Carl Dickson

In a US Government RFP, the evaluation criteria will typically be in Section M. If you do not have a Section M, you will need to look elsewhere for the evaluation criteria that the customer will use in making a selection. If the RFP does not have any evaluation criteria, you will need to look for language describing their preferences and approach to making a selection. See also: Creating a compliance matrix and proposal outline The second step in building a compliance matrix is to incorporate the evaluation criteria. Do this by taking the foundation created in the first step based on the outline instructions in the RFP, and then adding headings if needed to address the evaluation criteria. Depending on the RFP, you may find that the outline and evaluation criteria match up perfectly. If this is the case, you may not need to add any new headings, and can simply place the Section M/Evaluation Criteria references in the appropriate column, next to the corresponding outline item. However, most RFPs do not match up perfectly. It is vital to respond to all of the evaluation criteria, since doing that will impact whether you win or lose. If there is no logical place in your current outline to address something from the evaluation criteria, then you need to create a place by adding a section or subheading to your outline. For each item you add to the outline, make sure that you identify the RFP reference that drove it to be added. When complete, you should have a reference in your compliance matrix for every evaluation criterion. If the evaluation criteria include a narrative description of what the customer wants or how you will be graded, then you will need to decide whether to add new headings or add notes to make sure that your proposal is designed to get the maximum score. Navigation: Go to the next step and address the requirements from the Statement of Work. Return to the previous step: Create a high-level outline based on the RFP Instructions. Return to the Compliance Matrix topic hub. Return to the Starting Point: Figuring Out What to Say in Your Proposals.

See also: Completing a compliance matrix and proposal outline In a U.S. Government RFP, the instructions will typically be in Section L. If you do not have a Section L, you will need to look elsewhere for the instructions. If the RFP does not have a section providing instructions, you will need to look for language describing their expectations regarding the structure of the proposal. The first step in building a compliance matrix is to create the high level outline. This should be based on the instructions in the RFP. In the first column you should enter the proposal heading, and in the second column you should include the RFP reference. Start by identifying the volumes and sections that the customer expects to see. If they provide a description for what should go into a section, you must decide whether to create subheadings for them. Each heading that you add to the outline, should contain a reference in the Section L/Instructions column so that you know which headings are required by the customer and which ones were optional or ones that you created. When you have completed adding the instructions to the compliance matrix, you will not only have your high level proposal outline, but you will also be able to verify that you have followed all of the instructions in the RFP. If the instructions include a narrative description of what the customer wants to see in your proposal, then you should add headings as needed to your outline until you have a place to address everything the customer has asked for. Navigation: Go to the next step and address the evaluation criteria. Return to the Compliance Matrix topic hub. Return to the Starting Point: Figuring Out What to Say in Your Proposals.

The process detailed below for creating a proposal compliance matrix, shows writers where in the proposal they should address every RFP requirement: Definition: A proposal compliance matrix uses a grid to show which RFP requirements are relevant to each section of the proposal. A proposal compliance matrix shows proposal writers where the customer expects to find each require addressed in the proposal. A proposal compliance matrix shows exactly which RFP requirements are part of each proposal writing assignment. A compliance matrix increases win probability by helping you create a proposal outline that puts everything where the customer expects to find it. While an RFP Compliance Matrix is not the only thing you need to know what to write in your proposal, it is usually the starting point. The first step in building a Proposal Content Plan is to create a compliance matrix. See also: Compliance Matrix The proposal Compliance Matrix was developed to respond to RFPs with hundreds or even thousands of requirements to be addressed. Multiple overlapping sections of the RFP may have requirements affecting various sections of the proposal. An RFP Compliance Matrix shows all of the requirements that are relevant to each proposal section. They help proposal writers untangle the mess of requirements that many RFPs are and figure out where in the proposal to address each of them. For very simple proposals a Compliance Matrix may not be necessary. If all sections of the RFP are already perfectly aligned, then the Compliance Matrix may not be needed. However, if all section of the RFP are not in perfect alignment, then a Compliance Matrix is vital for understanding how they map to the proposal outline, ensuring compliance with all of the requirements, and making sure that everything in your proposal is where the customer expects to find it. A Compliance Matrix is often required for proposals written in response to Federal Government RFPs. A Federal Government RFP will typically have separate sections for the outline/formatting instructions (“Section L”), evaluation criteria (“Section M”), and statement of work (“Section C”). Creating the proposal outline requires cross-referencing. To create the outline, you start with Section L, which tells you the high-level outline. Next you incorporate Section M so that your outline reflects the Evaluation Criteria. Then you incorporate Section C to round out the outline with what you need to be compliant with the RFP. You may also need to include other sections of the RFP if they contain requirements that must be addressed in the proposal. If Sections L, M, and C are not in perfect alignment, then you may need to cross-reference the various sections of the RFP in order to complete your outline. For other (Non Federal Government) RFPs, you should look for RFP sections that correspond to formatting instructions, evaluation criteria, and a statement of work and then follow the same general approach. The more sections that an RFP has and the more they overlap, the more critical it becomes to have a great compliance matrix. Even if the customer hasn’t issued a written RFP, a cross-reference can be built by formally identifying the customer’s requirements and turning them into a list. Whenever the RFP is complex and you create a compliance matrix, you should consider submitting a copy with the proposal to help the evaluators see that you are compliant. The steps for creating a great proposal Compliance Matrix are: Step 1: Follow the RFP instructions Step 2: Address the evaluation criteria Step 3: Address the Statement of Work Step 4: Don't overlook any other requirements Return to: Starting a Proposal Based on an RFP, or return to the Starting Point: Figuring Out What to Say in Your Proposals.

See also: Proposal start-up and logistics The release of the RFP is the moment of truth. Either you are prepared or you are not. You will either be ready to issue assignments, or trying to figure everything out. The first thing to do is to distribute copies of the RFP to those who will be involved. Here is a sample RFP distribution list to speed this up. Then you should follow a checklist to make sure you quickly consider everything you should, without overlooking anything. The deadline for asking questions about the RFP may come up quick, so be prepared to submit your list of questions. Here is a sample RFP question format. You also need to anticipate amendments, or changes to the RFP. Here is an RFP amendment checklist. Then you must start the proposal based on the RFP and prepare an outline that is based on the RFP by creating a compliance matrix.

Everything you do, from lead qualification through proposal submission, should be based on what it will take to win. To capture the leads you have in your business development pipeline, you should position your offering to give you the best chances of winning. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know how to do that when it can be different with every pursuit. Having an RFP is not enough because all of your competitors have the same RFP and the RFP will not say everything that is important to the customer. Developing business requires you to discover what it will take to win so you can offer something that matters more to the customer than what your competitors offer. The best way to lay the foundation for beating your competitors is to develop an information advantage. If you know more about the customer, the opportunity, the competitive environment, and yourself, you can write a proposal that is more insightful than your competitors. Developing an information advantage is best done before the RFP is released. But first you have to know who to contact at the customer's organization and how to practice relationship marketing. Once the RFP is released, the customer is not likely to talk to you about what they care about and some customers are not allowed to talk to vendors at all at that point. Along with an information advantage, you need to be able to articulate a superior value proposition. You can’t write a great proposal if you don’t matter to the customer. Just make sure that you test your value proposition with the customer. You might find, for example, that all they care about is the price. Or that price is less important than risk. Or that their priorities are not what you think they should be. How they conduct their evaluation is often a clue, and discovering that is part of discovering what it will take to win. While price always matters, there are ways to win even if you don't have the lowest price. See also: Improving win rates When you can articulate your value proposition in a way that differentiates you from your competitors while showing insight that matters to the customer, you are ready to start writing a great proposal that the customer really cares about. Another benefit of developing an information advantage is that when you get to the proposal phase, things will be much easier. Instead of struggling over subjective opinions about what a “good” proposal is, you’ll be able to focus on what it will take to win based on actual customer knowledge. You’ll also be able to anticipate the questions that people will have when they're trying to write the winning proposal. You should also use what you learn about what it will take to win to help you design the winning offering. This is something you should keep separate from proposal writing to avoid sending your proposal down the death spiral. Here is some simple help for figuring out what to offer before you write about it. It will also help you balance which comes first, the message or the offering. We built the MustWin Process by starting from what it takes to win a proposal, and working backwards to ensure that the information needed by all of the stakeholders is delivered at every step along the way. It also clarifies roles to help you organize your sales function to win your proposals. We’ve broken down the pre-RFP period into Readiness Reviews that can help ensure you gather, assess, and prepare the right information in the right format. Readiness Reviews gives you a structured way to implement the single most important thing you can do to win more business. Here are six ways your monthly business development meetings are killing your win rate. Readiness Reviews give you a much better approach. What it will take to win also becomes a key part of how we define proposal quality. It gives you the information you need to define your proposal quality criteria and more effectively review your proposals. With the MustWin Process, we show you how to establish traceability from the draft proposal to your Proposal Quality Validation criteria, to your Proposal Content Plan, all the way back through the Readiness Reviews to what it will take to win. Everything you do to win a pursuit, from lead qualification through the submission of your proposal, should all be based on what it will take to win. Premium Content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers The following Topic Hubs group all of our related MustWin Process content and are only accessible to PropLIBRARY Subscribers: The part of the pursuit that occurs before the RFP is released is even more important for winning than the proposal. The MustWin Process brings structure to the pre-RFP phase of pursuit in the form of our Readiness Review methodology.

Improving proposal quality leads to higher win rates. Improving proposal quality requires more than just having reviews. And the proposal reviews you do have must be consistently effective. Most are not. Achieving consistently effective proposal reviews requires more than just asking some experienced people to show up, read what you've got, and give their opinions. It requires more than marking up the document with subjective corrections. Subjective reviews may not even be better than nothing. If you are serious about winning, you need to put more effort into quality validation. You need to evolve past looking for defects and instead build quality into the proposal and validate that it has been achieved. To do this, you need to define what proposal quality is, create quality criteria to use for assessing proposal quality, and then implement a process for validating that your proposal quality criteria have been fulfilled. The way most companies do their proposal reviews is broken To better understand problems companies have with proposal reviews, see also: What is the worst sin in proposal development? Why generic proposal reviews do not lead to success Why one proposal review is worse than none 3 reasons why your proposal reviews are failing Whitepaper: Is the Red Team obsolete? 10 signs that it's time to reengineer how your company reviews its proposals Who decides if a proposal is any good The proposal arguments we should be having Conducting a proposal review with little or no preparation beyond printing the proposal and a copy of the RFP can be worse than not doing any review at all. You shouldn’t conduct every proposal review as if they are all the same, when what it will take to win could be very different. If you focus on having one major proposal review, you are probably making both of these mistakes. Preparing for and passing your proposal reviews should not be about doing the same ineffective things only trying harder this time. Part of the problem is that most proposal reviews are based on obsolete proposal review methodologies that people follow instead of thinking through how to effectively apply quality to proposal development. We can do better than what we learned early in school or early in our careers. If you want to remain competitive and win what you submit, you need to improve the way you assess proposal quality. In many ways, your review process is your proposal process. Your proposal process should be driven by how you are going to review your proposals to validate their quality. If all of your proposals are not passing their reviews, something is wrong with your proposal process. You can’t deliver quality proposals if your proposal team doesn’t know what the reviewers expect. Achieving a consistently effective proposal review process Premium Proposal Quality Validation resources for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: Introduction and description of Proposal Quality Validation Defining proposal quality Proposal Quality Validation implementation Checklist-driven proposal quality validation Are objective or collaborative proposal reviews better? Focusing on self-assessment instead of reviews How to create quality criteria to use during proposal reviews Why you should use proposal quality criteria during writing as well as during reviews How many proposal reviews should you have? How many proposal reviewers do you need? Training proposal reviewers Proposal risks and issue tracking Creating Your “What it will take to win” List Completing Your Proposal Quality Validation Plan Proposal Quality Validation Plan Review Checklist Online training for Proposal Quality Validation: Understanding proposal quality (43 minutes) Implementing Proposal Quality Validation (52 minutes) When we created the Proposal Quality Validation methodology for the MustWin Process, we started by providing a written definition for proposal quality that links the pre-RFP pursuit, the content planning phase of the proposal, and proposal reviews. It provides proposal reviewers and proposal writers with the same criteria and set of expectations regarding proposal quality, while establishing traceability to what was discovered about what it will take to win during the pre-RFP phase of the pursuit. The foundation of a consistently effective review process is something that almost every company lacks: a written definition of proposal quality that can be turned into criteria to be used during proposal reviews. It is such a simple and obvious thing, but almost every company we encounter still uses outdated, poorly defined, subjective review practices. Proposal Quality Validation separates what you review from how you review it. What you review matters more than how you review it. Your proposal process should surface the criteria you need to define quality based on what it will take to win. Then you have as many reviews, conducted in whatever ways make sense, at whatever times make sense, to validate that the proposal fulfills the criteria. The details for doing this are accessible to PropLIBRARY subscribers.

When people have multiple things competing for their time, they often turn to templates and re-use libraries as a way to lighten the proposal workload. The problem is that they lighten the workload by reducing your win rate. And if you’re making smart bid decisions, the lost revenue will always be greater than the investment in doing proposals that are customized around your win strategies. People try to convince themselves that if they design their templates just right, they can beat the odds. But they can’t because they haven’t thought through what it takes to win and how that impacts the proposal. This issue does not impact all businesses the same. Templates are more dangerous for some offerings and markets than others. You can use this model to determine whether templates will do more to help or hurt your business. Luckily, there are alternatives to using templates or creating re-use libraries. They provide the critical inspiration and acceleration that people crave, they just do it in ways that can improve your win rate instead of destroying it: See also: Reuse The hardest part of winning proposals is not writing them. It's figuring out what your win strategies should be and then articulating them in writing. A lot of proposal failures are really bid strategy failures. A lot of proposal delays are really a result of rethinking your win strategies. Creating a bid strategy re-use library is an excellent way to inspire and accelerate your proposal efforts. People spend far more time figuring out what ingredients should go into their proposal writing than they spend actually writing. Writing and re-writing until you run out of time is a high-risk approach. Recycling a proposal that was optimized to win in a different context is a sure way to reduce your win rate. Proposal Recipes can accelerate the process of figuring out what should go into your proposals, and help you create a proposal that is optimized to win instead of one that is guaranteed to be not optimized for your current circumstances. The reasons you are having difficulty figuring out your proposal story are things that templates won't help with and recycling past proposals will get wrong. Instead of templates, maybe you just need to start your proposals with the right information. That's another problem templates won't solve for you. Figuring out your win strategies requires having a corporate strategic plan that guides your positioning. What many proposal teams do is fill a strategic planning void, reinventing the company as they go along. Your proposals will go quicker if you start with a corporate strategic plan that focuses your thinking. Instead of a proposal problem, you might really have an offering design problem. When you confuse the two, you can get caught in a proposal death spiral. Setting up a process to design your offering separate from the act of writing about it can help you avoid getting caught in the proposal death spiral. The bottom line is that unless you are bidding to the same RFP instructions and evaluation criteria with the same customer concerns, if you care about winning you should never recycle proposal narratives. Instead of building a labor-intensive proposal re-use library or trying to somehow create a template that defies the odds, you can still deliver the inspiration and acceleration people crave and help them win instead of lowering their odds.

Sometimes people get stuck writing a technical proposal about something in which they are not an expert. Sometimes the subject matter experts aren’t available or don’t exist within your organization. You can do research, but you can’t become an expert in a week or even a month. So how do you write a technical proposal that competes against real experts, proves your credibility, and earns your customer’s trust? If you’re the stuckee, we have good news for you. We have a little trick that may work for you. And it may work so well that you win the proposal right out from under the noses of the so-called experts. Most people try to win their proposals by loading their technical approach up with details. They seek lots of technical meat instead of the empty carbs of marketing slogans and unsubstantiated claims. But what if there’s no way for you to produce those details? If you try, the best you can hope for might be a watered down attempt that talks around the details. It’s surprising how many of the proposals we review end up looking like that. Instead of focusing on the technical details, you need to focus on something else. Instead of focusing on the steps for doing the work or the specifications of the components, try focusing on how you know the steps were performed correctly, or whether the results produced meet the requirements. That subtle distinction produces a very different proposal, but one that can still establish credibility and earn the customer’s trust. In fact, if you do it well you might appear more trustworthy and credible. For each milestone, deliverable, or component on the project, ask yourself how you will know: See also: Technical Approach If it’s on track before it gets delivered If it will meet specifications or requirements and be free of defects upon delivery How you can achieve transparency, so both you and the customer can see the status of everything at all times What the customer will get out of it It will help if you know the language of quality assurance programs. But a little common sense can go a long way. Here are 10 things to consider: How will you measure and track progress? How can you use online tools for status awareness? How will the customer know if you are going to deliver on time, within budget, and according to specs? How will the customer know if you are delivering as promised? How many check-ins, double-checks, checklists, checks and balances, and any other kind of checks can you define? What sign-offs, approvals, and reviews might be added? Do you check every item or implement a sampling program? Can you design quality in at the beginning to prevent defects? Would collaboration and stakeholder involvement be beneficial? How do you make sure that every step is visible: from the start, during performance, and in the result? Just keep in mind the difference between a technical approach and a management plan. What you need to do is make your technical approach about ensuring results instead of about construction. You still need technical details, but you can get by with less. For example, you might not know all the steps, but if you know the major ones you can discuss how you ensure that progress, performance, or delivery will be what it needs to be at each major step instead of discussing the minor steps in between. You can get by knowing what needs to be accomplished without all the details about how it will be accomplished. Instead of proving to the customer that you know what you’re doing, you will prove to the customer that they will get what they need as promised. You can actually ghost against technical experts who only have great skills, but may not be able to deliver on time, within budget, and according to specs. Even though the customer has asked for a technical approach, the technical details may not be what matters the most to the customer. The customer may not even understand the technical details. Most customers are concerned with trust issues. If you are not credible, you are not trustworthy. If you are a high risk, you are not trustworthy. Showing that you know how to build something doesn’t mean that you will be successful, although it helps. What you want to show is that you know how to be successful. You need to establish credibility and trust with the non-technical customer who is concerned about whether the contractor they select will deliver as promised. If the customer has tunnel vision when they evaluate your technical approach, the fact that you have less technical detail than another proposal written by someone who really is a subject matter expert will be obvious. But if you don’t have access to that level of subject matter expertise, then that’s a battle you would lose anyway. The battle you can win is with the customer who is more concerned with delivery than technical composition.

It’s not that companies don’t try to prepare before the RFP is released, although that is sometimes the case. The real problem is that when they do try, most of their effort is wasted. They have some time, they have some budget and somehow they start the proposal with nothing of substance to show for it. The reason you end up at RFP release unprepared even though you had an early start The primary reason is that they haven’t figured out how to stage what they know in a way that impacts the proposal. All they can think of is to start writing the proposal, but they can't without the RFP. So they end up gathering what meager information they can, trying to keep it in mind when they start writing, and being unable to use most of it as they try to untangle the RFP after it's released because: The information you have is not the information you need to respond to the RFP. You have to align what you know with the specific terminology of the evaluation criteria and position against what it will take to win. If you can’t make things align or if you have large gaps, then you don’t know what you need to know in order to maximize your chances of winning. You know stuff, but it’s useless. You just don’t want to admit it. The information you have does not help you make the decisions needed to create the proposal. When you are trying to implement your bid strategies in writing, if you find that the bid strategies you thought you had are either fluff or not specific to the RFP, then you have to make decisions in order to create new bid strategies. If the information you have doesn’t help you make those decisions, it’s like you're starting fresh and all your past preparations are abandoned. No one likes to admit that the previous work just got thrown out when the proposal started. Instead of gathering apparently useful information and “keeping it in mind” during the proposal, you should: Anticipate the information you will need to write the winning proposal. When you focus on what you can find instead of what you need, you should expect that most of it will not align with the RFP or positioning strategies of the proposal. Your information gathering efforts must be based on anticipating what will be needed and searching for it, instead of simply making contacts and mining them for useful tidbits. You will never find all the information you’d like to have, but the company that does the best job of getting the information it needs will have a competitive advantage when it comes to writing the proposal. Convert everything into instructions for writers. If you learned something about the customer’s preferences, then turn that into an instruction that will guide the future proposal writers. If you obtain a potentially useful client document, then mine it for instructions you can pass on to your proposal writers. For any information you gather to impact the document, you need to connect the information to the document. The way to do that is by articulating it as guidance for writers. If you can’t tell them how the information should impact the writing, then the information won’t impact the writing. Skip this step and the odds of the information making a contribution to the proposal are nil. In the MustWin Process we address this by: Building the pre-RFP process around answering the questions that will be needed to win the proposal. Structuring the process so that what you know flows into the Proposal Content Plan. Solving the problem that you can't start writing before the RFP comes out by creating something that will accelerate the writing when it's time. This approach: Increases the likelihood of winning by ensuring that your customer and opportunity insights make it into the document. Speeds up the proposal effort by shortening the length of time it takes to create a content plan before writing to it. Tells you what you can do to prepare before the RFP comes out. Throw away the PowerPoint briefings and unstructured files you are currently using to show "what you've learned" during the pre-RFP phase of pursuit. Instead, focus on preparing for the content planning phase. Proposal Content Planning is where everything comes together. Going from pre-RFP intelligence gathering to a written proposal draft is a huge step with a high likelihood of failure. If you measure the success of your pre-RFP preparations by their contributions to your content plans, you increase your chances of success tremendously. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers Introduction to Pre-RFP Pursuit Proposal writing before RFP Release

If you think doing too many proposals with too few people is about working faster or trying harder, you're deceiving yourself. Doing too many proposals with too few people is about what you’re going to give up. You can be forced into giving things up when you run out of time, you can do things halfway and get by, or you can plan exactly what you intend to give up and do it on purpose. See also: Proposal Management Be clear about your priorities. Every decision should be based on an assessment of how it will impact your evaluation score. Indirect or theoretical impacts have a lower priority. That’s a nice way of saying they get skipped. This can be a hard pill to swallow. Consider editing. If your proposal is in decent shape, editing only has a theoretical impact. You can skip it and be competitive. That’s right, I said skip editing. You can skip it on purpose, or you can drop something vital because you ran out of time. I’m picking on editing because it’s a sacred cow. The real point is that you have to cut the theoretical and indirect impacts in order to maximize your score with the resources you have. It’s not my fault you’re doing too many proposals with too few resources. Consider how Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs might apply to proposals. Don’t stop to read. You don’t have time for reviews that involve writers sitting around waiting for wise people to read and comment. You don’t have time to fully prepare a proposal and then wait for executives to bless it before submission. Reading must be done in parallel with production. Reviews must be performed against moving targets. Executives must be part of the solution and bless a less than final draft. You’re already going to reduce your win rate by doing too many proposals with too few people. You have to give up stopping to read in order to spend the time focusing on things that have a greater impact on whether you win or lose. Think faster. The vast majority of time spent on a proposal is spent thinking and talking about it. Instead of learning how to make proposal decisions faster, most people try to accelerate proposals by focusing on file management. And fail. If you want proposals to take less time, you need to accelerate how you design your offering, articulate your differentiators, and determine your bid strategies. You can’t afford to evolve them over time or think them through by writing about them. You need to be decisive, only you don’t become decisive by willing it to be so. Instead, anticipate the information needed to make decisions, ensure that it is there when needed, and be clear about your options. You need to have your offering defined and validated in the first 25% of the available schedule. Validating the offering is where most failures occur. Instead of defining your offering and then reviewing it, trying integrating the stakeholders into a collaborative effort so that everyone is on board with the first draft. Whatever you do, don’t design your offering by writing and re-writing it until everyone is happy. Design it and then write it. Once. Include a pricing assessment so you don’t end up with an offering that everyone likes but which isn’t competitive. Allow fewer iterations. Proposals go through far more iterations than people realize. Most represent minor incremental changes. Each comes at a cost in time and effort. Reduce the number of iterations and you reduce the level of effort. Do it right and you won’t give up anything of significance. The biggest source of extra iterations is changing your mind. You need to learn how to get a team to think things through and get them right the first time. Design quality in and avoid defects instead of practicing break/fix quality control. Give people fewer options. If the RFP doesn’t require it, don’t change your layout for every bid. Don’t even change the proposal’s colors to match the customer’s color. Do you really think that impacts their decision in a way that’s worth the effort? While you’re at it, standardize your cover layout. Reducing options is about avoiding decision fatigue and freeing your brain up to think faster about things that matter more. Don’t deceive yourself that figuring things out as you go along is accommodating people and being helpful. If it doesn’t impact whether you win or lose, you should standardize it, move on, and think about it no more. Simplify and gain some breathing room. You’ll need it. Do less. If you need editing to feel confident, then consider editing only the headings. You need to plan the content of your proposal, but maybe you can get away with planning at the section level instead of the full content. Instead of providing instructions for writers to follow, just provide the points you want them to make. Consider reviewing plans and not the text of the proposal. If the text matches the bid strategies, it should be good enough. Magic words may theoretically improve your chances, but bid strategies are vital. While we’re talking about doing less, consider writing less. Only say what you need to. Drop all that sales fluff and just make the points you need to. Use lots of tables so you can provide information without having to write narrative. Use graphics instead of explaining processes. If there's a page limit, aim to come in short and don’t add more just because you can. Avoid heroic efforts. Proposal specialists are heroes. They can make an on-time submission no matter how adverse the circumstances and create a winning proposal out of a big stinking pile of compost. But if you’re counting on heroes saving every single one of the too many proposals you're bidding, you're setting yourself up for failure in the form of low win rates that make the entire surge bidding pointless. And you can expect turnover in the hero department that will impact you in a big way when you rediscover how important your win rate is. When it’s done, stop. If you’re doing one proposal, you can afford to let it expand and consume all resources right up to the deadline. But if you’re working your way through a surge of too many proposals, you need to stop at good enough and move on. For many of you this will feel like pulling your punches and you’ll just have to get over it. Maximizing your average requires a different approach from maximizing your chances on one particular bid. This means that you’ll have to define completion. Most proposal processes don’t. If they have time on the clock, they invent a new review or iteration. Make your iterations finite, and when they’re done stop. And move on. Your attention is needed elsewhere and is also finite. It’s always about the next proposal. Maximizing your win rate is not about winning the proposal in front of you. It’s about winning the one that comes next. Instead of an unsustainable best right now or one-time victory, you want a little better each time that results in a high and sustainable win rate. Accept good enough for this proposal if it raises the bar for the next one. Repeat often. Don’t mess up. A bad proposal is usually not the result of poor proposal writing. A bad proposal is usually the result of figuring things out as you go along, changing your mind, and running out of time so that you submit the proposal you have instead of the proposal you wanted. To avoid messing up a proposal, simply figure things out ahead of time, don’t change your mind, and keep your iterations finite. It’s not about catching mistakes. It’s about setting up a mostly good quality process and then not introducing mistakes so that you win on average instead of pushing past the breaking point in the name of perfecting a single proposal. You can skip things on purpose, or you can be driven to skip unpredictable things by running out of time. This is inescapable and the reason why bidding too many proposals with too few people will inevitably reduce your win rate. When your win rate is reduced, all those “leads” you couldn’t ignore will produce less profitability than if you’d settled for fewer leads and focused on increasing your win rate instead. While the line between too many and too few might be theoretical and that might tempt you to get as close as you can, the consequences of crossing it are not theoretical. Make sure you understand the math. If you really want to challenge your brain, consider everything you might skip under adverse circumstances and what you would keep if you had a more reasonable workload and resource availability. How many of them would you still skip because focusing on the things that impact the evaluation score raises your win rate, while things that are esoteric, a matter of opinion, or theoretically might possibly impact your win rate don’t on average? The biggest mistake you can make is to stick to legacy approaches when your circumstances have changed. Ask the dinosaurs.

When we write proposals, we often don’t really know what the customer cares about. This is a big reason companies why talk about how great they are. It's easier to talk about yourself. The result is a proposal that isn’t what the customer wants, written in a way the customer doesn’t want to read. You can't win if there's nothing in your proposal that the customer cares about. Even when you have the best of intentions and put effort into discovering what the customer cares about, somehow when the proposal starts and people start writing, they end up having to write based on what they think instead of what the customer thinks. Companies often tell themselves they understand what the customer cares about, when they know just a few of the customer’s preferences. What about all the others? Here are some questions to help you determine some of the things the customer might care about: See also: Customer Perspective Does the customer care who wins? What will actually annoy or offend the customer? Will the customer notice or care about a typo? Does the customer care about when you were founded or who owns the company? What will make the customer roll their eyes? What will the customer skip past and what will they read? What does the customer have to do with the information you are giving them? How will the customer react if you don’t follow their directions? Will the customer be inclined to believe your claims, or will they be skeptical? Will the customer be more impressed by your qualifications, or what they imply you can do for them? Does the customer care more about following procedures or results? What will the customer be willing to pay more to get? Does the customer care enough about its vendors to be loyal to them? Does the customer select a vendor and score to get who they want, or do they let the scoring do the selecting? How does the customer’s technical knowledge impact what they care about? What puts the customer to sleep? What wakes them up? Will the customer care more about finding key words, features, results, differences, details, proofs, price, trustworthiness, or something else? Does the customer care more about experience or capability? What will the customer ignore in what you’ve written? What does a stranger have to do to become a desired vendor? When someone truly understands you, what did they write that made that happen? Is it because they share your pain, have the same goals, or share the same preferences? Is it because you care about the same things? The real challenge is how to write a proposal when you can’t answer the questions above. If you are competing against someone who does know, your proposal is at risk of sounding bland and watered down, while they can write a proposal that aligns everything in ways that show they know what the customer cares about. And that will make the customer care about them. Luckily, they probably don’t know all the answers either. Sometimes as people, we just want someone to care about us. They don’t have to know everything about us. They just have to show that they’re willing to put their own concerns aside and put enough effort into ours to show they care about us. You can do this in your proposal. Instead of talking about yourself, you can show what you’ll do to find out their concerns, where in your approaches you’ll seek their input, and what you’ll do with it when you get it. You can show you care and that the result will better serve them. Instead of bragging about how great you are, you can demonstrate how great you’ll serve them. And all those qualifications and attributes about yourself can become evidence of your ability to deliver those results. To write a proposal that the customer cares about, you have to write a proposal that is about caring for the customer.

Very few companies achieve consistently effective proposal reviews. Most tell themselves that their reviews are better than nothing. But ineffective reviews do not somehow lead to an effective increase in quality. Still, they assume that if they just try harder next time, their ineffective approach to proposal reviews will somehow produce effective results. No matter what they try, their reviews are still a struggle producing questionable results. Here are three reasons why your proposal reviews may never get any better. See also: Proposal quality validation Your reviews don’t reflect reality. Most proposal reviews are done at milestones. When the draft is complete, you review it. But this has nothing to do with the way information evolves over the course of a proposal. An offering design becomes your value proposition, which becomes your bid strategies, which becomes instructions for writers, which gets translated into RFP terminology, and ends up becoming positioning against the evaluation criteria using language that sounds nothing like when you started. Strategies don’t come into the world fully formed --- they evolve. What you need to validate is each step in the evolution of your strategies and not the milestones. Your reviews are improperly scoped. Most proposal reviews have no scope definition. If you just hand it to someone and ask them to review it, you’re doing something wrong. You need to define what the review should validate. If you can’t itemize it, then your reviews are purely subjective and will quite possibly do more harm than good. But even if you have defined the scope for your reviews, there’s a good chance that the scope is impossible to achieve. If there is not enough time to validate what needs to be validated, it won’t be validated. A partial review is not necessarily better than no review. It will at best give you a false sense of confidence. If a review is too big, it needs to be made into multiple smaller reviews. If you can’t do that, you need to consider what you want to validate, and what you want to skip. Skipping a review is not worse than having a review that does not validate what needs to be validated. There are dozens of things you need to validate. It may be better to have dozens of validations than have one or two big reviews. Your reviews are about defects instead of risk. Since reviews are about quality, most people make the mistake of assuming they are about inspecting for defects. This leads to reviews that do more harm than good, because proposals are created through a series of trade-off decisions. What needs to be validated are the decisions. It’s not about defects, it’s about risk. Which decision is the right risk to take? Companies should validate decisions about strategies and approaches, and not wait until some milestone, look at what ended up on paper, and make a subjective judgment about it. This leads to going back to the drawing board instead of correcting a bad decision at the time it was made. To break the cycle of ineffective reviews, try scheduling lots of well-defined validations at key decision points to manage your risk instead of having one or two major reviews at late-stage milestones looking for defects. Doing so will not only lead to more consistently effective reviews, it will change your proposal culture. It will become a collaborative effort to make better decisions instead of an arbitrary and uninformed judgment that people just subvert anyway. Which of those do you think will be more competitive in the long run? Do you think that might just be worth overcoming a little institutional inertia in order to change? We dropped the whole idea of reviews based on milestones or color team labels a few years back and have been glad we did. Our methodology for Proposal Quality Validation is part of the MustWin Process. PropLIBRARY Subscribers get the details on how to implement it.

If you write a bad proposal introduction, you’ll probably also have a poorly written proposal. Unfortunately most of the proposal introductions I review are in bad shape. They don’t reflect the customer’s perspective or say anything that matters to the customer. Proposals often make common mistakes like saying the company is “pleased to submit” the proposal, stating universal truths, or making (often grandiose) unsubstantiated claims. Or they introduce the company submitting the proposal and describe themselves instead of saying what the customer wants to hear. They talk around what matters as if they have to get warmed up before writing with substance. For the customer this means reading and reading, which they probably don’t want to do in the first place, in search of what they really want to know. By the time they get to it, they’ve often tuned out. And they see your proposal as lacking in substance and value. That’s obviously not the way you want to get started. What the customer wants to see in a proposal is what they are going to get. That is what your introduction should focus on, right from the very first sentence. The first thing you should tell them is what they are going to get. The rest of your proposal is about why they should believe it. The problem with doing this is that on large, complex projects, it’s difficult to say what the customer will get in a single sentence and make it matter. If the customer has told you what to provide, then it’s hard not to simply say you’ll give them what they’ve asked for. When this is the case, what matters to the customer is what challenges will have to be overcome in order to deliver the desired result. Your introduction should be about how you’ll overcome those challenges. When you are wondering what to make your proposal about, consider making it about how you’ve solved the challenges that are in the way of achieving the desired result. Your value to the customer is being able to deliver the result in spite of the challenges. This does not mean you should list or describe the challenges. It means you should list or describe the solutions you offer that lead to achieving the results. Don’t make your proposal about problems. Make it about solutions. You don’t even have to use words “challenges,” “solutions,” or “results” in your proposal to take advantage of this approach. People often make the same mistakes at the paragraph level. They write introductory sentences that are about what they are going to write, instead of writing what matters. If you learn to stop doing this at the beginning of your proposal, you can also improve every single paragraph that follows. If you make every paragraph about offering solutions to the challenges of that topic that lead to the desired result, you will strengthenevery paragraph of your proposal. When you make your entire proposal about: The solutions to the challenges That lead to the desired result What the customer sees is a credible approach to getting what they want. That has value. The customer doesn’t care about who you are, how great you are, when you were founded, or even how much experience you have. What they care about is how your attributes solve the challenges that lead to the desired result. If your experience or other attributes matter, they only matter because they’ll do something that leads to the result. Sometimes the same challenges show up throughout a proposal. Sometimes the same result is what is desired in every section. When you have the same solutions leading to the same results but applied to different details, what you really have are proposal themes. Flip that around and what this approach gives you is another way to develop your proposal themes. You can also use this two-part strategy as an approach to reviewing a proposal. Does the introduction offer solutions to the challenges that lead to the customer getting the result they desire? Does every paragraph that follows do the same? To write a great proposal, you have to write it from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. This can be a challenging skill to learn. Using this two-part strategy to give the customer a credible approach to getting what they want, that has value to them, and shows how your attributes add credibility to them actually getting what they want can help you achieve a proposal that reflects the customer’s perspective. It’s a simple technique that can greatly improve your chances of winning.

Objective proposal reviews might be possible if you have unlimited staffing. But nobody has unlimited staffing. And maybe striving too hard for objectivity actually gets in the way of validating the quality of a proposal. Where should we draw the line between reviewers who are part of the proposal effort and reviewers who are separate? Do you really have enough trained reviewers to bring in a fresh team for every review to ensure objectivity? If you do, you are the exception and not the rule. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a company where this was the case. At best, you strive to have a review team that doesn’t include the same people working on the proposal. But it’s hard not to include the people who planned the proposal or participated in decisions related to the proposal. Stakeholders should be involved. But are stakeholders objective? Effective proposal reviews should follow a sequence. By the second review, there is a context and your reviewers are no longer objective. Maybe proposal reviews shouldn’t be objective. For example, in an early review you should ask “Does our offering design reflect the right strategies?” And in a later review you should ask “Does the plan for the proposal account for and incorporate those strategies?” And when the draft is ready you should ask “Does the draft effectively implement those strategies?” After the first review, your proposal reviews need to be invested in those strategies to achieve effective proposal quality validation. After the first review you should not be approaching things freshly or objectively, but should be ensuring the integrity of the implementation. If you could bring in fresh staff for each review, you wouldn’t want to because they’d lack the background and context to provide validation for the next step. Maybe seeking objectivity can get in the way of quality as much as it can help. See also: Proposal quality validation Some of what we need to do when reviewing proposals doesn’t lend itself to objectivity. For example, key decisions and trade-offs should be validated. While you don’t want the program or proposal team validating their own decisions, your proposal process should make sure that key stakeholders participate in decision reviews. Where is the line between being an objective party outside of the proposal team overseeing quality, and a collaborator participating in the decisions? And once the reviewers participate in validating the decisions, they are no longer objective about those decisions. But maybe that can be a good thing. Perhaps objectivity isn’t what we really need. Quality requires oversight. A company should provide oversight to ensure that proposals are properly planned and executed. The Powers That Be and our Corporate Overseers are rarely objective. Leaders must have goals and preferences if they are to provide direction. What we need for proposals is to ensure that the proposal reflects what it takes to win, as judged by the company submitting the proposal and not just the proposal team. The ultimate judge of proposal quality will be your customer and not your company. But you can’t wait to get the customer’s opinion to validate the quality of your proposal before you submit it. It helps to recognize that proposals are created over time and that validation should occur over time as well. Reviews are part of proposal development. They don’t just tell you whether a proposal is any good, they tell you whether a proposal is on track to reflect what it will take to win. Proposal reviews should bring an outside perspective to assessing decisions, plans, and execution in order to make sure that everything has been appropriately considered. You need reviews to second guess, challenge, and reconsider what the proposal team has decided and done. And then bring everyone onto the same page so you can move forward together. But when you move forward together, you leave objectivity behind. Notice that I left "critique" out of the list of things we need from a proposal review. The job of a proposal review team is not to critique. It is not to comment. It is to validate decisions and plans, validate that execution was according to the plans, and help the proposal team by noting any deviances so they can be reconciled. A proposal review team brings oversight of the decisions, plans, and execution that enables the company to ensure that the proposal team creates the proposal the company wants to submit. But it’s not their objectivity you need. It’s their validation.

When a proposal has an absolute deadline, it’s important to know that things are on track towards completion. But that’s easy to say and hard to do. It’s even harder when there are multiple people involved in the effort to create the proposal. 1. Milestones Proposals typically start with making assignments and setting deadlines. Then you wait for the deadline and find out the assignments aren’t complete. Or worse, the assignments look complete, but the quality is low. Either way, you have more work to do to complete the first milestone chipping away at the time you have to meet the next one. You are already falling behind. You need some way to measure progress before you get to the milestones. Most people settle for subjective queries, or early read-throughs. Neither one gives an accurate picture of the real progress. 2. Measuring whether the glass is half-full or half-empty You can measure proposal progress by what you have completed. Most people take this approach when they measure progress by checking off items on their outline. You can also measure it by what you have left to do. It’s not necessarily a choice between the two. You can measure proposal progress both ways. When I'm working with reliable proposal writers, I like to have them perform a gap analysis as progress milestones in between submission milestones. You have to look over their shoulders and make sure the gaps are accurately reported, but in addition to being easier than doing it all yourself, the writers gain a much better understanding of what they still have to accomplish when they do the gap analysis. That drives results better than when you tell them they have gaps. 3. It doesn’t matter if you have something written if it’s not what you need See also: Proposal management If you measure by whether “something” is written, that’s all you’ll get. It won’t reflect what it takes to win. You need to define completion as passing a test that the writers can apply themselves. A model based on getting something written, and then having a review team do a subjective assessment, will not produce consistently effective results. That’s a polite way of saying that you’re setting yourself up for failure and low win rates. If you are using proposal reviews to assess progress towards completion instead of assessing whether the proposals reflect what it will take to win, something is wrong. The way you consistently achieve what it will take to win in writing is to define criteria for each section that tell you and the writer what it’s supposed to be. Then people don’t measure progress by how much of the page is covered, they measure it by how many sections fulfill the criteria. Of course, this means you have to define criteria for each section. And doing that means knowing what it will take to win before you start. 4. Much depends on the skills of your proposal contributors The amount of guidance and oversight needed depends on the skills of your proposal contributors. Unfortunately, experience does not guarantee skills. Ten or more year's experience producing countless ordinary proposals does not mean the writer can produce a single great proposal. Most proposal specialists, even the professionals, produce ordinary copy. Ordinary is acceptable. Most proposals with multiple contributors are a mixed bag of experienced and inexperienced staff. It is usually best to assume a lower skill level than you are hoping the contributors actually have and provide more guidance and oversight than is actually needed. 5. A Proposal Content Plan is also a progress measurement tool A Proposal Content Plan contains instructions for writers. Content Plan instructions go well beyond an outline and address everything related to what it will take to win, and not just the RFP requirements. You can measure your progress by how many of those instructions have been acted on. 6. Progress is not a milestone Progress is not an event or a point in time. The step after starting is not completion. Measuring progress is not about determining where you are, but about determining whether you will get to where you need to be. The secret to measuring proposal progress is to have progress and fulfillment criteria that show you whether you are on track. What you don’t want are undefined milestones like “first draft/second draft” or reviews that determine whether you’ve arrived. Fulfillment of your criteria is where you want to end up. But you don’t get there in one step. Instead of measuring against completion, at each step you should be measuring whether you are on track, behind, or ahead of where you should be to get to completion. Successful completion means a proposal that reflects what it will take to win, and not just one that has “no holes” or something written for each item in the outline.

Incredible amounts of time and energy are wasted in proposal arguments that are basically pointless. They cause delays. They create extra work. They make people dread working on proposals. And they probably do more to lower your win rate than raise it. The right things are worth arguing about. Arguing about the right things can make the difference between winning and losing. But how do you get people to focus on the right things and channel all that energy into productive debates? See also: Great Proposals Never mind what you think or I think. The arguments we should be having are over what the customer thinks. Never mind the use of commas, editorial conventions, or what terminology we prefer. What language does the customer prefer? Let’s argue about what they think is acceptable. Never mind what we think we should propose. What does the customer think we should propose? Let’s argue about what the customer has said or not said about what we think they want. Never mind my way or your way. What way does the customer prefer? Let’s argue about that. Never mind how we think we should respond to the RFP. What did the customer mean when they wrote it that way? Let’s argue about why the customer wrote the RFP the way they did. Never mind what you or I think about what constitutes good proposal writing. What does the customer need to see to make their decision? Let’s argue about what we can write to make their decision easy. Never mind our procedures. What does the customer want to get? Let’s argue about the best way to give it to them. Never mind how we conduct our proposal reviews. How will the customer evaluate the proposals and make their decision? Let’s argue about what the customer thinks a good proposal will be. How much do you want to bet that if we’re arguing over what you and I think it’s because neither one of us knows what the customer thinks? It would still be better to argue over our guesses about what the customer might think. If we’re arguing about what the customer thinks, then no matter who wins the argument, we’ve invested our energies into understanding the customer. No matter who wins the argument, the odds of winning the proposal go up when we improve our ability to make the proposal reflect the customer’s perspective. If we avoid confrontation over what the customer wants and accept a choice without debating what the customer prefers, what does that do to our win rate? A lot of proposal arguments are really just control dramas fought out of fear that we won’t be able to fulfill our assignments. Maybe instead of arguing about control over our own destinies,we should be arguing over what the customer wants and just give it to them. The best thing about arguing over what the customer thinks is that to win the arguments you have to know how the customer thinks. Being able to win those arguments means doing your homework. When you argue over what the customer thinks, it becomes obvious pretty quickly if you haven’t done your homework. Having the right arguments leads to having the right processes. And that leads to not having any need to argue at all.

Creating a proposal is easy. Working with other people is hard. Combine the two and you’ve got trouble. A big part of the problem is that other people have opinions. They have their own ways of doing things. When you’re trying to do your proposal a certain way or say things in a certain way, it often doesn't work out that way when other people are involved. It would be great if you could just tell them how you want things done and have them do it that way. Unfortunately, other people don’t work that way. How good you are at resolving issues involving other people is a major determinant of the success of your proposal. You need those other people. But they are such a pain. Working with other people on a proposal can be like herding cats. See also: Assignments How good you are at resolving issues involving other people has three components: Inspiration, authority, and personality all play a part. But you can make a huge difference just by focusing on tangible things and building them into your proposal process. How well you surface the issues. When working with other people, they may not even tell you there’s an issue. Maybe they’re avoiding conflict. Maybe they don’t even realize it. But what they’re not doing is what you think they should. That’s an issue. And if you don't surface the issue, it will come up when it’s too late, or it will keep coming back. To work with other people, you have to create opportunities to surface issues. You need disagreements and other opinions to come up to the surface where they can be resolved. When this doesn’t happen on a proposal, you see people turn in their assignments late and without following directions. You get a tug-of-war over what the strategies should be. You see proposal teams undermining their reviews because they disagree with the reviewers. You get last minute surprises. Or worse, you get a proposal that is the lowest common denominator because it avoided the controversies. You can create opportunities to surface issues with content planning and proposal reviews. When you think people have other opinions, give them a voice, whether written or spoken. Sometimes you can disagree but still move forward together. How well you resolve the issues. Once an issue has been surfaced, you have a chance to resolve it. How you do this depends on your organizational culture, decisiveness, and politics. Differences in strategy or approach must be resolved if you are to achieve them. It’s vital to get everyone on the same page. But doing this and keeping them there has to be a shared goal. You shouldn’t move forward until everyone agrees to the same path. But if you force them, what you’ll get is a passive/aggressive agreement that won’t stick. Often the first step in resolving an issue is to agree on the approach to resolution instead of the outcome. In the same way you can build opportunities to surface issues into your proposal process, you can build in approaches to resolving them in as well. When your proposal process is seen as giving everyone a voice, a path to resolution, and a way for everyone to work together in spite of all the other people, your proposal process will be seen as delivering value beyond what people can do for themselves. That can be a tremendous help in getting people to accept and follow the process. How well you monitor the results. Other people are not always consistent. Sometimes they say one thing and do another. They tend to change their minds. Or get distracted. Or forget. You need ways to monitor issues to make sure they don’t come back and that resolutions stick. This is something you should build into your quality assurance or review processes. The more you can do to enable them to check their own work, the more likely they are to achieve consistent results. None of this addresses the real problem with working with other people on proposals The real problem with other people is that you have to depend on them. It can be really tempting to cut them out and just do it all yourself. But you can’t win proposals that are bigger than yourself that way. You depend on them to win big. You’ll get better results if you make your process about working with other people by making it serve other people. Ask yourself what people need to work together. If you want your proposals to reflect the best that all the participants have to offer, what can you do for them to facilitate their contributions? Giving other people a voice for their opinions and a path to working together that avoids endless struggle might be a good place to start. But it’s so hard. It does make proposal writing look easy in comparison.

We all dream of winning it big. If you want your business to win it big, there is something you need to master that’s more important that finding big leads. You have to create an organization that can do things bigger than yourself. What separates a large proposal from a small proposal is not the value or the size of the project. It’s the number of people involved in preparing the proposal. A proposal with one author is a straightforward production. A proposal with multiple contributors is a challenge in herding cats. A small business struggling to get proposals out the door while doing a hundred other things might not have time to think about esoteric subjects like process. But unless your proposals can be larger than a single person, you’re thinking small. The real problem is that you’re creating a culture that’s small. You’re creating an organization that does things by assigning someone to it. The capabilities of your organization are limited by the skills of that person and the number of people you have. Growing requires taking someone away from what they are doing to start up the new work. It’s a zero sum game. It's a trap that most small businesses fall into, that limits their potential even after they've grown large. There is a better way. Stop thinking about individuals, and start thinking about roles. Stop defining quality as whether a person did it right enough and start defining quality as practices. When you do these two things, you create an organization and a culture that are bigger than any one person. Even if it’s just you. Think about how a larger business operates. They have defined roles and responsibilities, policies, and processes. But you’re not ready to create all of that. What you are ready to do is to create a scalable framework for those things. You can fill in the details regarding policies and process later. But first you need to start thinking about how you do things and not just what to do. You need to start thinking like a company that is something more than the individuals it employs. The reason this is important is that it sets your business development efforts up to have a win rate that is based on how you do things instead of personal preferences. It lays the expectation for how people work as a team before there are enough people to call it a team. See also: Dealing with adversity Eventually the person who finds the leads will be different from the person who chases and captures them. The person who captures the leads will be different from the person who produces the proposals. But the flow of information from one to the next is vital. If before you even have a proposal process you have an expectation that whoever handles the pre-RFP pursuit has to deliver the information needed to win the proposal, and the people preparing the proposal need to be able to articulate what they need to win the bid, you will create the right culture and framework even if today you are the one handling both the pre-RFP pursuit and the proposal. It’s all about expectation management. The expectations you set today will be a part of the organization for years after your circumstances change. Do you want those expectations to be small or large? Should they be based on individuals or should you manage expectations like a larger organization? And if you are a large organization, what are your expectations? Are you practicing expectation management or are you just a bunch of individuals following policies? If you set the expectation that people get things done, then you will create a herd of cats. But if you build expectation management into your organization, you will create an organization that coordinates its pursuits. You need this if you are going to pursue and win opportunities that are bigger than one person. When people practice expectation management, they perform as if they have processes, even when they don’t. Keep in mind that being arbitrary is the opposite of expectation management. When actions and decisions are unexpected, people react as individuals. It’s a culture destroyer. But more importantly, it’s a win rate destroyer. Arbitrary decisions in business development and proposals lead to the lowest common denominator. They lead to bids that are low risk and ordinary instead of exceptional bids that are the best your team could have brought to the table. And that reduces your win rate over time. No matter how gifted someone is at business development and proposals, you want an organization that is better still. To get there you have to stop thinking small. The first step in creating a culture that is larger than a collection of individuals is to start practicing expectation management.

Most training for proposal writers focuses on the mechanics of identifying what to write, and provides very little help for how to write it. I see a lot of well-trained proposal teams struggle with how to address things when they have a problem. I’ve also watched a lot of technical staff and proposal writers struggle with how to say things in writing. They may know that benefits are more important than features or they may know that writing proposals from the customer’s perspective is better than describing yourself. But when it comes time to put words on paper, they struggle. Even proposal writers fall in the habit of merely being descriptive instead of demonstrating what their proposal is the customer's best alternative. When I review proposals for companies I’m not just looking for the defects, I’m looking for how to better guide their proposal writers. I see proposal reviews as being as much about training and organizational development as they are about quality assurance. Recently I caught myself helping someone solve a proposal writing problem by subtly changing the nature of the problem, wording things so they would appeal to two different kinds of proposal evaluator, and resulting in something that added more value that what the competition might offer. The problem was really an opportunity in disguise. What made the moment special was that I was able to identify a couple of things that directly addressed how to write instead of just what to write. The purpose of this article is to share them with you. Proposal writers must be problem solvers See also: Great Proposals Proposal writing is not a creative exercise. Proposal writers use words to achieve specific goals. But what goals to achieve and how to accomplish them are the key. Proposal writing is really nothing more than problem solving. Deciding what to offer in a proposal is an exercise in trade-offs. How do you increase value without increasing the price? How do you deal with ambiguous or conflicting customer requirements? Figuring out which trade-offs to take is a problem you will continuously face in preparing your proposals. Proposal writing is about articulating a solution to problems or ways around them. It can be both the presentation and the solution to a problem. If you focus on presentation, you’ll be stuck about what to write when you are indecisive about how to solve the problem. But if you approach proposal writing as the way to solve the problem, you can formulate words that address the issues you are a facing. When you need to, a proposal writer can be ambiguous, use examples instead of precision, make assumptions, or redefine the problem. Proposal writers can also provide options or describe the benefits of a solution. One of my favorite strategies is to turn a weakness or a problem into your greatest strength. Proposal writers can do that with words. Words can describe the solution. But sometimes words are the solution. A proposal writer can define the problem, put it in context, and turn the resolution of the problem into an advantage if they turn proposal writing into problem solving. In many ways, how you address the trade-offs and solve the problems you face defines what you need to write. In the same way that you identify your strengths and plan how you want to present them, you should identify your problems and plan what you want to say to mitigate them or turn them into strengths. Your bid strategies are nothing but words. What bid strategies can beat your competition is a problem to solve. By approaching how you write proposals as a problem solving exercise, you can often come up with more effective words than if you simply describe your offering. What to write in your proposals is an academic problem. How to write proposals is a skill. Developing your ability to solve problems with words is a skill that takes practice to master. But it is also a skill that has applications far beyond the world of proposals. Great proposal writing requires match making Proposal writers bring things into alignment. Matching your strengths to the customer’s needs. Matching your offering to the evaluation criteria. Features must be matched with benefits so that they matter to the customer. It can also be about the contrasts, such as between you and your competition. But even that is really more about why you are a better match than about the differences between you and them. Every statement in your proposal should be a comparison, an alignment, and/or a reason why the customer should select you. Every. Single. One. This is because proposal writing is about putting things into context so the evaluator can make a decision. It is not enough to provide facts or the descriptions the customer asks for. Winning proposals requires those facts and descriptions to matter to the evaluator in a way that impacts their decision. To accomplish this, you need to match what you include in your proposal to what matters to the evaluator. Being a good match maker, who can pair the right elements in each sentence, such as what to offer something and why it matters is the foundation that great proposal writing is built upon. Instead of describing things in your proposal, you should match every fact, feature, or item you need to put in your proposal with why it matters and how that differentiates your offering. You should put everything in context. Everything you say in a proposal requires match making. Like solving problems in writing, being able to match things to the right context takes practice. You don’t want to pair a feature with just any benefit. You want to pair it with a benefit that aligns with the evaluation criteria. You want to match what you are proposing with why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative. Take two steps forward The best proposal writing is a combination of the two approaches. First you solve the problem or deal with the trade-off, and then you put the result in context. Bringing a problem into alignment with a solution or matching your approach to a trade-off to what matters about it turns the elements of your proposal into reasons why the customer should accept your proposal. This is what turns a proposal document into a winning document.

Proposal reviews typically result in dozens of comments from each reviewer. Multiply that by the size of your team, and it’s not unusual to have hundreds of comments. So not only do you invest time in preparing for the review and waiting for the participants to complete their review, you have to invest more time in processing all those comments. Most of the time you start off by eliminating all the comments that can’t be acted on. This is often a large percentage of what you’ve received. Then you drill down to the ones that require action. When you look back you think about how much effort was wasted, even if you acknowledge that some of the comments actually produced positive change. That’s why we keep having the proposal reviews and tolerate the inefficiency. But what if you could get rid of that inefficiency with just one simple change? And you don’t even have to change the steps in your process or workflow to implement it. See also: Making proposals simple To greatly improve your proposal reviews, all you need to do is ask for instructions instead of comments. When you ask for comments, you get observations. Nearly all of the observations, no matter how well meaning, will be things you can’t take action on. Observations of a proposal are too far removed from what to do about them to provide consistent value to proposal writers. Observations are what are at the core of proposal reviews that are not consistently effective. We are taught that observations have value, but the truth is that for proposal reviews, observations are counterproductive. If you want to make your reviews productive, you’ll turn observations into instructions. You’ll still get some instructions that won’t have enough information for you to take action on, but the percentage will greatly improve. And the overall number will go down as reviewers self-edit, not even submitting the “comments” that they can’t translate into instructions. An instruction like “Add more detail to this” may or may not be actionable. But it’s better than a comment like “This section is weak.” While it doesn’t guarantee success, by prohibiting observations and requiring instructions, you force the reviewers to think more productively. Only permitting instructions greatly facilitates processing the results after the review. You get fewer submissions, and the ones you get have a defined action. You don’t have to put time into figuring out what action to take. That’s it. I told you it was a simple change. But I know all you proposal specialists are overachievers, so here’s the advanced version. If you have implemented Proposal Content Planning like we recommend in our MustWin Process, and if your comments are a result of reviewing your Content Plans, then the instructions can be added directly to the Content Plans. You can set up headings or use a different color for instructions from reviews. But they go right in the document. You don’t have to collate “comments,” figure out what to do, and then somehow get them in the document. The reviewers put their instructions in the Content Plan. Afterwards, you can review their additions, tweak wording, and remove any that are contradictory. But it will go much, much faster. And there are no extra steps after you are done reading what the reviewers had to say. As a side-effect, making your reviews about creating instructions will train your organization to think in terms of crafting better instructions. Your review process becomes a guidance process. The proposal process becomes about planning instead of correction. That’s much better than a review process that devolves into observations and trains your organization to do exactly what? You might not want to answer that question…

Persuasion is Part Differentiation If you are not different, the customer won’t have a reason to select you. If you don’t point out the things that differentiate your offering, then all the evaluator has to consider is the price. Everything can be differentiated, even when the customer forces everyone to bid the exact same thing. Differentiation is how you make your bid special. See also: Great Proposals Persuasion is Part Positioning How will your proposal compare against the competition? Will it be stronger, faster, cheaper, better, more credible, more trustworthy, less risky, more technical, or something else? It’s not enough to have a strong proposal — you need to help the evaluators understand how your proposal relates to the competitive environment, the customer’s objectives, the requirements of the opportunity, and any alternatives they might be considering or things that might impact the project. Positioning is about defining the relationships. Even if your proposal is not competing against other proposals, it will still be compared to other alternatives, approaches, or solutions. You should position your proposal amongst these alternatives to frame the discussion, instead of letting it happen randomly. Persuasion is Part Motivation An evaluator can get all the answers they need and still not accept your proposal. Accepting a proposal means effort. It means spending money. It means justifying things to your boss. It means taking action. It means change. The evaluator needs to be motivated to accept your proposal. Maybe your reasons will motivate them. Or maybe you’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse. In addition to anticipating the questions the evaluator needs answered, you should also anticipate what they have to do to accept your proposal and what it will take to motivate them to do it. Persuasion is Part Anticipation The most important thing you can do to win your proposal is to anticipate how the evaluator will reach their decision. Finding this out will require research. Sometimes you can just ask them. But sometimes what people tell you and how they actually reach a decision are two different things. Researching their decision making history and trends can help. If the evaluation is a formal process, then understanding and anticipating it can help you optimize your proposal to win the evaluation. Sometimes you have to guess. However, make sure your guess is based as much as possible on the evaluator’s perspective, instead of your own. Not all evaluators are the same. Different people have different priorities. For example, consider this list: Risk Cost Time Speed Policy Customer satisfaction Public welfare Competitive positioning Thoroughness Formality Innovation Quality Reputation Politics Career Personal goals Corporate goals If you ask people to rank them by priority, you’ll find that everyone will put them in a different sequence. If you ask them to write them down or tell you their priorities, you’ll also find a difference between what they say and what they actually do. It’s human nature. You must accept it and dig a little deeper if you want to be able to anticipate how they will make their decision. If you want to win, you should build every aspect of your proposal around how the evaluator will reach their decision. The problem is that you have to find that out before you can build your proposal around it. Your ability to anticipate is one of the most important factors in writing a successful proposal. It is also why if you wait until an RFP comes out, you are already at a disadvantage, because you have a very limited ability to anticipate the customer. Persuasion is Part Strategy What are your corporate strategies? How does this pursuit align with them? How does that impact what you should do and say in the proposal? What is your customer relationship strategy? What are your offering strategies? What are your competitive strategies? What are your proposal strategies? Once you know what you intend to do to win, then you need be able to translate that into the things you need to say in order to win. If you jump into proposal writing without thinking through your strategies, or if you try to develop those strategies by writing about them, you’ll be at a disadvantage to competitors who did their strategic homework. Persuasion is Part Value Proposition Value is always a consideration for the customer, because the price is always more than just a number. Is the price reliable? What does it include or exclude? What are the short term and long term implications? When are their discounts? What could change? What is the most probable price really going to be? Your value proposition is more than just a strength or justification for your pricing. A value proposition is really an explanation of what the price really means. A value proposition is also a definition of what matters. If a customer is not persuaded to award to your higher price when it is also a better value, it just means that you don’t understand what the customer really values. It means you don’t understand what really matters to the customer. Ultimately the customer decides what to value, so if you haven’t validated your value proposition with the customer, you are at risk of being wrong. Persuasion is Part What Matters In addition to differentiation and positioning, customers care about what matters. Even when they don’t know what matters. By explaining what matters, you show insight and add value. You also align what you are offering with what matters. And that matters. Persuasion is Part Copy Writing and Presentation A lot of people make the mistake of thinking about how they want to present their proposal first. They worry about how it will look. Or they jump head first into writing as if all it takes are the right words to hypnotize the evaluator into doing whatever you want. Unfortunately, persuasion in writing is different than persuasion in person. And the decision process behind selecting a proposal and making an award is different from other kinds of decisions. Before you are ready to think about copy writing and presentation for a proposal, you need to have thought through everything identified in this article so that you have the right inputs. Effective copy gets attention and sets the stage. A good presentation will create the right impression. But without the right differentiation, strategies, positioning, value proposition, and methods for motivation copy writing has nothing to be persuasive about. Once you’ve done your homework, copy writing and presentation are about effectively delivering your message to the proposal evaluator. You can appeal on an emotional level or on a rational one. Or even both. What is going to work depends on who the evaluator is and what the evaluator’s expectations are. This brings us back to anticipation. You must anticipate what matters most to the evaluator, how they go about making decisions, and what they expect to see in a proposal. Will a fancy proposal impress them or offend them? Will copy based on fear motivate them or make them oppositional? Do they need to see all the technical details or will their eyes glaze over? Ultimately, all of the aspects of persuasion are integrated. Their effectiveness depends on your ability to anticipate so that none are left out or weak. That’s why we believe in having just enough of a structured approach to prompt you to think through everything. When only the best proposal wins, it’s usually how well thought through you are that determines whether you are able to push past writing a good proposal and deliver a proposal that’s great.

When the customer receives your proposal, what will they think? Nearly all the proposals I review are written about the company submitting the proposal. Is that what the customer wants to see? I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent discussing whether proposals should use words like “will” or “ensure.” Does the customer even notice? Are there things that matter more to the customer? The trick to figuring out how to say things in your proposal is to be able to see your proposal like your customer sees it. The following questions will help guide you through looking at various aspects of proposal writing. While first impressions count, try going deeper. Ponder each question. Not all customers are the same. So a question might have more than one answer. Knowing what to say in your proposals depends on knowing the answers for that particular proposal to that particular customer. It’s worth pondering. When you are the customer: See also: Customer perspective Do you read the first sentence, or start in the middle? If you read the first sentence and it says something perfunctory that’s not useful to you, how do you react? Do you care which vendor wins? Do you always have a preference? How strong is that preference? Do you feel any loyalty to your current vendors? What does it take for you to make a switch? What does a stranger have to do for you to give them a chance? Do you read the proposal cover to cover? Do you read it in order? What do you see that annoys or offends you? Do you notice or care about typos? Do you care enough for it to impact your selection? Do you care about when the vendor was founded or who owns the company? What do you care about? What's the difference in writing between something being believable and not being believable? What makes you roll your eyes? Do you accept what they say or do you seek proof? How much detail satisfies you? At what point does it become overwhelming or get skipped? What do you seek out to read? What do you ignore? How do you separate the vendors? How do you react when vendors don't follow directions? How do you justify your preferences to your boss? What impresses you more, a vendor's qualifications or what they're going to do for you? What will you pay more for? If you have to point score and fill out evaluation forms, do you figure out who you want and then score them, or do you let the scoring do the selecting? When you don't know the technical subject matter, how does that impact whose proposal you like more? Do you look for words, features, results, differences, details, proof, price, trustworthiness, or something else? Do any particular words like “will” or “ensure” bother you or do you not even notice them? Are most of the proposals you receive written better or worse than the documents produced inside your own organization? What puts you to sleep? What wakes you up? When a vendor truly understands you, what did they write that made that happen? When a vendor claims a bunch of experience, does that impress you or does it take something else? Do you try to imagine what the vendor is going to be like to work with over the life of the project, or do you just pick the best of what's in front of you? Is it different when you are helping someone else make a selection than it is when you are picking a vendor for yourself? What does it take for a vendor to prove they've fixed a problem? After answering by pretending to be the customer making the decision, what did you learn that might apply to your next customer? How should that impact what you put in writing when you are preparing your next proposal? The way we make decisions in writing is different from how we make other decisions. How we read a proposal is also different from the way we read other documents. The best way to understand how to win a proposal is to understand how the written word impacts the evaluator. And the best way to figure that out is to understand, empathize with, and see things from the customer’s perspective when they are reading what you put on paper. Can you break out of old habits like describing yourself? Can you write things from the evaluator’s perspective instead of your own? Winning proposals isn't about what you think you should say about yourself. Winning proposals anticipate what the customer wants to see. To win your proposals, being able to read a proposal like your customer is a more important skill than being able to write with style. Style is not the icing on the cake. It’s more like the sprinkles on top of the icing. You can make a great cake without any sprinkles. A proposal can win if the customer sees what they want, and doesn't notice or overlooks the rough spots. It’s not even about substance over style. It’s about what the reader wants to have instead of what the chef wants to make. The words you put in your proposal should be based on what you think the reader wants to see instead of what you think sounds impressive. Let your competitors sound impressive to themselves. It’s better to win than it is to brag. The way to write winning proposals is to write them from the customer's perspective instead of your own.

There is a clear line. If your company crosses it before it has institutionalized a winning business development process and culture, it may never be able to recover. Most businesses drive right off the cliff because they are more concerned with keeping the car going than where they are steering. The problem starts when companies are in their startup mode. Everyone is wearing multiple hats and figuring out things as they do them. They don’t have the capacity do something extra like formalize their business development processes. I talked with one company that went from 40 people, to 80 people, and next year will be at 300 people. Another company I worked with went from 20 people, to 40, and then 200. This kind of growth is not unusual. Once a company is established and proven, they start to land larger contracts. Instead of growing neatly and incrementally, they grow in massive spurts. However, what really matters is not their total head count it’s how many people in how many locations are supporting business development. What triggers the trap is when they go from just 2-3 people in one location involved in business development to 5-10 people at multiple locations involved in business development. Instead of making it up as they go along, they now need coordination and a workflow that supports developing an information advantage. The Small Busines Growth Trap is fully sprung when they open other locations. That is the point at which they lose control without ever realizing it. While impressed with their growth, they are about to spoil their future. If they don’t already have an integrated approach to business development, what they end up with is different groups with different priorities, agendas, and approaches. What they grow into is a group of dispersed staff. Each new person brings different skills, capability, and experience. In the absence of any other direction, each person does things the best way they know how. Since most are quite good (that’s why they got hired), the company continues to grow. But even just a year later, as the company evolves, precedents are set and their corporate culture for business development becomes based on groups who have developed their own ways of doing things. They become a collection of business development groups instead of one integrated company. The Small Business Growth Trap becomes harder and harder to escape as time passes on. Ultimately it limits the potential of the company because their business development and proposal functions are not coordinated. Each territory does things their own way, and it’s impossible to get everyone on the same page. Some groups do a good job and some groups don’t. The company marches on, never realizing how much bigger and better it could have been. Until that fateful year of expansion, the trap can be avoided. But once you are in it, you get sucked in like quicksand. Once the trap has sprung: See also: Small business Changing business development procedures will be disruptive and could impact the company’s continued growth. Processes that are not fully documented cannot spread ("I know how to do it" is not sufficient for others to follow). It costs far more in time and training to implement a standard process. The business units or operating groups are now large enough to be small companies of their own, with sufficient power and control to resist a process roll-out. Anything less than a top-level mandate to implement a standard process will probably fail. This is the Small Business Growth Trap. The key to avoiding it is going beyond having a way of doing things and having enough of a process so others can follow it when no one else is there to tell them what to do. While training helps individuals perform better, it will not give you a process. Training can be part of implementation, but only if it’s tailored to your particular process needs. A big part of winning bids as a company is knowing what information people need and how to get it to them so that it results in a winning proposal. For people to do this, they have to know what is expected of them. That is what you want from a business development process. Here are some simple tricks we’ve discovered that will help you avoid the Small Business Growth Trap: Focus on roles instead of positions or people. Don’t build your process or culture around your superstars. In the early stages, it’s common for one person to do it all. Then when someone else is hired, they split things up according to their strengths. If you keep doing this, everything will be defined by individuals, and the Small Business Growth Trap will consume you when you end up with more than one group, each doing it their own way. You’ll also be vulnerable to turnover. Instead, you should focus on what needs to be done and define the roles that need to be played. If one person plays all the roles at the beginning, that’s fine (assuming they can keep up with it all). But as more people are added, they should fill roles and not just split up duties according to individual desires. What needs to be done to win is independent of who is doing the work. Defining the roles, even if people wear multiple hats, goes a long way towards setting expectations regarding who should do what. Focus on information instead of steps. Don’t build a process based on a flow chart. It will break in practice and people will ignore it or “fill in the blanks,” resulting in people doing things differently. Instead, focus on what information you need to prepare a winning proposal, and trace it back to the beginning. You can actually define your entire process as a series of questions. As each new person becomes involved, they’ll need answers in order to take things further. You can refine the questions and answers over time, so it’s easy to implement. Checklists are better than steps because things don’t always happen in sequence. If you set them up to provide guidance to the people creating as well as the reviewers, they’ll also help keep everyone on the same page. Focus on three phases. There are three main points in time when you need everyone on the same page regarding what information is needed to win, what to do with it, and who is responsible for what. The first is the pre-RFP phase. Then there is the transition from pre-RFP into the proposal. Then the proposal phase. Too much structure at the beginning is a burden. But a little bit of structure is a big help. Put it in writing. If you can’t send it to someone you’ve never met at another location and have them be able to follow it, then you don’t have a process. You just have a way of doing things. You don’t need a set of process documentation that addresses every little thing. But you do need just enough to keep everyone on the same page. If you do things at the level described here, your entire process could be described in 10 pages. Maybe five to start with. Use those key pages to keep everyone on the same page. Require those pages to be updated with every process change. To avoid the Small Business Growth Trap, you need one document so short it can almost be memorized, that defines how your company wins. It should explain who gathers what information and who does what to it to result in a winning proposal. Avoid orphans. Be careful about what people have to do to follow the process. Avoid creating plans, reports, and forms that have a single use and are then ignored. The way you store and present information should make it easy for the other participants to make use of it. That means instead of a report or presentation, provide what will be needed for the next step in the process. Keep it scalable. If you focus on finding and assessing information that relates to what it will take to win, then it should be applicable to all proposals. People change. Deadlines change. RFPs force change. But what you need to do to win remains the same. If you focus on that and define roles functionally, then you have something that adapts to circumstances while still establishing the standards and expectations you need to set across your company as it grows if you are going to keep everyone on the same page, have a fully and continuously integrated effort to win new business, and achieve your company's full potential. Recognize why it’s important. It’s not about increasing the company’s revenue, although I’m sure the owners who employ you appreciate that. It’s important because it’s how your company creates new jobs, opportunities to promote its employees, and the finances to permit salary increases. With each contract, your company locks in its prices and revenue, usually for years at a time. Without new contracts, those finances will usually not expand. In fact, they may shrink due to inflation and cost creep. Business development is not a necessary evil, it’s the only way to reward the people who make up the company. Each new bid is also an opportunity to redefine the future of the company, what it will become, and how it does things. So doing it well by perfecting how you work like a team is important enough for everyone to put some effort into. Cheat. Buy it off the shelf and then customize it instead of creating everything from scratch. A subscription to PropLIBRARY gives you a scalable and fully documented process library that you can put to work immediately. It puts you in the position of being able to say “this is how we do things” before people starting coming up with their own ways, and without having to take the time to create it yourself. It will make life easier and increase your win rate now. But more importantly it can also enable your company to avoid the Small Business Growth Trap. But only if you act before you grow to the point where the trap is sprung. If you are already past that point, it can be a rallying point to bring together the groups, factions, and territories, to literally get everyone back on the same page. If you are still a small business, the future success of your business is riding on whether you can avoid the Growth Trap. If you do not avoid it, you will find it increasingly difficult to implement the best practices for pursuing and winning business. You may never be able to get everyone on the same page and will struggle with getting people to follow any process you try to implement. You will never reach your full potential. We’ve seen this play out many times at many companies. The more decentralized a company is, the harder it becomes. But even in a highly centralized authoritarian company, people will find reasons to make exceptions or opportunities to interpret how to implement the new mandates. Proposal specialists often complain that “people won’t follow the process.” What they usually don’t realize is that the company fell into the Small Business Growth Trap, maybe years ago. If the trap is already sprung, you need three things to overcome it: An executive mandate. One with teeth and stamina from the highest level. You don’t need permission from the top, you need participation at the top. Speed. You need to announce that “this is how we’re doing things now” and not “we’re going to standardize as soon as it’s ready.” You can have stakeholder participation in the tailoring and application of the process. But if you don’t go straight into implementation, you’ll get diluted through delays and passive/aggressive implementation resistance. The ability to change the company’s culture. Some executives have it. Some don’t. Without it, you can’t become a company with business development fully integrated into its soul. You can see why it’s so much easier to build it in from the beginning and avoid the trap altogether.

When people use the term proposal manager they often mean different things. When people use the title proposal manager they often give it to staff with varying capabilities. And even more variation in the level of authority. What one company expects from a proposal manager can be very different from what another company expects. When people think of a proposal manager as the person ultimately responsible for delivering the proposal, they sometimes make the mistake of rolling up all the possible roles and responsibilities and assume the proposal manager should fill the gaps. Different sized companies often have different expectations, based on how many proposal specialists they may or may not have. There are also different sizes of proposals that greatly affect the roles that people need to play. In some companies, the proposal manager can be knowledgeable about all the content that goes into their proposals. In other companies, they can’t. Then there’s how centralized or decentralized a company is. And how consensus driven or authoritarian the culture is. This is a problem... See also: Proposal Management The result of all this is that in some companies, proposal managers write. In others they don’t. In some companies, the proposal manager figures out the bid strategies and in others they don’t. In some companies the proposal manager formats and produces the proposal. In others there’s a whole department that handles that. In some companies, the proposal manager tells the sales and operations staff what to do to win the proposal, while in other companies the sales and/or operations staff tell the proposal manager what to produce. In some companies, the proposal manager manages staff. In other companies the proposal “manager” is on their own. Letting the proposal manager's role get defined by who’s in the role and what gaps you have is not very strategic. Instead, you should define the role by how you want to win. A little self-assessment... At your company: Should the proposal manager be part of the sales function, or is he or she administrative support to the sales function? Should the proposal manager have responsibility for your win rate and will he or she have sufficient authority to impact it? Is the proposal manager responsible for win strategies and messaging, or will someone else be responsible for that? Is the proposal manager supposed to figure out what to offer, or will someone else be responsible for that? Does the proposal manager play a role in deciding whether to bid, or is the proposal manager stuck with someone else’s decision? Is the proposal manager responsible for filling gaps in proposal staffing, or will someone else be responsible for that? Who defines the sales and proposal processes? Do you want a leader who will decide the direction things should go in, or a manager who will accomplish what they are assigned with maximum efficiency? Who will manage volume and capacity issues, especially where it impacts win rate? These questions are trickier than they appear. How you answer will have a big impact on what the proposal manager does, or does not, do to contribute to winning. It will affect how people look at your proposals. It also impacts what others at your company do. Instead of answering these questions with the status quo based on who’s available, trying thinking through how your company should approach winning. Focus on what your sales process should be, how your company develops customer awareness and opportunity insight, and how that should get into the document. In larger companies, designing the offering, developing the win strategies, and formatting and producing the document are performed by people other than the proposal manager. Even in smaller companies, there will be more proposal stakeholders than you might think. If a proposal manager is a manager, then a key part of the job is winning proposals by working through other people. When we provide coaching and training to companies, we focus on how to win and not just how to get a proposal out the door. We walk companies through answering questions like those above so they can understand all the implications and take the approach that's right for their particular business. The right approach depends on your market, customers, the nature of your offering, sales volume, company size, resources, and more. But it all comes down to implementing a process that improves your win rate, while executing it with solid coordination and issue management. Proposal management can really be thought of simply as problem solving. This means you must fill the role with someone who can solve the problems and support their efforts to do so. When people use a term like proposal manager to mean different things, or when they use it as a title for the stuckee who "does their proposals" regardless of their experience or actual role, the term becomes meaningless. It makes far more sense to ignore the title and focus on how you want to organize the effort to win new business. Your ability to give people raises, hire new staff, promote people, develop your capabilities, extend your reach, compete, thrive, and simply continue to exist as a company depends on winning new business. If that business requires winning proposals, you might want to think through whether your proposal manager really is a proposal manager, and what you really need them to be.

Where you start depends on who you are, or more accurately the role you play. People look at proposals differently depending on their role, and their contribution to winning is different as well. If you don’t start at the right place for the role you play, you risk leaving a gap that will decrease your company’s ability to achieve its full potential. Let’s take a look so you can see how this plays out… See also: Improving win rates If you are the top dog, it is vital that you create a culture that treats decisions about pursuits and proposals as investment decisions. The top dog has different titles at different companies. But you know you are the top dog if you have authority over the finance group. If you provide leadership and direction to the finance group, you can teach your organization not to treat business development and proposal costs as expenses, but rather as investments. Bad investments get cut. Good investments are maximized. The reason this is vital is that the key metric is your company's win rate. If you allow a culture that treats winning business as an expense, it will be cut even if that means a reduction in win rate. A reduction in win rate will lower the overhead pool that funds business and proposal development, creating pressure to lower expenses again, resulting in an even lower win rate that can send your company into a death spiral. However, if instead you treat pursuit costs as investments, then you manage their costs according to what will produce the greatest return on investment. If you are the head of business development or capture, then improving proposals starts by identifying what it will take to win them, and delivering the information that a proposal team needs to write a proposal based on what it will take to win. This is different from what most companies put into their “capture plans.” Success requires you to anticipate and discover the answers to the questions your proposal writers will have when they try to combine the response to the requirements with what matters to the customer. You may have to restructure your commission system if it emphasizes leads because if your sales close with a proposal, then the role of sales is not complete until the proposal is won. If you are a proposal director, in charge of overseeing how proposals are done, then improving proposals starts by managing the hand-off from sales/marketing/business development to the proposal and integrating that with the review process. You can achieve this by informing those involved in the pre-RFP pursuit about the questions the proposal writers will need answers to after the RFP is released. You can't write a proposal about what matters to the customer unless you know what matters to the customer. You won’t be able to get what matters to the customer unless those who face the customer bring it to you. They won’t bring it to you unless they know you need it. In addition to smoothing the transition, you can also make improvements by changing how your company defines and assesses proposal quality. If you are a proposal manager, in charge of producing proposals, then improving proposals starts by being able to articulate what information you need to write a winning proposal, and flowing that information into a plan for writing the proposal before any writing actually begins. It will help if you become a teacher. You should not expect those who must bring information to you to know what information you need or how to get it. They may need you to teach them and show them how that information impacts the document, long before the proposal has even started. Your success depends on them, so making improvements in your company’s proposals means making improvements in their performance as well as your own. If you are a production manager, in charge of formatting and completing the proposal document, then improving proposals starts by getting involved earlier in the process and not by simply trying to mandate deadlines or style sheet compliance. If you want to add value, you need to move beyond formatting and produce information. You need to create the process tools that make getting information into the proposal and through the review process easy. The more you do to help contributors complete their jobs, the more they will be able to meet the deadlines that you need to do your job. The common thread in each of these is information. Winning in writing is about discovering what it will take to win and flowing that information to the document needed to close the sale. It requires an integrated approach. If everyone is not on the same page regarding roles and information requirements, then no matter what you do in your sandbox, it will never reach its full potential. While improving your proposals starts with defining your role, you won’t get very far until you’ve defined everyone else’s role and the flow of information between all of you. A subscription to PropLIBRARY can help you define those roles as well as well as get everyone on the same page and guide people through what they need to do to fulfill them. Or for something less comprehensive but quicker to implement, our Master Proposal Startup Information Checklist identifies the questions that drive the flow of information and turn it into something checklist simple. Enjoy!