Carl Dickson

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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.

There are two dimensions to time management. One is managing yourself. It’s not always easy, even though it’s completely in your own control. The second is working through other people, who have to manage their own time. This is much harder. The combination is extremely challenging. The time management strategies for each are similar. But working through other people requires a variety of techniques. It is not as simple as needing discipline and authority. In fact, those are the least of the tools you need. Doing proposals with other people is its own topic. Time management for proposals See also: Faster Do more earlier. It takes some time to ramp up a proposal. And there is much that you can’t do until you have the RFP. What you can do is think things through, determine what matters, and develop your win strategies so that when the outline based on the RFP is ready you can accelerate the time between having the outline and being ready to write. Don’t try to do more than the time available allows. This one is a little counter-intuitive. You need to scale back in a planned way to avoid having to drop quality assurance at the end. Simplifying does not have to mean that you produce a proposal that is not as good. Consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Focus on your message and drop the bells and whistles. Don’t try to make it up by working harder. If you plan to make up for it by just working harder, you’re setting yourself up for trying to accomplish the impossible. You’ll increase the odds that you end up scaling back quality to enable you to meet the deadline. Scale what you’re going to build to fit the time available with enough time to do a quality job. And then work harder to make up for it when you discover that unforeseen complications made things take longer than expected. Stop moving the goal post. Don’t add revisions just because it looks like there is enough time available or you think you can make it better. Keep doing this and you’ll trip over the point where there won’t be enough time and you’ll sacrifice quality to make the submission. Cycle your proposals through planning, writing, and quality assurance, then final production. If you find yourself backing up from final production to writing, then either your planning or quality assurance is broken and that may jeopardize future proposals. For example, if you use quality assurance to discover what the proposal should be and then create rework instead of using it to validate that the proposal is what you planned it to become, you have a broken content planning process. Not only that, you risk entering into the infinite loop of reviewing and revising in the hope that the proposal will become something great until the clock runs out and you submit what you have in the last cycle. This is not a valid approach to quality assurance and can easily reduce quality instead of improving it. Define your proposal quality criteria and plan your content and then validate the plan. Validating that plan is far more important than reviewing the drafts that come later. Don’t fail at validating your content plan and whatever you do, don’t skip it. Think things through. Once. If you are constantly rethinking or trying to figure things out, you are constantly wasting time. Take the time to think things through well and then validate your approach before implementation. You can refine your plan as you move forward, but you don’t want to be moving backwards because the plan was insufficient or broken at the start. Plan to figure things out. Plan a careful reconsideration to validate your plans. Don’t move forward until it is complete. But then don’t move backwards. Efficiency. Proposal efficiency is not what you think it is. It is not making proposals take less time. Proposal efficiency is winning what you bid. But the kind of efficiency that involves making activities only take as long as they need to and not more is good for managing the time between RFP release and the deadline.

A great way to learn where you need improvement is by paying attention to the questions people ask, especially the ones they ask more than once. They are the signs that your process is flawed. They are also signs of potential process resistance. When people don’t need to ask any questions, it’s because they find the process to be easy. It meets their needs. It is delivering to them what they need. When they have what they need and are being pointed in the right direction, they will produce better proposals and do it more efficiently. Do the people you are working with on your proposals ask questions like: See also: Successful Process Implementation Where is a file located? What are they supposed to write? Is this what you want? Is this any good? How do I…? When do you need it? Should I…? Where do I find out? Who should I talk to about…? Do they ask for input so they can complete their assignments? In a perfect word, people would not have to ask any questions at all during a proposal, because the process would deliver the information they need, when they need it. In the imperfect world we live in, we make compromises and have limited resources, so we don’t have time to anticipate every question and prepare answers to them. But in the competitive world of proposal writing, we seek to outdo everyone who might challenge us by being closer to perfection. Anticipating their questions and preventing the need to even ask them is part of how the proposal process can improve your company’s competitiveness. It is also key to getting people to accept and follow your process. To improve your process, focus not only on what it does or what the steps are, but also focus on making your process self-explanatory. Make sure that your forms, communications, and assignments are not only self-explanatory, but that they anticipate the questions that people will ask while completing the assignments. This sounds basic and is easy to understand, only it is quite difficult to achieve in practice. Examples of proposal assignments How do you make a proposal writing assignment self-explanatory? Take a look at these three examples of articulating a proposal writing assignment: 1. Write this section. 2. Write this section and make it RFP compliant. 3. Write this section and while making it RFP compliant, optimize it to score highly against the evaluation criteria, implement our win strategies (here’s a list), use lots of graphics (here are some suggestions), prove these points we’re trying to make, establish that we are qualified to do what you write about (here’s another list), and that we have experience doing it (from these projects). Obviously, writers will produce much better proposal writing if the assignment resembles the third example. Obviously the third example takes more care and time to create. But less obviously, people will still have questions about how to fulfill the assignment with the third example. They will have fewer questions than with the first two. But the questions they ask will tell you what you left out and help you choose better wording. With any of the three examples, you may also find that answering the questions before they are asked is not as simple as wording your assignments better. You may need to add steps to obtain the information needed or to discover the answer. Those steps may involve other people. Those other people will have questions about what you require of them. And so on… This is a good thing. It’s showing you what needs to happen in preparation for people to be successful with their assignments. And you want that to happen. The success of your process is determined by how well you surface the questions people will have Simply asking whether people have any questions is better than nothing, but won’t get the best results. Try asking probing questions like: What do you think about…? Would this be easier if we…? Do you think this would work? Does that make sense? Do you have everything you need to complete your assignments? Look for the problems that will surface later if people don’t have the input they need or don’t understand how to accomplish their assignments. Remember, goal is not just getting something on paper. The goal is getting people to write a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. Don’t expect them to just show up knowing what that is.

Saying things that differentiate your offering from your competitors is a well-known best practice. Proposal writers spend a lot of time identifying differentiators and then working them into their proposals. At least they should. What we see in a lot of the proposals we review are things that do the opposite. People write things in their proposals that make them sound ordinary. You can’t be competitive and sound ordinary. We call these statements anti-differentiators. If you can’t write a great proposal built around your differentiators, you should at least try really hard not to base your proposals on anti-differentiators. 5 examples of anti-differentiators Anti-differentiator: “Our company is fully capable of performing the required work on time and within budget.” When you say that you can do the work, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is a potential competitor can do the work. Being able to do the work will not win you the bid. Doing the work in some way that is exceptionally better is what will win you the work. Talk about how your way of doing the work is superior or will deliver superior results instead of simply saying you can do the work. Adding “on time and within budget” to the list is like saying “pick us because we will do a merely acceptable job.” When you claim that you will do the work exceptionally, no one will believe you. So don't say that you are an excellent performer, have a great track record, or will do a great job. Being exceptional must be proven. Ordinary companies claim all kinds of things without proving them. No one ever pays them any attention. No proposal evaluator ever told their boss that they should approve a proposal because the vendor they’d never heard of before said they are the industry leader. A company that proves they have a credible approach to mitigating the risks resulting in more reliable delivery will beat them every time. Anti-differentiator: “Our company meets all of the qualifications required by the RFP.” When you say that you are fully qualified, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is a potential competitor will be qualified. Being qualified will not win you the bid. Being over qualified will not win you the bid. However, being qualified in a way that matters and makes a difference can win you the bid. Focus on why your qualifications will make a difference and prove that it matters. A vendor that brags about “meeting all qualifications required by the RFP” will lose to a company that shows how their qualifications will result in better delivery or that simply offers better qualifications. Every time. Anti-differentiator: “Our company will staff every position required for this project.” When you say that you have the staff or that you’ll just hire the incumbent staff, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is bidding will claim to have the staff or be capable of getting them. And they’ll be just as credible as you are. Don’t just say that your staff or ability to get them is better, somehow. Say what the impact of your better staff or ability to get them will be. And prove it. Anti-differentiator: “We will meet all of the requirements in the Statement of Work (SOW).” If you really want to sound ordinary, say that you’ll fulfill or comply with all of the contract requirements. Because everyone will say that and you’ll have lots of company. You’ll be one of many and just like all the rest. And it’s not even what the customer really wants. It’s merely the minimum of what they must have. What they want is someone who will do better than the contract requirements. Only if you’re going to say that you have to detail how you’ll do that and what the impact will be. Anti-differentiator: “Our company delivers the best value.” When you say that you or your approach provides the best value and leave it at that you sound ordinary. If you prove the value impact of what you offer is greater than the value impact of other offers, then you sound compelling. Only how are you going to do that? The best you can usually hope for is to explain the trade-offs and how the trade-offs you chose will strike the best balance between cost and performance. Skip trying to claim to be the best value. Your claim means nothing. The customer will determine who is offering the best value. And they’ll do it by considering the trade-offs. Information about those trade-offs that help them understand what matters is the kind of thing that customers cite as strengths on their proposal evaluation forms. Don’t be the minimum Anything that involves doing the minimum, meeting the requirements, and being capable, will always be anti-differentiators no matter how affirmatively you state them. Why would the customer choose a vendor who is merely acceptable over someone who is better? Any claims that are unproven, no matter how complimentary or grandiose, will also be an anti-differentiator. They do the opposite of what you intend and make you look like an ordinary, somewhat untrustworthy, vendor deserving of skepticism. Each anti-differentiator that you include in your proposal lowers your competitiveness. Don’t be ordinary because ordinary doesn't win. If you can’t find a real differentiator, at least just prove that you are good at what you do. Proof points can be differentiators.

Not only will you never have enough people to help write and produce a proposal, but many of the ones you do have will be inexperienced. You need to get the most out of what you’ve got to work with. Sometimes this means that instead of best practices and a great proposal, you need to figure out how you're going to be able to submit anything with the staff you have to work with. And hope you can still win. Maybe your proposed price will be low. Basic things you can do to improve your chances See also: Dealing with adversity Anticipate everything an inexperienced proposal writer is going to mess up and have questions about. Don’t just think about the procedures. They won’t already know what the goals should be and you can’t afford for them to get stuck. They won’t know how to structure their response or what points to make. They won’t know what the expectations are. Keeping them from wandering around in the dark will save a lot of time. Make sure people can fulfill their assignments. It will help tremendously if you have practical guidance you can give those contributing to the proposal effort. It will also help if you take the time to detail your proposal assignments. Most proposal assignments come with failure built into them. If you just pass out an outline, you’re setting yourself up for a bad proposal experience. Detailing your proposal assignments means telling people what they need to succeed with their assignment and not just giving them a heading to fill in. Guide them towards success. Proving training is beneficial, but can increase the time burden that the proposal represents. Classroom training is best for procedures, knowledge transfer, or contextual awareness and pays off best for staff who will do more proposals in the future. But practical proposal training is best embedded into your process and doesn’t have to even look like training. Think of it as guidance that can be implemented in the form of explainers built into forms, cheat sheets, and checklists. A little goes a long way, even if it’s just explainers included with assignments. The further you go beyond an outline and a schedule, the more you will get out of the staff you’ve got to work with. Set the bar low and be careful where you raise it. Decide whether your goal is to submit an ordinary, compliant proposal that no one will be embarrassed by without mentioning that it’s not a competitive strategy, or whether you are going to stretch your thin resources to the breaking point in an attempt to win against better prepared and resourced competitors. You’ll do a better job if you assess your circumstances and make an intentional choice between those two instead of leaving it unstated or claiming to do both. Going all heroic without the right resources tends to result in a last minute train wreck of a proposal full of defects that no one will want to admit to. Going beyond the basics to really get more out of people If you only task your proposal writers with writing, you are in for a bad proposal experience when insufficient and inexperienced staff try to figure out what to write and how to present it on their own. There is a lot more to winning a proposal than showing up and putting enough words on paper to fill the page limit. The more you do to plan what should be written, including not just what to write but what points to prove and how to present things, the more likely you are to get writing that reflects it. Planning is how you accelerate thinking through how the writing should be structured, presented, and all the ingredients that will go into each assignment. Planning is how you accelerate writing, increase your win probability, and reduce rework. The more your assignments specify the structure and topics of what should be written, the more likely you are to get writing that reflects it. You may or may not be able to involve the writers you have to work with in this planning. You also need to define proposal quality criteria so the writers know what defines successful completion. If your assignment is “complete a section” you’ll get words that fill the page limit. If you make the standard “pass the review,” then they will write without knowing what it will take to pass. If you start by writing down your proposal quality criteria, then your writers can self-assess their own writing before it gets to the review. Your proposal quality criteria can be a simple checklist asking if they’ve established compliance with all RFP requirements relevant to their sections, whether they’ve proved the points that were supposed to be made in their sections, whether they wrote it to score highly against the RFP evaluation criteria, etc. Planning and quality criteria change writing from something mysterious into something that is guided toward a successful outcome with minimal rework. It is just what you need to maximize the use of insufficient and inexperienced resources. It is also just what you need to maximize the productivity of highly capable and experienced resources. Once you have planning and quality criteria, you can manage your humble, under-resourced proposal by focusing on goals and expectations instead of procedures. Build for the future In this moment on this pursuit, the staff you’ve got to work with is limited and the best you may be able to do is accelerate the time from thinking to writing and eliminate rework. But over time and on future pursuits, you can improve those staff and possibly find new ones. Building people’s awareness about how to streamline the writing through planning and improving their understanding of proposal quality criteria will benefit future proposals. How much to invest in proposal staffing is an ROI consideration. If you want The Powers That Be to better resource your proposals, you need to show the impact that will have on revenue, and that the return is orders of magnitude more than it costs. The converse is also true. Understaffing proposals will reduce revenue by far more than it saves. Maximizing ROI depends on improving your win rate. Regardless of whether your proposals are fully staffed, understaffed, or most likely somewhere in between, improving the effectiveness of the staff you’ve got to work with will always be part of improving your win rate.

Proposal management is not just about implementing the proposal process. Procedural oversight is an archaic view of the primary role of management. Proposal management should be about accomplishing the goal of submitting a winning proposal. Having a process does support that goal, but a more important part is looking beyond the process to what is required for people to be successful and guiding them to achieve it. Proposal management is more about things like training and problem solving than it is about procedural oversight. See also: Steps Proposal training itself is about a lot more than just procedural training. By default we think of training as learning what to do. We always seem to want to start with Step 1. But the reality is that proposals aren’t really a developed in a series of sequential steps. Proposal training needs to cover expectation management, issue resolution, and seeing things from the customer’s perspective as much as it should cover the proposal lifecycle. When it comes to proposals, “what to do” is fifth in line even though it’s often the first thing people ask for. Ahead of it should be: What are the goals? Developing great proposals is best done through a series of accomplishing goals instead of following steps. Understanding the goal people are trying to accomplish is more important than which procedures they follow to accomplish it. This is because it is completely possible to follow procedures and not achieve any of the goals. What to expect from each other. You can’t fulfill stakeholder expectations if you don’t know what they are. This is the basis for how people work together and not the “steps” in the process. How to prepare. Being able to get the right information in the right format so that you can turn it into a plan before you start writing will do more to ensure success than any skills you might have at writing. The most highly skilled proposal writers in the world will lose to highly skilled proposal writers who are better prepared. Every time. How to validate that you did it correctly. Most proposal writing is… ordinary. Ordinary is not competitive. Most proposal writers can’t define proposal quality. Think the two might be connected? Learning how to define proposal quality criteria, use them as guidance for writing, use them for self-assessment, and use them to validate that what was written is what it should be will do more to ensure success than clever wordsmithing. What to do to accomplish the goal. What can be done? What options are there? What must be done? What must be done in a particular way? Proposal procedures can be accelerators that prevent people from having to figure out what to do to accomplish the goals. Presented this way, people more readily accept steps and procedures. But what is important is achieving the goals and not procedural compliance. The doing part of proposals becomes straightforward when you first understand the four things that come before that doing. And to the extent that you have a proposal process, it should do these things first, before tasking people with assignments. The management of proposals is practically built in when you have goals, expectations, preparation, and validation in place before the doing. The challenge for proposal contributors is learning what goals to accomplish, what is expected, how to prepare before writing, and how to validate proposal quality. This should be the focus of proposal management and proposal training. Give me someone who has learned these things and we can win. Give me someone who has not learned these things and we’ll be able to submit… something. The good news is you don’t have to deliver hours of training for each of these before you start. You just need to communicate things and give people handy checklists and reminders: Do you even tell people the goal for each activity? Do you put it in writing? We recommend using a goal-driven process instead of a step-driven one. What do you do to set expectations? Do you define the expectations for each activity? Is it all talk? Or is it in writing? Do you provide it as a handout? Learn how to communicate expectations in writing during every activity, event, or phase. An assignment without written expectations is just telling someone to do something and not how to do it. An assignment with expectations helps people work together. How do you help people prepare? Do you tell people how to prepare before you need them to do something? Do you give them time to prepare after you’ve told them how? Or do you wait until they fail to give you what you need? Every task on a proposal requires input. Planning what to write before you start writing is vital for success. How do you validate that proposal assignments were done correctly? Do you enable people to self-assess their work? Do you give them the same criteria that the proposal reviewers will use? Or do you set them up to be surprised at the review? How do people bring you completed assignments with a high likelihood of them being well done without it just being based on opinion and hope? We recommend enabling proposal quality validation by having written quality criteria. They can even take the form of checklists. Always give writers and reviewers the same criteria. Proposal management after the fact without these things is just complaining and attempting to fix things that shouldn’t have shown up broken. Proposal management with these things is competitive. It’s managing to win instead of managing to submit.

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. The target audience for this course: 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. A little history to put things into context… In 2004, Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com launched the MustWin Process as a fully documented proposal process with innovations to improve win rates. In 2017, we began migrating the MustWin Process from a milestone-based process to a goal-based process, in which achieving the goals were more important than the steps used to achieve them. This opened up tremendous flexibility. In 2021, we began developing a new model for proposal development, based on defining expectations instead of steps. When combined with the goal-driven MustWin Process, it achieves full awareness of what needs to be done, what is required to do them, when they need to be done by, and how to assess whether they were done properly. In practice on real world proposals we are finding this to be transformative. People don’t need to follow a flow chart that breaks with the first curveball thrown by an RFP. Proposal contributors and stakeholders can all know what’s expected of them for every activity without even asking. When there are issues, the expectations are clear so that the team can focus on resolving the issue in a way that puts them back on track. People are less likely to ignore a set of written expectations that will come up later if they do. People tend to appreciate having the expectations spelled out at the beginning. We’re ready to teach our model to you, along with how to apply it across the life of the proposal. We’ll focus on the key roles contributors and stakeholders play so that everyone will understand what expectations they need to fulfill during a proposal. In this new training course, you will learn to use our Expectation Model to: Enhance an existing proposal process. You'll learn how to bring more clarity to the people participating. As a step toward formalizing how you do proposals. If you don't have an established process or it isn't well documented, in this course you'll learn how to build a foundation for better proposals. To be honest, you can get by without a Proposal Process if people understand the expectations for working together. And once they do, implementing a process later becomes an easier, incremental step. The real issue isn’t whether, how much, or what type of proposal process to have. The real issue is how to improve your win rate and how to get there from here. This course will give you what you need to improve your win rate on the people level instead of the flow chart level. But the two can work together. Eliminate friction during proposals. More proposal friction is caused by unfulfilled or conflicting expectations than any other cause. Except maybe for RFP amendments ;-) Address expectations with a 360-degree perspective. All proposal stakeholders have expectations that flow in every possible direction. And they all matter. Improve efficiency. People should know the expectations without having to ask. “Work late until it’s done” is an example of a poorly communicated and flawed expectation for a very real need. That need can be better addressed with better expectation management. Handoffs between people go much more smoothly when expectations are clear. Smooth handoffs mean effort spent on improvement instead of rework. Increase your company’s competitiveness. When everything else is the same, the proposal team that works together the best has a competitive advantage. If you are in a line of business where differentiators are hard to find, this becomes even more important. Introduce beneficial change over time. Expectations change. And when they do, you need an effective way to communicate the changes. If you have a model for defining and communicating expectations, you can use it to introduce change. Got a recurring problem? Change the expectations to prevent it. Got a lesson learned? Change the expectations to address it. Got an RFP mandated curveball that no one would expect? Now you’ll have a way to change and communicate the expectations for each stakeholder group throughout the process. Overcome problems with process buy-in and acceptance. Resistance happens when people are asked for things that are too far out of line with their expectations. When you improve how you communicate expectations you reduce resistance and increase acceptance. Or you surface the issue. The real problem is how do you resolve the expectation conflict? Having a structured way to declare expectations gives you something you can change if needed to gain acceptance. Expectations flow in both directions. You want to address your stakeholders' expectations as well as your own. This course will put you in position to be able to do that. What does this course consist of? Two 1.5-hour zoom sessions per week, for four weeks Examples you can tailor Homework assignments to research and articulate expectations Conversion of expectation lists into checklists and assignments The first cohort for this course will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11am, starting on February 7th, 2023. Pricing You have two options, single participant and dedicated group: Single participants are $1,595 with a $600 discount if you are already a PropLIBRARY Annual Subscriber or become one first. Dedicated groups: $5000 with only your company participating, up to 30 attendees, and 3 free annual subscriptions ($1500 when purchased through our website) or renewals to PropLIBRARY Invite your key stakeholders to participate in defining expectations Use company specific role definitions and milestone terminology By the end of the course you will complete a ready-to-implement expectation matrix that will transform your process Schedule at our mutual convenience Inflation fighting tip: You probably waste more than this in B&P spending on every single proposal you do, due to issues that directly result from problems with expectation conflicts... A day of schedule slippage here. An extra day of review recovery that should not have been necessary there. A tenth of a percent point decrease in win rate due to having to lower the bar instead of raising it… Multiply by the number of people impacted and soon you're talking real money that this course can help you stop wasting. Instead of fighting inflation by reducing the headcount on proposals (which we both know will lower your win rate), try reducing the number of wasted hours instead. How do I enroll? Click this button and let us know whether you would like to enroll as one or more single participants or as a dedicated group. Based on the option you select, we’ll check your PropLIBRARY membership status and send you an invoice for online payment, with payment by check as an option. Along the way, feel free to ask any questions you may have. Register, ask a question or get more information We strongly encourage you to make sure you are a paid subscriber to PropLIBRARY first so that you can take advantage of the discount. You can become a subscriber to PropLIBRARY here.

We like to think that when someone didn’t fully complete an assignment on time even though they accepted it, it was just a problem with motivation. It’s easy to throw shade. But experience shows us that it’s more complicated than that. It’s also easy to assume there’s an easy solution, like better deadline “enforcement” by The Powers That Be. Or that people should “just follow” the process. But experience shows us that it’s more complicated than that. The key to being able to make improvements is to get to the root causes of assignment failure, and not to assume reasons or solutions. The root causes are often pretty basic: See also: Assignments 1) The person receiving the assignment isn’t capable of fulfilling it Maybe it’s a lack of training reducing their effectiveness. That can be fixed, but only if you anticipate the need and do something about it. Just muddling through with staff trying to figure things out as they go will reduce quality. Maybe it’s something else that makes them not capable of completing their writing assignments on time. If you give them the assignment anyway, hoping they can stretch and complete it anyway, the proposal will suffer if they can’t. How are you going to prevent that? How can you tell the difference between able to stretch and not able to stretch that far? What can you do to help them make the stretch? Sometimes people aren’t capable of completing their assignments effectively, but they either don’t realize it or they aren’t willing to say it. Maybe they think it’s better to give it a try than to look like they don’t “want” to contribute. Asking directly won’t help. You’ll need to ask probing questions about what they plan to write, what it will address, how it will be presented, and when you can check in on them informally to see if there are signs of evasion. If you don’t have clarity about the capability of your contributors, you are already in trouble. Gaining that clarity should be a priority. Waiting until a review increases your risk instead of lowering it. Keep in mind that you’re not looking to just get something written, you’re looking to get something written that will win. It’s extra challenging understanding what a person’s proposal contribution capabilities are when you haven’t worked with them before. But understanding what you have to work with early enough to do something about it is often the difference between winning and losing. 2) Things changed Circumstances change. Things pop up, whether business or personal, and they aren’t always predictable. This is especially true for your star contributors, because they are the most in demand. Another place you need clarity is regarding priorities. This should come from The Powers That Be to ensure they aren’t assumptions or preferences. Or subject to debate. If the priorities are set well, then it will be clear what must be done so that action can be taken more quickly. The problem with avoiding priority conflicts is that it often involves saying, “No.” Some people, including executives, really struggle with that. They’d rather have everything done “good enough,” than to say “No” to something. The problem is that there is no such thing as “good enough” in proposal writing. There is only what it will take to win. Losing because you shorted the proposal some hours that cost the company a tiny fraction of the cost of the proposal sucks. But what sucks worse is when you compare the cost of resolving the priority conflict with the cost of the lost revenue. Priority conflicts can be difficult to untangle. Instead of focusing on expedience, try to focus on ROI. Multiply your win rate by the anticipated award value and compare that to your overall cost of pursuit so you can be mathematically clear on what resolving the conflict is worth. It helps to discuss contingencies ahead of time and gain some clarity on what the priorities are. It also helps to be decisive and quick when unexpected changes do occur. 3) They were never going to do it Some staff are so overloaded that they are shorting everyone. Usually, they are trying to do the best they can. For proposals, this creates a conflict over whether that will be enough to win. But sometimes they not only know when they accept the assignment that they’ll be incomplete or late, they also have an attitude that you’ll just have to accept it because that is all they have to give. Sometimes they just want you to know their excuse for failing ahead of time. Sometimes people assign a lower priority to the assignment you give them than you do, and they don’t bother to tell you. Sometimes people will passively accept an assignment and aggressively respond when they are late or it’s incomplete. Understanding their constraints is the secret to determining what kind of assignments to give them and whether to coax them along with assistance or add pressure. Sometimes you are just better off without them. What good is it to put extra effort you don’t have into getting an assignment completed if it’s not going to be done well enough to win? And sometimes you can’t replace them because they are your key subject matter experts. Before you try to apply pressure, try to understand their constraints regarding time, capacity, capability, and personality. Maybe there are ways around those constraints they haven’t thought of. Maybe you can just get the information you need from them and have someone else do the writing. Maybe you can use them as a reviewer instead. This can be dangerous if they also have the attitude that only they know the right way to do things and whatever is brought to them is going to be all wrong. But sometimes you can work a section in stages, by discussing what is going to be written and how it is going to be presented, followed by an early informal draft, and then a more formal draft. 4) There was an expectation mismatch If people don’t bring you what you need after saying that they will, there is an expectation mismatch. Either they did not understand your expectations, your expectations were not feasible, or something else got in the way. In any event, they failed at delivery because you failed in expectation management. You can do something about that. You can describe your expectations. You can coax them to describe theirs. But you will still run into conflicts, because expectation fulfillment is often a subjective thing. When people are conflicted over unfulfilled expectations, they often don’t handle it well. They feel let down, irritated, and defensive. You need to separate their reaction from what needs to be done. When you have an expectation conflict, ask yourself whether your assessment is real if it is based on interpretation. When talking to other people, ask them to do the same. Is it real? Is that true? Or is it an interpretation? Was the reason that they missed a deadline really that they “don’t take deadlines seriously?” Or is that your interpretation? It might be real that the deadline wasn’t their top priority. But why was that? And is your reason for that also true? Or is that also an interpretation? What are their priorities? Are you making assumptions or do you know because you’ve discussed them? This is especially important for small businesses and proposal teams. You might be tempted to claim that someone “always does this” or that you “knew they were going to do that.” But that’s not real or true. And if they are true, why did you give them the assignment without mitigating the risks? It is even more important to depersonalize expectation management when you work with the same people over and over again. Once you can separate the truth at the core of the conflict from people's feelings about it, you can do something about it. Because what happened doesn’t matter nearly as much as what needs to be done next to win before the proposal deadline. Try not to get overly distracted by who said what, what assumptions were made, what was justified, who was to blame, what changed, or what was unexpected, because now you not only need a new plan, you need a new set of expectations. And since your expectations were either wrong or not communicated with sufficient clarity for the receiver the first time, you need to adjust and try again.

People bring their expectations to work with them. People form expectations while at work. Expectations run in every direction, between every stakeholder. Humans generally do a poor job of communicating them, and an arguably worse job of fulfilling them. It is a wonder that anything ever gets done. We can do better. What if expectations were communicated more clearly? And accepted? What could we accomplish if we fulfilled all of our expectations for each other? What stands in the way of this? Problems with managing expectations The biggest thing standing in the way of expectation fulfillment is that our expectations clash. A missed assignment deadline is a common form of conflicting expectations. Conflicting expectations during proposals come about in various ways: See also: Successful process implementation Sometimes one person’s expectation is not accepted by another. Sometimes this is communicated, and sometimes it is held back. New expectations form, often the result of competing priorities, after an expectation is set. The person with the expectation does not realize that the people they expect things from have expectations of their own. Each new stakeholder with a new set of expectations further complicates the dynamic. Some people’s expectations count more than others. Sometimes an expectation is not valid. We want things we cannot have. Or we ask for the wrong things. Potential issues with expectations are not anticipated and prevented or mitigated. Expectations are interpreted differently than intended. And we thought it was going to be simple. What you can do about it Here’s a little advice that can have a big impact: Instead of defining your expectations, start by fulfilling the expectations of your stakeholders. This will make it far more likely that they’ll be able to fulfill your expectations. It also requires you to understand your stakeholders' expectations, which is rather important. Define the scope. You don’t need to also address expectations that are set by corporate or human resource policies. You can’t possibly address the entire universe of expectations. Quality methodologies don’t give up on trying to achieve quality because we can’t actually define it universally in a way that is useful. Instead we define a scope in which we can define quality and focus on that. You need to do the same thing with expectations. Instead of articulating your expectations as what people should do, articulate them as goals to be accomplished. This is the difference between discussing needs and micromanaging. Try focusing on what has to happen. Minimalism rules. Especially when it comes to expecting things from other people. What expectations must be fulfilled for what has to happen to be achieved? Only then should you try to deal with expectations related to the options, considerations, and contingencies. This also helps to de-personalize expectations. Separate what you expect from how you expect it to be fulfilled. Do you need both expectations fulfilled? Can you leave it up to them how to accomplish the goals? Or make suggestions instead of mandates? Balance every expectation you have against every possible expectation the people you depend on might have. Other people’s expectations are the most common reason your proposal expectations aren’t getting fulfilled. Remember the difference between expectations and rules or mandates. You’re not trying to codify compliance backed by threats of enforcement. You’re trying to make sure that everybody is on the same page regarding how you’d all like things to go so that you can work together to accomplish great things. Rules deal with differences in interpretation by adding more rules. This gets in the way of expectation fulfillment. Remove room for interpretation. This is not about closing loopholes. It’s about achieving clarity and simplicity so that people can understand each other without conflict. Surface differences in expectations as quickly as possible. You want to know about them because if you leave them unaddressed, they are more likely to result in expectations being unfulfilled in a way that jeopardizes overall success. And the sooner you find out about the differences, the more likely you are to be able to reframe them in a way that provides a path to a successful outcome. Improving your management of expectations will not only improve efficiency and the proposal experience. It will also increase trust. When people know what others expect and can count on each other to fulfill those expectations they begin to trust each other. And when people don’t understand each other’s expectations or how to fulfill them, distrust can seep in. It is so much easier when change does occur or a chaotic element rears its ugly head to overcome the challenge when you are working with people you trust. And as a bonus, when people understand each other’s expectations, changes are less frequent and the way to resolve them is often readily apparent.

Before people invest in a pursuit, they like to know what their chances of winning are. They want to know the odds of winning are high enough before they commit. To make their estimate of their chances sound more scientific than it really is, they often call this estimate “probability of win (pwin).” The problem is that no one can accurately predict pwin See also: Making better bid/no bid decisions Try this… Add up every pwin estimate your company has done over the last year and average them. Now compare that average to your win rate over the same period. The difference proves that your pwin estimates were inaccurate. If your pwin estimates were accurate, they’d average out the same as your win rate. How much would you like to bet that most pwins are much higher than the actual win rate? People who want to bid tend to estimate high. Most companies avoid comparing their win rate with their pwin so they don’t have to admit that all of their pwins, and quite possibly all the decisions based on them, are wrong. Not only that, but nobody in charge of business development wants to admit that they don’t know the likelihood of winning. And nobody in finance is willing to make future revenue projections without something “quantified” to base them on. So people go along with the mythical fiction that is pwin. Because they need some way of quantifying the chances of winning. Pwin can’t be fixed Go back to your pwin average. Where did your pwin estimates go wrong? Which factors were too high, low, or missing? And how can they be changed to be accurate under future circumstances instead of last year's circumstances? You don’t know. You can guess, but your guess won’t be accurate. If we come back next year, your pwin estimates will not match your win probability. Again. Because pwin is a myth. There is no way to accurately represent pwin as a percentage. No matter how much we want it to be true. It’s just that pwin is a myth we can't do without. We need to be able to make decisions based on the likelihood of winning. Should we pursue it? How much should we invest? How much revenue will result? What we can do to understand our chances of winning We can stop pretending we can estimate pwin as a percentage with sufficient accuracy. We can admit it’s a guess and not a mathematical probability. I recommend using simple pros and cons and then talking it out. Whatever you do, don’t try to convert it into a percentage. There is value in talking about whether a lead is worth pursuing. But let’s not fool ourselves that there’s mathematical precision to our guesses. I mean forecasts. A good reason to base your pursuit decisions on talking about the factors in favor of and against bidding, is because that is what will drive your win strategies. A percentage just gives a false sense of confidence. Pros and cons can both be turned into action items. A percentage does nothing to help you win and may work against it. But pros and cons help you know what you need to do to win. Arguments for and against bidding articulate your strengths and weaknesses in a way that you will need if you bid. If you must assign a number to pwin so you can do spreadsheet calculations, then do what you have to do. My recommendation for this is to do that as a factor above or below your average win rate instead of as a percentage of the chance of winning a future competition. If we think this one has a 10% better than your average chance of winning, you can calculate your estimates. You are likely to be more accurate with an amount over or under your actual win rate than you are starting from zero to estimate your chances of winning. And could you at least once a year compare your pwin average to your win rate average and improve your estimates? Create a feedback loop. And can we have some corporate tracking and accountability for these numbers? Because if a number for pwin is so important we must have it, then it’s important enough to refine our accuracy and to make those who make the estimates accountable for them.