Carl Dickson

The skills you need on your proposal team depend on the expectations of your company and the nature of what you are offering. What you need to write a proposal for complex services and unique solutions is different from what you need for engineering, which also is different from what you need for construction, product proposals, operations and maintenance, logistics, etc. Here’s what I like to have in the people on my proposal teams, which are mostly mid to high value US Government proposals, with some state and local proposals. See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques I need people who can read an RFP. The proposals I do are measured by what’s in the RFP. People who need someone else to parse the RFP for them are at a disadvantage. Sometimes it’s okay if they just read the statement of work and respond to it point by point. But sometimes responding to an RFP can be a lot more complicated than that. And that’s when I need something more than just the ability to read the RFP. I want people who understand how a cross-reference matrix works. I don’t need them to build the cross-reference matrix or even know how to build it. But I do need them to understand how to integrate different sets of requirements into a single written response. For example, can they hold the instructions, the evaluation criteria, and the performance requirements, along with any customer and competitive intelligence, in their heads all at the same time and write a single, cohesive response? A team of people who can do that can achieve far more than a proposal team with only a chosen few who get it. When people understand the cross-referencing involved in proposal writing, they’ll be able to figure what to do with the input you give them regarding what it will take to win in writing. This is key. It’s not just that proposal cross-referencing is an important skill. It is a skill that opens up all the other skills related to winning in writing, like writing from the customer's perspective instead of your own. All the other skills and considerations just get factored in as something else to cross-reference. I routinely guide people who have never done this through their contributions to the proposal, but the people who do the best proposal writing are the ones who show up already understanding this. People who rely solely on the proposal manager to cross-reference everything for them lack a critical understanding of what’s involved in successful proposal writing. It also streamlines things if I can trust writers to take a section down to a more granular level on their own. Some RFPs are so straightforward that they really don’t need a cross-reference matrix. But they still need people who understand them to make sure what gets written addresses everything it should. Give me someone who understands how to cross-reference everything that goes into winning a proposal, and then when I create the cross-reference matrix and we work on the proposal content plan, they’ll understand how it all fits together. Their expectations for what’s involved in proposal writing will better match mine (and the proposal reviewers and most importantly the customer’s proposal evaluators). People who show up expecting to be spoon-fed what to write so they can write it and get back to what they were previously doing are literally doing the least they possibly can to help the proposal win. When people who show up not knowing what to expect, I am willing to invest in explaining everything today so they can make better contributions on future proposals. Usually, the choices are limited and we work with the resources made available to us and it feels like you are working for the underdog. When I have a team that understands how to cross-reference everything that will go into winning the proposal, it makes me excited about the prospects for winning. One thing I don’t care about is proposal certifications. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I prefer demonstratable talent over documented certification. HR loves them because they are easy to check in the hiring process. And people want to please HR. However, the knowledge and skills required to produce proposals are really pretty basic. What is advanced is the depth of understanding and insight into how to apply that knowledge and skills required to win proposals, and certification doesn’t deliver that if the talent wasn’t already there. A proposal certification may improve awareness, but it does not deliver the ability to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. I want a team of people with the talent for winning in writing. In my experience this talent has more to do with the individual’s sense of perspective and does not correlate at all with proposal certifications. If those on the team lack knowledge about proposal writing I can happily give them that. But if they lack perspective, it can be like pulling teeth. It doesn’t help that everyone thinks they have perspective — until you ask them to prove it by writing from the customer’s perspective. Some won’t understand what you are asking for and never will. And some will take naturally to it, even though they lack knowledge and experience, and are not certified. I could write a list with hundreds of skills and techniques that are good to have during proposals. But you will never get them all and teams always have gaps. All I need to be happy is a team of people who understand proposal cross-referencing and have a wide sense of perspective. Give me that and we can fill in any other gaps on our way to winning proposal after proposal.

This is an example of four different approaches you can take to learning about proposal writing from the customer’s perspective. What you see also applies to our other training topics like improving proposal quality and proposal communications and expectations. You can see how our training scales from immediate solutions to challenges to complete process guidance to continuous improvement programs. Click here for more details on how the training works. See also: Enterprise training topics Learn about proposal writing from the customer’s perspective. One session. Quick learning. Leaves you with a new awareness that will impact your proposal writing. Price of one learning session: $1200. You can have as many people listening in on the session as you need. Use this approach to address a key challenge quickly and inexpensively. Develop your team's skills at writing from the customer’s perspective. One learning session plus one practice session. Leaves you knowing how to apply what you’ve learned. Price of one learning session ($1200) and one practice session ($1800): $3000. You can have as many people participating as you need. Use this approach where you want skills development in addition to awareness. Train your organization to collect the right input and use it to write from the customer’s perspective. One session to learn about creating and using proposal input forms, one session on writing from the customer’s perspective, and one practice session. What you’ll learn is that writing from the customer’s perspective requires an understanding of the customer’s perspective. Price of two learning and one practice sessions: $4200. You can’t just make it up, you have to go get the input you need. Learning how to collect what you need from the people who have customer contacts is a necessary part of writing from the customer’s perspective. Combine the three sessions and your people will see how that plays out and what to do about it. Train your organization in the process of collecting the right input, using it to write from the customer’s perspective, and validating that people didn’t slip back into old habits. One session to learn about creating and using proposal input forms, one practice session to tailor proposal input forms to your particular needs, one session to learn about using that input to write from the customer’s perspective, and one session to practice writing from the customer’s perspective. Price of four combined sessions: $6000. Use this approach when you want to institutionalize writing from the customer’s perspective in a way that incorporates it into your proposal process. Remember, writing from the customer's perspective is only one of dozens of possible topics. Not only can each be taught in isolation or scaled up like the example above, but topics can also be combined to broaden the coverage of the training. Continuous win rate improvement You can also change how the training rolls out over time, because of how flexible the deployment model is. For example, you could: Do one or two proposal writing topics a week for a month in preparation for an RFP release. Do a single proposal writing topic with the practice session once per month for a year and have continuous skills improvement. Do a single proposal process topic each month for a year and have meaningful continuous process improvement. Repeat it the following year and revisit topics to improve them even more. You could use a similar approach to roll out your proposal process, starting from scratch or improving what you have as a starting point. Combine a few key proposal quality topics into an intensive series over a week to prepare review teams to do a better, less subjective job of proposal review for a critical must win. Start by asking yourself what challenges you need to address over what period of time. Then scale the training to fit what you are trying to accomplish. You can also scale the depth according to your budget, simply by how many sessions you select.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Proposal quality training topics See also: Enterprise training topics It takes more than just asking people to review a proposal to achieve quality. It takes more than just a single review to achieve proposal quality. These course topics take you on a deep dive into what it really takes to achieve proposal quality and the options you have to build quality into your proposals. 4.1) Defining quality and quality criteria. With all the attention given to measuring performance, it’s hard to believe that most proposal reviews are completely subjective, without even having a written definition for what proposal quality is. If you can’t do that, you can’t possibly be measuring proposal quality. This topic starts by defining proposal quality and then showing you how to use written quality criteria to achieve it. Add in an exercise review session and we’ll help you tailor our standard proposal quality criteria to solve your challenges and help you win your proposals. 4.2) 10 different ways to conduct proposal reviews. There are more ways to review proposals than most people realize. There are more ways to review a proposal than sitting around a table and asking people their opinions, or asking them to comment on your files. Should you use forms? Should you hold your reviews at milestones? Should they be highly structured or loosely structured? Should everyone be colocated or are remote reviews okay? What instructions should you give your review teams? This session will address all these topics and more. Add in an exercise review session and you can tailor the forms we use during reviews to meet your needs. 4.3) Proposal quality validation instead of draft reviews. Proposal quality validation requires defining the things you want your reviewers to assess. Proposal quality validation requires organizing the reviews around what you need to validate instead of days on a calendar. Proposal quality validation is a methodology for assessing proposal quality and not just simply collecting opinions. It is the methodology we created for the MustWin Process. Select this topic and we’ll teach it to you. Add in an exercise review session and we’ll help you tailor the materials you’ll need to implement it so you can get started immediately. 4.4) Proposal review leadership and logistics. If you want quality reviews, they should be led by someone who, separate from the proposal manager, manages the logistics and trains the reviewers. Quality management is separate from project management for good reasons. In order to achieve something similar with your proposals, you’ll need training for your review team. This session can be used to train your review team or as a train-the-trainer session to train your review team leadership. Add an exercise review session and together we’ll tailor the review planning documents that you’ll be able to use to guide your efforts.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage of a topic, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could be a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Adding in the exercise session for proposal writing is even more important to encourage skills development and not just awareness. Training Topics See also: Enterprise training topics 2.1) Good vs. great proposal writing. Good proposal writing loses to great proposal writing every time. In this session you'll learn how to increase the competitiveness of your proposal writing. Add in an exercise review session and your writers will practice how to get from good to great with their proposal writing. 2.2) Writing using the words in the RFP. To maximize your win probability, you need to use the language of the RFP, since that is what the evaluators will be looking for. It can be challenging for people to write using someone else’s words. This session will explain how to use the words from the RFP to optimize your proposal’s chances of winning. Add an exercise review session and your writers will get valuable practice and feedback. 2.3) Fixing bad proposal writing habits. When we review proposals, we see the same problems over and over. A lot of people have picked up bad habits like unsubstantiated claims, patronizing the customer, telling the customer about themselves, talking about your commitment instead of what you will do, claiming instead of proving, stating universal truths that don’t differentiate your offering, and more. In this session we’ll discuss bad proposal writing habits and how they weaken your proposals. Add an exercise review session and your writers will gain experience recognizing and correcting their bad habits. 2.4) Writing from the customer’s perspective. How do you write your proposals based on what the customer is looking for, instead of what you want to say? This starts with learning how to see your proposal through your customer’s eyes. Proposals shouldn’t be about you. They should be about how the customer will be better off if they accept your proposal. Adding an exercise review is even more important for this topic, because it requires writing from someone else's perspective and this does not come naturally. 2.5) Refreshing your proposal writing techniques. This session is for both proposal writer newcomers and experienced proposal writers who want to improve their skills. It covers techniques like how to cross reference everything and use that to drive sentence construction, how to exceed RFP compliance, the right way to demonstrate understanding, proof instead of claims, and how proposal writing changes based on what it will take to win. Add in an exercise session to practice what you learn so that you'll be ready to apply it all on your next proposal. 2.6) Everything I needed to know about proposal writing, I learned from writing the introduction paragraph. A proposal introduction paragraph should provide a thesis that makes the rest of the section easier to write. If you can write a great introduction paragraph, you can write a great proposal. But writing a great introduction paragraph is harder than you might think it is. It requires all of the proposal writing skills and techniques to come together into a cohesive whole. This session is about combining everything that you know about proposal writing into the paragraph that becomes the section that becomes the proposal. Add in an exercise review session because you'll definitely need the practice and the feedback will directly impact your future proposal writing.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Defining and communicating proposal expectations Most proposal issues have at their root the fact that we have to work with other people, with different needs, agendas, and expectations. We come together for a proposal and bring our expectations. When those expectations go unfulfilled or conflict, problems result. And those problems ultimately hurt your win rate. This course provides a structured approach to define and communicate proposal expectations so that we can work more smoothly together and maximize our win rate. See also: Enterprise training topics The presentation sessions below will look at expectations during each phase of proposal activity. Because expectations flow in all directions, it involves considering the expectations of all proposal stakeholders. In addition to helping you to prevent disasters due to expectation mismatches, this course will enable you to reduce friction, improve teamwork, ensure participants better understand how to make their contributions, and improve your win rate. This course is for companies with RFP-based proposals large enough to require a team of people to contribute. It is equally relevant to large government contractors as it is to small businesses trying to make the leap from one person who's done all of their proposals to an environment with multiple contributors. For each of the presentation topics below, you can also add a corresponding exercise review session where you will tailor our expectations matrix to match your environment and create a tool that people can reference to understand expectations throughout the process and better work together on winning. List of proposal expectation training topics to choose from: 3.1) Expectations during proposal startup 3.2) Expectations during proposal content planning 3.3) Expectations during proposal writing 3.4) Expectations during proposal reviews 3.5) Expectations during final production and submission

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. For more information on how our mix and match course topics work and registration, click here. Below is a list of topics related to the proposal process that you can use to build your process or improve an existing one. You can mix and match these with other course topics to solve the specific challenges that you are facing. You can write down the topic number and heading if you want to remember your picks and send them to us or discuss them with us by clicking the buttons below. Training Topics See also: Enterprise training topics 1.1) Starting your proposals with the input you need. In this session we’ll discuss what information you need to write a winning proposal and explain how to use proposal input forms to assess whether you’ve got it. You’ll never have all the information you’d like to have, but by quickly figuring out what you do have to work to with, you can build your proposal strategies around it. Add an exercise review session and we’ll end the first session with a sample set of proposal input forms that your staff can customize and we’ll review them together in the second session to make sure you are ready to implement them. 1.2) Implementing a goal driven proposal process. The proposal process should not be about the steps. It should be about accomplishing goals. When the goals are clear, the procedures can be quite flexible. In this session we’ll throw away the flow chart and replace the proposal process with a series of goals. When you combine the goals with your procedures for doing things, you’ll change the proposal process from an imposition into something that helps people achieve their goals. Add in an exercise review session and you can map the goals to how you are currently doing things and get feedback to help reposition how you approach your proposals. 1.3) Modular communication templates. If you have a mature proposal process, you can use our modular approach to communication templates to improve performance by delivering the right information before, during, and after each activity. If you don’t have a mature proposal process, you can use our modular approach to communication templates to fill the gap by coordinating all of the activity and work as effectively as if you had a mature process. Add in an exercise review session and you can tailor the templates we’ll provide and then get our feedback prior to implementation. 1.4) Alternative proposal reuse strategies. Recycling narratives is far more expensive than people realize and has the potential to do far more harm than good. But there are other reuse strategies that can provide inspiration and acceleration for your proposals. In this session, we’ll cover three: Proposal Recipes, Content Plan Libraries, and Inspiration Libraries. Add in an exercise review session and you can experiment with all three, get feedback, and better decide which approach is best for your company.

Over the years we have turned some of the most important content on PropLIBRARY into training materials. Only instead of combining all that content into lengthy courses, we’ve kept them modular so that we can mix and match as necessary to solve your particular challenges. For full coverage, you can combine topics and make a nice, long, comprehensive course covering the topics. To quickly address a challenge you face, you could choose a single topic and focus like a laser on it. Or you could pick something in between. You decide. In person or remote See also: Enterprise training topics Before the pandemic, in person training was already in decline because it is more expensive. All of the course topics below can be taken remotely. If you want training in person, we will be happy to give you a quote for that. Each session is 1-1.5 hours followed by up to a half-hour of Q&A, for a total of two hours. Ready to implement We have also set things up so that the training delivers tangible benefits. For each topic, you can choose whether to include a corresponding exercise session. When you do, that topic will be taught in two parts. One is the presentation, which will end with an exercise assignment, and the next session will be a review of the completed exercises so that you get feedback. The exercises for our process related topics involve creating or tailoring the process artifacts needed to implement what you have learned. The exercises for our winning in writing related topics involve written exercises to practice what you have learned and develop your skills. Some of the other topics involve tailoring checklists, forms, or other items that will help with implementation and ensure understanding of how to apply what you’ve learned. However, you decide which topics you want exercises to go with. If you just want discussion and Q&A, you can skip the exercises. It all depends on what challenges you are facing and what your goals are. Our approach is extremely flexible so that it adapts to you instead of the other way around. Flexible scheduling Scheduling is flexible as well. Modules can be combined back to back for a few long days, or spread out on the calendar. You can have a couple of sessions per week, or one per week until they are done. You could even do one a month all year long for continuous improvement. We find a session or two per week to be a pace that works for most companies with billable staff. Dates and times will be at our mutual convenience. If you prefer mornings, lunch-time, or even evenings we can probably find a way to accommodate your preferences. Normally we can get you on the schedule with 2-4 weeks' notice. Easy registration Use the online contact buttons below or set up a date/time for a call and we'll walk you through it. Then we can send you an invoice so you can pay by card, you can send us a purchase order, or we can work something else out. It will help if you already select the topics from the list below and whether you want the corresponding exercise sessions. But if you're not sure which best meet your needs we can discuss it. We've made it easy to calculate the total cost. We don't count heads. You can have as many people participating as you'd like. To manage course time, if you have more than a handful of people participating in an exercise session, we may have to aggregate responses when providing feedback instead of addressing every individual response. Topic presentation sessions are $1200 and exercise review sessions are $1800. We'll confirm the total with you to make sure there are no surprises. PropLIBRARY Subscribers get a $100 discount for each session they take. With just three topics including exercise sessions, you can save more than a subscription costs!

AI won’t enable you to win a proposal simply by asking the AI to create it for you. But it can give you ideas that could give you a competitive edge. First you have to know what to ask for. And the way you figure that out using AI is remarkably similar to following the same process you already use, only including AI as a participant. AI will not replace the process, it will just become a contributor instead of a replacement. AI makes it even more important to have an effective process in place, instead of allowing you to skip all that process stuff. Those who have a strong process that includes AI contributions will have an overwhelming advantage over those who don’t, even if they use AI. Here are five examples of how you can include AI as a contributor during proposal content planning: Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say. You are aware of things that require reading between the lines of the RFP and of other things that simply aren’t published anywhere. An AI is not aware of these things. In addition human SMEs usually struggle at combining all the different topics that need to be incorporated into proposal writing. Instead of using AI to write the proposal, try using it to help you write the content plan. Ask it to pretend it is helping someone else write a proposal and then ask it what instructions it would provide to someone writing a proposal based on the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, and SOW. Pull out specific fragments from the RFP and consider them one at a time for the best results. Then take any intelligence you have about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, as well as your win strategies and insights, and ask it to update its recommendations based on them. Don’t expect to use the list of recommendations directly. Cherry-pick it’s suggestions, just like you would from a human contributor, to create the most effective content plan possible. Provide instructions to guide others to figure out what to offer or say. If the RFP is for a solution, requires the bidder to figure out what to offer, or does not specify exactly what to propose, then you will need to guide the proposal writers to not only figure out what to offer, but how to present it based on the RFP and the evaluation process. AI can’t figure this out for you. And even if it could, you wouldn’t want it to, since winning the proposal requires a differentiated offering at the price to win based on as much unpublished information as possible. But what AI can do is help you think of questions to ask your SMEs that will guide them to do these things. AI can also think of things the offering and your approaches should include and things about them that matter. AI can take your input regarding the competitive environment or what your competitors will likely offer and make recommendations for things that are better. Using AI this way can greatly accelerate your offering design efforts. Remember to coach the AI to articulate things as instructions so that it provides a set of specifications for the next steps after the content plan. These steps may be human led, or may also involve AI some more. An AI will do better proposal writing taking a content plan as input than it will just taking the RFP as input. Provide the details to the writers. If you know the details (who, what, where, how, when, and why) for each instruction, you should include them in the content plan. If you don’t know the details, maybe you can ask an AI to provide at least some of them. The more details you provide, the more it will accelerate proposal writing. Think of this as using the AI for inspiration. If you have basic instructions for what to write and how to present it, then you can use AI for ideas regarding how to improve them. Once you have the details, you can also use AI to rewrite the instructions you have including them. Provide instructions that identify the details others should find and include. Sometimes the details will require knowledge of things that aren’t published and are things an AI can’t provide. What an AI can do is help you identify the questions that need to be answered so that a solution can be developed or so that the proposal writing can reflect your goals. Proposal writers can work more quickly when provided with a list of questions to answer instead of open-ended problems that have to be conceptualized first, then resolved, and then written about. Interview the AI like it’s an SME. Think of AI as a partner. It’s sitting next to you and each time you have a question or an issue to resolve you can ask it. If you need information, you can ask it. If you want to shift a list from being suggestions into being questions, it can do that. If you need to know what the steps in an approach you know nothing about should be, it can provide some steps. Getting ideas that will enable you to win is gold. Compared to that getting writing done is trivial. Using AI to provide winning ideas will make you more competitive than simply using AI to put words on paper. Ask yourself what you can do without and still win. Can you do without cross-referencing the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, SOW, win strategies, customer insight, competitive intelligence, solutioning, price to win assessment, and knowledge about what matters? Delete everything you can from that list, and then ask yourself whether you’ve given the AI all of what’s left as input. Whoever gives their AI the best input has a huge competitive advantage. The proposal content plan is that input. Whether you use humans, AI, or a combination to put your final words on paper is a minor consideration that should come after you use AI to help you figure out how to win. Try discussing that with your AI. Once you have that and turn it into a set of specifications, which is effectively what a proposal content plan is, then you’ll have the input you need regardless of who does the writing. Just don’t forget to review the content plan before you ask humans or AI to write something based on it. Reviewing the specifications before you build something based on them is key to preventing things from failing after they are built. You can also use AI to help with this review. But that’s a topic for another article.

Planning before writing your proposals is challenging. Getting everyone on the same page to do it as a team is even more challenging. It’s one thing to have a methodology. It’s another to successfully implement it. You can use the list below to determine whether you are getting the results you should from the way you are planning your proposal content. Whether you follow the MustWin Process approach to Proposal Content Planning, some other approach, or if you just prepare annotated outlines, here’s how to tell if what you are doing before you start writing is everything it should be: See also: Content Planning Box Does it account for everything you want people to write about? A proposal content plan should itemize everything you want to talk about in your proposal. It should turn proposal writing into a process of elimination. Does it inform people how to present what they are writing about? A proposal content plan should provide guidance regarding how to present your offering in a way that reflects what it will take to win. It should explain how to position your offering against the RFP and the competitive environment. It should explain what points to make and what strategies to take in presenting your offering. Does it streamline proposal writing? Proposal content planning saves time. A few hours or even a few days of time spent on proposal content planning should save more than that in reduced revisions. If it’s making proposal writing take longer, you’re doing it wrong. Start by asking why the writing is taking longer when the plan should spell things out and make proposal writing a process of elimination. Does it help the proposal writers get closer to getting it right on the very first draft? Does it act like a proposal prototype? When you look at the proposal content plan, can you envision the proposal before it is even written and determine whether it’s going to be the proposal you want before you invest time in proposal writing? Does it help people with time management? Sometimes you have very little time to plan. Sometimes you have more. Your approach to proposal content planning should scale to the time available. It should make time management easier and not harder. The things that most affect your win probability should come first. This will put you in a position of being able to find the right balance for time management. Putting more time into your content plan will improve your win probability. But even doing the minimum amount of content planning should improve your win probability some. Does it support training and collaboration? If you have staff with less experience, does your content plan include everything your proposal writers need to know in order to complete their assignments? Does it point out how to find out more information they might need? Does it adapt between centralized and decentralized approaches? Sometimes you need an experienced person to do all the planning. Sometimes you need a team to collaborate on figuring out what should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Can your approach work either way? Does it need a specific person to create it or can it be successfully implemented without any specific person in charge? Does it adapt to your circumstances and needs? Does it make having proposal graphics easier? Does it prompt people to think about where graphics would be useful? Sometimes you can start with the graphics and use them to drive the text. Does your proposal content plan enable people to describe the graphics using text and start building the proposal around the graphics before they are even rendered? Does it prevent potential points of failure? Does your approach to content planning surface issues related to proposal writing early and prevent the proposal from going down the wrong path, or does it wait for a draft review to discover that things went wrong? Does it anticipate and prevent potential issues from becoming real? Does it reflect your company’s lessons learned? Does it maximize the value of your information advantage? Do you have meetings that talk about the proposal only to discover later that the things discussed didn’t make it into the document? Do your proposal writers know what to do in their sections with any customer, opportunity, or competitive intelligence you’ve gathered? Do you spell out what should be said about the information advantage you have, or do you rely on individuals to figure it out? Somehow. Does it drive your win strategies into the proposal? Are all your aspirations for the proposal making it into the proposal? Are your strategies and key points disappearing along the way? Does your proposal content plan identify them all and explain how to best address them? Does it show how the entire proposal should be built around substantiating them? Does it help you avoid the Death Spiral? Does your proposal content plan prevent people from having to discover what to offer through infinite writing revisions? Are you submitting the proposal you have at the deadline instead of a proposal that reflects everything you wanted it to become? Does it think things through in order to prevent you from falling into the proposal Death Spiral? Does it produce what it will take to win? You can’t build your proposal around what it will take to win unless you first articulate what it will take to win. Results matter. Does the way you are preparing your proposal content plans improve your win rate? Does the review of the content plan become more important than the review of the draft proposal? Sometimes companies are still thinking things through when they review the draft proposal instead of thinking them through before they start writing. Sometimes they think things through by doing infinite revisions (See #12 regarding avoiding the death spiral). Proposals are so important that you should think them through first in the form of a content plan. Then review the content plan and revise it. Only when you are satisfied that your proposal plan accomplishes the things on this list that you need the most should you start writing. If you can’t think things through and still have enough time to write, you’re thinking too slowly or chasing something you weren’t prepared to bid. Skipping the content plan won’t solve those problems. If you are doing proposal content planning well, the review of your content plan will become more important to your success than the review of the draft proposal. With a solid content plan, the review of the draft proposal will just be follow-through to ensure the plan was properly executed. In many ways, proposal content planning becomes the proposal process. People tend to obsess over proposal reviews. But if instead you focus on getting your proposal content planning right, everything else will be easier.

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Even though branding applies to all of our interactions, in writing it mostly serves to introduce who and what you are. It’s the opening line before you get to the substance of the conversation. It sets a tone. It declares your aspirations and projects the reputation you want to have. And it can hurt your proposals and damage your win rate. If your branding is minimal and consists primarily of your logo, color scheme, and a uniform appearance, that’s (probably) not going to hurt anything. A little visual consistency can be a good thing. See also: Proposal Writing Tips and Techniques But if you consider your branding to be projecting an image through slogans and mission/value/whatever statements, the problem is that branding can’t just be sprinkled on the top of a proposal. A proposal is the closing of the sale and not the start. A proposal is the proof that you can deliver as promised so that the customer will sign the contract. A proposal is about what the customer will get and needs to be substantive and compelling. A proposal comes after you've made an impression. A proposal is the substance that is needed after an introduction. Be honest. Does your branding deliver substance? Is your chosen branding even capable of that in a proposal? If your slogan is an unsubstantiated claim, like most are, it does more harm than good to feature it in a proposal. And since most slogans are so watered down and lacking in substance they can never be contradicted, they also can’t be substantiated. Self-aggrandizing and unprovable is not the impression you want the customer to have of you in the proposal stage. A slogan says something about your company when it’s on a business card. But in a proposal, it stands out as a statement that intentionally says nothing substantive that could help the customer make their decision. This is the opposite of what the customer is looking for from your proposal. Aspirational pleasantries might be enough to get a conversation started, but they get in the way when you’re at the stage where you’re trying to get the customer to sign a contract. This is what's at the core of the complicated relationship between branding and proposals. Does your branding support your proposals? Branding can also be far deeper that logos, graphic design, slogans, and pleasantries. It’s what you want the customer to conclude about your relationship with them. In some ways it is the relationship because regardless of what you think you’re projecting, your brand is what the customer is really thinking about you. This is where there is some overlap between the goals of branding and the goals of proposal writing. Proposal writing seeks to help the customer reach the conclusion that they should accept your proposal. Branding seeks to help the customer identify your company in a favorable way. Branding that clarifies what you are like to work with makes sense for proposals. If it is proven in your proposal. The challenge is that different customers have different expectations regarding the working relationships they want with their vendors, and proposals that want to win will adapt to the customer's preferences. Proposals should be constructed around proof points and differentiators. But they are at their most effective when they are built from the ground up around the customer’s perspective instead of your own. When your proposal is completely written to reflect the customer’s goals and preferences, it’s hard to also make it prove your own aspirational slogan. And doing so may work against the messaging of the proposal and potentially hurt your win probability. This is what tends to drive branding to a watered-down message that applies to everyone. Insert better branding here If you want to include your branding in your proposals, you should give some thought to how you win business when creating your branding. Instead of lofty, fluffy, happily unprovable branding that could never offend anyone while sounding pleasing and beneficial, consider branding that is provable. Consider branding that will be in obvious contradiction if you don’t live up to the claims. Consider branding that requires everyone in your company to live the proof. Consider branding that when you put it in the header on every page in your proposals, the customer will also see it proven on every page. Or don’t even bother. Proposals are the proof that you will deliver as promised. In a proposal, branding should be part of the promise. Branding should be dangerous. If your people can't live up to the promise, you'll create dissatisfied customers. The remedy isn't watered down branding. It's stepping up and delivering as promised. Every proposal is a chance to ruin your past performance record. It's also a chance to achieve a past performance record you can be proud of. Always fulfill your promises. But if you want to win, your promises must require you to stretch beyond what your competitors can deliver. Remember, you are branding even when you are not trying. If don't promise anything that requires you to stretch, that is your branding. If you promise more than you can deliver, that is also your branding. No matter what it says in your slogan, you are what the customer thinks about your ability to deliver. If you stop intentionally branding and start writing great proposals, you may find that you are doing better branding than if you start your proposals with a focus on branding. If all of your business comes from the proposals you win, you might want to put some thought into making sure any branding that you do is part of how you accomplish winning. And delivering.

If the goal for both you and your company is to win new business, then people will remain indispensable even as AI becomes amazingly helpful. The reasons people will remain indispensable will be that while AI can write, AI can’t write competitive proposals on its own. Even with the entire Internet to learn from, AI will not have insights into the unpublished desires of the customer. People at your company will need to interact with people at the customer to understand them. And then people at your company will need to guide the AIs in order to respond to the people at the customer. This will remain true as long as people are deciding what to procure to get their needs met. If people are indispensable, the question becomes how many and which ones? The answer is all of the people required to: See also: AI Gain customer insight Interpret customer requirements Develop strategies based on unpublished information Discover what it will take to win Determine what to say in order to influence the customer’s decision Figure out how to build the proposal around what it will take to win Figure out what to do when things change Figure out how to make your AIs more competitive than your competitor's AIs The people who are vulnerable to becoming disposable are the people who: Aggregate and assess written information Just assemble documents Follow predictable procedures Can work without interacting with other people For winning business through proposals, this translates to needing fewer people for solutioning and subject matter expertise, estimation, pricing, document review, and document production. So there will be some lowering of overall proposal costs. The companies mostly like to prosper are the ones that use AIs to win instead of using AIs to bid more. Using AIs to win will mean guiding your AI based on your insights about the people at the customer. What you don’t want to do is to reduce staffing in areas that reduce your effectiveness at performing the items in the first list above. If you want to make yourself indispensable even after your company starts using AI, make yourself indispensable at accomplishing those items. This will put you in position to be the one: Controlling and guiding the AI, and not the one being replaced by it Responsible for maximizing ROI, essentially making you a profit center to the company Determining the mix between AI and humans Teaching the company how to be competitive and how to best leverage AI for winning This means that you’ll have to do more than push proposal paper. You’ll have to get involved in and build your skills at figuring out what it will take to win and how to build a proposal around it. You’ll have to be able to explain and demonstrate the difference between a proposal based on nothing more than published information, and a proposal that shows insight into the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. You’ll need to become more than a production or proposal manager. You’ll need to become a leader of winning proposals. P.S. Isn't it interesting that this would still good be advice for making yourself indispensable even if AIs weren't going to be a part of our future?

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The Impact of AI on Business Development See also: AI The goal of business development is to qualify a lead, primarily by developing an information advantage. Don’t assume an AI will be good at that just because it uses the word “information.” Developing an information advantage is most effectively done through relationship marketing. In fact, it’s the information that hasn’t been published that’s usually the most valuable. You’d think AIs would be good at prospecting for leads. However, current AIs like ChatGPT do not keep themselves current. They are trained but aren’t continuously updated on the state of the world. Lead databases that crawl the web may use AIs to improve match making between you and the leads in their database. But those AIs are missing a lot of unpublished information about you. AIs can be quite good at answering your questions, if you ask the right ones. They can speed up the process of considering which leads to pursue. They can help you analyze the publicly available information about potential customers. Over time they will get better at keeping current. AIs can make you a better relationship marketer. But they can’t replace you as the relationship marketer. They may enable a company that is overwhelmed and feeling like it can’t afford relationship marketing to begin practicing it in a highly focused way with a quantifiably positive return on investment. The Impact of AI on Capture Management Capture Management not only relies on information that is not publicly available, it relies on information that is not documented. Anywhere. No matter how smart an AI is, it needs to be fed information to be able to do anything. And it suffers from the garbage in/garbage out problem. The role for AI in capture management is not to be the capture manager, or even to prepare capture process artifacts and deliverables. The role of AI in capture management is to speed up assessing the publicly available information about a customer or opportunity, and provide options and strategies for consideration. The job of a capture manager is impossible. AI can help fill the gaps in a capture manager’s expertise. AI can also help provide ideas for approaches and solutioning. AI can help you understand the customer’s procurement process, if it is documented and published. The same is true for customer budgets. If you have good data to work with, AI can help you with price to win analysis. It can help you figure out how to do things. While it can’t replace you, it can make you a better capture manager, which will directly contribute to improving your win rate. The Impact of AI on Proposal Management Proposal managers apply the proposal process to the circumstances of each new bid, which involves modifying the process every time. Most of those modifications are based on things that aren’t published. Do you have enough written down to teach someone how to do a good job of: Scheduling Making and tracking assignments Proposal content planning Proposal quality validation and review Review recovery Issue surfacing, tracking, and resolution How much of these things require input that is not documented? Most proposal processes themselves are barely documented and frequently not followed. 90% of companies that say they have a process have little or nothing on paper to define it. Most proposals are an exercise in figuring it out as you go along. AI also can’t help you solve the problem that large proposals require working through other people. AIs aren’t going to replace the people working on proposals. They may, just maybe, enable you to get by with less effort from the subject matter experts required to define your approaches and perform solutioning. But you’re still going to need to work through other people. AI may do more harm than good at defining a proposal process. The publicly accessible information they have to work with isn’t good enough to be competitive. What they might be useful for is to improve specific steps. Or helping you solve the many, many problems that come up during proposal management. AI may also enable you to perform better proposal quality validation. Human reviewers, no matter how good, often reach their limits with the amount of material to review and the time available to do it in. AIs won’t have that problem. And let's face it, most companies have a subjective review process with human reviewers who on average do a job that's usually described as "better than nothing." How AI will impact proposal writing Here’s the challenge: Cross-referencing the RFP instructions, performance requirements, and evaluation criteria along with your win strategies and customer, opportunity, and competitive environment insights is not something you’re going to get from an off-the-shelf AI. The same is true for spotting opportunities to insert proof points, citations, testimonials, reference experience, etc. This is especially true when you can see the opportunity for something like a proof point, but you don’t have the actual data to make the proof and you need to task someone to get it. Until it can do this, AI won’t be able to write competitive copy. It will create easy to beat proposals. Using them this way may reduce your win rate instead of improving it. Using AI to eliminate having proposal writers is likely to create a lot of cheap but losing proposals. They'll lose because your competitors will be using AI differently. They’ll be using AI to write better proposals instead of using it to replace staff. Similarly, using AI to recycle your past proposals will ensure that the AI produces non-competitive proposals. All of your previous proposals were written with win strategies, proof points, and contextual details that were wrong for your current proposal. An AI won’t know that are and will happily produce a proposal that is not optimized to win based on what matters to the new customer. The AI-produced proposal will sound good and a lot of people won't realize it's destined to lose. Instead of writing good sounding but meaningless proposals, AI can inspire great proposal writing by people who understand what it will take to win. It can give you ideas and perform research. It can even help you articulate things. But it can’t plan how the section needs to be written in order to win. AI can help you write better proposals. It can do this if you provide the understanding of what it will take to win and direct it to supply the right details and put them in the write context. Use AI at the most granular level possible. Don’t expect it to write an entire section, or even an entire response to a requirement, because that response needs to cross-reference and incorporate too many other things that won’t be part of the input you give the AI. Don’t try to get a draft out of the AI and then modify it into something you think is better. Use AI to give you ideas that you incorporate into something that will matter to the customer. You will still need to do Proposal Content Planning to define what the proposal must become in order to win. You can use AI to address some of the items in your content plan and then decide which text fragments to use, discard, or rewrite in order to accomplish the goals of the content plan. Doing this will produce better proposal copy with a much higher win probability than anyone who starts from an AI generated draft. tl;dr The goal is to win proposals. Not to make them easier. Don’t use AI to write proposals. Do use them to answer your questions, perform research, and make your proposals better. The better you do at figuring out what it will take to win, planning your proposal around it, and then using AI to inspire you to fulfill your proposal content plan, the more competitive you will become.

AI can very easily enable you to make the same strategic mistakes in volume… You can write a lot of bad proposals quickly, with or without AI. Getting good at writing bad proposals isn't going to help your win rate. AI makes it so much easier and we are attracted to that. But they are still bad proposals. Why are the proposals bad? Because they: See also: Faster Are written from your perspective instead of being written from the customer's perspective. Describe the topic instead of showing insight about the topic. Either don't make a point, or make the wrong point. Don't define proposal quality and don't have written proposal quality criteria. Don't simultaneously consider how to interpret the requirements, what is being proposed, what you know about the customer beyond the RFP, your win strategies, the competitive environment, price, compliance, contractual terms and conditions, the wording of the evaluation criteria, and the customer's decision-making process, culture, and evaluation procedures. Can AI do these things? Maybe. Not really. Definitely not the last one. And certainly not well enough to win. Maybe better in the future? Most companies are not very good at doing all of these without AI. How is AI going to look at your old bad proposals and produce winning proposals from them? If you are counting on AI being able to make some improvement on your old proposals, you may be right. But that won't be competitive. Your win rate won't improve because lots of companies will be doing the same, and some companies will do much, much better. If that's how you use AI, you'll end up left behind. To effectively using AI you should: First understand how to consistently produce winning proposals without AI. You can't train, assess, and perform QA/QC unless you are the leader. Understand which parts of the process are suitable for AI and which parts not only require human involvement, but specifically require understanding of what it will take to win. In the future, AIs will analyze your win rate and get good at determining what it will take to win. That's years away. Right now we can't even trust ChatGPT not to give away your secrets to others or make up its findings. Even if they released better AIs today, you don't have the win rate data to train them on. Most companies aren't even clear (or honest) about why they win or lose their bids. There is no record of the decisions or explanation for why you wrote the proposal the way you did. It will take years of bidding to have good data to prevent an AI garbage in/garbage out problem. If you have a bad proposal process before AI, will AI make it worse? Ask an AI how to improve your proposal process and you'll get a mixture of good suggestions and really bad suggestions. You will not get a solution that takes into account the nature of what your company offers, the contents of the RFPs you bid, the availability of resources in your company, your corporate culture (the real one, not the one you think you have), your competitive environment, and your bid history with the reasons why you made the decisions you did. That is the input required to optimize your process. Without it, AI will definitely not be able to provide a fully integrated solution to improving your win rate. But someone else will take the time to prepare this input and their use of AI will be far superior to yours if you don't. While you use AI to get a little better, some of your competitors will use it to get a lot better and your win rate may actually go down, even though you're using AI! AI can't take away the burden of figuring out how to win and implementing a process that can consistently do that while working through other people. But it can be incredibly useful for inspiration, discovering options, and brainstorming approaches. Once you identify what needs to be done. Once you take the lead. You might want to start that today. Getting ready for AI means getting the data you'll need to train it ready. It means reengineering your proposal process to effectively flow the right information in the right format at every step before you try to add AI to the mix. It means discovering what it takes to win proposals and getting good at preparing proposals that consistently outperform your competitors, also before adding AI to the mix. If you expect AI to just do all that for you, then you're setting yourself up to be uncompetitive and fail in the AI future. You will lose to companies that can better train and use their AIs because they prepared in the right ways. People who look for AI to do their homework for them are going to be at a competitive dis-advantage. AI will be far more important and way to useful to just let that happen.

Although I see this mistake made frequently, getting more out of the people working on proposals does not mean getting more proposals written with the same number of people. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but the reality is that winning pays for the effort. And then some. And then a whole lot more. You want people to win proposals and not just work hard at submitting a bunch of losers. And if they are winning, hiring people to do more proposals is easy. If you leave people on their own expecting them to just figure out how to win the proposal, what you'll get is people working very hard to achieve a low win rate. To get more out of the people working on proposals, you should make sure they have the information they need, clear priorities and expectations, and know not only what to write about but also how to present it. A small investment in developing your proposal process and supporting your proposal teams will not only improve your win rate, it will provide a ROI that is orders of magnitude greater than the investment. People work more effectively when they are supported, guided, and don't have to figure everything out on their own. If you wrap them in what they need, they'll spend less time organizing and getting started, and they'll work more effectively too! Here is what you can do to help people working on proposals be more effective: See also: Organizational Development Figuring out what it will take to win. This should be the job of everyone who has customer contact and customer insight. Even if they are just guessing, their guessing will be better informed than anyone else’s guess. You can improve your ability to figure out what it will take to win by tracking metrics and getting customer feedback after submission. Continuously improving your understanding of what it will take to win before you start proposal writing should be your highest priority, since that is the most significant determinant of your probability of winning. If you are lacking in this area, you can’t make up for it with clever wording. Answer your proposal writers' questions before they have to ask them. Proposal writers have a lot of questions. If you are in position to win, they should have far less. They have questions like “Would the customer prefer this or that?” “What would the customer like the benefit of this feature to be?” “What context should I put this approach in?” “Why did they say this in this way in the RFP?” If you start the proposal already understanding the customer’s preferences, with insight into how to make trade-off decisions, the ability to tie what you do to the goals the customer has, and can see things from the customer’s perspective, your writers will not only be much more productive, they’ll be more effective. Develop an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. Everyone has best practices. Everyone hires from the same labor pool. If you start your proposal with an information advantage, you start it with a competitive advantage. If you want to get more out of the people working on your proposals, feed them an information advantage to work with. Set clear priorities and expectations. Other work gets in the way of winning proposals. Should it? Can resources be re-allocated? People often can’t make these decisions for themselves. Make priorities and options clear so that time is not lost untangling what the priorities should be. The same holds true for expectations. Everyone has expectations. When they conflict, the friction negatively impacts performance. If you want to get more out of people, get rid of conflicts by better communicating and managing everyone’s expectations. Script a constant flow of communications. When people have questions, it’s often because they need to know something that wasn’t communicated to them. Before, during, and after every task there should be communications preparing them, guiding them, and helping them complete before moving on to the next set of before, during, and after communications. While creating templates for proposal content will do more harm than good, creating templates to communicate about common activities and issues can reduce the time it takes, make people more productive, and enable it to actually happen. Provide guidance regarding what to write and how to present it. People spend more time talking and thinking about the proposal than they do writing it. The more you streamline the conversations and thinking process by providing inspiration and direction that drives things onto paper, the more productive people will be. Define proposal quality criteria for both writers and reviewers. The largest productivity destroyer in proposals are unexpected review results causing extra revision cycles. Review results should never be unexpected because the writers and reviewers should both be working from the same set of written proposal quality criteria. The writers should know what target they are aiming for and the reviews should merely be confirming how close they got and helping them get it to the bullseye. If you skip this step then the writers will guess, the reviewers will subjectively assess, and revision cycles will get continuously added until you get to the deadline and submit what you have instead of what you were really capable of. Surface issues quickly during the proposal for resolution. When working against a proposal deadline, you don’t want people to be stuck or slowed down by working around an issue. You want issues surfaced quickly. The more quickly they are surfaced, the more time you have before the deadline to resolve them and get back on track. These add up to something important These eight items add up to an environment where people have what they need to work with, know how to deal with priority and expectation conflicts, aren’t slowed down by issues, know what’s coming and what they need to do, and pass all of their reviews so they can spend their time improving instead of starting over. When you wrap people with support like that, they become more productive at winning. This delivers a far superior ROI to making them more productive at cranking out bids in volume at your current win rate. What is it that you wanted to get more out of your people working on proposals? It’s all about growth. Getting more revenue by winning more proposals is not the same as getting more proposals submitted. The minute your company starts focusing on submitting more proposals instead of winning more proposals, people stop spending time on winning and start spending as little time as possible on submitting something. People stop personally investing in the win, although they’ll continue to give it lip service. Instead they personally invest in playing defense and making sure their contributions are just good enough to be defensible. This is not what you want to get more out of them. Instead, try focusing on ROI. Stop treating the people you need to win your proposals as expenses, and start treating them as investments. Measure your return. Drop bad investments. But double down on the ones that are paying off. You don’t have to get all emotionally intelligent to see that getting proposal staff the right information and a little more clarity is worth the investment. If improving your win rate by a couple of percentage points pays for the entire proposal, what does improving your win rate by 10% get you? If that is what you get out of your people, you can hire all you need to submit as many proposals as you want and still have enough to improve your company’s overall margins. Then go for a 20% improvement.

When I’m working with people who are inexperienced writers and are struggling, I often tell them to not worry about style and just write conversationally. I’ve written on how to have conversations in writing before. See also: Proposal Writing Tips and Techniques Writing is easier when you’re not trying to sound like someone else or how you think something is “supposed” to sound. It’s easier to just drop all that and talk. Communicate. Make your points. But some people struggle with their conversation skills. And when people are engaged in a conversation, their personalities shine through. Some people are engaging and charismatic. Some people are matter of fact. Some people are academic. And when writing, some personality characteristics get amplified. Some people panic at the idea of starting a conversation with a stranger. And when you ask them to do it in writing, they just freeze. Starting a conversation in writing for a proposal is easier than doing it in person. The customer has already told you what they want to discuss in the RFP. But I suspect that all people can improve their proposal writing by just spending some time thinking about conversation. What makes for a good conversation? Should you be direct? What tone should you set? Do you give the other person a chance to share their thoughts? How do you not come across as a know-it-all? How do you steer a conversation without forcing it? When writing a proposal, you should have a content plan that tells you what points you’d like to make. The next step is to turn them into prose. That’s where your conversation skills and personality kick in. Don’t present the points you are trying to make. Don’t talk past the reader or make it a monologue. Instead, just talk like you would to someone you know. And be considerate. Being considerate doesn’t mean being polite or formal. It means considering their point of view. Show a little empathy. What might the reader say if they were there? What questions might they have? What are they trying to accomplish? What can you suggest to help them? Your personality will play a role, whether you realize it or not. Are you an empathetic person? Or has that never really been a concern of yours? Are you hyper focused or hyperactive? Do you value conversation skills or are other things more important to you? The way your personality shows up when you are having a conversation will impact how you write. The solution doesn’t have to involve changing your personality. But improving your conversation skills will help. You don’t have to be different from who you are to write well. You don’t have to write like someone else. You just have to communicate what’s in the proposal content plan. If you freeze when trying to write that, try speaking it out loud. How would you say it if the customer was sitting across the table from you? If that makes you freeze up even more, then the issue might be your conversational skills as much, or even more than, your writing skills.

Every proposal milestone and every review require communication before, during, and after. While recycling your proposal content is a terrible idea that will hurt your win rate, recycling your communication pieces can enable you to make them more frequent and better. Let’s use the proposal kickoff meeting as an example. The preparation for a proposal kickoff meeting will be similar on every proposal. Details may change, but that’s okay. You can template the emails or other communication regarding your kickoff meeting invitation, instructions, and follow-ups. Doing this will enable you to let people know it’s coming, what they need to do, and what the agenda and desired outcomes are. It will only take you a minute or two to tailor all the details and click send. After the meeting, you can quickly send a follow-up email with action items. By communicating before, during, and after, people aren’t left hanging and are more likely to show up prepared to have a productive meeting. It's nice in the heat of production to achieve a deadline to have your communication templates queued up and ready to go. It produces better outcomes than just shooting from the hip, launching an activity, and trying to communicate about it ad hoc. You can get by without a process. You can't get by without communication. And if you communicate in the ways described here, no one will ever know if you don't really have a process. Maybe communication is the process. Or the process is what you communicate. Or something like that. Turning your proposal communications into templates You don’t have to create dozens of email and communication templates ahead of time. Each time you create or send an email or other communication, save a copy. Save them in a structure that matches your process, so that you can quickly look up the relevant pieces. Over the course of a proposal or two, you can fill out your communications library. Proposal communication templates have a low investment to create and produce a high return, even when things are changing rapidly. Maybe especially when things are changing rapidly. This is because they give you precise points in which to communicate what has changed and what hasn’t. And while tools, procedures, and other details may change, the need to communicate about them tends to be fairly stable. Setting goals What are the goals for the communication? Target: What are you trying to accomplish? Coordination: What needs to be coordinated? How? Information: What do people need to work with? What is the value chain for information delivery? What do people need to know about it? What form should it take? What reference material is available? Issues and resolution: Risks can become issues. Mitigation helps and sometimes needs to be communicated. Issues need to be surfaced, identified, and tracked to resolution, with the communication needed at each of those steps. Recognition: A little gratitude and appreciation for what people accomplish during the proposal goes a long way. Don’t wait until the end to recognize the group. Communicate that you recognize their accomplishments all along the way. Bringing structure to your proposal communication templates Format your communications with subheadings to make them modular and easier to tailor. Most process steps require communication before, during, and after. That becomes a handy way to group your communication templates: Before: Let people know what’s coming up. Give them ample notice about deadlines and key dates. Help them prepare by giving suggestions and letting them know what will be required. Avoid unpleasant surprises. During: This can be defined as the start of an activity or the middle of it. But this is where you inform them of what needs to be done, how it should be done, what resources and help are available, when to complete it by, and who to collaborate with. After: When things are completed, there are often tasks that need to be performed before moving on. These can be as simple as storage, recordkeeping, or notifications. There can also be follow-up queries and activities. And for some tasks, you’ll want to show gratitude, appreciation, and recognition. These things are more likely to happen if you have items in your communications library as prompts and accelerators. Building proposal communications around events Events need communication about schedules, locations, agenda, and more. There are often events occurring at regular intervals during a proposal, and if you synch to them you’ll have a nice constant flow of communication. Meetings: Meetings need to be set up and planned. They will be most effective if people come prepared. Reviews: Having only one proposal review can be worse than having none. Everything that should be validated needs a review, but every review doesn’t have to require meetings. Regardless of the number or types of reviews, communications will need to happen about them. Deadlines: People need to be aware of deadlines in advance, and successfully meeting them will require coordination and collaboration. If you do nothing but communicate about deadlines before, during, and after, you’ll have opportunities to communicate on every topic below. Templating the content of your proposal communications The contents of your emails and communications not only inform people, they also set expectations and are a low-key form of training. You can use subheadings, like those below, to organize the content and make it modular. You can add, remove, or update sections as needed. Use placeholders, such as putting things in [brackets], to identify details that you expect to change in every proposal, such as names, dates, file folders, etc. Scope, definitions, and details: What is the topic, activity, milestone, etc. you are communicating about? Instructions: What do you need people to do and how should they do it? Locations: Where are the things needed to do what is required? Locations can be physical or they can be online. Resources: What tools, people, processes or other resources are available to accomplish the goal? Access: Who has access, who needs access, how to get access, whether physical or online. Reference material: Details that people may need to look up. Collaboration: Points of contact, methods of collaboration, who to talk to, how to get help, etc. What should they communicate? Action items: Assignments and “to do” list items. Status: Is it ready? When will it be complete? What’s in progress? What do people need to know about where things are at? Expectations: What should people expect of each other? What will be expected of them? What can they anticipate? Assumptions: What have you assumed? What should your stakeholders assume? Deviations: What should be ignored or skipped? What exceptions have been made? Turning your communications into a reference library for proposal contributors Your emails will become reference material for proposal contributors. But if a user gets too many emails, they become challenging to manage. It’s a good idea to setup a folder and put copies of your key communication pieces there as reference. This is another place where a modular design pays off. You can copy and paste the instructions and other details out of the emails, put them in a file, name it something logical, and put it in a designated folder where people can find it. They’ll come to rely on that folder for instructions and reference.

What is the learning curve for using MustWin Now? MustWin Now makes managing complex proposals so much easier. But a complex proposal is still complex, even if the software makes managing it easier. See also: MustWin Now In MustWin Now, if you are there to write, you don't need to understand how to import and cross-reference the RFP. If you are there to review, you don't need to know how to configure or tailor all the tool options. If you are the Proposal Manager you'll need to know how everything works. And if you are the designer and developer of your company's proposal process, you'll need to know why it works that way. But the concepts will all be familiar, and it will mainly be the user interface you’ll need to learn. If you throw everything MustWin Now can do at a proposal writer, they'll get overwhelmed. If you try to manage a proposal without having done a dry run, you'll probably get overwhelmed. It is far better to start by playing around with things and then do a dry run on a fake proposal. That way instead of getting overwhelmed, you can be excited about all the possibilities. The good news is that if you are a proposal manager, you'll already know what a win theme is and how to cross-reference an RFP. All you'll need to learn is how those things work in MustWin Now. And once you learn them you'll find that they work easier than the old manual ways of doing things. If you understand how to build an RFP cross-reference matrix in a spreadsheet, learning how to do it by drag and drop is easy. If you understand how to write win themes, then doing them in a tool that enables them to be cross-referenced to the outline is not a big deal. The same is true for content planning. Proposal Input Forms might be a new concept, but it's really just a matter of learning to work with online question and answer forms. You'll have new tools for making assignments, managing issues, and scheduling. But it's just a matter of learning the user interface for familiar concepts. You'll also need to learn how to get your users set up and control access. If you are a writer, you'll have to learn about Proposal Content Planning. What you'll find is doing it online is so much easier than trying to do it on paper. But when it comes to writing, all you need to do is be able to click on your sections and incorporate the content plan instructions into what you write, which will still be in Microsoft Word. You'll also want to learn how to use the Collaboration Toolbox to do things like quickly report issues or ask questions, and to work with the dashboard that shows all the assignments, issues, and questions so you can filter them down to just the ones that apply to you. The best part about the learning curve for MustWin Now is that what you will learn will open your eyes to new and better ways to win proposals. MustWin Now will get you out of the box of thinking that process has to revolve around paper. When you use MustWin Now it's like the process disappears and you just focus on what it will take to win.

The best way to improve your win rate is to improve the flow of information to the proposal so you can write it from the customer's perspective. You can't start at RFP release and accomplish this. So what can you write about to maximize your chances of winning the proposal? Results that exceed the requirement. All of the competitors who matter will meet all of the requirements. If you want to win, you have to do better. What will make your approaches deliver results that are better than what the customer asked for? Qualifications that exceed the requirement. All of the competitors who matter will also be fully qualified. What qualifications do you have that go beyond what they asked for? Differentiators. Customers make selections by comparing what's different about them and picking the one with the differences that they like best. This remains a factor when the RFP has detailed, written evaluation criteria, because they still have to apply those criteria. Point out the differences that make your proposal better and substantiate them, and they become the reasons why the customer will score you higher than your competitors. Strengths that are not differentiators. Things that are good but may not be unique to your company are still worth pointing out. They improve your score and do differentiate you from the companies that don't say them. This doesn't mean you should just pile on every positive claim you can think of in the hopes that enough of them will put you over the top. But it does mean that if you make your strengths scorable they can help you win. Proof points. The best way to improve your score is to prove your claims. Unsubstantiated claims won't improve your score and may weaken your credibility. Proof points are exactly what evaluators look for to justify their scores. Compelling reasons why. Often the reasons why you do things matter more than the procedures themselves because that is where you show insight and judgment. If, in the customer's eye, two companies do the same thing but one shows more insight and better judgment, who do you think they will pick? The price to win. If you can't propose better results, qualifications, differentiators, or strengths and don't have the details to write solid proof points and the customer doesn't care about why you do things, then outside of achieving a compliant proposal sometimes the only thing you can do right now to maximize your chances of winning is to have the right price. But be warned, the right price is not always the lowest. Knowing what the right price is may be even harder than knowing what to write about in your proposal. It is worth just as much effort to do well. What's not on the list Benefits. The reason I left them out is that it's too easy to write something beneficial sounding that the customer won't care about, doesn't differentiate your proposal, and ends up not having any impact on your score. If you sit through enough customer debriefs after a proposal loses, you'll realize that the hundreds of "benefits" cited in those proposals didn't help one bit. Compliance. Because the best way to maximize your chances of winning a proposal requires more than just not screwing it up. Graphics. Or any of the many unquantifiable but hopeful things that might possibly improve your evaluation score. Because you can put time into all of them and it may not add up to anything. Or it may. You never know. They might be worth doing. Graphics most certainly are. But you can't even have the kind of great graphics that can win your proposal if you don't have the seven things above first. Spell checking. Speaking with one voice, or anything having to do with formatting or typography on the list for the same reasons. Certifications or experience. And other attributes that fall under qualifications, so no need to call them out individually. Developing an information advantage. Even though it's the single most important thing you can do to improve your win rate developing an information advantage is not on the list because at the start of the proposal you either have one or you don't. What it all adds up to Write about how you deliver better results, are more qualified, have clear differentiators, have more strengths than your competitors, prove everything you claim, provide compelling reasons why you do things the way you do, and bid the right price and you will maximize your chances of winning. But you will still be weak against a competitor who has an information advantage over you. Do these things and gain an information advantage and not only will you maximize your win rate, you'll maximize the ROI of the proposal function.

A good friend of mine, Mark Amtower, recently wrote a book in collaboration with a bunch of authors all experts on marketing and government contracting. A wealth of great discussion has resulted from the many useful nuggets of wisdom the book contained. Full disclosure: I’m one of the authors. Here’s a great quote from the book by Mark: Thought leadership is not for the timid or intellectually lazy. Building a SME or thought leadership position in the market is an active, ongoing activity where your personal learning never stops. It thrives on feedback and discussion. — Mark Amtower in Government Marketing Best Practices 2.0 I like this quote. Naturally my obsessive brain went straight to how it impacts proposals. But first I had to parse it apart and understand all the implications. The key word in "thought leader" is leader. You can't be a lazy leader. A thought leader must be an innovator and teacher. A thought leader can't just rest on the "best practices." A thought leader must continuously invent new and better best practices. To be a thought leader, you must expose your new ideas to validation by the world. That is most certainly not for the timid. What's the difference between a thought leader and an influencer? See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques A thought leader is something very different from an influencer. An influencer is a promoter. A thought leader is an inventor first and then a promoter. Influencers broadcast and thrive on drama and ratings. Thought leaders participate in discussion and thrive on feedback. If people see you as entertaining or as a role model, you can have influence in proportion to the size of your audience. But people won’t see you as a thought leader unless they see you as an innovative trailblazer and a teacher. The influence a thought leader has is in proportion to the impact of their ideas first and the size of their audience second. While you might be able to get away with it as an influencer, you can't get away with being timid or intellectually lazy as a thought leader. The key question is when do you need a thought leader, and when do you need an influencer? An influencer is great if you are trying to advertise. A thought leader is great if you need insight. What does this have to do with proposals? If you try to write proposal copy that sounds like advertising copy, your win rate will drop dramatically. The way people read proposals makes selling in writing different from selling in video. If your company is known for thought leadership and you show insight in your proposals, your win rate will go way up. People make decisions on proposals based on the impact of what they read. Insight multiplies that impact in innovative and differentiating ways. Proposals are not about you. They are about the customer. Proposals don’t achieve influence by making people want to be like them, by being controversial, or by the popularity of their authors. Influencing in writing is not achieved through personal charisma. Influencing in writing is achieved by sharing insights that matter to the customer and presenting them from the reader’s perspective instead of your own. Thought leadership can improve your ability to win proposals. This works directly, when the thought leader is also a proposal writer. But it also works indirectly when thought leadership is a marketing strategy for the company submitting the proposal and the customer associates innovative ideas with the organization and wants them as a resource. Being an influencer can be claimed. The claim is part of the influence. However, being a thought leader can't be claimed. It must be proven. Self-proclaiming your status as a thought leader doesn't make it so. In fact, self-proclaiming your thought leadership is more likely to backfire than it is to establish your thought leadership. The only thing that can make you or your company a thought leader is other people following and seeking your recommendations. You can publish insights and innovative ideas. But it’s only when people start sharing them or reaching out to you for more that you become a thought leader. Doing the hard work of gaining and sharing insight to establish yourself as a thought leader takes time. And for it to impact your proposals it must be done well before you even start a proposal. But the next time you review one of your proposals and see that it’s full of content that every one of your competitors will or can claim and you realize that all the proposals submitted will basically sound the same, that’s when you’ll realize the value of thought leadership and why it’s worth the investment.

Writing from the customer’s perspective while cross-referencing the RFP requirements with the evaluation criteria and your win strategies are really just proposal writing basics. They are mechanics that tell you what to write about. They are vital, but minimum skills for writing a proposal based on what it will take to win. I have come to realize that the skill that I find myself leaning on the most to figure out what words and phrases to use to present things in writing is translation. We normally think of translation between languages, but translation applies to ideas as well. And in fact, translating ideas is also key to advanced language translation. The translation of ideas is relevant to proposal writing because it is what you need to be able to articulate things in a different context. See also: Proposal Writing Tips and Techniques The same approach, the same offering, gets presented differently when the customer is more concerned about your qualifications than your processes. Or vice versa. Or when the priority is management over your technical approach. Or vice versa. Differences in circumstances, customer preferences, the nature of the work, evaluation procedures, budget, and so much more change the context. Not only that, but you often learn more about the context while working on the proposal. The strategies you start with can shift during proposal development. It starts with looking at things from a different perspective, but for your strategies to make it onto paper, you need to be able to translate how you originally described things or your first attempt at describing them into the new context by articulating them differently. There are always different ways to express something you are trying to communicate. Some have different connotations and leave different impressions. Sometimes you can completely transform what you are writing by shifting the language from one way of wording things to another. This is not as simple as finding “a good way to say it.” Instead, it is more like anticipating how you want the reader to react and then expressing the idea in a way that leads them to that reaction. Instead of poetic creativity, it requires being able to phrase things with a purpose. Doing this means anticipating their reaction, and instead of choosing the first words that come to your mind, selecting the words that will guide them to the reaction you desire them to have. This form of translation is very similar to the process of selecting words in another language that the person you are communicating with will understand. This is especially true when you consider that good language translations are not literal. To convey meaning in another language that phrases things differently, you can’t translate directly word for word. You have to substitute words and phrases to convey the meaning. Advanced proposal writing requires a similar way of mapping new phrasing to convey a meaning that will have the right impact on the reader. Advanced proposal writing goes way beyond simply selecting words that sound good. An example of how this affects proposal writing For example, imagine that an RFP says you should summarize your experience with what you are proposing and they want you to create something that achieves a purpose they specify. Should you provide a list of similar projects? Should you focus on the quantitative or qualitative aspects of the projects? Should you tell anecdotes about projects in which you accomplished something similar? Should you write about the challenges you had to overcome and lessons you have learned from doing similar work? Or should you create a table of your projects with columns to provide descriptions or checkmarks of things like similarity in size, scope, and complexity along with your relevant accomplishments? What understanding do you want to guide the reader to realize? It may very well be the same project information being delivered. The difference is primarily in how you word things. What drives your decision when writing is what the customer needs to hear to perform their evaluation. If you choose incorrectly, you’ll communicate in a way that doesn’t match what the customer needs to hear and you will not get as high an evaluation score as you could have. Advanced proposal writing is translating the information into a form that not only the customer will understand, but which also achieve your goal. Application to proposal writing The best way to achieve this level of advanced proposal writing is to learn to ask the right questions. Consider how many different ways you can express an idea. How many different considerations should go into what you want to communicate? What will affect how the customer interprets what you have to say? What do you want to communicate beyond the words themselves? What impressions, positioning, attitudes, or emotions should you communicate? What will they do with the information you are providing? Is there a way to provide it that makes it more useful or easier to work with? Then match the words and phrases you use to what you are trying to accomplish, while doing that through another person’s interpretation of what you just wrote.

Proposals are deep. Understanding them and getting good at them requires skills that go beyond just getting words on paper. And the skills that you develop to write great proposals apply throughout life. This may be true of every profession. But here are some of the things I have learned from mine. I find no depth in simple rules for living. I'm not trying to write memes. Simple rules often gloss over important things and tend to be self-contradictory. I like to look at the core, at the root of what causes things, and seek to understand where things come from and how they relate. In the list below you will find many things that relate and work together. So instead of rules for life, this is a list of things to ponder. And you could spend the rest of your life pondering them. I know I will. From a career spent working in and around proposals, I have learned that: See also: Proposal Management Being considerate is more important than you realize. Only this is not the kind of being considerate that is synonymous with manners. It is the kind of consideration that involves thinking. Being able to consider things from the customer’s perspective is key to great proposal writing. Being able to see the proposal process from the perspective of proposal contributors is key to gaining process acceptance. Maximizing your perspective skills turns out to be beneficial well beyond proposals and in all aspects of life. Gaining perspective occurs mostly though consideration. Applying consideration to your customer, proposal contributors, family, friends, or strangers requires thinking about things from their point of view so that you can reconsider your own. The more perspectives you consider, the wiser you become. You should never stop growing. Proposals matter because growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. This turns out to be true in life as well. Without growth there is only stagnation and decline. For contractors, growth comes from winning proposals. In life, growth comes from accomplishment. The difference is less than you might think. People who resist change, resist growth. In life we can define accomplishment broadly, but we should always be seeking it. And as a result we should always be growing in ways that bring the good kind of change. Everything we do revolves around values. All decisions regarding proposals, from staffing, to priorities, to action items, should all be made on the basis of ROI. Most of the decisions we make in life are also ROI decisions. The difference is that in life we can consider far more than monetary returns. The more clearly you can articulate your values, the better informed your decisions will be. However, the values that most people articulate do not reflect the way they behave. There are other items on this list dealing with perspective and cognitive dissonance that can help you spot your true values. Bringing this back to proposals and the world of business, look at your company’s mission statement for an example of values being articulated that don’t match people’s behavior. Interacting with other people depends more on expectations than it depends on procedures. Nearly all of the friction encountered when working on proposals comes from mismatches in people’s expectations. If you want a better process that leads to a better proposal experience and results in a higher win rate, focus on discovering, articulating, and refining expectations instead of focusing on the steps. Prioritize clarity and consideration of expectations, because they flow in every direction. If I don’t consider your expectations when I issue an assignment, it’s not going to achieve the best results. All stakeholder expectations should be considered by all the stakeholders. Giving more clarity and consideration to expectations reduces friction and improves outcomes. This is true throughout life in working with and getting along with other people. Working through others is a critical skill. Working in proposals requires working through other people. You can’t create a proposal bigger than yourself if you don’t depend on other people’s contributions. Doing things yourself is easy. Doing things through other people is hard. This is something else that is also true in life. You can see how perspective, consideration, and expectations all interplay when working through others. Being good at conflict resolution makes you better at problem solving. Not all conflicts can be anticipated or prevented. How you handle those conflicts impacts the success of your proposals as well as your relationships in life. Being able to resolve conflicts means looking deeper than what’s on the surface to address the real problem and then translating a solution into the interests of the other people involved to find common ground. If you can do this, you have all the skills to write great proposals. And to work past the difficulties you will face in life. Why is more important than what. Writing about the reasons why you do the things you do often matters more to a proposal evaluator than the things themselves. Being clear on the reasons why you do things is likewise often more important to yourself than what you end up doing. And being able to explain those reasons to others is the same. Focus on “why.” Asking the right questions is key. The entire pursuit process can be expressed as a series of questions. Often this works better than trying to chart the process, because “the process” is really just a flow of information. When writing proposals, trying to consider the customer’s perspective often starts with questions like “what is it they are looking for” or “what matters about this to the customer.” Every item on this list can be delved into deeper by applying inquiry. Just for fun, go through each of your thoughts on each item and ask yourself, “Is it true?” Integration is how we make things work. Great proposals are fully integrated. There is a concept of operations and a story about it that gets woven into each section of the proposal. The context of every feature and benefit is related so that they add up to something compelling. People work the same way. Everything you learn must be integrated and compatible with every other thing you have ever learned. If you don’t practice the things you think you believe and make them all work together you’ll have disconnects between your emotions and behavior and your beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is believing two things at the same time that conflict with each other. Whether you realize it or not, cognitive dissonance shows up in all kinds of negative ways. Just a like a great proposal requires integration, so does fulfilling your potential in life. Everything is training and learning is continuous. The pursuit process is a learning process. Learning what it will take to win that pursuit. Learning how to best execute the process. Learning what must be done. Learning over time how to improve your win rate. It never ends because you will always be improving your win rate. Instead of creating a process and thinking you’re done when you’ve listed the steps, try creating a platform for learning. Continuous learning applies to life as well. Only it shouldn’t just be random learning. Inquiry, perspective, and integration are what lead to continuous growth. Translation is critical for successful communication. In many ways, proposal writing is translation. It’s taking your ideas and translating them into what the customer needs to hear in order to reach their decision. Proposal development requires translating the RFP so that non-specialist contributors can understand it. And then translating their technical language back into something the evaluators will understand. All while translating the language into something integrated that reflects the customer’s perspective. If the receiver doesn’t process the communication the way you intended, then communication hasn’t occurred. This also is true in life. Translation is far more than just language skills. It’s really about idea skills. Can you reconfigure your ideas to match a new context and then reconfigure them again in order to shift the perspective and finally communicate them successfully? This happens both when you communicate to someone else, and when you receive communication and are trying to process it. It can even happen when you are trying to understand your own thoughts. Master the things on this list and winning proposals will come naturally. And life will be better and full of accomplishment as well. Your proposals will be full of customer awareness. And your own awareness, of both yourself and your world, will expand greatly. At the very least, you’ll never look at proposals the same way again.

Nobody wants a burdensome proposal process. Proposal specialists don’t want one because they want people to be efficient and they want people to buy in to working on the proposal. Proposal contributors don’t want one because they may not want to work on the proposal at all, let alone have to jump through hoops to do it. Executives don’t want it because they don’t want people complaining about having to work on proposals. How do you get the balance right between making sure you do all the things required to win and having the most simple, highly efficient proposal process? For starters, I recommend that you make sure you are defining proposal efficiency correctly. Most folks get that wrong. But the best way to ensure that your proposal has nothing in it that isn’t absolutely necessary is the proposal process minimization challenge. I highly recommend them. What is a proposal process minimization challenge? See also: Successful process implementation A proposal process minimization challenge is a dare that people can’t find anything in your process that can be safely skipped without lowering your win rate. If they find anything, you agree to remove it from the process. If they find a way to do things that increases win probability over what’s there, you agree to replace what’s in your process with it. It’s a challenge to turn your process into the absolute minimum needed to maximize your chances of winning. If people think there’s a way to get by with less process, let them prove it. I’ve never had to change a proposal process implementation because someone else won this challenge. I’m kind of disappointed by that. I want the least burdensome process that maximizes the chances of winning. If someone else has a better idea of how to achieve that, I want to shamelessly steal that idea. And I tell them that. How a proposal process minimization challenge can play out in reality Proposal contributors often want to start writing immediately when the RFP is released and the deadline clock starting ticking. Their eagerness can get in the way when staff want to skip content planning and start writing immediately. Try listing the things that are addressed during content planning and then challenge them to identify a more reliable way of identifying those things and building the proposal around them. The form that content planning takes is less important than that it gets done. However, you may find that while a lot of proposal contributors have proposal experience and can do a good job, they’ve never really itemized everything that goes into proposal writing or structured their sections to make sure they don’t overlook any. They write and try to press as many buttons as possible. This can produce good proposal writing. But it will never produce the best proposal writing that the team is capable of producing. You won’t get there through infinite unplanned, subjective draft revisions that you keep doing until you run out of time. Achieving your full potential requires thinking it through before you start writing. And the better the first draft, the better the proposal experience. But we can debate the best ways to go about thinking things through and planning the writing. If we focus intensely, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Everyone benefits when the team works through this together. When companies with proposal operations in multiple locations try to maximize their win rate by standardizing their proposal process, it can be difficult to get everyone on the same page. When you’ve got something you are recommending for implementation by all, that’s when to hit them with the minimization challenge. Invite them to point out anything that isn’t necessary for achieving a high win rate. If your recommendations are sound, they won’t find anything. But more importantly, the discussion will shift from “your way” vs “our way” to what it takes to improve your win rate. That is an argument well worth having. A lot of companies only have one major proposal review, even though that can be worse than having none. I’ve recommended that they have separate reviews for compliance matrix/outline, content plan, offering design, early draft, mature draft, instruction compliance, evaluation criteria optimization, finalization, submission readiness, pricing model, pricing, and contracts. This list freaks people out. They are incorrectly thinking all reviews require a pens down and senior staff sitting around a table while reading and pontificating. You don’t need (possibly any) reviews to be performed like that. What you need is validation at each step to achieve reliability before you take things further. This can often be achieved informally and without a pens down or halt in proposal progress. To get them on board, you’ll have to show them that it can be implemented. You should also use the minimization challenge. Dare them to identify anything in that list that doesn’t need to be validated and won’t create win rate stealing disruption if skipped. Everything should have a proposal minimization challenge Every single decision related to proposal development should be prioritized based on how it will impact your win rate. Winning pays for the effort that it takes to win. If it doesn’t, you’re either selling a commodity and writing a proposal when you should be giving a quote, or your margins are too thin to tailor your proposals. A 1% difference in win rate on a $10 million proposal returns $100,000. That pays for a lot of effort. Imagine how much a 10% difference returns. Some things have more of an impact on win probability than others do. But all decisions should be prioritized based on their impact on win rate. And all proposal decisions should pass the proposal process minimization challenge. Do the least amount possible that will maximize your chances of winning. Instead of arguing over preferences, argue over the impact. Winning those arguments will require learning more about how the customer will perform their evaluations. And understanding that is critical to improving your win rates.

Success requires more than just identifying the steps in your proposal process. It’s a good start, but it's just a start. You can follow the same steps with very different results on different days. One day those steps will help you win. And on another day you’ll still lose even though you followed the steps. Here are some things that will help you transform your ordinary, challenging proposal process into something that will make things easier and be seen as an asset: See also: Successful process implementation Anticipate needs. Think about what people need to be available, focused, and successful at playing their role. Then set your process up to deliver that. Anticipate what great proposal writing will require. And deliver the information they will need. Anticipate what they will need before they get there, and when they do get there things will go more smoothly and they’ll spend their time trying to win instead of getting what they need. Guide expectations. A lot of friction during the proposal process comes from people not having their expectations met. Most of this is a result of expectations not being communicated and agreed on. To reduce this friction, you need get expectations out in the open. Consider spelling out the expectations in writing for every stakeholder at every step. Make sure you give them a chance to add, delete, or change those expectations and keep at it until everyone has explicitly agreed to accept the expectations relevant to themselves. Track issues to resolution. When issues arise, they need to be tracked to resolution. Tracking means following up and escalating when needed. Unresolved issues are not only proposal risk, they can impact your win probability. A whiteboard can count as an issue tracking system. But it’s not a very good one. Consider how help desks work to identify, track, and escalate issues without any ever being lost. Then emulate those concepts in whatever form or media works for you. Smooth the handoffs. Through the pursuit process information flows through many hands. At each handoff, there is a chance that information will be lost, expectations will go unmet, issues will remain unresolved, and friction will increase. Smooth the handoffs by identifying what information, in what format, needs to be delivered to meet expectations, resolve known issues, and reduce friction. Then go back to the beginning of the previous step and build in what it will take to accomplish that. Script your communications. For many steps, you can anticipate what you are going to need to communicate before, during, and after. So write them in advance. Leave placeholders for the details that are still to be determined. Have clear triggers for when you pass from one step to the next, and send the communications right away. Anticipate their needs, reaffirm expectations, provide instructions, and include links for additional information. Before, during, and after every step, what they need to know should just show up before questions even occur to them. This does not take extra effort. You need to communicate anyway. So forget about proposal reuse. But do practice communication reuse. Deliver just-in-time handouts. Where are things located? How should things be formatted? What procedures should be followed? What are the expectations? What will be needed? At every step, for every review, and to help every role, create handouts. Limit the handouts to one sheet (one to two pages). You could easily have a dozen or two of them. Don’t pass them out all at once. That’s like asking someone to read a book. Instead, distribute them at the moment of need. This should synch up nicely with your communications scripting. Just make sure your handouts are fulfilling the reader’s needs instead of your own, so that the person finds them useful and is happy to receive them. Deliver quality criteria checklists. How do proposal contributors know when they’ve done a good job? How do proposal reviewers know? Every assignment should come with a set of quality criteria in the form of a checklist, so that people know when they’ve done a good job. Reviewers should get the same checklists to use in performing their assessments. Like the handouts, limit the length. People need to be able to keep everything on the checklist in mind while they’re working. Have a system and communications plan for customer amendments and changes. Every once in a while, seemingly at random, customers change the RFP. Sometimes it’s a very minor change. Sometimes it requires major rewriting. Sometimes it comes early, and sometimes it comes late. It may or may not come with a deadline extension. How do you possibly plan for something that random? You can notify people that it’s arrived and is being reviewed. You can give first impressions. You can follow up with more details. You can script these communications so they can be done quickly. You can have if-then-else contingency plans that cover things like under what circumstances you want people to stop writing while you figure things out. Pass the minimization challenge. I like to challenge proposal stakeholder to identify any step, assignment, or action that can be safely removed from the process without causing a reduction in win probability. If there is anything in the process that doesn’t improve win probability I want it removed. As you implement your process or any of these recommendations, you should be doing the same. What can you safely skip? Only do the things that improve your chances of winning, and prioritize them by the amount of impact that they have. You want the tiniest least burdensome process that maximizes your chances of winning. How do you know if these things are working? You’ll see a reduction in friction and fewer questions. Those are the first signs that people are getting their needs met. And if the process is meeting their needs, it’s not a burden. It’s helpful. A helpful process does more to improve win probability than a mandated process. A helpful process is a tool that people want to use. And a helpful proposal process executed by people who want to win will not only transform everyone’s proposal experience, it will also supercharge your win rate.