Carl Dickson

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.

It all starts with a conversation Examples of projects we've undertaken: Proposal management and professional proposal writing ROI based Win rate improvement Pursuit process improvement (pre-RFP and post-RFP) Coaching to independence, where I provide experience and quality assurance while your staff and organization develops and then I fade out over time Proposal content planning Proposal reviews and quality validation Checklist-driven Proposal quality criteria development Pursuit strategy development Training in all the topics you see addressed on PropLIBRARY Becoming an organization that wins what it pursues Engagement options: Quarterly retainer with a master contract and task orders Not-to-exceed project quotes Hourly rate consulting I like to start by listening to you and getting to know your goals and preferences. I need enough information about the size and scope of what you have in mind to be able to make recommendations and to prepare reliable estimates. Along the way we can discuss options, approaches, schedules, and the outcomes you desire. If you want to know more about me, connect with me on LinkedIn and view my profile. Sometimes I roll up my sleeves and help create a winning proposal by employing all the recommendations you see on PropLIBRARY. Sometimes I help develop your staff, processes, and organization, so you can win more of what you pursue. Depending on your needs I might help start and plan a proposal, and then wait until it's ready to review so I can provide quality assurance. This is far more economical than billing the whole time. Or I might help you develop your company's internal capabilities and fade away over time. Our first conversation is usually to discover whether we're a match for each other. If not, I always try to make a referral or give you other options so you can get the help you need. I have some rather large agencies as partners, so it's usually not hard to find the right talent. While PropLIBRARY serves all kinds of businesses, most of my consulting engagements are with US Government contractors. When it comes to training, speaking engagements, and process improvement efforts, I work with organizations of all types. I fly all over when needed, but usually work remotely. How we can move forward together If you've got questions, you can use this green button to send them to me. Click here to send me a question Or you can use the widget below to get on my calendar for a telephone conversation so we can discuss whether we're a match.

Proposal teams are great at filling voids and getting things done without proper direction. They’ll complete the proposal no matter what. And that’s part of the problem. If they have to, they’ll water things down to gain acceptance. If they have no choice, they may even fake it. They are quite good at making the most of their circumstances, but they can’t read minds, and their authority is limited. Make things clear and your people will work more quickly and be better focused on winning instead of working around indecision. There are things that need your involvement. They don’t require a lot of time. But they do require decisions that the proposal team can’t make on their own. The team will do the work, but they need you to decide: See also: Roles Who defines quality and leads the review process? Proposal quality is too important to be left to opinion. Getting a group of people, no matter how experienced, around a table for a review without any definition of proposal quality is no way to achieve it. One of the key functions of the executive level is to define standards. Proposal quality should be defined in a way that can be validated so the reviews will be effective. Your entire proposal review process succeeds or fails based on how you define quality. But if you don’t do this before the writing starts, then don’t bother. Changing the definition of quality in the middle is worse than a consensus driven subjective and undefined concept of quality. If you feel the temptation to jump in at the end and fix the proposal because they don’t understand your vision for proposal quality, that’s your failure and not theirs. Who is responsible for identifying contributors? The proposal team can identify what is needed, but they don't own the resources required to get things done. They need help, both with identifying relevant resources and with obtaining their participation. Especially when it requires crossing organizational boundaries. Who is responsible for identifying, articulating, and approving bid strategies? If you wait until the proposal to figure out your bid strategies, or if those involved in the pre-RFP pursuit show up without anything to differentiate your bid, it's probably too late. Even though the proposal team should participate in articulating the bid strategies, someone else needs to be responsible for bringing the winning strategies to the table, and doing so at the start of the proposal. If the proposal lacks solid bid strategies, that should not reflect on the proposal team. Working out who is responsible for bid strategies and when will have a huge impact on your win rate. Who decides whether to cancel the proposal? The person who approved the bid almost never wants to cancel it. When a bid goes bad, a ton of money and effort usually gets wasted as a result. The proposal team can tell when the plug should be pulled, but who's going to listen? And if it’s worth continuing anyway, who’s going to explain why? Who is responsible for making decisions regarding contractual matters? What terms and conditions are acceptable? Who’s responsible for knowing what the small print means? Who is responsible for regulatory and other compliance? When, where, and how does that review take place? Who is responsible for making sure contributors meet their deadlines? Expectation management is crucial. The proposal team is responsible for setting the right expectations. And then others are responsible for fulfilling them. What happens when they don't? You can leave it to the proposal team to try to exert pressure while doing the proposal, or you can help with expectation management. Who is responsible for making sure teaming partners make their deadlines? If you have subcontractors or teaming partners contributing to the proposal it can be like pulling teeth to get their assignments completed. The people who network with them don't want to be the bad guys and enforce the schedule. Who's going to step in with enough clout to get the attention of staff at another company? Who makes decisions regarding what is being proposed? Who is responsible for determining what to offer, as opposed to how to describe it? Who is involved and who has the final say? With authority comes responsibility. Someone needs to define the offering competitively and on schedule for the proposal team to do its job. Who makes decisions regarding proposal content and presentation? Should it say this or that? Be organized this way or that way? Who can make changes? And who has the final say? Instead of letting games and power struggles figure it out, just put it on the table and tell them straight up. Isn't it interesting how many are all about "who?" Your staff can figure out "what" to do. But "who" does things is usually best decided higher up on the org chart. This means you. The proposal team can figure out what to do. But they can’t assign resources. They can't decide among themselves who has the final authority to make decisions without a consensus. They can negotiate with other staff to get what they need, but this takes time and often results in somewhat less than what they really need, which has a negative impact on the proposal. As an executive, you can have as much impact on your organization’s win rate as the proposal writers, without ever setting pen to paper. All you have to do is be decisive, and clearly communicate roles and responsibilities. If you are decisive, your win rate will go up. If you are indecisive, your organization will produce watered down proposals, do it more slowly, and with more risk, resulting in a lower win rate.

It’s a pretty common mistake. When you’re under schedule and budget pressure, it seems like starting from a page that already has some words on it should be easier. It seems like such a waste to spend all that time, effort, and money on preparing a proposal for only one use, so it must save money to use it as a starting point for the next proposal. Unfortunately reusing your proposals will end up costing you far more than it might save you. The economics of recycling proposal narratives are not what they seem. And you ignore them at your own peril. The best approach to take for proposal writing is making it a return on investment (ROI) decision. If you focus on lowering costs you are probably not making the best investment decisions. Even though there is a cost savings by recycling proposal content, it will be less than the negative impact on your win rate multiplied by the anticipated revenue. It’s just the way the math works out, and I encourage you to explore the numbers. Unless you are dealing with a low-margin commodity or an offering priced too low to cover the cost of a customized proposal, I find the numbers almost always favor maximizing customization around your bid strategies. Especially when you run the numbers across multiple bids. Let's look at some numbers See also: Reuse If your total proposal cost is 1% of anticipated award of the opportunity, and you can lower the cost of the proposal by 10% by recycling previous proposals, the total savings is 0.1% of anticipated award. I’d argue that you won’t see even a 10% cost savings because reuse requires far more editing than people realize. But let’s pretend that 10% savings is real. Now, how much will proposal reuse lower your win rate? And what will that cost you? All it needs to do is lower your win rate by 0.1% to eliminate the savings. Consider two proposal approaches: Lower costs by maximizing reuse Skip any theoretical savings from reuse and apply it to maximizing the customization around your bid strategies If you take the second approach and it only improves your win rate by 1%, it will produce 10 times the ROI that reusing your proposal content might. If it improves your win rate by 10%, you get 100 times the “savings” from recycling your proposals. My goal in business is not to achieve a low cost and a low rate of return. My goal is a high rate of return and the costs required to bring me that return are welcome. If your goal is also to maximize ROI, but you aren't structured to prepare the proposals required to achieve it, you might want to rethink your business model. You should ensure that the investment you make in customizing your proposals around your bid strategies is efficient and is not made in a way that is frivolous. But efficient means achieving the win rate needed to produce the desired ROI. If you customize the proposal around poorly thought-out undifferentiated bid strategies, it will not increase your win rate. What should you do about it? If you are focused on organizational development instead of a single bid, then you can look at the increase in win rate as compounded interest. You can also look at proposal reuse as compounded negative interest. This means you want to train your organization to avoid reuse and invest in learning how to write proposals that maximize win rate. You want to train people to make sound decisions based on understanding the economics of their win rate, and not to take what looks like the easy path if it lowers your future ROI. The value in your previous proposals is in the ideas and approaches, but not in the narrative. I’d go so far as to consider scanning your proposals and storing them as images so people can’t recycle the narratives. Let them see the steps in the approaches, but force them to put those steps into the context required to win the current bid. Or extract those approaches and turn them into proposal recipes. Just don't copy the narrative that was optimized to win in a different context. Proposal reuse is a trap that will prevent you from maximizing your ROI If you don’t start your proposals knowing what bid strategies to customize the proposal around, you can’t achieve your ROI goals. The only way reuse increases ROI is if your profit margin per sale won't cover the cost of doing a proposal and you have to cover that cost through volume. If you care about ROI and don't sell a commodity, you can’t pursue bids opportunistically. You need an information advantage to have something to customize your proposal with. Your approach to prospecting should not be about finding leads, but should only look for leads where you can develop an information advantage. Focusing on ROI forces you to create an organization that bids to win, instead of one that bids a lot, and uses easy to submit low probability of winning recycled narratives to do it.

The easiest corporate strategy for growth is to bid everything. Proposal professionals hate this strategy because it results in a low win rate that they expect to get blamed for. It also increases their workload for little gain. But the undeniable fact is that you can win business by bidding opportunistically. That’s what makes it so tempting. The result is a certain… tension… See also: Bid/no bid decisions Whether you should bid opportunistically or strategically is a simple return on investment calculation. Add up your costs of bidding and compare it to your wins. The problem with opportunistic bidding is that it results in low win rates. When you bid without an information advantage, you bid at a competitive disadvantage. Your cost per win goes up as your win rate goes down. And the ones you win are probably the ones where your pricing was lowest, resulting in lower profit margins. Opportunistic bidding leads to higher costs and less profit. But it also results in more profit than you would have had if you didn’t bid anything. Every time I've run it with real numbers, I find that the impact your win rate has on your profitability makes investing in a high win rate the better investment. For example, at a 10% win rate, you'll need three times the number of leads as a company at a 30% win rate, just to hit the same revenue. All that opportunistic bidding is often great amounts of energy spent uselessly. The idea that opportunistic bidding produces more revenue than you would have had without it is an illusion. At a 30% win rate you’ll achieve twice the revenue of a company with a 10% win rate, and do it with half the leads and a lower cost of bidding. There is no doubt that you can win some business with an opportunistic approach. The question is whether that's the best ROI. The answer will not be the same for everybody. Consider: The closer you get to a commodity service, the less important trust and other factors become, the more important price becomes, and the more bidding in volume can pay off. If the size of your bids does not cover the costs of customizing your bids, then while win rate will remain critically important, you will not be able to afford strategically pursuing each opportunity. In certain niche markets, customers buy without advance planning or announcements. Some things are purchased by a customer only once and customers are widely dispersed, making targeting impossible. But even putting aside the importance of win rates for a moment, it’s a strategic question that determines whether opportunistic bidding will destroy your company: Does opportunistic bidding lead to growth, or does it plateau when you run out of leads that are easy to find and bid? For opportunistic bidding the only path to growth is to find more low-hanging fruit than you lose. Forever. The idea that opportunistic bidding can get your foot in the door is an illusion. Opportunistic bidding is not a way to jump start a business or something you can switch from when “you are ready.” If you can get the business without a customer relationship, then someone else can steal it from you the same way. Opportunistic bidding requires a business model that can survive high levels of churn. If you run a non-commodity services business, rapid turnover will kill your business. When you run out of easy leads, you will be unable to replace the revenue at the same rate. That’s when things go bad quickly, because you’ve built an organization that structurally, culturally, financially, and otherwise is incapable of the investment required for strategic pursuit. You can’t switch on a whim to strategic business if you don’t have the right processes, the way people think they are supposed to do things is all wrong, you haven’t mastered long lead time pursuits, your win rate is abysmal, you can’t cover the costs of strategic pursuits, and you habitually start too late. Every time I've seen it tried in a non-commodity services business, opportunistic bidding led to a crash that was most often resolved by selling the business and not simply reorganizing it, but replacing it with a strategic organization. The difference between a strategic organization and an opportunistic one is that maximizing win rate is a higher priority than maximizing the number of bids. Investing in a high win rate means doing things like relationship marketing, developing an information advantage, and perfecting your lead qualification and proposal processes. A strategic organization doesn’t focus as much on chasing leads as it does on winning them. But a better way to look at it is that investing in win rate means hitting your numbers without any opportunistic bids. You can indulge in opportunistic bids in a strategic company. You just can’t depend on them. To be strategic you have to build an organization that hits its numbers by achieving its win rate targets and constantly raising them. Opportunistic bids can be pursued if they are paid for by sunk cost resources and don’t conflict with strategic bids. If you have resources sitting around not pursuing strategic bids, then you may not be as strategic an organization as you think. Even when those resources aren’t working on a bid, they should be investing their time in increasing your win rate.

Proposal recipes work best when they reflect the specifics of the way your company does things and its circumstances. They can also help prevent your authors from reinventing the wheel. But you have to be careful when you make them specific that they remain applicable to all your bids. Luckily the question format facilitates this. You can include options that may or may not be applicable by how you phrase the questions. Instead of finding the balance between generic and specific, you can get as specific as you need to. Proposal recipes are also a great tool for bringing together the best that every part of your company has to contribute. For example, inter-departmental expertise and coordination can be leveraged by adding questions to your recipes that prompt the author with what to say, do, or remember. You don’t need people to contribute manuals, slide decks, or narrative to create recipes. You just need to know the key issues so you can insert a question that prompts the author to look into it. If you get to proposal reviews and people ask things like, “Why didn’t we include information from so and so?” you can insert a question into your recipes that will prevent the oversight in the future. Not only that, you can anticipate the need and track down the information or prompt the author with what they need to do to get it. The following list gives you some considerations you should apply to every recipe to ensure that it is fully customized: See also: Guidance for Using Recipes Business line specifics. What does you company do or offer? What does the author need to consider about that? What should they consider when designing the offering and writing about it? Customer specifics. If you bid to the same or similar customers frequently, you can add questions that reflect the customer’s concerns and preferences. Procedures. What relevant procedures has your organization already developed? What policies may impact what you say in the proposal? Terminology. What terminology do you and your customers prefer? What’s current? Recipes should prompt authors to say things the way you want them said. Bid strategies. How do you typically position your company and offering? What strategies do you employ in common circumstances? What strategic lessons learned has your organization accumulated? Resources. What people, equipment, facilities, technology, tools, assets, etc. exist in your organization that might be relevant? Points of contact. Who should proposal writers contact for more information, to obtain decisions and approvals, or to coordinate? What information should proposal writers deliver as well as potentially receive? What forms or other tools might help? Institutional knowledge. Has your organization done things before that are relevant? What does your organization know that is relevant? What practices has your organization developed? What preferences does it have? What lessons learned has it accumulated? Data. If data can be anticipated and doesn’t change frequently, it can be inserted into your recipes. For example: the number of locations your company has, its employee turnover rate, etc. If the data does change rapidly or the data required isn’t consistent enough to accumulate it in advance, you can still identify where to go, which tools to use, or who to get the data from. Inter-departmental coordination. A staffing plan might require coordination with your human resources department. Subcontracting, logistics, fulfillment, supply chain, invoicing, timekeeping, and many other functions are handled by specific departments in some organizations. If you want proposal writers to coordinate with them, you can use the recipes to prompt it. The recipes can prompt proposal writers with the who, what, where, how, when, and why of the coordination. Graphics. You can anticipate that many of the issues faced in common proposal sections can be communicated visually. Even if you don’t have the information to draw the graphic in advance, you can inspire the proposal writers by showing them the kinds of graphics that are relevant.

The goal of a proposal recipe is to accelerate proposal writing and inspire your staff to write better approaches. Proposal recipes suggest topics to write about, instead of providing topics that are already written but in the wrong context. A proposal recipe avoids providing you with a narrative you can recycle. Instead, proposal recipes ask questions about everything that should go into the narrative. When you answer the questions, you not only create the narrative, but what you write is customized for what it will take to win the current bid from the very beginning. Instead of starting your proposal with a blank screen, the questions in a proposal recipe get you started explaining the right things and putting things in the right context. By suggesting ingredients, it accelerates how quickly you arrive at knowing everything that should be addressed in your section. People spend more time thinking about and discussing their proposal sections than actually writing them. A proposal recipe gets you past that more quickly so that the writing can actually be accomplished. Creating a proposal recipe requires identifying the questions people should answer in their responses. The trick to creating the right questions is to use the questions to both give information and guide people to consider the right things. Proposal recipes typically address: See also: Guidance for using recipes What should be included in your solution, process, approach, or response What you need to know before you can write your response Options you should consider How the context impacts what you should write How issues could impact what you write Ways to add value to your response Potential ways you could use graphics to enhance your message A proposal recipe shouldn’t tell you what the steps in your approach must be. Instead, a proposal recipe should ask about everything that might go into your approach, so the author can quickly assess what is needed for this bid. A recipe should ask about various options so the author can decide what is applicable. A recipe should ask about how aspects related to the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, or RFP might impact what you need to write about. A proposal recipe should ask about any potential issues so the author can determine what to do about them. A recipe should ask about approaches that might add value. Or it might ask about how visuals could be used instead of words to make your points. There is a fine line between asking you to consider an option and suggesting things for your consideration. Suggestions are fine, but everything in a proposal recipe should be formatted as a question in order to avoid leaving the impression that the recipe is telling the author what to write. In order to end up with a proposal that is fully customized around what it will take to win, recipes help the author work more quickly without giving them the end product. The authors decide the sequence, wording, what’s applicable, and what adds value. A recipe identifies the ingredients and ways to prepare them, but the author is the chef. It’s also important to remind the author that they are not limited to what it says in a proposal recipe. If a proposal recipe inspires you to think about something that adds to the proposal but that the recipe didn’t address, then it’s doing its job of helping you figure out what to say in order to win.