Carl Dickson

When I wrote Are you one of these 11 kinds of proposal manager? it was as a fun self-exploration with some interesting implications about the nature of proposal work. If you haven’t read that article, you should start there, because it defines the types discussed below. Most people find that they are more than one type. But what types are appropriate for a given environment and for your future? I’ve seen great proposal managers fail because they clashed with the environment they found themselves in. I’ve also seen people with potential limit their career growth by sticking to their comfort zone. You can use the list below to determine whether you are a good fit for a corporate culture before you join it. You can also use it to get out of your box and improve. What type of proposal manager should you become? See also: Proposal Management The owner of the win. If you define success as winning and not just completing proposals, measure success by how much the proposal function maximizes ROI, want to work on pursuits before the RFP is released, and are willing to work in areas like capture management and pursuit strategy (and can do so without conflict within your company), then this type of proposal manager is an option. If your company has capture managers, then you might focus on articulating pursuit strategy. If your company does not have capture managers, then you might end up filling the void. This approach is most successful in an organization that understands the importance of ROI and the impact on win rate on its success. The producer of what people give you. If you are without support, overwhelmed by the volume of bids you work on, not capable of playing a role in the pre-proposal phase, and not able to influence key factors that determine win or loss (Do you have the right offering? Do have the price to win? Can you accomplish a proposal written to maximize its score?), then you might just want to let other people take on those roles and focus on production. There’s nothing wrong with that. Unless no one takes on the role of winning. The leader who works through others to get what is needed. If you know what other people need to do to accomplish a winning proposal, can coach them through it, and are sufficiently assertive and charismatic to get what you need out of them, then you can be the one who leads the proposal team to victory. If you hate herding cats and no one ever listens to you, you might not want to take this on. The hands-on manager. It’s good to be able to roll up your sleeves, fill gaps, and write what needs to be written or do what it takes to create the proposal. But it’s only good to act on that capability if you have the capacity and aren’t really just in denial about needing to control everything by doing things yourself. If you don’t have the capacity, you might be better off applying yourself to being the leader who works through others by training, coaching, and guiding their efforts. And occasionally demonstrating. The technician. If you are in an environment where you can’t take it all on yourself and people are difficult, you might be able to shift from being the manager in charge of the proposal to the manager in charge of the process and tools instead. You have to be able to position as supporting the people who are doing the proposal, instead of being responsible for getting the proposal done. The perfectionist. Good luck. Everything in a proposal does not impact your probability of winning equally. If you are a perfectionist, you might be prioritizing things that have little or no impact on winning. If you understand what impacts your win rate the most, can effectively prioritize effort accordingly, and simply are an overachiever pushing to maximize win probability, you might just succeed. But a lot of perfectionist Proposal Managers ended up that way not because they are good at winning, but because they are afraid of losing. Sometimes fear can be healthy. The pleaser. If your proposal reviews are dominated by assertive staff who must get their way, you either need to tame them or go along with them. You might not be able to retrain them, assert other ways of doing things, or successfully introduce other considerations. If you are a people person, instead of seeing this as a problem, you might just define success as supporting them since they probably have more experience and authority. The know-it-all. If you know what needs to be done better than anyone else and if you do not assert your will, chaos will reign. You may just need to take over to prevent this from happening. If you see things as a choice between chaos or being assertive and telling everyone else what to do, then you have no choice. You must become this kind of Proposal Manager. In reality that’s not true, but that’s how you see it. And you know best. However, some know-it-alls are also proposal heroes. It is much better to be a proposal professional than a proposal hero. The artist. If you see a kind of beauty in the messiness and complexity of proposals and believe no amount of process is up to the task, too much structure is a bad thing, and proposal quality can’t be defined, you might just have to become a Master of the Art of Proposals instead of a Proposal Manager. Can your creativity win, or will it fail? Or like many people, should you keep your artistic side hidden while at work? The improvisationist. If you think proposals are different every time, are too complex to script out, and you don’t have time for that anyway, then you might need to be the kind of Proposal Manager who makes it up as you go along. Hopefully you have enough of the “know-it-all” in you that have good judgment when doing that. Improvisors are rarely perfectionists. And improvising often requires more skill than planning. If you are not a planner and have the skills, you might be able to pull off being this kind of Proposal Manager. In orderly environments, this type of Proposal Manager might not be a match. But in chaotic environments where every proposal is different, it could be a good capability to have. The enforcer. If you don’t have time to develop relationships or work in an authoritarian culture, you may need management by rules. Rules must be made. And enforced. Failures are a result of people not following the rules. If you don’t have actual authority, you may get by on your force of will. Which type of Proposal Manager do you need? Enforcers and improvisors are polar opposites. Enforcers do better in highly structured cultures and improvisors do better in unstructured cultures. They may not get along if they have to work together. Artists and improvisors may get along well, enjoying complicated environments and unstructured cultures. Improvisors may do well as consultants, parachuting into a new company with every proposal and surviving off the land. Enforcers work best in highly structured cultures and are more likely to get along with know-it-alls and perfectionists. Know-it-alls aren’t going to be a good fit for collaborative, consensus driven environments. While know-it-alls and hands-on managers overlap, hands-on managers are best on proposals that are small enough for them to do it all. The leader who works through others, on the other hand, requires larger proposals and may not do so well on the smaller ones. Similarly the producer of what people give you requires there be enough people to complete what needs to be produced. Pleasers get along with everyone, as usually do technicians. Both are more of supporting roles, and do best on proposals where someone else takes overall responsibility. The owner of the win is necessary for company success. However, the owner of the win really shouldn’t be the proposal manager. It’s just that proposal managers tend to fill voids. This really should be a capture manager role. However, the proposal manager may be able take ownership over turning the vision for winning into a document. Ultimately, the success of the proposal function is determined by its ROI and not the role the proposal manager takes on. Will it blend? We all naturally fit into more than one of the areas above. Which ones we emphasize should depend on the type of proposal, the people we have to work with, the corporate culture, and the expectations the company has for the role of proposal manager. If you work in mixed environments, being able to switch from one type to another has advantages. What you don't want is to be a stuck like a fish out of water, being the wrong type of proposal manager for the environment you find yourself in. But the key question isn't what kind of proposal manager are you, it's what kind of proposal manager do you want to become?

We all know that it’s a best practice to write proposals from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. So when we discuss preparing to win a pursuit or whether we should bid it, why do we usually do it from our own perspective? Why do we focus on our capabilities, our qualifications, what we can offer, and our advantages instead of what matters to the customer? It’s natural to start from self-assessment, but shouldn’t we be looking at whether to bid and how to prepare from the perspective of the customer who will be making the decision whether we win? When we prepare by focusing on ourselves, is it any wonder that most proposals end up being about us instead of being about the customer? Maybe we should be conducting the entire capture process based on the customer's perspective. How to create a capture plan based on the customer's perspective What would it look like if we prepared our capture plan from the customer’s perspective instead of our own? See also: Capture Management Instead of defining what we should offer, it would focus on what the customer will get from what we offer to them. It would minimize the use of “We” or “Our,” and the use of our company name, and instead use the customer’s name as much as possible. The goal is to make the capture plan about the customer and not about you. Doing this can force you away from talking about your greatness and make it easier to talk about what the customer wants. It would present everything from the perspective of what matters to the customer instead of what matters to your company. Everything that you decide or do during the pursuit will have an impact on the customer. Talking about those things in terms of how they matter to the customer will do more to help you win the pursuit than will talking about your own preferences. It would address the customer as a stakeholder, instead of just as a source or target. The goal is to focus on working together with them and what you can accomplish together instead of just how you’re going to get them to buy from you instead of someone else. The only reason they’re conducting a procurement is because they have something they want to accomplish, and focusing on this will help you position as their best alternative. At each step during the pursuit, it would address the value delivered to the customer instead of the value extracted from the customer. Instead of focusing on what you can get them to tell you, what information can you provide to help them? It would be readable by the customer. If the customer was able to read your current capture plans, would they be offended? Would they feel manipulated? Or would they feel appreciated to be considered and involved? How this impacts your probability of winning This isn’t some intangible feel good approach. This is tangibly setting up the proposal to win. Here’s how… People who struggle for what words to use when proposal writing usually struggle even more when also asked to shift from their perspective to the customer’s perspective while writing. The current way we approach the capture process delivers information to the proposal and why you think it’s great, but doesn’t usually do that from the customer’s perspective. The result leads to proposals about your company and its offering instead of proposals about how the customer will be better off by selecting you. It relies on the proposal writers, typically with no customer interaction, to be able to channel the customer’s perspective. When the capture plan is written from the customer’s perspective, then proposal writers start from a much better place to create a winning proposal. If you can't articulate the customer's perspective in a way that's compelling, then you shouldn't bid. If you can’t empathize with the customer enough to recognize and articulate how they see things, then you can’t be competitive against companies that can. Bid/no bid isn’t simply about whether you know the customer. How should what you know impact the proposal and influence the customer’s decision? If you bid because of things that matter to the customer, you will be bidding with a higher win probability than if you simply convince yourself that what you know gives you a sufficient chance of winning to bid. Being able to articulate why you should bid from the customer’s perspective instead of your own should be a critical lead qualification criterion and a primary bid/no bid consideration, instead of something left for the proposal stage to figure out. Defining your offering according to the customer’s perspective during development will produce a superior offering to one that is developed according to your own perspective and then described in a way that you think might reflect the customer’s perspective afterwards. Doing these things will turn your capture plan into something more than just a status tracking and preparation assessment tool. It will turn your capture plan into a vital part of winning. It will set your proposal writers up for success in a way that gives your company a competitive advantage. No one will be scratching their heads for “themes” at the last minute and accepting watered down claims the customer will ignore anyway. Instead, proposal writers will take the customer’s perspective from the capture plan, update it with the specifics of the RFP, and put it in the context of the evaluation criteria. They will have what they need to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective and make it matter to the customer more than any other alternative. And it will be based on a corporate-wide assessment of the customer instead of some writers working in isolation. Can you make the change? I find it interesting that this approach doesn’t require much, if any, change to the steps in your process to implement. It requires that you change who your capture plan is about instead of what goes into it or the steps in preparing it. It simply requires changing from talking about you and your preparations, to talking about the customer and what they’ll get from your preparations. If you can’t make that shift in the capture plan, how do you expect to be able to make it in the proposal? The only impediment to taking this approach right now is overcoming inertia and people's resistance to change. It doesn’t require a new process. It just requires changing writing styles and assessment considerations. And people hate changing their writing style or how they review things. You have to decide whether the effort to overcome that inertia is more important or whether the potential increase in your win rate is more important.

When you first get thrown into the job of being a capture manager, you’ll get told plenty of things you need to do. What you might not figure out for years is how to approach things so that you can successfully accomplish all those tasks well enough to win. Here are 8 areas that you can focus on that will help you be a better capture manager and increase your win rate. See also: Capture Management Focus on the areas where you are not comfortable. As a capture manager, most of your losses will come from the areas where you are weak, and not the areas where you are strong. You can become a better capture manager by doing such a good job of overcoming your weaknesses that they become your strengths. You can achieve that through research, training, delegation, or whatever else it takes. Get outside your comfort zone, because that is what’s required to win. If you don’t know what your weaknesses are, then start there. Every capture manager has weaknesses because the job of being a capture manager is impossible. If you can’t thoroughly channel the voice of the customer, then no one will. Only the customer gets to decide whether your proposal is any good. Every decision you make and every word in your proposal should be based on being able to think like the customer. If you don’t bring that to the proposal, then no one else will. Others will have customer contact. But they won’t be focused on understanding how they’ll make this decision. Making your own opinions and the voice of your company secondary to the voice of the customer is vital for being able to capture the win. Focus on having an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. But who will interpret it better? Who will have more insight? Who will know what matters the most? An information advantage is the best competitive advantage. Your ability to conceive of the right strategies will depend on developing your skills for gathering the information needed to gain the insight required. Make it your job to win the proposal. You may have a proposal manager to lead the effort. You might even have an entire proposal department to support the effort. But you should come into that process knowing more about what it will take to win than anyone else on the planet except for the customer. The proposal department will have the RFP and their process. They’ll handle production. But you need to drive the strategies and themes that will result in the win. Everyone else who contributes will just be guessing. Improving your ability to discover and articulate what it will take to win will improve the work of everyone else who contributes to the pursuit. Be constantly aware of the critical path to winning. If win or loss depends on an evaluation that’s scored, where will you earn enough points to win? And how? Will the strategies and themes you developed before the RFP was released still earn your proposal the highest evaluation score? If winning requires capabilities or qualifications that your company doesn’t have, where will you find them? What is the critical path to winning your proposal? Improving your understanding of the RFP evaluation process and how the evaluation criteria will be applied to your proposals will help you write a proposal that is optimized to get the highest score. Don’t forget to sell inside your own company. You need resources. You need approvals. You need a budget. You need to delegate. You need effort. Don’t expect people to do that just because they are supposed to. You not only need to sell to the customer, you need to sell to your own company to convince it that the pursuit is worth investing in. You need to convince people that their efforts will be worthwhile. You need to convince them that they want to be a part of it. Improving your ability to make people feel excited and inspired when they make their contributions will pay off. Sell to them like you depend on them to win. Learn how to calculate the price to win. What will the winning price be and can you hit it? Just like you shouldn’t rely on the proposal department to be responsible for winning it, don’t expect the pricing department to know the customer’s budget and competitive pricing for this type of procurement. Improving your ability to calculate price to win will help you make better trade-off decisions throughout the process and will substantially increase your probability of winning. Learn the customer’s acquisition process better than they know it. What step are they on? What comes next? What information do they need to take that step? How should you interpret what it says in the RFP? What will they do with your proposal when they receive it? The more you know about the customer’s acquisition process in general and their evaluation process in particular, the better your predictions and decisions will be.

When you receive an RFP, study the evaluation criteria, how they relate to each other, and how they add up. Each RFP is different. Sometimes the customer is focused on experience, and sometimes on qualifications. Sometimes on capabilities, and sometimes on approaches. When they organize the evaluation criteria by proposal sections, you may find insights that tell you what it will take to win. It is easiest to do this when the RFP evaluation criteria are point scored. But even when the RFP uses strengths and weaknesses or other subjective criteria you can still find relationships in the criteria language. For example, do they evaluate your proposed approaches in terms of experience, procedures, management, outcomes, or something else? What do they evaluate your management, experience, staffing, and other sections in terms of? Are there any overlaps? What you are looking for are: See also: RFPs Things that get double counted because they show up in more than one criterion. For example, in addition to criteria for evaluating your experience, do they also evaluate your capabilities, approaches, staffing, and/or management in terms of your experience? This could make experience be what determines your win or loss, as well as the primary focus of your proposal writing. You would talk about everything in the context of your experience with it. If, however, in every criterion they mention quality then everything you say should relate back to how you deliver quality, even your experience write-ups. Criteria that when added together carry so much weight that they basically determine the winner. If management and experience together are more than the technical approach and price together, then the critical path for winning is having strong, proven management approaches, as evidenced by and based on your experience. If, on the other hand, the technical approach and staffing plan outweigh the management approach, experience, and pricing, then it’s all about having the right people who know how to do the work. What they left out. Did they ask for a management approach? Or a staffing, quality, or risk mitigation plan? What about corporate description, experience, or references? Was it a simple mistake, or does it indicate an area that they just aren’t that concerned about? Can you gain points by filling the gap or will talking about it be a waste of time that won’t impact your evaluation one bit? The critical path to winning is the shortest path to gaining the most points. It tells you what your priorities for time, effort, and page space should be. It tells you what the content should be when you’re discussing why you made the choices you made and are proposing what you offer. The critical path is the difference between writing about the topics and writing about the topics in a way that gets you the top score. The best way to win proposals is not to be all things good in every way possible. The best way to win proposals is to focus on being good in the ways that maximize your evaluation score. Knowing how to accomplish this starts with finding the critical path to winning.

See also: Proposal Management Take a step back from proposal mechanics. Becoming a better proposal manager has more to do with understanding the goals and what’s required for people to improve their performance than it does with making the trains run on time. A conductor doesn’t just keep the musicians in synch. A conductor helps them be more than the sum of their individual parts. Here’s how to apply that to proposal management: Decide on what kind of proposal manager you want to be. You may not realize it, but there are many different kinds of proposal manager. Or maybe it’s more like competing priorities for different corporate goals. Is your priority to write and produce proposals by yourself, produce the work of others, ensure that proposals are error free, do proposals as cheaply as possible, do proposals with as little effort as possible, submit as many proposal as possible, win the proposals you submit, build the infrastructure needed to do a lot of proposals, or something else? Rank your priorities in order. Then drop all but the top few because you’ll never get to them. You can’t be everything to everybody. Sometimes focusing brings clarity. So focus all of your effort onto the ones you kept. What does that look like? What kind of people, process, and tools are required? Define your goals and the goal of each action item. A goal driven proposal process is better than a step driven proposal process. Goals can be flexible regarding how they are accomplished. Goals imply how to define success. Without goals, a proposal process tends to become a brain-dead attempt at automation that is doomed to failure. If you can’t articulate the goals, then you don’t have any and aren’t trying to achieve them. If you can articulate the goals, you can improve performance. Improve how you communicate expectations. Proposal management is mostly expectation management. And you can always improve expectation management. Communicating expectations is a combination of diplomacy and education. It helps to have training materials diplomatically named anything other than “training” like checklists, handouts, guides, or cheat sheets. Any expectations left unsaid will come back to haunt you. Remember that expectations flow in both directions and can be very different between different stakeholders. The earlier you get involved, the better. But the way you get involved matters. You can help people understand what information you need to prepare a winning proposal. Look at every step that happens before the start of the proposal, going all the way back to marketing and strategic planning. What things could be done to increase win probability when it gets to the proposal stage? That’s what you need to define and help people accomplish. Help other people to help you. A more precise way to say this is help other people do their jobs better so they can bring you what you need to do your job better. But that’s not nearly as catchy. If you want people to give you what they need, you have to first help them understand what it is that you need, and then help them understand how to fulfill it. They’ll be even happier if you just do it for them, but you can’t do everything. They’ll have to be satisfied with training, facilitation, guidance, and expectation management. However, the more that you do to help them, the more likely you are to get what you need for the proposal. And coincidentally, the more they will think you’re a great proposal manager! The best communication requires no effort. Great communication is not the same as more communication. Other than notifications, the best communication should not require any special action. Every interaction with the proposal should bring awareness of what stakeholders need to know. It should be in front of them, ever present, just what they need in that moment, without having to ask. Now go build that. One small piece at a time will do. Every interaction should bring clarity and preparation for what comes next. Try making it feasible to work on a proposal without ever talking to people and without anyone having to ever ask a question or go look something up because it’s already there. They’ll ask anyway, and you’re not really trying to eliminate questions, but the more you reduce the need, the smoother the experience will be for your stakeholders. Streamline the flow of information. Every activity during proposal development requires taking information, assessing it, and improving what’s there. Every activity can be facilitated. The delivery of information can be improved (faster, lower level of effort, better quality), assessment tools (as simple as a checklist) can be created, guidance for how to improve it or desired outcomes (quality criteria possibly presented as a checklist) can help. Streamlining and improving the flow of information during a proposal not only reduces the level of effort, it improves the quality of what gets produced. In other words, it improves your win rate. In addition, it puts the proposal manager in the role of helping people instead of being the deadline cop or process police.

The purpose of this article isn’t to tell you how to be an executive. You already know that. And if you don’t, you’ll be hearing soon from all the needy voices. The purpose of this article is to share some insights and lessons learned related to business development, capture, and proposals that can help you grow your organization and be more prosperous. This article is not about the details of those functions, but what those functions need from their executive sponsor. This isn’t obvious stuff, it’s not generic rules of thumb, and it’s usually not taught. So hopefully there’s a pony in there somewhere for you. See also: Organizational Development Make who does what clear. Don’t leave it up to your people to figure out roles and responsibilities by themselves. People without authority have no way other than asking nicely for other people to do things that are critical to success. They have no way to resolve other people’s priority conflicts. They know what needs to be done and how to do it. But they need you to make it clear who is responsible and what their priorities should be. When you leave an issue like billability vs proposal support unresolved, you’ll get watered down proposals. Every time. Your staff won’t consider alternatives that are easy for you. Your staff likely do not have the authority to compel people to do what might be necessary. With your experience and authority, you probably won’t need to use compulsion. In any event, clarity in roles and responsibilities prevents a lot of wasted time and reduced quality. Don’t break things. When you are involved, show up to reviews prepared, complete your proposal assignments on time, and follow the process. If you don’t set the example, your people will also find reasons to make exceptions instead of working together. If it’s too much of a pain for you to show up prepared and do things the right way, your staff will emulate that. On the other hand, when they hear you citing the RFP from memory, questioning interpretations, and matching strategies to what it will take to get the highest score, they’ll emulate that instead. When you make exceptions for yourself, you don’t just set a bad example, you break things you depend on. Explain resource trade-offs. Your staff may not understand it, but of course every function is understaffed. Staff are the biggest cost in a service company. One of the few ways to run a services business into the ground is to overstaff. They don’t realize this. They need to understand that it’s not just about profitability for shareholders, but that each new hire costs as much as a raise for 20 or so people. When they know the trade-offs that have to be balanced, it’s easier for them to understand why they can’t have everything they’d like to have. And when combined with creating a culture of growth, you can give them a light at the end of the tunnel. Create a culture of growth. Your company’s mission statement is probably wrong and someone should fix it. The goal isn’t to be the “best at what you do” or whatever similar noise it currently proclaims. Your mission is to create opportunity. And the source of all opportunity comes from growth. Growth is like the tide that raises all boats. Your company’s growth brings new benefits to your customers, new positions for staff, salary increases, and increases in the size of the overhead pool. What happens without growth is not pleasant to talk about. There are precious few opportunities for raises or new hires when contracts are locked in for years. Opportunity beyond the status quo only comes from organic growth and winning new contracts. Every single person in your company contributes to that growth. And every single one of them benefits from it. But for too many of them, it’s just an abstract concept instead of an everyday reality. They don’t realize just how personal winning new business is. Building a culture of growth starts by making them aware and then making prosperous growth everyone’s mission. Explain your approach to bid/no bid decisions. Similar to resource trade-offs, your business development, capture, and proposal staff also need to understand that they’re not wasting their time pouring effort into a proposal for a pursuit that should never have been bid. If you can’t come up with anything more inspirational than “we can do the work” or “I think we have a chance at winning it,” you might want to reconsider the criteria you’re using to make bid decisions. Provide good, solid, inspiring reasons why each pursuit is worth the effort. Breaking into new customers in new markets may require bidding pursuits with lower odds of winning. Staying in front of a key strategic customer might make bidding something you don’t expect to win worth it. Instead of that being a signal to your staff that they can slack off, it should be a call to submit something competitive to improve your future chances of growth. Help them be goal driven. Help them develop a sense of purpose and accomplishment for all of their efforts. As a bonus, articulating your rationale will help you make better bid decisions in the future. Show that you understand win rate math and ROI economics. Your organization’s win rate determines its success more than any other metric. And yet, it is so difficult to properly calculate your win rate that it can be meaningless to compare win rates. What makes win rate so important is that it is crucial for understanding ROI. And understanding ROI is critical for measuring growth. You should become an expert in understanding win rate math and ROI economics in order to make data driven decisions about things like the proposal process and staffing. It is also good to teach it to your staff so that they understand how to measure growth and make better resource allocation decisions during pursuits. As much as process mechanics, having a common understanding of these issues is what will make your team work like a team. They add up to the combination of purpose and situational awareness needed for people to do a better job of working together to win.

Your proposal should not be about you. Compare these two approaches to proposal writing: Our approach is to do this and then we do that. We can do this well because we are so qualified. You will get all this and as a result things will be much better for you and it will be easier for you to do so much more. If you’re talking to a salesperson about something you need, which approach do you want to hear? What does the customer really want? How should you say things in a proposal so that it's written from the customer's perspective? Here are some techniques you can use to transform your proposal writing from being all about you to being about something the customer wants to have: See also: Customer Perspective Make it all about what the customer will get. The only reason the customer reads your proposal is to find out what they are going to get, and then what they have to do to get it. So make the proposal about what the customer will get and how good it will be for them when they have it. When writing, instead of asking “how will I do this” ask “what will the customer get from what I do?” Minimize “We” or “Our,” and the use of your company name. You use “We,” “Our,” and your company name too much in your proposals. Pick a page at random. Highlight them. See just how many there are. Look closer and you’ll see that every action is taken by one of them. Worse, you’ll see that your own qualifications, attributes, and actions are usually the result of what you do. This means the proposal is about you and not about the customer. You do this too much for editing to fix. Try to get ahead of the problem. Think twice before ever writing them again. Get conversational. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who only talked about themselves? Did they barely acknowledge when you spoke and then start talking about themselves again? Did you feel like you didn’t even need to be there? If you can have a conversation where you give the other person a chance to be the focus, then try doing that in writing. Even though the other person is not physically present, you can still put the focus on them when writing. You’ll need a little empathy, but you can write as if you're having a conversation about things that matter to them. Like a good friend, discuss what they are trying to accomplish, how to improve it, and how great things will be for them when they get there. Dare to use the word “You.” In copywriting, it’s considered a best practice to talk directly to the reader and say how “you” will benefit from the product or service. In proposal writing, people suddenly become afraid of being informal. But if it measurably makes copywriting more effective, why shouldn’t it work in proposals? Its effectiveness will depend on the customer’s culture and your relationship with them. But using the word “you” and talking directly to the customer is so rare it’s practically a differentiator. Your proposal will read differently from the other proposals. You will stand out. You must stand out if you want to win consistently, so instead of being afraid of it, try embracing it. Use the customer's name to force you to talk to them instead of about yourself. You have so much to tell them about what you can do and how you do it that it’s easy to forget that it’s really about the customer. So if you can’t use “you” then use their name. Use their name more than your own. But don’t just name drop. Use their name with purpose. Use their name as the focus of what each sentence is about. Use their name instead of your own to trick yourself into making the proposal about them. If you can’t talk about the customer, then talk about results that matter to the customer. This is easier, and while it’s not as effective as talking directly about the customer and what they will get, it’s better than talking about yourself. And if you are writing about something that doesn’t have a significant result or deliverable, then write about why you do it that way and what matters about it. The customer cares about the things that matter. If you want your proposal to matter to the customer, then you must write about what matters. Avoid passive voice. Passive voice hides who does the action in a sentence by making the subject of the sentence receive the action instead of performing it. Here’s an example: “The project will be performed according to the management plan.” Who is performing the action? Who is the sentence about? Passive voice not only hides that you are doing the good things you are proposing, it makes it harder to talk about the customer. Here’s a much better example of proposal writing, “Our project team will be guided by the resource allocation, procedures, and schedule documented in our project management plan so that the fulfillment of every one of your requirements is fully accountable and so that you receive all of the benefits.” Make the customer the focus in each sentence. Make the customer the noun that receives the action and not something neutral. Make the customer the reason why you do things. Don’t make your qualifications about you. Make your qualifications about what the customer will get. Don’t talk about how you have experience, talk about how the customer will be better off as a result of your experience or why your experience matters. Reverse your roles. Most companies would not accept their own proposals. To test this, instead of playing the role of the proposal writer, play the role of the proposal evaluator. Don’t accept all those claims to greatness just because your company made them. Pretend to be a cynical customer who has been burned in the past and expects vendors to prove their claims. Read what you see in your proposal and ask yourself if that’s really an organization you’d like to work with, when you have so many others to choose from.

See also: winning Sometimes why you are proposing something says more about the value than a description of what you are proposing. Simply claiming value is both easy and meaningless. How many times has every company bidding claimed to be the “best value?” Substantiating your value proposition is where you win or lose. While your approach delivers the value, the reason why you chose that approach is what explains and substantiates the value in what you are offering. “We deliver” or “Our approach delivers” Follow this simple phrase with what the customer gets from your approach. Make sure it addresses why they should they care and what matters about it. And make it better, faster, less expensive, etc. “As a result” or “The result is” What happens as a result of what you are proposing? That is where the value delivery occurs. Don’t assume that whatever happens “as a result” is obvious and don’t downplay it. Anytime you have the opportunity to say “as a result” you have an opportunity to talk about the customer getting something from you that matters. Something of value. Extra credit if it’s a differentiator. “In order to” This is an easy transition that lets you explain why your approach is so great. Take advantage of it. Don’t just give them a simple explanation. Give them the reasons to accept your proposal, without having to say “Pick me! Pick me!” “So that” This is another transition that provides the reason why you are proposing what you are proposing. We take this approach so that… “We bring” This is a way to cite your advantages as part of what you are offering. Do you bring qualifications, experience, better results, value, more resources, or something else that matters? “We offer” What do they get from you? What are you offering in your proposal? Make sure that you go beyond a simple claim and offer something that matters to them. “Because of” or “Because we” The word “Because” can be used to explain or as a synonym for what will result. Either way it can help you transition to the value in what you are proposing. And don’t be afraid to start a sentence with it. Because when you do, you have an opportunity to explain the value the customer will get. “What’s more” Used rarely, but that only increases its dramatic impact. It sets up the value delivery as a bonus, as something that exceeds the requirements, and as a potential differentiator. “More” is what you need to beat the competition. Combinations Stack them up. It’s a great way to be compelling without being too self-promotional because you’re giving the reasons, the explanations, and the substantiation for your ability to give them what they asked for. We bring… as a result… We offer… so that… The result is… We deliver… in order to... Because we… the result is… Our approach to… is… so that… and as a result… If you just give the customer a description of your offering without the rationale for why it should matter to them, you’ll be leaving out what they really need to make their decision. You don’t have to overtly sell. But you do need to explain. You need to help the customer make their decision. A proposal is a decision support tool. If you help your customer make their decision, they’ll appreciate you for it. Think and write in pairs For everything you describe in your proposal, there needs to be something else. It can be an insightful or beneficial addition, or it can be an explanation. Write in pairs. Whatever you need to say to fulfill an RFP requirement should also: Be an explanation Add value Have a benefit Achieve, deliver, or produce something that matters Be something you chose for a reason that matters Differentiate your proposal from your competitors Use the language of the evaluation criteria. When trying to articulate your explanations or value optimize your wording to score highly during the customer’s evaluation, don’t just use phrases like these delivered in pairs to sound beneficial. Use them to add up to the highest evaluation score.

These are some of my “go to” ways of expressing value, focusing on benefits, and differentiating during proposal writing. When I’ve decided what to write to achieve RFP compliance and am pondering how to take it further and win in writing, they often come to mind. Winning by giving the customer something more See also: Examples The following phrases work like formulas that combine things in ways that raise the bar and help make your proposal more persuasive and more competitive. They help you establish that your proposal is the customer’s best alternative. They can be used when discussing your offering. Or your qualifications. They can be used to introduce benefits or show differentiation. They enable you to take what you have to say and turn it into something more, something that can win. In addition to... This phrase lets you meet the requirements and then take them further. It can be used with features that go beyond the specifications or to introduce the benefits that go along with the features. Examples: In addition to [doing what you asked for] we [do something more]. In addition to delivering on time, we make sure the parts are operating properly. Not only... This phrase is great for introducing unexpected benefits. Examples: Not only does our approach [do what you asked for], but it also [surprising result or benefit]. Not only does our approach meet the schedule, but it also achieves much greater efficiency and lowers costs. We also... This phrase is for when you want to win by doing more. This can be by adding another attribute, feature, benefit, or result. Example: We also double check to make sure that… We combine... Use this phrase to communicate that the total is greater than the sum of the parts. By combining things you can turn them into something more. Examples: The way we combine our [attribute|approach|qualification|feature] with our approach to [attribute|approach|qualification|feature] results in [an even better result]. The way we combine our process documentation with our experience and lessons learned results in lower risk performance. On top of… This phrase is another way to win by doing more than expected. It is often used in the conclusion after you’ve proven your point to raise the bar even further. Examples: On top of [all that] we [something that differentiates and makes your proposal superior]. On top of our ability to meet all of the specifications, our approach collects valuable metrics and measurements to improve efficiency and support making data-driven decisions. As well as… This phrase is great for pointing out attributes the reader may not consider at first. Examples: Our [approach|offering] delivers [result of your solution] as well as [less obvious result]. Our proposed staffing delivers the required skillsets, as well as providing cross-training to increase flexibility, improve our ability to handle surge requirements, and lower risks. Combinations Combinations of these phrases can be fun to pile on. They can be over the top in a good way, although I wouldn’t take them too far. Then again, maybe I would if it raises the competitive bar. Here are some examples of combinations: Not only do we bring [attribute, qualification, or feature], we also [bring|have|will|are able to|etc.] In addition to achieving [compliance], our approach will also [benefit beyond compliance] Not only do we [do everything], but on top of that we [features of your differentiated approach] Give your proposals a one-two punch Don’t simply describe things in your proposal writing. Remember that “why” you are proposing what you are can be more important than “what” you are proposing. Then think about what matters regarding what you have to say. What impact could it have for the customer? Why should the customer care about it? Then use the phrases above to combine your simple statement about what you are proposing and turn what you are proposing into something that matters. Give the customer what they asked for (one), and then give them something more (two). That’s what the phrases above set you up to do. Every sentence in a proposal can have those two parts. It’s a one-two punch that can knock your competitors out.

It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Most proposal processes are created during proposal development. This is a bit like building the airplane while trying to fly it. But needs must. I’ve often been asked to help a company with a proposal only to find that there basically was no process and I’d have to make one up while doing the proposal. Having written most of what you see on PropLIBRARY makes it easier for me to do this. But it also gives the insight needed to help others in similar circumstances. Don’t try to do everything below on the first day. Or even the first proposal. If you only do the first item that might be enough for now. But over time, proposal by proposal, you’ll want to address the rest. They get harder because they reach places that require organizational approaches instead of an individual one. Working through other people is hard. But it helps if you do it in a well-structured way that manages expectations. Here’s where to start and where to take it from there. Where to start See also: Making Proposals Simple Build your proposal process around your reviews. Each stage with a deliverable, whether it’s a plan or a draft, should end with quality validation to ensure that it reflects what it will take to win the proposal at that stage. In practice, proposal assignments can be thought of as completing tasks in order to perform these reviews. A great way to quickly launch a process is to define the number of quality validation reviews and then plan what needs to happen in order to pass them. Think of everything you need to have at the completion of each stage, then plan reviews to validate that everything is appropriately accomplished so that they build on each other to result in a winning proposal. Implement a before, during, and after model. Define how to prepare for each review, how to conduct each review, and how to recover after the review. This is a quick and easy way to turn a set of targets into a plan for hitting them. Discover what it will take to win and build your proposal around it. While the structure of the process is built around the reviews, the process is driven by what it will take to win. What it will take to win defines the standard by which priorities should be set and decisions made. The challenge is that what it will take to win must be discovered for each bid and can change everything else about the proposal. Then mature your process Plan proposal content before you write it. The guidance you give your proposal writers has a huge impact on what shows up in the draft. Thinking things through by writing draft after draft is a great way to see the level of effort explode and lose the proposal anyway. Build your process so that preparing a proposal content plan makes it easier to write the proposal and pass the reviews than it is to jump straight into writing. Implementing proposal quality validation. Achieving proposal quality requires having specific quality criteria to validate instead of subjective draft reviews. This is how you make proposal reviews more about quality than just draft cycles. Define roles functionally. Everything that needs to be done to win, needs to be done on every proposal. This remains true whether you have two people working on the proposal or 200. Define the roles that people play functionally so that you can assign more than one role to a person. Each person becomes responsible for fulfilling all the expectations for every role assigned. But at least you know what you should be trying to accomplish. Improve stakeholder interaction and how you work through other people Defining inputs, handoffs, and collaboration. The better the job you do of defining what people need, the more likely they are to get their needs fulfilled so they can contribute to the proposal effectively. Reach back before the proposal starts. Don’t let a proposal lose before it starts. Make sure that what will be needed to close the sale with a winning proposal is delivered to the proposal. Define expectations instead of steps. Proposal development has far more to do with decisions, and interactions than steps. Expectations are what guides decisions and interactions. Each step in the process can have many expectations. If you want them fulfilled, focus more on the expectations than the steps. Keep in mind that expectations flow in both directions and both need to be fulfilled in order to achieve success. Go beyond the process Address culture. If everyone doesn’t share the same goals and can’t resolve their priorities based on the same goals, the proposal will encounter friction that will lower your win probability. Educate people about how growth is the primary source of opportunity within a company and that winning proposals is really how the company creates jobs, opportunities for promotion, and buys the things people need. Everyone in the company is a proposal stakeholder. A corporate culture that explicitly recognizes this helps reduce proposal friction, set expectations, and get everyone on the same page with compatible goals and priorities. Measure and track ROI. If you want your company to stop treating proposals like an expense, you need to learn to speak the language of ROI and manage the proposal function accordingly. Embrace advanced proposal management. Advanced proposal management requires going beyond The Process. It requires that we integrate elements of organization, resourcing, the flow of information, performance, quality validation, and culture that are required to be successful. Once you think you have a mature process, advanced proposal management is how you take it even further.

The way we think about proposal efficiency has a major impact on the results we achieve. Instead of managing proposals as a cost to be minimized, we should manage them as an investment. Let’s start with how NOT to measure proposal efficiency When we think of proposal efficiency as doing more proposals with less effort, we ignore ROI and focus on lowering costs using an equation like: See also: ROI total cost of proposals divided by the number of submissions total value of wins divided by the total number of submissions total value of wins divided by the cost of all proposals number of submissions divided by the number of proposal staff total value of wins divided by the number of staff The first equation shows you the cost of each proposal. This is the most common way people think of proposal efficiency and yet it completely ignores ROI. This is a huge problem, because winning proposals typically return orders of magnitude more than their cost. As we’ll see, there are much better ways to measure proposal efficiency. The second equation shows you the value of each proposal. The value of each proposal is an important metric, but it does not tell you anything about how to improve. In fact, it implies that improvement comes from bidding more, but as we’ll see, this is not the best way to maximize ROI. The third equation shows the ratio of dollars won to dollars spent on proposals. If it’s not greater than one, your proposals cost more than your revenue. That should never happen. Your revenue should be much greater than the cost of your proposals, because when you take all of the cost of fulfillment into consideration, including both direct and indirect costs, you could still operate at a loss even though revenue is greater than the cost of your proposals. This is a good metric to track, but it tells you more about what you are pursuing than how well the proposal function is doing. The fourth equation shows you the average number of proposals prepared by your proposal staff. It’s a measure of volume. We tend to think of productivity in terms of volume. But it tells you nothing about value. A single win that doubles the company’s revenue can be much better than a hundred wins that increase revenue 20%. Which staff performed better? The fifth equation shows you the average value returned by your proposal staff. It can be used to approximate your ROI. It would be more accurate to compare revenue (or even better profit) to the salary cost of the staff. But headcount can be used as a crude estimate if you don’t have the salary data. This gets you closer to ROI, but still tells you more about what you are pursuing than whether the proposal function is efficient. Win rate matters A big problem with the five equations above is that they ignore the win rate. They focus on submissions. When you do that, you tend to reward doing lots of proposals instead of winning them. Win rate should be plural. You need to calculate win rate by the number of submissions/wins and well as by the value of those submissions/wins. You also may want to compute separately proposals in which you are a subcontractor vs being a prime contractor, those for current customers vs new customers, those for particular contract vehicles, different customers, and other distinctions. Two basic equations for win rate expressed as a percentage are: (Number of wins divided by the number of submissions) multiplied by 100 (Value of wins divided by the value of submissions) multiplied by 100 It’s better to focus on wins than submissions. But if you’re trying to track performance you need both. Win rate tells you how you did. But it doesn’t take the cost of proposals into consideration. A better way to define proposal efficiency We should start thinking of proposal efficiency as: (value of submissions * win rate) divided by the total cost of the proposals The win rate used should be the first example above, based on the number of submissions and wins. This equation shows the ROI — the amount won for the amount expended. Suddenly the most important number becomes your win rate and not your cost. Without increasing cost, an increase in win rate dramatically improves ROI. A cost increase that improves your win rate likely improves ROI more than the cost increase. ROI is the “efficiency” that matters. Here's why… Example 1 Take 100 submissions with a total value of $100 million at a win rate of 20%, produced at a cost of $300,000. This is a high-volume proposal shop. You can see they have a team of three people submitting about two proposals per week. The staff are making somewhere around $60,000/year depending on the company’s overhead and benefits. The cost of the staff used should be their fully loaded cost. $100,000,000 in submissions * 22% / $360,000 = $61.11 won for each dollar spent If they increased their win rate to 30% the amount won for each dollar spent would be $100. This is a 33% increase. If they increased their win rate to 35%, they’d increase revenue by $13,000,000. That’s a 63% improvement in revenue for the same number and value of bids. Win rate is that important. But how would they increase that win rate? Maybe they’d need to hire an additional person. This might increase their cost to $480,000. But if they did, their ROI would still go up a bit to $62.5. This is important. They spent more, but also increased their ROI. The company made more for each dollar it spent because it was a successful investment and not strictly a cost. Example 2 Now let’s look at what might have happened if they somehow increased bid volume with the same staff by 10%. But their win rate went down by 3% because they were stretched too thin and cut corners. $110,000,000 * 19% / $360,000 = $58.06 won for each dollar spent Even though they submitted $10 million more in bids, their total revenue actually slipped a bit over a million dollars and their ROI went down. This is the power of win rate. Reducing proposal costs at the expense of win rate is rarely worth it. Reducing costs without reducing win rate requires looking at things differently. It requires looking at the ROI impact of your win rate impacting decisions. Example 3 Now just for fun, let’s imagine the example above where we decrease the proposal costs by 33% and win rate only goes down by 7%, but volume remains the same. Unless you do the math, you might conclude that losing 7% of win rate in exchange for a 33% reduction in proposal cost is a good deal. However... $110,000,000 * 12% / $240,000 = $55 Not only did ROI go down in spite of the massive cost savings, but revenue declined by $7.7 million. How’s that cost reduction working out? Using ROI to make better decisions Don’t just compute your ROI. Track your ROI. Use it to inform bid decisions. Before you create a proposal reuse library, think about whether reuse will hurt your win rate enough to make it cost you money instead of saving you money. Use it to inform decisions about whether to build a proposal assembly line or to invest in extensively tailoring your proposals around what it will take to win. Track your ROI so you can see when it goes up or down and what's driving it. Instead of getting more effort out of your staff, focus on getting better win rates out of your staff. Include your business development and capture managers in this, since many bids are won or lost before the proposal even starts. Discover what it will take to win and then how to build your proposal around it. Everything you see on PropLIBRARY is based on improving how you do these two things. Maximizing ROI The right definition of proposal efficiency shows that focusing on win rate is more profitable than focusing on cost. Instead of thinking of proposal efficiency in productivity measures, think of it in terms of ROI measures. Instead of trying to get more proposals out of the same staff, take the same number of people and improve their ability to discover what it will take to win and build their proposal around it. Maybe even invest a little in that. Obsess over and improve your win rate. Even obsess over win rate more than lead generation. If you’re still not convinced that capturing the leads you have is equally important to lead generation, redefine how you calculate proposal efficiency and then run the numbers for every scenario you can imagine. Let that convince you and help you make better decisions.

I blame Henry Ford for the idea of the proposal assembly line. Although a case could be made that it was Frederick Winslow Taylor and the time and motion study method for management. But hardly anyone recognizes Frederick Winslow Taylor, and sooner or later everyone working in proposals meets someone who suggests setting up an assembly line. Using the assembly line model for proposals is a great way to lose money on proposals. It puts the emphasis on getting proposals out the door instead of winning them. It treats every proposal as the same lowest common denominator instead of a custom creation optimized for winning each pursuit. An assembly line ignores the mathematics of win rates. You can’t make up for losses by losing in volume. Each proposal win brings orders of magnitude more revenue than the proposal cost. Improving your win rate increases revenue more than building an assembly can save in costs. Should you lower costs in ways that will reduce your win rate? Or should you invest knowing that each additional win will return orders of magnitude more than the proposal cost? An assembly line mentality leads to several win rate destroying approaches to proposal development: See also: Improving win rates Templates. Instead of designing the form and content of each proposal to optimize its chances of winning, a template results in sending every customer the same good proposal. Good proposal aren’t competitive. You need great proposals to maximize your win rate. Content reuse. Recycling your old proposals results in proposals that are optimized for the wrong context. The things that matter the most to the previous customer are not the things that matter the most to your new customer. Starting from reuse does more to encourage people to submit “good enough” proposals that are less likely to win than it “saves” in effort. Measuring efficiency by piece work. Which proposal shop is more efficient? The one that submits 200 proposals with three people, or the one that submits six? Before you can answer that, tell me what the revenue won by the first group is and what the revenue won by the second group is. Which is the better proposal writer? The one who spits out 100 pages per day, or the one who writes eight? Again, it’s a meaningless comparison. Proposal efficiency is not determined by the quantity produced, but rather by the amount won. Do you want your proposal staff to see their goal as getting proposals out the door, or as winning them? Opportunistic bidding. When a company has a proposal assembly line, the goal becomes to bid at maximum capacity (or it build its assembly line to keep up with a large volume of bids). This encourages bidding low probability pursuits. It raises costs and lowers revenue instead of doing the opposite. Companies with proposal assembly lines tend to either never develop lead qualification criteria, or to water down the ones they have. Either way the culture shifts to bidding everything they find, ignoring how that lowers their win rate and trying make it up in volume, lowering it even more. Bidding without an information advantage. While an assembly line may accommodate tailoring proposals to win, they also make it easy to bid proposals without the information needed for tailoring. Having a proposal assembly line may even incentivize bidding without tailoring in order to keep up with the volume of bids. This in turn enables a business development and capture function that never develops or loses the ability to cultivate an information advantage prior to the start of the proposal. This also lowers your win rate. Overloading staff. When feeding the assembly line is the standard, overloading staff just isn’t a consideration. When win rate is the standard, companies will drop a lower probability bid in order to maximize the chances of winning a higher probability bid. Making up your process as you go along. When you have an assembly line, that is the process. You don’t need to set expectations, fine tune the flow of information, discover what it will take to win, plan what you write, validate that what you write reflects what it will take to win, or any of the other aspects of process designed to maximize win rate. Instead, companies with assembly lines allow their proposal process to degrade to just having a subject draft review before they submit what came off the assembly line, while trying to convince themselves that it was sufficiently tailored and trying to ignore their win rate. Standardization of proposal content means reducing the relevance to each individual customer. And that will reduce your win rate. The cost of reducing your win rate will exceed, by many times over, the cost savings through standardization. Cost savings shouldn’t even be the goal. The goal should be maximizing wins. An assembly line mentality leads to the wrong definition for proposal efficiency. There can be times when improving production efficiency helps to maximize your win rate. But setting win rate as the standard has to come first. The issue here isn’t whether templates, reuse, and productivity measures have value, the issue is what is your management model for assessing value. What is your standard? What is your priority? Is it to get the most proposals submitted using the staff and process you have turned into an assembly line, or is it to maximize the wins by putting the effort into creating proposals based on what it will take to win each pursuit? It can’t be both. What’s the alternative? Instead of looking at proposal development as a mechanical assembly process, look at proposals as information development for a decision support tool to give to the customer and build a process that supports doing that and is measured by how often the customer makes the desired decision. That is not an assembly line driven process. At the corporate level, measure the proposal function by its ROI. Treating it like an expense will result in bad resource allocation decisions. When you treat the proposal function as an expense to be minimized, an assembly line sounds like a good idea. However, your company’s future potential depends on winning proposals and not just submitting them. You need a business model based on winning and not only submitting. Win rate is a good day-to-day proxy for measuring performance against ROI. Within a pursuit, we recommend making the standard discovering what it will take to win and organizing the proposal effort around using what it will take to win as the standard for process, decisions, and resource allocation. We used what it will take to win as the standard when we created the MustWin Process. When the primary standard for business development, capture, and proposals is to discover what it will take to win and build a proposal based on it, you’ll still have challenges, but you’ll have a clear basis for making decisions about approaches and resources. And you’ll be better able to avoid the temptation to build a proposal assembly line. Instead, you’ll be growing the company and increasing the resource pool instead of minimizing it.

While proposal management obsesses over process, advanced proposal management focuses on maximizing ROI and realizes that requires more than process alone. We love to obsess over the proposal process. We talk about it as if it is how proposals are done. However, once a proposal manager gains a few years’ experience, every one I’ve ever spoken to realizes that success requires a lot more than just steps. A lot of proposal issues relate to working through other people, especially across organizational boundaries. But some of them have to deal with the inadequacy of the process itself in an environment where customer changes to RFP requirements forces the process to manifest differently every time. Most proposal “processes” are really a collection of techniques stitched together differently for each proposal. Winning proposals requires more than just steps. It requires a broader view of process and realization that process is not the goal. ROI is the goal. And the most important driver of ROI is your win rate. Advanced proposal management requires a framework that addresses everything that impacts proposal win rates. The process we obsess over is really just a small part of that. To maximize ROI, advanced proposal management must address: See also: ROI Organization. Organization is not limited to an org chart. Organizing the proposal function requires thinking through connections to stakeholders, how decisions are made, resource allocation, strategic planning and positioning, setting quality standards, prioritization, and more. Resourcing. How many staff? Which staff? And how do you sustain that over time? How do you nurture staff to improve resourcing over time? Inputs and the flow of information. How do you discover what will it take to win and turn that into ink on paper? Along with that, how do you flow customer insights and win strategies into the document? And how do you design your offering without writing about it, but then use that to write the proposal? Performance. Performance is not simply execution of the steps. Performance is maximized when you support people so they can be more successful than they would be on their own. This requires addressing assignments, progress tracking, process tailoring and implementation, collaboration, issue resolution, tools, conventions, expectation management, feedback mechanisms, and more. In effect, this becomes the user interface for the proposal experience. If you don’t think about the user experience for your proposal, you are likely not maximizing the performance of those you are depending on to win. Quality validation. You need more than subjectively reading a draft to achieve proposal quality. No quality methodology I have ever seen defines quality as the opinion of a few people, no matter how experienced they are. You need to define proposal quality and the criteria you will use to validate it if you are going to maximize your win rate. The more things you ignore in the lists above, the less advanced your company's proposal management, and the further from maximizing your potential win rate you will be. To achieve advanced proposal management, you need to see past document production and defining success as another on-time submission, to develop an organizational solution to maximizing the ROI of the proposal function. Advanced proposal management is about integrating all the elements that impact your win rate and not just following the steps. This is beyond the charter and job description of most proposal managers. In many organizations, they are not allowed to do what this will take. Even if you are high enough on the org chart to consider it, you’ll need to work with other executive stakeholders. It is an organizational problem and not an individual or even department-level problem. Organizations that approach proposal management in an advanced way like this have the potential to greatly improve their revenue and profitability. Simply going from a 20% to a 30% win rate increases the company’s revenue by 50%. This makes the extra effort of herding the cats to an integrated approach so worth it. It makes the direct involvement of the CEO and the entire executive team worth it.

See also: About MustWin Now This is an opportunity for consultants who want an easy way to promote themselves. We want to expand the Inspiration Libraries we’ve added to MustWin Now. We're looking for consultants who know how to do things like plan a construction job, build rockets, run a project, manage software development, do engineering, manage supply chains, operate a help desk, do recruiting, implement quality methodologies, provide janitorial services, develop curricula, perform maintenance, design systems, provide acquisition support, implement testing protocols, and all the other things customers procure. In all their variations. Our audience is huge and covers every industry in B2G and B2B. We're looking for people to write simple instructions at the bullet level to help other people figure out what to write about and how to present it. In exchange, we'll provide attribution and a link back to your website. It's a chance to demonstrate your expertise to people actively working on proposals and give them a way to reach out to you to get more help. The instructions will be added to our inspiration library along with your information. The image up top is a screenshot from one of our inspiration library topics so you can see what we're talking about. Each topic should target about 30 items. Those items should include: Instructions for proposal writers on your chosen topic that help them know what to write about and how to present it Questions for proposal writers to answer about your chosen topic that can help them figure out what approach makes sense for their proposal Options, suggestions, and things for proposal writers to consider on your chosen topic that might help them with their proposal People using MustWin Now will be able to search the topics available, browse ones that are relevant to them, and select items to include in their proposal content plans to guide proposal writers. A topic like "Construction proposals" or "ID/IQ proposals" can easily reach hundreds of items. If you have more than 30 items, we'll split the category. Think about how many different kinds of construction, or phases, or activities there are. Or how many ID/IQ contracts with differences in their task order responses. Whatever your chosen topic, think about how it can be broken down. Each category page will include your information. We really are interested in covering all the topics as deeply as possible, so if you're prolific, you could show up all over the inspiration library. We're fine with that. We'll retain editorial control and make final decisions on what to include and how to word things. You should ask about a topic and write some examples before you get started to make sure we understand each other and so we can prevent redundancy or wasted effort. Since no money is being exchanged, we can get started very quickly. When potential customers contact you, they will be yours to nurture and you'll keep all the revenue. Got a topic? Got questions? Want to know more? Click a button below to reach out to us.

See also: About MustWin Now The Inspiration Libraries we’ve added to MustWin Now can have a huge impact on your proposals, by changing how they get written in a way that can radically improve win probability. MustWin Now’s Inspiration Library helps people understand what should go into a proposal content plan and greatly accelerate creating one. It sets your proposal writers up for success by enabling you to rapidly describe what should go into each proposal section and how it should be presented. The Inspiration Library is accessed through a new menu bar in the Proposal Content Planning tool: Simply click on a topic Select the instructions you’d like to add the content plan Save Currently we have dozens of topics in the Technical Approach, Management Plan, and Other categories. Within those topics we have over 700 possible instructions, questions for proposal writers to answer, and options for consideration. And they can all be tailored to match the specific needs of the proposal you are working on. You can also add your own instructions to the Proposal Content Plan. Use the combination to drive your win strategies and guidance into your proposal content plan and help your writers figure out what they should write more quickly and more reliably. Step by step use of the Inspiration Library To try an example, click on "Other" and then "Win strategies." Then select one or more instructions to drop into your content plan. This will provide a prompt to help shape the proposal when it is written. You may be tempted to select them all, but that could overwhelm your proposal writers. Just give them the minimum guidance they'll need to write the winning proposal. This may vary depending on the skills of your proposal writers. Maybe spend a minute or so on each to tailor them after you click the button. For example, you might change “What does it all add up to” into an instruction saying “Explain how this all adds up to a lower risk solution” because the evaluation criteria in this RFP emphasize risk. If the RFP emphasizes quality you could say “Explain how our approach results in quantifiably better results.” The goal of the inspiration library is to inspire. Don’t take our suggestions as how you have to write your proposals. Instead, let our ideas prompt you to think of something better that helps you win your proposals. If you don’t use any of our suggestions but they help you articulate your own ideas for what your proposal should become, we consider that a success! In addition to picking items from our Inspiration Library, you can also provide guidance to your proposal writers by typing some instructions of your own into the entry fields. This also only takes a few seconds. Maybe a few minutes if you want to give it some thought (and you should). Put in five minutes per section and you’ll end up with a content plan that greatly improves your chances of winning. Hold a review of your content plan prior to writing and you can eliminate unnecessary revision cycles and save many hours of proposal writer time. You can save more time doing this than you would starting from the text of a previous proposal. We have similar inspiration library items for the technical approach in areas like cybersecurity, training, administrative support, construction, and other topics. Plus we’re adding more over time. Our goal is not to replace your subject matter expertise, but to help inspire you to quickly figure out what to write and how to best present it. Instead of a blank page, your proposal writers will get prompts, reminders, suggestions, and details to include. If you do a good job of planning the content of your proposals, your writers should be able to prepare a great first draft with a much higher probability of winning. You must be a PropLIBRARY Subscriber in order to use the Inspiration Library. You can subscribe here. Special note for consultants who are current subscribers to PropLIBRARY We are going to be greatly expanding the breadth and depth of the topics in our Inspiration Library. If you have content or subject matter expertise and want to contribute, we'll add your name, phone number, email, and a link to your website to the topic page with the items you contribute. This will put how to reach you right in front of people working on proposals in the topic areas you can support. Reach out below and we can discuss it.

Maximizing win probability requires going beyond simply trying to provide the best response to the customer’s requirements. This is because: The customer is more than one person. Evaluators often have different ideas about which submission is “best.” We often do not know who will be participating in the evaluation. And yet, we know we need to write our proposals from the customer’s perspective instead of our own. This makes understanding the range of perspectives that the evaluators might bring important. You can’t write to their perspectives unless you can empathize with them. Unfortunately there is a whole range of potential perspectives to consider. This requires advanced empathy in order to write proposals with the maximum win probability. Advanced empathy requires going well beyond what does “the customer” want. It requires understanding that there are multiple stakeholders in making an organizational decision, and what matters to each of them as individuals. Here are some ways to apply empathy to winning proposals: See also: Customer Perspective Roles. A Contracting Officer plays a specific role that is very different from a Program Manager or a Source Selection Officer. And they are all different from the end user. Each brings a different perspective regarding what they want to accomplish. The result is that what they want to see in the proposal is different. You should write your proposal to satisfy the needs of all the potential evaluators. Stakeholders. Some stakeholders will participate in the evaluation. Others may not participate in the evaluation, but may influence the decision. These stakeholders can even be people outside the customer’s organization! It depends on the nature of the customer’s mission, how strong the voices of their stakeholders are, and how much this procurement will impact those stakeholders. If the customer cares about keeping its stakeholders happy, your proposal may need to address that. Goals. Goals occur at multiple levels. There can be individual goals and organizational goals. There can be personal goals and business goals. There will be unstated goals as well as stated ones. And within an organization, every territory can have different goals. But when the individual sits down to evaluate a proposal, they are looking to fulfill their goals. Put yourself in the place of all the possible individuals and imagine what might be shaping their goals. Maximizing your win probability depends on figuring out which goals of which individuals to address. Agendas and motivation. Similar to goals, each person participating in the decision will have things they want to accomplish. Those are the things that motivate them. But they are never clear and can sometimes contradict those of other evaluators. It can be as simple as wanting to complete the evaluation so they can get back to their “real” job. Or it can be as big as reshaping their own organization by impacting how this procurement plays out. You will do better if you help them get what they want. Culture. The culture of the organization strongly impacts how it makes decisions. Is it hierarchical? Is it chaotic? Is it serious? Is it deliberate? Is it accountable? Is it the opposites of these? How will that impact the individuals participating in the customer’s decision? How can you write the proposal to be a better fit for the customer’s culture? Attitude. We are rational animals. We are also emotional animals. Each individual participating will be a mixture of both. What attitude will they bring to the evaluation and what can you say to influence it? Processes. Formal evaluations follow a process. Proposal evaluations are conducted according to that process. So how closely will they stick to their process? And how does that change what the evaluator needs to see? How does that change the evaluator’s attitude, preferences, goals, and agenda? The more you understand about the customer’s acquisition process, the more influence you can have on it. Training. Do the evaluators know what they are doing, or are they making it up as they go along? Do the evaluators understand what matters about what is being procured? Do they even understand the terminology? Who are you writing for? Should you be subtly training them through your proposal? Or would that be patronizing? What do you know about who will participate in the evaluation and how should that impact the way you present your proposal? Regulations, directives, policies, etc. Rules are rules. Usually. We think of proposal compliance in terms of the RFP. But the customer thinks of compliance in terms of all the rules at all the levels that impact their organization. The RFP is just a small part of that. Showing that you are not only aware of that but will make it easier for the customer to achieve compliance at their level can put you ahead of your competitors. The great unknown. Does the customer know what they should ask for? Or even what the implications are of the requirements they wrote? Do they know how to achieve their goals? Do they even know what their goals should be? Do they even know what they don’t know? How can you help them face the great unknown? You do that without making them admit what they don’t know, simply by explaining the trade-offs and why you recommend the approach you chose to offer. This gives them something to rally around. Conflicts. The individuals that comprise the customer may not all agree. They may not agree with what’s in the RFP. They may have conflict between what they want and what they can afford. They may have conflicts with their end users and other stakeholders. They may be indecisive. Proposing something that helps the customer unravel their own conflicts is a great way to leap ahead of the competition. But being in the middle of their conflicts is a great way to lose if the turf battles don’t go your way. I have seen more than one customer lose because they thought they knew the customer, only to discover the one person they were talking to was on the losing side of a conflict inside the customer’s organization that played out during proposal evaluation. Aspirations and the future. Beyond this procurement, how do they want the future to turn out? How do they see themselves in that future? Do you understand your customer well enough to know? Can you paint a picture of that future? How will that vision impact how they evaluate your proposal today? I have helped companies win with customers who didn’t know how to get there, but knew where they wanted to end up by focusing on their future aspirations and being flexible about the steps required to get there. Take all that into consideration before thinking you know what the customer will find compelling. Taking it all into consideration is basically, trying to understand what the evaluator thinks and feels. That’s empathy. Trying to do that across the customer’s organization or even just the team of evaluators is advanced empathy. Turning what your empathy tells you into compelling proposal messaging is where great proposal writing comes from. It’s also why actually talking to your customer before bidding is so important. You can project what you might think if you were in their position, and it’s good to be able to do that. But your accuracy will be questionable if you haven’t actually interacted with them. Building an information advantage is important for winning. But right behind it comes building an empathy advantage.

Effective proposal management requires thorough expectation management. But while some expectations will be the same for every proposal, many will change. Many will need to be determined, figured out, or updated as things change during the proposal. But with a little structure, you can improve how you communicate expectations and do a better job of making sure everything is covered. Remember: If you overwhelm people with too much information about expectations, they will not absorb it all and even though you think you’ve communicated it to them, your expectations will not be met in full. Expectations are bi-directional. The proposal manager has expectations. So does everyone receiving their assignments. So does every other stakeholder. They all need to be communicated for expectations to be met. Not just yours. How you articulate your expectations matters greatly. If you expect participation, that’s what you’ll get. But you might get better results by defining outcomes that you can objectively assess and the full scope of contributions. The structure for proposal expectations below can be documented in different ways, depending on your goals. For example, you can implement this structure as a: Matrix in Microsoft Excel. This is great for consolidating your view across all the roles and phases, but less useful when you are trying to focus on a particular role or phase. Series of slides in PowerPoint. This works well during online meetings, giving you talking points for setting expectations. Series of handouts made in Microsoft Word. This gives you something to attach to assignments or pass out at the beginning of each phase that defines expectations. The structure for proposal expectations should be tailored to fit your stakeholders. Start by focusing on the roles people play and the phases in your pursuit lifecycle. Identify the key roles people will play For example: Business Development Manager Capture Manager Proposal Manager Coordination Proposal Writer(s) Graphics Production Pricing and Contracts In some circumstances, you may need to consider stakeholders who are not part of the proposal team, and issues like whether to include subcontractors. Create a list of phases for your proposal, based on deliverables For example: Pre-proposal pursuit and preparation. What is expected of each role before the proposal starts? Proposal startup. What is expected of each role immediately after RFP release? Content planning. What is expected of each role during content planning? Writing. What is expected of each role during proposal writing? Production. What is expected of each role during production? Every phase, or even every step within a phase, can be thought of as being wrapped in planning, execution, and quality assurance. Each of these can have their own set of expectations. For each phase, create a list of categories for expectations For example: Deliverables. For each role, what deliverables are expected? Who is responsible for those deliverables and who makes what contributions? Deadlines. When are assignments expected to be complete? Formatting. What format must deliverables be in? Communication. When, where, and how should notifications, updates, and other information be communicated? Responsibilities. Who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed? Procedures. What steps must be followed in order to perform a task? Guidance. What information can you provide to help the contributors? What policies must they be made aware of? Resources. What tools, facilities, equipment, staff, or other things are available or must be located? In some organizations, during some phases contributors will be expected to submit deliverables in the required format. In other organizations, during some phases writers will not be expected to perform formatting at all. This structure gives you the means to define expectations for that particular pursuit, in that particular phase, under the particular circumstances you find yourself in. Simply as “what do we expect?” And then document it. Pro tip: If you want your expectations to be met, you should make sure your expectations are feasible and those making the contributions are capable (available, sufficiently trained, etc.).

Proposal content planning should give a lot of guidance to proposal writers regarding what to write and how to present it. They should be able to follow the content plan like a set of instructions, that they can follow to create the right proposal on the very first draft. You can anticipate many of the things that will need to be addressed in your future proposals, based on the nature of the work that you do and how you manage it. The problem is that unless every RFP really is the same, and not merely similar, reusing the text from your past proposals can easily do more harm than good. The good news is that it is far easier, and safer, to reuse your content plan instructions. You can think of them as recipes for your proposals. And you can quickly pull them together and greatly accelerate preparing the level of guidance needed to raise the bar on your proposals. When you practice proposal content planning, you will discover that sometimes you know just what to specify for the proposal, and sometimes it must be figured out by other people. This directly impacts the guidance you can provide. In addition, sometimes you have options, choices, and decisions to make between alternate approaches. Some may work better in certain circumstances than others. Or you might have recommendations to make but don’t want the writers to feel like they have to take the advice if they have something better in mind. This can all be confusing, until you realize that it’s the secret to organizing the guidance you give to your proposal writers. Whether you implement a proposal recipe library or are simply giving ad hoc guidance, here are four ways you can organize the guidance you offer to your proposal writers: See also: Guidance for Using Recipes Instructions. These guide your proposal writers regarding what to write about and how to present it. They focus on things like what to include, what to leave out, what points to make, how to differentiate, what to emphasize, what not to forget, and how to incorporate your customer, opportunity, and competitive awareness. If you explain what matters, your writers can put things in the right context on the very first draft. This is a huge accelerator for proposal writing and can turn it into a simple process of elimination when done thoroughly. But it requires knowing how you want to shape the proposal, knowing what should be offered, and already having the necessary details. Questions for your writers to answer. When you don’t know what to offer or have the details, you can still provide guidance in the form of questions they should address when they write their sections. You can still lay out what should be addressed in each section, without knowing the details. For example, you can prompt them to address features and benefits in a particular way, without knowing what the features or corresponding benefits might be. This can point them in the right direction and still provide some acceleration. Even if you don’t completely frame each section, just pointing out a few key questions ensures they get attention and leads to a better proposal. Options/ things to consider/ recommendations/ examples. A little inspiration goes a long way, providing both acceleration and raising the bar. You can inspire your proposal writers with ideas and choices, with them even being required to do the things you’ve cited. If you leave the door open, you might even inspire them to think of something better than what you recommended. Options, examples, and considerations are eye openers that can prevent writers from getting stuck by not knowing what is expected of them. And that turns them into potential accelerators. How to guidance. When you hear the word “guidance” one thing all people think of is “how to” guidance. As in “Proposal Writing 101.” This kind of guidance can be good, especially when you have inexperienced writers. It embeds training into the document specifications. But it’s not the only kind of guidance, so I put it last. “How to” guidance can encompass the proposal process, writing techniques, task procedures, goals, domain knowledge, institutional knowledge, and more. At a minimum, you should provide sufficient guidance so that those assigned to the proposal can complete their assignments. An example of how they can be combined When you combine these, you might get guidance like this: An instruction regarding how to introduce the section. Options for potential win strategies depending on whether your company is the incumbent or not. Questions about what matters to the customer so they build the section around it. Instructions for how to set up a table as part of the response. “How to” guidance related to meeting proposal writing expectations and proposal department procedures. Compare what you can anticipate getting back from your writers when you provide guidance like this to what you can expect to get from proposal contributors when all you give them is an outline and a copy of the RFP. Should you create ad hoc or pre-written guidance? If you build a library of instructions, questions, and options, you can very quickly assemble your proposal content plans. This can be important for adoption if you are currently struggling to plan your proposal content before you jump into proposal writing. You don’t need complete coverage for your content plans to have a large, positive impact on how your proposals turn out. A recipe library like this is much easier to both create and maintain than a content reuse library based on pre-written narratives. And pre-written instructions won’t hurt your win rate the way recycling narratives will. Even if you don’t have a recipe library, you can use this as a technique to focus on the guidance you conceive of in the moment of need. Building a library Start with your subject matter or other domain topics and drill down. When you get to the lowest level, organize the guidance items you have by these four categories. This will stage your material according to your future needs. When you can specify what should go into the document and how it should be presented ahead of time, you’ll have instructions to pass on. When you don’t know the details and you need your writers to figure things out, you’ll have questions to guide them. When you have potential approaches that are good in the right circumstance, you’ll have the options category to draw from. What we learned by following our own advice This is exactly what we’re doing in MustWin Now. We’ve built an online tool that accelerates proposal content planning by enabling quick lookup of pre-written instructions, questions, and options that you can drop right into your content plans. But which category you use will depend on the nature of what you offer, your personal knowledge of what’s being proposed, your company’s preparation, and the circumstances you are bidding in. The goal is to have the right type of guidance ready. In fact, it was in creating MustWin Now and having to figure out an interface that would enable people to deliver pre-written guidance without knowing their circumstances that we discovered this approach to categorization. If you ever want to reimagine the proposal process or how you can support it, try imagining your process as a user interface for other people to implement and you’ll gain tremendous insight into how to improve their performance.

Instead of focusing on document assembly from lowest common denominator reusable parts from past proposals that were optimized in all the wrong ways for the current pursuit, MustWin Now focuses on helping you create a better proposal than your competitors. The design of MustWin Now puts the priority on doing whatever is necessary to win by supporting people working on proposals with the guidance, information, and management they need to write a better proposal than their competitors. It definitely makes things quicker and easier. But our priority is winning because that makes any effort required profitably worth it. A big challenge with being competitive is that you start the proposal as you are, instead of how prepared you’d like to be. From the moment you start the pursuit, MustWin Now helps you be more effective, and that’s what makes you more competitive. 1) Increasing competitiveness before RFP release Most pre-RFP efforts get bogged down in teaming and end up contributing very little to the proposal. If you’re lucky, you get a list of themes. Sometimes you don’t even get that. MustWin Now increases your competitiveness during the pre-RFP phase in four ways: See also: MWN PM It prompts people to think about dozens of questions like what matters, what your differentiators are, how you should position or ghost against your competitors, how what you know about the customer should impact what you write, etc. It guides you to turn what you know into instructions for proposal writers. This is crucial because it’s the bridge from “we know stuff” to “we know how to win.” After RFP release, it provides tools to drive those instructions into the document in all the right places. Its collaboration toolbox enables you to manage pre-RFP assignments, track progress, review results, ask questions, get help, and make the most of the time until the RFP is released. 2) Increasing your competitiveness when you start at RFP release The challenge to starting at RFP release is to make the most of what you know. This requires quickly surfacing what you know and then figuring out how to make use of it in your proposal in ways that maximize your evaluation score. The Proposal Input Forms in MustWin Now are a variation on the pre-RFP forms designed for use at RFP release. They can increase your competitiveness in the four ways described above, even when you get a late start by quickly assessing what you do know about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and your own strengths and weaknesses. The quicker you can get this information to your proposal writers, the better. And MustWin Now lets you map the implications of what you know to individual proposal sections and assignments. 3) Increasing competitiveness by making your proposal about things that matter If your writers don’t know what points to make, you are likely to produce a proposal that is, quite literally, pointless. You often see this when proposal teams put all their struggle and focus into creating a proposal that is merely RFP compliant. MustWin Now increases your competitiveness by: Whether you start before or at RFP release, bringing forward your team’s knowledge about what matters to this particular customer and about this particular procurement. Enabling you to quickly articulate the points you want to make in each proposal section before the writing starts. Keeping the full text of the relevant RFP requirements in front of proposal writers, so they are writing compliant approaches, but doing it in the context of the points you want to make. 4) Increasing your competitiveness with better management and problem solving Sometimes increasing your competitiveness means removing the problems that reduce it. Proposals frequently encounter problems. Your ability to deal with those problems quickly and effectively impacts your competitiveness. In MustWin Now we include the collaboration toolbox on every page as a reminder and to make it easier to surface issues. Once an issue has been reported it shows up in a dashboard where you can sort and filter by section, severity, user, deadline, and more. Users can click a single button and switch between whether they see the issues that affect them or all issues. A calendar view shows when things are due and what things are overdue. People can ask for help or a quick review of something they’ve done. You get continuous, real-time progress tracking and status awareness. You’ll find yourself conducting meetings with MustWin Now open to add or update issues, manage resources, and more. You’ll save time through quicker response, but more importantly, you’ll prevent last minute surprises and unresolved issues from damaging your competitiveness. 5) Increase your competitiveness by making sure nothing got overlooked Between the Content Planning Tool and the Collaboration Toolbox, you can itemize what should get written, how it should be presented, who should be doing what, and any issues that have been encountered. Instead of open-ended subjective proposal reviews, you can validate that everything that was supposed to go into the proposal made it in and in the way it was supposed to be presented. You can track and work the issues through a process of elimination. But nothing hides. Nothing gets forgotten. Beating your competitors Let your competitors struggle with immature paper-based processes that don’t really work in the real world. Let them fail at planning before they write. Let them make all the same excuses people have been making about proposals for decades. Regardless of what position you are in at the start the proposal, it’s the ink that makes it onto paper and gets put in front of the customer that counts. MustWin Now can help your people prepare a better proposal than they could have without it.

Before you begin proposal writing, you should prepare a proposal content plan that accounts for everything that should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Here is some inspiration for writing the instructions that should go into your proposal content plan. Decide what type of guidance you can provide See also: Content Planning Best Practices Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say Provide instructions to guide the writers to figure out what to offer or say Provide details the writers will need or options to consider Provide instructions that identify the details others should find and include Provide instructions to proposal writers regarding the key points they should make How to achieve the best score against the evaluation criteria The results of your approach/how the customer will benefit Your strengths Your differentiators Things they should prove Information/data they can use when making proof points Providing instructions related to positioning How they should introduce the section, offering, etc. How to present things How to talk about features, issues What to emphasize or focus on Why you’ve chosen this approach or made trade-offs Competitive positioning, ghosting, or comparison What matters The impact Provide instructions related to anticipated customer fears, concerns, and risks What are they aware of What are they not aware of What you plan to do about it (risk identification/mitigation methodology) Provide instructions for research they should do or things writers need to figure out Qualifications Certifications Related details Names to name Capacities Amounts Dates or schedules Provide instructions related to using graphics in this section Guidance or examples regarding the use of graphics and tables Suggestions for graphics to use Instructions for them to figure out what graphics to use Describe the conclusion you want the reader to reach Provide instructions to help the writers figure out what to offer or how to fulfill the requirements What we should offer/do/deliver Achieving RFP compliance Features/benefits/proof What to include Phases or steps in your proposed approach Components of your offering Capabilities Solution architecture People, processes, and tools to propose Roles that project staff or stakeholders will play Who, what, where, how, when, and why Deliverables Estimates Availability or use of resources Provide instructions related to proposal concerns Assumptions Limits in what can be done or amounts Issues Dependencies Proposal risks Mitigations Definitions RFP interpretation Alignment with the pricing or other proposal sections Provide instructions related to discussing your experience/ past performance/ citation/ testimonials Relevant project experience Details about experience Important things about your performance Stories/Anecdotes Accomplishments Testimonials Instructions related to proposal writing Writing from the customer’s perspective Conventions Procedures to follow Style guidance Instructions related to contracting Procurement rules and advice Relevant FAR Clauses and what to do about them

If you need to write a winning proposal to close the sale, then the pre-RFP pursuit phase isn’t just about lead identification. The pre-RFP pursuit phase becomes about preparing to win the proposal. People can’t achieve the goal if they don’t know what it is. If you have more than one, they need to be prioritized. See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Qualify the lead. Does it fulfill for the company’s lead qualification criteria? Discover what it will take to win. Can you articulate what it will take to win? How will the customer make their decision? What must the customer see in your proposal in order to conclude it is their best alternative? Develop an information advantage. What matters to the customer? What are their preferences? How should you interpret the things they say? What do you need to know to design your offering? Turn your information advantage into a competitive advantage. What are you going to do about it? What should you say in your proposal based on what you’ve learned? How should you present what you have to say? Influence the future RFP. If you are serious about winning, you can’t just be passive and wait for the RFP to see what’s in it. If you are serious about winning you should be helping the customer understand their needs and how to articulate them as RFP requirements. If you’re not trying to influence the RFP, you’re just waiting for someone else to. To support this, your pre-RFP pursuit process should be built around: Discovery. What information should you seek? Consider building your pre-RFP pursuit process around questions instead of charts. Positioning. Articulating how you will position against the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and other potential considerations. Guidance. People perform better when they have good guidance. The challenge is to deliver it in a form that doesn’t tie their hands, is accessible from where they happen to be, is useful when they are in the field as well as at their desk, and scales to the time available from start until RFP release. Guidance should cover what to discover, how to do it, and what to do about it. Development. Developing your offering design and validating it with the customer before RFP release is a huge advantage. This assumes you have a process for designing your offering and a way to discuss it with the customer. But even if you can’t validate it with the customer or even complete your design without the RFP, the more you document what you plan to propose and why, the better off you will be at RFP release. If your pre-RFP pursuit process is built around lead identification and bid/no bid decisions, then even though leads are passing the decision-gate, you likely aren't doing a lot of the things needed to maximize your win probability.

Marketing is often poorly defined. What one company calls “marketing” can be very different from another company. Business development is often poorly defined. What one company calls “business development” can be very different from another company. This makes comparing them fun. They overlap so much that some companies don't really do marketing. And that makes understanding the comparison important. See also: Roles What is marketing? What is business development? Marketing is what brings people to your sales process. Business development is that sales process. Except when it’s also marketing. It’s more like business development contains a little of both marketing and sales. And that’s the problem. Business development overlaps with marketing when it is responsible for identifying new markets and customer segments (as opposed to individual customers). For example, by partnering with other companies to bundle their offerings, a business developer might gain access to their partners' customers as well as their own. Or by figuring out that if it develops a new solution, the company can win new business. However, when business development is also responsible for identifying new individual customers, it also overlaps with sales. When business development is responsible for hitting targets based on closing sales, it is a sales function. How much of that marketing do you think will really get done? The overlap between marketing and business development is mostly at the front end. The central issue is what needs to happen before you start prospecting, and who should be responsible for it. There is another set of issues at the back end, revolving around who leads the pursuit once a lead is qualified, who decides what to offer, and who is responsible for proposal development, Where do you want people to spend their time? Do you really want your business development staff spending time on marketing? Do you want them designing a web site to attract the right customers and figuring out how to flow them to the information that will convince them to make contact, or do you want them spending time with the customers that do make contact? Do you want them spending their time crunching analytics to determine what kind of customers to chase, or do you want them selecting individual customers to pursue? Do you want them segmenting markets to determine the right composition to fill your pipeline, or do you want them identifying specific customers to fill those segments? If your business development staff are incentivized based on deals, that’s where they will spend their time. And you will get no marketing. But you definitely do need marketing. And for a lot more than just “branding” or name recognition. Even if you can get by just responding to publicly announced RFPs, you need marketing to figure out which market segments to target and where it’s worth developing relationships. If you just turn your business developers loose, what you’ll get are the low hanging fruit. And over time you’ll grow like a weed instead of growing strong. Beware the seesaw effect When business developers are incentivized based on leads and sales, they won’t start marketing until they run out of leads. Marketing requires time to pay off. It won’t pay off fast enough when you’ve run out of leads and then start. I’ve seen companies go up and come right back down because of this. Marketing would have saved them by creating a continuous funnel of leads for their business developers to spend their time qualifying and pursuing. Instead of an either/or approach or a relationship based on territories, consider having an integrated approach. Ultimately the goal isn't to have marketing, or to have business development. The goal is to win and win big. This requires skills and effort that are beyond what we can reliably expect of one person. It's so much bigger than one person that it really should be the corporate culture and not simply roles that people play.

The problem with planning a Black Hat review is understanding what people’s expectations are. Everyone defines it differently. I’ve never seen two practiced the same way. The very name tells you nothing about its scope. But it does sound cool, and everyone wants to have one. So let me start off with a definition: A Black Hat review is a (preferably pre-proposal) competitive assessment. But that doesn’t tell you what should go into it or how it should be conducted. See also: Capture Management Learn what your stakeholders' priorities are To get to that level of detail, you need to know your priorities. Is the "Black Hat" going to be about: Articulating language for the proposal? Uncovering what your competitors might propose so you can better position against them? Assessing competitors' strengths and weaknesses? Maybe a SWOT chart? Assessing competitive pricing ? When is a Black Hat really a Price to Win? Attempting to score the competitors against the evaluation criteria as if you were the customer? Before conducting a Black Hat review, I recommend circulating a list of possible goals to be discussed and ranked first by all of the stakeholders to the review. Some people want everything. But you need to prioritize. One reason I’ve never seen a Black Hat review done the same way twice is that doing them well is time-consuming and expensive. You can’t just show up to the review, throw some opinion bombs, and pat yourself on the back for not needing to do any research. Building your Black Hat review around your goals Once you have defined and prioritized the goals, a "Black Hat" is just intelligence gathering and strategy development to achieve the goals people said were important to them. How to plan and implement your Black Hat review becomes a solvable problem once you know the goals. Keep in mind that the goal is not going to be to prepare some wicked PowerPoint. The ultimate goal is to impact the proposal. The Black Hat review deliverables should provide guidance to the proposal writers regarding what to talk about, how to position things, and how to present them. Use the Black Hat to determine where you need to change your offering, your team, or your messaging. Then section by section drive those changes into the proposal. Instead of making your Black Hat review about aggregating data about the competitors that none of the proposal writers will know what to do with, try making your Black Hat about discovering and articulating what it will take to win.

I was recently asked about what’s changed in the proposal industry over my career. My response was that what strikes me far more is how little has changed. It’s not just that we have the same problems we had decades ago, it’s that there are viable solutions just waiting to be implemented. Every other part of the companies that depend on winning proposals for their revenue have developed and matured their practices. Except the proposal function. Please read the following as motivation and focus on what to do about the need for change instead of making excuses. This isn't venting. We’ve heard all the excuses and done our share of venting. Note that I haven’t pointed fingers. It’s not the proposal department’s fault. Or sales. Or the executives. The fault belongs to all of us. But fault doesn't matter. Only progress does. I'm sure not all of these apply to every company. But consider just how many of them do still plague your company… See also: Successful process implementation Why are we still doing proposals without defining what proposal quality is? Instead companies still practice “I’ll know it when I see it” quality management. But only on their proposals. Is there any quality methodology in existence that sets that as its standard? Why does every aspect of what we do have actual standards but the critical proposal function which impacts, give or take 100% of the company's ability to generate revenue, does not? Why aren’t we giving writers and reviewers the same set of quality criteria? Why are we surprising the writers with what the proposal should be or say after they have prepared their draft? Why after all this time are we still expecting writers to guess what will be required to pass proposal reviews? How do we ever expect this to work? This is a completely solvable problem. So why haven’t we implemented the solutions? How often are we still beginning proposal writing with little more than the RFP to guide the writers? Even when you start at RFP release, you should have some ideas about what it will take to win that you can use to guide people. Why are we still throwing RFPs at people and expecting them to just figure it out? How is that we’re still getting little or no useable input from business development or capture effort? It’s always amazed me how little the business development briefing or capture plan had in it that helped put the right words on paper during proposal development. Why haven’t we helped them prepare better and create more useable inputs that would have a greater impact on the win rate? Why aren’t we giving them input forms for what we need to know in order to write a winning proposal, and why aren’t they building their processes around delivering it? How is it even possible that engineers and subject matter experts who know better are designing the offering or solution to be proposed by writing narratives about it? This is a major cause of the proposal death spiral. What engineering school or best practice recommends designing things by writing narratives about them? Why do we still do this? Are we really incapable of figuring out what to offer and validating it before we starting writing? When are we going to starting measuring proposals by ROI instead of cost? Going from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate would increase the company’s revenue by 50% and pay for all the effort required to do it many times over. So why are we still under investing in the proposal function instead of tracking its ROI? Is there any other business line or function with the potential to increase the company’s revenue by that much which isn’t tracking its ROI? How much would the company pay for a sales function that could increase revenue by 50%? Increasing your win rate can do that with the leads you already have. And yet, we get stingy with proposals. Maybe it’s because companies don’t know how to increase their win rate. And maybe that’s where they should start. Why haven’t win rates changed? Separate from the ROI issue above, why haven’t companies improved their ability to win proposals enough to change industry average win rates in an amount that’s noticeable? If our “best practices” really are such, shouldn’t there be a quantifiable impact? Why are we still preparing “lists of hot buttons and themes” that do not map to either the proposal outline or the evaluation criteria? We’ve convinced ourselves that we have a process because we have themes. By why do those themes never seem to actually cover the outline or relate to how we’re going to maximize our score against the evaluation criteria? And why are so few themes differentiators? Why can so many of the themes on the lists I see companies preparing be claimed by any company that makes the competitive range? Weak themes are not a best practice, do not mean that you have a process, and are ultimately uncompetitive. Why are they still tolerated, let along offered as something to brag about? Why are people still giving more attention to proposal content reuse than proposal content planning? We all know that content reuse does more to lower win rates than improve them. So why do we focus on that while assuming that planning before writing is just too hard to achieve? Still. By now, we should all know that we spend more time thinking and talking about the proposal than actually writing it. So why do we continue to believe that recycling content is a better way to accelerate things than speeding up figuring out how to prepare a proposal based on what it will take to win? Still. Can we finally kill the meaningless color team labels and milestone-based proposal reviews that don’t actually validate proposal quality? Why can I still ask everyone at the [insert color label here] review what the scope of the review is and get a different answer from everyone participating with nothing defined in writing? And if it is defined in writing, why does everyone still define the scope of the review differently? And regardless of the scope why do we simply ask reviewers to tell us whether the proposal is “any good?” Still. And why do we think that reviewers can read the entire RFP and the entire proposal and assess everything that needs to be validated in a few hours? And do it without any written quality criteria. Are we really still giving assignments to writers with the only guidance amounting to heading titles and the RFP? Why do we still say “write this section” without providing any guidance regarding what to write about and how to present it? Still. Why do companies still treat business development/sales, capture, proposal, contracts, and pricing as sequential silos instead of fully integrating them into winning proposals? Is it because we still try to staff everything proposal related with people who have day jobs and the proposal isn’t their top priority? See the items about ROI and win rate above. Why do we tolerate people expecting the proposal to magically appear without them touching it or learning about it as little as possible? What kind of win rate is that supposed to generate? With everyone claiming to know the “best practices,” how is it that we continue to tolerate train wrecks at the end of proposal production? Why do I still find people who think that a train wreck at the end of the proposal is just the nature of the universe? What other function potentially increasing revenue by 50% or more is allowed to continuously have obviously disruptive results because “that’s just the way it is” and “we can’t do anything about it?” Why are (unsubstantiated) claims still showing up in proposals? We’ve known that this is the most common and curable win rate stealing worst practice for decades. Why is it still showing up? We talk about it. Everyone knows about it. And yet companies have done nothing to eliminate it. Do we care so little about win rate that we can’t even fix this? Since you’re on PropLIBRARY, you probably are not the source of these problems, and if you are a subscriber you have access to solutions for all of them. But the Powers That Be have some mighty bad habits. They’ve accepted these problems for so long they may not even be looking for a solution. Or they’ve institutionalized these problems for so long they’re afraid of what it would take to tear down and rebuild. Or maybe they’re just afraid to admit they don’t know how to solve these completely solvable problems. You can help them with that. But they have to show up motivated and with the will to make it happen. None of these problems are technical. All of these problems are habits. Habits may not be easy to change, but these are opportunity stealing, growth limiting, and revenue reducing habits that are within your power to change. Everyone says they want to win. Now’s the time to finally prove it.

It may seem a bit counterintuitive, but streamlining your proposal management process starts by writing down your proposal quality criteria. In fact, it’s the quickest and easiest way to launch your process. It works better than starting at the kickoff meeting and trying to chart the steps. See also: PQV Quality Criteria Just simply having proposal quality criteria gives you a way to: Provide guidance to your proposal writers Enable reviewers to validate the quality of what your writers produce Inform the activities before the proposal starts about what information will be needed to successfully complete the proposal Ease into proposal content planning by establishing a framework it needs to accomplish. People can attempt proposal content planning without any other guidance beyond the quality criteria, and mature the planning process over time. Enable performance metrics and the discovery of what impacts what it will take to win the most Basically, having proposal quality criteria makes every step better and can be implemented before you’re ready to formalize all the other steps. That’s the sophisticated-sounding way of saying that in the beginning you can make do without having any other process details, if you’ve got your proposal quality criteria figured out. What do you need to get started? To create proposal quality criteria you must: Have a written definition of proposal quality. You don’t know what to achieve if you can’t define it. And oh by the way, proposal quality is not defined by whether it wins. That is out of your hands and can’t be used to guide the people preparing the proposal. Be able to articulate what it will take to win. If you do want your proposal quality criteria to be based on what it will take to win, you’ll have to discover that and be able to itemize the components of it. But if you can’t do that, how are you going to be able to prepare a winning proposal other than by luck? Use that to validate what you’ve written. This means you have to get The Powers That Be who participate in your proposal reviews to accept the quality criteria and use them to conduct a review that is not subjective. Hint: You might want to get them involved in creating your proposal quality criteria. Incidentally, the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY is built around defining proposal quality and having quality criteria. It has all the details needed for immediately implementing a proposal management process that does all these things. How does this streamline your proposal process? Having proposal quality criteria sounds sophisticated, but turns out to be easy to implement and acts as an accelerator for other parts of the process: Your proposal quality criteria can be presented as a checklist. This checklist is usable by proposal writers and reviewers to accelerate and improve performance in both areas. Your proposal reviews are planned by allocating quality criteria to reviewers and dates. This is something that can easily be turned into a form, producing a written proposal review plan in minutes. With slight modifications your quality criteria become a set of pre-RFP goals. This can also take the form of a checklist. Doing this helps ensure that the information you need to fulfill the quality criteria is delivered to the beginning of the proposal effort. With some other changes, your quality criteria become worksheets for planning themes and win strategy development, proposal section planning, offering design, and more. The things required to fulfill the quality criteria can be turned into worksheets for proposal writers. This provides a little structure that helps ensure what they write passes the proposal reviews. It shows what the proposal content plan should result in, providing a defined scope for the planning. Between the checklists and worksheets, you can accelerate proposal content planning, which accelerates proposal writing, and helps ensure you get the proposal right on the first draft. It makes all the other parts of the proposal management process easier to implement. But the most important thing having written proposal quality criteria does is: It enables the people doing the work to know when they’ve succeeded. It increases the likelihood of passing quality validation on the first draft, eliminating unnecessary revision cycles and saving far more time than it took to create the quality criteria in the first place. It pays for itself many times over by improving your win rate. If defining and achieving proposal quality doesn’t improve your win rate, you have the wrong proposal quality criteria. If you want to streamline proposal writing in addition to the proposal process, focusing on reducing revision cycles will save far more time than increasing the amount of proposal text reuse (which can actually increase revision cycles). So why is it that… Nearly every company out there with a proposal process has it backwards? Why do they have the steps, but no written definition of proposal quality and conduct their reviews without any quality criteria? Like I said, it’s counterintuitive. When someone asks you to create a process, people naturally start with the steps. However, in this case, it’s better to start in the middle. The steps should be driven by itemizing what is required for success. When you start with the steps, you get a process designed to make a submission. When you start with defining success, you get proposals designed to win.