Carl Dickson

Companies have different issues that impact what is the best approach for achieving proposal quality. For example, if you only have a few people capable of performing quality reviews and you use them on every proposal, the best approach will be different from an organization where the participants on the reviews are different for every proposal. Here are some other considerations: See also: Proposal quality validation The level of training and expertise in available reviewers. Untrained reviewers, even if experienced, may not be capable of validating proposal quality. Training can be embedded into the methodology. Or the methodology can be simplified to lower the amount of training required. The availability of reviewers. When reviewers simply aren’t available, the methodology needs to feature more self-evaluation. When reviewers have limited availability, there is a tendency to have fewer but larger reviews, lowering their effectiveness. A scalable set of criteria can help ensure that the critical items are adequately covered. Budgets and how you account for the reviewers’ time. Budgets can make something with a great return on investment (ROI) look too expensive to implement. An effective quality methodology increases your win rate significantly. Having proposal quality reviews does not add to the cost, it adds to your ROI. If people are minimizing reviews to save money, you might want to check your math and see if your accounting system is getting in the way of your ROI. The size, scope, complexity, and consistency of your proposals. The effort to achieve proposal quality is based not only on the page count of your proposals, but also on the complexity of the content. What you need to validate in a proposal with a simple structure is different from a proposal with a complex structure. When implementing a quality methodology, consistency is also a factor. Is every proposal a unique creation? Do you always bid a similar offering? How much variation is there in the RFPs? Do you need to validate every decision and unique aspect? Does that change with every proposal? The anticipated award value. How much is it worth to make sure this proposal is the best it can be? Risk and return on investment (ROI). How much quality risk can you tolerate? How much are you willing to risk your investment in the proposal? The importance of win rate. How much will an improvement in your win rate increase your bottom line? What role should your proposal quality methodology play in achieving it? With those considerations in mind, consider these three approaches to proposal quality. Each has different characteristics that make them better suited for some organizations than others. Proposal Quality Validation. A criteria-based approach that focuses on defining proposal quality, turning that into criteria, and then validating that the proposal reflects those criteria. Implementation involves giving the same criteria to the writers that the reviewers will use. The methodology is very efficient. It requires a great deal of thought, but a low level of administrative effort. The basic premise is that how you perform the reviews is far less important than what you review. It requires reviewers to validate against the criteria and not to simply comment on whatever enters their mind during the review. It requires an integrated process that spans the pre-RFP and post-RFP phases, with attention paid to defining proposal quality criteria at the beginning of the proposal. Checklists instead of reviews. In high volume environments, or when trained reviewers are not available, the things reviewers would look for can be rendered as checklists. Checklists can be based on topics like the proposal outline, RFP compliance, bid strategies (differentiators, themes, etc.), offering design, competitive positioning, writing (accuracy, does it reflect the customer’s perspective, etc.), and final production (format, assembly, etc.). Converting quality criteria into checklists works best when there is a great deal of consistency between your proposals, although a hybrid approach is possible, if you provide a place for additions to your standard checklist for pursuit-specific items. It may also be more suitable for low value proposals. Depending on your needs, checklists might require one or more sign-offs to maintain accountability. One interesting feature of this approach is that you can eliminate some or possibly all of your sit-around-a-table and read-it-all reviews. They are not the only way to achieve proposal quality. Design quality in. When the experienced staff who are the only available reviewers are also the key decision makers for the offering, the idea of an objective review team is not feasible. So embrace it. Instead of a break-fix quality approach that uses objective reviewers on the back end to assess whether the proposal meets standards, try designing quality in at the beginning. In this approach, the “reviewers” validate proposal team decisions as you go along. Instead of waiting for the document, they review and approve the decisions regarding the offering, strategies, and approaches to the writing. They review what the proposal will be, as much as they review what it has become. When the proposal is written, the review team no longer needs to consider whether the approaches are correct, but can instead focus on whether they’ve been implemented effectively. It is worth considering the value of objectivity vs the value of designing quality in from the beginning. While both have value, how well you can achieve them depends on your resource availability.

Like color team reviews, I have never seen two companies conduct Black Hat Reviews the same way. At a high level, a Black Hat review is a competitive assessment to address who the competition is and their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes a Black Hat review scores your company and your competition against the anticipated evaluation criteria to determine who has what advantages, and what to do about them. At a minimum, a Black Hat Review should help you discover how to best position your company against its competitors, and what differentiators to focus on in your proposal. There are many techniques for acquiring and assessing competitive intelligence. These range from simple SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to more sophisticated methodologies. The technique you use is less important than your diligence at implementing it. However, like risk assessment and quality assurance, if you don’t implement a formal methodology, you won't consistently get good results. Also, any assessment is only going to be as good as the data it's based on. Gathering good competitive intelligence takes time. If you simply bring all the stakeholders into a meeting and ask them what they know about the competition, you will not get the best data to work with. You must collect and validate competitive intelligence data throughout the lead qualification and capture phases of the pursuit if you are going to have solid data to assess at a Black Hat review. See also: Proposal quality validation The key to a successful Black Hat review is to translate what you know about your competition into action items. And those action items should not simply be to fill in the holes in what you should already know. The action items coming out of a Black Hat review need to affect your capture and proposal strategies in ways that will impact your odds of winning. Otherwise, it’s an academic exercise that doesn’t affect your chances (this is a fancy way of saying “a waste of time”). One set of action items that should come from a Black Hat review relates to teaming. A Black Hat review should tell you which companies are strong where you are weak and therefore make good teaming candidates, because you are more likely to win together than you are if you remain apart. It can also show you who you might want to take off the street by teaming with them. It may be better to give up a portion of the revenue by teaming with someone than it is to risk losing all the revenue in competition. Or not. A good Black Hat review should help you assess this quantitatively, by showing the effect on evaluation scoring of different teaming scenarios. That’s another reason that formal competitive assessment methodologies can be valuable. They help you look at things objectively by providing the means to rank and score the competition. Finally, a Black Hat review should help you finalize your win strategies. Win strategies cannot be developed in isolation from your competition. It's not enough to simply articulate to the customer why they should select you. You must also be able to say why they should select you, rather than your competition. A Black Hat review can help you formally position yourself against the competition instead of just guessing, the way most people (including your competitors) do.

For each item, who does it and what comes next? Sometimes it’s not about the step, but how you set up the next one that determines your success. Clarifying who does what, and what each person involved can expect from each other, is as important as having enough people. One company might have lots of small customers. Another may have a few large customers. One company might have lots of different offerings. Another may only have a few. One might offer custom solutions. Another might sell commodities. There is no one way to organize marketing, pre-sales, sales, capture, and proposal development functions. This means you can't assume that everyone knows what each role is supposed to do. And because each is dependent on the others for success, you can't assume that each knows what to give to the others when it's time to hand off. Do you lose information at each step or do you build to the finish? How does that impact your win rate? The Sales Pipeline What are the roles of marketing, pre-sales, sales, and capture in filling your pipeline? Where are the handoffs? What gets handed off? How should the overlaps be managed? Do you have any gaps or lack of clarity? Who finds the leads that fill the pipeline? Is it the sales person or is there a pre-sales function? What gets passed on to who? Who qualifies the leads? And how are leads qualified? What are the standards? Who closes the deal? Does it close with a proposal? Who has responsibility for doing what it takes to close the sale? This can be everything from designing the offering, to staffing the proposal, to overseeing delivery. If a salesperson is responsible for chasing as many leads as possible, does someone else need to be responsible for capturing the lead? If you're offering is complex, you might need specialists involved to design the offering? When, where, and how will they be involved? And if a proposal manager is used to oversee developing the proposal, who is responsible for providing the information needed to write a winning proposal? Is sales still involved during the proposal phase? Who decides when to drop a lead? Who is responsible for bid/no bid decisions? When do they happen? Who owns the customer relationships? If there are handoffs from sales to capture to proposal, then does one person retain ownership of the customer relationship? Or can anyone interact with the potential customer? The approach that works for a company with multiple contracts at each customer might be different from the approach that works for a company with only one contract per customer. Intelligence Gathering Is one person or multiple people responsible for gathering intelligence? What gets delivered for use in the proposal? Who prepares it? See also: Improving win rates Who gathers customer intelligence? What are their intentions and preferences? Who are the decision makers and stakeholders? Who is supposed to find out? Who gathers opportunity intelligence? What are the real size, scope, and requirements? What are the budget and funding issues? Who gathers competitive intelligence? Who currently does business with the customer and who might want to? Offering Design and Teaming What are the roles of sales, capture, operations, and the proposal team in determining what to offer? Who determines what the winning offer should be? Who engineers the solution? Who drafts the specifications? Who selects among the options? Who defines and describes it? Who describes it and how? Who writes about it? Who determines the price to win? What are the price targets? How low can you/should you go? How does this impact the offering? Who identifies potential teaming partners? Can you/should you team and who with? Who provides the justification and who decides? Who is responsible for finding the right companies to team with? Who is responsible for maintaining relationships with potential teaming partners? Who negotiates and decides teaming arrangements? Who decides what roles the team members will play? Who is responsible for their contributions to the proposal? Who will decide the business arrangements? Strategies You can’t write about them if you don’t have them. Who should provide them? Who is responsible for identifying bid strategies? If you get to the proposal and you have no differentiators and no clear bid strategies, should that be the proposal manager’s problem to solve? Who is responsible for being able to articulate why the customer should select you? Is that something that should be considered during lead qualification or pursuit? Who is responsible for knowing what it will take to win? You can’t build a process around what it will take to win, if no one knows the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment well enough. Who is responsible for discovering what you need to know, assessing it, and turning into your bid strategies?

We have some really exciting things planned for 2017. And while it's not yet time for a public announcement, I'd like to discuss them with you so that you know what your options are... If business development or proposal training is part of your plans for 2017, we should talk. If assessing the effectiveness of your business development or proposal groups is part of your plans for 2017, we should talk. If you need to assess the quality of the proposals you will prepare in 2017, we should talk. If you're interested in new ways to roll out improvements across your entire organization in 2017, we need to talk. If you want to simultaneously address win rate, training, quality, process, resource allocation, and return on investment, then we really need to talk. We are launching a huge new training capability. We're also expanding our process tools to enable groups to assess their effectiveness. And upgrades to our corporate subscriptions are going to turn PropLIBRARY into an organizational improvement platform. The new offerings integrate with our current ones, providing tons of options. We're going to solve problems that have gone unsolved for decades, lower the cost of doing things you know you should do but could never afford, and give you ways to increase your competitiveness. If you'd like to know more about what we're up to, click here and schedule a time when we can talk about it.

An effective proposal group is more than just process and tools. But how do you assess its effectiveness? There are techniques and best practices, but what are the issues that impact its effectiveness? Here are five focus areas that reveal when you have things holding you back from maximizing your effectiveness. There are different ways to correct or improve things. But you must know what the issues are before you can select the right solution. Assuming the solution before you really understand the problem leads to continued ineffectiveness and frustration. The first sign of an ineffective process is often frustration. Frustration happens when recurring problems aren’t resolved. The five areas below are common sources of proposal frustration. See also: ROI Handoffs. As soon as your proposal efforts grow beyond one person, there are handoffs. For example, many companies struggle with the handoff from sales to the proposal. When does it take place? What gets handed off? When these questions are not explicitly answered, missed expectations at the handoffs will not only lead to frustration, but lower win rates when people don’t have the information they need to write a winning proposal. If you define the handoffs at the proposal kickoff meeting it’s too late. People won’t have the information they need to hand off. Things will be far less frustrating for everyone involved, if you define the handoffs, including who, what, where, how, when, and why before the sales cycle starts. When people know what will be expected, they’re more likely to show up prepared. And your win rate will rise as a result. Uncertainty regarding roles. Who should do what? If it’s not said, it won’t happen. Instead of dividing tasks up based on who’s available, try defining roles functionally. When one person plays more than one role, they take on all of the responsibilities for all of the roles they take on. And everyone else knows what to expect based on who is playing which roles. In addition to unmet expectations and inefficiency, the big problem with uncertainty regarding proposal roles is delay. It takes longer to get things done and you run out of time for quality assurance (who’s responsible for that anyway?). On their own, staff can usually figure out how to get things done (for better or worse). But one thing they often can’t decide on their own is who must do things. They need clarification regarding the authority to make decisions regarding who must do things. Lack of resources. It makes complete sense that overloaded staff are frustrated. But more staff is not always the right answer. The answer is what will give you the best return on investment (ROI). In the absence of data to establish that, most companies opt for the minimum to get things done. The minimum to get things done will not return the best ROI. To discover the best ROI, you need to collect data that correlates staffing levels with win rate, and collect enough of it to be statistically significant. Another, sometimes easier approach is to establish standards, and measure their compliance and correlation with the win rate. Then you staff at the level that will meet your standards. Depending on the size and volume of your bids, an increase in win rate will usually more than pay for the staff required to achieve it. Once you track your ROI, your corporate culture will change from regarding proposals as a necessary expense to be minimized to an investment that benefits all. Also, take note. Resource sufficiency applies not just to having enough staff for proposal development, but also to executive staff. Do they have enough attention to give and to fulfill their commitments to the process and make timely decisions? Sometimes organizational development is primarily a matter of eliminating executive bottlenecks. Different agendas. People differ on priorities. They differ on techniques. They differ on decisions about things like resource allocation. Ultimately they have different goals. Even though everyone may share the goal of winning a proposal, they may have other goals that differ. Expectation management is critical. Understanding why goals and techniques are chosen is critical. People will more readily accept a goal that is different from theirs when their own expectations have been voiced and they understand why the different goal is being pursued, even if they disagree with it. An effective process is more than just steps. An effective process also facilitates expectation management and guidance regarding why things should be done a particular way. Often why this should be done is more important than how. Sometimes an RFP can require you to do things differently, but often the goal will remain the same and it can be okay if people improvise or innovate what they do, so long as they achieve the goal. Who decides what quality is? Most companies treat proposal quality as a subjective thing and make it up as they go along. People debate, advocate, and discuss everything from word choice and style to bid strategies. They waste huge amounts of time talking in circles around the issues. Usually there isn’t one person who has the authority to declare it, and even if there is that just makes it one person’s opinion. You need a written definition of proposal quality that provides the criteria everyone should follow to achieve the kind of proposals the company wants to submit. Then people can argue over those criteria, but you can also settle those arguments by reviewing and publishing those criteria. This has the added benefits of informing proposal writers what they need to accomplish and giving you metrics you can use to track correlation with your win rate. It is a key part of expectation management.

There is a place for short-term thinking. You've got to start somewhere. But there are also risks. And it's easy to become sidetracked along the way. This creates an opportunity to beat your competitors by continuing to evolve when they get stuck. Short-term proposal thinking Short-term thinking can trick you out of having an investment mentality. You’re not thinking about investing in your proposal capability. You may not even be investing in the win. You think short term when you’ve got a deadline, that’s all you're accountable for, and you only have the resources you’ve been given to prepare the proposal. You may be talking about winning, but your staff are probably more focused on just getting the darn thing submitted “while doing their best to win” so they can have their life back. If those are the cards you are dealt, that’s how you play it. A short-term proposal often involves making up a process as you go along. Re-using old proposal text that was good enough for the last proposal, is good enough for this one. If you are starting at RFP release with no information advantage, you may just have to fake your customer awareness. You are a hero. You get the job done. But your company sees you as a cost to be minimized. Short-term techniques for proposals include having a way of doing things (a process that’s not fully documented), re-using proposal text, and getting to a draft quickly so you can fix it. Your process is probably based on having one major draft review. The proposal succeeds or fails based solely on the strength of the participants. And whether they are heroes. If you only do proposals rarely and the values are not large enough to make them investment-worthy, you can get away with short-term thinking. When you start out with short-term thinking because you have no ability to invest, you risk having that become how you go about doing proposals when the volume picks up. This is a disease that infects both executives and proposal managers. The bridge to long-term proposal thinking is usually your business development and proposal process. Companies seek to formalize their process when they want to start doing things consistently better in the future. Mid-term proposal thinking Most established companies make it this far and never make it to long term thinking because it’s so easy to get sidetracked. I know billion-dollar companies that never matured past this level. Companies who get stuck here are often trapped in a process Catch-22. They haven’t documented their process that people won’t follow anyway. Even if it was documented, it would fail if followed diligently in the real world. Stuck in this trap, “The Process” seems to be the only way out. Mid term proposal thinking can become an eternal struggle around “The Process” while falling back on short term techniques to keep making proposal submissions. Just when you think things are going smoothly, staff turnover sets you back, demonstrating that your process was never independent of your people. With long term proposal thinking, gambling or relying on continuous heroics gives way to continuous win rate improvement. But only for those with the patience, perseverance, and strength required to build the right culture. Long-term proposal thinking Long-term thinking only happens when there is a multi-year commitment to continuous win rate improvement backed by the authority to drive change. By the time companies get to long-term thinking, they have usually fallen into the business development growth trap, with multiple locations, lines of business, and territories that have evolved different ways of doing things that are hard to standardize. You can’t begin long-term thinking until you can get everyone on the same page. When you do, wonderful things can be achieved with a long-term outlook: You recognize that winning is cross-functional and requires integration instead of stove pipes. You make everyone part of business development and the flow of information from lead identification through award. Proposals are not something a department does, they become something the entire company does. Instead of process as required steps, you create a process that based on guidance and staff development. Instead of steps, the process itself gets built around discovering the information needed to answer the questions that stakeholders have so they can make their contributions. You make it easier to follow the process than to complete an assignment without it by showing, accelerating, and inspiring so that people want to follow it. Instead of a rare event, training gets built into the process and becomes continuous and never-ending. It facilitates your ability to adapt and change by giving you a vehicle to inform and guide while doing. When there is a multiyear commitment, process and training combined become the engine for organizational change that drives continuous win rate improvement. Your review process begins to focus on risk mitigation and quality validation instead of document critique. You define proposal quality. You define quality criteria for your proposals and train your reviewers to be responsible for validating them. Quality gets built in at the beginning instead of fixes applied at the end. When there are alternatives reviewers and the proposal team collaborate to make decisions based on risk management and acceptance. You get good at analytics. Very few business development or proposal groups have any analytical capability. It is surprising how few companies have any analytical capability. In this context, analytics means quantifying process performance so that you can correlate decisions and activity with your win rate. Continuous change is senseless if it is uninformed. The things that actually impact your win rate are not always what you think they will be. What experts think they know is often contradicted by hard data. For long-term success, take the subjectivity about what you should do out of the equation and replace it with a culture of experimentation and analytics. This is necessary to make the big evolutionary shift from thinking about proposals as a cost and instead managing them as investments. How does resource allocation impact your win rates? Is more always better? Under what circumstances? When does spending more lead to higher win rates and when does it not? Winning proposals should be about maximizing the company's return on investment. But without analytics all you are doing is gambling on your future. Long-term thinking minimizes gambling in favor of steadily increasing returns. Evolving like this is something we help companies do. All the individual things we offer are part of a bigger plan. From our off-the-shelf process documentation, to our pipeline assessments, review participation, and integrated process, guidance, and training, they add up to transformation into an organization that maximizes its win rates. When you are too small to invest much, we have subscriptions. When you are ready for more, we have easy ways to get started. And once we have a relationship based on a proven ROI track record, we help our friends over the long term become truly great. Click the button if you are ready to think long term and want us to help your company win. Contact us about improving your company's ability to win

PropLIBRARY contains a ton of information that can help you solve common business development, lead capture, and proposal problems. We give many solutions away. And some are part of our premium content. The list below is a mixture of links to free content and premium content that's only available with a PropLIBRARY Subscription. If you are already a subscriber, don't forget to use the bookmark feature (look for the icon in the title) to tag the content that you want to show up in your list of "Favorites." We use PropLIBRARY to solve problems for our customers all the time. But it's easy because we know what content is where. No matter how many ways we give people to find the content they need, with this much depth and breadth it's easy to get overwhelmed. The list below can help you find the good stuff that you need to really have an impact on your business. See also: Winning If you have difficulty finding leads before the RFP is released If you need to fix a broken proposal If you need to be more selective in what you bid If you are writing a proposal even though you don't know the customer as well as you should If you don’t have a lead capture process If you start your proposals unprepared If you are having trouble figuring out what to write in your proposal If you don’t know how to create an RFP compliance matrix If you don’t have a written definition of proposal quality If you need to prepare for a customer debrief If you need to conduct a proposal lessons learned review If you need guidance for staffing your proposal If you have to write a proposal but you don't have the background or input you need If your business development meetings are boring, stupid, and pointless If your proposals contain poorly written themes If your proposals are good, but not good enough If you don't have enough staff to work on your proposals If you just need to prepare a simple proposal If you think the RFP might be wired for someone else If you are having trouble doing proposals with other people involved If you need your proposals to be more persuasive If you need to respond to a Request for Information (RFI) or a Sources Sought Notice If you want to improve your process, but not replace it If your proposals do not reflect an information advantage If your proposals end up being merely compliant If you need to accelerate your proposals If you are struggling to find differentiators for your proposals If people are ignoring your company's strategic plan If people aren't following your proposal process If your proposal reviews aren't working out the way they should If you got a late start on your proposal If you're having trouble knowing what to propose If people are having difficulty completing their proposal assignments If you have to use people who aren't proposal writers to produce your proposals If your proposals are failing their reviews If you need to fill your bid opportunity pipeline

We're adding features that will turn our huge library of incredibly useful content into online training courses with exercises, quizzes, videos, and more. But that's not all... There will be special features for Corporate Subscribers. They involve customization, certification, live instructor integration, real proposal participation tracking, transcripts, mentorship programs, and more. It's not just about training. They turn PropLIBRARY into a strategic tool for developing a winning organization. We'd like to tell you about it. And answer your questions. Thursday, October 27th at 11am EST (UTC-5), we're hosting a webinar to do just that. This webinar is just for large companies, and is only relevant to companies with at least 50 employees and will support companies with thousands of employees. A single user subscription is more relevant to smaller companies, and they'll be getting an upgrade too. We're also doing some things for all you freelance consultants out there that will send some love your way too. Click the button to request the webinar access details. And since it will be a small group, feel free to share something about yourself, your company, or your proposal challenges. And if you can't make it, use the button to let us know so we can email you some information. Click here to register for the webinar

You need someone to do all of these things. But it’s far more than one person can handle. So we’ve categorized them according to the roles as we define them in the MustWin Process. You should add items specific to your company. If you don’t have enough resources, each person may have to play multiple roles. But everything on the list needs to be assigned to someone. Some can be shared, but there always needs to be someone with primary responsibility. For each role, we’ve listed primary and secondary functions. See also: Roles and responsibilities Executive Sponsor Lead the bid/no bid review Conduct readiness reviews Approve budgets and plans Help locate and approve resources Overcome obstacles and indecision Provide guidance based on the company’s strategic plans Set the tone Provide oversight and guidance Participate in pricing and other reviews Business Development Manager Manage a portfolio of leads Lead identification and qualification Be the primary customer contact Conduct relationship marketing Lead the pre-RFP pursuit until a capture manager is assigned Positioning Gather customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence Provide estimates Bid/no bid decision support Validate the offering design and win strategies with the customer Make sure the proposal reflects what you know about the customer Participate in competitive assessments Capture Manager Be dedicated to and take the lead on winning the pursuit Transition from intelligence gathering to bid preparation Participate in customer contacts Discover what it will take to win Ensure that the right information about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and your own company is there when the proposal writers need it Recommend and implement the pursuit budget Provide detailed estimates Lead the offering design effort Lead teaming efforts and negotiations Determine staff to bid Determine the price to win Work in partnership with the business development manager, proposal manager, and executive sponsor Identify and obtain resources Develop the win strategies Determine what the differentiators should be Sell the opportunity internally as well as externally Pursuit Strategist Articulate win strategies, differentiators, themes, and messages based on the capture manger's input Develop strategies to optimize the proposal against the evaluation criteria Conceptualize the presentation of the proposal Proposal Manager Lead proposal process implementation Lead the creation of a proposal that reflects what it will take to win and the pursuit strategies Create the RFP compliance matrix and proposal outline Lead the creation of plans, schedules, and assignments Manage the resources assigned to the proposal Set expectations during proposal development Plan, hold, and lead the proposal kickoff meeting Schedule and coordinate proposal reviews Determine how to resolve review comments Track progress towards proposal completion Determine what should be written Work with the capture manager to resolve any resource gaps Prepare for and coordinates proposal delivery Articulate what information proposal writers need to write winning proposals during the pre-RFP pursuit Fill gaps Resolve conflicts Coordinate production of business and pricing volumes Process Administrator Support the implementation of the proposal process Free the proposal manager to focus on managing proposal resources and completion Provide notifications, reminders, and guidance for executing the process Complete process forms, documentation, and paperwork Maintain proposal records Track assignment completion and schedule fulfillment Proposal Writer Contribute to proposal content plan development Implement the proposal content plan Write finished copy that incorporates the content plan instructions Work with subject matter experts and other contributors to obtain information as needed Conduct research as needed Meet deadlines Subject Matter Expert Describe approaches and provide technical details Deliver information and details instead of finished copy Make sure the proposal is technically accurate and complete Make sure the offering is executable and best-in-class Draft proposal content as required Production Manager Implement the Production Plan and compliance with RFP instructions regarding formatting, packaging, and delivery Oversee the rendering of graphics and their insertion into the document Implement editorial standards, production conventions, and branding requirements Function as a single point of contact for production assistance, tracking, and quality control Maintain configuration management once production begins Graphics/Illustrator Work with the pursuit strategist, proposal manager, writers, and subject matter experts to conceptualize graphics Render proposal graphics Comply with instructions regarding graphic composition Complete any forms related to graphics Maintain configuration management of graphic files Other/Corporate Support Prepare teaming agreements Review contractual terms and conditions Prepare pricing Respond to requirements for certifications and representations Recruit staff to bid Obtain resumes for staff being bid Support and prepare Bill of Materials, Basis of Estimate, and other business/pricing ancillary documentation

See also: Proposal management What one company calls a proposal manager, another might call an administrative assistant. Or an editor. Or a coordinator. Or a production manager. Or a pursuit strategist. Or a capture manager. Is the proposal manager the person is charge of the proposal, in charge of producing what people give them, or just a proposal specialist assigned to support the proposal effort? Or, on occasion, just some unlikely person who happened to be available. A large portion of the conflict and difficulty related to doing proposals is directly a result of a lack of clarity regarding expectations. What do you expect from your proposal manager? You can’t get away with just assigning someone “who’s supposed to know” and then letting things play out. Expectations for all roles should be clear. That’s a key goal addressed by our MustWin Process. But making your expectations for the role of the proposal manager clear is especially important. Do you need your proposal manager to: Develop the win strategies? Determine what the differentiators should be? Create the RFP compliance matrix and proposal outline? Determine what should be written? Write proposal content? Ensure RFP compliance? Create the process for everyone to follow? Implement the process? Create the schedule and plans? Set expectations? Track status? Conduct communications with all stakeholders? Enforce deadlines? Ensure the content scores highly? Edit the content? Define the review process? Plan and coordinate the reviews? Participate in the reviews? Decide which changes to make and how? Interact with the customer? Design the offering? Decide which staff to bid? Format the document? Oversee document production? Set editorial conventions and standards? Recommend, approve, or allocate proposal budgets? Assign and allocate staff? Decide whether or how to use consultants? Identify, procure, and implement specialized software? Make assignments and manage proposal contributions? Determine the winning price? Produce the pricing proposal? Develop competitive strategies? Conduct post-submission lessons learned reviews? Collect and assess proposal metrics? Response to post-submission customer inquiries? Participate in bid/no bid decisions? Coordinate teaming documentation? Conceptualize proposal graphics? Produce proposal graphics? Determine what it will take to win? Produce, present, and package something created by others? Do what it takes to create the proposal? Fill voids? Does your proposal manager have the authority to do the all things you want them to do? Do they know how to do all the things you want them to do? Do they have the capacity? Have you overloaded them? It’s a bit of a trick question. There are items from what I would consider six different roles in the list above. And yet, some companies expect their proposal managers to be responsible for all of them. The way we approach roles and responsibilities in the MustWin Process is functional. We identify what needs to be done and then figure out how we’re going to allocate things. If resources are short, one person may take on multiple roles. But when this happens, they are still responsible for doing everything required for every role assigned. It's important to know when you're overextending and what the cost might be. But it's even more important that everyone know what to expect. So what kind of proposal manager do you want? A producer to finish what you create? An admin to provide support? A strategist to figure out how to win? An engineer to figure out what to propose? Someone who will take ownership? Someone who will give orders? Someone who will take orders? Someone to do it all? Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.

At the tail end of your proposal, you do not usually have much time to think things through. Having a checklist will make it much easier and help ensure that you don’t overlook anything. See also: Proposal completion Delivery method verified (hand delivered, FedEx, courier, etc.) Directions printed (if needed) Final editing done Spelling checked Widows/orphans/pagination checked Headers/footers checked Front matter prepared Contents checked against the table of contents Contents assembled correctly Cover letter signed Covers, spines, and tabs correct Number of volumes and copies Electronic copies Foldout counts and placements Margins Single vs. double sided copying checked Reproduction quality checked Cover text/graphics Attachments Original stamped (if required) Forms Proposals are packaged properly Packages are labeled properly Delivery address checked Tracking numbers for any shipments

Use the following as inspiration for your questions. The exact wording will depend on your circumstances and who your customer is. And don't forget... you can also ask for a debrief for a proposal that you won! See also: Post submission Basic questions: Who won? How many bids were received? What was your overall score? Was your score close to the top or close to the bottom? What was the winner’s score? Did the winner have the lowest price? Did the winner have the highest score on the technical evaluation factors? If price was a major factor and you lost: Was the winning price higher or lower than yours? What was the price difference between your bid and the winning bid? Did you scope the level of effort (number of people/hours) appropriately? Was the skill level of your proposed staffing too high? Did the winner propose more or less staff/hours? By how much? What drove the customer's perception of value? How did they calculate the difference in value? How did they consider price realism/reasonableness? If you scored higher on technical factors but lost: Did you lose because achieving a higher score on technical factors drove up the cost? If your price had been the same as the winner, would your proposal have represented the best value? If you scored lower on technical factors: How did your staffing score? How did your technical understanding and approach score? How did your management approach score? How did your past performance score? Did you have any compliance issues? If the incumbent won: Did the incumbent score higher on the technical evaluation factors? Did the incumbent score higher on experience? Would more details about how you would retain the incumbent staffing have improved your score? Miscellaneous: What kind of impact did your bid strategies have? What were your strengths? What were your weaknesses? Were you non-compliant with the RFP in any way? Did you understand the customer? Did you make the right decisions? How did the presentation and appearance of your proposal stack up against the competition? What differentiated you from the other bids? Was your proposal easy to navigate and score? Did your proposal contain any fluff or content that should have been substantiated better? What in your proposal made their eyes roll? What in your proposal got their attention? Is there anything the customer would recommend for you to improve?

Proposal risk increases as the deadline approaches. A simple mistake at the last minute can ruin a great proposal and all the effort that went into creating it. And yet, your best opportunities to mitigate the risks at the end of the proposal happen long before you get to the end of the proposal. To reduce your risk, in each of the following areas, consider what is at risk, what the stakes are, and what you can do about it. Then think about whether your efforts are proportionate to the risks. See also: Production Final reviews and approvals. This is what destroys many otherwise good proposals. How many review iterations? Can you fit one more in? Can you ever be satisfied? Will your need to constantly tweak things lower quality instead of raising it? How about actually defining your reviews, having a finite number, and defining their scope and who should participate? Your proposal process should go beyond steps and provide scope definitions, decision criteria, deliverable specifications, and role descriptions. When you arrive at final production with an incomplete or broken proposal, you will have to do everything you can to fix it and eat the risks. But if you are making tweaks to satisfy someone’s idea of perfection that won’t impact your evaluation score, you should reconsider because you may be increasing the risk of failure instead of improving the proposal. Use process and criteria driven definitions of quality to get everyone on the same page before the next proposal. Quality is not discovered at the last minute. No formal quality methodology in existence achieves quality by missing deadlines, failing to define what needs to be created, and then making an undefined number of improvements at the last minute. Final changes. After your final review to make improvements, and your final review to make corrections, you still need time to make the changes. Going into “final production” with changes that haven’t been made is an oxymoron. Quality does not arise from oxymorons about what you are doing. Yet it happens all the time. It is best to organize so that final production occurs after final review changes have been made, even if you do it section by section. Configuration management. The number of authors, files, and versions increases the likelihood that edits will be made to the wrong file or that the wrong version will be used in production. Collaborative editing helps, but introduces risks of its own that multiply with complexity. The more complex the proposal, the more time should be invested in configuration management to carefully track all the moving parts and prevent a disaster at the tail end of the proposal. Formatting. If your proposal formats are standardized and they are efficient, this is a straightforward step that depends mostly on the complexity (number of tables and graphics primarily) and the page count. Simplicity and elegance in formatting is better than complexity and ambition. Using features that only a few know how to use (or can be taught) limits the number of resources that can be employed to help. The more complex your formats, the more time will be needed for quality assurance. Keep it simple. Put the time and effort into your message. Graphics. Graphics communicate better than words. It’s that simple. But first you must have the message to communicate. It is good to have lots of graphics. But keeping it simple and going for elegance over ambition still applies. If you enter final production and are trying to figure out what graphics you should have, you have higher risk than going with fewer graphics. Your proposal messages matter more than the means you use to deliver them. Achieving a proposal with lots of well communicating graphics requires it to be done in parallel with the writing effort with the goal of completing the graphics before final production. Editing. A proper editorial review is an all or nothing step. It’s not as simple as having someone with “good grammar” skim it for obvious errors. You can’t rush an editorial review. Reading and checking every word requires reading and checking every word. If you blow your schedule, you probably have to skip it. It should be the first thing to go, since just about everything else that needs to be fixed will have a higher impact on your potential win or loss. If you make it your declared policy that missing the final production deadline means skipping the editing, this provides some incentive not to blow the schedule. People who want it all no matter what it takes often increase risk of failure instead of reducing it. Don't be a proposal hero. Be a proposal professional. Reproduction and assembly. While hard copies are requested less and less these days, when they are you still have to allow time for it to be done carefully. Complexity, driven by the number of binders, tabs, foldouts, files, inserts, etc., will slow you down more than page count. And the number of copies. Complexity is what drives the risk that something will get left out or be defective in the proposal as submitted. Electronic submissions have their own risks related to website access, formats, content errors, etc. Preparation and packaging. You should itemize everything you’ll need for submission long before final production starts. Don't wait until you are ready to submit to find out whether you can access the customer's website, have the submission email address, or know how to do what is required. Allow enough time to double check both what is being submitted and how it is being submitted. Delivery. How much risk are you willing to take? If a hard copy absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, are you willing to send it by two carriers and put someone on a plane to hand deliver it? If it absolutely, positively has to be there by the deadline, are you willing to complete your proposal a day or two early in case of technical difficulties with an electronic submission? The highest risk of a final production failure occurs before it starts. Final formatting and submission risks are relatively low compared to the risks of poorly executed reviews, final changes, and configuration management. Unanticipated review and change iterations don't mean rushing final production. They mean reducing quality assurance during final production. They mean increasing the risk when you are out of time. The investment you should make is in preventing the need for last minute changes instead of seeking out last minute changes. How you end the proposal writing phase usually has more to do with the success of your preparation for proposal production than the production effort itself.

Proposal losses generally fall into these categories: Price Your proposal didn't score high enough against the evaluation criteria Someone had an offering that the customer liked better You made mistakes or didn’t follow the instructions Presentation So when a proposal loses, why do people tend to focus the lessons learned on how the proposal was written? The truth is that you probably lost before the proposal started. Here are the universal lessons to be learned at the end of a proposal: See also: Winning Increase your pricing skills, part of which is increasing the information you have about costs and your competition. Don’t make mistakes. Good luck with that. Quality processes can help. Trying really hard can help. Follow the instructions. Try harder. But sometimes it comes down to how to interpret what the customer said. It’s often not as clear as they thought it was. Improve how you write your proposals. This can be either improving your planning or improving your execution. It can be proposal writing or proposal management. Process and training can help. A lot. Recycling content, using tools, etc. won’t help as much as you think. Improve your offering. What are you proposing to do or deliver? What makes your offering better? In my experience, problems with the offering are the number one reason why proposals lose. A loss on price is more likely to be a result of differences in how the work was scoped and defined than it is to be a result of an actual difference in prices. Bid strategies can be based on the RFP, but the best ones are based on giving the offering strategic impact. When offering design occurs during the proposal phase, it often degrades to being more about presentation than strategic impact. Mistakes like missing forms or proposal requirements should never happen. But they do. That’s the nature of mistakes. Thankfully, they are rare. Poor decisions about what to offer happen far more often but are also harder to admit. Lessons learned reviews tend to focus on making the proposal better instead of making the offering better. People want to believe that they made the best decision they could without beating themselves up about it. The only problem is that accepting this does not lead to better decisions in the future. Almost all of the bad decisions people make about their offering are a result of not having the right information. Informed decisions are easy. The reasons people don’t have the right information is that they didn’t do their homework, they made assumptions, or they didn’t dig deep enough. You can fix two out of those three: If you didn’t do your homework, it’s most likely because the assignment was poorly constructed and not from lack of effort. This is a nice way of saying that whoever was supposed to be in charge gave poor instructions. Usually they led a fishing expedition instead of a real inquiry. If you made assumptions, like “the customer loves us” or “the customer doesn’t like [fill in the blank],” then you need to learn how to recognize your assumptions so you can start catching yourself making them and test them instead. Most assumptions take the form of thinking you know what the customer will like or not like. If you didn’t dig deep enough, it may be because you exhausted your contacts and the customer wasn’t willing to talk. Maybe you could have tried harder, but you might have just run into a wall. One challenge is that the customer is not one person. There are many people involved in the decision, often with competing agendas. Does your information reflect that? If not, are you assuming the people you have talked to reflect the consensus? How do you get to those at the customer you don't know and who might not be willing to talk to vendors? It's harder for incumbents. It’s easy as the incumbent to think you know the customer. But what are they not telling you? What are the preferences at management levels above the customer staff you interact with? Are you assuming that the future project should resemble the current project in size and scope? What has changed? And what might a competitor do to woo the customer away? Are you willing to change? Are you willing to downscale to increase your chances of keeping the customer? Is that what the customer wants? Did you invest in real continuous improvement and delighting the customer? Are you going to pay the price if you didn’t? An outsider has nothing to lose by submitting a bold proposal. When an incumbent loses, it’s even sadder. When it’s not the result of a mistake or pricing, it can because of things like they weren’t providing the awesome service they thought they were, their offer didn’t support the changes the customer wanted to make, or someone else offered something new that the customer wanted more than they feared the risk of change. In every case, bad information or assumptions are what killed the bid and not bad proposal writing. Even though we want to believe that a last-minute heroic effort can save the day, no improvement in the proposal process or writing could have changed the fact that what was proposed was inferior. The real lesson to be learned isn’t just that you should start before the RFP is released. It’s that you should make sure that what you think you know is real. Otherwise, no matter how nice a house you build during the proposal phase, the weak foundation can make it collapse. You lose the proposal before it even starts. Bring valid information to the proposal and heroics won’t be necessary to write one that wins.

Getting the most out of your lessons learned For a lesson to be truly “learned,” it must result in change. It is not enough to discuss and collect lessons learned. You must do something with what you find out. Issues should turn into action items that will lead to improvements on future proposals. Focus on how lessons learned apply to specific roles in the proposal process, not to individuals. The following questions can help elicit constructive feedback. Before the proposal Improving your proposals means improving what you do before the proposal starts. At the end of each proposal, it's a good idea to look back to see what could have been done before the proposal started to increase your chances of winning. How were you positioned at the start of the proposal? Did you start the pursuit at the right time? What could you have done to better qualify the lead? Did you start the proposal already having an information advantage? What could you have done to increase your information advantage? Did you start the proposal having clear differentiators? Did you start the proposal knowing what you intended to offer? How did you validate your offering design? Were you able to answer all of the questions that the proposal writers had about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment? Did you start the proposal knowing what it would take to win and how to articulate your bid strategies? Improving the effectiveness of the proposal process See also: Post submission In some instances issues arise because the process was not faithfully executed. Had the process been properly followed, the issue would not have come to be, or would have been mitigated. If this is the case, you can ask participants: Did you have the inputs you needed to complete each step? Should you change what information you collect, when you collect it, how you collect it, or how you distribute it? Were expectations clear? Would better guidance or notifications help with executing the process? Would better orientation/discussion and/or training help proposal contributors? If so, when should it occur? Did offering design and proposal writing get tangled up? Did you define and use the right quality criteria during your reviews? Should you change what, when, or how you validate the key aspects of the proposal? Improving resource allocation Did you have enough resources at each stage (pre-RFP, proposal, reviews, production, etc.)? Did you have the right resources? Evaluating process documentation issues Consider if the lesson learned feedback impacts your process documentation: Does the process address the issue? How should your process documentation be changed or expanded? Does the change have an impact on roles and responsibilities? What can occur earlier in the process to mitigate the issue? During future proposals, if the issue recurs, how will you know and what will you do about it? Evaluating proposal software issues Many companies now take advantage of software tools to facilitate workflow automation, proposal collaboration, reviews, and document management. If your company takes advantage of software tools, consider the following line of questioning: Were participants able to use the system as designed and to its full potential, or did they find the need to work around it? Did participants have sufficient technical support available when and how they needed it?

Holding a lessons learned meeting after the conclusion of a proposal is a good idea. But only if it results in change, and ideally a set of action items. It's not a place to vent. It's a place to turn experience into inspiration. Some lessons learned can be addressed by changing the process. Others can be addressed by providing training. Ideally, any training required can be incorporated into the process, instead of being treated as a one-time event. With each issue that you face, if there is an improvement you can make to mitigate or improve it in the future, make the change in the process. Then the next time you execute the process, you can take advantage of the lessons learned. See also: Post submission When holding a lessons learned meeting, you can also use this approach to keep the discussions productive. When an issue is raised, you can ask the attendees, “What changes could we make in the book to circumvent this issue in the future?” You want your lessons learned meeting to be more about improving your future win rate than about what went wrong. Any resource issues should be addressed as a return on investment issue instead of a cost issue. What would the investment have cost and what would its return be? Moving forward, how should the company invest scarce resources with regards to proposals? How does that relate to win rate and the return on investment? The more you can do to quantify resources issues and win rate impacts, the more you can minimize opinions and focus on making, more informed decisions in the future. When considering proposals, you should have a holistic view of what contributes to the win rate. For example, you might conclude that because assignments were submitted late, you need better enforcement of deadlines. But if the problem was that the authors didn't have the information they needed about the customer, opportunity, or competitive environment, they might have had more difficulty completing their assignments than they should have. The same can be said about reviews. If there were defects at a review, was that because of presentation defects or inadequate information about bid strategies, customer preferences, differentiators, etc.? An effective lessons learned review needs to dig deep to find root causes in order to actually achieve the desired changes.

This is a system for hosting online training. This is a system for selling and managing live instructor-led training. This is a system for recording your live training and reselling it. This is a system for selling webinars. This is a system that enables you to wrap all of the above with exercises, quizzes, content, and certification options. It also lets you combine online and offline options in the same course. It also features a content management system that enables you build courses from a library of content. Oh, and it has customization options. You can have standardized off-the-shelf courses. And you can upsell customized versions of those courses. We use these features to offer a set of off-the-shelf courses related to our MustWin Process, that enterprise scale customers can customize. For example, they can add items to our courses that are specific to their internal lead tracking, time keeping, or invoicing processes. Naturally only their customers get to see the additions. We sell customization as a service, and you can too! We can offer companies certification programs that align training with performance requirements and measure participation. All tracked automatically, with online transcripts. We can even track and give credit for live training. Or even live events like participation in a proposal, or use of a consultant-mentor. And you can too! It can be as simple as a video. Or as complex as an ongoing customized enterprise-wide training program with real world events and certification. And while that is a complex undertaking, we've reduced both the complexity and the cost by an order of magnitude.

Courses are divided into modules with course items that can include things like articles, files, exercises, quizzes, etc. Course items can also include: Event descriptions with purchase, registration forms, and attendance/participation instructions Videos An event could be a live-instructor presentation, a proposal, or other real world activity. You can add an event to your course, record it, and then replace the event item with the recorded item afterwards. This can be used to initially sell instructor-led training and then convert it afterward to recorded training with the click of a button. Whether or not you should do this really depends on your goals. Are you trying sell instructor led training seats, or do you want to go straight to online training? Are you marketing an event or just-in-time availability? You decide. The system will support you either way and give you hybrid options you never had. For example, you can sell events and then repurpose the content into smaller, more granular topics that go online. This way, you pick up the passive income, without cannibalizing your events. But if you are not currently promoting events, and don't want to take the risks associated with them, you can go straight to online.

When your business is ready to become serious about winning, there are only a few things that you need to do. The problem is that you have to do them all, and won’t have the time or resources. If you understand what you are trying to grow into, you can formalize things over time. But what you can’t do is ignore them. Ignoring them creates a trap that may prevent you from ever being able to get good at winning business. Here are some things to focus on as soon as you are ready to get serious about winning: See also: Organizational development Are you qualified to bid? This does not mean what you think it means. You can be completely capable of doing the work, but the customer won’t even consider your bid because you don’t show up with the right paperwork. Before you invest time and money into preparing a proposal, you should make sure the customer will actually read it. This means understanding the customer’s business and evaluation requirements in addition to their performance requirements. Do you know how many leads you need to hit your numbers? If your answer is “all of them” then you’re not serious about winning. You will not bid every lead you identify. You will not win everything you bid. So how many leads do you need to end up with the numbers you need, and can you afford the resources it will take to pursue and capture those leads? This is a mathematical question. You need to understand how to construct a pipeline model for your business that can do the math required to enable you to make informed decisions. You need to understand your pipeline in order to determine what strategies you should pursue, where you should look for leads, and what lines of business you should be in. Can you anticipate the questions you’ll need to answer to write a winning proposal? Identifying “what you need to know to win” starts by identifying what you need to know to write a winning proposal. Many proposals fail because companies think they “know the customer” but can’t answer their proposal writers' questions about the customer’s preferences or perspective. The most important goal of the pre-RFP phase of a pursuit is to develop an information advantage over your competitors. Information only becomes an advantage when it impacts the proposal. Being able to anticipate what information you need to do that is critically important. You should build your entire pre-RFP pursuit phase around getting it. How will you flow information from lead identification to lead capture? So there are a certain number of leads where you should pursue an information advantage. How do you do that and what do you do with the information? It’s supposed to impact the proposal, but how does it do that? How does information change hands and transform to become a winning proposal? Proposal writing is not one step. You don’t go from a discussion into writing. And definitely not into winning consistently. Across all your bids, you need to be able to map all of your information and bid strategies to the plan for the document and articulate it in enough detail for the writers to have the information they need to write a winning proposal. Then you need a way to review their work that isn't just subjective. To achieve this across all of your bids, you need a process. But you can start with something easy. Do you have the skills, knowledge, and resources you need to do all this? Your pipeline tells you what resources you can afford. You still have to cultivate them. If you are going to have a process you have to implement it and ensure that people are capable of following it. Regardless of whether you will be using your own staff or consultants to prepare your proposals, you still have to have people who know what information is needed, how to get it, and how to pass it along. The process describes how information should flow. People are required to do that effectively. They need to know what and how, and have to skills to do it well. Each one of these requires a different approach: To ensure you are qualified to bid means doing your research and not making assumptions. Knowing how many leads you need to pursue and what the resource implications are requires understanding how to construct a pipeline model for your business. Being able to anticipate the questions you will need to answer to write a winning proposal requires a combination of research, relationship marketing, and process awareness. Being able to flow information from lead identification through lead capture requires knowing how to build a process around what it will take to win. Having the skills, knowledge, and resources not only requires training but also requires a curriculum that reflects your process. Or better yet, a process that embeds the training that people will need. The trick to being successful when you don’t have the time and resources is to start with a pipeline model that tells you what resources you can afford and when. Then instead of defining your process, pay attention to the questions you should be asking and the answers you wish you had. You can keep it simple. You can treat your entire process, the entire flow of information, as a series of questions. Until you are ready to formalize your process, all you need to do is ask the right questions. And continuously grow your list. You can use this approach both to ease into having a formal process and to educate your staff at the same time.

Here are some of the strategies that we employ when fixing a broken proposal. I prefer to focus on process and preventing these problems. But once a proposal is broken, it's too late to implement a process. Maybe improving your process can prevent the next proposal from breaking. Fixing this proposal requires a different approach. Often the biggest problem is getting people to realize that they aren't going to be able to submit the glorious proposal they originally envisioned and need to change their expectations. Every one of these requires people to change. There's a good chance that the proposal is broken because people didn't change quickly enough. So pick your approach and move forward without further hesitation. And remember this variation on Murphy's Law: If it doesn't work, force it. If it breaks, it needed fixing anyway.Priorities Proposal priorities can be thought of as a variation on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If a proposal is broken, that means you’ve lost time, only limited time is available, and you have to scale the solution to the time available. This means you’ve got to prioritize. See also: Proposal Management Don’t get thrown out. Fix disqualifiers first to ensure you are even in the game. Next, make sure you have followed the instructions in the RFP. Literally. In their words, with everything organized the way they asked for it to be organized. If you deviate from this organization, you are at risk of getting thrown out. Fixing that is more important than saying things in any particular way. Score. Once your proposal is organized the way they want it to be organized, then focus on their evaluation criteria. The goal of a proposal written against published evaluation criteria is to achieve the highest score. This is more important than how you might want your proposal to sound or look. Your proposal is not about how you want to present yourself, it’s about how the customer will score what they see. Maximizing your chances of winning requires giving them content that is optimized to score well against the evaluation criteria. Strategies. You should have some. If the proposal doesn’t implement them, you might want to fix that. If your proposal is organized according to the RFP and optimized against the evaluation criteria, next comes having clever bid strategies. What they should be depends on your company, the customer, and the competitive environment. But your proposal should implement those strategies effectively and consistently. One way proposals commonly go bad is that they never really settle on their strategies and try to figure them out by writing and rewriting instead of thinking clearly. Price. If your proposal content didn’t go as well as you’d have liked, the importance of having the lowest price becomes even more important. If your proposal isn’t likely to compete and win with a top score, then you might be able to compete and win on price. Production. Minimize it. If things aren’t going so well, lower your production standards. A good message can win with a plain presentation. But a bad message isn’t going to win. Period. In the roughest of circumstances, I have skipped final editing to provide enough time to fix a proposal that didn’t comply with the RFP. Not getting thrown out is more important than not having typos. They may lower your score, but if you’ve done a halfway-decent job they won’t get you thrown out. Time If you realize your proposal is broken halfway through the schedule, you can’t take the same approach you had at the beginning. You have to change your expectations based on the time remaining. Do less. You do not need to do everything possible to win. Everything does not have the same impact on whether you win. Do only the things that impact winning the most. See “Priorities” above. You are more likely to achieve your priorities if you simplify things. Quit piling on. Instead of an elaborate, sophisticated, detailed, and long proposal, go for an elegant, plain-speaking, minimal, and short proposal. It's not about which is the better presentation. It's about which can you do a better job of producing. Perform triage. In an emergency, you don’t practice heroic medicine. You practice triage. Staff In addition to managing time, you have to manage your resources. Change contributors. Hopefully the problem is that the goals weren’t made clear, and clarifying things will enable the staff you’ve got to try again and be successful. If you are relying on a writer who doesn’t even understand the goals, let alone have the ability to fulfill them, you’ll never get there. Switching to someone else might be less than ideal, but see “Don’t get thrown out” above. Throw bodies at it. Or not. Some problems can be broken down and worked by multiple people. Some can’t. Know which is which. If the proposal is broken, you either want quantity or quality to fix it. The odds are that what got you into this mess wasn’t the right choice. Risk You can't just wish it away... Fixing a broken proposal isn’t about doing everything you can to win. That opportunity has come and gone. Fixing a broken proposal is about risk management. What risks do you want to take in order to achieve what gains? Do you risk presentation defects or typos? Do you risk not having enough detail? Do you risk noncompliance? Put it on the table. One way proposals get broken is by not facing up to the risks. Instead of taking risks by chance, you should take risks by choice. Not taking any risks is not an option. Collaborate and validate. Don’t hide your risks. Bring them to The Powers That Be at your company and get them to validate your risk decisions. The company should decide what risks get taken, not individuals. And one more... Run away. Don’t throw good money after bad. You should walk away from sunk costs rather than submit a proposal that can’t win. If you can’t admit your broken proposal can’t win, you’ve got another problem. If your broken proposal can be fixed, then I’ll leave you alone to get on with it.

You and I don't get to decide whether a proposal is good. Only the customer gets to decide that. Only the customer can decide which proposal is good enough to accept. You might have what you think is a great offering, on paper. You might have what you think is a great plan, on paper. But if the customer chooses another alternative, that is what will get done, built, or delivered. And your proposal will remain a concept. On paper. Forgotten. See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria No matter how good you think your proposal is, if the customer chooses another alternative, it’s because the customer considers that other alternative to be a better match. If your proposal is not the best match, in the customer’s eyes, then your proposal is not as good as the alternative. The trick to doing proposals isn’t to develop your own awareness of what a good proposal is. The trick is to develop your awareness of what your customer thinks a good proposal is. A company that consistently wins its proposals does so by discovering what their customers think is good. They set this as their standard and measure everything they do, from offering design to proposal development, against that standard. Their proposals aren’t descriptions of themselves and what they do or will deliver. Their proposals are about doing or delivering things in a way the customer thinks is good. Their proposals aren’t about telling the customer what’s good. Their proposals are about substantiating their ability to deliver what the customer thinks is good. There is a problem with this. Knowing that the customer will decide what is good regardless of any thoughts you might have on the subject does not help you know how to prepare your proposal, unless you know the customer’s preferences. Winning proposals do not start with brilliant writing. Winning proposals start by understanding the customer’s needs, expectations, preferences, and approach to making decisions. This usually happens long before any proposal writing actually starts. This information becomes the basis for bid strategies and proposal writing. Building your proposal around these things, instead of what you think is important to say, is how you achieve a good proposal. Discovering, assessing, and then using this information to drive proposal development forms a process that has more to do with whether you win than the act of proposal writing. But there is another problem with it. You don’t find out whether your proposal is good until after you submit it. This means that you have to prepare your proposal based on your assessment of what the customer thinks is good. The challenge is to focus not on what you think is good, but what the customer thinks. This is particularly difficult if you don’t know the customer as well as you should. You have to think from their perspective, even if you have to guess. Your process and standards for defining what a good proposal is should systematize looking at things from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. Your writing and your reviews should not be based on your own idea of what is good. You must define your own quality criteria, but they should be based on what you believe the customer will think is good. Theirs is the only standard that matters.

If your company matters to the customer receiving your proposal, it’s because the results of what you offer matter to them. To win the proposal, what you propose must matter more than any other alternative available to them, and this can include doing nothing. None of the things you say in your proposal will make a difference if the customer doesn’t think what you’ve said matters to them. We’ve all experienced this... See also: Customer Perspective When a salesperson approaches you and says “I know all about you and know exactly what you want” does that fill you full of enthusiasm, or skepticism and dread? Do you roll your eyes? Do you find that salesperson credible? When a salesperson describes something in a way that matters to you, does that change your level of interest? Does it show how well they know you, without them actually having said that they know you? Don't write your proposals like a bad salesperson or a lame advertisement. Start writing proposals that help the customer make a decision that matters to them. Who would you be most likely to purchase from? Mattering is what you must accomplish in writing a proposal. Stop claiming to know the customer. Stop claiming to have the best offering or to be the best company. Your claims do not matter. Instead, put all of your energy into being able to describe things in your proposal in ways that do matter to the customer. Example of why your corporate experience does not matter Saying you have experience does not matter. How your experience produces a better approach or results is what matters. When you say that “Our experience has taught us…” or “Because of our experience we’ll be able to…” and complete the sentence with something insightful, what you have to say matters so much more than someone else saying “We bring X years of experience to ensuring your success.” Example of why your understanding of the customer does not matter Saying that you understand the customer does not matter. But when you offer them something or do something that does matter to them more than any other alternative, they will not only conclude that you understand them well, they will also conclude that your understanding matters. If you want the customer to believe that you understand them, offer them a better approach or better results. Show insight into how what you are offering relates to them and achieves their goals. You don’t even have to use the word “understanding” for the customer to conclude that you understand them far better than all the competitors who do claim understanding but offer something ordinary. Example of why your offering does not matter Saying that you'll deliver better results or fulfill all RFP requirements does not matter. Saying what results you'll deliver or why they are better is what matters. This is what will inform the customer’s selection between their alternatives. Claims that aren’t proven do not matter and do not impact the decision process. If anything, they get in the way and lower credibility. Your offering does not matter until you make it matter. How to matter to the customer See a pattern here? It’s not the claim, it’s how the claim leads to benefits that are differentiated or that the customer can only get from you that matters. That’s the kind of information the customer needs to make their selection. If you want your experience, understanding, and offering to matter to the customer, then don’t claim how wonderful they are. Don’t describe them. Explain why they matter. It is surprising how many companies are comfortable describing themselves, but draw a blank on why they matter. Instead of starting with a description and then trying to make it matter, start by articulating things that matter and then write an explanation. It sounds simple, but it can massively improve your competitiveness. Let's try looking at it from the customer’s perspective… Every bidder who gets considered at all will have experience and a credible offering. If they understand well enough to have a credible offering, they understand well enough. They have all described themselves well enough to be worthy of consideration. These companies are your only true competitors. You can try to be competitive by providing better descriptions. But this is like trying to win by being just a little better at a lot of things. If you want to be competitively dominant, you’ll go beyond describing. You’ll matter. You’ll go beyond the details and explain why the choices you made in your offering matter more than the alternatives. Instead of claiming to have more or “better” experience, you’ll show how your experience matters because of the way it translates into a better offering that’s more reliable, more responsive, quicker to implement, and achieves better results. A simple claim that your experience will make your offering more reliable, more responsive, quicker to implement, and achieve better results won’t cut it. You need to explain why that’s true and how it will happen. If you really matter, you’ll be indispensable. And you’ll never even need to claim it. When the customer concludes you matter, they are willing to invest and make things happen. When you matter more than all of their other alternatives, you become the only option that truly matters. You’ll skip being “better” and go straight to being vital. From the proposal evaluator’s perspective, nearly all the vendors focus on describing themselves. Some of those vendors describe things better than others do. But if the customer is lucky, they’ll get at least one vendor responding in a way that matches up with what they think matters. Vendors who do that deliver something far more than an offering that is just good enough and maybe a little better than the others. From the customer’s perspective, a vendor that delivers what matters to them is not just a vendor. They are an asset. You may think you’re that good, but if you don’t write a proposal that matters, then what the customer sees really doesn’t matter and you are not the asset you think you are capable of being. If you look at your company and what you do and can’t think of anything that matters to the customer to say, you might want to fix that. The first step in mattering to the customer is to stop saying things that don’t matter. Quit claiming, Quit describing. Start explaining what matters about who you are and what you do. Start proving why who you are and explaining why what you do matters.

Does the RFP ask for one? If it does, you have to provide one. If it doesn’t, you might want to think twice before you add an “Understanding” section. See also: Customer Perspective Are you making the customer read a patronizing section about stuff they already know about themselves before they get to find out what you’re going to do for them? A better approach may be explaining what you are going to do for them in a way that shows insight and demonstrates your knowledge and understanding (as opposed to claiming it). Nothing should get in the way of the customer discovering what they’ll get if they accept your proposal, because that’s the only thing motivating them to read it. Instead of describing your understanding, consider doing this instead But even if they’ve asked you to "describe" your “understanding,” that may not be what they really want. The best way to demonstrate understanding to a customer is usually not by reciting the problem, reciting the customer’s mission, describing their current state, etc. Customers often ask for descriptions of things when the real issue is that they want to know whether they can trust you to deliver as promised. They want to know if you have the capability to deliver what they want, so they ask you to describe your capabilities. They want to know if you understand what it is they really want, so they ask you to describe your understanding. It’s not your capabilities or understanding that they really want to know about, it’s whether they’ll get what they want. They want to know if you know where they want to go and what it will take to get there. They want to know if you understand the best way to accomplish that. If you are a complete outsider, you probably won't have the insight they are looking for. So they are giving you a chance to demonstrate your insight. Recitations won't provide that. If this is the case with your customer, then you should respond by making your understanding part of substantiating that they’ll get what they want. In fact, it’s not your understanding that matters at all, it’s how your understanding translates into the customer getting what they want that matters. Why you do things can matter more than what you do when it shows that you understand how to achieve what they want more than anyone else. How do you know what the customer means when they say "understanding"? The most important consideration is how the particular customer in question will perform their evaluation. Different customers have different cultures, expectations, and decision processes. For example, a customer from an academic culture might have very different expectations from a business customer. B2G and B2B have very different evaluation processes. Etc. The impact of understanding on a commodity product procurement is very different from the impact of understanding on a complex solution procurement. A customer who is used to reading research papers, written studies, engineering change requests, or similar documents might have an expectation that documents should start by stating the problem or your understanding. But while you should give them what they expect, they still need information to make a procurement decision. A demonstration of understanding can provide that, while a recitation may not. Who decides whether your proposal should have an "understanding" section? Ultimately, the correct approach for a given proposal is not determined by you, me, or anyone other than the customer. The most important part of proposal writing is not the writing itself, it’s discovering the customer’s preferences so you can adapt your offering and presentation to match them. But interpretation can be tricky because customers do things like ask you to describe things when they don’t really want descriptions. Except that sometimes they do. Those tricky customers…

This checklist is a companion to an article we wrote describing 30 reactions the customer might have to your proposal that could result in your losing. That article provides hints for what you should say in your proposals and how you should say it. We created this item to make it easier to use as a checklist or a test, so you can see whether you'd accept your own proposal. Have you actually made contact and had a conversation with the customer? Does your proposal rely solely on experience as your differentiator and reason for the customer to accept your proposal? Does your proposal claim or describe your experience without saying how the customer will benefit as a result of your having it? Do you only talk about or describe yourself or do you talk about how your qualifications and approaches will result in something better for the customer? There is a fine line between saying that incumbency is an advantage and insulting the customer by saying they can't live without you. Have you crossed it? Do you have unsubstantiated claims that could destroy your credibility and trustworthiness? Is your trustworthiness proven or claimed? Are you offering your commitment to produce results or are you offering results? Do you talk about your own values and mission or do you talk about helping the customer fulfill their goals? Have you gone beyond restating what the RFP says about the customer's mission? Have you shown how you'll fulfill the customer's actual goals and needs? Have you patronized the customer by telling them what their needs are or have you made fulfilling those needs the result of what you'll do or deliver? Do you simply state that you understand the customer or do you demonstrate that you understand with an approach and result that reflects the customer's preferences? Have you followed the instructions in the RFP? Do you use the customer's terminology or your own? Does your proposal reflect a vision that the customer shares, and is exciting and feasible? Does your proposal conform to their decision making process, support it, and make it easy for the customer to move forward? Have you demonstrated why what you propose is the customer's best alternative? Does what you promise or propose match what it says in the contract? Is what it says in the proposal completely separate from what your fulfilment staff actually do? Will your staff deliver as promised? Does the proposal offer approaches or results achieved through your approaches? Are your approaches generic and could apply to any project, or do they talk specifically about how they would be applied to the customer? Does it sound like you just recycled the text? Is what you're sending really a proposal or is it a brochure? Are you just sending a contract? Will this offend the customer? Does your proposal show what you'll be like to work with? Does your proposal contain descriptions or insight? Have you proposed something the customer could figure out by themselves? Does your pricing account for everything it should as well as everything you've promised? Can the customer afford what you are proposing? Will the proposal trigger questions that lead to negotiations? Does the RFP describe what the customer really wants? Can you give them a way to get what they really want while still complying with the RFP? The customer is more than one person. Have you talked to multiple stakeholders? Do their headquarters, the field offices, department heads, and end users all have different agendas and preferences? Who does the proposal talk to? Will the customer accept it only because they have to accept something? How will they feel about that? Have you offered them something compelling that will make them excited to accept the proposal?

People spend too much time thinking about what to say about themselves in their proposals and too little time imagining what it must be like as the customer reading what you are submitting. Most people wouldn’t even accept their own proposal if it came from another vendor and it was their decision. Here are 30 reactions the customer might have to your proposal that could result in your losing. Do I know you? Have we ever talked? All they have to say is that they have experience. I get that they’ve done it before, but how does that translate into the future? My future. The proposal is a description of them. Why are they talking about themselves? What does that have to do with me and my needs? The company currently doing the work is insulting me by claiming that I can’t live without them. They claim to be trustworthy. They claim a lot of things. The whole proposal consists of unsubstantiated claims about how great they are. They never actually give me any reasons to trust them. Their proposal sounds like an empty sales pitch and sketchy. Instead of saying what they’ll do or deliver, it’s about how committed they are. They talk about their values and mission. They sound... generic and undifferentiated. In any event, I'm the customer and I've got goals of my own. What I want is someone who will help me achieve mine. They say they’ll support our mission. They restated what was in the RFP about our mission, showing no real insight. They didn’t say anything about what my actual goals are within my organization’s lofty mission statement, let alone how they'll help me achieve those goals better than their competitors. They state my needs as if they are the authority on what my needs are. It’s patronizing. They think saying they understand me makes it so. They didn’t follow the instructions I gave them in the RFP. If they can’t follow my instructions to get the work, why should I believe they’ll follow them after? Do they speak the same language we do? This matters both on a functional level and on the proposal level. If the words in the proposal don’t match up with the words in the RFP it’s hard to evaluate it. Do we share the same vision? Do they have any vision? Does it match mine? Does it sound exciting? Is it feasible? Or is it so watered down that it's meaningless? What should I do with the information they’ve provided? How will my organization made this decision? Does what they’ve given me match up with what our decision makers need? What is my best alternative for the future? Is what’s in this proposal it? Does this proposal tell me what I need to know to determine whether they are my best alternative? What’s the difference between this proposal and my other alternatives? Is there one? Does the proposal help me understand my options? Do the promises in the proposal match up with the terms and conditions of the contract? Do the vendor’s staff who will be responsible for fulfillment even know what it says in the proposal? Will they deliver the what they've promised? Do they talk about approaches without actually saying what they’ll deliver? Do they describe approaches in a way that sounds generic, like they could apply to any project? Or do they talk specifically about how they would be applied to us and our project? Does it sound like they just recycled the text? I wanted a proposal and what they sent sounds like a brochure. All they sent is a contract. That’s not very friendly. Why should I sign it? What does this say about what they’ll be like to work with? From their proposal, I can’t tell what they’d be like to work with on a daily basis or what they’d be like to have around. They talk about their extensive capabilities, but they haven't said anything insightful. In fact, they haven’t proposed anything I couldn’t figure out for myself. What do I need them for? Are they more than just resources? Does their pricing account for everything it should as well as everything they’ve promised? Is what they’ve proposed affordable? Is it even worth discussing? What questions do I have? My contracting department put out the RFP. Does the proposal give me a way to get what I really want? Headquarters, the field offices, my department head, and I all have different agendas and preferences. Who does the proposal talk to? Would I only accept it because I have to accept something? How does that make me feel about them? Or would I accept it because it’s compelling and how would that make me feel? Do I agree with what they've said? If you turn them around, each one of these gives you hints for what you should say in your proposals and how you should say it. If you look a little deeper, they also give you hints for the pre-RFP process and how to approach your customer relationships. Taken together they show why proposal writing is not about what you want to say and all about what the customer needs to hear. You can also treat this list like a checklist or a test. Did you pass? Would you accept your own proposal?