Carl Dickson

The right words to use in a proposal are the ones that the customer needs to hear to reach a decision in your favor. This can be hard to figure out. Luckily, when the customer releases an RFP, they give you those words. Before you put pen to paper, proposal writing requires you to interpret and understand the RFP. This skill has more to do with your ability to win a proposal than your writing skills. Where to find the words you need to use See also: RFPs When a customer writes an RFP, they identify the things they want vendors to address and the things that their evaluators will assess. When you read an RFP, you can see when they are indicating these things by the words the customer uses. For example, they may identify sections of the RFP as providing instructions, evaluation criteria, and a statement of work identifying what they require. Within those RFP sections, they often use words like "shall," "will," and "must" to indicate their requirements. In fact, a lawyer specializing in procurement will tell you that terms like “shall,” “will,” and “must” have precise meanings and that certain words should be used for things that the customer believes are mandatory and certain words for things that are optional, facts, etc. But while this might be how RFPs should be written, proposal writers must deal with how proposals are written. Often the person writing the RFP doesn’t understand the subtle nuances. This can make interpreting the RFP more challenging. Words like “shall,” “will,” and “must” usually indicate things the evaluator will be looking for and assessing. They may indicate things like customer requirements, instructions, terms and conditions, or facts, depending on how precise the customer is with their terminology. This is where interpretation becomes important. What you can rely on when they use those words, and others like them, is that they are indicating or identifying things that matter. The customer may be doing this to bring things to your attention, to the attention of their own evaluators, or both. It may be necessary to acknowledge them to be considered compliant with the RFP. The evaluator may be tasked with accounting for whether you responded to them in your proposal. The words that follow "shall," "will," "must," and other similar words are telling you what words to use in your proposal. You want the evaluator to be able to easily find the indicated words. They are what the customer will be looking for. You should also look for lists, bullets, numbered items, and things put in tables. When the customer itemizes things, they make it easier to account for them. You should make those lists easy to find and just as easy to account for in your proposal. Using the same bullets, numbers, table formats, etc., that the customer used can help. You should make your proposal checklist-simple to evaluate. Whether it's true in reality or not, it can help you write your proposal by picturing the evaluator looking at your proposal and checking off on a list as they find each keyword indicated in the RFP. Sometimes lists are simply words separated by commas. If the customer is looking for three things separated by commas, you need to decide how important those three things are. If they are the essence of what the customer is looking for, then you might want respond to those requirements with a bullet for each, with a run-in heading that uses those words. Or a table with those words as headings. You might even want a graphic that shows the relationship between those three requirements (are they a sequence, parallel activities, equally important (or not), goals/results, things that have prerequisites, etc.). When the customer looks at the section they should easily see those key words, see that you've responded to them with what they need to evaluate, and also see that you've shown some insight about them that goes beyond the RFP. Once you figure out what words they have indicated are important and that the evaluators might look for, you should write your proposal based on those words. Pay particular attention to the words used in any evaluation criteria provided. If there will be a formal scoring or decision process, it will be based on the words in the evaluation criteria. Those words may very well determine whether you win or lose. You should use their words when you write to fulfill the RFP requirements, but in order to win you should also do write in a way that adds up to a superior score against the words of the evaluation criteria. Turning their words into your proposal The job of a proposal writer is not to simply present the offering in a way that "sounds good." It’s to present the offering in a way that maximizes your chances of winning. Part of doing this requires using the language of the RFP when you write about your offering. When you are looking for what words to use, use theirs. What you don’t want to do is repeat the RFP exactly. This makes it harder for the evaluator to determine whether you understand what you are saying and can be trusted. Instead, take your offering design, bid strategies, and the points you wish to make, and articulate what differentiates them using the words from the RFP. Think of the words of the RFP as providing a structure. Your words describing your offering need to fit within that structure. You should review your proposal by making sure that all keywords indicated or identified in the RFP can be found in your response. You should read the proposal and evaluate it the same way the customer will. If you have trouble finding any of the key words in the RFP, even if you eventually do find them, it’s a safe bet the evaluator will also have difficulty finding them. And they may not even try that hard. Companies have lost proposals because the customer couldn't find things that actually were addressed in the proposal — they were just hard to find or didn't use the same terminology as the RFP. A few words about page limitations If the RFP contains several times the number of pages they limit the length of your proposal to, it may be physically impossible to include all of the keywords in the RFP and stay under the page limitation. The words you should use are the ones the evaluator will be most likely to look for. This means you must look past what they have indicated are keywords to consider what words they need to perform the evaluation. This requires correctly interpreting the RFP. Understanding which words the evaluator needs to see This also requires understanding the customer's evaluation process, right down to the forms they use. Sometimes helping the customer reach their decision comes down to helping them complete their forms, and sometimes that comes down to matching the words in your proposal to the words on their forms. This is not being trivial or nit-picky. In a page-limited proposal, doing this can be vital, since any words that do not impact your evaluation are extraneous, even if they are in the RFP. Every word you put in your proposal should be measured not by how important you think it is, but by how much it will impact the evaluation made by the customer. Before putting pen to paper, pause for a moment to consider what the evaluator needs to see in order to perform their task. Proposals do not get read. They get evaluated. Evaluators don't read proposals. They score them. The customer may not read your proposal at all. They may search for evaluation criteria keywords and then score what they find, bouncing all around your carefully articulated narrative without any concern for "how it flows." Knowing how your customer performs their evaluations is critical for achieving a high win rate. What the customer needs from you Customers who go to the trouble of publishing an RFP typically need to assess certain things about each proposal and bidder: Have they met the qualification requirements that were in the RFP? Did they follow the instructions I gave them? Does what they propose match what I said I needed? Did they accept all the terms and conditions that will be part of the contract? Which proposal best fulfills our requirements at a price we can afford? They often ask these questions before they ask which offering they like more. If they have written evaluation criteria, they may not even consider which proposal they "like." They will consider how the bidders compare on the basis of the evaluation criteria. How the evaluation criteria are worded, and how your proposal stacks up against them, will determine whether you win. When well-liked incumbent contractors lose, it is because their proposal did not get the highest score against the evaluation criteria. Being "liked" did not help their score because they wrote what they thought sounded good instead of what the customer needed to award them the proposal. At each step, ask whether you have used all of the words from the RFP that matter. If the page limitation means you can’t possibly address every RFP keyword, then think about the information the evaluators need and their evaluation or scoring process, and give them the words they need to make a decision in your favor. No matter how attached you are to a particular way of articulating things, you should make sure you are using the words the customer needs to hear in order for you to win.

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All proposals represent change for the organization considering them. This is true even if you are the incumbent and aren’t really proposing any significant changes in approach. There will still be incremental changes to account for. All proposals can add value through change management practices. This is true whether the changes are explicit, with the customer expecting change, or if the customer either hasn’t considered or isn’t concerned with change. They may not think the project needs change management. And yet, addressing some of these can show you have a better approach for managing the project. The following items can be used either to explicitly address the topic of “change management” or to improve your management approach without even using the word “change.” See also: Technical approach How can you engage people to address their concerns about the changes? How do the benefits compare to people's concerns about the changes? How do the changes relate to missions, goals, and requirements? How do the changes align with strategies and plans? Who are the stakeholders who will be involved, contribute, participate, or be impacted? What are the size, scope, and complexity of the changes? What is the gap between the current state and the change state? What alternatives are being considered? What effort will be required by various stakeholders? How will various stakeholders be impacted? What timeframes are significant? Will change implementation be expert-led, participative, or collaborative? How will change progress be tracked and communicated? What can you do to provide recognition of impacts and contributions? What motivations might impact people's reactions? What can be done to help prepare people for the changes? What should people anticipate? Can modeling or simulation help with change planning, communication, or risk mitigation? How can you engage people who are influencers? Is there a difference between internal and external impacts and issues? How are people concerned with compliance, risk, cost, or uncertainty related to the changes? What can be done to mitigate issues? Will existing policies, procedures, working practices, culture, budgets, job designs, effort, satisfaction, or prospects be impacted by the changes? Do you have a communication plan that will make the change agents visible and accessible? What can you do to ensure communications are timely and consistent? Who will be responsible for listening and learning during the change process? How will you collect stakeholder input? Will you communicate and interact with people both one-on-one and in groups? Who will you target for communications? How can the "who, what, where, how, when, and why?" model help you improve your communications? What media and channels will you use for communications? How will you match media and channel preferences to communication receivers? What can you do to reinforce communications? Is a training plan part of your approach? What logistics issues should you anticipate or prepare for? How will you handle both active and passive resistance to the changes? How will feedback be obtained and handled throughout the process? What will you do to monitor changes both during and after implementation?

Sometimes the friction between sales and fulfillment results in the company being afraid that someone might say something in the proposal that the company can’t deliver in order to make the sale. I see this often at engineering companies, where the customer’s concerns can deviate from the engineering realities. A proposal is supposed to be written from the customer’s perspective and address their concerns. But what about the engineering realities? The truth is that there is no conflict. But there is a lack of understanding. And the result can be decisions that do more harm than good. Proposal writing is not about saying whatever needs to be said to win. Proposal writing is about putting things in context. It is a lot like translation. Proposal writing is about putting your solution in terms that the customer will understand and that show the alignment between your features and their concerns. In many ways it is merely an extension of engineering, since it begins with understanding the requirements and measures its success by how well it addresses them, just like engineering does. One key difference is that for proposal writing, the evaluation criteria and procurement process are part of the requirements assessment. I could probably make the case that this is not different from including supply chain considerations or alternatives assessments in an engineering methodology, but I’m not trying to convince anyone that proposal writing is the same as engineering. What I am trying to do is show that there are enough similarities to make an integrated process-driven approach better than fighting over who should control the writing. When companies have their engineers write their proposals but don’t train them to understand what drives the evaluation process, they get poorly engineered proposals that do not meet the requirements of the end user. In other words, they lose. Engineers can be great proposal contributors. In fact, great proposals require strong technical contributions. But proposal quality is based on the procurement process and not simply on the offering design. It requires both to be addressed. You can teach your engineers to understand proposal development, or you can teach them to work with people who do. Either way, you need a process that defines and validates proposal quality. If engineering does not address fitness for purpose, it is not good engineering. And you can’t have a great proposal without having a well-designed offering. When companies try to handle everything from offering design, approach validation, RFP compliance, and bid strategy effectiveness to proofreading in a single review, it can be worse than not having a review at all. A better approach is to have multiple reviews to validate specific criteria like whether the approach as written reflects an approved offering design. When companies try to do engineering in writing, they are just asking for trouble. The design of your offering and the design of your proposal are two separate things. Is there any engineering methodology that recommends designing things by writing narratives about them? Don’t let your engineers do this and call it proposal writing. Don’t let your proposal writers do this. First design your offering to fulfill the relevant requirements. Then write about how your offering fulfills those requirements and is the customer's best alternative. The implementation of engineering benefits from also having a quality methodology. The implementation of a proposal process benefits from having a quality methodology. The success of your integration of your engineering and proposal practices can be proven by your quality methodologies. Any concerns or debates about how to interpret the requirements that drive both engineering and proposals, as well as whether the work product produced reflects them, should be addressed by defining quality criteria and applying them to the proposal. The debate you should be having is not who should write the proposal. It’s not about control. The debate you should be having is about what a quality proposal is, what concerns need to be addressed in producing a proposal, and how to validate the proposal that is produced. The debate you should be having is about what defines proposal quality and what your proposal quality criteria should be. If you can’t engineer the right proposal quality criteria, you shouldn’t be trying to produce a proposal.

Most of the proposals companies ask us to review have one or more of these issues. This means that most proposal writers have one or more of these bad habits. Simply fix these bad habits and you will make a dramatic improvement in your proposal writing. Once you’ve broken the habit, you can flip each one around and find a best practice hiding inside. See also: Themes Don’t state a universal truth by way of introduction. Avoid the temptation of starting off by saying something that is obviously and universally true, like “quality is vital for the success of this contract.” This is equally true of your competitors, and says nothing to make you a better alternative. If the statement is true, then start off by saying what you’ll do about it. That matters far more to the customer than what you were going to say. Take credit for owning the solution. Frame the issue with insight instead of something that does not differentiate your proposal one bit. Add value. Don’t state your commitment or intentions. Don’t be committed to customer satisfaction, quality, risk mitigation, etc. Deliver them. If it’s important, then don’t promise it, do it. Show commitment instead of intent. Which do you find more compelling, a vendor’s intentions or their credible and verifiable approach to delivering what you want? Likewise, don’t promise, believe, look forward to, hope, or otherwise say what you’d like to happen instead of saying what you are going to do. And don’t make your proposal about your mission or values, since those are essentially intentions. Prove your intentions through the results your actions will deliver, instead of making unverifiable empty promises, even if your intentions are good. Don’t tell the customer about themselves. Don’t tell the customer what their mission, needs, or requirements are. Don't write your proposal like a lab report in school. Instead, show insight into how to achieve these things. The customer looks to a proposal to find out how what is offered will help them achieve their mission and fulfill their needs. They do not look to a proposal to discover their mission, or to see if you can repeat it. Simply describing their requirements does not add value or help them make their decision. It does not show understanding. Understanding is best shown by results. If you deliver the right results, the customer will know that you understand. But seeing that you copied and pasted something from their website doesn’t give them any confidence in your understanding. Don’t make your proposal about you. It’s easy to get tricked when the RFP says to describe your company and offering. But what the customer really needs is to know why your offering is the best alternative and what makes it credible. Most of the details they request are so they can evaluate your credibility. They aren’t really interested in you. They are interested in what you can do for them. Make your proposal about the customer and what they will get as a result of accepting your proposal. The easiest way to do this is to never describe yourself. Describe what matters to the customer about your qualifications and approaches. Prove that they can trust you to deliver. But don’t make your proposal about you. Make it about the customer. And while you are at it, don’t waste their time saying things like you are pleased to submit your proposal. That’s obvious, adds no value, imposes extra reading on the evaluator, and does not reflect the customer’s perspective. If you want to reflect the customer’s perspective, start off by saying what they are going to get if they accept your proposal. Don’t build to the finish. What you learned in school can lead to bad proposal writing. What the customer needs to see in a proposal is what you offer. Then they read the details to see if they can trust you to deliver it. When writing proposals, the conclusion should come first. If it comes last, it is just a wrap up and not an offer. They may not see it at all. Building to the finish does not reflect the customer’s perspective, what they want to see, or how they approach reading a proposal. Don’t make unsubstantiated claims, especially grandiose ones. If you call yourself unique, you better prove it. Otherwise you hurt your credibility. Don’t claim to be state-of-the-art or innovative. Prove that you are through the results your approaches deliver. When you are selecting a vendor by reading proposals, you are less likely to select the one that sounds like a television commercial than one that shows insight. A good way to avoid making unsubstantiated claims is to avoid describing your company at all. Instead, talk about what you will do or deliver. Details about your company only matters as proof that you can deliver. If what you do or deliver is exceptional, and the way you do or deliver it is credible and differentiated, you will be the customer’s best alternative, even if you don’t make grandiose claims about yourself. The reverse is not true. Don’t use slogans. When used in the narrative portion of a proposal, slogans and tag lines are all unsubstantiated claims unless you are somehow using one in a proof point or summary. In a proposal, slogans don’t even support your branding because they make you look like someone who is willing to put selling ahead of talking about how you’ll fulfill the customer’s needs. In a proposal, slogans and tag lines don’t characterize what you are presenting. They just get in the way, create extra reading, and can make the customer skeptical of your trustworthiness. What makes proposals different from other marketing materials is that you are not positioning unspecified services against unspecified customers with unspecified needs and unspecified actions where a high-level statement adds structure. In a proposal, you are speaking to a specific customer to address their needs and help them make a decision. Slogans don’t help with decision making. The customer gets no value from slogans used in a proposal. Instead, just be your slogan. Let your proposal prove it. But make your proposal about the customer and not what you think you need to say.

You’re pleased to submit your proposal. So what? You care about quality. So what? You’ve got great experience. So what? You’ve got top-in-class, state-of-the-art solutions. So what? You’re fast growing. So what? You’ve won awards. So what? Why should the customer care? See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques How do you know if you’ve said something the customer cares about? Ask yourself if it passes the “So what?” test. People often say things in their proposals that do not pass the “So What?” test. They start their proposals, and often most paragraphs with pleasant and professional sounding sentences full of words that don’t matter to the customer one bit. Of course you “care about quality,” but no one is really believing “quality is your highest priority.” All these sentiments do is add noise and require extra reading. How do you think that makes the evaluator feel about your proposal? Do not write a single sentence in your proposal that fails the “So what?” test. For every single sentence in your proposal, ask yourself “So what?” If the sentence leaves that hanging, rewrite it. Never, ever assume that the answer is obvious. Your company has 30 years of experience. So what? What’s the customer getting as a result of all that experience? Why does it matter? What impact will it have? What difference does it make? So what? It’s a simple thing. And yet even people who have heard about it often forget. It’s a rare proposal that I review that doesn’t have at least one instance of failing the “So what?” test. Advanced application of the “So what?” test It's such an easy concept that many people overlook all the ways to use it. You can apply the “So what?” test to more than just your sentences. You are submitting a proposal. So what? Why should anyone except you care? You’ve got an approach, offering, staff, resources, etc. So what? The “So what?” test is about more than just sentence construction. It’s about discovering what it all means and creating a proposal that matters more than just as a way to get contracts that earn money. The reason the "So what?" test works so well is that it shifts people from thinking about what to say to the customer into explaining why. "Why" shows insight. The reasons why you do things can be a bigger differentiator than what you do. Do you prefer a vendor that does what they are supposed to, or a vendor that understands why things are supposed to be done that way? Answering "So what?" turns you into the vendor with insight. If you want to make yourself unpopular, try asking “So what?” at the next meeting you go to where people are talking about bid strategies. A lot of bid strategy suggestions are weak and fail the "So what?" test. We should bid because we can do the work. So what? We should bid because we have experience. So what? If you can pass the So what? test, you should bid. If you can't pass the So what? test, then you're not going to win against someone who does pass it. You can also be a hero by using the “So what?” test to replace all the platitudes with bid strategies that will matter to the customer. A fun homework assignment would be to review the last couple years of proposals and compare the win rates of those with bid strategies that passed the “So what?” test to those that didn’t. The “So what?” test helps you create a meaningful proposal by seeing things through your customer’s eyes. The simplicity of the “So what?” test betrays some important subtleties. For example, you must ask “So what?” as if you were the customer in order to arrive at an answer that matters to the customer. The “So what?” test is really a tool for understanding your customer. Try applying it to what you see in the RFP and you might be able to gain some insight into what matters to the customer beyond the requirements on paper. One of the more challenging aspects of the “So what?” test is that it can be recursive. Ask and answer. Then ask again. And again. You can do this forever. Here’s an example: We are committed to keeping risks low. So what? We are committed to keeping risks low in order to prevent problems. So what? We are committed to keeping risks low in order to prevent problems that could increase your costs. Now you’ve said something that matters. But you can still ask “So what?” again. We are committed to keeping risks low in order to prevent problems that could increase your costs so that the project remains within budget. The point at which you stop asking “So what?” is when the answer doesn’t matter anymore. Adding “so that the project remains within budget” is pointless if it does not matter to the customer because it is obvious. It can also cause challenges with page limitations. When you are out of space, you have to prioritize what you add based on what will impact the evaluation criteria the most. The good news is that you can use the “So what?” test to identify beneficial sounding but meaningless sentences that can be dropped completely. Just don’t start applying the “So what?” test to instructions from your boss or executive mandates. Seriously, this simple test should come with a warning label.

The following links are from the Introduction to Content Planning course. They are here in case you need a quick refresher before jumping into the exercises: In the exercises, you'll be stepping through all 8 iterations for creating a Proposal Content Plan. Here are a list of those iterations so you know what to expect. For a reminder about what a Proposal Content Plan looks like and how it works, here is a presentation from the introduction course to help you visualize it. Here is a link to a sample Proposal Content Plan you can download where you can see examples of things that might help you complete the exercises. If you get stuck anywhere, remember you can always use the Q&A Forum to ask questions.

Proposal managers get all the glory and usually more money. Proposal writers are sometimes treated like low-skilled interchangeable assembly-line workers. It's as if anybody who can complete a sentence can do the job. But proposal writers are different from other forms of writers. And if you care about your win rate, it’s a difference that matters. See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques Proposal writers are matchmakers as much as they are writers. They don’t merely put things on paper, they put things in context. They don’t merely find the right words, they consider what things add up to, and then find the right way to express it so that it matters to the proposal evaluator. There is always more than one way to say something. Proposal writers find the combination that produces the best chance of winning. Proposal writers focus on a lot more than just getting words written Their skill at what to consider is as important as their skill at writing. First, they must consider RFP compliance. Then they must consider what wording will get the highest evaluation score. Then they must incorporate the company’s bid strategies and positioning. They might even need to reference the company’s strategic plan or branding guidelines. Then there is the consideration of graphics and visual communications which are often initiated by the proposal writers. And oh yeah, while they’re at it they must not only describe the offering, but do it while focusing on what matters about it. They must figure out how to articulate things so that your aspirations become real and proven. Doing this usually means collaborating with one or more subject matter experts who understand the offering, but usually don’t understand the context that it must be presented in. And everything must be written not as simple descriptions, but from the perspective of what the customer needs to see to make their decision. They must translate not only the words, but the perspective as well. Proposal writers as matchmakers And this is just the mechanics. Considering the strategies, positioning, and other elements required to put the offering in a context that makes it the customer’s best alternative is where a proposal writer's matchmaking skills come into play. Proposal writers create a match between you and your customer. Proposal writers create a match between your best attributes and strategies, and what the customer needs to see in order to reach a decision based on the customer's evaluation process. They not only produce a proposal, but they help you realize what your company needs to become to reach its full potential. They are transformative. And they don't get the respect they deserve. While other forms of writing are pure art, proposal writing is just as much a process. It has a discovery phase, an assessment phase, a planning phase, and an implementation phase. It’s not just as simple as putting words on paper. It requires steps. In many ways, the writing part is the smallest. It's one part writing and 999 parts figuring out what to write. Proposal writing is closer to systems integration than it is to art. Proposal writers as winners Proposal managers provide vital leadership. They herd cats. They implement the necessary process. It’s a critically important role and very difficult. But proposal managers need writers who can do more than put RFP compliant words on paper. Proposal managers lead, but they require proposal writers to win. And just as all types of writers are not the same, they don’t all have the skills required to win. Think about that the next time you select a proposal writer. Think hard about it when you are selecting the most inexperienced person to do proposal writing simply because they are available. You aren’t selecting a writer. You are selecting a winner. And to win you need someone who understands how to do that in writing. And oh, by the way, the skills a proposal writer needs do not always correlate with experience or training. Sometimes well-trained proposal writers with tons of experience still write descriptive copy from their own perspective. If you are a PropLIBRARY subscriber, here’s an assessment tool we created to help you identify those who have the gift.

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The reason that very few writers can do both technical writing and proposal writing well is that they have different goals, methods, expectations, and processes. All writing is not the same. Having experience with one set of goals, methods, expectations, and processes does not guarantee success at the other. In fact, it may increase the odds of failure. Technical writers value clarity and accuracy. People must be able to not only understand their instructions, but follow them. Technical writers describe carefully. They help people learn and execute tasks. Their methods and processes emphasize accuracy. Proposal writers put things in context. A descriptive proposal is a bad proposal. Proposal writers seek the alignment between the RFP, the offering, and pursuit strategy. They position for advantage in a competitive environment where a single winner takes all and defines success. Great proposal writers explain what matters about things instead of simply describing them. They translate what needs to be known into what matters from the customer’s perspective. They help evaluators learn only what they need to know to make their selection. They write about things that are imprecise, not well defined, unknowable, emotional, and yet vital. They do this competitively. See also: Technical Approach Even though both are writers, both are writing for a purpose, and both believe they can express what needs to be expressed, very few people can do both types of writing well. All proposal writing needs to make a point and not simply inform. The points made by proposal writing involve positioning against everything that will impact the evaluators' decision. These typically include how the buyer will benefit from the offering, how the proposal relates to the evaluation criteria, and everything that matters to the customer. Proposal writers tell a story. They also think as much about pursuit strategy as they do the details they are writing about. Both technical writers and proposal writers need to anticipate the questions their readers will have. However, proposal writers position their answers to put them in the context that gives them the best chance of being selected. Both technical writers and proposal writers need to understand their reader’s perspective to translate what they want to communicate into terms the reader will best understand. However, proposal writers must anticipate the reader’s reaction and put things into terms that have the best chance of getting selected. But what about writing the technical proposal? Is a technical writer a better fit for writing the technical proposal? Probably not. The technical proposal is not really about technical sophistication. The two main goals of the technical proposal are to demonstrate that you are the customer's best alternative for achieving their goals and that your claims are trustworthy. While you may not need a technical writer, you probably do need a technical solution architect. And for most companies, a technical writer is not the best person to do the solutioning behind what you want to propose. A technical writer would be a great candidate for documenting what the technical solution is, but might not be the best candidate to convince the customer that your solution is a better match for their needs. A proposal writer and a technical writer might start with the exact same subject matter to cover, for example a process for doing something. A technical writer will produce a clear and accurate description of what needs to be known in order to execute the process. A proposal writer will produce a rationale based on the subject matter, written from the customer’s perspective, that makes it clear why their approach is the best alternative. Instead of describing the details, the proposal writer will position those details to relate to the decision the customer is going to make. Technical writing and proposal writing have different goals, they have different approaches, and they produce very different documents. Where a technical writer communicates what needs to be known in terms the reader can understand, a proposal writer considers how the details relate to the evaluation process and bid strategies, and then articulates what the customer needs to hear to be convinced. Is it possible for technical writers and proposal writers to do a good job of both? Possibly. Not all of them can, but there may be some who can do both. The problem is that a good proposal is not enough to win. You need to beat all the other good proposals. And that requires a great proposal writer. Great proposal writing requires a set of skills that are not only different from technical writing, but in many ways conflict with the skills and goals required for great technical writing. Don't just assume the two are interchangeable. In selecting a proposal writer, your highest priority should be to find someone who understands that great proposal writing is based on what it will take to win and how to structure the writing to achieve it.

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The way most companies do it Most companies have one proposal review, which is often worse than having none. Some have more than one, but still base them on milestones making them more progress reviews than quality reviews. This is especially true since almost no one actually defines proposal quality. The result is that quality is not quantified and they commit the worst sin in proposal development. The way everyone aspires to do it See also: Proposal quality validation Everyone loves the idea of reviewing and scoring the proposal the same way the customer will do it. Unfortunately, this is easy to say and nearly impossible to do. It is a rare RFP that has enough detail to enable you to actually score the proposal. It is a rare company that has enough customer insight to score it the same way the customer will. The result can be a quantifiable assessment of quality, but not an accurate one. Because it is not reliable, it can be part of the mix, but should not be your only way of defining, assessing, and quantifying proposal quality. Define it and measure against your definition Proposal quality should be defined. Then you can use criteria to determine whether your proposal fulfills the definition. Few companies have the discipline to do this because you must define proposal quality before you write the proposal, and not fall into the trap of writing and rewriting until you think you’ve got it figured out. Few companies have the discipline to do this because it makes the job of the review assessing the narrative against proposal quality criteria and not simply reading and judging. Few companies have the discipline to do this because creating criteria that are sufficiently objective enough to become measurable is not easy. Combining them all Milestone reviews are necessary to prevent getting ahead of yourself. If you start writing narrative based on an outline that is invalid, you are creating the potential for a quality disaster. The outline needs to be reviewed before proposal writing starts. There is a similar issue with bid strategies. You can't write to substantiate the points you are trying to make, if you don’t know what they are before you start writing. Then there are bid/no bid and proposal readiness reviews, pre-final production, ready for submission, etc. Once you have identified your proposal quality criteria, you can allocate them to milestones in order to assure that proposal quality builds over the life of the effort. You can also make emulating the customer and scoring the proposal as the customer might one of your criteria defining proposal quality. Scoring is just one way to assess whether the proposal reflects the customer’s point of view and gives them the information they need to conclude that your offering is their best alternative. We use a combination of our Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation methodologies to combine all these elements and quantify proposal quality. We start with a baseline set of sample proposal quality criteria and look at over 60 quality considerations that we then customize around what it will take to win each pursuit. In addition to quantifying proposal quality, this provides traceability from the proposal narrative to your bid strategies and what it will take to win. Combining them all enables you to assess proposal quality as it progresses through its phases of development. When you score your quality criteria, such as with a simple red/yellow/green or a scale of 1-10, you can chart the progress of your proposal. Do it across all your proposals and you gain a benchmark and can assess what correlates with your win rate. You can turn proposal development from an art into a science.

When every company intending to bid is struggling to prepare their proposal, then the one who does the best job of recovering from their mistakes is the one who is most likely to win. It may be counterintuitive, but in addition to giving your attention to implementing best practices, maybe you should give some attention to getting better at submitting imperfect proposals. It takes both offense and defense to win See also: Winning Putting effort into writing a great proposal is like playing offense. Putting effort into turning around a problem proposal is like defense. You need both a good offense and a good defense to win the championship. I’ve seen many more proposals that were a mess than I have proposals that went smoothly. This has remained true at the precious few companies I've known who were great at proposal development. Herding cats against a deadline through problematical RFPs with reliable pre-RFP preparation and a mixed bag of experience in your writers is simply challenging. A good way to hurt yourself is to review a proposal that you thought was one of your best, after you have submitted it, and start counting all the defects. You will be appalled at the number that were submitted after detailed processes, multiple reviews, and so many eyeballs looking for them. Every proposal is subject to Maslow's Hierarchy and the time available rarely lets us reach the pinnacle. We’ve never seen a proposal, including the ones we’ve worked on ourselves, check every box for how we define being a great proposal. We all aspire to be perfect, even though none of us really are. In addition to striving for perfection, a case can be made for striving to be able to turn imperfect into winning. Perfection is not possible when trade-offs are required All proposals, including the great ones, involved trade-offs, risks, and compromises. Facilitating trade-offs, taking risks, and expediting compromises better than your competitors is just as important to winning as aspiring to best practices. During a proposal we make dozens if not hundreds of decisions regarding strategies to take, what the best approach to something is, which way to word or present things. How to make most of those decision is less than clear and usually made with less information than we'd like to have. All decisions like these require balancing risks. Perfection is not possible. However, improving your ability to balance risk is possible. Maybe, just maybe, instead of submitting a proposal that is as perfect as you can make it, you should improve your defense and simply aim for a proposal that doesn’t make critical mistakes like: Compliance failures that get you thrown out Outlines that change after the writing has started Figuring out your bid strategies and the points you want to make after the writing has started Figuring out what to offer by writing about it These are highly disruptive mistakes that can be impossible to recover from. Other mistakes and defects are easier to recover from or can even be tolerated. If you avoid these mistakes, there’s a much better chance your team will say enough good things to outscore a competitor who was also struggling to complete their proposal and made the mistakes you avoided. Relying on your competitors to fail isn't the best win strategy, but the other team will make mistakes and you want to be in position to take advantage of them. If you also bring a good offense, your win strategies will not be weak. Since you'll never achieve a 100% win rate, the best win rate will come from combining a solid offense with an improved defense. When perfection is not possible go for the best at imperfect trade-offs and risky strategies. This is how you achieve the best win rate. Four mostly counterintuitive tips that can make a big difference Okay. I get it. You aspire to not have any failures on your proposals. Everyone will fulfill your expectations. And you will aim high and always hit your target. In my experience, it doesn’t play out that way. And insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over expecting different results. Even though it may be counterintuitive, you might achieve more success if you try doing things differently: Fail quickly. If you wait for a major review to discover and fix your mistakes, your chances of recovering are less than those of a competitor who did smaller, less formal reviews more frequently. Consider validating decisions as they are made instead of waiting for the Powers That Be to see the document. Design your process around validating things in real time instead of putting it off as some kind of "milestone" in the name of a “quality review” that comes too late to do any good. Manage expectations. The sooner you know that your expectations won’t be met, the sooner you can figure out how to work around them. The more you do to have clear expectations, the more you can prevent expectation failure. And allowing expectations to be rejected will enable you to find out more quickly than waiting for a deadline to be missed. Aim lower. Simplify. Go for simple elegance instead of ornate. Make it easy to produce and require fewer people. Aim for preparing proposals that are reliably good instead of heroically failing at producing great ones. It’s hard to look like an overachieving employee full of esprit de corps when you’re pulling your punches, but the odds sometimes favor a defensive game instead of relying solely on offense. Maximize your score by hitting what you aim for instead of overreaching. Make sacrifices for the greater good. We all want a proposal without typos. But sometimes it's better to sacrifice proofreading to allow more time to get your bid strategies right. If you don't have time for both but you can't make the sacrifice, the result could be everything falling apart during final production, creating multiple unknown chances of losing. It’s better to ship an intentionally imperfect proposal than a broken one. A wise co-worker of mine used to say, “Better is the enemy of good enough.” Being imperfect is better than being a proposal hero Managing your mistakes is about reliability and managing risk. Inflexibly attempting to eliminating all mistakes can actually increase risk. And increasing risk is not a good strategy for maximizing quality. Heroically challenging bad odds is a way to mostly lose. That occasional heroic win won’t make up for the lost revenue. I'd rather work on proposals with professionals than with heroes. Be the tortoise instead of the hare. Or better yet, build a process that is reliable instead of heroic, that recovers from problems, that tolerates imperfection when it doesn't impact your win probability in a meaningful way, and best of all steadily cranks out proposals that are better than those of your similarly struggling competitors.

Most people approach reviewing a proposal the same way they approached reviewing papers in school. They think of the task as reading and commenting. Unfortunately this is only one way to review a proposal, and it is far from the most effective. Consider: See also: Proposal quality validation What are reviewers supposed to be commenting on? Are reviewers following a checklist or compliance matrix? Will reviewers complete a form or have questions to answer? Are reviewers even working from a definition for what proposal quality is? Are they all using the same definition? Do reviewers have written proposal quality criteria to validate? Are reviewers sight-reading or being formal and deliberate? Will reviewers provide subjective opinions or is effort being made to be objective? How? What are reviewers trying to accomplish via the review? What are the goals for this review? Are they being asked to "review" the proposal without any guidance, and assuming they know what to do? How are the reviewers going to cover everything that needs to be considered? Are reviewers going to be divided up to focus on different things? There are so many things that need to be considered and factored into proposal writing. There are so many requirements and trade-offs. There are so many sources of input. And there are so many strategies. This also makes a proposal hard to review. How do you consider and double-check everything during a review? The answer is, “you don’t.” It’s not possible, unless you want your review to take nearly as long as the writing took. Don't set your reviews up for failure by being open ended with expectations. Do you really need to double-check EVERYTHING? My answer is to prioritize attention based on the impact each thing has toward winning. You are not trying to submit a perfect, flawless proposal. You are trying to submit a winning proposal. The distinction is important. It drives how proposal quality should be defined. When your reviews complete without reviewers getting through the whole document or providing the validation required, it usually means you've over-scoped the reviews. In one sitting, it's not possible for a single person to review: RFP Compliance; and Bid strategies; and Messaging; and Level of detail and completeness; and Writing, style, consistency, and grammar; and Graphics, layout, and presentation; and Competitiveness A partially completed review is not better than nothing if it misses something that results in a loss. That defeats the purpose of having reviews. This means it’s not so much a question of “what should I look for” during a proposal review, but rather how to structure your proposal reviews so that you can check EVERYTHING that impacts WINNING (and nothing else matters). What do you mean by "proposal review?" When you review a proposal, should you be looking at whether you followed the instructions, whether it is optimized around the customer's evaluation criteria so that it gets a high score, or whether you have the right solution? Should you look at compliance or value? What about whether it's compelling, tells the right story, and has the right positioning and messaging? What about whether it's competitive? Or if it contains differentiators, win strategies, proof points, experience citations, etc.? Most companies want their reviews to consider ALL of that. You should realize is that you’re not going to review EVERYTHING in one sitting. This means you’re going to need more than one review. In fact, it’s vital to have more than one proposal review. If you have multiple reviews, then each review should have a different focus, and you need to define the scope of each review. Reviews of "a draft" that consider EVERYTHING are a good way to lose. A proposal review without a defined scope is a safety net with holes, relying on luck to catch the problems. The best way to define the scope of your reviews is to start by defining what “everything” means. Identify “everything” that needs to be validated. Then allocate those things to as many reviews as it takes. There is no reason why you can't validate things in parallel, and most quality validation does not require the proposal to be formatted the same as for submission. How many reviews should you have? The only answer, if you want to win, is all of them. For some proposals, covering everything you want to review may require a large number of small, manageable informal and formal reviews. For others, it might be just a few major reviews. The number of reviews does not matter. What you are reviewing and whether your reviews fulfill their goals matter tremendously. Along the way, you’ll find that the things you need to validate fall into categories and phases of the proposal’s development. But don’t make the mistake of organizing your reviews around moments in time. Organize your reviews around what you want to validate. Whatever you do, don’t look at the calendar, decide to have a certain number of reviews, and then decide what they should focus on. This tends to result in multiple un-scoped, inconsistent, and ineffective reviews. How do you define the scope of a proposal review? Start with what you need to validate. What you review is far more important than how you review it or when you review it. You might have multiple teams validating different things at the same time. You might even have some things that can be validated while the proposal is still being written. Some things need to be validated before others can start. Some things can be reviewed by someone working on the proposal, while others might require some distance and objectivity. There are many ways to conduct proposal reviews and none of them is best for all the different kinds of validation you require. If the proposal is small, you might have one person validate an item. But if the proposal is valuable, you might require a team of people to validate the very same item. Start with what you need to validate. Then allocate it to reviews, reviewers, and the calendar. This enables you to make sure that everything that needs to be validated gets addressed, and that you do it at the appropriate level. This becomes the scope for each review, giving your proposal reviews specific purpose, greater accountability, and more reliability. When you reach this level, there are several benefits that result. The first is that you can define your review criteria before the writing starts, so your writers and reviewers are on the same page. You can also turn the process of identifying criteria and allocating them to reviews into a forms-driven process that not only makes it quick and easy, but also enables you to review how you are going to review the proposal. This enables you to tailor the review to the needs of the proposal, while validating that it still meets the needs of your company for oversight. This takes you to much higher levels of proposal quality and improved win rates than simply having an un-scoped, un-defined proposal “review.” To accomplish all of this, we created a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation. This formalizes how to identify proposal quality criteria, allocate them to reviews, use them to define the scope of reviews, and even how to validate that you have sufficient validation.

PropLIBRARY is rapidly changing from being a resource library into an organizational change tool for improving win rates. That’s not a bunch of marketing speak, that's a result of combining our information resources with a customizable online training platform. We have added more than a full day’s worth of online training to our process documentation and best practice guidance. We will continue to add courses until we have about a week’s worth. And we’re not charging extra for it. Our Corporate Subscribers can use PropLIBRARY to provide a week of training and business and proposal development to up to 50 staff. What will the impact of that be? But online training is not our full vision. We want to build something that shows people how to overcome their challenges so they can prosper. We’ve taken the idea of online training a few steps forward. We started by making our training customizable. We can tailor our courses to match your particular needs, like when, where, and how to account for time spent working on a proposal. Or to teach people the information you need to qualify a lead in your particular line of business. Then we realized something far more important about it. We can use that customization to solve problems. When you recognize a need to change, such as from a lessons learned session, you need to get that message in front of the right people at the right time. Building training into the process helps. But when the training itself adapts and changes, it takes things to a higher level. Imagine deciding that reviewers need to be on the lookout for something. So you make a change to the 20-minute reviewer orientation course. Then you send the link to your review team and ask them all to go there before the review on Wednesday. Incidentally you can track who does. The same approach can work with writers. You can have them take a course, whether short or long, prior to starting to work on the proposal. Or, if you look at their draft and realize there’s a problem, like if it’s not written from the customer’s point of view, you can send them a link to a course that explains it to them. The same approach can also work with subcontractors, consultants, or anyone else who needs to know your process or procedures. But wait, that’s not our full vision. We’ve taken the whole tracking and reporting thing, and turned it into a way to implement an internal certification program. You can have people certified as being qualified to review proposals, write them, etc. And they are certified in doing things your way. They have to prove their knowledge through the quizzes built into the training, and they have to demonstrate their skills through the exercises. PropLIBRARY tracks their course participation and issues awards and certificates when they meet the right thresholds. PropLIBRARY transforms training into something continuous and built into the process. It transforms it into a tool that you can use to develop an organization's ability to win what it pursues. It enables you to track participation and use your win rate and lessons learned as feedback to continuously adapt and improve. That way it’s more than just an online training platform. From a business model perspective, we’re aiming to get you there with our off-the-shelf training for about $100/person and customized for less than $400/person. We can show up and do instructor-led training when needed. But with online training, there are no travel costs and billable staff can stay billable. For less than the price of a single course per person, we’re delivering continuous organization development that continuously improves your win rate. A PropLIBRARY Corporate Subscription currently costs $3,000. On May 1st, it will increase to $6,000. We'll also be offering a fixed price customization service. If you purchase a Corporate Subscription before then, or at least contact us to let us know you've started the paperwork and are just waiting for it to complete, you get the current price. Click here to ask us a question Or call 1-800-848-1563

Your company is losing proposals because your people are afraid to lose proposals This is true even though most companies lose more proposals than they win. Maybe it's the large value and huge amount of effort that's on the line. Maybe it's the fear of being blamed. Unhealthy fear The people you most need to grow your business often live in fear. And it’s not a productive fear. It’s an accountability avoiding I don’t trust you to watch my back I’m not going to take a risk win rate limiting kind of fear. Sometimes it’s an I need some CYA to avoid getting blamed if something goes wrong and I'd better blame someone else first kind of fear. Or a don't ask me to do anything, and if you do spell it out in so much detail that I can't be blamed if something goes wrong kind of fear. Unproductive and unhealthy fears hide in the dark while making you more likely to lose. Do you know anyone like this or resemble it yourself from time to time? Healthy fear Healthy fears can result from agreeing to maximize our chances of winning by discussing expectations until we agree on them. Or taking some calculated risks together so we can beat the competition. Or making an innovative, unproven, choice that gives us a better chance of winning, but if the customer doesn't like something about it, it will certainly cause us to lose. Healthy fears come from choosing to do things that might fail because it's necessary in order to have a better chance of winning. If you are going to be the best, you can't let the fear of possible failure hold you back. Do you know anyone like this or resemble it yourself from time to time? Looking in the mirror See also: Organizational Development Business Development. Have you known business developers who avoid process because they are limited by how open and willing to share each customer is? Or who don’t want to be held responsible for providing information they can’t always get? Or who don’t admit what they don’t know and can’t find out? Or who don’t want to be held accountable if the information they get from one source is wrong or if that source does not participate in the decision? Have you known business developers who obfuscate and avoid participating in the proposal where spoken words become concrete? Have you noticed how they stay in prospecting and avoid closing? All because of fear. Fear reinforced by incentives that have negative side effects. Proposals. Have you known proposal specialists who are terrified of being blamed for a loss because they are the last to touch the document? Have you noticed they sometimes create a process that’s not actually documented but they still blame people for not following it? When reviews are performed inconsistently and ineffectively, have you known proposal managers who sandbag the reviews by running out the clock and lumping everything into a single review that can’t possibly consider everything it should, just so they can pick and choose which comments to ignore and which to take action on? Have you seen proposal specialists retreat and just focus on production, which is the only thing they control, rather than helping people prepare winning content? All because of fear. Reviews. Have you known executives who participate in reviews just enough to take credit, but not enough to establish accountability for oversight? Who demand "quality" but will only say that they know it when they see it? Or who create strategic plans that are all about the financials and encourage bidding anything, with meaningless positioning statements that have nothing to do with winning proposals? Or who arrive at reviews unprepared and avoid defining quality, let alone validating all its components on every bid? Have you known executives who don’t enforce deadlines, but expect people to be grateful when they expense some pizza because people are working a late night because deadlines were missed? All because of fear. Is your corporate culture based on fear? When the corporate culture is too heavy with fear, they tend to submit merely compliant proposals that are low on price. If you do a minimally decent job you'll almost never lose because of compliance and nobody gets blamed for losing because of price. Of course, compliance isn't enough to win consistently so you'll have a low win rate, but people will avoid bringing that up. Instead, when they do win they'll convince themselves that bidding anything is a good way to win and their undocumented process is just fine. Because no one can be blamed and no one has to fear. This is how unhealthy fear dooms a company's win rate. Why do most companies "play it safe?" The answer is "Fear." They hedge their bets, don't go out on a limb, and get by just well enough that it takes away any incentivize to change. The effort of changing never seems worth the risk. The fear is there, quietly changing people's behaviors and eating away at your win rate. How much higher would your win rate be without this fear? The problem is that a good proposal is not enough to win. And a safe, low-risk proposal isn't enough to win either. What if people weren't afraid of losing, didn't stay on defense, and went on offense to win your proposals? What if the entire company was willing to change in order to become what it takes to win? When you see companies that are shooting up and seem to be on an extended winning streak, do you think their culture plays it safe? How do you get there? What are some practical, achievable things you can do to create a culture of growth? Create an environment where you can have clear expectations without turning them into threats. People want to fulfill expectations. They want the company to succeed. That should be enough. Unless fear gets in the way. People who don't want to fulfill expectations should simply be let go. Focus on positive incentives instead of negative incentives. Reward accomplishment. Do not penalize failure. Failure from taking the risks needed to win is an acceptable thing. Failure from not taking risks is easy to hide. Intrinsic rewards instead of extrinsic rewards. Encourage, inspire, and support. Don't pay or quantify, whether it's abstract or concrete. For example, instead of enforcing deadlines, try enabling them. It works so much better. Be careful with accountability. It very easily degrades into legalese and putting effort into constantly closing loopholes and trying to specify instead of doing. Accountability should be informative and not a mandate. I don't even like the word "accountability." I much prefer "expectation." Expectation management is more effective because expectations flow in both directions. Does accountability take into consideration the needs of those held accountable? What are the people who make the mandates accountable for? And as soon as you ask that, the legalese starts to flow in both directions. Accountability has a good side, but it must be strictly limited to informing and tracking. That information is part of bringing clarity to expectation management. Be very careful that it doesn't become more. Every time an executive in the room uses the word accountability, the temperature goes up and the fear gets in the way of people collaborating on the expectations. Set standards for what constitutes a valid process. It's not enough to say you have a process. If the process falls apart without a particular person leading it, it's not a process. It's just their way of doing things. If someone can't learn the process well enough to execute it from your documentation without requiring someone to "show" it to them, then it's not a process. It's a habit. A valid proposal process will be minimal (everything removed that does not directly contribute to your win rate), will survive the real world, and will be easier to follow than to skip. Here's how to recognize whether your proposal process is broken. Define proposal quality. You can't expect it from people if you can't articulate what proposal quality is. Implement a bid/no bid decision process that doesn’t put people through low probability pursuits that are understaffed and being bid just because the company can. Make sure people understand how ROI, overhead, and trade-off issues impact staffing and resource allocation decisions. Of course you're understaffed. When people understand why and see a path to fixing that, they're more likely to buy in and help you grow your way out of it. Make sure the potential upside of winning is far greater than the fear of making mistakes. You want people incentivized to take the risks that are necessary to be the top competitor. You want people avoiding mistakes because they want to win and not minimizing risk because they are afraid of being blamed. Make trustworthiness as important as performance when people accept a proposal assignment. Completing assignments that fulfill the quality criteria by the deadline should be rewarded. Winning will come when people fully commit to their proposal assignments instead of treating them as their last priority. A case can be made that reliability is more important than accountability. Involve reviewers as collaborators and supporters, not as critics or drive-by lecturers. Make sure reviewers are as dedicated to their role as the rest of the proposal team. Or at least that they show up prepared. Never permit executives to show up unprepared. It sets a bad example for everyone else. Make sure people are emboldened to take risks and foster a culture that recognizes the necessity. Plan and manage risk. Don't punish it. Just make it rational. Make sure people realize that you don't have to do proposals — you GET to do proposals. The difference is important. Overcome fear with inspiration, at all levels of the organization. This is more than just having pep rallies. This is about giving people a reason to believe in what they are doing. Make sure they understand that growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. If you're not sure about whether you have the right staff, watch how they interact during a pursuit. Many truths will be revealed that hide behind the metrics you are tracking. Who is experiencing fear and where is the fear coming from? You know how you can’t win a proposal if the customer doesn’t trust you? You also can’t win proposals if your people are too afraid to trust you and each other.

Price always matter. But some customers define price as value. They are willing to pay more to get more. Other customers want the lowest possible price. And the lowest possible price depends on what is the minimum they will accept. One term for this kind of evaluation is low price, technically acceptable (LPTA). In an LPTA evaluation, no matter what you say or do that's better than the minimum acceptable, the customer will not care. It looks like all the customer cares about is the price. And while this is mostly true, there is one thing other than price that the customer may pay attention to. A good strategy for winning an LPTA evaluation is to influence what “technically acceptable” means. This is far easier to do before the RFP is written, when you can discuss with the customer what they need to do to ensure they get what they need despite the award going to whoever lowballs the price the most. The end user is likely to be receptive to language that will prevent cost-shaving tricks. But what do you do after the RFP is released? How do you write a proposal, when what you say in the proposal hardly matters? In an LPTA evaluation it does not matter if your approach is better. It only matters if an approach is good enough. What can you do during proposal writing that will make a difference when the customer will only be evaluating minimal compliance? Try writing about what minimal compliance means See also: Pricing Define your minimum standards and explain what happens when they are not met. Explain why they are your minimum standards. You want to provoke the customer into making a comparison and asking whether the other bids meet that standard. You want the customer to decide that if a company doesn’t meet that standard, their bid is not acceptable. The customer will not do this just because you think they should. They will only do this if the problems that result from failing to meet the standards you describe can’t be tolerated or lived with even a little bit. They will not do this if there’s a chance that something unacceptable might happen if the standards are not met. I’m not a big fan of selling by scaring the customer. But in an LPTA evaluation, you need to inform the customer about unacceptable things that can happen and motivate them to accept the standards you describe. If an award is made without discussions, then your definition of minimum acceptability must be clear, quotable, and result in any bid lower in price than yours getting thrown out. This is a long shot. But you know the subject matter, and you know what opportunities to look for to make your case. If the customer responds with questions or requests for clarifications before making an award, there’s a much larger chance that the issues you raise will become questions sent to your competitors. When a company receives a question from the customer asking if they meet a certain standard or have accounted for something, it’s hard to say “no.” You want those questions to trigger your competitors to raise their prices in order to meet those standards. In defining minimal acceptability, look for things that may cause your competitors to raise their prices. You must do this so many times and in enough magnitude that your proposal is not only the only one technically acceptable, it is also the lowest in cost. How do you implement this approach in your proposal? At every opportunity, preferably in every paragraph… Position everything you do that might be more expensive than a competitor’s approach as being absolutely necessary for success. Prove this point. Explain why your minimum standards are the absolute minimum for acceptable performance. Stay objective and avoid qualitative values like “less risk” because the customer has no way to evaluate qualitative differences in an LPTA evaluation. Avoid things that are improvements above the minimum requirements. You get no credit for being better. You get no credit for adding value. You only get credit for being acceptable. If you must propose an improvement, then it must be something that is necessary (and not just better) and you must prove that. Explain the trade-off decisions you made. But remember, there is no “better.” All trade-off decisions must be between unacceptable and minimally acceptable. Prompt the evaluator with everything that your competitors should account for in order to be minimally acceptable. Articulate things to give the customer the wording to use in justifying a claim that another bid is not acceptable, or to ask a competitor whether they meet a standard or have accounted for something.

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Most companies perform their proposal reviews at level two. They recognize the need and are serious about reviewing their proposals. And yet, the results are not always effective and many ask themselves if it's worth it. Some have made it to the third level and they understand that reviews are needed across all phases of the pursuit. But they too suffer from inconsistent results. Few, if any, companies ever reach the higher levels. I wonder why that is. It's especially perplexing when you realize that your competitiveness depends on the level of sophistication of your proposal reviews... Levels of proposal reviews: See also: Proposal quality validation We review most of our proposals. We don’t have enough staff/time to review all of our proposals. If you have reviews and no written quality criteria, then you do not have a quality process. You have a review process. A review process is a good first step, but you will be more competitive if you evolve it into a quality process. We do a major review of every proposal before it goes out the door. This seems like an accomplishment, but unless you push to the next level, you are vulnerable to discovering that systemizing one proposal review can be worse than having none. You have achieved improvement but not quality. We have several proposal reviews over the course of each proposal. This is a huge advance over only having a single review. It narrows the scope considerably, but can still leave the scope for a given review undefined or too wide. You still have a problem with subjectivity, writers and reviewers not being on the same page, and getting contradictory or irrelevant advice from reviewers, because you are still effectively asking reviewers to give their opinions. You have well organized improvement over the life of the pursuit, but not quality. We have multiple reviews of each proposal, and we train our reviewers. Ten-minutes of discussion about what to look for before starting the review does not count as “training.” Do you train them in procedures, or in what to look for? Training reviewers in what proposal quality is, what the standards should be, and what to look for is necessary for raising the bar on the competitiveness of your proposals. The most experienced and capable proposal specialists may not agree on how to define proposal quality and what the criteria should be. You have no quality standards for your proposal unless you create them, and your reviewers consistently enforce them. The process of debating, standardizing, articulating and implementing your proposal quality criteria is one of the most important things you can do to increase your competitiveness. It’s how you set the bar. It’s how you raise the bar. It’s a necessary step toward making sure things are done correctly. Reviews without this may sometimes be very effective, but they will also be inconsistent. Our proposal reviews are based on criteria and not on milestones. At this level, you realize that what matters most is to validate the fulfillment of your quality criteria. The number of reviews or how they are conducted is a lesser concern. But to maximize your competitiveness, some of these criteria will be pursuit-specific. This means you need a process for defining your quality criteria on every pursuit, and reviewers trained to enforce pursuit-specific quality criteria. This is the level where you switch from having a review-oriented process to having a quality-oriented process. It is as big a step as when you first implemented reviews, and it requires organizational commitment to change how you perform proposal reviews. We have a written definition of proposal quality based on what it will take to win that we use to inform our quality criteria, we customize our criteria for each opportunity, and our proposal writers and reviewers both use the same criteria. This is the level you should be trying to get to. This is where you take your quality criteria driven reviews and integrate them into the function of closing the sale. When you create your quality criteria before the writing even starts, so that writers and reviewers both have the same expectations and the same standards, you integrate quality into your entire process. This results in better proposals that are far more competitive than proposals that have been reviewed, no matter how many times. Which level is your company at? What we find at the companies that have engaged us as consultants is that they are willing but struggle with time management and getting everyone on the same page. The senior staff who often participate in proposal reviews often only have a limited amount of time to give. Making the shift from milestone-based reviews to criteria-based reviews can mitigate the time management issues. But it requires an organization that is willing to change how they perform their reviews, and it often requires a strong mandate to get everyone to leave their review process behind and embrace a quality-oriented process instead. Companies that embrace quality methodologies everywhere else, often fail to apply them to their proposals. If you'd like to discuss how to successfully make that transition, just let me know...