Carl Dickson

There are two dimensions to time management. One is managing yourself. It’s not always easy, even though it’s completely in your own control. The second is working through other people, who have to manage their own time. This is much harder. The combination is extremely challenging. The time management strategies for each are similar. But working through other people requires a variety of techniques. It is not as simple as needing discipline and authority. In fact, those are the least of the tools you need. Doing proposals with other people is its own topic. Time management for proposals See also: Faster Do more earlier. It takes some time to ramp up a proposal. And there is much that you can’t do until you have the RFP. What you can do is think things through, determine what matters, and develop your win strategies so that when the outline based on the RFP is ready you can accelerate the time between having the outline and being ready to write. Don’t try to do more than the time available allows. This one is a little counter-intuitive. You need to scale back in a planned way to avoid having to drop quality assurance at the end. Simplifying does not have to mean that you produce a proposal that is not as good. Consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Focus on your message and drop the bells and whistles. Don’t try to make it up by working harder. If you plan to make up for it by just working harder, you’re setting yourself up for trying to accomplish the impossible. You’ll increase the odds that you end up scaling back quality to enable you to meet the deadline. Scale what you’re going to build to fit the time available with enough time to do a quality job. And then work harder to make up for it when you discover that unforeseen complications made things take longer than expected. Stop moving the goal post. Don’t add revisions just because it looks like there is enough time available or you think you can make it better. Keep doing this and you’ll trip over the point where there won’t be enough time and you’ll sacrifice quality to make the submission. Cycle your proposals through planning, writing, and quality assurance, then final production. If you find yourself backing up from final production to writing, then either your planning or quality assurance is broken and that may jeopardize future proposals. For example, if you use quality assurance to discover what the proposal should be and then create rework instead of using it to validate that the proposal is what you planned it to become, you have a broken content planning process. Not only that, you risk entering into the infinite loop of reviewing and revising in the hope that the proposal will become something great until the clock runs out and you submit what you have in the last cycle. This is not a valid approach to quality assurance and can easily reduce quality instead of improving it. Define your proposal quality criteria and plan your content and then validate the plan. Validating that plan is far more important than reviewing the drafts that come later. Don’t fail at validating your content plan and whatever you do, don’t skip it. Think things through. Once. If you are constantly rethinking or trying to figure things out, you are constantly wasting time. Take the time to think things through well and then validate your approach before implementation. You can refine your plan as you move forward, but you don’t want to be moving backwards because the plan was insufficient or broken at the start. Plan to figure things out. Plan a careful reconsideration to validate your plans. Don’t move forward until it is complete. But then don’t move backwards. Efficiency. Proposal efficiency is not what you think it is. It is not making proposals take less time. Proposal efficiency is winning what you bid. But the kind of efficiency that involves making activities only take as long as they need to and not more is good for managing the time between RFP release and the deadline.

A great way to learn where you need improvement is by paying attention to the questions people ask, especially the ones they ask more than once. They are the signs that your process is flawed. They are also signs of potential process resistance. When people don’t need to ask any questions, it’s because they find the process to be easy. It meets their needs. It is delivering to them what they need. When they have what they need and are being pointed in the right direction, they will produce better proposals and do it more efficiently. Do the people you are working with on your proposals ask questions like: See also: Successful Process Implementation Where is a file located? What are they supposed to write? Is this what you want? Is this any good? How do I…? When do you need it? Should I…? Where do I find out? Who should I talk to about…? Do they ask for input so they can complete their assignments? In a perfect word, people would not have to ask any questions at all during a proposal, because the process would deliver the information they need, when they need it. In the imperfect world we live in, we make compromises and have limited resources, so we don’t have time to anticipate every question and prepare answers to them. But in the competitive world of proposal writing, we seek to outdo everyone who might challenge us by being closer to perfection. Anticipating their questions and preventing the need to even ask them is part of how the proposal process can improve your company’s competitiveness. It is also key to getting people to accept and follow your process. To improve your process, focus not only on what it does or what the steps are, but also focus on making your process self-explanatory. Make sure that your forms, communications, and assignments are not only self-explanatory, but that they anticipate the questions that people will ask while completing the assignments. This sounds basic and is easy to understand, only it is quite difficult to achieve in practice. Examples of proposal assignments How do you make a proposal writing assignment self-explanatory? Take a look at these three examples of articulating a proposal writing assignment: 1. Write this section. 2. Write this section and make it RFP compliant. 3. Write this section and while making it RFP compliant, optimize it to score highly against the evaluation criteria, implement our win strategies (here’s a list), use lots of graphics (here are some suggestions), prove these points we’re trying to make, establish that we are qualified to do what you write about (here’s another list), and that we have experience doing it (from these projects). Obviously, writers will produce much better proposal writing if the assignment resembles the third example. Obviously the third example takes more care and time to create. But less obviously, people will still have questions about how to fulfill the assignment with the third example. They will have fewer questions than with the first two. But the questions they ask will tell you what you left out and help you choose better wording. With any of the three examples, you may also find that answering the questions before they are asked is not as simple as wording your assignments better. You may need to add steps to obtain the information needed or to discover the answer. Those steps may involve other people. Those other people will have questions about what you require of them. And so on… This is a good thing. It’s showing you what needs to happen in preparation for people to be successful with their assignments. And you want that to happen. The success of your process is determined by how well you surface the questions people will have Simply asking whether people have any questions is better than nothing, but won’t get the best results. Try asking probing questions like: What do you think about…? Would this be easier if we…? Do you think this would work? Does that make sense? Do you have everything you need to complete your assignments? Look for the problems that will surface later if people don’t have the input they need or don’t understand how to accomplish their assignments. Remember, goal is not just getting something on paper. The goal is getting people to write a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. Don’t expect them to just show up knowing what that is.

Saying things that differentiate your offering from your competitors is a well-known best practice. Proposal writers spend a lot of time identifying differentiators and then working them into their proposals. At least they should. What we see in a lot of the proposals we review are things that do the opposite. People write things in their proposals that make them sound ordinary. You can’t be competitive and sound ordinary. We call these statements anti-differentiators. If you can’t write a great proposal built around your differentiators, you should at least try really hard not to base your proposals on anti-differentiators. 5 examples of anti-differentiators Anti-differentiator: “Our company is fully capable of performing the required work on time and within budget.” When you say that you can do the work, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is a potential competitor can do the work. Being able to do the work will not win you the bid. Doing the work in some way that is exceptionally better is what will win you the work. Talk about how your way of doing the work is superior or will deliver superior results instead of simply saying you can do the work. Adding “on time and within budget” to the list is like saying “pick us because we will do a merely acceptable job.” When you claim that you will do the work exceptionally, no one will believe you. So don't say that you are an excellent performer, have a great track record, or will do a great job. Being exceptional must be proven. Ordinary companies claim all kinds of things without proving them. No one ever pays them any attention. No proposal evaluator ever told their boss that they should approve a proposal because the vendor they’d never heard of before said they are the industry leader. A company that proves they have a credible approach to mitigating the risks resulting in more reliable delivery will beat them every time. Anti-differentiator: “Our company meets all of the qualifications required by the RFP.” When you say that you are fully qualified, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is a potential competitor will be qualified. Being qualified will not win you the bid. Being over qualified will not win you the bid. However, being qualified in a way that matters and makes a difference can win you the bid. Focus on why your qualifications will make a difference and prove that it matters. A vendor that brags about “meeting all qualifications required by the RFP” will lose to a company that shows how their qualifications will result in better delivery or that simply offers better qualifications. Every time. Anti-differentiator: “Our company will staff every position required for this project.” When you say that you have the staff or that you’ll just hire the incumbent staff, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is bidding will claim to have the staff or be capable of getting them. And they’ll be just as credible as you are. Don’t just say that your staff or ability to get them is better, somehow. Say what the impact of your better staff or ability to get them will be. And prove it. Anti-differentiator: “We will meet all of the requirements in the Statement of Work (SOW).” If you really want to sound ordinary, say that you’ll fulfill or comply with all of the contract requirements. Because everyone will say that and you’ll have lots of company. You’ll be one of many and just like all the rest. And it’s not even what the customer really wants. It’s merely the minimum of what they must have. What they want is someone who will do better than the contract requirements. Only if you’re going to say that you have to detail how you’ll do that and what the impact will be. Anti-differentiator: “Our company delivers the best value.” When you say that you or your approach provides the best value and leave it at that you sound ordinary. If you prove the value impact of what you offer is greater than the value impact of other offers, then you sound compelling. Only how are you going to do that? The best you can usually hope for is to explain the trade-offs and how the trade-offs you chose will strike the best balance between cost and performance. Skip trying to claim to be the best value. Your claim means nothing. The customer will determine who is offering the best value. And they’ll do it by considering the trade-offs. Information about those trade-offs that help them understand what matters is the kind of thing that customers cite as strengths on their proposal evaluation forms. Don’t be the minimum Anything that involves doing the minimum, meeting the requirements, and being capable, will always be anti-differentiators no matter how affirmatively you state them. Why would the customer choose a vendor who is merely acceptable over someone who is better? Any claims that are unproven, no matter how complimentary or grandiose, will also be an anti-differentiator. They do the opposite of what you intend and make you look like an ordinary, somewhat untrustworthy, vendor deserving of skepticism. Each anti-differentiator that you include in your proposal lowers your competitiveness. Don’t be ordinary because ordinary doesn't win. If you can’t find a real differentiator, at least just prove that you are good at what you do. Proof points can be differentiators.

Not only will you never have enough people to help write and produce a proposal, but many of the ones you do have will be inexperienced. You need to get the most out of what you’ve got to work with. Sometimes this means that instead of best practices and a great proposal, you need to figure out how you're going to be able to submit anything with the staff you have to work with. And hope you can still win. Maybe your proposed price will be low. Basic things you can do to improve your chances See also: Dealing with adversity Anticipate everything an inexperienced proposal writer is going to mess up and have questions about. Don’t just think about the procedures. They won’t already know what the goals should be and you can’t afford for them to get stuck. They won’t know how to structure their response or what points to make. They won’t know what the expectations are. Keeping them from wandering around in the dark will save a lot of time. Make sure people can fulfill their assignments. It will help tremendously if you have practical guidance you can give those contributing to the proposal effort. It will also help if you take the time to detail your proposal assignments. Most proposal assignments come with failure built into them. If you just pass out an outline, you’re setting yourself up for a bad proposal experience. Detailing your proposal assignments means telling people what they need to succeed with their assignment and not just giving them a heading to fill in. Guide them towards success. Proving training is beneficial, but can increase the time burden that the proposal represents. Classroom training is best for procedures, knowledge transfer, or contextual awareness and pays off best for staff who will do more proposals in the future. But practical proposal training is best embedded into your process and doesn’t have to even look like training. Think of it as guidance that can be implemented in the form of explainers built into forms, cheat sheets, and checklists. A little goes a long way, even if it’s just explainers included with assignments. The further you go beyond an outline and a schedule, the more you will get out of the staff you’ve got to work with. Set the bar low and be careful where you raise it. Decide whether your goal is to submit an ordinary, compliant proposal that no one will be embarrassed by without mentioning that it’s not a competitive strategy, or whether you are going to stretch your thin resources to the breaking point in an attempt to win against better prepared and resourced competitors. You’ll do a better job if you assess your circumstances and make an intentional choice between those two instead of leaving it unstated or claiming to do both. Going all heroic without the right resources tends to result in a last minute train wreck of a proposal full of defects that no one will want to admit to. Going beyond the basics to really get more out of people If you only task your proposal writers with writing, you are in for a bad proposal experience when insufficient and inexperienced staff try to figure out what to write and how to present it on their own. There is a lot more to winning a proposal than showing up and putting enough words on paper to fill the page limit. The more you do to plan what should be written, including not just what to write but what points to prove and how to present things, the more likely you are to get writing that reflects it. Planning is how you accelerate thinking through how the writing should be structured, presented, and all the ingredients that will go into each assignment. Planning is how you accelerate writing, increase your win probability, and reduce rework. The more your assignments specify the structure and topics of what should be written, the more likely you are to get writing that reflects it. You may or may not be able to involve the writers you have to work with in this planning. You also need to define proposal quality criteria so the writers know what defines successful completion. If your assignment is “complete a section” you’ll get words that fill the page limit. If you make the standard “pass the review,” then they will write without knowing what it will take to pass. If you start by writing down your proposal quality criteria, then your writers can self-assess their own writing before it gets to the review. Your proposal quality criteria can be a simple checklist asking if they’ve established compliance with all RFP requirements relevant to their sections, whether they’ve proved the points that were supposed to be made in their sections, whether they wrote it to score highly against the RFP evaluation criteria, etc. Planning and quality criteria change writing from something mysterious into something that is guided toward a successful outcome with minimal rework. It is just what you need to maximize the use of insufficient and inexperienced resources. It is also just what you need to maximize the productivity of highly capable and experienced resources. Once you have planning and quality criteria, you can manage your humble, under-resourced proposal by focusing on goals and expectations instead of procedures. Build for the future In this moment on this pursuit, the staff you’ve got to work with is limited and the best you may be able to do is accelerate the time from thinking to writing and eliminate rework. But over time and on future pursuits, you can improve those staff and possibly find new ones. Building people’s awareness about how to streamline the writing through planning and improving their understanding of proposal quality criteria will benefit future proposals. How much to invest in proposal staffing is an ROI consideration. If you want The Powers That Be to better resource your proposals, you need to show the impact that will have on revenue, and that the return is orders of magnitude more than it costs. The converse is also true. Understaffing proposals will reduce revenue by far more than it saves. Maximizing ROI depends on improving your win rate. Regardless of whether your proposals are fully staffed, understaffed, or most likely somewhere in between, improving the effectiveness of the staff you’ve got to work with will always be part of improving your win rate.

Proposal management is not just about implementing the proposal process. Procedural oversight is an archaic view of the primary role of management. Proposal management should be about accomplishing the goal of submitting a winning proposal. Having a process does support that goal, but a more important part is looking beyond the process to what is required for people to be successful and guiding them to achieve it. Proposal management is more about things like training and problem solving than it is about procedural oversight. See also: Steps Proposal training itself is about a lot more than just procedural training. By default we think of training as learning what to do. We always seem to want to start with Step 1. But the reality is that proposals aren’t really a developed in a series of sequential steps. Proposal training needs to cover expectation management, issue resolution, and seeing things from the customer’s perspective as much as it should cover the proposal lifecycle. When it comes to proposals, “what to do” is fifth in line even though it’s often the first thing people ask for. Ahead of it should be: What are the goals? Developing great proposals is best done through a series of accomplishing goals instead of following steps. Understanding the goal people are trying to accomplish is more important than which procedures they follow to accomplish it. This is because it is completely possible to follow procedures and not achieve any of the goals. What to expect from each other. You can’t fulfill stakeholder expectations if you don’t know what they are. This is the basis for how people work together and not the “steps” in the process. How to prepare. Being able to get the right information in the right format so that you can turn it into a plan before you start writing will do more to ensure success than any skills you might have at writing. The most highly skilled proposal writers in the world will lose to highly skilled proposal writers who are better prepared. Every time. How to validate that you did it correctly. Most proposal writing is… ordinary. Ordinary is not competitive. Most proposal writers can’t define proposal quality. Think the two might be connected? Learning how to define proposal quality criteria, use them as guidance for writing, use them for self-assessment, and use them to validate that what was written is what it should be will do more to ensure success than clever wordsmithing. What to do to accomplish the goal. What can be done? What options are there? What must be done? What must be done in a particular way? Proposal procedures can be accelerators that prevent people from having to figure out what to do to accomplish the goals. Presented this way, people more readily accept steps and procedures. But what is important is achieving the goals and not procedural compliance. The doing part of proposals becomes straightforward when you first understand the four things that come before that doing. And to the extent that you have a proposal process, it should do these things first, before tasking people with assignments. The management of proposals is practically built in when you have goals, expectations, preparation, and validation in place before the doing. The challenge for proposal contributors is learning what goals to accomplish, what is expected, how to prepare before writing, and how to validate proposal quality. This should be the focus of proposal management and proposal training. Give me someone who has learned these things and we can win. Give me someone who has not learned these things and we’ll be able to submit… something. The good news is you don’t have to deliver hours of training for each of these before you start. You just need to communicate things and give people handy checklists and reminders: Do you even tell people the goal for each activity? Do you put it in writing? We recommend using a goal-driven process instead of a step-driven one. What do you do to set expectations? Do you define the expectations for each activity? Is it all talk? Or is it in writing? Do you provide it as a handout? Learn how to communicate expectations in writing during every activity, event, or phase. An assignment without written expectations is just telling someone to do something and not how to do it. An assignment with expectations helps people work together. How do you help people prepare? Do you tell people how to prepare before you need them to do something? Do you give them time to prepare after you’ve told them how? Or do you wait until they fail to give you what you need? Every task on a proposal requires input. Planning what to write before you start writing is vital for success. How do you validate that proposal assignments were done correctly? Do you enable people to self-assess their work? Do you give them the same criteria that the proposal reviewers will use? Or do you set them up to be surprised at the review? How do people bring you completed assignments with a high likelihood of them being well done without it just being based on opinion and hope? We recommend enabling proposal quality validation by having written quality criteria. They can even take the form of checklists. Always give writers and reviewers the same criteria. Proposal management after the fact without these things is just complaining and attempting to fix things that shouldn’t have shown up broken. Proposal management with these things is competitive. It’s managing to win instead of managing to submit.

Most proposal issues have at their root the fact that we have to work with other people, with different needs, agendas, and expectations. We come together for a proposal and bring our expectations. When those expectations go unfulfilled or conflict, problems result. And those problems ultimately hurt your win rate. This course provides a structured approach to define and communicate proposal expectations so that we can work more smoothly together and maximize our win rate. The target audience for this course: This course is for companies with RFP-based proposals large enough to require a team of people to contribute. It is equally relevant to large government contractors as it is to small businesses trying to make the leap from one person who's done all of their proposals to an environment with multiple contributors. A little history to put things into context… In 2004, Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com launched the MustWin Process as a fully documented proposal process with innovations to improve win rates. In 2017, we began migrating the MustWin Process from a milestone-based process to a goal-based process, in which achieving the goals were more important than the steps used to achieve them. This opened up tremendous flexibility. In 2021, we began developing a new model for proposal development, based on defining expectations instead of steps. When combined with the goal-driven MustWin Process, it achieves full awareness of what needs to be done, what is required to do them, when they need to be done by, and how to assess whether they were done properly. In practice on real world proposals we are finding this to be transformative. People don’t need to follow a flow chart that breaks with the first curveball thrown by an RFP. Proposal contributors and stakeholders can all know what’s expected of them for every activity without even asking. When there are issues, the expectations are clear so that the team can focus on resolving the issue in a way that puts them back on track. People are less likely to ignore a set of written expectations that will come up later if they do. People tend to appreciate having the expectations spelled out at the beginning. We’re ready to teach our model to you, along with how to apply it across the life of the proposal. We’ll focus on the key roles contributors and stakeholders play so that everyone will understand what expectations they need to fulfill during a proposal. In this new training course, you will learn to use our Expectation Model to: Enhance an existing proposal process. You'll learn how to bring more clarity to the people participating. As a step toward formalizing how you do proposals. If you don't have an established process or it isn't well documented, in this course you'll learn how to build a foundation for better proposals. To be honest, you can get by without a Proposal Process if people understand the expectations for working together. And once they do, implementing a process later becomes an easier, incremental step. The real issue isn’t whether, how much, or what type of proposal process to have. The real issue is how to improve your win rate and how to get there from here. This course will give you what you need to improve your win rate on the people level instead of the flow chart level. But the two can work together. Eliminate friction during proposals. More proposal friction is caused by unfulfilled or conflicting expectations than any other cause. Except maybe for RFP amendments ;-) Address expectations with a 360-degree perspective. All proposal stakeholders have expectations that flow in every possible direction. And they all matter. Improve efficiency. People should know the expectations without having to ask. “Work late until it’s done” is an example of a poorly communicated and flawed expectation for a very real need. That need can be better addressed with better expectation management. Handoffs between people go much more smoothly when expectations are clear. Smooth handoffs mean effort spent on improvement instead of rework. Increase your company’s competitiveness. When everything else is the same, the proposal team that works together the best has a competitive advantage. If you are in a line of business where differentiators are hard to find, this becomes even more important. Introduce beneficial change over time. Expectations change. And when they do, you need an effective way to communicate the changes. If you have a model for defining and communicating expectations, you can use it to introduce change. Got a recurring problem? Change the expectations to prevent it. Got a lesson learned? Change the expectations to address it. Got an RFP mandated curveball that no one would expect? Now you’ll have a way to change and communicate the expectations for each stakeholder group throughout the process. Overcome problems with process buy-in and acceptance. Resistance happens when people are asked for things that are too far out of line with their expectations. When you improve how you communicate expectations you reduce resistance and increase acceptance. Or you surface the issue. The real problem is how do you resolve the expectation conflict? Having a structured way to declare expectations gives you something you can change if needed to gain acceptance. Expectations flow in both directions. You want to address your stakeholders' expectations as well as your own. This course will put you in position to be able to do that. What does this course consist of? Two 1.5-hour zoom sessions per week, for four weeks Examples you can tailor Homework assignments to research and articulate expectations Conversion of expectation lists into checklists and assignments The first cohort for this course will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11am, starting on February 7th, 2023. Pricing You have two options, single participant and dedicated group: Single participants are $1,595 with a $600 discount if you are already a PropLIBRARY Annual Subscriber or become one first. Dedicated groups: $5000 with only your company participating, up to 30 attendees, and 3 free annual subscriptions ($1500 when purchased through our website) or renewals to PropLIBRARY Invite your key stakeholders to participate in defining expectations Use company specific role definitions and milestone terminology By the end of the course you will complete a ready-to-implement expectation matrix that will transform your process Schedule at our mutual convenience Inflation fighting tip: You probably waste more than this in B&P spending on every single proposal you do, due to issues that directly result from problems with expectation conflicts... A day of schedule slippage here. An extra day of review recovery that should not have been necessary there. A tenth of a percent point decrease in win rate due to having to lower the bar instead of raising it… Multiply by the number of people impacted and soon you're talking real money that this course can help you stop wasting. Instead of fighting inflation by reducing the headcount on proposals (which we both know will lower your win rate), try reducing the number of wasted hours instead. How do I enroll? Click this button and let us know whether you would like to enroll as one or more single participants or as a dedicated group. Based on the option you select, we’ll check your PropLIBRARY membership status and send you an invoice for online payment, with payment by check as an option. Along the way, feel free to ask any questions you may have. Register, ask a question or get more information We strongly encourage you to make sure you are a paid subscriber to PropLIBRARY first so that you can take advantage of the discount. You can become a subscriber to PropLIBRARY here.

We like to think that when someone didn’t fully complete an assignment on time even though they accepted it, it was just a problem with motivation. It’s easy to throw shade. But experience shows us that it’s more complicated than that. It’s also easy to assume there’s an easy solution, like better deadline “enforcement” by The Powers That Be. Or that people should “just follow” the process. But experience shows us that it’s more complicated than that. The key to being able to make improvements is to get to the root causes of assignment failure, and not to assume reasons or solutions. The root causes are often pretty basic: See also: Assignments 1) The person receiving the assignment isn’t capable of fulfilling it Maybe it’s a lack of training reducing their effectiveness. That can be fixed, but only if you anticipate the need and do something about it. Just muddling through with staff trying to figure things out as they go will reduce quality. Maybe it’s something else that makes them not capable of completing their writing assignments on time. If you give them the assignment anyway, hoping they can stretch and complete it anyway, the proposal will suffer if they can’t. How are you going to prevent that? How can you tell the difference between able to stretch and not able to stretch that far? What can you do to help them make the stretch? Sometimes people aren’t capable of completing their assignments effectively, but they either don’t realize it or they aren’t willing to say it. Maybe they think it’s better to give it a try than to look like they don’t “want” to contribute. Asking directly won’t help. You’ll need to ask probing questions about what they plan to write, what it will address, how it will be presented, and when you can check in on them informally to see if there are signs of evasion. If you don’t have clarity about the capability of your contributors, you are already in trouble. Gaining that clarity should be a priority. Waiting until a review increases your risk instead of lowering it. Keep in mind that you’re not looking to just get something written, you’re looking to get something written that will win. It’s extra challenging understanding what a person’s proposal contribution capabilities are when you haven’t worked with them before. But understanding what you have to work with early enough to do something about it is often the difference between winning and losing. 2) Things changed Circumstances change. Things pop up, whether business or personal, and they aren’t always predictable. This is especially true for your star contributors, because they are the most in demand. Another place you need clarity is regarding priorities. This should come from The Powers That Be to ensure they aren’t assumptions or preferences. Or subject to debate. If the priorities are set well, then it will be clear what must be done so that action can be taken more quickly. The problem with avoiding priority conflicts is that it often involves saying, “No.” Some people, including executives, really struggle with that. They’d rather have everything done “good enough,” than to say “No” to something. The problem is that there is no such thing as “good enough” in proposal writing. There is only what it will take to win. Losing because you shorted the proposal some hours that cost the company a tiny fraction of the cost of the proposal sucks. But what sucks worse is when you compare the cost of resolving the priority conflict with the cost of the lost revenue. Priority conflicts can be difficult to untangle. Instead of focusing on expedience, try to focus on ROI. Multiply your win rate by the anticipated award value and compare that to your overall cost of pursuit so you can be mathematically clear on what resolving the conflict is worth. It helps to discuss contingencies ahead of time and gain some clarity on what the priorities are. It also helps to be decisive and quick when unexpected changes do occur. 3) They were never going to do it Some staff are so overloaded that they are shorting everyone. Usually, they are trying to do the best they can. For proposals, this creates a conflict over whether that will be enough to win. But sometimes they not only know when they accept the assignment that they’ll be incomplete or late, they also have an attitude that you’ll just have to accept it because that is all they have to give. Sometimes they just want you to know their excuse for failing ahead of time. Sometimes people assign a lower priority to the assignment you give them than you do, and they don’t bother to tell you. Sometimes people will passively accept an assignment and aggressively respond when they are late or it’s incomplete. Understanding their constraints is the secret to determining what kind of assignments to give them and whether to coax them along with assistance or add pressure. Sometimes you are just better off without them. What good is it to put extra effort you don’t have into getting an assignment completed if it’s not going to be done well enough to win? And sometimes you can’t replace them because they are your key subject matter experts. Before you try to apply pressure, try to understand their constraints regarding time, capacity, capability, and personality. Maybe there are ways around those constraints they haven’t thought of. Maybe you can just get the information you need from them and have someone else do the writing. Maybe you can use them as a reviewer instead. This can be dangerous if they also have the attitude that only they know the right way to do things and whatever is brought to them is going to be all wrong. But sometimes you can work a section in stages, by discussing what is going to be written and how it is going to be presented, followed by an early informal draft, and then a more formal draft. 4) There was an expectation mismatch If people don’t bring you what you need after saying that they will, there is an expectation mismatch. Either they did not understand your expectations, your expectations were not feasible, or something else got in the way. In any event, they failed at delivery because you failed in expectation management. You can do something about that. You can describe your expectations. You can coax them to describe theirs. But you will still run into conflicts, because expectation fulfillment is often a subjective thing. When people are conflicted over unfulfilled expectations, they often don’t handle it well. They feel let down, irritated, and defensive. You need to separate their reaction from what needs to be done. When you have an expectation conflict, ask yourself whether your assessment is real if it is based on interpretation. When talking to other people, ask them to do the same. Is it real? Is that true? Or is it an interpretation? Was the reason that they missed a deadline really that they “don’t take deadlines seriously?” Or is that your interpretation? It might be real that the deadline wasn’t their top priority. But why was that? And is your reason for that also true? Or is that also an interpretation? What are their priorities? Are you making assumptions or do you know because you’ve discussed them? This is especially important for small businesses and proposal teams. You might be tempted to claim that someone “always does this” or that you “knew they were going to do that.” But that’s not real or true. And if they are true, why did you give them the assignment without mitigating the risks? It is even more important to depersonalize expectation management when you work with the same people over and over again. Once you can separate the truth at the core of the conflict from people's feelings about it, you can do something about it. Because what happened doesn’t matter nearly as much as what needs to be done next to win before the proposal deadline. Try not to get overly distracted by who said what, what assumptions were made, what was justified, who was to blame, what changed, or what was unexpected, because now you not only need a new plan, you need a new set of expectations. And since your expectations were either wrong or not communicated with sufficient clarity for the receiver the first time, you need to adjust and try again.

People bring their expectations to work with them. People form expectations while at work. Expectations run in every direction, between every stakeholder. Humans generally do a poor job of communicating them, and an arguably worse job of fulfilling them. It is a wonder that anything ever gets done. We can do better. What if expectations were communicated more clearly? And accepted? What could we accomplish if we fulfilled all of our expectations for each other? What stands in the way of this? Problems with managing expectations The biggest thing standing in the way of expectation fulfillment is that our expectations clash. A missed assignment deadline is a common form of conflicting expectations. Conflicting expectations during proposals come about in various ways: See also: Successful process implementation Sometimes one person’s expectation is not accepted by another. Sometimes this is communicated, and sometimes it is held back. New expectations form, often the result of competing priorities, after an expectation is set. The person with the expectation does not realize that the people they expect things from have expectations of their own. Each new stakeholder with a new set of expectations further complicates the dynamic. Some people’s expectations count more than others. Sometimes an expectation is not valid. We want things we cannot have. Or we ask for the wrong things. Potential issues with expectations are not anticipated and prevented or mitigated. Expectations are interpreted differently than intended. And we thought it was going to be simple. What you can do about it Here’s a little advice that can have a big impact: Instead of defining your expectations, start by fulfilling the expectations of your stakeholders. This will make it far more likely that they’ll be able to fulfill your expectations. It also requires you to understand your stakeholders' expectations, which is rather important. Define the scope. You don’t need to also address expectations that are set by corporate or human resource policies. You can’t possibly address the entire universe of expectations. Quality methodologies don’t give up on trying to achieve quality because we can’t actually define it universally in a way that is useful. Instead we define a scope in which we can define quality and focus on that. You need to do the same thing with expectations. Instead of articulating your expectations as what people should do, articulate them as goals to be accomplished. This is the difference between discussing needs and micromanaging. Try focusing on what has to happen. Minimalism rules. Especially when it comes to expecting things from other people. What expectations must be fulfilled for what has to happen to be achieved? Only then should you try to deal with expectations related to the options, considerations, and contingencies. This also helps to de-personalize expectations. Separate what you expect from how you expect it to be fulfilled. Do you need both expectations fulfilled? Can you leave it up to them how to accomplish the goals? Or make suggestions instead of mandates? Balance every expectation you have against every possible expectation the people you depend on might have. Other people’s expectations are the most common reason your proposal expectations aren’t getting fulfilled. Remember the difference between expectations and rules or mandates. You’re not trying to codify compliance backed by threats of enforcement. You’re trying to make sure that everybody is on the same page regarding how you’d all like things to go so that you can work together to accomplish great things. Rules deal with differences in interpretation by adding more rules. This gets in the way of expectation fulfillment. Remove room for interpretation. This is not about closing loopholes. It’s about achieving clarity and simplicity so that people can understand each other without conflict. Surface differences in expectations as quickly as possible. You want to know about them because if you leave them unaddressed, they are more likely to result in expectations being unfulfilled in a way that jeopardizes overall success. And the sooner you find out about the differences, the more likely you are to be able to reframe them in a way that provides a path to a successful outcome. Improving your management of expectations will not only improve efficiency and the proposal experience. It will also increase trust. When people know what others expect and can count on each other to fulfill those expectations they begin to trust each other. And when people don’t understand each other’s expectations or how to fulfill them, distrust can seep in. It is so much easier when change does occur or a chaotic element rears its ugly head to overcome the challenge when you are working with people you trust. And as a bonus, when people understand each other’s expectations, changes are less frequent and the way to resolve them is often readily apparent.

Before people invest in a pursuit, they like to know what their chances of winning are. They want to know the odds of winning are high enough before they commit. To make their estimate of their chances sound more scientific than it really is, they often call this estimate “probability of win (pwin).” The problem is that no one can accurately predict pwin See also: Making better bid/no bid decisions Try this… Add up every pwin estimate your company has done over the last year and average them. Now compare that average to your win rate over the same period. The difference proves that your pwin estimates were inaccurate. If your pwin estimates were accurate, they’d average out the same as your win rate. How much would you like to bet that most pwins are much higher than the actual win rate? People who want to bid tend to estimate high. Most companies avoid comparing their win rate with their pwin so they don’t have to admit that all of their pwins, and quite possibly all the decisions based on them, are wrong. Not only that, but nobody in charge of business development wants to admit that they don’t know the likelihood of winning. And nobody in finance is willing to make future revenue projections without something “quantified” to base them on. So people go along with the mythical fiction that is pwin. Because they need some way of quantifying the chances of winning. Pwin can’t be fixed Go back to your pwin average. Where did your pwin estimates go wrong? Which factors were too high, low, or missing? And how can they be changed to be accurate under future circumstances instead of last year's circumstances? You don’t know. You can guess, but your guess won’t be accurate. If we come back next year, your pwin estimates will not match your win probability. Again. Because pwin is a myth. There is no way to accurately represent pwin as a percentage. No matter how much we want it to be true. It’s just that pwin is a myth we can't do without. We need to be able to make decisions based on the likelihood of winning. Should we pursue it? How much should we invest? How much revenue will result? What we can do to understand our chances of winning We can stop pretending we can estimate pwin as a percentage with sufficient accuracy. We can admit it’s a guess and not a mathematical probability. I recommend using simple pros and cons and then talking it out. Whatever you do, don’t try to convert it into a percentage. There is value in talking about whether a lead is worth pursuing. But let’s not fool ourselves that there’s mathematical precision to our guesses. I mean forecasts. A good reason to base your pursuit decisions on talking about the factors in favor of and against bidding, is because that is what will drive your win strategies. A percentage just gives a false sense of confidence. Pros and cons can both be turned into action items. A percentage does nothing to help you win and may work against it. But pros and cons help you know what you need to do to win. Arguments for and against bidding articulate your strengths and weaknesses in a way that you will need if you bid. If you must assign a number to pwin so you can do spreadsheet calculations, then do what you have to do. My recommendation for this is to do that as a factor above or below your average win rate instead of as a percentage of the chance of winning a future competition. If we think this one has a 10% better than your average chance of winning, you can calculate your estimates. You are likely to be more accurate with an amount over or under your actual win rate than you are starting from zero to estimate your chances of winning. And could you at least once a year compare your pwin average to your win rate average and improve your estimates? Create a feedback loop. And can we have some corporate tracking and accountability for these numbers? Because if a number for pwin is so important we must have it, then it’s important enough to refine our accuracy and to make those who make the estimates accountable for them.

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.