pass the “So what?” test in the hope that something will stick. Their goal is to have more “positives” (whatever that is) than their competitors. If you list all the reasons why you think the customer should accept your proposal, you’ll find that some of them matter more than others. What you think matters doesn’t. It’s what the customer thinks that matters. So how would they weight them? Which ones are strengths, which ones will get ignored, and which will detract? You can guess. You can pile on, and hope some signal makes it through all that noise. Or you can write a proposal that reflects the customer’s priorities. When you get to the proposal, it’s probably too late to discover the customer’s priorities. But it’s not too late to think about them. Which do you think has the best chances of winning? Guessing about their priorities and writing a proposal based on that in order to show the customer why they should want your offering Piling on beneficial sounding fluff to somehow add up to the customer wanting your offering. Or not. It's not about you Great proposal writing is not about you. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Learn to write your proposals from the customer's perspective. Is a proposal similar to your priorities, or at least one that shows attention to them, with a few awkward spots the best? Or is looking through a list of sales slogans and finding a few gems the best? Do you read it all or do you skim? And if you skim, won’t the parts that grab your attention be the ones that reflect your priorities? And what about your boss and other stakeholders? Does it reflect their priorities? The real problem with a strategy of piling on beneficial sounding fluff (even if you don’t think your fluff is fluff) is that it is quite literally pointless. From one section/paragraph/sentence to the next, the point is opportunistic (that’s a nicer word than “random”). Basing your proposal on random, opportunistic points hurts your credibility and can make the customer question whether they can trust you, since it appears your priority is being self-promoting and you’re willing to say anything to win. When you base your proposal on making points that reflect the customer’s priorities, you create a more meaningful proposal in the eyes of the customer. Your points matter. They add up to more than a list of beneficial sounding fluff because they have meaning. Not only that, but you appear considerate. It shows you considered the customer in more than just a casual way, which makes you appear more trustworthy than vendors who didn’t. Can you discover them? Can you guess them? Can you be honest about them? Being honest about the customer’s priorities is perhaps the most challenging. How can you be honest about them, when the customer is often not honest to themselves about their priorities? When people think about and discuss their priorities, they often reflect their aspirations, and you can base your bid strategies on your customer's aspirations. But when people act, they do so based on their real priorities. Understand these and you will know what must be done to win every proposal.

This is a what a few days in the life of a proposal team can be like if instead of working with just an RFP and Microsoft Word, they use a performance support system. In her book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, Gloria Gery defined performance support systems as: An integrated electronic environment that is available to and easily accessible by each employee and is structured to provide immediate, individualized on-line access to the full range of information, software, guidance, advice and assistance, data, images, tools, and assessment and monitoring systems to permit job performance with minimal support and intervention by others. This makes a performance support system something very different from a workflow or automation tool. That’s okay, because unless you sell a commodity, proposal automation can do more harm than good. But a performance support system can enable your staff to produce better proposals. At least that’s been our experience in using the MustWin Performance Support Tool. We created it to bring together all of the content and training we’ve created at PropLIBRARY and make it part of the act of creating proposals. We’ve used it as an example below to provide the details necessary to visualize what preparing a proposal using a performance support system can be like. Walking through a typical proposal effort The Proposal Manager gets the go-ahead to start the proposal. Just like she usually does, she reads the RFP and begins creating a compliance matrix so that she can build a compliant outline for the proposal. When she’s done, she goes to the MustWin Performance Support Tool and clicks on the “Add Proposal” button and names the proposal. Then she starts entering the outline. It takes about 15 minutes to enter all the headings. When she’s done she can click on any outline item and have a place to plan the content of the proposal and enter instructions for the writers. Within the Mustwin Performance Support Tool, people can be “planners,” “writers,” or “reviewers.” So, the Proposal Manager needs to decide who will be involved in planning the content of the proposal. Will it be just her? Will she involve a few key people? Or will she give everybody access? Different companies have different needs at this stage. While she’s at it, she can also give the writers and reviewers their access. Now the Proposal Manager sends them email explaining what she wants the proposal content planners to do and when she needs them to complete it by. She likes to give people about 20% of the available schedule for content planning, so that she has a couple of days to review the plan and still have plenty of time to complete the writing. Making planning before you write a reality When the content planners click on the proposal in the MustWin Performance Support Tool, they see the outline and can select the items they are supposed to contribute to. If the Proposal Manager sets it up that way, that may be all they can see. When the content planners enter a proposal section, they’ll see seven topic headings covering key subject areas related to proposal planning. For example, “Win strategies: For identifying the points you need to prove, your differentiators, things to emphasize, and ways to maximize your evaluation score.” Within each of the topics they can enter instructions that cover not only what to write, but how it should be written, things that should be included, etc. There are six types of instructions that they can pick from. One type is called “Quality Criteria” and can be used to define the criteria that both the writers and reviewers will use to assess the quality of the proposal. There are filters that can be used to turn viewing of various types of instructions on or off, so that writers might focus on instructions, or when they are nearly finished only show the quality criteria so they can self-assess their work. Each person participating in content planning will go through their sections and add the various types of instructions across the seven topics in each section. This helps make sure that everything that should be addressed is included. When they enter the instructions, they can start fresh and say whatever needs to be said. Or they can click on an icon and look at the PropLIBRARY Recipe Library. There they’ll find hundreds of ideas for possible instructions. They can add them with a click of a button. Or they can customize the recipes based on the particular circumstances of this proposal. It only takes a few seconds to enter an instruction. Wrapping the plan with everything else needed for successful performance Proposal writers can see how much easier it will be to write... and they will feel less afraid of the reviews because the reviewers will be using the same instructions and quality criteria... Over the last decade we’ve published hundreds of articles related to guiding people toward writing better proposals. All of this material, including all of our online training courses, are available inside the MustWin Performance Support Tool. When you are in planning mode, you see guidance related to proposal content planning. When you are in writing mode, you see guidance related to carrying out proposal assignments and winning in writing. When you are in review mode, you see guidance related to proposal quality validation and how to be a better reviewer. If you are new to proposals, you can take a course targeted to what you need to do right then and there. One of the key goals of the system is to prevent people from getting stuck. When people get stuck and the deadline clock is ticking, some will procrastinate, some will work around the problem and leave a hole, and others might fake something to fill the hole. Do enough proposals and you’ll see it all. It’s much better to prevent people from getting stuck than to have to dig your way out of the hole. See also: MWPST (deprecated) Over the next few days, the content plan starts to fill up with instructions. Soon it gets to the point where people can take a step back and really see what will be going into each section and how it will be presented. If there are holes or issues, they can bring someone in to address them with an instruction for the writer before they get stuck. The writers can see how much easier it will be to write with all that guidance, and they will feel less afraid of the proposal review process because the reviewers will be using the same instructions and quality criteria to assess the proposal. When the instructions are complete, the Proposal Manager asks the reviewers to take a look at the plan. The review of the content plan can be even more important than the review of the draft. Once the content plan has been approved, it’s time to invite the writers in to get started. The writers take over They don’t have to struggle to come up with what they should write about. Now, as much as I enjoy designing a winning proposal by crafting the instructions, this is where things really get fun. The writers go to the proposal page in the MustWin Performance Support Tool. If they can, they load it in a browser on a second monitor. Then they open Microsoft Word. If you have one ready to go, they load the format template with your headers, footers, and heading styles. They stare at the blank page, but only for just a second. Then they look at the instructions that have been entered in the MustWin Performance Support Tool. They don’t have to struggle to come up with what they should write about, if the instructions are well crafted. They don’t have to wonder about what points they are supposed to make. They see what they are supposed to write about and how they are supposed to present it. The results of doing this are so much better than handing them the RFP and a section assignment. It can turn proposal writing into a process of elimination instead of a risky black hole. The proposal writers don’t even have to fear the reviewers, since the quality criteria enable them to self-assess by applying the same standards the reviewers will be applying. But this is reality, and things aren’t always perfect. What if an instruction is difficult to interpret or implement? If a writer doesn’t understand an instruction or even objects to it, they can click on the instruction and post a comment. They can get clarification, discuss an issue, and figure out how to move forward as a team. Even if they are all working remotely, no one is alone. While they are working, the writers can signal their progress by clicking a traffic light icon next to each instruction. They all start off red, and when they are complete they should be green. The data show up on the proposal outline as an average, showing you the overall progress toward completion. It’s self-reported, but it’s a far more detailed, reliable, and data-driven way of measuring progress than you’ve ever had before. Proposal quality validation that goes beyond opinion-based reviews Proposal reviews are not a fishing expedition. The proposal manager has more choices for managing the review process. Should she require “pens down” during the reviews? The MustWin Performance Support Tool makes it easier than ever to have “rolling” reviews that don’t bring the writing to a screeching halt. But if you think it’s best to call a halt while the reviewers perform their assessment, you can. Reviews using the MustWin Performance Support Tool are not a fishing expedition. They target whether the instructions were followed and the quality criteria fulfilled. This makes the quality of the instructions more important, but it also makes the review of the narrative much easier. The reviewers get the same traffic light icons that the writers get for measuring progress. On one screen/window they have the proposal in Microsoft Word. On the other, they have the MustWin Performance Support Tool. The reviewers use the traffic light icons to declare whether the instructions were followed and the quality criteria fulfilled. Click. Click. Click. When published, the review results show up on the proposal table of contents. Section by section you can see where the reviewers scored the sections red/yellow/green. If the reviewers see something they want to comment on or explain, they can enter comments under the instruction or quality criteria. And don’t forget, you can still have a classic paper-based review with document mark-up and a debrief meeting. The MustWin Performance Support Tool just gives you new options for new approaches. For example, you can segment your reviews and have as many as you’d like. For example, you could have one or two experts review the instructions in the “RFP compliance” or “Offering Design” topic, but have others review the instructions in the “Win Strategies” topic. You can stage those reviews for when they make the most sense and conduct them without bringing the writing to a halt. You could even have them all going simultaneously. Then later, when you are ready, you can still have a traditional document review if you want. Or not. You decide based on what works best for the nature of your offering, the circumstances of this bid, and your corporate culture. Oh, and if your reviewers need training or guidance, it’s right there. They can take a course or read one of the articles we’ve published on making your reviews more effective. The Proposal Manager can take advantage of our library as well. The entire Proposal Quality Validation methodology that we recommend is available to them to help make their decisions and plan the reviews. What comes after the writing and reviews are complete? With the last click to green you can confidently take the proposal into final production. Experienced proposal professionals and most honest reviewers will tell you that many review comments are difficult to take action on, sometimes contradict each other, or have other problems. Writers are often not sure what to do to resolve some comments. Some comments get ignored. Some comments should get ignored. Within the MustWin Performance Support Tool, writers can ask questions after a review. They can discuss a comment. They can ask for suggestions or examples. And get them. No one needs to be left hanging when time is of the essence. You can also choose to have follow-up reviews to see if you can move any yellows to green. And they can be as quick as opening the file, looking at the yellow items in the MustWin Performance Support Tool, and re-reading just that part. With the last click to green you can confidently take the proposal into final production.

Take a moment and ask yourself why you're interested in reducing the amount of proposal writing. It could be because you're out of time. Or have strict page limits. Or have other priorities and want to reduce the effort required by a proposal. This is where I'd normally jump in with an ROI calculation that shows that the impact on your win rate of doing a proposal well makes it mathematically worth it. However, today I'm going to skip that and take an unjudgmental look at what it takes to reduce the amount of proposal writing. See also: Making Proposals Simple How to do proposals The Wrong Way™ is a topic I love to write about. Because, let's be honest, sometimes the "best practices" won’t help you. They generally aren't applicable to adverse circumstances. And sometimes just simply getting something submitted is such a great challenge that going the extra distance to improve your chances of winning is not an option. That’s when you may have to do a proposal The Wrong Way™. Doing a proposal The Wrong Way™ can ruin your chances of winning. You have been warned. But it can also help you survive the experience. Can you make a shorter proposal without hurting your chances of winning? The length of what you write for your proposal only matters if it’s related to what it will take to win. Adding detail may or may not impact what it will take to win. The trick to winning a short proposal is to understand what it will take to win so that you can say only that and do it in the fewest words possible. Most people add detail when they aren't sure what the customer is looking for and just want to cover the bases. The points below are not about how to achieve the best presentation or maximize your chances of winning. That's what the rest of PropLIBRARY is for. These are for when your top priority is to do less proposal writing. As anyone who has had to cut a proposal down to reach an RFP-mandated page limit can tell you, it can take a stupidly huge amount of time to shorten a proposal that's too long. If you want to save time and resources, the trick is to shorten it on the first draft. And since you’re probably working with proposal contributors who are not professional writers, you need simple, easy techniques like these to help them achieve that. The following tips are useful, risky, and problematic, but also effective in the right circumstances: Don’t talk about anything the customer doesn’t care about. Don’t say what you want to say. Only say what the customer needs to hear to make their decision. I could stop right there because it's really all you need to know about proposal writing in general, but you’d probably find that annoying. Separate features, benefits, qualifications, and what you are offering. Normally proposals contain a lot of narrative. And in that narrative, we try to do a bunch of things all at once. We add or expand our sentences to introduce, inform, include, claim, prove, differentiate, explain, position, qualify, score, comply, and more all in the same narrative. Stop doing that because it expands the amount of writing. Separate the points you are trying to make from the details of your offering. Use theme statements under headings, call out boxes, subheadings, tables, or anything else. Create zones where the parts go so that you don't have to connect them all with transition words or make them "flow." It will help you be less wordy, while still making the points. Go for punchy over smooth. Only do one thing in each sentence. Quit trying to write the perfect sentence. Quit trying to combine things like features and benefits in the same sentence. You still need to address the benefits. But when you weave them in and throughout, you make the proposal wordier than it needs to be. You can even create proposal writing formulas for your paragraphs with each sentence having a single purpose. Quit talking around it and just say it. Simply state the facts, details, proof points, qualifications, and benefits. You don’t have to ease your way into them. Don't introduce. Don’t be indirect. Think of your entire proposal as a checklist instead of a document. Instead of engaging with your narrative like it's literature, enable the customer to process their decision like a checklist that's presented as paragraphs. Don’t try to tell a story. Every proposal tells a story, even if you don’t try to. So tell a story about how easy you are to work with by making your proposal checklist simple. Just don’t explain the story. Let it be told by the clarity and simplicity of what you submit. Let your story be revealed without telling it. As much as possible, group things. When you group them, you can remove a lot of connecting words. You can make one point that addresses all of them. For example, in Quality Control Plan, you might say “Here are all the ways we improve quality by increasing transparency:” and then give them a super tight, concise list. Or you might say “Things we do to address the RFP requirement:” and then just give them a list. Write in lists. Bullets may or may not save space, but writing in lists definitely does. Write a long semicolon-separated paragraph with nothing but details if you have to. Just don’t explain every item in your list. Don’t summarize. Summaries are redundant. Skip them. Telling them what you are going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you told them makes for long proposals, just like this sentence. If your proposal needs a summary, then it's not well organized or you wrote too much. If your proposal needs a summary, the customer probably doesn't want to read your proposal (even if it has a summary). Don’t write warm-ups. Don’t introduce by setting a context, stating some universal principle, describing some background, providing history, or otherwise saying anything other than what you offer or why it matters. Don’t write conclusions. Building to the finish in a proposal is a mistake. Make your point up front and then support it. Don’t feel like you need to put something at the end. If you made your point, then the evaluator got what they needed. They want you to stop. Seriously. They don't need you to close out with something more. They just want to be done and don’t need to read through a recitation or a conclusion that doesn’t add anything new and just gives them more to read before they are done. Just stop. Do you hear me? Once the point has been made, that’s all they need. Giving them more to read might just be counter-productive. Don’t feel like you're leaving them hanging. Don't put them through a long goodbye. Just stop already. Make points, then stop. Spend a moment thinking before typing. What point do you need to get across? Make the point. Prove it. Then stop writing. Graphics. Graphics may or may not take less effort and space. In the right circumstances, they can radically simplify. If a process has more than half a dozen steps, you can probably illustrate it in less space than you can describe in writing. Just don’t explain the graphic in your text. Simply say “Our process is shown in the exhibit.” Don't create graphics that require explaining in the text. Ever. Tables. Tables work best when you can take a bunch of items in your outline and collapse them into a table instead of using headings. Tables are also great for making sweeping pronouncements and applying them to lists of things like RFP requirements. Another great thing about tables is that you can often structure them so you don't even have to use complete sentences. Often just a few words for each item will do. Try planning your proposal around tables and see how much less writing you actually have to do. Delete all the promises. I have reduced the length of some of the proposals I’ve reviewed by pages, simply by deleting all those statements about the company's commitment, values, dedication, or other expression of intent that don't actually say what the company is going to do. Don't promise things. Just do them. While you’re at it, simply delete any sentence that starts with “We understand” because all it's probably going to show is that you know how to copy and paste. Real understanding would show that you know how to deliver the results they are looking for and wouldn’t need to use the word “understand” at all to communicate that you deeply understand. Oh, and delete all those unsubstantiated claims too. Better yet, don’t write them in the first place. Make fewer claims. Focus on proof points. Remember, the goal is not to write a long proposal and then edit it down to a concise proposal. The goal is to write it that way from the first draft. Think twice, write once. Then go home.

It sounds so obvious that few companies bother to define it. But if you want to maximize your win rate, it’s worth giving some attention to how you define proposal success. You can't intentionally seek proposal success or consistently achieve it if you're just guessing at what it is. Let's start by looking at some common ways that people try to define proposal success. See also: Proposal quality validation Anything that wins! During the proposal phase you haven't won or lost, so it doesn't help you any to use that to define success for the proposal you are working on now. On time submission. Your goal should not be to simply submit the proposal. A late submission might be a loss, but an on-time submission does not mean you will win. Even if all your proposals are submitted on time, you could still lose them all. A defect free proposal. Being free of defects doesn't mean your proposal is better than all of the other ones submitted. RFP compliance. Being RFP compliant may keep you from losing before your proposal even gets read. But it doesn't make you more competitive than the other companies that are also RFP compliant. Proposal success is also not determined by the amount of effort put into it, how bad you want to win, how much you like it, whether it "sounds good," the most experienced person’s opinion, what the sales lead thinks, or even what makes The Powers That Be in your own company happy. So just what the heck in the world is it? Defining proposal success If you submit a proposal that to the best of your knowledge reflects all the attributes of a winning proposal, you have done everything you can to achieve success. You just better make sure that the best of your knowledge reflects the way the customer thinks, evaluates, and decides. The way we like to say it is that what defines proposal success is whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win. Success comes when you: Conduct a reliable discover phase that determines what it will take to win. Create a feedback loop that factors past customers' award decisions into future determinations of what it will take to win. Measure your win rate and the impact of the things you do to change it. If you leave "what it will take to win" undefined, or leave it up to opinion, you are just gambling. If you set your sales process up so that it is driven by opinion, you will not be competitive against companies that put more thought into it than that. If your bid/no bid process, pursuit strategy, offering design, proposal writing, and proposal reviews are all driven by opinion, your win rate will suffer. You may have great staff, but they will lose to the staff at another company who consistently put their energies into determining what it will take to win from the customer’s perspective, instead of basing their proposal on their opinions. If you pursue proposal quality by holding reviews that are basically subjective opinion-fests, you should take note. You could do so much better. Ensuring proposal success To accomplish what it will take to win, you need to identify the attributes that make up what it will take to win, articulate them as quality criteria, and then assess the quality of your proposal by comparing it to those attributes. To do this, your quality criteria need to be reliable. If they don't accurately reflect what it will take to win, they can actually become counter-productive. Your pursuit should start by researching what it will take to win. Sales should not just be about having “a relationship” with the customer and finding out whatever you can about the pursuit. Sales should use relationship marketing and intelligence gathering to discover what it will take to win. All the deliverables and progress reviews for the sales process should build toward being able to articulate this in the ways needed to win the proposal. They provide the input you need to create valid proposal quality criteria. Then you need a review process that ensures your quality criteria are reliable by making sure that: Everyone is on the same page and that how you have defined what it will take to win reflects the best knowledge available throughout your entire organization. The quality criteria themselves are reviewed and approved for use based on what it will take to win. This should include verifying that how you define what it will take to win is based on how the customer will reach their decision, instead of how you think they should reach it. When you do this, you define proposal success in a way that everyone can use to ensure their role contributes to achieving it. That is something that just basing your proposals on best efforts and opinions won’t do for you. How defining proposal success this way produces a better win rate With this definition of proposal success, the people working on the proposal know what they need to accomplish. Before the proposal starts they need to discover what it will take to win. After it starts, what it will take to win should be turned into quality criteria so that the proposal writers can create a proposal based on what it will take to win. And to provide quality assurance, the proposal reviews should use the same quality criteria to determine whether the writers achieved what it will take to win.

I realized today when I was working on the specifications to support pre-RFP opportunity pursuit and capture, that nearly all of the functionality could be achieved right now using the current version of the MustWin Performance Support Tool. Sure, it would lack some of the automagic streamlining we're planning, but the core of what you need to use it during the pre-RFP phase is already there. I love it when things work out like that. It confirms that we're on the right track with how we've designed the architecture. Because the plan is to stick as close to the same database structure as possible and to use the same instruction-based information model, you can do much of what we’re working on right now. You’ll just have to do some things manually and it will require more clicks than it will when we officially add the pre-RFP support. Before we get into features, functionalities, and steps, let’s start with some requirements analysis. What do we need in order to smooth the transition from sales and business development into proposal writing? We need: Containers for the information gathered To provide guidance regarding what information to gather A mechanism for tracking progress and ensuring the right information has been collected To address the bid/no bid decision Within the paper-based MustWin Process, we recommend Readiness Reviews. So we definitely want the new features to support that, as well as be flexible enough to support the myriad gate reviews and pursuit processes already in use at companies. The first step is to add a “proposal.” Maybe we’ll rename that to a “pursuit.” But functionally it doesn’t matter. The next step is to create your “outline.” An outline item is really just a container. The outline might contain an item for each Readiness Review or gate in your process. Plus any other topics or containers you want to have. In essence, what you're doing is setting up the structure of your capture plan, along with any pre-RFP reviews and bid/no bid meetings. Try numbering your outline as decimals less than one (0.x). That way, they won’t conflict with the future proposal outline and you’ll end up able to have your pre-RFP information right next to your proposal information when the RFP is released. Our plan is to automate creating the pre-RFP outline, and enable you to save and reuse your own. Here is a sample outline to try. When you enter an outline item, you’ll see the topics we use in Proposal Content Planning. Not all of them are relevant to pre-RFP pursuit, so we’ll be changing them. For now, some of them will come in handy and the rest you can ignore. Within the relevant topics, you’ll want to add instructions and questions for your sales or business development staff to seek answers to. You can use the current instruction adding functionality to do this. We’ll be creating a default list of off-the-shelf questions that will instantly import. And it will be customizable. But for now you can manually enter the questions from the Readiness Review methodology or from our Master Proposal Startup Information Checklist. If you structure your pre-RFP pursuit around answering questions, the way we like to do, then your sales and business development staff can answer the questions by using the discussion feature. Every instruction item added automatically comes with a discussion area. You can use this to plan, review, and clarify your answers as you work to develop an information advantage ahead of the RFP release. When the RFP is finally released and it’s time to start the proposal, you’ll need to convert the information you gathered into input for the Proposal Content Plan. This will involve creating an RFP compliance matrix in order to develop your proposal outline and adding it in the MWPST. Once the outline is ready, you’ll need to manually copy and paste from your pre-RFP outline items to the final proposal outline and articulate things as instructions and quality criteria for the proposal writers. The bulk of the coding we have to do for pre-RFP support will be to streamline this, because we should be able to greatly reduce the number of clicks that are currently involved. The result will be that all of the customer, opportunity, competitive, and other intelligence you gather, along with the work that you do to design your offering and develop your win strategies, will all be in a place where it will be relatively easy to convert it into Proposal Content Plan instructions and quality criteria. Doing this will ensure that your information advantage gets translated into a better proposal with a competitive advantage. Down the road (don’t ask me when, but I'm expecting it to be less than six months), it will become even easier. You’ll click a button to start a new pursuit, set some configuration options, and then go straight into tweaking the questions and instructions that will already be there for your sales/business development staff. It will be easy to enter and build the information you gather. And then at RFP release, you’ll easily map what you’ve got to the Proposal Outline, maybe with some drag and drop. Then, when you are doing your Proposal Content Planning, you’ll have all of your pre-RFP intelligence right there in each section where it’s relevant so that you can turn it into instructions and quality criteria. It will be easier than I’ve ever seen this done before. But you don’t have to wait. You can do it all right now. We didn’t realize that it would work out that way when we built the Proposal Content Planning tool, but we’re glad it did.

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 processes are procedure-driven. Their focus is on completing tasks and steps. When we break down a major effort, we tend to think about the things "we need to do" to complete it. However, it is better to break things down by what must be accomplished instead of what you think people should do. It's a bad sign when a process description brags about how many steps it has. Each extra step adds to the likelihood that it will break in practice and the difficulty in gaining process acceptance. And this is what we see in the proposal process at most companies. They are task oriented and frequently ignored when the task descriptions don't fit the circumstances of the bid. See also: Successful process implementation I've had great success in challenging environments by implementing goal-driven processes instead of procedure-driven processes. The entire MustWin Process is organized around accomplishing goals instead of following steps or procedures. What is a goal-driven proposal process? A goal-driven process gives following procedural steps a lower priority than fulfilling the goals. Let that sink in. There is often more than one way to accomplish something. The steps in the process are not important. It's the accomplishments that are important. In a goal-driven process, the point is to accomplish the goals that lead to winning, and never just to complete a task or pass a milestone. In a goal-driven process, you have to understand how a task leads to accomplishing something. Why you do things is more important than which way you do them. Why is a goal-driven process better? A goal-driven process not only accelerates people's ability to accomplish the things needed to win, it also increases the reliability of achieving them. Proposal processes tend to be fragile because RFPs can be very different from each other. The result is that people interpret the proposal process rather than follow it with precision. When goals are more important than procedures, people can follow the process every time and still accomplish the right things, even when they have to do things in an unorthodox manner. The process becomes more reliable and doesn't break, even if the procedures followed previously are not applicable because of a difference in the current RFP. Accomplishing the goal is more important than how you did it. Earning process acceptance 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. If you have mapped out procedures and the use of resources in a way that makes achieving their goals easier, most people will gladly adopt them. This changes the perception of the process from being a mandated burden into becoming an asset. Once someone accepts a goal, if you offer them a faster, more reliable way to achieve it, people tend to readily accept it. Defining your goals The most important part is how you define the goals. You shouldn't try to simply convert every step in your process to use goal-language. And you can't leave them at too high of a level. "Writing a proposal" is not a good goal because it can lead to creating an ordinary proposal. A better goal would be "Writing a proposal that fulfills the instructions and quality criteria of the Proposal Content Plan." A goal like this requires: Not only having a Proposal Content Plan, but having one with enough detail that it provides the instructions and quality criteria that writers need. Following your content plan after it is written. This is how you get people to effectively plan before they write, with or without a top-level mandate. Well-written goals, once accepted, lead people to accomplish the things needed to win. It is best to only have a handful of goals, so that how they fit together and add up to what it will take to win remains memorable. Most proposals have startup, outlining/planning, writing, review, production, and submission phases. Identifying what your goal is for each of these helps those involved know what to accomplish in each phase. When you do this successfully, the goals imply what people must do in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Any steps or procedures that you have worked out over time become easier to understand because they help achieve the goals. You should also make all of your goals require success from the previous goal. With procedures, people are tempted to take shortcuts. However, if the goal of a review is to assess whether the proposal fulfills the content plan, you can't skip the step of creating a content plan before you start writing. This is how the goals encourage people to do the things needed to create a winning proposal. When they are interconnected, you can't take shortcuts. The proposal process also becomes more reliable, because it is easier to hold people accountable for accomplishing goals than it is to hold them accountable for tasks or following procedures. Implementation and getting process buy-in Instead of implementing your process as a procedural mandate and trying to compel or cajole people into following it, you can implement the proposal process as a set of goals and then offer 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 another reason why you only want a handful of them. Ideally, you want everyone to be able to memorize them. If you write your goals to accomplish things and make it so that they can't shortcuts, it's easier to get everyone to agree that the goals are the right goals. You can even offer a minimization challenge. Offer to delete any goal that isn't absolutely necessary for creating a winning proposal. If they can't, then all the goals are necessary and you are closer to getting their buy-in. Instead of getting everyone to agree to The Process and all of its steps, you can start 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.