Carl Dickson

While proposal sight reading is a good technique to know, if you are using it to perform all of your reviews something is wrong. It is better to have a proposal quality methodology that is comprehensive and not simply quick. You can read more about improving your proposal reviews here. The process we recommend for methodically reviewing proposals and maximizing their quality is called Proposal Quality Validation. We will post online training in how to implement it soon!

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Congratulations! You've reached the point where you always have proposal reviews. You may even recognize that only having one review can be worse than having none, and have several reviews. But while your reviews make clear improvements, reviews alone are not enough to achieve quality proposals. It all comes down to how you define your proposal quality criteria. The odds are you don’t have any. Most companies don't have written quality criteria (and there is no other kind). Most reviews are performed by getting experienced people around a table with little or no advance preparation and having them sight read a draft of the proposal and give their opinions about what should be changed. A collection of people, no matter how gifted and wise, who think they know what quality is when they see it is not a quality methodology. If your reviewers just show up and render an opinion, then your definition of proposal quality is based on a whim. Sometimes many whims. That often conflict. So where do proposal quality criteria come from? See also: Proposal quality validation It turns out that they're the same as the guidance you should be (but possibly aren’t) providing to your proposal writers. If the instructions you give your proposal writers reflect your definition of proposal quality, the instructions can be converted into quality criteria for use by your reviewers. We created a methodology for providing instructions to proposal writers called Proposal Content Planning and a review methodology based on converting them into quality criteria called Proposal Quality Validation. If you plan to convert the instructions in your Proposal Content Plan into quality criteria, you really should have a review to validate those instructions. And if you do this, that review will become as important as, if not more important than, the review of the draft proposal that comes later. Yes, your organization's decision regarding how quality will be defined for the proposal will do more to impact the quality of the proposal you submit than the review of the narrative draft if that definition is used as the blueprint for building the proposal. These instructions will need to reflect what it will take to win. And knowledge of what it will take to win will require customer intimacy, which will in turn require relationship marketing. You also need a way to design the winning offering that does not amount to engineering design by writing about it. To achieve proposal quality validation, you need more than reviews. You need quality criteria that derive from the instructions you give to your writers and are based on a flow of information that extends back in time to before the proposal even starts. In other words, to achieve proposal quality validation you need to integrate the steps that produce your quality criteria and not just simply have some reviews. Quality results from an integrated process and not from a step that occurs near the end. In many ways, the proposal process is not a writing process. It is a process of defining and achieving proposal quality. Since most companies don’t bother to define proposal quality, you can gain a significant competitive advantage and improve your organization's ability to win what it bids by being the one who does.

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See also: Differentiation Contain a differentiator. When customers compare proposals, they look for the differences. Your proposal should call out the differences that make it the customer’s best alternative. Deliver a result or benefit from the feature. Features do not matter as much as what the customer gets from those features. Customers don’t just want features, they want their goals and desires fulfilled. What will they get out of what you have said? Matter. If what you just wrote doesn’t matter to the customer, then either delete it or rewrite it to make it matter. Pass the “So what?” test. Pretend you are the customer. Read what you just wrote. Ask yourself, “So what?” Now make sure it provides the answer. Align with the evaluation criteria. No matter how brilliant it is, if it doesn’t fit the customer’s scoring or decision making procedures, it won’t help you win. Prioritize the points you make to reflect how you will be scored. Address who, what, where, how, when, and why. It’s an easy mantra that can help ensure you exceed RFP compliance and ensure you answer all of the customer’s questions. Address everything the RFP required. What you write should add up to full compliance with all of the RFP requirements. Did you ignore, skip, or fail to meet any of them? Use the same terminology the RFP used. The customer will evaluate you against the words in the RFP. Using other terminology, no matter if it is more up to date or otherwise superior, can reduce your score. State the conclusion and substantiate it instead of building to the end. Customers read proposals by first looking for what they will get and then looking for why you are their best alternative. Then they look for the details to see if they can trust you. When you build to the finish, you make their decision harder and reduce the chances of it being successful for you. Be about the customer (and not you). Everything in a proposal should be about the customer and their decision. Even when they ask you to describe yourself, what they really are looking for are the things that they care about that might impact their decision. It’s all about them. Don’t make your proposal all about you. Every sentence should provide information from the customer’s perspective. Demonstrate instead of claim. Your claims may be hurting your credibility. The customer does not accept it when you say you “understand” them, have the best solution, have the most experience, etc. They want proof. Don’t make a claim and support it. Instead, offer a benefit or result and support your ability to deliver that. Show why you are the customer's best alternative. If you are not, you won’t win. It’s that simple. Just make sure you carefully apply #11 as well. Every single sentence of your proposal should be part of achieving this goal. Plus 6 things you should never do: Make unsubstantiated claims. See #11. Simply describe. See #3, #4, and #10. Talk only about your company. See #10. Use passive voice. See #9. Lead off with a universal truth that applies to all competitors equally, like "quality is vital for this project." See #3 and #4. Say anything that doesn't matter. See #3, #9, #11, and #12. You can’t do all of these in every sentence of your proposal. But you can do at least one. And in each section (if not each paragraph), you should cover them all. So check yourself. See how well you did. And the next time you're not sure how to approach writing something for a proposal, pick one and start. #9, #12, and #1 are good places to start. If writing like this is too unnatural for you, then just focus on achieving #3 and let your passion for the subject matter come through. But you should still check it against the full list when you are done.

Different people bring different perspectives to a proposal, both good and bad. They also bring different skill levels. Unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve a great proposal with contributions that are merely good. Or worse. It takes more than trying really hard to get good people to produce a great proposal. And yet, working with a team is the only way to create proposals larger than yourself. The only way to achieve a great proposal with a team of people is to design a great proposal, guide people through how to build it, and then verify that is what they accomplished. A design requires specifications. Specifications require knowing what to specify. But where most proposals fail is in the guidance. Assignments are given, but no guidance is provided until a draft is completed. On top of this, most proposal reviews are not based on any specifications other than the RFP and are not in synch with any guidance that is provided. This is not a path to greatness. Instead of proposal design specifications and construction guidance, it might be easier to think of them both as simply “instructions.” The instructions that you give the writers, and how well you validate that they were followed, determines whether you can achieve a great proposal using a team of people of mixed skill levels. We created a methodology called Proposal Content Planning that we use to create a container that you put your instructions into and ensure that nothing gets overlooked. What it really does is give you a way to ensure that all those great ideas you have about what should go into a great proposal actually make it onto paper, and it does it in a way that supports Proposal Quality Validation. Proposal Content Planning is a structured way to create instructions for proposal writers. The purpose of this article is not to describe the Proposal Content Planning methodology in detail. It’s to show how delivering the right instructions to proposal writers can help a team of people with mixed backgrounds achieve a great proposal. Here are 9 examples of how instructions can help you get past intent and put the right words on paper: See also: Assignments Best practices. Writing from the customer’s perspective is an example of a proposal best practice. Specifying in the instructions that something should be written from the customer's perspective not only prompts the writer to do it, but compliance with the instructions can be validated to ensure it happens. Every recommendation that we’ve ever provided on PropLIBRARY can be turned into an instruction this way. Follow the formula. There are many formulations you can use to help you construct your proposal. One involves using who, what, where, how, when, and why. Another involves passing the “So what?” test. There are many variations on features and benefits that add details like proof or risk mitigation. Whenever you want a formula to actually be followed, you can turn it into an instruction, put it into a Proposal Content Plan, and validate that it was followed. Reminders. Want the first sentence of every section to focus on what the customer will get? Try reminding your writers. The odds of it happening without a reminder may be pretty low. Do you have an internal procedure to be followed? Insert a reminder for that. All those ideas about what should go into the proposal that often get left behind in discussion? Reminders are how you can make sure they get onto paper. Graphics. Want people to use more graphics in your proposals? Try reminding them. Or better yet, point out where the subject matter lends itself to creating a graphic. The best way would be to give proposal writers the graphic and have them explain it. But you don't have to be able to draw the graphic to know that a process should be illustrated, a relationship visualized, or a set of related items turned into a table. A simple instruction for the writer can make it happen. Inspiration. Inspiration can help people get past the fear of a blank page. Inspiration can help people raise an ordinary descriptive response to higher levels of greatness. Inspiration also works when you don’t know the answers, but you can ask intelligent questions that can inspire the writers with things to consider. The Proposal Recipes in PropLIBRARY are designed to do just that. But you can use the same technique and incorporate considerations that are unique to your organization. Standards and preferences. While I’ve never made it a priority, some people believe that you should never use the word "will" in a proposal. Some people have other editorial preferences. If you have a corporate or other standard, or just a particular way you’d prefer to have things presented, you can turn it into a Proposal Content Plan instruction. Strategic plans and positioning. If your company is serious about strategic planning, it should flow down into how you position the company in your proposals. An instruction to the proposal writers is a good way to implement this. Customer, opportunity, and competitive intel. When the staff who have customer contact don’t participate in proposal writing, what the company collectively knows about the customer’s culture and preferences often never makes it onto paper. Instructions can act as an intermediary, providing a place to record intelligence but tasking the writers with figuring out how to articulate what needs to be said. What it will take to win. Discover it. Explore it. Explain it. Explain how it impacts this section. Guide the writers on how to respond to the requirements while incorporating what you know about what it will take to win. If it’s just you doing the proposal, you are probably so smart that you can keep all this in your head without notes and write the proposal perfectly on the first draft. But as soon as others get involved, the proposal will settle into an average that is somewhat less than great. You can talk with them for hours and hash everything out. But the minute they leave the discussion, what makes it onto paper will be something less. This is where most companies start discussing it again. And they go over and over the same topics and the same issues. Then they submit whatever they’ve got at the deadline. Converting those discussions to instructions, preferably right there in the meeting, puts them on paper. This saves time by bringing resolution to circular discussions. But most importantly it gives you something to compare the draft to. When the draft is written, you can see whether it reflects everything that it was supposed to. This greatly improves the quality of your proposal reviews and establishes traceability from the draft all the way back to what you discovered about what it will take to win.

Proposal development should not be treated as an expense to be minimized. It is an investment as part of the cost of sales. When you compare what an increase in win rate does to your revenue, you find that increasing the investment generates a positive return. Decreasing the investment leads to a lower win rate, and what that does to your revenue is create a death spiral. The trick is to lower proposal development costs without lowering your win rate. A winning proposal is one that is based on what you have discovered about what it will take to win, and is written from the customer’s perspective. Your best chances of winning come from fully customizing the proposal to make everything presented matter to the particular customer it is being submitted to. This makes automating proposal writing, recycling proposal narratives, and fill-in-the-blank templates bad approaches for lowering proposal costs because they lower your chances of winning. Unless your bids are small or you sell commodities, any benefit of lower costs will be less than the loss of revenue from the decrease in win rate. This has been true every time we've run through the numbers with real companies. A better approach is to reduce the time spent on things other than proposal writing. This is an overly precise way of saying not to waste time. If you watch proposals being produced, you will notice that far more time is spent with hands not on keyboards, than is actually spent writing. That is the time you want to reduce, not the time spent writing since the writing is what delivers the win. Most of this time spent not writing is spent thinking and discussing what should go in the proposal. This can be accelerated with these approaches: See also: Faster Have the information writers will need. A great deal of time is wasted talking in circles around things that the proposal team doesn’t know about customer preferences, intentions, and how to make trade-offs. If you structure your process, including your pre-proposal process, to deliver this information, you will lower your proposal costs. A failure here impacts not only proposal writing, but proposal reviews as well. Make sure writers know what to do with the information they have. Can your writers take information and present it from the customer’s perspective instead of merely describing it? Do they know how to feature differentiators instead of beneficial-sounding platitudes? Do your writers know how the proposal content will be planned and validated? If you want them to waste less time and make fewer mistakes, they need to know what to do with the information they have. And this means training. But it doesn’t mean generic once-a-year training. It means building performance guidance into the process. And that means having a process and not merely a way of doing things. It means creating an organization that develops the staff you need to achieve a high win rate. There is no alternative to this. Fail to develop staff who know how to prepare winning proposals and the process that supports them in doing it, and you will fail to win. Accelerate through inspiration instead of recycling. Give people a list of questions to accelerate their thinking instead of generic win-rate lowering answers. Bullets that remind people of topics to address are better than paragraphs written for the wrong context. We like to create proposal recipes to provide inspiration and accelerate the thinking process. Separate proposal writing from offering design. Offering design is something different from proposal writing and trying to do them both at the same time is a big time waster. Have an efficient methodology for designing your offering that doesn’t involve writing and re-writing until you figure out what to offer. Know your bid strategies before you start writing. If your proposal is going to articulate why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative, you need to know what points to make in your proposal before you start writing so that the writing can substantiate them. If your writers are searching for bid strategies and making up themes as they go along, a great deal of time is being spent trying to conceptualize instead of writing. Not only that, but if they have started writing before they can articulate what points to make, there’s a good chance they’ll be tacking on the points at the end instead of writing based on the points to be made. This produces a less competitive proposal. Eliminate rework. Eliminating proposal rework doesn't just mean preventing defects. It means resolving differences of opinion and designing in improvements instead of changing direction in the middle or layering them on at the end. There are three aspects to this: Collaboration and validation instead of break/fix. Waiting for things to break and then fixing them is not the best way to achieve quality. It is far better to design proposal quality in and prevent things from becoming broken. Writing a proposal and reviewing it to see if it is broken and then rewriting it is basing your win rate on a break/fix approach. A better alternative is to validate your decisions (offering design, bid strategies, etc.) before writing to produce a first draft that is correct in its composition. Achieving this requires many small collaborative reviews instead of one big corrective review. Giving detailed instructions to writers lowers the total effort. The better and more detailed the instructions you give your proposal writers regarding what to write, the more likely you are to get that back. See how that works? See how it relates to how thinking takes longer than writing? See how much easier it makes validating the proposal without having to read and rewrite draft after draft? Using Proposal Content Planning to figure out what you should write before you actually write mitigates proposal risks and turns writing into a process of elimination instead of endless write and rewrite cycles. Focus on what to review instead of how to review it. Instead of organizing reviews around events (usually one big review called a “Red Team”) and only looking at full drafts, try focusing on what needs to be reviewed instead of how you review it. Identify what needs to be validated. If you have a Proposal Content Plan, validating it will be more important than validating the draft. If you are trying to design quality in, then validating individual decisions as they are made can be a major focus. Catching errors early is much better than waiting to see a proposal that “looks ready to deliver” and then deciding it needs to change. Criteria-based reviews give the proposal writers a clear set of expectations for what will be required to pass the review so that they can get it right on the very first attempt. When you follow these approaches for proposal development, you accelerate the things that take the most time, while eliminating your biggest sources of waste. But the best part is that you lower your costs while preparing a proposal that will beat those that focus on cost reduction by giving potential new customers the same recycled narrative they give to all their customers. Author's Note: I always feel relieved when I get to the end of an article like this and I check to see if what I wrote is consistent with what we've recommended in the past and built into our process, and find that it is consistent. In this case, I'm especially pleased with how the Readiness Reviews, Proposal Content Planning, and Proposal Quality Validation methodologies built into our MustWin Process all support the goals of reducing effort and lowering costs while increasing win rate. You can verify this yourself by looking around PropLIBRARY.

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There’s a gap between what you do to identify leads and winning. Once you identify a lead, then what? That’s where things get challenging. If you are going to get past the gap between identifying a lead and capturing the win, you’re going to need to build a bridge. To build a bridge you need to know things like: See also: Winning The size of the gap and what’s in it How to design a bridge to get you there How to validate your bridge design so it doesn’t fail after it’s built What resources you will need to build it How long it will take How much should you invest in its construction for it to be reliable How to build the bridge When you just start writing a proposal as soon as the RFP comes out, it’s like skipping straight to building the bridge without doing any of the other steps. When bridges are built like that, they fail. Disastrously. Yet, this what most companies do. They throw good people into construction before developing the organization that people need to successfully build a bridge. What’s in the gap? The gap between lead identification and winning consists of two things that your bridge will need to successfully accomplish for you to pass: The pursuit that happens before the RFP is released Proposal development, submission, and contract award after the RFP is released If you want to consistently capture the win, you can’t simply tell people to cross the gap. They might make it across. But they won’t be able to do it reliably. And if do this routinely, your win rate will suffer. To reliably cross the gap you need a bridge that provides a path to follow. And it needs to address both the pre-RFP pursuit and post-RFP proposal efforts. The MustWin Process is about bridging gaps The MustWin Process prompts people to discover what it will take to win. During the pre-RFP pursuit, it manages the intelligence gathered to build an information advantage. When the proposal phase begins, it delivers the information needed to plan the content of a proposal that is based on what it will take to win. It guides people through discovering and then articulating the messages in the right format to submit a proposal. It provides a quality validation methodology to ensure that the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win. But process is not enough For people to successfully implement a process they need to understand what is expected of them and be capable of fulfilling those expectations. The MustWin Process builds a considerable amount of expectation management into each step, but people also need to have the right skills. That’s why PropLIBRARY combines MustWin Process guidance with just-in-time online training. The MustWin Process also provides a framework for metrics and measurements that enable you to refine your techniques and increase your win rate over time. When combined with customized online training, this gives you the means to continuously improve your organization's ability to win proposals. Increasing your win rate over time requires change. It requires anticipating problems where you can, and implementing future solutions to the proposal problems you face today. Our approach with PropLIBRARY is to give you an efficient means to change, by enabling you to implement improvements and keep proposal contributors informed and trained. This is a key part of providing the organization required for people to be able to reliably cross the gap and capture the win. Our goal isn’t just to build a bridge to capture a win. We want to show people how to get so good at building bridges they capture all the wins.

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Most of the examples of proposal outlines we see on the internet are bad. Really bad. And many of them are used in textbooks and taught as best practice! Here is a typical example: See also: Proposal Outlines Title Summary/Abstract Introduction/Background Statement of the Project Problem Recommendation/Solution Objectives Scope Methods Schedule Budget/Pricing Resources/Staffing Conclusion References Now, forget you ever saw it and never use any of these headings. While this outline may get you a good grade on a lab report, using it in a proposal could result in a loss because: It forces the decision maker to read halfway through your proposal before they find out what exactly it is you are proposing. Do you really think they are going to work that hard? At best it creates extra reading for the decision maker and at worst it is patronizing, because it tells them about themselves and tells them what their problem is. Recitation does not show understanding or scope. It’s giving them information they already have when what they want is a solution that proves you understand because it addresses their concerns. Understanding is best demonstrated by showing your solution in insightful. It saves the conclusion for the end, when that should be the place where a proposal starts. Proposals should make your points and substantiate them instead of building up to them. Readers don't read a proposal to find out how it ends. If they don't see something compelling up front, they skip ahead looking for something that is compelling. You see variations on this bad outline all over the place, probably because it's what people learned in school. It might be easy for a teacher to grade, but it makes a buyer’s decision more difficult, and that will increase your odds of losing your proposal. This outline is not competitive against an outline that’s written to give the decision maker what they need. The headings in your outline should tell the customer what they need to know The best way to understand how to write a proposal is to put yourself in the shoes of the person making the decision. When someone sends you a document asking you to do something, what do you need to see to decide what to do? The decision maker starts with questions and looks for answers. They don’t read your proposal. They look for answers. When you are the decision maker, your questions might include: What am I going to get or what will the results be? Have my expectations been fulfilled? Do I have sufficient information and have my questions been answered? What could go wrong? Why should I believe I’ll get what’s been promised? What does the vendor want from me? How much is it going to cost and is it worth it? Am I sufficiently motivated to move forward? If I accept the proposal, what do I have to do? Now pretend that you are receiving a proposal from someone who wants you to do something, approve something, or buy something. Think about the first thing you want to read. If you weren’t expecting to receive a proposal, it might be “What do you want (from me)?” If you were expecting the proposal, then the first thing you'll probably want to know is “What am I going to get?” This is closely followed by “What do I have to do to get it?” and “Is it worth it?” If you agree that it’s worth it, you’ll want to dig deeper and find out what it will take to make it happen. At that point you start looking for things that could go wrong and will want to make sure you can trust the person or company who brought you the proposal to deliver what they promise. If this is what the decision maker is looking for, then that is what your outline should be. You can use the questions above to organize your proposal: Introduce what the customer is going to get Are you fulfilling their expectations? Explain how you will do or deliver the desired results Are you answering all of their questions, addressing and mitigating any risks, eliminating obstacles, establishing value, and proving that your proposal is their best alternative? Have you credibly shown that they will get what you’ve promised? If you are basing that (at least in part) on your experience or track record, have you shown what they’ll get as a result of your having that experience or how it will impact this project? Describe the cost and explain how to move forward Have you made it clear what they need to do to act on your proposal (including both their procedures as well as yours) and given them sufficient motivation to take that action? Converting what the customer needs to know into your outline You should organize your proposal around the questions that you anticipate the customer will have. But to convert these questions into an outline you present the answers. Instead of words that define categories, you can use your headings to deliver a message. If your headings are answers instead of questions, they can tell a story on their own. They should all add up to proof that you are the customer’s best alternative. When you answer the questions you anticipate the customer having, provide each answer as a heading and then substantiate them in the text. Each heading should provide one more reason why the customer should accept your proposal. After you do this, compare it to the outline at the top and ask yourself which best provides the buyer with what they need to know. What about the RFP? If you're writing a proposal in response to a written RFP that specifies how they want the proposal organized, you must follow their outline. If you are like me, you didn't learn in school how to parse the instructions in an RFP into an outline, let alone how to incorporate multiple sections of the RFP to create a compliant outline. And you definitely didn't learn how to create a compliance matrix. However, the evaluator still has the same questions and they still need to find the answers in your proposal. An excellent way to exceed the RFP requirements without increasing the cost of your solution is to do a better job of answering these questions, especially the ones they forgot to ask. If the RFP permits it, you can usually add to the customer's required outline. This gives you a chance to create a proposal that does a better job of answering the customer's questions. The primary goal of a proposal is not to inform or describe, it’s to persuade by helping the reader decide. To win your proposal, you need to provide the decision maker with the answers they need and then motivate them to accept your proposal. Your outline should be organized to meet their needs and not simply recite the problem or categorize information.