Carl Dickson

Winning more business this year is not as simple as submitting more bids or trying harder. There are so many things you could improve that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. So instead of making the longest list we could think of, we’ve prepared the shortest. There is nothing on this list that you can safely ignore. And anything we can think of to add is arguably just a subset of something already here. While we wrote the list with an entire company or business unit in mind, there should be plenty here to help you at the department or organizational level. Because we kept these so succinct, the questions have broad implications and subsume other questions at a more granular level. In answering the following, consider their full potential: See also: Pre-RFP Questions What’s your future if you stay on your current path and don’t change? Is it good? Is it bad? What should you do about it? What businesses do you want to be in? Note, this is a different from what businesses are you currently in. We played with the idea of making this one “What do you want to be when you grow up?” because we find it helpful to always be thinking about becoming and building towards something great instead of just being. What changes do you want to make internally? Separate from reactions to the external world, dealing with trends, and keeping up with the competition (and your customers!), you should periodically consider what you’d like to change within your own organization and how you do things. What numbers do you need to hit? Finance matters. It determines your resources, what you need to accomplish with them, and what strategies are applicable. How do the numbers translate into a pipeline of business? Just because you have targets, doesn’t mean you’re going to hit them. Understanding your pipeline serves two purposes. It tells you what it will take to hit your numbers, and helps you measure your progress towards achieving them. How should you invest in this future and allocate resources? Pursuing new business requires investment. But where and how much? Investment can mean both what shows up in your budget and the things that don’t. Effort is a form of investment that may or may not impact your budget. Where you are going to put effort is as important as how you are going to allocate your budget. How should you position in each marketplace you want to target? Are you the low price provider or the top quality provider? There are an infinite number of ways you can position. And you can position in the customer’s eyes, against the competition, in terms of technology, or any other way that makes sense. But you can’t position as everything to everybody. And you can’t change your positioning every time the wind blows. What differentiates you? The customer will select either you or an alternative. Differences matter. Planning to be different helps ensure that you show up with the right difference. Where should you look for leads and how will you qualify them? Where should people prospect? What constitutes a valid lead that’s worth pursuing? What information do you need to win and where will you get it? When everyone is bidding against the same RFP, being able to better interpret the RFP and understand the customer’s perspective becomes a major competitive advantage. In order to get the information that will help you win, you have to know what to seek and where to look for it. How will you track your progress in developing an information advantage for each lead? If you want to make sure you have an information advantage at RFP release, you have to take steps to ensure it happens. If you don’t track your progress, then the time will pass and you may have nothing to show for it. How you track your progress in developing an information advantage is a major part of the secret sauce for consistently winning. It’s the difference between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. Which of your leads should you not bid? Making effective bid/no bid decisions is important. If you're bidding everything you find, something is wrong. What you choose not to bid is a good indicator of how effective your bid/no bid decision process is. How does your positioning translate into bid strategies for each bid? While bid strategies should be pursuit-specific, they shouldn’t be made up out of thin air for each bid. Bid strategies should reflect the way your company wants to position itself. When you have solid positioning strategies, bid strategies are both easier to develop and more effective in implementation. How will you figure out what you should say in your proposals? Figuring out what to say in your proposals by writing them leads to re-write after re-write that ends with submission of what you have instead of a proposal that reflects your full potential. One of the single most highly leveraged things you can do to improve your win rate is to improve how you figure out what to say in your proposals before you start writing them. How should you define proposal quality? You can't achieve it if you can’t define it. If you think you know what it is and you can’t define it, then you don’t really know what it is. How will you assess quality and progress? Once you know what quality is, you need to implement an organizational approach to assessing it. Likewise, you need more than just draft reviews to measure progress towards creating a great proposal. Your ability to assess quality and track progress is crucial for the success of your proposal efforts. How will you get everyone on the same page to prepare the proposals you want to submit? Other people are a problem. Doing a proposal with other people requires coordination, communication, collaboration, and oversight in addition to just doing. You might be able to do a proposal quite effectively. But getting other people to do proposals effectively is the challenge. If your company is going to consistently win, you have to get everyone on the same page. A good place to start is by making sure everyone answers these questions the same way.

We have a lot of content. And our users have different needs. This can make for a deep and rich experience. It can also be overwhelming at first. This page provides information on how to find the content we have published that best meets your needs. The easy way to use our site Simply follow your interests by clicking links and spend countless hours reading, learning, and gaining inspiration. Becoming a power user There are methods behind our madness and once you learn them you can find just the right content at the moment of need. The information below can help. Click the symbol to open a topic box... How do I find my way around? When in doubt, click on one of the Starting Points in our menu. They'll take you to our content. Some of our content is grouped into Topic Hubs so that we can provide one place that links to everything on a given topic. It's basically a hub-and-spoke model. All you have to do is follow your interests and click on links and you can spend day after day learning more and more. You can just follow your nose without thinking about "how the content is organized." For more advanced users, we added the Table of Contents section of our menu to help you drill down through the Starting Points and Topic Hubs. It's not the same as a paper-based Table of Contents because we're dealing with dynamic content. But it gives you a list view in addition to the Starting Points. You can use whichever navigation approach you prefer. There's also a keyword search tool you can use. In addition to all that, subscribers can tag their favorites. Subscribers see a bookmark symbol next to every title. Click it and that item will be added to your list of favorites in the main menu. That makes it super easy to find your way back to the good stuff. Red links are ones that you haven't clicked yet. Black links are one that you have. Enjoy your exploration. Most of our content is not in a box you have to click to see, but it's a feature we use to simplify pages with lots of material on different topics. Like this one. What is PropLIBRARY all about? We have multiple audiences. Some people are just trying to get a proposal done. Some are proposal specialists and some are not. Some do a lot of proposals and want to increase their win rates. Some are executives who want their organizations to prosper. Some are business owners who want their companies to grow. Some are consultants who work with those companies. We are all about maximizing your chances of winning. If you just want to get a proposal done and off your desk, and aren't interested in maximizing your chances of winning if that means it may take some extra effort, then we may not be a good match. If you want to find out how to streamline the best practices for winning so that you can maximize your chances while being as efficient as possible, then we're a great match for each other. What kind of content do we have? All of our content is written to help people close a sale with a winning proposal, usually written in response to a Request for Proposals (RFP). We address pre-RFP marketing and sales, as well as corporate strategic planning in addition to business development, capture, and proposals. Can I access your site on my phone or tablet? Our site fully supports phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. There are several books worth of content to explore here, so we want you to be able to read in comfort. And we want you to be able to take it to meetings and put it to work. On a phone, the interface will condense to a single column, and the menu will reduce to an icon you can open when needed. Try it!

Building a Proposal Content Plan through an iterative process: The 8 iterations can be implemented one at a time in sequence or used like a checklist to expedite figuring out what to write: Create the initial shell. Insert instructions for addressing RFP requirements. Add instructions for incorporating win strategies and themes, and to optimize the proposal against the evaluation criteria. Add instructions for incorporating your customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence. Add instructions for summarizing your offering design, including the key processes, steps, or components of your solution or offering. Add instructions for the use of graphics, tables, relevance boxes, examples, etc. Add instructions regarding any assumptions, limits, boundaries, or issues that must be resolved. Add any boilerplate or re-use material that is relevant to the instructions, noting any deviations for correction. See also: Creating a proposal content plan A Content Plan can be built through an iterative process. With each pass, you focus on different aspects of a winning proposal. Everything that goes into a Content Plan is in the form of instructions to the proposal writers. When you are done it should read like a recipe for the proposal. When you complete the last pass, you have confidence that you have considered everything that should go into your proposal. Working ahead or out of sequence is okay When creating a Content Plan: You are encouraged to include instructions from any iteration cycle whenever they occur to you The iterative process ensures that nothing gets overlooked What matters is capturing the instructions and not necessarily the sequence followed to capture them. If you think of something that should go in your proposal or that the Proposal Writers should know, put it in when you think about (so you don’t forget to add it later). It is also okay to go back and expand prior iterations, or to combine statements from different iterations. What matters is that you arrive at clear guidance for everything that should go into the proposal.

When we think of partnerships we think of something far more strategic than referrals. We like partnerships that force us both to revise our business plans. In our experience, partnerships that don't require investment by both parties have a low probability of success. We have occasionally taken on sponsors when companies wanted to get in front of our audience but lacked a capacity for cross-promotion. When we have complementary offerings, we're open to bundling and other forms of cross-promotion. Software and products that target or audience may fit in this category. Click here to discuss it

The normal way to work with a consultant is to agree on a scope, budget, and schedule for what needs to be done. This requires discussion, getting to know each other, some back-and-forth, and some risk. We can spend a lot of time talking about it and then face the risks in performance, or we can get right to work on something relevant but small that mitigates those risks. The projects described below can jumpstart the process, with four ways we can work together for under $5,000. They cover most of what we typically do at the beginning of an engagement anyway. Each leaves you better off, with a deliverable that makes it worth the investment, even if that's all we do together. But each package also gives you a chance to test us in your environment and mitigate your risks before agreeing to larger or ongoing commitments. Let's find out if we are a match Which one to start off with depends on whether you’re thinking strategically, have a specific bid in mind, or have already started a proposal: A pipeline assessment to quantify what needs to be done to hit your numbers. Our spreadsheet model not only quantifies how many leads you need to hit your numbers, but also how much effort is required at each phase and what has the biggest impact on revenue. It clarifies goals, budgets, and how to allocate resources. Understanding it helps turn business development from an art into a science. It implements the recommendations we make here. But the best part is that everything we do together after this task can be compared to a set of expectations and tracked against a measurable return on investment. Preparing to win a proposal before the RFP is even released. In four sessions that can be conducted remotely and be a week or a month apart, we help you get into position to win. In each session we’ll challenge your company to be better prepared than it would be on its own. We'll work with you on your positioning, value proposition, and articulating you bid strategies and themes. It will help you implement our recommendations for preparing to win before the RFP is released. We’ll help you go from gathering data to articulating what you need to say to create a proposal that is built from the ground up around what it will take to win. It's a great way to see exactly what we can do to help you win the proposal before it even starts. Help getting your proposal off to the right start. Our MustWin Process includes a methodology for figuring out what to say and planning the content of your proposal before you start writing. We’ll guide your staff through this planning and help define what the proposal will be so that you aren’t surprised when you see the draft. We’ll help you think through what it will take to win in writing so that you can write a great proposal, whether or not you use us to help with the writing. A proposal review that shows the difference between a good proposal and a great proposal. We do reviews that are formal, detailed, and criteria based, as well as quick reviews just based on our experience. Either way, we focus on more than just personal opinions and can help you implement some of the recommendations we make here. We’ll show you what it means to assess a proposal against what it takes to win, and how to look at things from the customer’s perspective. What you learn from our review of this proposal can benefit all the proposals you produce in the future. It will also show you exactly what our standards are should we work on a proposal together in the future. What comes after we get started with one of these projects? Beyond these tasks we can figure out whether training, coaching, hands-on help, or something else will serve you best. We'd love to provide those services, but it's easier to start off with a small project and then follow-up something ongoing. We usually set larger ongoing projects up with an hourly rate and a not-to-exceed limit. Sometimes we quote a daily rate. Our preference is to create a limit for a quarter and then complete tasks under that limit. This makes it easy for you to call us with things you want us to take a look at, small pieces you want written, meetings you want us to participate in, etc. Outsourcing vs Insourcing We also have a small staff that you can outsource writing and production to. We can travel to your site when needed, but a few hours here or there delivered remotely may be all you need (and it's much less expensive). We love to help companies develop their internal staff and organizations. We are happy to mentor new proposal groups until we obsolete ourselves and have done it for several customers. You can use less experienced staff without having to put an expensive expert on the payroll. Your staff can do most of the work and we can provide the expertise and quality assurance needed to maximize your win rate. During our initial project, we'll learn each other's capabilities and preferences. You can engage us to take the next step or take it on your own. But either way there will be a lot less risk and uncertainty. And you'll have more confidence in the ROI. Because that's really what we're talking about. From your perspective we're either an investment that will pay a happy return or a loss. Picking one of the above gives you a way to quickly find out before making a huge commitment. It all starts with a conversation: 1-800-848-1563 Or click the concierge button and send us a message

We work primarily with business development, proposal, marketing, and sales consultants. Sometimes consultants work for us and sometimes we work for them. We prefer relationships that are mutual and well-balanced. We don't simply place people like a temp service. We help the consultants we work with grow their practice by maximizing the value they offer to their customers. Together we offer a whole range of capability that if properly positioned enables you to maximize the value of your customer relationships. For example: With PropLIBRARY you don't show up at your customer's site empty handed. You show up backed by a huge library of process support materials and recipes. If your customers become PropLIBRARY subscribers, then you can help them implement the recommendations. We can help support you as you do that. You can offer your customers services that are far larger than just yourself. You can be an agency or a prime contractor and continue to own your customer relationships. You can be a prime contractor and be a subcontractor. You can be a subcontractor for our other partners and well as for us. You can promote yourself to our audience. If you write an article that we accept for publication, we'll give you a plug. We also have low cost advertising opportunities in our apps, website, and newsletter. You can develop multiple streams of income. If you have enough of the right content, we can sell your content on PropLIBRARY. For example, you can repurpose training materials you have developed. You become part of a referral network that supports reach other. You keep all the benefits of being an entrepreneur, but are no longer completely on your own. You can become one of our Concierges. When customers call us, one of our network of concierges answers. As a Concierge you take the lead in offering solutions to the customer. If you use our FindAConsultant App, you can get in front of our audience and work directly with them. That's right. We don't take a cut if they call you directly. If you want to be one of the resources that we draw on when people ask for Concierge Service, you should get in touch with us. We need to discover what's special about you. You get what you put into it. At a minimum well have to invest significant time into learning about each other. We're not looking for passive consultants who wait for the phone to ring. We're looking for consultants who create opportunities so that we can create bigger ones together. Typical steps for working together As soon as they are available, download our apps Use them to promote yourself Explore how we can offer more together, grow your practice, and maximize the value in your channel Learn about the MustWin Process so you can be positioned to teach and implement it Learn the rules of engagement for how or partner network works together Become a Concierge

It’s easy to confuse strategic planning with business planning. However, what business you want to be in and how you should allocate resources to do business are two very different issues. If you jump ahead to business planning without having done a thorough job of strategic planning, you risk achieving great resource allocation applied to the wrong strategies. You might think that you know what businesses you are in and want to be in, but that does not give you a strategic plan. If your strategic plan consists of identifying customers and pursuing anything you can get from them, you don’t really have a strategic plan. Bidding everything leads to failure. A strategic plan is the first step in making sure you don’t go down that road. One counter-intuitive way to understand the necessity of strategic planning is to realize the horrible fates of companies that don’t do effective strategic planning. A good sign that you’re already going down that path is when you get to the proposal phase and find that it’s really hard to write your proposal win themes. When companies don’t have effective strategic plans, they often fill the void with bad habits. Like all bad habits, they are notoriously hard to break. It’s better to prevent bad habits than try to correct them. You can do this by developing good habits that lead to winning. To become a company that wins through strategy, you need to think about strategic planning differently. It’s not about creating a document. It’s about recognizing that you want to be a company that responds to RFPs like your business depends on it by thinking through the chain of events that leads to winning business. And then positioning the right way in the right places, with the right pursuit strategies. A strategic plan helps focus people in your company on pursuing the right targets. But it should also guide them in the right ways to pursue them. This requires considering a combination of: See also: Winning Processes and policies Resource allocation and budgets Strategies and approaches Organizational issues Roles, responsibilities, and territories Incentives Positioning For example, in pursuing government contracts, teaming strategies can be vital. Or a way to reduce your income. The right strategic approach can make or break your success. Effective strategic planning pushes you to better understand your business. It requires you to understand how marketing, sales, and organizational issues impact each other, so that you can provide appropriate direction and resource allocation. For business development, it all revolves around your business pipeline. It’s not enough to track your leads. You need to link where those leads will come from to how they get qualified and each phase of pursuit. A pipeline is a mathematical model of this, that is often visualized with simple bar charts. But behind the charts lies a world of complexity that when you understand it can provide tremendous insight into the nature of your business. A good pipeline assessment can predict the future of your business. But it can also tell you how to fill your pipeline. You can learn what’s more important than lead generation. Adding metrics to your pipeline can tell you how to allocate resources. Understand how your win rate impacts your pipeline can help you make better decisions and improve your company’s ability to grow. Understanding your pipeline also tells you how much business development you can afford. The key to effective strategic planning is to turn it into a tool. A brilliant document that sits on a shelf is useless. You want to create a strategic feedback loop. You should learn something from creating your strategic plan and it should provide support and guidance for your staff at every step. It should be an asset and not a reference. And what you learn from implementing it will enable you to improve your strategic plans during the next update. It’s that feedback loop that guides you to greatness.

The Proposal Content Planning methodology was developed as part of the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process. While the MustWin Process helps ensure you have all the information needed to support Content Planning, you can create a content plan for a proposal even if you don't follow our process in full. Here's a document we wrote to explain Proposal Content Planning. Proposal Content Planning is: A tool that enables you to figure out what to write in your proposal. A way to build a blueprint for the proposal prior to its construction, or a recipe that the Proposal Writers can follow (pick your preferred metaphor). A way to collect input and build consensus regarding what should go into your proposal. A container into which you can put placeholders for everything so that you can keep track of them until they have been created. A way to deliver instructions, guidance, and information to the Proposal Writers. New ways to track progress and turn writing into a process of elimination. A baseline that you can compare the draft proposal to so you can tell whether the draft says and does everything it was supposed to do. A Content Plan functions as a container into which you place everything that should go into a proposal prior to actually writing it. A Content Plan is needed because it is impossible for one person to keep everything in their head, organize it, and then write it and get it correct. Indeed, most proposals require input from multiple people and sources of information. A Content Plan helps you avoid rewrite after rewrite while trying to turn what you have into what you really need. A Content Plan works like a container that holds proposal instructions as you figure them out. A Proposal Content Plan provides you with: ✔ A way to build a blueprint for the proposal prior to its construction so you can handle complicated RFPs ✔ A way to build consensus regarding what should go into your proposal ✔ A way to deliver instructions, guidance, and information to the proposal writers that are easy to act on ✔ Something that helps bring people together to facilitate their ability to work on the proposal, regardless of their level of proposal expertise ✔ New ways to track progress and turn writing into a process of elimination to make the writing faster and easier ✔ A structure for how to get an early start on the proposal and guidance for what information you should have at the start ✔ A baseline that you can compare the draft proposal to so that you can tell whether the draft says and does everything it is supposed to do The Proposal Content Planning methodology guides you through what to put into your Content Plans through an iterative process that makes sure you consider everything you should. It is very flexible regarding how it gets implemented so that your needs drive the process instead of you having to conform to the process. Premium Content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: The following items are only accessible to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. The MustWin Process provides the guidance and checklists you need to implement the Proposal Content Planning methodology. It expands on this introduction to help you visualize a Content Plan and provides additional detail on the of benefits of using a Content Plan. Content Plans are very flexible, giving you options for: Who should contribute to creating them The instructions that go in a Content Plan How to best balance schedules and resources Content Plans also help you manage the critical difference between planning your offering and planning your proposal content. The core of the methodology is an 8-Step process for creating a Content Plan covers everything you should think about going into your proposal. Because of the flexibility, we also provide a number of items to help you implement Proposal Content Planning. Once you have created a Content Plan, it is critically important that you validate it before you start writing to it, so here is a checklist to assist with that.

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.