Carl Dickson

The traditional way to define roles for a proposal usually includes: A Capture Manager to define the offering A Proposal Manager to implement the process Proposal Writers to follow the process and create the proposal narrative Under this model, the Proposal Manager seeks to bring together the solution and the writers to get it all on paper. The Proposal Manager brings together the Capture Manager and Proposal Writers so that bid strategies can be articulated and used to guide the writing. And that’s where things often stumble. Who is responsible for articulating things? Is it the Capture Manager, the Proposal Manager, or the Proposal Writers? Where there’s a void, the Proposal Manager usually fills it, or assigns it. But if you’re using technical subject matter experts or project staff to work on the proposal, they may not be good at conceiving or articulating bid strategies. This is where having a Pursuit Strategist comes in handy. A Pursuit Strategist is someone who specializes in combining the technical solution brought by the Capture Manager with the bid strategies and evaluation criteria in a way that can be articulated for use in the proposal. A Pursuit Strategist figures out what needs to be said to win. One of my favorite proposal experiences was working as a Pursuit Strategist on an effort with a Capture Manager and a Proposal Manager. The Proposal Manager handled all of the logistics. As the Pursuit Strategist, I worked with the Capture Manager to identify the right strategies, then I figured out how to articulate the messages and used them to help inspire and guide the writers. It was a very effective approach and the proposal won even though the company was the underdog. Without all three roles, the proposal would not have turned out nearly as good. Either the strategies would have been articulated by people who weren’t used to thinking in those terms or the Proposal Manager would have had to take time away from process implementation and oversight and put it into message development. The Pursuit Strategist role has also worked out well at small companies who couldn’t afford that many dedicated people. As a consultant, with just a few hours instead of a full-time commitment, I’ve helped a number of businesses figure out what needs to be said to win so that their own staff could do the hard work of cranking out the pages. Usually I throw in some process guidance and participate in quality validation reviews to help a proposal team that lacks experienced proposal specialists. But where I often make the most difference is as a Pursuit Strategist helping the company discover what it will take to win. Unfortunately, the title “Pursuit Strategist” isn’t commonly used, and companies rarely request it. This creates an opportunity for companies to beat their less informed and less strategic competitors. We love helping companies figure out the best pursuit strategies and discover what it will take to win. Let's discuss your circumstances... Click the Concierge Button under the menu or call us at 1-800-848-1563.

A lot of well-meaning people give really bad advice on marketing. Instead of saying "what has worked for me is…" they say things like "the only way to be successful is to…" Marketing rules of thumb aren't. Your goals, circumstances, resources, customer preferences, strategies, positioning, ability to execute, and so much more makes one person's marketing success another person's marketing failure. Everything depends on the nature of what you offer. The “rules” are very different if: You offer a commodity than if you offer complex services or solutions. Your customers are geographically dispersed or numerous instead of being few. You are in a B2G, B2B, or B2C market. Your proposals are really quotes and your sales are really orders or transactions. Your offering is something that is typically a part of a larger thing that the customer procures. Your typical sale is large enough to be a line item in the customer’s budget. The specifications for what you offer are typically defined by industry standards instead of being unique in every bid. How many other differences and exceptions are there? Marketing has more exceptions than it does rules. Here are some myth-busting examples of great marketing advice that is horribly wrong for some companies: See also: Strategic Planning People buy from people they know and trust. The truth is that people will buy commodities from strangers if they can get a good deal. And services can be commodities. It's also true that on some bids everybody competing is a stranger to the customer so no one is "known." Trust and credibility are important, but that doesn't always translate into a need to have a relationship before the RFP is released in order to win. What is true is that the more complex the services, the greater the need for the customer to trust a vendor in order to select them. For some types of offerings, the number of possible providers is so low that everyone knows who they are. In a market like that, if you are a stranger you are suspect instead of trusted. But most markets aren't like that. If you weren’t aware of the opportunity before the RFP came out, it should be an automatic no-bid. For many RFPs, nobody knows about them before the RFPs are released. Even when companies are “aware” that an RFP is coming out and “tracking it,” they often have no real insight or advantage and waste any extra time they might have from being "aware" of it. They can be beat. But if you are competing against others who have pre-RFP insight and the customer’s trust, if you can’t offer a credible and viable alternative and do it in the limited time after RFP release, you shouldn’t waste your time bidding. The more complex the procurement, the more insight required to win. It would be better to say that you shouldn't bid an opportunity unless you have an information advantage. But even that has an exception. Sometimes you can beat someone with an information advantage simply by having a better price! The reality is that bid decisions are often about how much to spend on pursuits and which of the pursuits have the best win probability/cost/revenue trade-offs. Task orders are always wired. Some task orders are initiated by companies who inspire the customer to procure something. On some of those, the company provided information that may have influenced the RFP. On some of those, the company might also have a close relationship with the customer. This is a minority of a minority and pretty far from “always.” On many contract vehicles, customers have trouble getting more than one or two bids on a task order. A viable alternative on a task order bid might have better odds of winning than a bid on a public RFP. And if the task order announcements are short notice and difficult to respond to, that just further limits the amount of serious competition. Blind bidding task orders is quick, low cost, high risk, and potentially lucrative. But even if you can win, you might not want to play in that market. It depends on the nature of what you offer and your ability to mitigate the performance risks. Branding is critical. When you bid RFPs that are distributed publicly, name recognition matters less than you might believe. What matters more is trustworthiness and credibility. This can be part of a branding campaign, but what you say in your proposal will do far more to make or break your trustworthiness and credibility than any branding campaign. Where branding matters is for inbound marketing. If you need the customer to tell you about their RFPs or to initiate contact, then branding is how you establish enough trust and credibility to get their attention and action. This is generally not how Government contracting works. Becoming known as a thought leader will increase your chances of winning. If you sell a commodity, the customer may not care. They’ll take your advice and still buy from the lowest price supplier. If you sell a service, the customer may not care how extraordinary your thought leadership is. It depends on whether what they are buying requires a leader or an operator. And it depends on how well you turn thought leadership into a demonstration of trustworthiness. Some procurements require the top experts in the field in order to achieve successful outcomes. But this is rare. For most procurements, it’s not about being a “thought leader,” it’s about whether you’ve proven you are a better vendor in ways that matter to the customer. Having a great website is important. If you have a dozen or so customers and the total number of customers you might target is only two or three times that number, you don’t need thousands of visitors to your website. And who cares about search engines? You just need to serve those customers. If you can do that with a one-page site, then great. Then again, if you’re trying to practice relationship marketing in writing and provide information that helps the customer, you might want to build a website that becomes part of your customer interactions. But will the customers adopt it as a resource or ignore it. Maybe all they want from your website are your NAICS codes and contract vehicles. Maybe your customers are your primary audience for your website. Instead, maybe recruiting potential employees should be the primary goal. Inbound marketing is more important than outbound marketing, or vice versa. Inbound marketing is how you get the customer to come to you. If most of your business is a result of responding to RFPs, you may not need it if your new customer relationships almost never start with the customer initiating contact. But if you are selling something very specific to customers who are numerous, widespread, and impossible to identify within their large organizations, you might be able to use inbound marketing to get them to register for your webinars or free content. The value of inbound marketing depends on the nature of your offering. Word of mouth is the best advertising. This assumes that potential new customers talk to your current customers. In some markets this is definitely true. In others, it never happens. Which market are you in and do your potential customers talk to each other? You should never bid blind. If you sell certain commodities, you may only be able to bid RFPs blind, without any prior customer relationship or contact. If your customers are geographically dispersed, numerous, don’t publish forecasts, don’t initiate contact with vendors, and/or only rarely procure what you offer, it may not be possible to find the buyers and build a relationship in advance. If the customer cares more about qualifications than insight, you can bid blind and win if you can prove your qualifications. What matters more than whether you are bidding blind is whether you are bidding because you have a competitive advantage or just because you can and are hoping for the best. So what should you do? If you give advice, make sure it's applicable to whoever you're giving it to. All companies are not the same as the companies you are familiar with. If you get advice, make sure it's applicable to you and the nature of what you offer. Is the person giving the advice even aware of that nature? And what is the nature of the companies that this advice is based on? Don't be afraid to do the opposite if it's based on the wrong premises. Your understanding of the nature of your offering and how your customers conduct their procurements and make decisions is a major indicator of your ability to succeed.

An ordinary proposal is a loser. Good is not good enough. Better than most is not good enough. Only the best proposal will win. Anyone can win occasionally. It’s winning consistently that’s hard. If your win rate is in the 20-30% range, you’re probably good at producing proposals. But they are not great. You usually lose. Keep in mind that if your win rate for your recompetes is much higher, then it’s also much lower for your attempts at gaining new business. For most companies, if you raise your win rate by 10%, it’s mathematically the same as adding 30-50% more leads. It’s better, actually, because it will have a lower cost of sales and consequently be more profitable. So what separates consistently winning from usually losing? Strategic Planning See also: Improving win rates Companies that usually lose prepare a strategic plan that focuses on finance. It identifies some kinds of work that the company would like to get more of. When it’s complete, it sits on a shelf. Companies that consistently win prepare a strategic plan that tells those pursuing business how to best position the company, describes the value propositions that support its strategic plans, and provides the criteria to be use in lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions. Lead Qualification Companies that usually lose qualify their leads by throwing out those they can’t win. Companies that consistently win qualify their leads by only pursuing bids where they have an information advantage. They use their strategic plan as a source of filtering criteria. Bid/No Bid Companies that usually lose paradoxically bid everything they can. Their growth strategy is usually to bid more. Companies that consistently win make bid decisions based on whether the opportunity fulfills the criteria in their strategic plan, whether they have discovered what it will take to win, and whether they have the information they need to write a winning proposal. Their growth strategies combine where and what to bid with how to increase their win rate. Pre-RFP Proposal Preparation Companies that usually lose prepare for RFP release by trying to guess when it will come out so they know when to start. Companies that consistently win prepare for RFP release by turning what they know into bid strategies and messages they can use in the proposal. Proposal Content Planning Companies that usually lose prepare a compliance matrix, turn it into an outline and assignments, and start writing. Companies that consistently win optimize the wording of their bid strategies and proposal messages based on the RFP’s evaluation criteria, and they can combine their response to the requirements with a message that adds the right value based on their pre-RFP preparations. They identify all of the ingredients required to win and use them to guide the writers and prepare a baseline for proposal reviews. They reach all the way back to their strategic plans for inspiration on positioning and their value proposition. Proposal writing Companies that usually lose submit a proposal that is fully compliant with the RFP. Companies that consistently win submit a proposal that reflects everything they have discovered about what it will take to win. Proposal Quality Validation Companies that usually lose have experienced experts decide whether a draft proposal is any good. Companies that consistently win define quality criteria that bring forward their strategic planning goals, discovery of what it will take to win, bid strategies, and proposal messaging goals. Instead of open-ended opinion-based reviews, they are checking to make sure their proposal reflects specific objectives that have evolved through every phase of the pursuit. Companies that usually lose say they have a process, but in reality they are making it up as they go along. They try to make up for it by working really hard. They treat business development, capture, and proposals as expenses to be minimized, and think they don’t have the budget to do it any other way. Companies that consistently win do everything based on discovering what it will take to win and then build their proposal around it. They track where they get their greatest return on investment in business development, capture, and proposals, and they find that an investment that produces an increase in win rate provides a huge return that dwarfs the expense. Which are you?

Imagine the customer finding a web page providing insight into the issues they face in getting what they want. What would it look like? What would they do with the information? Below are a series of topics that a potential customer would find very helpful if you published the answers. Take a look at this list as you consider what the customer needs to know to write an RFP that results in them getting what they need: See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Ways that we can work together that don’t require an RFP How much should it cost? What matters when selecting a vendor? Pricing models that deliver the best results for this kind of service What are the minimum qualifications to perform this kind of work? Things that could cause this type of project to fail Dealing with scalability Options for risk sharing Building risk mitigation into this type of project What should be included or excluded from an SOW for this type of project? Making sure inevitable tradeoffs are made the way you prefer What makes past performance relevant to this type of work? Comparing platforms, formats, and standards relevant to this type of project What certifications should staff have to be qualified to do this kind of work? Do performance bond and insurance requirements protect the customer on this type of project? Should you require a product demonstration before making an award decision? Are oral proposals worth it? Best practices for oral proposals Issues regarding project scheduling How contractors cheat How contractors lowball their pricing What it takes to ensure a smooth transition How to handle the intellectual property issues that can impact this project How to avoid having a vendor conflict of interest negatively impact this type of work Information you need to make decisions Streamlining the acquisition process Decisions you face on the way to procuring what you need How various acquisition strategies can impact a project like this Remember, the goal is to help the customer. Writing an RFP that gets what you want is harder than writing a proposal. Try it sometime. When you put advice out there, whether it’s on the web, on LinkedIn, hand delivered, or some other way, the customer is free to take it or leave it. Do it right, and it’s a valid part of their pre-procurement research. If you don’t do this, someone else will. Someone else will help the customer decide amongst alternatives, set their priorities, decide trade-offs, and write the requirements. How much do you want to bet that what they publish will justify writing requirements that support their positioning, give them a scoring advantage, and potentially eliminate yours from consideration? If you publish information like this on a regular basis you cast a net to attract customers dealing with these issues. You begin the process of relationship marketing in writing. You become their go-to source for getting what they need. You become recognized as an insightful expert who knows how to balance the issues the customer faces. At one per week you’ve got six months' worth above.

The entire Federal acquisition process runs on content. Either you're influencing it or responding to it. At. Every. Single. Step. Long before there is an RFP, the customer has to get motivated to initiate a procurement. Content can explain the vision. When the customer is ready to initiate a procurement, they’ll have to justify it. They need content to complete it. Once they decide they’d like to move forward they’ll need: To know how to specify what to procure. Content can help them decide amongst alternatives, how to make trade-off decisions, how to articulate specifications, and so much more. To estimate and budget what it will cost. In your area of specialization, you probably know more about this than the customer does. By explaining what drives the cost, you can help them avoid writing specifications for things they can’t afford, set the right expectations for what they should get, and make decisions regarding what to include and exclude. You can publish the guidance they need to get it right. An acquisition strategy. If don’t want to be surprised by their selection of contract type and vehicle, then you need to explain the issues to them so they can make a better decision. Content marketing can help with that. To write an RFP, starting with a statement of work. In addition to being a huge pain, it is difficult to write an RFP that results in getting what you really want. It’s even more difficult when it deals with a subject where you are not an expert. Keep in mind, that it involves more than just specifications, it involves how to make trade-offs, balance risks, and more. Content can help the customer with both writing the specifications and with understanding the issues. Goals for content marketing by government contractors At every step on the way to issuing an RFP, you can publish content that will: Help the customer by anticipating the information they need and decisions they need to make. Influence the procurement by making it easy for the customer to know what to write in their RFP. Accelerate the process by assisting their research, writing, and decisions. Strengthen your relationship by providing reasons to interact and frame constructive discussions that demonstrate what you’re like to work with. Increase your chances of winning by influencing the RFP, earning good will and demonstrating your expertise and capability. Help yourself by helping your customer In a world where most of your interactions with customers are by email and in writing, you need to learn how to help the customer in writing. If all you ever do is send your customers a capabilities statement, all you're doing is helping them to fill their recycling bins. Government contractors don't usually rely on inbound sales and often overlook the value of content marketing. Content marketing does more to help a government contractor capture a pursuit than it does to bring them leads through their websites. Contractors that incorporate content marketing into their capture processes have a higher win rate than those who don't. A small difference in win rate is worth a large amount of effort.

Watching TV growing up and seeing thousands of advertisements every day has ill prepared people for content marketing. They practice sales in writing when they should be doing marketing. People only procure contracts for services and solutions from companies they trust. Content marketing is about earning trust. Sales requires trust. See the difference? If you want a high conversion rate at closing sales, don’t make your pitch until you’ve established that trust. The way you earn trust remotely and in writing is by publishing things that are helpful and prove that you know how to deliver. Sales makes claims and promises, and instead of concluding with something insightful that influences the customer’s decision, sales ends with a call to action. Each has its place. Content marketing fills the funnel with leads. Sales ends the funnel. It’s not about which is more important, it’s about having both at the right time and place. Practice sales too early in your content marketing and you destroy your credibility instead of building it. Content Marketing vs. Sales It's not about you, it's about the reader It's not about you, it's about what the reader is going to get Conclude with something insightful Conclude with a call to action Never describe yourself Features, benefits, and qualifications Proves you know how to deliver Promises delivery Earns trust Requires trust Differentiates Closes Aids customer's decision making Solicits a decision Easy to view and share Direct and targeted Attracts readers to browse and consider Drives customers to the call to action Influences Persuades Fills the funnel Is the funnel Inbound and presales Outbound Because content marketing for contracts is really just relationship marketing in writing, you can learn a lot from understanding it that can improve your proposal writing. Proposals sit in between marketing and the close of the sale. Proposals sometimes have to earn trust and sometimes have to sell. In content marketing, you shouldn’t describe yourself or your offering. Maybe you can slip them in as an example, but never as an introduction. In content marketing, your description is a footnote at the end of a piece, which someone can click to learn more if they are so inclined. In sales, it’s all about your features, benefits, and qualifications. In proposals, it’s about avoiding describing yourself and presenting your features, benefits, and qualifications from the customer’s perspective. First you must understand the subtle distinctions. Then you must perfect your timing. This applies whether you are practicing marketing, sales, or proposals.

There are so many options for publishing content that it’s easy to get overwhelmed: blogs, websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, email, online forums, etc. "How should you choose?" is really the wrong question. How you publish your content depends on your goals: If you are trying to attract anonymous strangers to your website, search engine optimization matters If you are trying to directly engage with potential customers, then social networking provides opportunities If you are trying to channel potential customers into a funnel with multiple stages or options, then you need to bring potential customers to a landing page with an appropriate call to action If you are trying to build an audience, then you need to consider where you want their contact information stored and how you will interact with them And don’t forget that hardcopy printing and direct mail are still options Also remember, you can publish in one place and promote from all. For relationship marketing and the pursuit of contracts, the media you publish in is far less important than the way you engage your customers. It’s the interaction with the customer, whether that interaction delivers an information advantage, and how it influences the procurement that matter. It doesn't matter whether you distribute your content on a blog, in LinkedIn posts, on Facebook, using Google+, in online forums, or via email. It does matter whether it’s an article, post, podcast, tweet, video, or even on paper. If you want to use it to attract customers, you must make it accessible and preferably shareable. A good place to start is knowing where the customer prefers to consume their media. Do they spend time on LinkedIn or Facebook? Or would a link to your website be better? Or maybe just an email or attachment? If you want to use it to capture customers, then the most important thing is that it has to be useful to the customer. Relationships rarely start because of an ad or description of your firm’s capabilities. They start because the customer learned something relevant to what they are trying to accomplish and engaged with you to explore how much more they might learn. It’s only once after relationship is established and found to be beneficial that they start considering things you might do together or the benefits of what they might procure. There is very little difference in what you are trying to accomplish between relationship marketing and content marketing. The difference is in how you go about doing it and how you get your message across. The challenges of content marketing are articulating your messages, developing relationships in writing, and producing your content. While figuring out your message is more important, a lot of struggle goes into figuring out how to produce it. The simple answer is that writers write. If they don’t, nothing gets produced. The question becomes who should do the writing. The challenge with conducting relationship marketing in writing, is that the staff who see their role as primarily about personal contact have to become intimately involved in writing the content. That’s a big shift. You can’t conduct relationship marketing by outsourcing the contacts. You can’t conduct relationship marketing in writing by outsourcing the message, presentation, and/or delivery. To embrace content marketing you have to engage the people who shape your customer relationships in the content creation and production workflows. It not only has to become part of their jobs, it has to become part of their daily routines. The result will be an integrated approach that makes both your relationship marketing and content marketing efforts more successful contributors to your ability to win contracts.

The traditional Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis doesn’t work well for proposals. It was invented to support corporate planning in the 1960s at the Stanford Research Institute by a management consultant named Albert Humphrey. The traditional SWOT model looks like this: When a SWOT analysis is used on proposals, it’s usually a part of a fishing expedition that starts without any knowledge of the customer, competitive environment, or offering design. Every time I’ve seen it used on a proposal, it was a complete and utter waste of time. It rarely collects anything of value and never really addresses the details that you need to win a proposal. But it can be fixed. It needs to be reformatted and have some things added that impact proposal writing, like differentiators and customer benefits. For proposals, try this version: Add/Delete/or Change the items below: What should we offer? How is it differentiated? How does the customer benefit? Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats If you like it, you could try doing one for each major proposal section (Technical, Management, Experience/Past Performance, Staffing, etc.). Or you could add a column for the proposal section. Under each SWOT heading, add your features and issues. But then you need to address what matters about them in a way that will impact the proposal writing. That’s what the new columns are for. Instead of a data collection tool, you might just use the table to guide the discussion. For each thing that you think is a strength, what exactly are you offering (doing about it), how does that impact your competitive positioning (differentiation), and what does the customer get out of it (how do they benefit)?

How much does it cost to do things the right way? What does doing things the right way mean when it comes to what you should offer in your proposal? Doesn't doing things the right way prevent problems? Doesn't preventing problems reduce costs? Where is the line where the cost of doing things right becomes greater than the cost of the problems? Isn't that something worth discussing with your customer? See also: Pricing Obviously preventing problems is best, but the customer usually expects there to be some problems and often cares a lot about what you do to resolve problems when they occur. What does it cost you to think that through in advance and present them with a rapid problem identification and response plan? Adding value often does not require doing anything different. It requires recognizing the value in the things that you do and being able to articulate it and differentiate it from your competition. Sometimes doing things the right way means being well organized. Does being well organized cost money? Does it save money? If you have clever ways of doing things that add value while reducing costs, shouldn't you tell the customer in your proposal? Sometimes doing things the right way just means knowing what you are doing. What does "knowing what you are doing" mean? How do you prove that you know what you are doing? How do you show that it adds value to the customer? All the things that go into “doing things the right way” are potential features for your proposal and each has benefits for the customer that you should articulate. Often doing things the right way isn’t so much about what you do as it is how you do it. Doing more and adding effort might add to your proposed cost if there aren’t offsetting savings. But doing the same thing in a better way doesn’t have to add to the cost. Here are a half dozen examples: Do it in a way that is more verifiable Do things transparently Do things in a way that is scalable Be flexible Do things that lower risk Be responsive Or anything else beneficial. Ultimately, adding value is more about why you do things than it is about what you do. When you make trade-off decisions and design your offering, you are doing things for a reason. Those reasons usually revolve around offering the maximum value for the lowest cost. You just need to prove to your customer that they are getting that.

When the RFP forces everyone to bid the exact same thing, the ways people differentiate their bids tend to be intangible. This makes it difficult for the customer to evaluate. How, other than price, do they rank the bids based on intangible differences? How do they justify selecting a winner that costs more when the difference in value can't be quantified? It's difficult, but if your proposal is full of unsubstantiated claims, you don't have a chance. Consider each of the following ways companies try to position themselves as better than their competitors: See also: Examples Experience. Sometimes it's pretty easy to show that you have more experience. But too many companies leave it there and fail to pass the "So What?" test. For your experience to become a value, it has to result in something that matters to the customer. Experience on its own has very little value. How many experienced people do you know who, let's be honest, aren't really that good? And yet, experience can make a difference. But it's the difference you want to emphasize, and not just the experience. The difference is what the evaluator can use to justify their decision. Justifying paying a higher price just because an organization has more experience is a lot more difficult than justifying a higher price because their experience matters in a particular way. Quality. If you say you offer better quality, it won't be clear what you mean. Just what does quality mean in this context? Just like with experience, quality has to result in something to matter. Does it result in fewer defects, less downtime, better performance, more durability, or what? Unlike experience, when claiming better quality, you also have to prove how you achieve better quality. What do you actually do that makes the delivery of the better result credible? That's what the evaluator will look for. The claim is meaningless unless they find it. If they do, and if you really are doing something that your competitors are not, then the result is a value they will get from you and not from your competitors. That is something they can use to justify a selection in your favor. Performance. Sometimes you do better work, but it can't be quantified. For example, maybe you recruit better staff or staff who are a better match. Whatever it is, even if you can't quantify it, you have to define it. You have to make it into a something that your competitors don't do, have, or deliver, and then link it to a value that matters to the customer. The place to start is by articulating just what makes your offering better and then by articulating why that matters to the customer. Risk. Risk is a popular topic for making unsubstantiated claims. It's so bad that you can pretty much count on everyone bidding being "the low risk provider." Or at least claiming to be. Saying that you are the low risk provider because you have more experience is just combining two unsubstantiated claims. If you work in an area where the risks and their impacts can't be quantified, then you have to give the evaluator something beyond your claim so they can make a selection in your favor based on risk. So what do you do about the risks that's special and what's at stake? If the risks are unpredictable, then provide examples. Skills. Does your staff or organization have more skills than your competitors? How do you make that credible? More importantly, so what? The customer will only care about those skills if they matter. And they don't matter... until you explain why they do. Understanding. Everyone bidding will understand the customer. Or more accurately, no one bidding is going to say that they don't. Every single one of them can parrot back what they read in the RFP and find by searching the internet. Telling the customer about themselves, in addition to being patronizing, is not a winning strategy. Besides, it's not really what the customer wants. What the customer wants is to see if you know enough about their environment to actually deliver on your promises. They care more about your ability to deliver than what you claim to know. The best way to show understanding is through results. If you get those right, then it's clear that you understand. If the customer tells everyone to bid the same results, then what matters is how you achieve them and whether it's credible. That's where understanding can make a difference. If your approach or your results are different because of your understanding, then your understanding becomes something that matters to the evaluator. There is just one thing you need to do with your intangible claims, and there are three ways to go about it: Substantiate your claims to make them credible. Substantiate your claims to make them differentiated. Substantiate your claims to make them matter. You must substantiate your claims in all three ways if you want the evaluator to be able to use them to justify selecting you. If you don't do that, you're just wasting everybody's time by saying things that make you feel better but don't impact whether you win. The good news is that most of the proposals we review don't do these three critical things. This means that doing them gives you a competitive advantage. It's also a great way to unseat an incumbent, since incumbency is also an intangible value if they don't follow this advice.

What is "content marketing?" Content marketing uses the publishing of material to achieve your marketing goals. It can be used to support inbound or outbound marketing. Content marketing has become extremely popular because of the web, where it is used primary for inbound marketing. Companies post content that brings visitors to their websites. Because of the growth of the web, sometimes this is the only form of content marketing that you hear about, with some additional references to search engine optimization. But you can use content marketing to support marketing efforts where getting people to your website is not your first priority. If you are chasing RFPs or looking to close high-touch complex sales, your website might play a minor or even non-existent role. But content marketing can still be extremely valuable for capturing contracts. How do you use content marketing to win contracts? Instead of simply being about getting people to your website, content can serve other marketing goals like building trust, influencing RFPs, establishing expertise, demonstrating insight, and convincing the customer that it's worth the effort to get to know your company. Many of the things you need to do to capture a contract can be supported with content marketing. Content marketing can help you find and qualify leads. It can help you engage leads and give them a reason to want to talk to you. It can give them information they need to decide whether to initiate a procurement. It can give them the information they need to complete their acquisition process, influencing the RFP along the way. In many ways, content marketing is just practicing relationship marketing in the internet age. Think of it as one side of a virtual conversation where you publish things that contribute to relationship building. It's not about publishing a brochure. It's about having ongoing engagement. One mistake that people make is to confuse marketing and sales. Marketing is not selling. Marketing brings customers into your sales process. The same is true with content marketing. If you try to sell in the content you are trying to use for marketing, the marketing will fail and the sales will underperform. A brochure is a sales tool and not a marketing tool. Content that engages potential customers and achieves marketing goals, like establishing trust and proving expertise, can bring qualified people into your sales process. But the content that does this can only sell indirectly. What content marketing can do is build a sales funnel. You can channel your audience into a database, events, or actions. Content marketing is far more sophisticated than putting out a brochure and saying "call me." Content marketing is about giving the customer something that proves you are an asset, so they will choose to come back for more, qualifying themselves along the way. For example: A content item can lead to people following you for more; Which can lead to people seeing webinar announcements; Which can qualify their interests; Which can then lead to contacts. By the time you make contact, you have a relationship, you've earned trust, and you've proven your expertise. If your initial content item tried to sell, it would not be nearly as effective. The trick to content marketing for capturing contracts is to integrate it into your relationship marketing practices. It's not something separate. It's not a series of printed pieces that you leave behind like brochures and data sheets. It's something you lead with. It's what gives the customer a reason to want to have a relationship with you. And once it opens that door, it still has a role to play because it's how you prove your worth, how you shape the procurement, and ultimately how you close the sale. If you fully integrated it into how you develop business and capture your contracts, then adopting it can improve your competitiveness throughout every phase of the process.

Price always matters. But price is not always the most important factor. If it was, no one would buy iPhones. With a consumer product, Apple succeeds even though their value proposition is completely intangible and unquantified. In a written proposal submitted to an organization, you’re going to need different strategies. To win with a higher price, you must convince the customer that you’re giving them something that makes the price difference worth it. In a competitive procurement, to avoid picking the lowest cost bid and to pick the proposal that costs more, the customer has to do one of two things: Decide that all the other lower-priced proposals are unacceptable. Decide that the higher priced proposal is actually a better value. 1) How to win by having an acceptable proposal when everyone submits unacceptable proposals One strategy you can take is to prove that any approach that produces a lower price than yours will result in unacceptable sacrifices. Just claiming it won't be enough because the customer knows you are biased. You have to prove it. If you are certain of the approaches that your competitors will take and what the customer considers unacceptable, this can be an effective strategy. However, companies are often surprised by a customer’s willingness to accept less to get a lower price and by the creativity of their competitors. If you are not certain, then you might want to make use of this strategy but not completely depend on it. 2) How does the customer know that you offer the best value? See also: Pricing The easiest way for the customer to justify selecting a proposal because it’s a better value is when they can objectively prove that it provides value greater than any difference in cost. If they can quantify the value difference and show that it’s greater than the price difference, they have a strong argument. They might still base a decision on value when they can’t quantify the difference, but it’s a lot harder to for them to justify that decision. A good example of how this can be done relates to maintenance costs. It might be worth it to pay more for higher quality parts if it lowers the costs of maintenance more than the higher cost of the parts. In other words, it’s worth it to pay more upfront if it quantitatively lowers your costs over the long run. Another example relates to automation. Paying more upfront for an automated solution might result in lower long-term labor costs. Saving money over the long term is not the only value-based strategy that’s possible. It’s just one of the easiest ways to convince a customer that a higher proposal price results in spending less. Sometimes an offering can be better because it delivers more or produces better results that have value. It might be worth it to the customer to pay more to get more. But again, to be convincing it’s best if you quantify what they are getting and show that the value it represents is worth any difference in price. 3) Delivering a superior return on investment One way to look at these approaches is as investments that generate a positive return. The customer could take the lower price, but you're asking them to invest in a higher price in order to achieve a greater return. If you can quantify that return, it will be a lot more credible and more convincing to a customer who is skeptical when they see the term “investment” in a proposal. 4) Winning when you can't quantify your better value When you can't quantify why you offer a better value, you can still offer an effective rationale. You can demonstrate that something has a higher value, even if you can't pin a number on it. You can show that something will deliver more, even if you can't say how much more. When there is a range that your better value falls into, you can show that it is at least a certain amount. You can also use comparisons or outcomes to show the better value that results from your better offering. 5) Selling Insurance Sometimes value comes in the form of intangible and unquantifiable possibilities. Risk is like that. Most of the time you can't quantify how much you've reduced risk or what the impact is definitely going to be. Risk is about probabilities and not certainties. When people are faced with uncertain risks that could have negative impacts, they often are willing to purchase insurance. You can capitalize on this by positioning your improvements as risk reduction and positioning it in ways that are similar to how insurance is positioned. Novices sell fear. Experts sell insurance. What is the impact of the potential problems that you have identified and how have you mitigated the risks of them occurring in ways that others may not have? The extra effort you put into mitigating potential problems is the cost. The mitigation is the insurance. Mitigation is not certainty, and neither is insurance, but it does deliver peace of mind. Putting a small amount of extra effort into preventing problems or reducing their impact can pay off in a huge way, just like an insurance policy. You can say in your proposals that you put extra effort into preventing problems because the impact of those problems occurring is far larger than the cost of the effort. To a customer evaluating value this is a clear value statement, even if it is not quantified. The more detail you put into statements like this, the more credible they are. The more credible they are, the more apparent value in what you offer. 6) Everything is a trade-off Every decision you make involving your offering involves a trade-off between value and price, or risk and reward. Every decision your competitors make also involve trade-offs. The more you explain the trade-offs, why you made them the way you did, and the impact of making them differently, the better the chances of the customer seeing the wisdom in deciding your proposal is their best alternative. Sometimes the real value you bring is your completely intangible and thoroughly unquantifiable judgment. Instead of making a claim that you have superior judgment that is impossible to prove, explain the rationale of your trade-off decisions. This proves the strength of your judgment without even using the word. 7) Winning with a low-price proposal against better value competitors It’s much easier to win by having the lowest price. But it’s much more profitable to win with a price that’s not the lowest possible. The problem is you can never tell if someone else is going to undercut your price. If you are going to compete on price and remain profitable, you have to be really good at it. And even if you are, you might want to hedge your bet and deliver a value proposition that proves your offering is the best trade-off between price and other factors. While being able to explain and prove your value proposition is vital when you expect competitors to undercut your price, it is also a good idea to do so when you’re going in with what you think is the lowest price possible. Flip the script. Steal your competitor's claims of being the best value by providing better proof. A low price has a value all of its own, and under budget pressure, customers may not give as much weight to value considerations. You can prove that your low price trade-off decisions are not only acceptable, but deliver the right balance between quality and price. Expect your competitors to be doing this when you go into a proposal relying on best value strategies. May the proposal with the best proof points win! 😎 Winning consistently Training your organization to think in terms of value and being able to prove it is part of how you achieve a win rate that continuously increases over time. When people sit down to write your proposals, if they are just thinking about this for the first time, you won't get the best results. But if, as an organization, you commonly discuss value and how to flip the script on it, you'll not only achieve better proposals with higher win probabilities, you'll also achieve better project outcomes. You will be improving your organization's collective judgment and making it part of your culture. The result will not only be better price realism, value determination, trade-off decisions, and project plans, it will be better decisions every day. How many decisions do you make in a day?  

Quantifying what you need vs. what you have First you need to quantify what you need and compare it to what you have. You can do this in a table if you want to break it down in detail, such as by multiple locations or by labor categories. But comparisons are better made visually. One way to do this is with a pie chart: The goal is to show that the gap is really small and you already have the vast majority of what you need. The best way to prove that you already have the staff is to name names and explicitly identify them as existing hires that you commit to delivering if you are awarded the contract. The next best way is to show letters of commitment by the staff to join your firm upon award. Quantifying that you can fill the gap Once you've shown the gap, you still need to show that you can fill it. This is a similar issue. You want to show that you have access to far more staffing resources, either within your company or on your team, than you need to fill the gap. Again, visually works best. You want to show that what you need is tiny compared to the number of relevant applicants who are directly within your reach. These might include the number of resumes you have received and track in a database. They could also include the resumes that your team members have in their databases. They could include other sources that you use for recruiting, such as estimates of the draw from placing advertisements.

The heart of this app is the "Set Availability" page. It updates the database used by the companion app, Get Proposal Help, so that potential customers know your status. Once per week, the app will send you a notification to update your status. All you have to do is slide and set it to keep everyone updated on your availability. Other options If you are working on an extended project, take a long term job, or are going to be unavailable for any other reason, click the "Unavailable until further notice" box. The app will leave you alone until you uncheck the box. Updating your consultant profile If you want remote work, click the box. If you don't mind travelling, click the box. If you don't want to travel, don't click the box. Click the areas you support. They are at a pretty high level because we don't want to make users doing a search have to read through a long list of that splits hairs. We want them to look you up and read your LinkedIn profile or visit your site to determine whether you're a match. You can include an hourly rate, or not. It's your choice. Some customers will only click through if they see it. Some might not if they get sticker shock. It's an ancient dilemma. We'd rather let you decide for yourself than force a particular approach on you. The service description should be more like a tag line than a brochure. You've only got 100 characters to work with. It gets displayed under your name when you are displayed in search, so we don't want a lot of word wrapping. Updating your account settings It's pretty basic. Email, username, first/last name, and zip. But this is where you can upload your picture by tapping the icon. Having you picture set will result in more people clicking on you. Promotions Once you download the app, using it and all the exposure it brings you is free. But we also have some extra options for you overachievers and serious marketers. In addition to the apps, we publish to over 100,000 people every week. Our website gets nearly that many visitors every month. If you click on promotions, we give you some inexpensive ways to get in front of our audience. Our entire audience is composed of people interested in winning more business. You will not find a better qualified audience anywhere. If you want to run a special promotion, such as a discount or free service, you can use this to get the word out. All of the proceeds from the promotions get reinvested into upgrades for the apps.

This app has three main features that help you win your proposals: Search for Consultants. To search for consultants who are available locally, enter your zip code. If no one is available locally, try the advanced search. With the advance search you can search for future dates. For example, if you expect an RFP to come out in 30 days, you can see who expects to be available then. When you get the search results, if you tap on a consultant their LinkedIn page will load. You have a choice when contacting consultants. You can contact them directly, without us in the middle. Or you can tap the button for the Proposal Help Desk and we’ll provide concierge service. We’ll select from consultants we know and trust for you and then help plan, manage, and provide quality assurance for your pursuit. Proposal Help Desk. Tap the button to contact us and we’ll recommend a solution to your needs. You can contact us via phone, text, or email. Instead of searching and contacting consultants one-by-one, we’ll assign someone we know and trust. We’ll take the lead and make sure things are done to our standards. PropLIBRARY. We’ve included the starting points from our content library that cover strategic planning, pre-RFP pursuit, proposal development and more. Feel free to browse and use what you learn to win. Or better yet, become a subscriber to access our premium content. You might only need a consultant rarely, but you can always use PropLIBRARY to improve your ability to win your pursuits.

See also: Winning There are only three ways to win a proposal. All the strategies and techniques you can think of fit into these three. The three are fundamentally different. Understanding that gives you an advantage when it comes to figuring out the winning strategy. Most companies just muddle through, with strategies based on any one of them at any given moment. This gives you an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by understanding the implications of how they apply to you. If you understand which applies and when, you can present a more focused message based on strategies that are clearer. Selling what you've got and convincing the customer to buy it. You have to get what you have through the customer’s selection process. You search for the perfect words to turn what you’ve got into what the customer wants. Product companies generally fit into this category. You have to convince the customer that the benefits of having your company’s offering make it worth the cost and effort required to procure it. The customer has to trust your ability to deliver. Figuring out what the customer wants and selling them an offering that fulfills it. You can offer anything you can think of and deliver. You need to understand what the customer needs, so that you can become it. Tailored services and solutions generally fall into this category. You have to convince the customer that you are the best alternative to fulfill their needs. The customer has to trust your capabilities and insight. Selling on price. Price always matters, and sometimes it’s the only thing that matters. The closer what you sell is to a commodity, the more important price will become as a consideration. Everyone tries to have a low price. But having the lowest price requires effort. This is especially true for services businesses where everyone hires from the same labor pool. To sell on price you have to know just how little you can get by with. You have to convince the customer that in spite of your low price, you are still trustworthy. You have to be really good to be trustworthy at the lowest price. While difficult, it is possible. It just requires a completely different way of operating. Muddling through and being a little of all of them will keep you from being the best. And you can’t consistently win proposals without consistently being the best. Even when the evaluation is formal and bureaucratic, like in government procurement, these forces are still in effect. They just operate in an environment with regulated acquisition procedures and written evaluation criteria. Sometimes what the customer wants most is a procedure followed. Sometimes convincing them requires following that procedure. The key to winning is to understand what you have to convince the customer of. The key to winning consistently is to build your organization around being that. You don’t just want to create branding around something that sounds positive. You want branding that supports the kind of selling you do. You don’t just want to appear trustworthy, you need to appear trustworthy in the ways that reinforce the kind of selling you do. You don’t just want the best offering, you want the best offering based on the kind of selling you do. And the kind of selling you do needs to be based on the kind of buying that your customers do.

People buy from people they know and trust. But sometimes they don’t know any of the vendors who respond to the RFP (which does happen, more in some markets than others) or they’ve had bad experiences with the vendors they do know. Trust is a complicated thing. You don’t achieve trustworthiness by claiming it (as in stating that you are a “trusted supplier” or anything similar). You don’t achieve trustworthiness by sincerely feeling that you are trustworthy, or through commitment or intent. In a seller/customer relationship, trust must be earned. Here are some ways to earn a customer’s trust that you can build your win strategies around: Knowing each other for long enough that the customer has seen that you deliver on you promises Methods or processes that are transparent, verifiable, and reliable A track record or history that is verifiable (and not simply claimed) Covering all contingencies Being up front about risks and having a credible approach to mitigating them (instead of just saying that you will) Details (having a plan is better than having a plan to have a plan) Warranties and guarantees Certifications Making things quantifiable Making things tangible Writing the proposal from the customer’s perspective instead of making it all about you Avoiding things that work against trust Things that work against trust: Unsubstantiated claims Failing to deliver on promises Having a bad reputation (or negative performance record) Making it up as you go along Being opaque or closed instead of transparent Leaving things unquantifiable Leaving things intangible Talking about yourself instead of showing concern for the customer You should think about trust on at least four different levels: The sales person/customer relationship. Without credibility and trust, the sale will not close. Project staff/customer relationship. In services markets, the staff who will do the work often matter more than the company that delivers them. And your customers often know it. Performance. It comes down to delivering as you promise and meeting expectations. Proposal. When you don’t have a prior relationship with the customer, all they have to decide whether to trust you is what’s in your proposal. Cynical customers know that some vendors will say anything in a proposal. Trustworthiness must be proven in order to be earned in writing. If it is possible at all… Win strategies based on trust come down to: What you need to say What you need to do What you need to deliver If they aren’t in synch, it works against trust. Stealing a contract away from a customer that already has a relationship with another vendor isn’t about getting them to like you more. It’s about getting them to trust you more. Achieving this means avoiding all things that work against trust. And thoroughly delivering on all things that build trust, before, during, and after the proposal.

Features and benefits are often presented in a table in a proposal. But they are also addressed throughout the text. The following list can help you call out the things that matter most about your offering, its attributes, or its specifications. What really matters though is how the customer is going to benefit from the presence of a feature. But how the customer benefits depends on the evaluation criteria and the customer’s needs and preferences. Some things can be either a feature or a benefit, depending on how the customer perceives them. The topics below are not intended to be the features themselves, but rather are topics you can use to discover features to present that are relevant to your offering: Performance. What about your offering will have a positive impact on performance? How will it meet or exceed any performance standards or service-level agreement? Sustainability. What about your approach makes it more sustainable and lowers maintenance or total lifecycle costs? Scalability. In high growth or unpredictable environments, scalability can very important. What about your offering enables you to ramp up capacity or rapidly reduce it? How will it enable you to respond to peaks and valleys in the workload? Efficiency. How is your offering more efficient? How does it enable the customer to do more with less or conserve? Responsiveness. Customers don’t like to be kept waiting. What does your offering do to prevent that? Lower cost. Price always matters, even if it’s not quantified. Price strategy, such as increasing short term costs to lower long term costs (or vice versa), also matters. Value. Sometimes customers will spend more to get more. Sometimes they won’t. When they do, it helps for the value to be tangible, if not thoroughly quantified. Reliability. Downtime and failure has a cost. A reliable offering saves the customer that cost. Risk. Most customers are risk averse. All the little things you do to make sure things don’t go wrong can be features. Seamless. Many things the customer buys have hidden (or even known) costs related to installation, configuration, and implementation. A seamless solution can be ready quicker without these costs. Security. Security happens at many levels, personnel, physical, network, software, etc. Everything you do to protect your assets can be features if the customer is concerned about security. Size. Bigger or smaller. If it matters, it’s a feature. Weight. Weight becomes a feature when you have to carry or ship something. Sometimes a heavier weight is better. Whatever the reason, if weight is a concern, it can be a feature. Coverage. Your ability to cover the time, locations, geography, subject matters, etc. can be a feature. Flexibility. In unpredictable or changing environments, the ability to adapt to changes becomes a feature. Measurable. Simply being able to quantify or measure things can lead to better management and performance, making it a feature. Speed. Faster is not always better. But if speed matters, it’s a feature. Verifiable. When trust is an issue, being verifiable becomes a feature. Certified. Certification brings with it a presumption of qualification and reliability. Since you are in the role of being a sales person, certification can add a layer of third-party verification to your capabilities. Standards compliant. Being standards compliant is a form of self-certification. It implies that your claims are verifiable. Depending on the nature of the standard, it could also bring other benefits like compatibility. Off-the-shelf. Off-the-shelf parts and solutions tend to be lower in cost and quicker to implement. Customized. Sometimes the customer needs a solution that is tailored to their specific needs. An off-the-shelf solution may (or may not) be a good starting point, any customization you do becomes a feature. Experience. Your relevant experience is a feature and not a benefit. The benefit is what the customer gets as a result of your experience. But experience is a feature. Often features can be found in what you normally do. They do not have to add to the cost. For example, if you follow ISO quality assurance methodologies, then instead of just citing “ISO 9001:2000 Certified,” you might want to list features like the following: audited process compliance, repeatable methods, fully documented, independent quality oversight. These are all things that come with being ISO certified, but when they are listed out as features they will make your proposal seem like it offers better value, even when you are competing against another ISO certified firm. All the little things you do to make sure things are done right, prevent problems, fix things, or make things better can fall into this category. Just avoid features that don’t matter to the customer. The goal is not to have the longest list of features (even though that’s a feature in itself), the goal is to have the most impact. Also, you should remember that while features are good, customers buy based on the benefits that features deliver and not the features themselves.

IntroductionEven when you provide the same offering as your competitors, you can differentiate your proposal by demonstrating that you will do a better job of achieving their goals. Of course, it will help to understand what those goals really are. Consider the following questionsWhat should you say about the answers in your proposal? How do you define success, based on the requirements and goals described in the RFP or your customer awareness beyond the RFP? What drives success or is required to achieve it? What constrains or limits the actions you take or resources allocated? What degree of freedom do you have in decisions and resource allocation? How do the constraints and degree of freedom impact your approach? How do your differentiators relate to your ability to achieve success? What acceptance criteria does the customer have or you can provide for their consideration? How do you make success measurable or verifiable? How do you make progress towards success measurable or verifiable? What risks, contingencies, and mitigations can you anticipate on the path towards achieving the results? Does your approach explicitly reflect the customer’s priorities and preferences? Have you accounted for schedule, budget, lifecycle, performance specifications, functionality, staffing, resources, delivery goals, risk, quality objectives or other relevant factors? Have you incorporated the customer’s evaluation criteria? What trade-offs are required? How does the way you've made the trade-offs better support achieving the customer's goals? Can you define a process or workflow based on measuring your way to success? Can you illustrate how project elements add up to success? Strategies You can expect your competitors to say they will achieve the customer's goals. This is especially true regarding the goals they describe in the RFP. To be the customer's best alternative, you need to show how you will achieve those goals and prove that your approach is the most credible. You can also add value by exceeding the customer's goals. You can do this by providing better performance specifications or you can do it by providing better goals. Either approach can become differentiators.

Most companies assign whoever’s available to the role of proposal manager. Often it’s the future project manager, someone with a technical writing or editorial background, or an ambitious administrative assistant. Excellent proposal managers can come from these and other backgrounds. But so can failures. We’ve identified seven key things to look for when selecting someone to manage a proposal effort. It’s worth noting that experience with the customer and technical experience with the offering aren’t on our list. That’s because they are not what separates a great proposal manager from a bad one. They are “nice to haves” and not “need to haves.” If you want a great proposal manager, you have to learn to look for other things. But first, there’s something critically important that you need to do: Define the role. What does it mean to be a "Proposal Manager" in your organization? Who has the final say regarding the outline, process, offering, pricing, bid strategies, and text? Those are often split between multiple people. Do you expect the proposal manager to write some or all of the proposal or participate in final production? Will they be creating the proposal or managing others who will create it? Do you want someone to take orders or give the orders? Do you know how to prepare a winning proposal or do you want someone to take the lead who does? Do you want someone to follow your process or do you want someone to create the process? A lot depends on whether you see the proposal manager as someone who pushes paper or someone leading you to the win. Whatever you do as the executive sponsor, don’t leave who is responsible for what up in the air. If you delegate figuring out what roles people should play or expect the proposal team to just know it, what you’ll get is a portion of the energy that could have gone into winning spent on indecision, turf battles, and petty squabbles that could have been avoided with more clarity. Below are eight things you should pay attention to before tossing your proposal manager to the wolves. Some key considerations for success that go beyond the proposal manager job description Instead of making a long list of everything a proposal manager needs to know or tasks to be capable of, like you might see in a typical position description, we prefer to focus on just the key things that drive everything else. There are a lot of different things you could look for in a proposal manager, but if you get these things right, most of the others will fall into place. See also: Proposal Management Do they understand what an RFP compliance matrix is, and have they ever created one on their own? If they do, you’ll get someone who knows how to flow the right information to the right sections of the proposal to make it easy for the customer to evaluate. If they don’t, you’ll just get someone who tries to do a good job, but may create a proposal that looks good but is in reality difficult for the customer to evaluate. Creating a compliance matrix often involves judgment calls. It’s not something you can do just by following procedures. Experience making those judgment calls can help a lot. If you don’t know what an RFP compliance matrix is, select someone who can explain it to you. If you do know what an RFP compliance matrix is, select someone who can explain how to make the right judgment calls to your satisfaction. Can they articulate what a quality proposal is and what is required to create one? If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll never get there. If you define a quality proposal as one that “wins,” it won’t provide any guidance regarding what to do to win. If all you do is focus on RFP compliance, it’s not enough to win. You want someone who knows what it will take to win and who can build the proposal around it. Have they ever participated in a proposal review? Participating in proposal reviews is a great way to learn what not to do. Making that a requirement for new proposal managers is a good way to keep your organization from repeating mistakes of the past. Knowing what you are looking for as a reviewer is good experience for being able to deliver it. A potential future proposal manager's comments during a review may be the best form of interview for the position possible. Can they help the proposal team do better than mere RFP compliance? You’ve got the RFP. You know what to do to comply with it. And so do all your competitors. To be competitive you must go beyond simply responding to the RFP and you need a proposal manager who can guide the proposal team to do that. Ask the candidates you are considering what can be done to exceed RFP compliance. See if they understand that it doesn’t have to increase the cost of what you bid. See if they understand that it has more to do with calling out the value in what you intend to offer and linking it with superior results. Do they understand what it means to write from the customer’s perspective? A good proposal describes your offering to the customer. A great proposal is about the customer and the decision they need to make, and not about describing yourself. To get from a good proposal to a great proposal, the proposal manager must understand how to guide the writers to reflect the customer’s perspective instead of simply being descriptive. Can they manage staff who don’t report to them? A proposal manager usually operates with one hand tied behind their back. Often none of the staff working on a proposal report to the proposal manager. And yet the proposal manager still has to get results from people with conflicting priorities, deadline pressure, and other stresses. It requires a certain gravitas that not all managers have. It can be the difference between proposal failure and proposal success. Can they articulate exactly what they will need from you? A proposal requires involvement from the executive sponsor at key points. A good proposal manager must set expectations and not be afraid to involve you when that is what’s required to achieve a winning proposal. If you can’t discuss it before they take on the job, then you can’t count on it under the pressures of proposal development. If they don’t push a little, negotiate well, and end with clear expectations, you might want someone else as proposal manager. Does their style of management fit your corporate culture? Are they too authoritarian, or not authoritarian enough? Do your people need to be forced to excel or inspired to excel? Do you need a teacher or a doer? Which will be a better fit: a leader, a manager, or a coordinator? Do you want a change agent or a facilitator? What is your tolerance for proposal risk and how does that impact your choice of a proposal manager? Your needs are different from other companies The nature of your company, offering, culture, and the resources available have a lot to do with what kind of person you need as a proposal manager. But if you want someone who has a chance at succeeding, the questions above will help you find the right person, regardless of their background. Should you promote from within or bring in outside expertise? How much experience is enough? What can you afford? In general, we don’t see the correlation between experience and capability that most people seem to rely on. We prefer to hire based on talent instead of experience. However, the talent to be a great proposal manager is different from the talent required to be a great project manager, salesperson or administrative assistant. Take a look at the list above, and consider which ones you can skip. Which ones can a proposal manager lack and still be successful? Which one are the most applicable to your environment? Skip all the ones that you feel are unnecessary. Then see whether you win or lose.

It can be difficult to find the right person to talk to at big Government Agencies and companies. That’s a major reason why people don’t do pre-RFP pursuit. It’s also why many companies are in perpetual sales mode, with no real inbound marketing. Before you can influence the RFP or gain pre-RFP customer insight, you have to make contact with the right people at the customer. Here are some ways to do that: Past contracts. Sometimes the best source of data about future purchases starts by identifying who the buyers were for similar purchases in the past. So start with mining the data and looking up past contracts through online databases. The points of contact may not always be up to date, but it’s a good place to start. Associations. What associations might the customer belong to? Do they publish their membership or attendee lists? Do they hold meetings where you might meet face to face? Do they publish presentations or documents that might mention names? Councils, standards setting organizations, and committees. Are there any other organizations the customer might participate in? In addition to their membership list, do they publish minutes or other documents that might provide insight or contacts? See also: Information advantage LinkedIn profiles. Can you find your points of contact on LinkedIn? If you do, can you find their co-workers and business partners? In addition to searching by demographics, you can also search by acronyms, technical terminology, program names, functional terminology, etc. LinkedIn groups. Look up what groups on LinkedIn your customers have joined. If they post, see what you can learn. If they read, you have an opportunity to put words in front of them. Just simply knowing what groups they are in can provide insight. If you can’t find your customers’ profiles on LinkedIn, maybe you can find them in a relevant group. Trade shows and events. What trade shows and events do they host or participate in? Can you get introduced? Can you meet face to face? What can you learn? What can you demonstrate? Websites and org charts. Does the customer have a website? Does it name names? Does it have an org chart that can help you navigate? Can you do an image search for a relevant org chart? Publishers. There are companies that research, aggregate, and publish databases that include customer contact information. Some can save you a huge amount of time. Google. Learn how to use Boolean search operators. Then combine fragments of names, email addresses, titles, projects, technology, locations, etc. to see if you can find the needle in the haystack. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). If it’s a Government customer, you can try doing a FOIA for rosters, staff directories, points of contact, organization charts, committee memberships, attendance lists, etc. Teaming partners. Who do your subs or primes know? Can you get a referral or introduction? Personal networking. Who do you know? Who do they know? How wide can you cast your net? Are you actively seeking to expand your network? Alumni. Not yours. Theirs. Where did they go to school? Can you track them down through Alumni organizations or discover someone else who knows them? Certification registries. If their job requires specific certifications, are there lists or registries of people with that certification? Look for coordination points. Where does the customer’s organization need to coordinate with the outside world? That’s where people will be visible. Look for common interests, platforms, tools, and requirements. Show interest in their interests. Be where they will be. Then be helpful when they arrive. As much fun as tracking down your customer can be, it’s not always the best approach. Why go to all that effort when you can get them to come to you? Doing that is not as hard as you might think. You have to look at things differently. You have to practice marketing instead of sales. You have to get past the need for immediate gratification. Here are some approaches you can take: Host the event. Don’t go to an event where they might be. Host the event. Have them come to you. Make it worth their while. And invite them. The event could involve training, or something else. Do it on a regular basis so that word of mouth can bring you more. Start a LinkedIn group. This is the same as hosting events. Only instead of face-time, it brings them to you online. Start an association. If you are trying to reach particular people, but you are having difficulty locating them as individuals, try starting an association that targets them. While this one is a long term proposition, it also has a high potential payoff as it can combine all of the other approaches. Create a forum. Whether online or otherwise, a forum encourages discussion. If your customer will participate. They have to perceive the value in it. Publish and gain followers. When you create content that the customer finds interesting, usually because they find it helpful, they’ll seek it out. They’ll invite you to put words in front of them. Instead of selling, try being an asset. Prove your value. Give them a way to follow for more and a way to invite their coworkers. Philanthropy. Host and support charitable events that your customers are interested in. Better yet, collaborate with them on philanthropic efforts. Let the customer come to you in support of your cause. Advertise. It costs money. It may or may not produce results. But it’s an easy way to get attention. It’s what you do with that attention that counts. Many of these work best when you don’t push your branding and you leave your corporate identify in the background. Selling can chase people away. The mere expectation that selling will occur can chase customers away. They’re not going to call you because they want to buy from you. When they want to buy they issue RFIs and RFPs. It’s not about selling. It’s about getting to know each other and working together. It’s about professional development. It’s about brainstorming and a quest for solutions. It’s about their mission. It’s about anything besides sales. This is inbound marketing. It’s something that government contractors rarely do, and almost never do well. But which do you think is mostly likely to result in a sale - you cold calling them, bidding blind, or them contacting you?

Congratulations! Either you got promoted or have started your own company. You’re an executive with profit and loss responsibility now, and must grow your business. You probably have some experience with business development, sales, or proposals, but being in charge of it is another matter. That’s okay, because like most executives, you’re confident you can make the stretch. My goal in writing this is to help you avoid falling into traps that look rational, but will weaken your competitiveness. Your competitors make these mistakes all the time. You can do better. See also: Organizational Development Business development is about what you close and not about how many leads you have. Closing requires understanding what it will take to win. If you sell a commodity, the strategies and processes for winning are very different than if you sell something that is not a commodity. Likewise, government, commercial, international markets are different. The rules of thumb you hear could be completely wrong for you. Vet the relevance. For non-commodity services businesses, the best competitive advantage is an information advantage. Only bid leads where you have an information advantage. If you don’t have an information advantage, it means you are competing on price or luck. Neither is sustainable or leads to the best ROI. For commodity services businesses, an information advantage may be the only differentiator you have. But it still might not be enough if all the customer cares about is price. But an information advantage is how you figure that out. Relationship marketing doesn’t work by getting potential customers to like you. It works by producing an information advantage. You can measure the success of your relationship marketing efforts by how much they produce an information advantage. People are not enough for successful business development. Being successful takes more than just hiring smart or charismatic people who “can sell.” Your organization needs to become more than just its people in order to win consistently over the long term. People work more effectively with the right processes and tools. Institutional knowledge should be grown and applied to constantly improving your win rate. Winning consistently is an information problem and not a “selling” problem. What it will take to win the proposal should drive what you do during the pre-RFP pursuit. Start with the end in mind. Ask “what will it take to win the proposal?” And work backwards from there. Use it to guide what you do at the beginning. If the staff involved in the pre-RFP pursuit don’t know what it will take to win the proposal, they can’t deliver it. Thus, the pre-RFP pursuit is really about discovering what it will take to win. Pay special attention to the questions the people preparing the proposal will need answered in order to write a winning proposal. Starting the proposal already having those answers is how an information advantage becomes a competitive advantage. Not having the answers leads to a watered down proposal. Tracking leads and customer contacts is not enough to end up prepared to win. Holding regular meetings about the status of leads will only result in starting the proposal unprepared. It’s not the status that matters, it’s the amount of information advantage you’ve developed. Your business development meetings should be about assessing your ability to answer key questions and not about status. Don’t debate whether a lead is a “good opportunity” or not. Debate whether you understand what it will take to win and have an information advantage. Making your meetings about what it takes to win and how to get an information advantage will set the right expectations and help train your staff. You can measure your readiness to win at RFP release by how well you can answer the questions related to what it will take to win. You can quantify your ability to answer the questions related to what it will take to win. You can build your pursuit process around that, as well as your bid decision process. Your strategic plan should tell people where to prospect for leads and which leads are acceptable. It should become a tool used in making bid decisions, and not just sit on a shelf. Make sure you understand how to build a funnel or pipeline and the math related to it. Study the relationship between leads, win rate, and revenue. This will help you set the right targets and know what to expect in the future. We have found changes in win rate to have 3-4 times the impact on revenue as do changes in lead discovery. If this is the case for you as well, you will want to invest in achieving a high win rate, as opposed to focusing on finding leads. Put the burden of proof on those who recommend bidding and not on those who recommend cancelling. No matter how hard it might be emotionally, you can improve your win rates simply by making bids easy to cancel and hard to get approval to continue. Continuing a bid should always be about whether the ROI justifies it. Always be prepared to walk away from sunk cost pursuits if you haven’t fulfilled your criteria for achieving a high probability of winning. Don’t throw good money after bad. You should build an organization that hits its numbers by achieving its win rate targets and constantly raising them, instead of one that hits its numbers by bidding in volume. Opportunistic bids can be pursued if they are paid for by sunk cost resources only if they don’t conflict with strategic pursuits. If you have resources sitting around not already pursuing strategic bids, then you may not be as strategic as you think you are. Your best chance to influence and improve the proposal occurs before it is written. If you come in late to the game and see that changes are required, that’s your failure and not the proposal team’s failure. Be a good role model if you want your staff to do their homework and not procrastinate. Be aware of the questions that your proposal team can’t answer on their own, and help them get the answers they need. If you don’t provide the answers, then they’ll hedge and water things down. Don’t allow the proposal review process to be subjective. Proposal quality should be defined in writing. Reviews should validate specific attributes or criteria. If your organization can’t articulate what those criteria should be in detail or hasn’t done so before the writing starts, then you’ve got a problem. Arguing over quality criteria will do far more to benefit your organization than arguing over whether to make a subjective change. Proposal writers and reviewers should have the same definition and criteria for proposal quality. Otherwise, neither one of them can fulfill it. This means you have to be able to spell out your quality criteria before the writing starts. The break/fix model is wrong for proposals. Design quality in from the beginning. If you hardly ever cancel a pursuit, you’re probably doing something wrong. The best proposals are written from the customer’s perspective. They should not describe your company, they should describe why your company’s qualifications and approaches matter to the customer. You need to understand what matters to the customer in order to achieve this. It’s a great place to start when listing your quality criteria. PS: Share this with your staff and use it to start conversations. You might say “I think this makes sense. What do we need to do to implement it?” You will be educating them, setting expectations, raising the bar, and learning yourself all at the same time.

In addition to PropLIBRARY's online resources, we also provide full-service consulting. We have experts who can provide hands on help, either at your site or remotely. The content you see on PropLIBRARY demonstrates our expertise and approach to doing things. To start a conversation about how we can do business together call 1-800-848-1563 Feel free to ask us about business development or proposals, or suggest a topic for us to write about. We're geeks about this stuff and love to chat about it. Click here to ask us a question

What's this site all about? PropLIBRARY is a site with a TON of useful information about business development, pursuit strategy, capture, and winning proposals. There are hundreds of free articles that explain the theory and foundations supporting our recommendations, and hundreds more for our paying subscribers that provide the checklists, templates, forms, and process guidance needed for immediate implementation. Our subscribers also get access to MustWin Now, a tool we've built based on our process recommendations. We also provide consulting services to help companies implement our recommendations and win their proposals. Tips for navigating our site To browse the information available, just click the menu button for our Best Practice Library and follow the links that interest you. Some people will be at the beginning, some in the middle, and some with have a particular topic in mind. We have so much content it can be overwhelming, but we make it quick to browse through. Permission to use our content We don't require any special permission if you want to link to one of our articles. If you want to reprint one of our articles or quote or excerpt a significant portion you may ask permission by clicking on the button for asking questions. If it is a single article with limited distribution we may only require attribution with a link back to the source. For anything on a larger scale, please describe your intentions so we can discuss it. Speaking and training Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY is a frequent public speaker. It's one of his favorite things. Because he runs a web-based empire he doesn't get out enough. He'd love to speak at your event, but can't do them all. You are welcome to ask. Let us know when, where, about the audience, and the topics you think will excite them. You can contact him through our site. About us... We try to keep the attention on you and your needs, but how we got here is an interesting story. We are we located? CapturePlanning.com was formed in 2001 in the Washington DC area. Eventually we realized that as an Internet-based company we can be located anywhere. So these days we spend our time on the beach in Florida. Before COVID-19 we frequently travelled to our customer's sites.

In addition to PropLIBRARY's online resources, we also provide full-service consulting. We have experts who can provide hands on help, either at your site or remotely. The content you see on PropLIBRARY demonstrates our expertise and approach to doing things. To start a conversation about how we can do business together call 1-800-848-1563 If you are new to our site, here are some tips on navigating and finding things. Feel free to ask us about business development or proposals, or suggest a topic for us to write about. We're geeks about this stuff and love to chat about it. Click here to ask us a question What's this site all about? PropLIBRARY is a site with a TON of useful information about business development and winning proposals. There are hundreds of free articles that explain the theory and foundations supporting our recommendations, and hundreds more for our paying subscribers that provide the checklists, templates, forms, and process guidance needed for immediate implementation. We also provide consulting services to help companies implement our recommendations and win their proposals. Are you a proposal or business development consultant? See also: Proposal support services We have several ways that we work with consultants. We don't run a placement service, but we can support your growth with training, tools, and opportunities to promote yourself. Together we can expand what you can offer your customers and help you maximize those relationships, while keeping you up front and in control. If you are a product company or have a similar audience, let's explore how we can become partners. Permission to use our content We don't require any special permission if you want to link to one of our articles. If you want to reprint one of our articles or quote or excerpt a significant portion you may ask permission by clicking on the button for asking questions above. If it is a single article with limited distribution we may only require attribution with a link back to the source. For anything on a larger scale, please describe your intentions and we can discuss it. Speaking and training Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY is a frequent public speaker. It's one of his favorite things. Because he runs a web-based empire he doesn't get out enough. He'd love to speak at your event, but can't do them all. You are welcome to ask. Let us know when, where, about the audience, and the topics you think will excite them. You can call us at 1-800-848-1563 or contact him through our site. About us... We try to keep the attention on you and your needs, but how we got here is an interesting story.