Carl Dickson

If you complete all of your opportunity readiness reviews but the RFP does not come out on time, you should put a monitoring program into place. Your plans are based on the earliest anticipated RFP release. But what if it gets delayed or comes out later than that? The Business Developer and Capture Manager should take advantage of that time. The Executive Sponsor should set up a schedule (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly?) to review the status. Suggestions for what to monitor while you are waiting for RFP release: See also: Pre-rfp readiness reviews Could the opportunity be cancelled? Could the customer’s acquisition strategy change? Are all necessary budgets and approvals really in place? Could the scope change? Can you add detail to any of the readiness report questions? Is there anything else you can do to prepare for the proposal? Is there anything else you can do to position yourself in the eyes of the customer? You can't run at full speed forever. Should you pause? In addition to monitoring, you have to decide whether to maintain a high tempo of pursuit or slow down to wait for the customer to act. The MustWin Process helps you decide. Are you satisfied with the answers to the Readiness Review questions and do you feel you have an information advantage? You don't ask these questions in isolation where you have no way to assess the answers. You ask them against a specific set of questions including: Your responses to the Readiness Review questions What you have discovered about what it will take to win The questions you will need answered to complete your Proposal Content Plan Regardless of whether you pause active pursuit or not, you'll still need to implement the monitoring program.

The MustWin Process will not break if you start late. In fact, it tells you exactly what you need to do to get caught up. Regardless of how much time is available, you still need to identify, assess, and achieve what it will take to win. Whether you can achieve it depends on how much time is left after you've identified and assessed it. The MustWin Process accelerates these steps by providing the questions you need to answer and what you need to do. The real question is do you have the information you need to win. We recommend starting ahead of RFP release to provide time to gather this information. What you need to do to catch up What you need to accomplish does not change because you started late. You still need to do the same things, you just have less time to do them. Because the MustWin process tells you the questions you must answer and things you must do in order to be prepared, all you need to do is answer them quickly. It’s a bit like cramming for an exam, only worse. You cannot get caught up by skipping steps like the Readiness Reviews or proposal planning. You should not simply start writing based on nothing more than the RFP unless you want to lose. The reason you need to complete the questions for the Readiness Reviews is that they lay the foundation for developing your bid strategies. The only thing worse than bidding at the last minute is bidding without any strategy for winning. The MustWin Process not only helps guide you to develop those strategies, but it helps make sure that you build the proposal document around them. If you want the writing to implement your plans for winning, you need to make those plans before you start writing. Writing first and then trying to insert statements that help the proposal win in a later draft is a strategy that relies on the competition doing a worse job on their proposal than you are doing on yours. That is no way to ensure a win. The MustWin Process is based on building your proposal around your knowledge of what it will take to win. You can’t do that without thinking it through first. And you cannot do it reliably without validating it. You cannot skip steps if you want to win. Is it too late to bid? See also: Pre-rfp readiness reviews If you cannot answer the questions, then objectively you are not ready to bid. Your odds of winning if you are not ready are much lower. How much lower depends on how effective you are at answering the questions. This is a good time to suggest reading the topic on “Bid/No Bid Considerations” and “More Reasons to No Bid.” After you read them, go back and read them again. If after answering the questions, you do not have a competitive advantage, then you question whether bidding is still a good idea. If you are committed to bidding in spite of a late start, then you better start working some long hours immediately. You should have started developing your win strategies and draft proposal plans before the RFP is released so that you can complete them quickly when the RFP hits the streets. If you are starting late, you still need to do the pre-RFP steps, but you can’t let it take more than a few days. You don’t have time to warm up or gather your resources. To get your proposal back on track you need your proposal plans in place without delay. If you work hard you can achieve that and the proposal will have a fighting chance. If you delay getting your plans together, it will impact the amount of time to write the proposal and quality will suffer. There is a variation of Murphy’s Law that says that all proposals take the same amount of time. If you start late, you just have to work round the clock to put the same number of hours in as if you had started early. If you do the hard work to get caught up, you will be rewarded by how the process makes the writing easier and by what it does to improve your chances of winning. The good news is that because the MustWin Process defines what it takes to be ready, you can measure your progress at getting caught up. The bad news is that you will know exactly how far behind you are…

The MustWin Process uses a formula to schedule Readiness Reviews: The Business Development Manager should complete each report by the due date entered on this page. The due dates are set by dividing the time until RFP release evenly across the four reviews. On or as soon as possible after that date, the Executive Sponsor should review the report and assess whether the progress is sufficient to be ready at RFP release. See also: Pre-rfp readiness reviews To determine the dates, you must have an anticipated date of RFP release — even if you have to guess. You should always use the earliest anticipated RFP release date, since it is better to be ready too soon than it is to be ready too late. To schedule the four opportunity readiness reviews, take the time between now and the anticipated date for RFP release, and divide evenly by five. This will enable you to set the date of the last review with some time left for action items before the RFP is released. Examples: If RFP release is expected in 10 months, then the Lead Identification Review would be at the start of Month 2, the Qualification Review would be at the start of Month 4, Intelligence Review would be at the start of Month 6, and the Bid Preparation Review would be at the start of Month 8. If the RFP release is expected in 30 days, then the Lead Identification Review would be on day 6, the Qualification Review would be on Day 12, the Intelligence Review would be on Day 18, and the Bid Preparation Review would be on Day 24. The dates do not have to be precisely even. You can adjust for weekends, holidays, etc. Should you find that the anticipated date of RFP release has slipped, it’s OK to change and extend the readiness review dates. You want people to be able to take advantage of all of the time available. You just don’t want the RFP to come out before you’ve passed your readiness reviews. Readiness reviews are cumulative. If for some reason you start the process in the middle, then all of the goals of the previous reviews up to that point would be included in the next review. At each review, the Executive Sponsor will assess whether the pursuit has sufficiently fulfilled the goals for that phase.

Readiness Reviews are a methodology we invented to ensure that the pre-RFP process delivers the information you need to write the winning proposal. They do this by making better use of the time available (whatever that ends up being) between when you identify a lead and when the RFP will come out. Readiness Reviews prompt people with what to do and provide a means to track progress and even measure effectiveness. They make the pre-RFP pursuit less of some kind of mysterious art and more of a science. The way they work is to first divide the time available into four equal stages. During each stage you try to find answers and take actions that are guided by a list of goals. Each stage ends with a review. The reviews are conducted against a standard. The standard is whether progress is sufficient to be in position to win at RFP release. Each question, goal, and action item gets graded on a scale that can be easily quantified. This enables you to see whether over time the trend is toward being ready, or moving away from being ready. Each of the Readiness Reviews is a bid/no bid decision. Each review considers whether it’s worth investing more to get to the next review. In addition to stopping low probability leads sooner, they make it easier to pull the plug on valid leads that were not adequately pursued and are no longer competitive. See also: Pre-rfp readiness reviews Each review has a separate list of questions, goals, and action items. They build on each other over time. For example, identification of incumbents becomes identification of all possible competitors, which becomes competitive assessments and teaming considerations. Readiness Reviews ensure that nothing gets overlooked and that the information you gather adds up to what you need to write a winning proposal. Readiness Reviews address the problem of getting to the proposal stage and having questions that you can no longer get answers to by bring up those questions earlier. Over the four reviews Readiness Reviews also change from gathering information to assessing information and finally to articulating win strategies and themes. They guide the flow of information from raw data to the things you need to say in your proposal. Because the way we approach proposals measures everything against what it will take to win, Readiness Reviews also guide people from gathering data to using it to identify what it will take to win. It even itemizes this information to form the basis for creating the criteria that will guide Proposal Quality Validation. The result ensures that the proposal reflects what you learned about the opportunity, customer, and competitive environment. It sounds complicated because we get a lot of mileage out of a few lists and reviews by setting them up in an innovative way. The result is fairly simple to implement, highly efficient in terms of the effort it takes, and produces a huge return for that effort. Return to the Introduction to Readiness Reviews Topic Hub.

Within the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process we measure progress and quality against what it will take to win. During the critical pre-RFP phase of the pursuit, we use Readiness Reviews to ensure measurable progress towards discovering what it will take to win. Readiness Reviews bring structure to the pre-RFP phase of pursuit and help ensure that you arrive at RFP release and begin the proposal prepared to win. Each Readiness Review has specific questions, goals, and action items that must be completed. We recommend having four Readiness Reviews. With four readiness reviews you can use this technique to schedule them flexibly no matter how much time there is between lead identification and RFP release. This way if you find out about the opportunity one month before RFP release, you have a week to prepare for each review. If you are tracking a year in advance you have three months to prepare for each review. And if you find out about it at (or even after) RFP, it tells you what you need to find out in order to get caught up. If you finish the Readiness Reviews and the RFP is delayed, you have the right foundation to wait and monitor, or continue to prepare. Each Readiness Review builds on the previous one so that information is collected, assessed, and transformed into what stakeholders need. We do not expect people to be able to answer all of the questions we ask. Instead, we look for them to answer as many as are humanly possible, and to provide help, guidance, and alternative approaches for the questions that they have been unable to answer. Smoothing the transitions from business development to the proposal See also: Faster Readiness Reviews also provide a means to transfer knowledge and streamline the transition from business development to the proposal. They help ensure that you can answer the questions needed to write a great proposal and do it from the customer’s perspective. Metrics and Management by Measurement Most companies have regular meetings where they review their leads, gloss over what the don’t know, and put the emphasis on the fact that calls were placed or meetings held. Instead, Readiness Reviews enable you to measure your progress towards being ready for RFP release. You can quantify whether you know what you should. This feedback is important. It shows you how much more you need to do in order to be prepared. It can also be used to show trends or areas of weakness across multiple pursuits. When you score your Readiness Reviews, you can generate a ton of metrics that you can use to assess what impacts your win rate and improve it over time. You can use Readiness Reviews to turn business development from an art into a science. At each review, assess whether the answers provided and actions taken are sufficient to prepare you for RFP release. We use a Red/Yellow/Green scale to grade the answers to each question. You should see answers that score a “Yellow” or “Red” in an early review move to “Green” by later review. While movement in the other direction is bad, it’s good to have an objective way to identify it when you are slipping. Readiness Reviews connect strategic planning to the proposal Your strategic plans should point you in the direction to prospect and provide high level positioning. This positioning lays the foundation for developing your value proposition. When you identify leads, you bring those strategies to the customer. During the pursuit, as you build the customer relationship, gather intelligence, and develop an information advantage, Readiness Reviews guide you through gathering information, assessment, ad articulating your bid strategies and themes. Along the way they also give you the means to connect your strategic plans all the way to the proposal. Improving ROI and making effective bid/no bid decisions Each Readiness Review is essentially a bid/no bid decision. At each review the question becomes whether the lead is worth the cost of preparing for the next review. If a review shows that your company does not have an information advantage or is not prepared to win, you have the opportunity to stop the pursuit without incurring any additional cost. Readiness Reviews help you break out of the idea that a bid/no bid decision happens at a moment in time, and replaces it with a continuous focus on ROI. List of questions and scoring sheets to implement Readiness Reviews: The following items provide the list of questions, goals, and action items in a table that can be used as a scoring and signoff sheet. Readiness Review #1: Scoring Sheet Readiness Review #2: Scoring Sheet Readiness Review #3: Scoring Sheet Readiness Review #4: Scoring Sheet Readiness Review #4b: Capture Report Scoring Sheet

Proposal writing is not about finding the magic words that will somehow compel the customer to select your proposal over all other alternatives. It's really about understanding what the customer needs to see to reach their decision and then giving it to them. And yet most companies fail to do this. See also: Customer perspective The most important skill for winning in writing is writing from the customer's perspective. Your proposal should not be about you, it should be about your customer and be written from their perspective. To achieve this, you need to avoid describing yourself and your offering. Instead, you should be putting your offering in context, based on the customer's perspective and not your own. Even when the RFP says to "describe" your company or offering, you should be putting it in the context that the customer cares about. It really helps to learn how to read your proposal the way the customer will. The customer doesn't really care about you, they care about the outcome of the procurement and what you will do for them. The last thing you want to do is to tell a story in your proposal that the customer doesn't care about. If all you do is describe yourself and your offering, then the customer will not care about your proposal. When the customer looks at your proposal, what do they see? If you are not sure about the customer's perspective, here are 33 ways to see things through the customer's eyes. And here are 22 more examples of things the customer might be looking for. And in case you find the RFP confusing, here are 34 reasons it was written that way. If you still lack insight, you can try making your proposal part of a conversation. If you are trying to write a proposal when you don't know the customer, you might have to make some assumptions. Or you can try writing your proposal dangerously or even ignore the customer's vision. The good news is that if you write your proposals from the customer's perspective, then a proposal beginner can beat their more experienced competition. Most proposals are written about the company submitting instead of being about the customer. Lots of companies even write their Executive Summaries backwards and introduce their proposal sections in painfully ordinary ways. It's critically important that you write the Executive Summary from the customer's perspective. You can write a good proposal by simply answering the RFP and describing yourself and your offering. And that is what most companies do. But you can't write a great proposal unless you matter to the customer. In addition, here are three ways to go from writing ordinary proposals to writing great proposals. This is how writing from the customer's perspective turns proposal writing into a competitive advantage.

You can’t write a great proposal unless you have a great offering. Trying to write about something in a great way when you haven’t figured out what that something even is, is just a recipe for failure. You need to start the writing already knowing what your great offering is going to be. In fact, making up a great offering by writing about it is a great way to ensure that you end up with a poor offering that is poorly explained. That’s a major way that companies end up with a low win rate, and it's completely avoidable. Great offerings are not simply made up. They are engineered. Even if you offer a service that is far removed from engineering, the process you go through to design your offering will resemble engineering. Most offering design efforts focus on what should be included in your offering design. However, to engineer your offering, you also need to focus on the process. The specifics of your engineering methodology for capturing the specifications of what you are offering will vary because they depend on the nature of what you are writing. But there are some goals that all offering design efforts have in common. For more information about preparing your technical approach: Technical Approach You should validate your offering design with the customer before you propose it. You are not the judge of whether you have a great offering. Only the customer is. If you want to be sure that your ideas are impressive and reflect the customer’s preferences, you need to test your assumptions by running them by the customer. You can’t do this if you wait until you have the RFP to start designing your offering. You can’t do this if you don’t have a customer contact plan in mind. You need to be able to anticipate the customer's goals and preferences. Having an offering design in mind will help you know how to influence the RFP. What would you like to see in the RFP? Or not see in it? What should guide the customer’s decision? It depends on what you are offering. You can’t influence the RFP with your offering in mind unless you start talking to the customer about it before they start writing the RFP. It’s not enough to start discovering the customer’s requirements that early, you have to start designing your offering that early as well. Offer design is driven by value. What is your value proposition? How do you add value without adding cost? How do you make trade-offs to arrive at the best value? How do you win when the value you add is intangible? Is what you are offering competitive? A great offering design that will cost too much is not a great offering design. If the customer loves it but can’t (or won’t) afford it, it’s not a great offering design. To be the best alternative for the customer, you must consider the price of your offering compared to their other alternatives. Your offering design process also needs to be validated within your company. Is it the best your company can offer? Are the risks acceptable? What is your company’s decision or approval process, and how does that impact the process for your offering design? Finally, your offering design process needs to anticipate the information that will be needed to write a great proposal. Note that I didn’t say you should start writing. That would be a mistake because you can’t tailor the writing to win the RFP until you have the RFP. But you can anticipate the information you will need. You want to be in a position where you can combine all the details about the RFP’s requirements, the customer’s perspective, the evaluation criteria, etc., with the details about your offering. You want to accelerate your Proposal Content Planning so that the writing can reflect everything it needs to, without creating additional editing cycles to fix a narrative that’s not only worded wrong but structured wrong because it didn’t anticipate everything it needed to. Don’t write until you’re ready. But absolutely do design your offering and be prepared when it’s time to describe it in writing. From these items, you can arrange a sequence and milestones. Then you have a structure with which you can address all of the details you want to represent in your offering design, based on the nature of what you offer. When your process and schedule are complete, you not only have a better flow of information towards a proposal that is more likely to win, you have a means to better integrate the talent throughout your organization towards the common goal of winning and growing. Premium Content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers Planning Your Solution vs. Planning Your Content

The problem with best practices is the worst care scenario. When the best practices don't apply or can't be used, they leave fail people by leaving them hanging. Don't worry. We're here to help. See also: Dealing with adversity When you can't do proposals the right way, sometimes you have to do proposals The Wrong Way™. It's one of our favorite subjects to write about, because it's so diabolical and fun to do the opposite of what the best practices say you should do. But we have to give you fair warning: doing proposals The Wrong Way™ can ensure that you lose. Doing proposals The Wrong Way™ is for when surviving the proposal has a higher priority than winning. How often do The Powers That Be come into your office and say “We’ve been looking at this RFP and have decided to submit a proposal.” You look into it and realize that you’ve lost 10 days off of a 30-day schedule, there was no client marketing before the RFP came out, no one knows who the potential competitors are, the customer doesn’t even know your name, and you know you have almost no chance of winning. However, The Powers That Be say you must bid, so you have no choice but to do the proposal The Wrong Way™. Doing proposals The Wrong Way™ is sometimes necessary when you have weaknesses you can't fix, so you turn them into strengths instead. But more often, proposal writers have to figure out how to write about a subject they know nothing about. Sometimes you have to do it that way because you have adverse circumstances, like bad past performance to overcome. Even a good proposal where the best practices mostly apply can have rough edges and insurmountable challenges to overcome. Doing proposals The Wrong Way gives you techniques for overcoming obstacles, coping, or even cheating when the best practices fail you. Just beware the dark side of the force. It is extremely powerful, but also tempting. And it can destroy your soul. But it can also save a proposal, because knowing how to do proposals The Wrong Way can also help you improve their quality. Premium Content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers Recipes for how to do proposals The Wrong Way.

Waiting for a contract before you start developing your customer relationships is doing business development backwards. There are more ways to get ahead of the RFP and start relationship marketing than most people realize. This is a critical first step towards being able to influence the RFP. See also: Relationship marketing A lot of people focus on customer intimacy as something that improves your chances of winning. Plus, it sounds cool. No company is going to say they’re not interested in customer intimacy. It’s pretty easy to convince the executives that it’s something you just have to have. But then you have a problem... How do you achieve customer intimacy? It has more to do with being helpful than it does with being conversational. Relationship marketing is largely about demonstrating your value to the customer by sharing information and insight. To help you get started, here are 82 topics to discuss with your customers. Relationships are vital for winning contracts, only not for the reasons that some people think. Relationship marketing isn't about winning contracts because the customer likes you. Relationships alone aren't enough for you to win contracts. Relationship marketing is about winning contracts by having more insight into the customer's needs, and being able to translate that information advantage into a better proposal. In addition to understanding your customer's needs, you can also gain a competitive advantage by understanding your customer's acquisition and decision process. When you start late and can't write a proposal based on your insight into the customer's needs, one strategy you can use is to make the proposal part of a conversation and approach it like the start of a relationship. Another approach is to share a vision and invite the customer to be a part of it. In many ways you can think of the entire customer relationship as one big conversation. Only you need approach this conversation by trying to be helpful and as a chance to demonstrate your ability to deliver value, instead of as an opportunity to talk about yourself.

It's not enough to track your leads. You need to know what they add up to. You need to know how many resources you'll need to win the pursuit. And at each step along the way, you'll drop some leads. Either they fail to qualify, the customer cancels them, or they all land at the same time and you can't pursue them all. Pipeline analysis blends lead tracking with analytics. A pipeline model is a spreadsheet that shows your leads over time, status, source, and other attributes. The formulas contained in the pipeline can enable you to do "what if" analysis that give you exceptional insight into what drives the success of your business. See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline An assessment of your pipeline can tell you whether you're going to hit your numbers, what your numbers should be, and what it will take to get there. Consistent success requires more than just getting a database of leads and submitting some proposals. But perhaps the most important is that pipeline assessments can tell your future. When you try to answer the questions that determine the success of your business development efforts, most of them require a pipeline model and some time to collect the data. In every pipeline assessment we've done, we've discovered that there's something more important to the growth of your business than lead generation. It's so vital that if you don't have it, you really aren't in business at all. You're just gambling. But collecting the data is tricky. And if you interpret the data wrong, you can fool yourself. But when you do it right, it can also help you better integrate business development, lead capture, and proposal submission. You will also discover that successful growth requires more than just good people. When you structure your pipeline correctly and collect the right data, it can help you fill your pipeline the right way, and greatly contribute to successful growth.

Having a proposal process is easy. Successfully implementing a proposal process is hard. And everyone else is to blame. Okay, maybe you are part of the problem too. I call it the Other People Problem. To create a proposal bigger than yourself, you have to be able to work through other people. And other people are problematic in so many different ways. For something to be a proposal process, it must be something that other people can implement. If a specific person is required for it to function, it is not a process. It's simply that person's way of doing things. A process that other people can implement requires more than just steps. It requires a flow of information. People must not only have steps for creating a winning proposal, but they also have to have information as inputs, know what the step involves, and have a way of knowing if they completed it correctly. It will also help if they know what options they have for various contingencies, in case things don't go as planned or in case circumstances change. And it will also help if people have a way to acquire any skills they might need to implement the process. Nearly every contractor I have encountered says they have a proposal process. And nearly all of them are wrong. This includes billion-dollar companies with tons of documentation about proposals. They have tons of documentation. They have expectations. But they do not have a process. One big reason that most companies do not have the process they claim they do is because they give up during implementation. Working through other people, enabling them to do a complex task without being dependent on any particular person, is extraordinarily difficult. It's much easier to simply direct them. To successfully implement your proposal process, you need to: See also: Successful process implementation Inform people of the goals they need to accomplish Deliver the right information to the right people at the right time Anticipate what information will be required and how it will need to be managed Itemize the information to be handled and what to do with it Enable people to discover how to do what is required Interface with things that are needed but are outside the scope of the process Collaborate with people who are outside your control Enable people to know when they've completed a task successfully Obtain adequate resources Reach appropriate decisions Operate according to schedule Manage the expectations of all stakeholders Adapt to customer-driven and other changes None of this will be possible without the enthusiastic participation of Other People. How you gain the enthusiastic participation of Other People depends on your corporate culture. However, the most important issue is likely to be whether the participants find it easier to follow the process or to perform their tasks in their own way. If following the process will take more effort than skipping it, you're going to encounter resistance. Forcing people to follow your proposal process is counter-productive. The MustWin Process is designed around the flow of information required to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. The MustWin Process is fully documented for PropLIBRARY Subscribers and can be immediately put to work. It is goal driven. And because it helps people realize and achieve their goals, it's easier than trying to create a proposal without it. I can't tell you how many times I've heard proposal specialists go to management wanting to force people to follow their process. This will never work. There's a reason why people aren't following the process, and it's not because they're not interested.

The only thing harder than winning business is having to work with other people to win business. See also: Roles and responsibilities First you've got all the hand-offs, from marketing to business development to capture to proposal to production. Then there is the natural tension between technical staff and those involved in marketing and sales. People in different positions have different perspectives. It only works when people work together. And to work together people need to know what to expect from each other. They need coordination. And all that starts by defining the roles. It's harder than it sounds. For example, when an organization has a proposal manager, they think that part of the process is settled. But sometimes a proposal manager is not a proposal manager. Titles are not enough. Within the MustWin Process we not only define the roles that people play, we do it in a way that makes it easier to allocate your limited resources. We make those roles a flexible part of the process, so that you can maximize the potential contributions of everyone in your organization, whether they are specialists or not. Premium content for PropLIBRARY subscribers Within the MustWin Process, we define roles functionally. This enables each person to wear multiple hats. It also gives you flexibility in how you map the functional needs of proposal development to the staff you have available. Executive Sponsor Business Development Manager Capture Manager Proposal Manager Process Administrator Production Manager Proposal Writers and Subject Matter Experts Graphics/Illustrators

Should you bid everything? Or should you carefully pick and choose what you bid? How should you qualify which leads are worth pursuing? How do you decide which leads are worth bidding? See also: Bid/no bid decisions If you have to justify dropping a lead instead of justifying pursuing a lead, you might want to change the dialog surrounding your bid decisions. To help you know when it's time to rethink your bid/no bid process, we created a list with nine ways to know if your bid decision process needs improvement to help you decide. Then to help you figure out how to change your bid/no bid process, here are six approaches to bid/no bid decisions and ten things they must get right. Lead qualification is key aspect of the pre RFP process and built into the Readiness Reviews. Readiness Reviews also provide a means to achieving effective bid/no bid decisions. The MustWin Process explains how to assess your bid/no bid process, provides major bid/no bid considerations, and because it can't be reinforced enough provides still more reasons to "no bid" a pursuit.

Tips for Site Visits: Just remember that anything you say or do will be observed by your competitors. The site visit should be attended by as many people as are allowed by the customer. Get answers to as many of the Readiness Review questions as possible. The following checklist can help you get the most out of your site visits: See also: Pre-rfp pursuit Gather Intelligence About The Customer ❏ Learn things that they won’t put in writing in the RFP like what their goals or preferences are. ❏ Try to identify who is participating in the procurement and in particular, who will be participating in the evaluation. Gather Intelligence About The Opportunity ❏ Count staff, including both Government and contractor, to help clarify the scope and pricing. ❏ Inventory which equipment is furnished by the contractor and which is furnished by the customer. ❏ Examine documents such as procedures manuals, standards, and policy documents. Request copies of any that look useful. ❏ Come prepared with technical scope questions. You may get different answers in person than in writing. Gather Intelligence About The Competitive Environment ❏ Examine the sign-in sheet to discover who your competitors are. ❏ Request a “Bidders List” or copy of the sign-in sheet. ❏ Find out who intends to bid as a prime contractor and who intends to bid as a subcontractor, while either broadcasting, hiding, or misleading about your own intentions. Influence The Solicitation ❏ Come prepared to make suggestions and influence the solicitation. ❏ Introduce your key staff to the customer face to face. ❏ Be helpful to the customer. ❏ Reinforce how you want to position your company in your customer’s eyes. Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

When the customer issues a draft RFP, you will need to take action. The Capture Manager should inform the Proposal Manager and together they should determine what action items are appropriate. The following checklist can help you plan your response: See also: Pre-rfp pursuit ❏ Is a response required/allowed? ❏ When are comments due? ❏ What is the schedule for release of the final RFP? ❏ Does the release contain the full RFP? ❏ Does the RFP provide all of the information you need to bid? ❏ Do you have questions about any of the RFP requirements? ❏ Are there any RFP requirements that you would like changed? ❏ Are there any RFP requirements that would lead you to cancel the bid if they are not changed? ❏ Does anything in the RFP require changes to your teaming plans? ❏ How can you influence the scope of work, performance specifications, evaluation criteria, or other aspects of the RFP? ❏ Is a bidders list available? ❏ Have you distributed the RFP to all proposal stakeholders? ❏ What can you do to stage your proposal planning documents? If your response includes any requests to change the RFP before it is released, make sure that you provide the text for the changes so that the customer can do a simple copy and paste to implement the change. Before taking action, give some consideration to the customer’s goals in releasing the draft RFP. Did they do it because they want: To verify the specifications are reasonable? To see how many bids they may receive? To give the company they want to win a chance to influence the RFP? To give bidders extra time to prepare to meet the requirements? The reason they released a draft RFP can have a major impact on your strategies for how to respond. Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

At any time prior to RFP release, a customer may or may not release an RFI. Customers request RFIs for different reasons and call them by different names. Knowing how to respond and what the impact is on the process depends on what the customer is trying to achieve by releasing the RFI. When the Government is considering a procurement, but is not sure about specifications, methodologies, or potential bidders, they may issue an RFI. An RFI may provide you with an opportunity to: Make suggestions regarding what they should include in the future RFP if it goes forward. Show that you are qualified, responsive, and helpful. Influence the procurement. Provide information about your company to the customer. You should take advantage of these opportunities, if possible. Sometimes, responding to an RFI is required if you want to respond to the future RFP. When this is the case, it will say so in the text of the announcement. There are other documents that are similar in nature to an “RFI” that customers sometimes release. Two of these include: Sources Sought Notice. Usually used when they know what they want, but do not know who can provide it. Market Survey. Used to learn about a market and its suppliers. If the Government thinks a procurement is a candidate for release as a small business set-aside, they may release a Sources Sought notice to see if they get sufficient interest from small businesses. If enough small businesses respond that they are capable of fulfilling the requirements, the Government may be obligated to make the procurement a small business set-aside. If you are a small business you should take advantage of this and include a recommendation and rationale for making the procurement a set-aside. If you are a large business, you should be on guard against this, and include a rationale for why the Government should not make the procurement a small business set-aside. If you have questions about what they are trying to do, you should call the contracting officer. In fact, you should look for an excuse to call, if only to make contact and boost name recognition. Because it is not (yet) a procurement, you may find them willing to talk and to discuss options, trade-offs, intentions, and other critically important concerns that they will not be willing to discuss once an RFP is released. When responding to an RFI, there are many things that you can try to influence, in order to give you a competitive advantage. These include: See also: Pre-RFP pursuit Technical scope. Try to include requirements that will limit the field of competitors. Specifications. Make recommendations that you can comply with, but which will be difficult for others. Contract Type. If you have a preference, here is your chance to make a recommendation. Contract Vehicle. If you have a contract vehicle that you think is advantageous, recommend its use. Provide sufficient detail (POCs, procedures, contract numbers, etc.) so that they can implement your recommendation. Small Business. If you are a small business and think you can do the work yourself, recommend that it be released as a small business set-aside. If you are not a small business, you may want to point out any aspects of what they need that would be difficult for a small business to provide. Then state your willingness to team with a small business if required. Pricing. Choices made early on can have a big impact on the price. Here is your chance to influence those choices. Past Performance. If you don’t have any Government project past performance, make sure you recommend that they consider relevant commercial experience. Certifications. If you have any relevant certifications, recommend that they become requirements to limit the competitive field. If you don’t have relevant certifications, recommend that they not be required because they would limit the amount of competition, really are not relevant, would increase the price, etc. Methodologies. If there is a particular approach you would take, describe it so that they can make it a requirement. Make sure that you describe your recommendations in language that can be included in the RFP. Keep in mind that if you make a recommendation and it ends up in the RFP, everyone will see it and bid accordingly. Sometimes this will level the playing field and you will lose the competitive advantage. These recommendations are better to save for when you are responding to the RFP, so that you can keep the advantage and stand out from the crowd.

Proposal management is needed when you want to go after contracts that are bigger than yourself and you have to work through

Never pursue a bid just because you can Every bid can’t be a “Must Win.” It’s really hard to break the habit of bidding everything you find. Here is an additional list of reasons to “No Bid” an opportunity: See also: Bid/no bid decisions ❏ You find out about the opportunity when the RFP is released ❏ The customer has no budget or can’t afford what is required ❏ Your competition is cheaper or there are too many competitors ❏ You don’t know who the competition is ❏ You can’t assemble a winning team ❏ There is a requirement in the RFP that you can’t live with ❏ The price risk is too high or the performance risk is too high ❏ You have negative past performance ❏ The customer doesn’t like you or you don’t like them ❏ The customer doesn’t know you or likes someone else ❏ The customer won’t answer critical questions ❏ The opportunity doesn’t fit your corporate strategies or goals ❏ The RFP is either too vague or is too specific ❏ There’s not enough profit in it ❏ You don’t have enough staff available to write the proposal ❏ You aren’t qualified ❏ You have a conflict of interest or intellectual property issues ❏ The customer or the schedule is unrealistic ❏ You don’t have the staff to do the work if you win ❏ You don’t know who the evaluators are ❏ The customer is trying to justify a selection already made ❏ The customer is just fishing or is not serious ❏ Location, location, location ❏ The contract type is not appropriate for the type of work ❏ Your awareness is limited to what’s in the RFP ❏ There is no potential for follow-on work ❏ Pursuing it would distract you from other opportunities ❏ You can’t articulate why you should be the one to win ❏ You don’t know how the procurement fits the customer’s strategic plans ❏ The technology requested is already obsolete Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

You should make a conscious decision whether a pursuit is worth investing in Think about the price of continued investment and not what you have already spent. Discipline is required to “no bid” opportunities that are a bad match, not worth pursuing, or simply questionable. The burden should be on justifying pursuit of the opportunity, and not on cancelling it. Deciding whether to bid an opportunity is not just a matter of guessing how much money you could make or what your chances of winning. Sometimes it’s worth it to bid something you know you’re going to lose money on. At other times it might make sense to walk away from a bid that would be profitable. Bid/No Bid Considerations: See also: Bid/no bid decisions Profitability Return on Investment Strategic value Positioning for future work To gain references Competitive positioning Relation to core competencies and customer base Level of effort to respond (cost/budget) Risk Risk in responding Risk in performing Likelihood of a win Relationship with teaming partners Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

If we had to pick one thing to change that would have the most impact on an organization’s ability to win, it would be how they approach bid/no bid decisions. If you think of them as just being about deciding whether to bid, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity, because they can have a much greater impact on how you bid, than just on if you bid. See also: Bid/no bid decisions Do you know what percentage of bids you drop at each stage or do you never drop anything? Do the things you bid reinforce your strategic plans or ignore them? Do you arrive at RFP release with an information advantage or just knowing what’s in the announcement? Are you tracking metrics that can quantify what’s driving your win rate? Or are you just assuming that conventional wisdom applies to your circumstances? Do leads go immediately into your tracking system? Or do you sit on them until you know you’re going to pursue them before you make them “official?” Do you put every lead you can find into your tracking system, no matter how weak or unqualified they are, to boost your numbers? Can you articulate what it will take to win before you start the proposal, or do you just base it on what is in the RFP? Do you know your win strategies and themes before you start the proposal? Or do you struggle to define your win strategies and themes during the proposal? Do you have a bid/no bid decision, or a bid/no bid process that defines standards and has steps, goals, and criteria as well as reviews? All of these problems are made worse by an ineffective bid/no bid process. It doesn’t even have to be broken. A weakness on any one of these issues can be addressed by improving how you approach your bid/no bid decision process. Another way of saying this is that you can improve you win rate by focusing on your bid/no bid decision process. If you already have a bid/no bid process, then you might want to add, “Has it become watered down over time by people who have learned how to game the system, or by people who just want to be nice and get along rather than make tough decisions?” And, “Is it driven primarily by financial considerations, or is it driven by the need to discover what it will take to win?” A lot of people assume that a bid/no bid process boosts win rates by dropping the low probability pursuits. While this is true, the real way that the bid/no bid process boosts win rates is by making people do the right things to position the company to win. You can change the behavior of people by changing the bid/no bid process. Readiness Reviews give you a simple structure and approach to implement a bid/no bid process that is strategic and positions you to win the proposals that you do decide to bid. By paying careful attention to the bid/no bid process, you can set the stage for continuous improvement in your win rate, and do it through tiny steps instead of a major overhaul. Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

Making effective bid decisions: Every pursuit progress review should be considered a “Bid/No Bid review.” Bid decisions should be about return on investment and not gambling. At each step, the decision should be whether to commit the resources required to get to the next decision point. You can't accurate predict your chances of winning, but you can assess whether you have met the conditions required to bid with a competitive advantage. The burden should be to justify pursuit of the opportunity, and not the other way around. The MustWin Process has many points where it makes sense to pause and consider whether it is worth continuing the pursuit. Think of them as opportunities. They also provide criteria for your consideration under other topics. Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

Hardly any RFPs are actually wired. Even if the customer has some bias, they can usually be stolen away if they get a better offer. Think about how you buy things. Most folks will give someone they’ve done business with for a long time the benefit of the doubt, but if someone has a better product or a significantly lower price, they sometimes make a switch. This is especially true if the relationship has gone stale. You may have no way of knowing without bidding. Use of the word “wired” makes it sound like either it is or it isn’t, when in reality it’s a question of how much. We deal in odds, not in certainties. 14 signs that the odds may be stacked against you None of them are conclusive on their own, and one or more will likely be true on every bid. But if several are true they may add up to something... See also: Bid/no bid decisions Emphasis on evaluation criteria that only an incumbent will be able to get top marks in. For example experience of the staff being bid with obscure or customer specific tools. Overemphasis on the relevance of experience might be another. Emphasis on criteria that are easy to bias. Risk mitigation and quality are good examples. Prohibitions against contacting or rehiring incumbent staff. Unusual labeling of key staff. If all of the staff are considered key and resumes are required for all staff being bid it’s a bad sign. Evaluation practices that are outside the norm for that agency. If pricing is normally evaluated at 40% and on this RFP it’s being evaluated at 10% you have to wonder why. But this also requires you to know what the norms and trends are for that customer. Use of multiple evaluation criteria to address the same thing. For example, requiring that past performance projects include the staff being bid so that in essence staffing is getting counted twice (and acceptable past performance is hard to find). When combined these can make one particular element count out of proportion. Short, inflexible deadlines. On its own it doesn’t mean much, but it can favor a contractor who is expecting the bid. Ambiguity that favors an incumbent. For example, requirement to supply custom software without the requirements being defined. Scopes that aren’t defined. Deliverables that are named, but not described. Statements of Work that require you to know the customer’s undocumented standard operating procedures. So much detail that it’s overwhelming. Page limitations that make it impossible to respond to all of the requirements so that only the preferred bidder will know what to focus on and what they can skip without being branded “noncompliant.” Fixed price proposals where you don’t have enough information to know how long things will take. Unusually brief responses to questions, especially when there are only a handful of bidders or when they are unresponsive to questions they could easily answer. Unusually lengthy answers to questions, often delivered at the last minute without an extension. “Processes” specified in the RFP that can’t be mapped or flowcharted so that only someone who has experience with them can figure out how they work. Return to the Topic Hub for Pre RFP Pursuit, or return to the Starting Point for Discovering What It Will Take To Win.

Helping the customer understand how to get what they need: You’ll be a more effective guide if you understand the customer’s procurement process better than they do. If you don’t influence the RFP, someone else will. Influencing the RFP can be as simple as helping them get the technical requirements right. But why not help them go further and understand what is important in making their selection? If you cannot influence the RFP, it’s a sign that you are not positioned to win. How you seek to influence the RFP depends on your circumstances. Are you an incumbent? Do you have a high-priced offering or a low-priced one? Can you exceed the requirement? How you seek to influence the RFP depends on your bid strategies. Researching an opportunity and influencing it go hand in hand. If you don’t look into the items below, you could be in for a nasty surprise if they go the wrong way. As you seek to learn more about the opportunity, it’s only natural to make recommendations at the same time. If it helps, instead of “influencing” the RFP, all you really need to do is make recommendations, provide guidance, or give feedback to the customer regarding how to conduct a procurement that will get their needs met. Here are some things to consider influencing before an RFP is released: See also: Influencing the RFP Should there even be an RFP? Depending on regulatory requirements and the customer’s rules, there might be other ways to conduct the procurement than through a written RFP. What approach to the acquisition will be the most advantageous to you while enabling the customer to comply with their rules? Number of awards. Some types of procurements lend themselves well to splitting the work up among more than one vendor. Sometimes, but not always, this is done through task order contracts. Sometimes having more than one award will help ensure you get a piece, while other times you want the door closed to potential competitors. For the customer, the decision rests on a combination of risk, competitiveness, and procurement complexity. Budget. What guidance can you provide to the customer regarding how to set their budget? The correct answer is not always “More!” Sometimes an approach (such as one your competitor favors — or far worse, your own) can be ruled out because the budget is too high or too low. Evaluation criteria. What guidance can you provide the customer regarding the most important considerations in selecting a vendor? Can you recommend criteria that match your strengths while simultaneously creating a disadvantage for your competitors? Some customers are open to discussions about what is important in making a selection, while others may not be. Award process. Can you recommend steps the customer should take to issue the RFP and make a selection? How can this process work to your advantage and your competitors’ disadvantage? Pricing structure. If you have a creative approach to pricing, you’d better make sure the RFP allows it. For example, it’s hard to bid a fixed rate for a project when the RFP requires an hourly rate. And vice versa. Depending on your circumstances, you may prefer one approach over another. You should make sure the customer shares your preference. Minimum qualifications to bid. Can you define any qualifications that would eliminate competitors while enabling you to bid? If you can’t eliminate them, maybe you can recommend changes to the evaluation criteria that would enable your qualifications to score better. Resumes. If you can name the staff you plan to bid, you should suggest that the RFP requires the resumes of the staff who will perform the work. If you cannot name the staff, then you may want to recommend that the RFP focus on qualifications and not specific individuals. Project references. Do you have excellent references? Make sure the RFP requires them and emphasizes them in the evaluation criteria. You can also make recommendations regarding how to define what experience is considered “relevant” that can work to your advantage. Scope/Specifications. Do you want the scope open-ended or tightly defined? Is there anything that you want specifically included, excluded, or not mentioned? Quantities. Do you prefer quantities to be high or low? Do you want them specified precisely or left ambiguous? Locations. Is it to your advantage to specify that the work be performed at particular locations? Are there any locations that would cause you difficulty that you would rather not be required? Trade-offs and Preferences. All projects involve trade-offs. The adage goes: “Good, cheap, or fast — pick any two.” What trade-offs work to your advantage? Can you influence either the scope/specifications or evaluation criteria to reflect the trade-offs you prefer? Risks. Are there any risks that you would like defined, not defined, or mitigated by the RFP? Platforms/Formats/Standards. Would specifying a particular platform, format, or standard work to your advantage? Resources. Could a requirement that the contractor have certain resources available work to your advantage? Site visits. Would having or not having a pre-submission site visit work to your advantage? Would making attendance a requirement to bid work to your advantage? Demonstrations. Would a requirement to conduct a pre-submission demonstration work to your advantage? Performance Bond/Insurance. Some RFPs require that the contractor have a performance bond or insurance. Would adding this requirement or raising the amounts eliminate competitors? Schedule. Do you prefer an aggressive schedule for RFP release, project start, project completion, or major milestones? Could the schedule limit the competitive field? Transition. Are their any project start-up, phase-in, or transition requirements that would work to your advantage? An incumbent will typically want little or no transition time while a non-incumbent may need it. Intellectual property. How the RFP addresses intellectual property can have a major impact on the competitive field. For example, if software developed is owned by the customer, it can cause difficulty for off-the-shelf providers. Conflict of Interest. Should a company that participated in the design of the requirements be allowed to bid on the work that fulfills those requirements or is that a conflict of interest? Adding a carefully worded conflict of interest requirement can cause difficulty for companies who have an existing relationship with the customer or who do business in multiple areas. Proposal requirements. Are there any recommendations you can make regarding the requirements for preparing and submitting the proposal? Are there any formats, page limits, or specific things to include/exclude that could work to your advantage?

When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves. They ask questions like “What do we do better?” and “How can we exceed the requirements?” But they are missing a much better way to find their competitive advantages. A competitive advantage is something that will make it more likely the customer will pick you over your competitors. The best way to find a competitive advantage is to discover your customer’s preferences. When the customer follows a formal evaluation process, the best way to find a competitive advantage is to influence the criteria used during the evaluation in your favor. When the customer will award to the lowest price technically acceptable offer, the best way to find a competitive advantage is to discover exactly what they mean by technically acceptable. In every case, what drives the search for a competitive advantage is information. Instead of looking for a competitive advantage, you should look for an information advantage. When people turn inward to look for a competitive advantage, it’s often a sign that they are trying to identify their competitive advantages too late in the game. At the back-end all you have is your own resources so at that stage people tend to look inward for competitive advantages. That is why they ask the wrong questions. Developing an Information Advantage See also: Information Advantage In order to develop an information advantage, the questions they should be asking themselves include: What do we know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that others might not? What can we find out about the customer’s preferences, opportunity, and competitive environment? How do we turn that knowledge into a better evaluation score? Your information advantage should be turned into a positioning advantage. It may result in you developing a better offering, or it may result in a proposal that scores better with the exact same offering. An information advantage can help you make better trade-offs in developing your offering so that you come in at a lower price. Or it could help you target the right features to better meet the customer’s needs. Or it could give your offering strength where your competitors' offerings are weak. When the RFP requires everybody to propose the exact same thing, an information advantage can enable you to show your offering in better alignment with the customer’s goals. When it’s not clear whether the evaluation will focus on price or value, an information advantage can make all the difference. Your bid process should be structured around developing your information advantage. It is far better to start early, when you can take active measures (influencing what’s in the RFP) as well as passive measures (discovering what’s in the RFP). But even when you start late, the process should drive you to make the best use of the information and knowledge that you have. Your business development, sales, capture, and proposal activities and hand-offs can all be thought of as information hand-offs and steps toward adding to what you know and converting it into what you need to say and do in order to win. The data you obtain, the reports you produce, the format you write things down in, how you assess what you’ve discovered, and what you do about it should all be done in ways that make it easy for your data to build and change into an information advantage. If your bid process is just about reports and reviews, it may not be doing everything it can to carry information forward in the best ways to turn it into an information advantage.

Once a request for proposals (RFP) is out, it may be too late to bid win a competitive advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP does not have to be hard, but it does take effort in advance and relationship marketing. Those that put the time and effort into getting ahead of the RFP are able to achieve an information advantage as well as a competitive advantage. See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Recompetes. Targeting recompetes is the easiest way to get ahead of the RFP. But it can take years to pay off. The day a contract is issued, you know the date of its recompete and roughly when the new RFP will be out. You can look up all contracts that have been issued through government and private sector databases. This approach gives you time to build a relationship and collect intelligence before the new RFP is released, but requires some investment and a lot of patience. Most companies squander this opportunity. They “track” the opportunity for years and then somehow don’t have much to show for it when the RFP is released. Forecasts and budgets. Most agencies publish procurement forecasts. They don’t include everything and it can be a challenge to reconcile what’s in the forecast with what actually comes out. Budgets are similar. Not all procurements are large enough to be line items. And reconciling what’s in the budget with what comes out can be extremely difficult. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Because it’s difficult, those who do it can have a competitive advantage. Sources sought notices and Requests for Information (RFIs). These announcements come out ahead of the RFP. Barely. They usually come out about 30 days ahead, usually after all the key decisions have already been made and it’s too late to start relationship marketing or obtain an information advantage. Mostly they give you the illusion of starting ahead of the RFP. But they can give you a chance to finalize teaming arrangements and get your proposal resources lined up — if you don’t mind bidding when you’re at a disadvantage to those who knew about it before the announcement. If you are interested in a pursuit, you should definitely respond to any pre-RFP announcements. But if you are just finding out about a pursuit because of an announcement, it doesn’t really count as being ahead and you should try even harder next time. If you are trying to get ahead of the RFP by looking for announcements, you should consider any of the other approaches listed here. Draft RFPs. Sometimes the customer will release a draft RFP. The good news is you get to see it and possibly even suggest changes. But the bad news is they're already invested in the approach described in the draft and there's a good chance someone else helped them get it that far. You're coming in late, but still may be able to influence things. At the very least it will be interesting to see whether the customer accepts any suggestions you make about the draft. Actually talking to the customer every chance you get. Every chance you get to speak with the customer, whether it’s on site, in meetings, or at trade shows is a chance to be there at the moment they need information or mention something related to a procurement they are preparing for in the future. Enlist any project staff who have contact with the customer. Any project can get your foot in the door. Winning a project, no matter how small, especially if it’s at the customer’s site or includes customer face-time, is a chance to build the kind of relationship that gives you the insight you need to win more. Subcontracting. You can get added to an existing contract, if the prime sees enough value in it to persuade the customer to let them add you. They won’t do this to help a future competitor. Subcontracting may not help you get to know the customer, unless you play a customer-facing role. Network with non-competing vendors. If you can identify companies that work with the customer in areas you don’t compete in, they may be willing to share contacts and information, especially if you can help them in other areas. Social networking. Don’t expect the customer to openly discuss future procurements in a group on LinkedIn. But you might gain valuable insight just paying attention to what questions they ask and what positions they take. You might even be able to ask general questions about preferences and interests too. If you establish an online relationship in which you demonstrate that you add value, you might even be able to land a face-to-face meeting. At a minimum, it's a great way to discover potential customer contacts and the roles they plan. Databases. There are companies that track contracts and recompetes, and do a lot of the difficult forecast and budget analysis for you. They will show you opportunities they anticipate will be coming out in the future. Of course, all their other customers know about them as well. But if you are sharp you can make better use of the information available than your competitors. If you are dependent on databases for all your leads, it's a sign that you're not doing enough of the other things on this list. Content marketing. To prepare an RFP, the customer must do a lot of research to write the requirements. If you set up a resource that helps them define their requirements, understand the trade-offs involved, and facilitate what they need to do, you can proactively offer them access to it (even if you don’t know whether they are planning anything). If you make it easy for them to ask questions and follow up, who knows what you will discover.