Carl Dickson

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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.

One way to approach proposal messaging is to make it about something. It helps to focus your thoughts. And it can give you something to stand for. Instead of simply positioning against the competition and everything else, you position to matter about something. This helps the customer perceive your value. When the competing proposals aren’t very different from each other, this kind of subtlety can determine who wins, because it shows better insight, understanding, and even value. The list below is also a good tool for learning to think about things from the customer’s perspective. You shouldn’t just focus on what you’d like to make your proposal about. You should make your proposal about what matters to the customer. 16 things to consider making your proposal about: You. It’s usually a mistake to make the proposal about yourself. But most companies do. It’s kind of like trying to get a date by talking only about yourself. Likewise, if you are the buyer, do you want “pick me!” to be a constant refrain? You can make the proposal about your being the customer’s best alternative, but this works best when you take it a step further and make it about what the customer will get by selecting you, instead of simply being about why to select you. The customer. All proposals are about the customer, whether you write them that way or not. Recognizing this explicitly and writing from their perspective is very powerful. Your offering. While you need to describe your offering, that’s not what your proposal should be about. Your proposal should usually be about why your offering is the best alternative for the customer. It’s always about the customer. Fulfilling the customer’s needs. Making your proposal about fulfilling your customer’s needs is one way to bring focus to making your proposal about the customer. Just be careful to make it about the customer getting their needs fulfilled and not about you as the one who will fulfill them. Don’t cross the line and make it about you by accident. And don’t make it about the fact that the customer has needs because that awareness of that fact doesn’t deliver any value. Instead make it about the fulfillment of those needs. A solution. While you’re offering a solution, what the customer is really interested in is why that solution is the customer’s best alternative. What the customer will get out of your solution and what makes it the best alternative may matter more than the solution itself. Giving the customer what they asked for. When the customer tells you exactly what they want and expects your proposal to be about that, it’s still about them. It’s about why your way of delivering exactly what they asked for will give them the best results or benefits. It’s about them getting what they asked for with the most value added. Even if price is the only value they are concerned with. And keep in mind that everyone else will be proposing at least what the customer asked for. Being about something doesn't have to cost any money and can make the difference. Getting results. It’s not the offering that customers usually want, it’s the results that offering delivers. Or more accurately, it’s about how much better off they’ll be because of those results. It’s always about the customer. The results of a procurement are often just a means to an end. When this is the case, the results that best facilitate achieving that end will have the most appeal. A recommendation. If you want the customer to take action, you can make a recommendation. You can recommend that the customer select you, but that’s the same as making the proposal about you. If the customer isn’t sure about what they want, or if they don’t realize the implications of what they’ve asked for, you can make recommendations that will achieve better results. If this deviates too far from their expectations and evaluation process, this can be risky. But if you deliver what they asked for, and can give them better options while staying within the structure of the RFP, you can offer a value that is highly differentiated. If the customer lacks expertise or has difficulty deciding what to do, you can make your proposal about your willingness and ability to make recommendations and enable the customer to make better informed decisions. Informing and teaching. Sometimes the customer just doesn’t know what they are doing. Maybe they’re just not good at writing RFPs. If you can avoid patronizing and offending them, you can deliver a proposal that is informative and teaches them what they need to know, and along the way you can show them that you are their best alternative. Even a well written RFP will require trade-offs, and your rationale in resolving them can matter. When you make your proposal about informing and teaching, you demonstrate the value of your expertise. Demonstrations trump declarations. Preventing a problem. When a key feature of an offering is that it prevents problems, you can make your proposal about that. The trick is to make it about the benefits of the resolution, and not about the problem itself, because your value is the resolution and not the problem. Focusing too much on the problem is just selling fear. Reducing risk. Reducing risk is similar to preventing problems, but with more uncertainty. With risk it’s not a feature in your offering that prevents a problem, but your techniques for identifying and mitigating risks that matters. You might not even know what the risks are at the beginning. For example, in systems development there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Your ability to prevent, monitor, and respond when they happen may matter to a risk averse customer. Making an improvement. Do you know a better way? Can you help the customer become better, more capable, faster, or more efficient? Just remember to make it about the customer and how much better their improved future will be instead of the improvement itself. And make sure you address any reluctance they may have in changing the status quo. Return on investment. Does the customer consider what you are proposing to be an expense or an investment? What they need from a vendor is different between the two. How does the customer perceive the procurement? You can prove it is worth it to spend as much as possible if your proposal nets a high return on investment, but if they view your proposal as an expense you need to reduce costs. If your proposal is about return on investment, make sure you prove your case. When a customer talks about obtaining the best value, it means they may be willing to invest in a better return but that their ability to do so may be limited. Answering the customer’s questions. If the customer is full of questions, your proposal can be about providing answers. But don’t just simply provide answers. Your proposal is really about generating sufficient confidence for the customer to move forward with what you propose. A destination. Where will the customer end up if they accept your proposal? How wonderful will it be? You can go beyond features and benefits and make your proposal about where they’ll end up as a result. Just make sure that’s where they want to end up. A differentiator. Customers look for the differences between proposals to determine which is better. If you are not actively identifying differentiators and featuring them in your proposal, you’re not trying to win. If you are, you can take it a step further and make your proposal about your differentiators. If you do so, make sure you make it about how the customer will be impacted by those differentiators and not the features that are different themselves. Features that differentiate get noticed, but it’s their impact that determines whether you win. Because many of these are related, you might be able to employ a couple at a time. But even though many will resonate with you, you can’t use them all at the same time and still have a proposal that is about something.

Proposals should stand for something. They are inherently aspirational. You aspire to win and beyond. The customer aspires to procure, reap the benefits, and beyond. Proposals matter when they fulfill aspirations. You want your proposal to matter. But are they your aspirations, your company’s, or your customer’s? Even within your own company, executives, sales, marketing, and proposal development staff all have different aspirations. Something similar is true for the customer’s aspirations. And which aspirations should impact your strategies? How do they impact what ink you put on paper? Discovering how you and your company’s aspirations impact your bid strategies: Are your aspirations tied to this particular pursuit, or are they broader? Should your strategies be aimed at developing the foundation for your broader aspirations? Are your aspirations personal or organizational? And if you answer “organizational,” who defines those organizational aspirations? How does this pursuit relate to them? Where is the line between your dreams and what can be achieved through this pursuit? How do those aspirations produce benefits for the customer of this pursuit? If you achieve your aspirations, why would that matter to the customer? Why should your aspirations make the customer more likely to accept your proposal? What should you change in your approach to the bid that would make this more likely? Discovering how your customer’s aspirations impact your bid strategies: Will the customer’s personal aspirations impact their decision making? Who defines the customer’s organizational aspirations and do the decision makers share them? Are the customer’s aspirations well focused, overly broad, or somewhere in between? Where is the line between what the customer dreams of and what can be achieved through this procurement? Does the customer have a consensus regarding their aspirations? How could this procurement impact the customer’s organizational aspirations? How do the customer’s mission, goals, and needs relate to their aspirations? Are there any conflicts between the solicitation requirements and the customer’s aspirations? Is your understanding of the customer’s aspirations up to date? What about fulfilling their aspirations could lead a customer to select one proposal over another? What can you do to further you and your customer’s aspirations in a way that makes your proposal the customer’s best alternative? Answering this in a way that impacts your bid strategies and what you say in your proposal can put you in a position of being the way for the customer to achieve their aspirations. What can you do or say in your proposal to become a vital part of the customer’s dreams? Or should you simply respond to the RFP like everyone else?

Q&A or point-by-point proposal formats are so easy. You don’t have to give much thought to the outline. But that’s not the reason to choose them. Easy is not always the best. What should drive your approach to creating the outline for your proposal is what the customer wants to see in your proposal and where they expect to find it. You do not want to lose just because the customer didn’t see things where they expected them and didn’t go looking for them. What information do they need to reach a decision? In what sequence? Remember, proposals are not read (like a book), they are evaluated. People don't want to read every word. They only want to read the parts they need to in order to make their decision. They need to be able to find these quickly. Don't get thrown out See also: Proposal Outlines The first goal for proposals is to not get thrown out. If the customer has given you instructions regarding the outline or proposal organization and you do not follow them, they may throw out your proposal without even reading it. If there is an RFP, you should start there. Your outline should make it easy to find what they will be looking for. Usually, this is best done by putting things in the sequence and terminology used in the RFP. Within the structure mandated by the RFP, you can add more headings of your own underneath theirs if needed. That might lead you to a Q&A or point-by-point low level outline. Or not. If the RFP itself specifies a Q&A or point-by-point response format, then you are lucky because it is clear what the customer expects and you’re not just doing it because it is easier. Should you choose a Q&A or Point-by-Point format? As long as they don't conflict with the RFP, there are many ways to organize the material you want to present. A Q&A format is best when the customer has given you questions to answer, or when you can anticipate the questions that the customer will have. A point-by-point response is best when that suits the nature of your offering. This can happen when there are specific locations, components, or details about your offering that fit with the customer’s needs or understanding. What about other alternatives? But not all offerings lend themselves to a Q&A or point-by-point response. A proposal to provide complex services or a solution might not have a finite set of objective components to structure your response around. They might be better suited to organizing based on: Results Processes Functions A work breakdown structure Risks Or something else that matters to the customer If telling a story is part of your proposal strategy, a Q&A or point-by-point response format can also make it more difficult. If the customer will have a formal evaluation process, like they do in government procurement, you might organize your response first around the RFP instructions, then the evaluation criteria, and then the offering in response to the requirements in the statement of work. Organizing around the way the customer makes decisions or will perform their evaluation is a powerful way to build your outline. How do you choose the best outline format for a proposal? The best outline format is one that the customer thinks is best, and not necessarily the one that you think makes the most sense. For the customer, proposals are a decision-making tool. Q&A outlines have the advantage of helping to make sure you answer all the questions that a customer might have. But not all subject matters are best organized around questions. You should choose the outline format that will: Not get you thrown out Meet the customer’s expectations Best support the customer’s evaluation or decision-making process Facilitate telling your story Help guide them to realize that your proposal is their best alternative Consider each of these carefully before committing to a Q&A or point-by-point outline format for your proposal.

Some people are faster than others. Estimating how long it will take someone to read something or perform an exercise can sometimes be very subjective. Here are some benchmarks we use to estimate course lengths to help refine and standardize our guesses: 1 article = 5 minutes 1 quiz question = 1 minute 2 presentation slides = 1 minute 1 video minute = 1 minute 1 page file = 5 minutes Here are a couple of examples: A one-hour course might consist of a single module with 5 articles, a 10-question quiz, a 10-slide presentation (or 5-minute video), and a 20-minute exercise. A 1.5-hour course might consist of two modules with 10 articles, a 15-question quiz, a 10-slide presentation (or 5-minute video), and a 20-minute exercise. A 2-hour course might consist of two modules with 8 articles, one 20-slide presentation, one 10-minute video, and a 1-hour exercise. Many other combinations are possible. Courses can be longer, there really is no limit. But for online consumption and development, it's better to break things up into smaller pieces. Sixteen one-hour courses are better than one 16-hour course.

We'll do the actual posting of your content online. You just need to show up with the right content, ready to post. But there will be overlaps where we need to work together. Here are some examples: You have files that might be better converted to articles You have PowerPoint that could be post as a presentation, video, or just a file You have recordings that are long and may need to be broken up into small pieces You need to create quizzes and exercises You need help estimating the length of the material you have and whether to add, delete, or change it to fit your target Contact us early. That way we can talk through what needs to be done, help you avoid problems, and figure out how to best work together to get your course posted.

If you have existing content, then your primary consideration will be identifying and filling any gaps. If you are creating a course from scratch, you will first needs to identify your needs. But even if you have existing content, you need to understand those needs to fill the gaps. Mapping instructional needs to course Start by identifying requirements such as: Capability to perform tasks Knowledge, awareness, or understanding Preparation required for contingencies Creating courses from scratch Map requirements to courses and identify course item topics to fulfill the requirements For each course item topic, identify the course item type based on subject matter (articles, presentations, videos, etc.). Consider whether subject is best learned by reading, stepping through the material, having it explained, performing exercises, etc. Consider quizzes for knowledge-based courses and exercises for skills-based courses Consider course length and reorganize courses as needed Create draft items Use the system to track progress and work towards a process of elimination Repurposing existing content While you should still consider the instructional goals above, repurposing content can be as easy as: Create a course item library Drag and drop into courses to create drafts Consider whether to post items as files, article, presentations, or videos Create draft items to fill any subject matter gaps Add quizzes and exercises Creating an outline You should plan your courses in an outline that looks like this: Course name(s) Module name(s) Item name(s) and type(s) Quiz or exercise in each module (optional but recommended) If you put your outline in a spreadsheet you can track other details like contributors, number of quiz questions, length targets, etc., it convert at least some of your course development into simple data entry.

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