Carl Dickson

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?

The day you start a new contract should be the day you start preparing for the recompete. You build your past performance day by day. And you have the opportunity to learn about the customer's preferences. But if you wait until the end of the contract to start doing the things that will help you win the proposal, they’ll take far more effort. And some will no longer be possible. See also: Bid Strategies and Proposal Themes Metrics. When you get to the proposal, you’ll want to be able to cite cost reductions, performance improvements, capacities, durations, and other figures. However, if you weren’t tracking them, you probably won’t be able to. If you can even remember the details. Think about the statistics that you might cite in the proposal, and then start tracking the metrics you’ll need early enough to accumulate the data. Intellectual property. Intellectual property can translate into strengths in a proposal that differentiate your offering. Consult a lawyer for the legalistic minutiae of creating intellectual property. Our focus here is on winning. If you have a library of documentation, software, procedures, checklists, or other tools that you developed on your own and that are your intellectual property, then the only way the customer can get them is through you. Nearly all companies will have to develop processes and procedures. Hardly any of those companies will document them and turn them into assets. It’s a time investment, and most service companies control costs by minimizing time instead of investing it. But if the labor is a sunk cost and you can create an asset, it will be worth it many times over if it helps you win the recompete. Just simply having your procedures documented can also make writing about how you do things a whole lot easier. Preferences and trade-offs. If you go into the recompete without knowing the customer’s preferences and the best way to make the inevitable trade-offs, you have wasted an advantage you might have had as the incumbent. During the contract, figure out what choices you’ll have to make in the proposal, both in your offering and in points of emphasis, and target them for research. Also consider the trade-offs an outsider will have to consider. When you write the proposal you’ll want to explain why you do things and what matters about them. You want to make sure what you say matches the customer’s preferences, as does every trade-off you have to make. As an incumbent, you have a tremendous opportunity to gain insight into the customer. Don’t waste the opportunity. Training your project staff how to gain and report this insight is so worth it. Clarifications. Is everything clear, or are there things about the customer and what they want that you’re not sure about? Seek clarity. But clarity is also a two-way street. Is the customer clear about what you do and why you do it that way? Do they even realize how much value you are adding? Articulate from the customer’s perspective. A great proposal is written from the customer’s perspective instead of merely describing yourself and what you do. When the proposal starts, you need to be able to put everything you do in the context of the results the customer is looking for. It takes a combination of information about the customer and the ability to write from someone else’s perspective instead of being self-descriptive. You should spend the life of the contract developing this skill and improving your understanding of the customer. Visualization. Visual communication is superior to text in a proposal. You should spend the life of the contract developing graphics about the project, so that you’ll be able to show insight with an illustration your competitors can’t match. While you’re at it, take lots of photographs that show effort, scale, and results. Improvements. Make improvements. Document the improvements that you made. You’ll want to be able to cite them in the proposal. You’ll want the customer evaluating past performance to be aware of them. You’ll want the customer to award you the recompete so they can get more. Even if the customer doesn’t want to deviate from the status quo, there’s still an advantage in making them aware that you have more capabilities that will be there for the customer when they need them. Awards and recognition. Give it, seek it, and document it. Keep a file. Email makes it easy. Instead of asking for praise from the customer, tell the customer that you’re recognizing your staff for their hard work and most of the time they’ll join in. It shouldn’t take a lot of extra effort. It just requires some mindfulness and note taking. And if you think it's not worth the cost to invest in a project to ensure great performance, just imaging the cost of not ensuring great performance. I've seen companies ruined by failing to adequately perform on a contract and losing their future work because of it. When you do the thing above, you'll create the kind of proposal input that writer love to have to work with. They are good sources of competitive advantage and differentiators. They are things competitors can’t match. Without them, even though you are the incumbent, a competitor can write a proposal just as good as yours. Without them, a claim to being best just because you are the incumbent is merely an unsubstantiated claim.

Most companies have regular business development meetings to discuss their pursuits. These meetings usually do very little to increase the company’s win rate, but give everyone a chance to convince themselves that “they’ve done everything they should.” The reality is that the meetings have been subverted and are doing more harm than good. How did that happen? It happens when your business development meetings focus on: See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit How many things you’re tracking and what they add up to. Most companies obsess more over how much they have in their pipeline and too little on what they are doing to win them or their win rate. Should your business development meetings be about quotas, incentives, and your company’s future finances, or about increasing its chances of winning? What’s on the reports or in the PowerPoint instead of discussing what matters. Reports usually describe the opportunity or activity instead of whether or how you are getting into position to win. When people read their reports they run out the clock for discussing anything more substantive, like assessments, validation, differentiators, and what it will take to win. Somehow people get away with claiming competitive advantages that aren't differentiators, but instead are the same things everyone else will claim. Status instead of change. It’s too easy to hide behind an acceptable sounding status. What really matters is what has been accomplished since the last meeting. What matters is change, both good and bad. Has anything new been learned? If not, then nothing has changed and why do you need to talk about it? What people are doing instead of what they are accomplishing. Another good way to run out the clock is to talk about what you’ve done instead of the results you’ve achieved that will impact your chances of winning. So what if someone called the customer, sent an email, or dropped off a brochure or capabilities statement? What did they learn that’s useful? Or what have they still not discovered that you need to know in order to win? The same-old, same-old. When pursuits become routine, people tend to go through the motions of team building, qualification, compliance, and positioning. They do what they think is expected without thinking about it. Your company is what it is, and nobody is going to admit it’s normal instead of great. What gets lost is differentiation. Normal doesn’t win. What will you offer and how will you deliver in ways that are superior? Your company’s perspective instead of the customer’s perspective. When your meetings are about what you have done, what you have learned, and where you are at, what gets lost is what matters to the customer. What matters to them regarding their needs? What matters to the customer regarding a potential vendor? Why should they care about you? Whatever you do, do not let this slide because no one knows the customer well enough to reflect their perspective. When the customer isn’t talking and you’ve exhausted your other sources, it’s hard to learn anything new. Most companies simply wait for the RFP, holding business development meetings that they coast through. Instead, spend the time thinking about what can you do to better position your company, develop your offering, or close the gap between where you are now and what it will take to win. Who else besides the customer could you talk to? Are there any other stakeholders or former employees you can identify? Use your business development meetings to detect when pursuits have stalled and to provide inspiration regarding what else can be done to increase your chances of winning. Here are some things you can do in your business development meetings to resist the incredibly strong pull towards routine and being merely ordinary: Throw away reports that just describe the opportunity. Create new reports with three items: what changed last month, what changed this month, and what it will take to win. Look for trends or stagnation. Make the meetings about winning instead of describing. Define and continuously debate what it will take to win. Create criteria. List questions that need to be answered. Start with a long list and use it to create a process of elimination. It will help people tremendously to know what is expected of them and what they should be prepared to discuss. Measure yourself against what it will take to win. Your meetings shouldn’t be about what you know or what you’ve done. They should be about whether you know what you need to know to win. Measure your pursuits against winning and not against last month. Do you have an information advantage? A competitive advantage? Differentiators? Bid strategies? Do you know how to write a proposal from the customer’s perspective instead of you own? What is the gap between what you know and what you should know? Are you trending towards or away from what it will take to win? Are you going months without any progress? Require people (including yourself) to read the reports before the meeting. Never spend expensive time sitting around a table reading information people already have. Instead, talk about it. Talk about what matters about the information instead of reciting report data. Talk about the challenges and what to do about them. Talk about what else can be done to improve your chances of winning and how to accomplish those things. Switch from asking “what do we know about the customer?” to “what do we think matters vs. what does the customer think matters?” Don’t let people get away with saying what they think matters to the customer. Push hard for verification directly from the customer. The customer will decide whether you win, and they won’t hand it to you just because you think they should. Recognize that while you will never submit a bid knowing everything you would like to know about the customer, that shouldn’t stop you from trying to discover it. Whether you are making sufficient progress towards being ready to win is a judgment call. The process should deliver the information you need to make that judgment call. You don’t want to make it blindly or simply accept whatever comes in as being all that could be obtained. When someone hits a stone wall, that’s an opportunity for you to add resources, try other contacts, try different approaches, and leverage your collective connections. The reason you should push is to create the opportunities for that to occur. During the pre-RFP phase, it is critical that you capture the information you will need to close the sale with a winning proposal. Without an information advantage, your proposal will be doomed to being merely ordinary. Your business development meetings should not be about reviewing "status" but about discovering that information advantage. What you do in your business development meetings can ultimately have a greater impact on your win rate than what you do during the proposal phase. So why do people put heroic efforts into the proposal phase, but sleep through their business development meetings?

You’re probably getting swamped with advice about all the things you need to do to develop business and win proposals. There are so many things you need do, but where should you start? You’re probably hearing that: See also: Organizational development You need more leads You should be selective in what you pursue You need more process You should enforce the process you have You should practice relationship marketing You need better software The proposal should start before the RFP is released If you didn’t help write the RFP, somebody else did The lowest price always wins Subject matter experts should write the proposal Proposal specialists should write the proposal Everybody needs training You should put your best staff on the proposal and not just whoever’s available And so on Some of it is probably not applicable to your circumstances. Some of it may be just plain wrong for what you bid. But a lot of the advice is good advice. And if you implement all of it you’ll blow your budget. It’s hard to tell which of it is good and which to ignore. Figuring out what you should do in your circumstances with your resources can be overwhelming. We have a way to simplify it for you. All you need to do is focus on just one thing: Simply deliver the information that people will need, when they need it to win. And the best part is you don’t necessarily need complicated processes or methodologies to follow this guidance. All you need to do is ask questions. If you want a process, then write down the questions and turn them into checklists. Create an organization that asks the right questions at the right time. Continuous improvement will come from constantly refining the questions, not from starting over. As your organization gets smarter about which questions to ask and when, it will get smarter and smarter. It will get more effective and achieve a higher win rate also, because your staff will not only get better at asking the right questions, they’ll get better at showing up with the right answers. The goal of the questions is to discover what it will take to win and transform that into winning in writing. Here are some questions to get you started: When you first hear about a lead, you should be asking, “What do we need to know to accept the lead as legitimate and worth investing in pursuing?” Once you’ve accepted the lead, you should be asking, “How do we gain an information advantage that we can turn into superior bid strategies?” The most important question for lead qualification is, “Do we know what it will take to win?” Before you invest much in a pursuit, you should ask, “Do we have an information advantage?” You should bid everything in which you have an information advantage. If you don’t, you should consider conserving your resources and not bidding until you do. Long before the proposal starts you should be asking, “What will people need to know to design the best offering?” Also before the proposal starts you need to know “How do we write the proposal from the customer’s perspective instead of our own?” Once you have these answers, you can improve proposal quality by asking, “How do we turn what we know about what it will take to win into proposal quality criteria?” After the proposal starts you should ask, “How should we instruct the writers so that the proposal turns out to be compliant, describes the best offering, reflects what it will take to win, and is written from the customer’s perspective?” When you are ready to review the proposal you should be asking, “Does the proposal as written reflect what we discovered about what it will take to win?” You will succeed or fail on the strength of the questions you ask, and how good you are at anticipating what people will need to know. All those suggestions about process and marketing techniques are just ways of moving information through the system. Sometimes people let the steps in their process habits distract them from what’s really important. You can fix that just by asking the right questions.

Exercises can be even more effective than text, graphic, or video presentations. This is especially true for skills based training. Exercises can also be used to assess learning. Within PropLIBRARY, exercises can take different forms. But usually they will be implemented with either a file or a forum. Exercises that are files contain the instructions, including self-assessment guidance if the exercises is not instructor-reviewed. They can involve writing sentences or paragraphs, or correcting them. They can involve spreadsheets or presentations. They can involve anything you can put in a file and explain. Forums can be used to create exercises that involve interacting with other students. A forum-based exercise usually involves posting, reviewing, or commenting on something someone else posted. They can be used to explain and explore while interacting with other students since everyone who takes a course can see the forum for that course. Most exercises should be scaled to require less than an hour to complete. An exercise should be used to complete a skills-based module, but they can also be used anywhere they aid in learning something. The more interactivity the better. If the exercise is a file, the instructor must create the file that the student will download. If the exercise is a forum, the instructor must create the copy for the initial post that will explain to students what they are supposed to do. You also have the option of making exercises self-reviewed or instructor-reviewed. But instructor-reviewed are usually limited to a set number or time period, since you don't want to be committed to reviewing a randomly received exercise for a student at some undetermined future date.

To include a URL that you want students to visit, we use the same type of content we use to post articles. You could simply give the name of the site and link to it: Federal Acquisition Regulation But it's better to provide some instructions and context: Visit this web site to learn about the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). You can use links to send students to pages where they can get information relevant to what they are learning. If you provide instructions, you can also make a URL part of an exercise. You can include as many links as you want: FAR Index FAR Table of Contents FAR Definitions They can all be in one article or they can be in separate articles. You can also include images, and link the images:

Quizzes have different question types: Multiple choice True/False Put the words/phrases in sequence All quiz questions and answers should be clear and objective. They will be graded automatically. The goal is to assess whether participants know the material well enough to put it to work. Quizzes should assess a student's readiness to fulfill their role and successfully complete assignments. Creating a quiz You will need to create 50% more questions as you intend the quiz to have. This will create a pool of questions that can be randomized so that students can take a quick more than once. Questions are presented in a random order. Once you know what the questions and answers will be, they'll all need to be entered into PropLIBRARY. Grading quizzes PropLIBRARY will automatically grade the quizzes and award points. Every module that is knowledge based should end with a quiz. But the quiz function can be used for progress or even fun. They can be used as a learning tool, similar to an exercise. Length of quizzes For multiple choice questions, we typically anticipate a minute per question. Thus a 20 question quiz adds 20-minutes to the course length.