Carl Dickson

What is the learning curve for using MustWin Now? MustWin Now makes managing complex proposals so much easier. But a complex proposal is still complex, even if the software makes managing it easier. See also: MustWin Now In MustWin Now, if you are there to write, you don't need to understand how to import and cross-reference the RFP. If you are there to review, you don't need to know how to configure or tailor all the tool options. If you are the Proposal Manager you'll need to know how everything works. And if you are the designer and developer of your company's proposal process, you'll need to know why it works that way. But the concepts will all be familiar, and it will mainly be the user interface you’ll need to learn. If you throw everything MustWin Now can do at a proposal writer, they'll get overwhelmed. If you try to manage a proposal without having done a dry run, you'll probably get overwhelmed. It is far better to start by playing around with things and then do a dry run on a fake proposal. That way instead of getting overwhelmed, you can be excited about all the possibilities. The good news is that if you are a proposal manager, you'll already know what a win theme is and how to cross-reference an RFP. All you'll need to learn is how those things work in MustWin Now. And once you learn them you'll find that they work easier than the old manual ways of doing things. If you understand how to build an RFP cross-reference matrix in a spreadsheet, learning how to do it by drag and drop is easy. If you understand how to write win themes, then doing them in a tool that enables them to be cross-referenced to the outline is not a big deal. The same is true for content planning. Proposal Input Forms might be a new concept, but it's really just a matter of learning to work with online question and answer forms. You'll have new tools for making assignments, managing issues, and scheduling. But it's just a matter of learning the user interface for familiar concepts. You'll also need to learn how to get your users set up and control access. If you are a writer, you'll have to learn about Proposal Content Planning. What you'll find is doing it online is so much easier than trying to do it on paper. But when it comes to writing, all you need to do is be able to click on your sections and incorporate the content plan instructions into what you write, which will still be in Microsoft Word. You'll also want to learn how to use the Collaboration Toolbox to do things like quickly report issues or ask questions, and to work with the dashboard that shows all the assignments, issues, and questions so you can filter them down to just the ones that apply to you. The best part about the learning curve for MustWin Now is that what you will learn will open your eyes to new and better ways to win proposals. MustWin Now will get you out of the box of thinking that process has to revolve around paper. When you use MustWin Now it's like the process disappears and you just focus on what it will take to win.

The best way to improve your win rate is to improve the flow of information to the proposal so you can write it from the customer's perspective. You can't start at RFP release and accomplish this. So what can you write about to maximize your chances of winning the proposal? Results that exceed the requirement. All of the competitors who matter will meet all of the requirements. If you want to win, you have to do better. What will make your approaches deliver results that are better than what the customer asked for? Qualifications that exceed the requirement. All of the competitors who matter will also be fully qualified. What qualifications do you have that go beyond what they asked for? Differentiators. Customers make selections by comparing what's different about them and picking the one with the differences that they like best. This remains a factor when the RFP has detailed, written evaluation criteria, because they still have to apply those criteria. Point out the differences that make your proposal better and substantiate them, and they become the reasons why the customer will score you higher than your competitors. Strengths that are not differentiators. Things that are good but may not be unique to your company are still worth pointing out. They improve your score and do differentiate you from the companies that don't say them. This doesn't mean you should just pile on every positive claim you can think of in the hopes that enough of them will put you over the top. But it does mean that if you make your strengths scorable they can help you win. Proof points. The best way to improve your score is to prove your claims. Unsubstantiated claims won't improve your score and may weaken your credibility. Proof points are exactly what evaluators look for to justify their scores. Compelling reasons why. Often the reasons why you do things matter more than the procedures themselves because that is where you show insight and judgment. If, in the customer's eye, two companies do the same thing but one shows more insight and better judgment, who do you think they will pick? The price to win. If you can't propose better results, qualifications, differentiators, or strengths and don't have the details to write solid proof points and the customer doesn't care about why you do things, then outside of achieving a compliant proposal sometimes the only thing you can do right now to maximize your chances of winning is to have the right price. But be warned, the right price is not always the lowest. Knowing what the right price is may be even harder than knowing what to write about in your proposal. It is worth just as much effort to do well. What's not on the list Benefits. The reason I left them out is that it's too easy to write something beneficial sounding that the customer won't care about, doesn't differentiate your proposal, and ends up not having any impact on your score. If you sit through enough customer debriefs after a proposal loses, you'll realize that the hundreds of "benefits" cited in those proposals didn't help one bit. Compliance. Because the best way to maximize your chances of winning a proposal requires more than just not screwing it up. Graphics. Or any of the many unquantifiable but hopeful things that might possibly improve your evaluation score. Because you can put time into all of them and it may not add up to anything. Or it may. You never know. They might be worth doing. Graphics most certainly are. But you can't even have the kind of great graphics that can win your proposal if you don't have the seven things above first. Spell checking. Speaking with one voice, or anything having to do with formatting or typography on the list for the same reasons. Certifications or experience. And other attributes that fall under qualifications, so no need to call them out individually. Developing an information advantage. Even though it's the single most important thing you can do to improve your win rate developing an information advantage is not on the list because at the start of the proposal you either have one or you don't. What it all adds up to Write about how you deliver better results, are more qualified, have clear differentiators, have more strengths than your competitors, prove everything you claim, provide compelling reasons why you do things the way you do, and bid the right price and you will maximize your chances of winning. But you will still be weak against a competitor who has an information advantage over you. Do these things and gain an information advantage and not only will you maximize your win rate, you'll maximize the ROI of the proposal function.

A good friend of mine, Mark Amtower, recently wrote a book in collaboration with a bunch of authors all experts on marketing and government contracting. A wealth of great discussion has resulted from the many useful nuggets of wisdom the book contained. Full disclosure: I’m one of the authors. Here’s a great quote from the book by Mark: Thought leadership is not for the timid or intellectually lazy. Building a SME or thought leadership position in the market is an active, ongoing activity where your personal learning never stops. It thrives on feedback and discussion. — Mark Amtower in Government Marketing Best Practices 2.0 I like this quote. Naturally my obsessive brain went straight to how it impacts proposals. But first I had to parse it apart and understand all the implications. The key word in "thought leader" is leader. You can't be a lazy leader. A thought leader must be an innovator and teacher. A thought leader can't just rest on the "best practices." A thought leader must continuously invent new and better best practices. To be a thought leader, you must expose your new ideas to validation by the world. That is most certainly not for the timid. What's the difference between a thought leader and an influencer? See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques A thought leader is something very different from an influencer. An influencer is a promoter. A thought leader is an inventor first and then a promoter. Influencers broadcast and thrive on drama and ratings. Thought leaders participate in discussion and thrive on feedback. If people see you as entertaining or as a role model, you can have influence in proportion to the size of your audience. But people won’t see you as a thought leader unless they see you as an innovative trailblazer and a teacher. The influence a thought leader has is in proportion to the impact of their ideas first and the size of their audience second. While you might be able to get away with it as an influencer, you can't get away with being timid or intellectually lazy as a thought leader. The key question is when do you need a thought leader, and when do you need an influencer? An influencer is great if you are trying to advertise. A thought leader is great if you need insight. What does this have to do with proposals? If you try to write proposal copy that sounds like advertising copy, your win rate will drop dramatically. The way people read proposals makes selling in writing different from selling in video. If your company is known for thought leadership and you show insight in your proposals, your win rate will go way up. People make decisions on proposals based on the impact of what they read. Insight multiplies that impact in innovative and differentiating ways. Proposals are not about you. They are about the customer. Proposals don’t achieve influence by making people want to be like them, by being controversial, or by the popularity of their authors. Influencing in writing is not achieved through personal charisma. Influencing in writing is achieved by sharing insights that matter to the customer and presenting them from the reader’s perspective instead of your own. Thought leadership can improve your ability to win proposals. This works directly, when the thought leader is also a proposal writer. But it also works indirectly when thought leadership is a marketing strategy for the company submitting the proposal and the customer associates innovative ideas with the organization and wants them as a resource. Being an influencer can be claimed. The claim is part of the influence. However, being a thought leader can't be claimed. It must be proven. Self-proclaiming your status as a thought leader doesn't make it so. In fact, self-proclaiming your thought leadership is more likely to backfire than it is to establish your thought leadership. The only thing that can make you or your company a thought leader is other people following and seeking your recommendations. You can publish insights and innovative ideas. But it’s only when people start sharing them or reaching out to you for more that you become a thought leader. Doing the hard work of gaining and sharing insight to establish yourself as a thought leader takes time. And for it to impact your proposals it must be done well before you even start a proposal. But the next time you review one of your proposals and see that it’s full of content that every one of your competitors will or can claim and you realize that all the proposals submitted will basically sound the same, that’s when you’ll realize the value of thought leadership and why it’s worth the investment.

Writing from the customer’s perspective while cross-referencing the RFP requirements with the evaluation criteria and your win strategies are really just proposal writing basics. They are mechanics that tell you what to write about. They are vital, but minimum skills for writing a proposal based on what it will take to win. I have come to realize that the skill that I find myself leaning on the most to figure out what words and phrases to use to present things in writing is translation. We normally think of translation between languages, but translation applies to ideas as well. And in fact, translating ideas is also key to advanced language translation. The translation of ideas is relevant to proposal writing because it is what you need to be able to articulate things in a different context. See also: Proposal Writing Tips and Techniques The same approach, the same offering, gets presented differently when the customer is more concerned about your qualifications than your processes. Or vice versa. Or when the priority is management over your technical approach. Or vice versa. Differences in circumstances, customer preferences, the nature of the work, evaluation procedures, budget, and so much more change the context. Not only that, but you often learn more about the context while working on the proposal. The strategies you start with can shift during proposal development. It starts with looking at things from a different perspective, but for your strategies to make it onto paper, you need to be able to translate how you originally described things or your first attempt at describing them into the new context by articulating them differently. There are always different ways to express something you are trying to communicate. Some have different connotations and leave different impressions. Sometimes you can completely transform what you are writing by shifting the language from one way of wording things to another. This is not as simple as finding “a good way to say it.” Instead, it is more like anticipating how you want the reader to react and then expressing the idea in a way that leads them to that reaction. Instead of poetic creativity, it requires being able to phrase things with a purpose. Doing this means anticipating their reaction, and instead of choosing the first words that come to your mind, selecting the words that will guide them to the reaction you desire them to have. This form of translation is very similar to the process of selecting words in another language that the person you are communicating with will understand. This is especially true when you consider that good language translations are not literal. To convey meaning in another language that phrases things differently, you can’t translate directly word for word. You have to substitute words and phrases to convey the meaning. Advanced proposal writing requires a similar way of mapping new phrasing to convey a meaning that will have the right impact on the reader. Advanced proposal writing goes way beyond simply selecting words that sound good. An example of how this affects proposal writing For example, imagine that an RFP says you should summarize your experience with what you are proposing and they want you to create something that achieves a purpose they specify. Should you provide a list of similar projects? Should you focus on the quantitative or qualitative aspects of the projects? Should you tell anecdotes about projects in which you accomplished something similar? Should you write about the challenges you had to overcome and lessons you have learned from doing similar work? Or should you create a table of your projects with columns to provide descriptions or checkmarks of things like similarity in size, scope, and complexity along with your relevant accomplishments? What understanding do you want to guide the reader to realize? It may very well be the same project information being delivered. The difference is primarily in how you word things. What drives your decision when writing is what the customer needs to hear to perform their evaluation. If you choose incorrectly, you’ll communicate in a way that doesn’t match what the customer needs to hear and you will not get as high an evaluation score as you could have. Advanced proposal writing is translating the information into a form that not only the customer will understand, but which also achieve your goal. Application to proposal writing The best way to achieve this level of advanced proposal writing is to learn to ask the right questions. Consider how many different ways you can express an idea. How many different considerations should go into what you want to communicate? What will affect how the customer interprets what you have to say? What do you want to communicate beyond the words themselves? What impressions, positioning, attitudes, or emotions should you communicate? What will they do with the information you are providing? Is there a way to provide it that makes it more useful or easier to work with? Then match the words and phrases you use to what you are trying to accomplish, while doing that through another person’s interpretation of what you just wrote.

Proposals are deep. Understanding them and getting good at them requires skills that go beyond just getting words on paper. And the skills that you develop to write great proposals apply throughout life. This may be true of every profession. But here are some of the things I have learned from mine. I find no depth in simple rules for living. I'm not trying to write memes. Simple rules often gloss over important things and tend to be self-contradictory. I like to look at the core, at the root of what causes things, and seek to understand where things come from and how they relate. In the list below you will find many things that relate and work together. So instead of rules for life, this is a list of things to ponder. And you could spend the rest of your life pondering them. I know I will. From a career spent working in and around proposals, I have learned that: See also: Proposal Management Being considerate is more important than you realize. Only this is not the kind of being considerate that is synonymous with manners. It is the kind of consideration that involves thinking. Being able to consider things from the customer’s perspective is key to great proposal writing. Being able to see the proposal process from the perspective of proposal contributors is key to gaining process acceptance. Maximizing your perspective skills turns out to be beneficial well beyond proposals and in all aspects of life. Gaining perspective occurs mostly though consideration. Applying consideration to your customer, proposal contributors, family, friends, or strangers requires thinking about things from their point of view so that you can reconsider your own. The more perspectives you consider, the wiser you become. You should never stop growing. Proposals matter because growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. This turns out to be true in life as well. Without growth there is only stagnation and decline. For contractors, growth comes from winning proposals. In life, growth comes from accomplishment. The difference is less than you might think. People who resist change, resist growth. In life we can define accomplishment broadly, but we should always be seeking it. And as a result we should always be growing in ways that bring the good kind of change. Everything we do revolves around values. All decisions regarding proposals, from staffing, to priorities, to action items, should all be made on the basis of ROI. Most of the decisions we make in life are also ROI decisions. The difference is that in life we can consider far more than monetary returns. The more clearly you can articulate your values, the better informed your decisions will be. However, the values that most people articulate do not reflect the way they behave. There are other items on this list dealing with perspective and cognitive dissonance that can help you spot your true values. Bringing this back to proposals and the world of business, look at your company’s mission statement for an example of values being articulated that don’t match people’s behavior. Interacting with other people depends more on expectations than it depends on procedures. Nearly all of the friction encountered when working on proposals comes from mismatches in people’s expectations. If you want a better process that leads to a better proposal experience and results in a higher win rate, focus on discovering, articulating, and refining expectations instead of focusing on the steps. Prioritize clarity and consideration of expectations, because they flow in every direction. If I don’t consider your expectations when I issue an assignment, it’s not going to achieve the best results. All stakeholder expectations should be considered by all the stakeholders. Giving more clarity and consideration to expectations reduces friction and improves outcomes. This is true throughout life in working with and getting along with other people. Working through others is a critical skill. Working in proposals requires working through other people. You can’t create a proposal bigger than yourself if you don’t depend on other people’s contributions. Doing things yourself is easy. Doing things through other people is hard. This is something else that is also true in life. You can see how perspective, consideration, and expectations all interplay when working through others. Being good at conflict resolution makes you better at problem solving. Not all conflicts can be anticipated or prevented. How you handle those conflicts impacts the success of your proposals as well as your relationships in life. Being able to resolve conflicts means looking deeper than what’s on the surface to address the real problem and then translating a solution into the interests of the other people involved to find common ground. If you can do this, you have all the skills to write great proposals. And to work past the difficulties you will face in life. Why is more important than what. Writing about the reasons why you do the things you do often matters more to a proposal evaluator than the things themselves. Being clear on the reasons why you do things is likewise often more important to yourself than what you end up doing. And being able to explain those reasons to others is the same. Focus on “why.” Asking the right questions is key. The entire pursuit process can be expressed as a series of questions. Often this works better than trying to chart the process, because “the process” is really just a flow of information. When writing proposals, trying to consider the customer’s perspective often starts with questions like “what is it they are looking for” or “what matters about this to the customer.” Every item on this list can be delved into deeper by applying inquiry. Just for fun, go through each of your thoughts on each item and ask yourself, “Is it true?” Integration is how we make things work. Great proposals are fully integrated. There is a concept of operations and a story about it that gets woven into each section of the proposal. The context of every feature and benefit is related so that they add up to something compelling. People work the same way. Everything you learn must be integrated and compatible with every other thing you have ever learned. If you don’t practice the things you think you believe and make them all work together you’ll have disconnects between your emotions and behavior and your beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is believing two things at the same time that conflict with each other. Whether you realize it or not, cognitive dissonance shows up in all kinds of negative ways. Just a like a great proposal requires integration, so does fulfilling your potential in life. Everything is training and learning is continuous. The pursuit process is a learning process. Learning what it will take to win that pursuit. Learning how to best execute the process. Learning what must be done. Learning over time how to improve your win rate. It never ends because you will always be improving your win rate. Instead of creating a process and thinking you’re done when you’ve listed the steps, try creating a platform for learning. Continuous learning applies to life as well. Only it shouldn’t just be random learning. Inquiry, perspective, and integration are what lead to continuous growth. Translation is critical for successful communication. In many ways, proposal writing is translation. It’s taking your ideas and translating them into what the customer needs to hear in order to reach their decision. Proposal development requires translating the RFP so that non-specialist contributors can understand it. And then translating their technical language back into something the evaluators will understand. All while translating the language into something integrated that reflects the customer’s perspective. If the receiver doesn’t process the communication the way you intended, then communication hasn’t occurred. This also is true in life. Translation is far more than just language skills. It’s really about idea skills. Can you reconfigure your ideas to match a new context and then reconfigure them again in order to shift the perspective and finally communicate them successfully? This happens both when you communicate to someone else, and when you receive communication and are trying to process it. It can even happen when you are trying to understand your own thoughts. Master the things on this list and winning proposals will come naturally. And life will be better and full of accomplishment as well. Your proposals will be full of customer awareness. And your own awareness, of both yourself and your world, will expand greatly. At the very least, you’ll never look at proposals the same way again.

Nobody wants a burdensome proposal process. Proposal specialists don’t want one because they want people to be efficient and they want people to buy in to working on the proposal. Proposal contributors don’t want one because they may not want to work on the proposal at all, let alone have to jump through hoops to do it. Executives don’t want it because they don’t want people complaining about having to work on proposals. How do you get the balance right between making sure you do all the things required to win and having the most simple, highly efficient proposal process? For starters, I recommend that you make sure you are defining proposal efficiency correctly. Most folks get that wrong. But the best way to ensure that your proposal has nothing in it that isn’t absolutely necessary is the proposal process minimization challenge. I highly recommend them. What is a proposal process minimization challenge? See also: Successful process implementation A proposal process minimization challenge is a dare that people can’t find anything in your process that can be safely skipped without lowering your win rate. If they find anything, you agree to remove it from the process. If they find a way to do things that increases win probability over what’s there, you agree to replace what’s in your process with it. It’s a challenge to turn your process into the absolute minimum needed to maximize your chances of winning. If people think there’s a way to get by with less process, let them prove it. I’ve never had to change a proposal process implementation because someone else won this challenge. I’m kind of disappointed by that. I want the least burdensome process that maximizes the chances of winning. If someone else has a better idea of how to achieve that, I want to shamelessly steal that idea. And I tell them that. How a proposal process minimization challenge can play out in reality Proposal contributors often want to start writing immediately when the RFP is released and the deadline clock starting ticking. Their eagerness can get in the way when staff want to skip content planning and start writing immediately. Try listing the things that are addressed during content planning and then challenge them to identify a more reliable way of identifying those things and building the proposal around them. The form that content planning takes is less important than that it gets done. However, you may find that while a lot of proposal contributors have proposal experience and can do a good job, they’ve never really itemized everything that goes into proposal writing or structured their sections to make sure they don’t overlook any. They write and try to press as many buttons as possible. This can produce good proposal writing. But it will never produce the best proposal writing that the team is capable of producing. You won’t get there through infinite unplanned, subjective draft revisions that you keep doing until you run out of time. Achieving your full potential requires thinking it through before you start writing. And the better the first draft, the better the proposal experience. But we can debate the best ways to go about thinking things through and planning the writing. If we focus intensely, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Everyone benefits when the team works through this together. When companies with proposal operations in multiple locations try to maximize their win rate by standardizing their proposal process, it can be difficult to get everyone on the same page. When you’ve got something you are recommending for implementation by all, that’s when to hit them with the minimization challenge. Invite them to point out anything that isn’t necessary for achieving a high win rate. If your recommendations are sound, they won’t find anything. But more importantly, the discussion will shift from “your way” vs “our way” to what it takes to improve your win rate. That is an argument well worth having. A lot of companies only have one major proposal review, even though that can be worse than having none. I’ve recommended that they have separate reviews for compliance matrix/outline, content plan, offering design, early draft, mature draft, instruction compliance, evaluation criteria optimization, finalization, submission readiness, pricing model, pricing, and contracts. This list freaks people out. They are incorrectly thinking all reviews require a pens down and senior staff sitting around a table while reading and pontificating. You don’t need (possibly any) reviews to be performed like that. What you need is validation at each step to achieve reliability before you take things further. This can often be achieved informally and without a pens down or halt in proposal progress. To get them on board, you’ll have to show them that it can be implemented. You should also use the minimization challenge. Dare them to identify anything in that list that doesn’t need to be validated and won’t create win rate stealing disruption if skipped. Everything should have a proposal minimization challenge Every single decision related to proposal development should be prioritized based on how it will impact your win rate. Winning pays for the effort that it takes to win. If it doesn’t, you’re either selling a commodity and writing a proposal when you should be giving a quote, or your margins are too thin to tailor your proposals. A 1% difference in win rate on a $10 million proposal returns $100,000. That pays for a lot of effort. Imagine how much a 10% difference returns. Some things have more of an impact on win probability than others do. But all decisions should be prioritized based on their impact on win rate. And all proposal decisions should pass the proposal process minimization challenge. Do the least amount possible that will maximize your chances of winning. Instead of arguing over preferences, argue over the impact. Winning those arguments will require learning more about how the customer will perform their evaluations. And understanding that is critical to improving your win rates.

Success requires more than just identifying the steps in your proposal process. It’s a good start, but it's just a start. You can follow the same steps with very different results on different days. One day those steps will help you win. And on another day you’ll still lose even though you followed the steps. Here are some things that will help you transform your ordinary, challenging proposal process into something that will make things easier and be seen as an asset: See also: Successful process implementation Anticipate needs. Think about what people need to be available, focused, and successful at playing their role. Then set your process up to deliver that. Anticipate what great proposal writing will require. And deliver the information they will need. Anticipate what they will need before they get there, and when they do get there things will go more smoothly and they’ll spend their time trying to win instead of getting what they need. Guide expectations. A lot of friction during the proposal process comes from people not having their expectations met. Most of this is a result of expectations not being communicated and agreed on. To reduce this friction, you need get expectations out in the open. Consider spelling out the expectations in writing for every stakeholder at every step. Make sure you give them a chance to add, delete, or change those expectations and keep at it until everyone has explicitly agreed to accept the expectations relevant to themselves. Track issues to resolution. When issues arise, they need to be tracked to resolution. Tracking means following up and escalating when needed. Unresolved issues are not only proposal risk, they can impact your win probability. A whiteboard can count as an issue tracking system. But it’s not a very good one. Consider how help desks work to identify, track, and escalate issues without any ever being lost. Then emulate those concepts in whatever form or media works for you. Smooth the handoffs. Through the pursuit process information flows through many hands. At each handoff, there is a chance that information will be lost, expectations will go unmet, issues will remain unresolved, and friction will increase. Smooth the handoffs by identifying what information, in what format, needs to be delivered to meet expectations, resolve known issues, and reduce friction. Then go back to the beginning of the previous step and build in what it will take to accomplish that. Script your communications. For many steps, you can anticipate what you are going to need to communicate before, during, and after. So write them in advance. Leave placeholders for the details that are still to be determined. Have clear triggers for when you pass from one step to the next, and send the communications right away. Anticipate their needs, reaffirm expectations, provide instructions, and include links for additional information. Before, during, and after every step, what they need to know should just show up before questions even occur to them. This does not take extra effort. You need to communicate anyway. So forget about proposal reuse. But do practice communication reuse. Deliver just-in-time handouts. Where are things located? How should things be formatted? What procedures should be followed? What are the expectations? What will be needed? At every step, for every review, and to help every role, create handouts. Limit the handouts to one sheet (one to two pages). You could easily have a dozen or two of them. Don’t pass them out all at once. That’s like asking someone to read a book. Instead, distribute them at the moment of need. This should synch up nicely with your communications scripting. Just make sure your handouts are fulfilling the reader’s needs instead of your own, so that the person finds them useful and is happy to receive them. Deliver quality criteria checklists. How do proposal contributors know when they’ve done a good job? How do proposal reviewers know? Every assignment should come with a set of quality criteria in the form of a checklist, so that people know when they’ve done a good job. Reviewers should get the same checklists to use in performing their assessments. Like the handouts, limit the length. People need to be able to keep everything on the checklist in mind while they’re working. Have a system and communications plan for customer amendments and changes. Every once in a while, seemingly at random, customers change the RFP. Sometimes it’s a very minor change. Sometimes it requires major rewriting. Sometimes it comes early, and sometimes it comes late. It may or may not come with a deadline extension. How do you possibly plan for something that random? You can notify people that it’s arrived and is being reviewed. You can give first impressions. You can follow up with more details. You can script these communications so they can be done quickly. You can have if-then-else contingency plans that cover things like under what circumstances you want people to stop writing while you figure things out. Pass the minimization challenge. I like to challenge proposal stakeholder to identify any step, assignment, or action that can be safely removed from the process without causing a reduction in win probability. If there is anything in the process that doesn’t improve win probability I want it removed. As you implement your process or any of these recommendations, you should be doing the same. What can you safely skip? Only do the things that improve your chances of winning, and prioritize them by the amount of impact that they have. You want the tiniest least burdensome process that maximizes your chances of winning. How do you know if these things are working? You’ll see a reduction in friction and fewer questions. Those are the first signs that people are getting their needs met. And if the process is meeting their needs, it’s not a burden. It’s helpful. A helpful process does more to improve win probability than a mandated process. A helpful process is a tool that people want to use. And a helpful proposal process executed by people who want to win will not only transform everyone’s proposal experience, it will also supercharge your win rate.

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.