Carl Dickson

What if I told you that on a 50-page proposal for services provided worldwide, due in just 7 days, we scheduled not one but two major reviews, and that we had the Red Team draft ready in less than 36 hours with only three writers... Want to know how we pulled that off and delivered an outstanding proposal? See also: Content Planning Box We started by using the Proposal Content Planning methodology we've been recommending and refining for two decades. The size and complexity of this proposal has convinced me once and for all that proposal writing goes faster and more reliably with the right approach to planning before you write. Planning did not take time away from writing, it accelerated the writing. Without the Content Plan, what we needed to accomplish would have been nearly impossible. Nobody believed we could be ready for the Red Team in 36 hours. And yet, what we turned in for review was in better shape than some drafts I've seen that had three weeks to prepare. Why we waited 24 hours before we started writing For the first 24 hours, we thought about what needs to go in the proposal and how to present it. We outlined and created a document shell. We dropped in placeholders, reminders, questions, details, and instructions for the writers. We did this at the bullet level, and sometimes didn't even use complete sentences. But we accounted for everything. We summarized strategies and approaches. We identified graphics and described them in text. What we created was a description of the proposal instead of a proposal. Another way to look at it is that we created a set of specifications for the document. This baseline defined what the proposal should be. We believe that all proposals should have written quality criteria, and that they should be given to the writers before they start writing and used by the reviewers when the draft is ready. What we did was to combine proposal content planning with defining proposal quality criteria. In effect, the content plan became the quality criteria. Why we waited a little longer still The very next day, we reviewed the plan. We needed to ensure the strategies and approaches were valid and that if we created the proposal according to the plan, it would result in the proposal that everyone wanted. We had disagreements about approaches. We used the Content Plan to put them on the table for decision. The compromises and decisions regarding the ways to do and say things went into the plan. We literally got everyone on the same page. Instead of hiding from disagreements, we enthusiastically sought them out so we could put them behind us and proceed in a straight line. This alone was a huge time saver. Instead of waiting for a draft, arguing over commas, and making inadequate changes that only became known when the next draft was produced, we presented, decided, and wrote it. Once. What happened when we finally started writing The writing took one 8-hour day and one 16-hour day. That's 50 pages created in 72 hours of writing. We knew exactly what we had to address and how much space we had to address it. The 50 pages only required 23 pages of narrative after you subtract graphics and tables. We intentionally used a lot of these and planned what would go in them to minimize the amount of narrative. In reality, the writing was half writing and half graphics and tables completion. For the narrative half, we not only knew what to say, but how to say it based on our strategies. The Content Plan also helped us treat the writing as a process of elimination. But the main ways it accelerated the writing was by eliminating guesswork, reducing the need for rewriting, and visually showing writers how much to write. How this approach improved the Red Team review It also changed the nature of the Red Team review. Because we had validated strategies and approaches, they focused more on the quality of the text. They identified additional details to make it stronger and put us in touch with new subject matter experts for specific items. The Content Plan approach not only made things faster, it also produced a much better proposal than anyone expected under the circumstances. Read this before you try it at home... Have caution. It's counterintuitive. An extra review, less time to write, and more work and structure for proposal reviewers may take some getting used to. There may be resistance from nervous writers. Retraining and executive trust will definitely be required. But this is now the only way I want to do proposals. Maybe we'll get to do one together one day.

Do templates make proposal creation easier, result in better quality, or destroy your chances of winning? First, let’s make a distinction between templates for formatting vs. templates for content. This article is about using templates for content, organization, or reusing previous proposals. Whether it makes sense to use a proposal template depends primarily on: The type of offering. If you are proposing a unique or engineered solution, you probably can’t use a template or reuse content and still be competitive. If you are proposing a product or a commoditized service, you may be able to employ reuse material effectively, but only if your customers' concerns are also consistent. When you recycle proposal content, the odds are that you will end up with a proposal that is not written from the current customer’s perspective. Even when you propose the exact same thing to two different customers, the description of what it will produce, deliver, or achieve should be different. The consistency of RFPs. If your RFPs are very consistent, you may be able to use reuse material effectively. If your proposals don’t have a written RFP, then whether you can effectively employ reuse material will depend on the consistency of your customers’ concerns and evaluation processes. The same offering could lead to increased efficiency, better performance, or improved quality. But which does this customer find compelling? Everything you say about your offering needs to be put into the right context. It’s how much that context changes from one proposal to the next that impacts whether using a proposal template will help or hurt. When you look at the nature of your offering and the RFP, you can actually see where boilerplate might be applicable. This model shows us that: Templates and reuse works best when you are offering the same services/products on every bid and the RFP is the same each time. Templates and reuse require time-consuming edits when you offer different services/products on every bid and the RFP is different each time. In between these are two conditions where templates and reuse may or may not be a good solution: See also: Reuse When you offer the same services/products on every bid, but the RFP is different each time. When you offer different services/products on every bid, but the format, structure, and content of the RFP is the same each time. In addition, the following concerns can also impact whether or not using a template will be a savior or destroyer of your proposal. The consistency of customer concerns and evaluation. Even if you are proposing the same thing, if your customers have different concerns or follow different evaluation processes, you will need to customize your response to reflect it. Since your proposal should show how your offering responds to the customer’s concerns, a difference in customer concerns can totally change the context and how you describe your offering. The strength of your writers. If you have weak writers, you may want to rely more on reuse material. Instead of training and guiding them through the process of creating winning proposal copy, it may be easier to write something good once and then reuse it often. However, this can be dangerous. Even if you provide detailed checklists and guidance, if the writers are weak to begin with, you may find that you are submitting proposals that are not customized and your win rate will suffer. The size of the proposal and your profit margin. It makes no sense to invest in winning if you do but don’t make enough money to cover the cost of the proposal. While we might argue that if this is the case you shouldn’t bid, it is possible to profitably sell a commodity with razor thin margins at high volume. If you are in this category then you have no choice but to automate. Then the question becomes, how can you automate while still producing a competitive proposal? It is important to remember that there is a difference between being similar and being the same. Most of your offerings and most of your RFPs will be similar. They may be about the same things. But unless they ask for exactly the same things, in the same order, using the same terminology, and evaluate them against the same terminology, the response will have to be different. The amount of that difference is what determines whether templates or reuse helps or hurts. If you are seeking proposal templates to “make proposals easier,” keep in mind that proposals are an investment. If you underinvest, you reduce your return on investment. At any established company, your win rate matters more than the cost of your proposals. If you manage your finances by focusing on proposals as a cost, then the reduction in win rate may end up costing you far more than any savings. The reverse is true. If you invest in creating more competitive proposals, the increase in win rate can generate a return far larger than that investment. Do the math. Compare what a change of just a few percent in your win rate returns, compared to the size of what you spend producing proposals. For each $10 million in proposals you submit, a 1% change in win rate is $100 thousand. To get a 10% or more increase in win rate, you need to go from writing good proposals to writing great proposals. To do that, you need to write your proposals from the customer’s perspective. Proposal templates are about standardization. The customer’s perspective is not standardized. You will never get a great proposal from a template. So maybe the real question that determines whether you should use a proposal template or recycle your proposal content is whether you can win with a cheap proposal that’s not great. And if you are thinking about building your company’s proposal process around templates, you might also ask whether you want to base your company’s whole approach to winning new business on cheap proposals that are not great? Do the win rate math and then decide.

Here are 8 simple things a non-specialist can do to dramatically improve their proposal writing. Use this list to go through what you have written sentence by sentence. Doing so can transform your proposal writing into something compelling and persuasive and significantly improve your chances of winning: See also: Winning Is it written to achieve the highest score based on the evaluation criteria? If you are writing a proposal in response to an RFP that has written evaluation criteria, this is the most important thing for you to do. You should study the evaluation criteria and make sure that what you have written will get the highest score. Use the terminology in the evaluation criteria as closely as possible. No matter how important you think something is, if it’s not addressed in the evaluation criteria, it won’t earn you any points. To each point, you have to put what you are writing in the context of the evaluation criteria. You should also format and say things that can easily be copied and pasted onto the customer’s evaluation forms to make it easy for them to justify their score. How quickly can the evaluator find what they need to prove RFP compliance? If you are not compliant with every requirement, your proposal may not even get evaluated. When there are lots of proposals submitted, the easiest way to get out of reading them all is to disqualify as many as possible based on non-compliance. Functional compliance is not enough. There must be a visual match between what you have written, and what the evaluator sees in the RFP. Does it include all of the keywords from the RFP? You must use the RFP’s terminology instead of your own, no matter how strongly you prefer to use certain terms. In fact, you should use all of the keywords from the RFP. The evaluator will be looking at the RFP and then looking at what you wrote to see where you have addressed what’s in the RFP. When they do that, they’ll be skimming for the keywords. You should make them easy to find. Does it answer all the questions the customer might have? An easy way to ensure that you answer the customer’s questions is to address “who,” “what,” “where,” “how,” “when,” and “why” in your response. Look at what you have written and ask yourself questions that start with those words. See if you can’t add detail to your response by providing answers to all of them. Does every sentence pass the “So what?” test? Have you written descriptive statements, cited qualifications, or made unsubstantiated claims in any sentence without explaining what matters and why? It is not enough to state your qualifications; you need to explain what matters about them and how the customer will benefit. The evaluator is often more interested in why something you said matters than the statement itself. Never assume that the value of a statement is obvious. Is what you are proposing merely compliant with the RFP? Everyone is responding to the same RFP. Any serious competitors will also be compliant. If your proposal is merely compliant then you are competing solely on price and vulnerable to someone with a better proposal. Going beyond RFP compliance does not have to mean increasing your price. It can also mean being more credible and trustworthy in your proposal or showing that your offering better aligns with what the customer wants. Does it demonstrate to the evaluator why what you are proposing is their best alternative? The customer is considering a purchase and has multiple alternatives to choose from, sometimes including doing nothing. Does your proposal help the customer to realize why it is their best alternative? This means you need to understand what they really want, which may or may not actually be found in the RFP. It also means you have to know what their alternatives are, the trade-offs that are involved, and the customer’s preferences among them. Winning a proposal is not about being the best you that you can be. It’s about being the customer’s best alternative. Is it written from the customer's perspective and not simply a description of yourself? If every sentence starts with your company’s name, there’s a good chance that you have written about yourself and not about what matters to the evaluator. When you talk with a sales person, do you want to hear them talk all about why they are the best or do you want to hear them talk about what the offering will do for you and how you will benefit from it? Look at every sentence and make sure that every feature, attribute, or piece of information you provide is put into the customer’s context. Out of the hundreds of proposals I've reviewed, I've never seen one that didn't fail at least two of these, and most fail four or more. That doesn't make them bad proposals, just ordinary. But what it really does is create an opportunity to beat your competitors by writing a great proposal instead of an ordinary one. If you need help with that, just let me know…

Differentiation is vital. And yet, sometimes people really struggle to find differentiators. For example, when the RFP tells you exactly what to bid, how many to bid, how to structure your pricing, and what the terms and conditions must be, it seems like there isn’t a lot of room to differentiate your offering. But the truth is, you’re just not trying hard enough. You can always differentiate. Here are four approaches to differentiation you can consider when you're struggling: See also: Differentiation Differentiate what your brand represents. Seth Godin posted that great brands are about what they represent and not about what they are. In proposals, we talk about having themes, a message, or a story. But really what we’re doing is establishing a brand. By telling a story that represents something, we give the customer an opportunity to associate with something larger than ourselves or the procurement. This really matters to some people and is why brands often associate with charities and causes. You can also go beyond answering the customer’s questions and provide something that the customer wants to be a part of. To do this, you have to have a real vision of what the procurement is going to do for the customer and paint a picture that is so vivid they can see themselves in it. The challenge with trying to represent something is that it has to be meaningful. You can’t do it by going through the motions. You can’t paint a picture if you have no vision. Most people try to take the personality out of their business correspondence. They worry that the reader may not like something. But in order to represent something the customer wants to be a part of, you’ll have to inject personality into your proposal. You’ll stand a much greater chance of winning because it has personality than you will of losing because it has personality. In fact, since the odds are that none of your competitors’ proposals will have any personality at all, you can count on getting more attention simply because yours does. Differentiate how you deliver. The customer might be getting the same thing, but if you have a better way of delivering it, you can be the customer’s best alternative. Can you deliver it faster, in more quantity, in less quantity, in better packaging, with more reliability, or in any other way that’s better? When you can’t differentiate what you offer, try differentiating how you will deliver it. Differentiate through results. If one proposal promises to deliver something, and another credibly promises to achieve the customer’s goals by delivering the same something, the second proposal will appear to deliver far more value. This will be true even though they both deliver the exact same offering. This isn’t about delivering the sizzle instead of the steak, it’s about focusing on delivering nutrition. To differentiate through results, you have to know what results the customer cares about, and credibly link what you will do or deliver to achieving those results. Even though everyone will deliver the same offering that will lead to the same results, your proposal will appear more insightful, offer more value, show more understanding, and better correspond to what the customer actually needs. Differentiate through trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is not achieved through claims. In fact, unsubstantiated claims work against trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is best demonstrated through results and honesty about the issues and tradeoffs. Since customers will only buy from people they trust, differentiating through trustworthiness can be very effective. If everyone proposes the same offering, the customer may very well pick the one who is the most trustworthy. They will often pick trustworthy over lowest cost. It takes more than just a credible, effective approach for delivery to appear trustworthy. You must address contingencies, risks, trade-offs, and why you made the decisions you made. Everything can be differentiated. If you can’t find any differentiators for your proposal, you aren’t trying hard enough. Maybe you’ve assumed that because everyone will propose the same thing, that everything else will be the same. Maybe you’ve assumed that since other people could say the same thing, it’s not a differentiator even though it becomes one when they don’t say it. Maybe you’re focused on the offering, when other things that also matter to the customer. Or maybe you are focused on the tangible aspects instead of things that aren’t tangible, but still matter. You can always be different. If you aren't different, then who needs you? One of the things I love to demonstrate when doing proposal training is that it is entirely possible to differentiate yourself through better proposal writing alone. I prefer to differentiate through having a better offering, but sometimes the RFP does not permit it. To differentiate through proposal writing, you have to recognize that even when the offers are pretty much the same, there are things that still matter. Talking about what matters, when nobody else does, it a great way to be different. It’s the kind of difference that makes you the best selection.

When you bid an opportunity simply because you discover that the client is accepting proposals from anyone and you decide to give it a shot, you start from zero when trying to articulate why the customer should select you. It is even more difficult when the RFP tells you what to propose. When everyone is bidding the same thing, it becomes more price sensitive and people are afraid to go beyond the minimum needed to fulfill the requirements. You are left with no clear way to differentiate yourself from the competition and no competitive advantage. See also: Themes Sometimes this doesn’t show up until people try to write their proposal themes. When you decide to bid before you can articulate what it will take to win, it’s hard to figure out what to say in order to win. All you can say that you can deliver what the customer has asked for and that you have experience. But your competitors will say the same things, and will say better if they are better informed. When you lack bid strategies, positioning, differentiation, and customer insight, all you can really do is talk about yourself and hope no one is better. Your themes will tend to be claims, usually unsubstantiated. They will be about you instead of being about the customer or written from the customer’s perspective. They won’t help the customer determine that you are the best alternative, no matter how much you want or claim that to be the case. It will feel like you’re struggling with writing the proposal, and you may conclude that proposal writing is hard or that you need to find better proposal writers. But the problem is not with proposal writing at all. A good bid/no bid decision reflects your win strategies. A bad bid/no bid decision leads to bidding without a competitive advantage. If you are: Struggling to identify your win strategies Having trouble identifying themes to emphasize in your proposal Unable to differentiate yourself from the competition Hopeful instead of confident The real problem may be what you are bidding instead of how you are bidding it. You should examine your bid/no bid system instead of just treating the symptoms. When you sit down to write a proposal aligns with your strengths and your company's strategic plans, then your value proposition and competitive positioning flow naturally. Instead of discovering your proposal win themes, you just have to articulate the alignment that’s already there. That’s a much more solvable problem, and the themes that result are more effective and authentic. This is how a good bid/no bid system results in a higher win rate. It's not simply that being more selective means you only bid opportunities that you have a better shot at winning. It's that the selection process points you to the win strategies that will enable you to write winning proposals. Winning proposals consistently isn't about somehow finding a clever way to present yourself so that you stand out. Consistently winning proposals comes from having a story to tell that the customer wants to be a part of. That story will position you against your competition, include your win strategies, be insightful, and make clear why you are the customer’s best alternative. When you only bid opportunities that relate to your corporate strategies and where you have a competitive advantage, you start the proposal already knowing what story you need to tell. Then the proposal effort becomes about making your story stronger and not about trying to figure out a story to tell. The most common approaches to making bid/no bid decisions include gate reviews and point scoring. But there is another, more simple approach: Do you have a story to tell and is it compelling? If you can't articulate a good story, you can’t write a winning proposal and therefore you shouldn’t bid. But more importantly, if you don’t have a story it’s probably because you have no positioning or differentiation, and are probably bidding because you can and not because you know how to win. You shouldn’t bid if your only bid strategy is figuring out a clever way to make you sound like you’re not ordinary or hoping you'll get lucky and win on price. Themes should be easy. If they aren’t, it’s a no bid indicator.

Writing an RFP is harder than writing a proposal. If you are a proposal writer and have never written an RFP, especially for something you need created or developed, you should try it some time. It is a great way to improve your ability to see things from the customer’s perspective. Even if you can clearly express what you want, doing so in a way that someone else won’t misinterpret is challenging. And most RFP writers are not experts, either in articulating what they want or in writing RFPs. They tend to word things poorly and get lost in the complexity of their own needs. If you’ve tried writing a complex RFP, you’d understand. Unfortunately, the result is that even though proposal writers have to follow the RFP precisely, the RFP is fallible. If it says something that’s clearly wrong, it can be fixed. But most of the problems people have responding to RFPs are when it’s hard to tell, like when the RFP requirements are ambiguous, open to interpretation, convoluted, or just a little… strange. Issues like that make you scratch your head and wonder why someone put it in the RFP that way. It’s easy to psych yourself out and develop conspiracy theories related to what they are really trying to do based on the assumption that they said it that way on purpose. The odds are more likely that it was just poorly worded. But the problem with conspiracy theories is that no matter how far-fetched, they could be true… If you are a proposal writer, you can’t just leave it alone. Understanding why the customer wrote the requirements the way they did helps you understand their motives. Understanding their motives is critical to winning in writing, because that is how you not only respond to the requirements, but fulfill their unwritten needs. So take a look at this list of possible reasons why the customer wrote something the way they did: See also: Customer perspective They had to They want to keep things the same They want something different They didn’t know what else to say They are afraid They are ambitious They were lazy They are cheap They want what they want They don’t want to be tied down They aren’t an expert in what they need to buy but have to write the RFP anyway Someone else suggested it They misinterpreted what you suggested They forgot They didn’t know how to quantify it They didn’t want it to limit them in the future The Powers That Be don’t trust their own people They don’t agree They have a deadline They've been burned They already know who they want to win They don’t want to keep the incumbent They want new ideas They are resistant to change It was in the RFP they recycled Bad copy and paste They changed their mind Their needs changed but they forgot to update the document They didn't realize they contradicted themselves They're short sighted They haven't figured it out yet Their priorities aren't what you think they should be They can’t predict the future They know more than you think they do How many of these could explain what you are seeing in the RFP? How many of these represent issues that you could have helped the customer with? Too bad once it's in the RFP it's probably too late. You need more information than just what's in the RFP. But if you know why they did what they did, you can strategize a way to work around it. Or better yet, you can address the requirements in a way that fulfills what their real motivation is. If you don't know the customer well enough to understand their motivations before the RFP is released, all you can do is guess. But as you can see from the list above, it will be easy to guess wrong. And you should assume that at least one of your competitors won't have to guess. Wouldn't you like to be the one making RFP suggestions and confuse your competitors instead?

Is it the statement of work? The evaluation criteria? The pricing model? Those are all important, but if you want to win there is something about an RFP that is even more important. The problem is that it’s not even in the RFP itself. Anyone can write a proposal that responds to what it says in the RFP, and certainly your competitors can do so. But when you try to write a great proposal, you’ll quickly start asking questions about the RFP, and you won’t find those answers in the document. In order to write a great proposal, you need to know more than just what the customer says in the RFP. You need to know why they said it that way. The most important part of an RFP is the motivation of the customer. The reasons why they put what they did in the RFP are more important than what they put in the RFP. Why did they go to all that work to produce the RFP? See also: Compliance matrix So what motivates the customer? It could be goal attainment, compliance, laziness, fulfillment of an agenda, a desire to change, a desire to keep things the same, fear, ambition, cost control, greed, status, fashion, or some other reason. Each requirement in the RFP was put there in order to achieve something. To satisfy what the customer really wants, you need to know what motivated them. When you respond to an RFP, it’s not enough to give them what they asked for; you need to give them what they asked for in a way that fulfills their motivations. If you just write to what it says in the RFP, you are not writing to their motivations. The company that does the best job of writing to the customer’s motivations has the best chance of winning. This is for two reasons: The RFP may not be an accurate reflection of their motivations Fulfilling their motivations is more important than fulfilling the specifications contained in the RFP If you can’t or don’t write to the customer’s motivations, you are bidding at a disadvantage. This is a nice way of saying that the deck is stacked against you and unless your competitors are total slackers you are probably going to lose. That’s not what we like to call a “win strategy.” The only problem is figuring out their motivation, as opposed to what they said in the RFP. This is where that whole “customer intimacy” thing becomes important. But if you can’t achieve real customer intimacy, sometimes you can make some good guesses based on the types of motivations you expect someone from that kind of organization, culture, and environment might have. A great proposal focuses on delivering results and not simply fulfilling requirements. But which results? In Proposal 101 level training, you learn that everything you write in a proposal should provide a benefit to the customer. But which benefit? The same exact feature could increase responsiveness, mitigate risks, lower costs, improve quality, improve the user experience, and increase stakeholder satisfaction. So which should you write about? A smart proposal writer will turn to the evaluation criteria in the RFP and make sure that the benefits correlate with how your proposal will be scored. But if you really want to win, the benefits you deliver will fulfill the motivations of the evaluator and the people who wrote the RFP. Whenever you see an RFP that asks you to describe your understanding of the requirements, they are crying out for you to show how you will fulfill the motivations behind those requirements. They went to all that effort to write an RFP and are planning to read a bunch of proposals and conduct an evaluation. Why? It’s more than simply to buy something. There’s a reason behind it. The company that writes to the reasons behind the RFP is the company that understands the customer. The company that fulfills those reasons is the one who will deliver what the customer really wants. If you want the customer to find what you say in the proposal to be compelling, write to their motivations. Discovering those motivations and structuring your proposal around how you will address them is how you have what we like to call “win strategies.”

Improving your win rate has the potential to double your revenue from the exact same number of leads. But improving your win rate is easier said than done. Most of the things that will have the greatest impact occur before you even start the proposal. Here are 14 ways to get into position to win so that you can increase your win rate: See also: Improving win rates Gain an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. The more you know about what matters to the customer and about the opportunity and competitive environment, the more you can create a proposal that matters more than those of your competitors. Differentiate from the competition. Positioning is about explaining why the differences about you and your offering matter. Even when the RFP forces everyone to bid the exact same thing, you can still differentiate on things like how, why, and trustworthiness. Disrupt. Part of getting into position to win can be getting into a position your competitors can't match, by influencing the selection of contract vehicle, terms and conditions, requirements, business models, definitions, etc. Prepare to write. You can't write a proposal optimized to win against an RFP until you have the RFP in hand. But you can prepare to write by improving your ability to articulate what matters about the customer, offering, and competitive environment. When the RFP is released, you will be in position not only to write about how you will fulfill the requirements, but how and why your approach matters. Prepare your offering. You should never figure out what to offer by writing a narrative about it. You should design your offering separately from writing about it. If you don't want that to impact the time you have to write the proposal, you should do as much offering design as you can before the RFP is released. Answer who, what, where, how, when and why. Take some time to think through all the questions now, so that you can get the answers you need before the writing starts. Put extra effort into being able to explain "why." Understand what it will take to win. If your explanation of what it will take to win is generic, you aren't in position to win. If your win strategies are based on your strengths and not based on what it will take to win you are vulnerable. If you can't articulate it, you can't write it. It is not enough to have information, know how your offering is differentiated, or know what matters. You must be able to articulate. If you can't explain what it will take to win, why the customer should select you, and what the customer's perspective is before you start writing, you can't incorporate those things into your response to the RFP's requirements. Turn strategies into action items. Your existing strengths are not strategies. What you are going to do about them and what you are going to do to develop new ones are strategies. Getting into position to win requires action. Be able to write from the customer's perspective. You can't write a proposal from the customer's perspective if you can't see things from the customer's point of view. Doing this requires a combination of information about the customer and the ability to write from their perspective. If your proposal consists exclusively of descriptions of yourself and your offering, it is not written from the customer's perspective. To get into position to win, you need to obtain customer insight and the ability to write from their perspective instead of your own. Price to win. Price always matters. But how much? Discovering what the price to win will be and what you can do to improve your pricing will help you get into position to win. Turn trade-offs into advantages. Proposals are full of trade-offs. Trade-offs can be a good thing when properly explained. Anticipating the trade-offs and becoming able to explain them can become a demonstration of insight that itself becomes a reason why the customer should select you. Get real about your value proposition. What is your value proposition, does the customer agree with it, and does it reflect the right cost/value trade-offs? Is it real? Become the best alternative. The customer has a choice to make. That choice could be is among competitors, insourcing vs. outsourcing, between doing what you recommend and doing nothing, or something else. What makes you the best alternative? What do you have to do to become it? And what do you need to say so they realize it? Anyone can win a single proposal from sheer luck. The trick is winning them all. And if you can't win them all, then just how high can you get your win rate? It takes a combination of preparation, positioning, and follow-through to turn it into a winning proposal. What we find with the companies that bring us in as consultants is that the same people you have now, putting in the same level of effort, can usually perform at a higher level if given the right direction. A lot of what we end up doing is showing people how to raise the bar. Our experience shows us that little things can have a huge impact on competitiveness. If you want to maximize your chances of winning, get in touch and let's have a conversation about what can be done.

Is working on a proposal a necessary evil or an opportunity? Is it an assignment you have to complete to keep someone else happy or is it a chance to bring meaning to your work? Is it a chance to add to the corporate coffers or is it a chance to advance your career and expand the salary pool? Is it something you have to do to get a customer, or is it an opportunity to define a new relationship? Proposals have deadlines. This means everything that needs to be done needs to be assigned to someone accountable for completing it on time. By definition, these assignments are things that people have to do. And by accepting that definition, you suck the motivation right out of the people you need engaged in winning. If you frame a proposal as something that people have to do, then people will do the minimum that they have to. There is no meaning in their work beyond fulfilling requirements. People will measure success by completion. The proposal is just a step towards getting the work, and even if it wins, will likely be ignored by those doing the work because it is irrelevant to what they do. Think about that last sentence. Most proposals are irrelevant to what people actually do. See also: Organizational development But a proposal is much more than a deadline. A proposal is a chance to define your relationship with the customer and the nature of what people will spend their time doing. A proposal is a chance to define what job opportunities will be created, and what those jobs will be like. A proposal is a chance to make positions more than just jobs. A proposal is a chance to bring meaning to those jobs. A proposal is a chance to be relevant. A proposal is a chance to matter. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if a proposal is required, you get to have a chance to matter. Most fail to seize that opportunity. It doesn’t even register as an opportunity when you see the proposal as something you have to do. A great proposal is written from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. An ordinary proposal is a description of what you will do and why you are qualified to do it. A great proposal will be about what matters to the customer. When you frame the proposal as something you get to do instead of something you have to do, it increases your chances of winning. If your proposal matters to the customer more than any other alternative, they will accept your proposal. Creating a proposal that matters to the customer starts by creating a proposal that matters. Your chances of the proposal mattering to the customer are much greater when you think it should and try to make it so than when you just fulfill the requirements because you have to. Do you get to work on something meaningful, or do you have to do something meaningless? Which will appeal to the customer? How do you create a proposal that matters? Step one is to find your passion for what matters about the customer and the nature of what needs to be done. The second step is to say what matters and why with passion. It helps to have a stake in the outcome. When you will be the one doing the work if the proposal wins, then wouldn’t you rather have defined a project with meaning and a proposal that remains relevant after the project starts? But even if you’re creating a proposal for a project that someone else will have to work on, wouldn’t you rather gift them with something relevant and meaningful, instead of something that will be ignored? Is the proposal a way that you get to pay it forward, or is it just something you have to do? Proposals can be challenging. They can be exhausting. Is there anything meaningful that we do that isn’t challenging and exhausting? Deadline pressures can warp people. People who respond by constricting what they do to the minimum to ensure they meet their deadline can’t create a great proposal, and can’t win against a competitor who isn’t also constricted. When you get to bring meaning to a proposal that matters, you get to win.

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The primary missions of business development, capture management, and proposal management are all very different. And yet, they share the same goal: winning proposals. Unfortunately, the way they are normally practiced is as a series of hand-offs, with each contributing towards the goal of submitting a winning proposal. They can be so much more, when they aren't trying to be islands unto themselves. Working together, they add up to more than the sum of the parts: See also: Capture Management Business development is the identification of solutions that address customer needs creating business opportunities. As part of the sales process, the business development function identifies a portfolio of qualified leads for the company to pursue. Business development managers identify, qualify, advocate, and track leads. They focus on gathering intelligence and building relationships. As a result, the business development phase is mostly about relationship marketing and gaining an information advantage about the customer and opportunity, while reporting on lead tracking. Business development hands off to capture management when it’s time to move beyond lead identification and qualification into pursuit. Then business development prospects for more leads while capture management provides a dedicated focus on closing the same with a win. Capture management is a dedicated focus on maximizing the probability of winning a particular business pursuit by leveraging resources, relationships, and processes. Capture Managers develop understanding, figure out what to offer, create strategies, identify resources, and make decisions. Capture management is all about what to offer and presenting it in a winning proposal. But figuring out how to capture the lead requires knowledge and skills in marketing, corporate strategy, proposal development, finance, pricing, contracts, project management, human resources, and basically everything else. Capture management may very well be the most difficult job in a company, partly because very few people have experience in everything needed, and partly because they have to sell internally within the company just as much as they have to sell to the customer. Capture management hands off to proposal management when the RFP is released and it's time to put it all in writing. A good capture manager will involve proposal management before the RFP is released so that they are better prepared to win the proposal. Proposal management is the implementation and oversight of the process of closing a sale by producing a written document. Winning proposals consistently requires implementing a successful proposal management process. Proposal management oversees the implementation of the process, but depends on the input delivered by capture management to position the content of the proposal. To be successful, the proposal manager and capture manager must form a close partnership. Without someone filling the role of capture manager, a proposal manager often has to fill voids that go well beyond the scope of proposal management. If the partnership is not effective, then the odds of winning go way down. Having each focus on their own role exclusively is not the best way to build toward achieving the common goal of winning. Instead of roles and hand-offs, what you really need is an integrated effort. Unfortunately when: Business development tracks the leads but doesn’t have much to contribute to the proposal beyond broad generalizations, it’s barely even part of closing the sale for the leads it identified. Capture management figures out what to offer by writing about it, fails to identify what it will take to win, or is unable to articulate strategies that differentiate, it sets the stage for a proposal effort that can do little more than make an on-time submission, with winning a secondary concern. Proposal management fails to define what information is needed from business development and capture management, how that information should flow into a plan for the proposal that defines what is to be written before writing starts, or how what it will take to win becomes criteria for reviewing the quality of the proposal produced, they set themselves up as document producers and not winners. Shifting from isolated roles to an integrated effort to win To make the shift from isolated roles to an integrated effort to win, each must contribute to and be involved in closing the sale. When the sale closes with a proposal, business development, capture management, and proposal management must each contribute to winning the proposal. Contributing to the proposal does not necessarily mean taking on writing assignments. What it really means is that each must deliver information that will support writing a winning proposal. Achieving this requires the right culture as much as it does the right business development, capture, and proposal management training. What separates a good proposal from a great proposal is how well it reflects the customer’s perspective instead of merely describing the company submitting the proposal. That means that instead of simply being a description of your qualifications and approach, everything in the proposal should be about what the customer cares the most about. This is typically what they will get and what matters about it. When you sit down to write, you want to be in the position of being able to describe yourself and your approaches in the context of why they matter to the customer, and not just why you think they matter. During business development, you should be actively seeking answers to what matters to the customer and what it will take to win. During the stages of the capture management process, you should be designing an offering that reflects what matters to the customer. When you do this, then during proposal writing you will be able to describe your response to the RFP requirements from the customer’s perspective and build a proposal around what it will take to win. Business development will not reliably provide the right information required to do this in the proposal phase, without some help from proposal management. The capture management process will not reliably design an offering around what matters to the customer, without some insight about the customer from business development and some help incorporating positioning into the offering design. Proposal management has to reach out and help both business development and capture management understand what they need at the moment of planning and writing, so they can help go beyond compliance and create a great proposal that is written from the customer’s perspective. If you give them generalizations, you will get generalizations.

I love starting off our consulting engagements by doing a pipeline assessment because it quantifies the reality of things and gives us both a better understanding of the true impact of the improvements we make together. It clarifies goals, budgets, and how to allocate resources. But the best part is that everything we do can be compared to a set of expectations designed to produce a measurable return on investment. But there are limits to what a pipeline assessment can tell you. This article is based on what we've learned by doing pipeline assessments for our customers. Most people want something concise, clear, practical, and quantifiable. Those who want something quantifiable usually respond to how our spreadsheet model makes it all about the numbers, makes it more like science than art, and opens up insights. While we love to talk about best practice philosophy those who just want the facts can see the exact numbers that drive your business. These often deviate from what you might expect from industry rules of thumb. We’re not trying to convince you that the spreadsheet model we use for pipeline assessments will cure everything that ails you. But we do think it’s pretty cool, and the more we use it in our customer engagements, the more we learn. Here’s some of what we can share to help clarify exactly what a pipeline assessment can and can’t do: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline Win rates. A pipeline assessment doesn’t tell you what your win rate is, unless you load it with historical data. That’s not a bad thing to do, but most companies don’t have good records of past submissions! Usually we start with an estimate and refine it with reality as we collect data moving forward. But knowing what your win rate is, while important, isn’t really the goal. It’s seeing what the relationship is between your win rate, the number of leads you need to chase, and the actual revenue you end up with. A spreadsheet model can tell you what the impact of a change in your win rate will be, but it won’t tell you what your win rate should be. But what it’s really good for is doing “what if” analysis. What if your win rate goes up (or down)? How does that impact the number of leads you need, proposals you have to submit, or your revenue? From that you can set targets for what you’d like your win rate to be. Bid/No bid decisions. A pipeline spreadsheet model isn’t going to tell you what bids you should or shouldn’t pursue. It won’t even tell you what percentage you should reject. But it will clearly show if you are out of balance, and either bidding everything or dropping too many bids because you’re registering unqualified leads. We actually set targets for the number of bids we expect to drop, and measure performance against it to ensure that qualification is taking place. However, I’ve never seen a company yet that could tell me with accuracy how many bids they considered in the past but didn’t pursue at each stage. This is another example of where we start with guesses and refine them over time. Benchmarks. A lot of people assume the place to start is with industry benchmarks, comparing your company to others. In service contracting this is usually a mistake. Never mind that this data is company sensitive and not available; even if it was available, it wouldn’t be applicable. No two services companies have the same combination of customers, offering, positioning, strategic goals, accounting systems, BD process, proposal process, internal resource allocation, etc. It does you no good to compare to someone else’s win rate when you don’t know if their strategic goals are, for example, to expand into new customers or maximize an existing customer relationship (ditto for markets and core capabilities), or whether they do most of their businesses through teaming or not. Differences like that do not average out. What a spreadsheet model will do is make visible your performance against the benchmarks that matter --- your own. You can separate metrics based on strategic issues like whether you are the incumbent or not. You can see when your metrics change over time, whether good or bad. You can see the impact of decisions you make. Building these metrics into your spreadsheet model will make it unique. It’s one of the reasons why every time we implement it, we heavily customize it. How many people do you need? This one is fun. A pipeline assessment with the right analysis can show you a whole new numerical way to look at how much effort should go into each phase of your pursuits. But it can’t tell you things like how productive or effective your people are or what subject matters you need to cover. The big thing it can’t tell you is when RFPs will be released or how many will come out at the same time. And off-the-shelf it can’t tell you how your company accounts for people’s time or how it approaches budgeting. But it can give you a numerical baseline you probably don’t have right now. And it can show disconnects between budgets and targets. If your budget won’t support going after the number of leads you need to hit your revenue goals, you’ve got a problem that is better dealt with sooner rather than later. It’s not the model that matters. It won’t make decisions for you, tell you what your strategies should be, or make people do the right things. But it will provide answers to key questions, if you know the right questions to ask. It will enable you to replace your assumptions with real hard data over time. It will help you set more rational targets. And it will help you make better decisions by enabling you to do “what if” analyses that will show the impact of decisions and resource allocation. But perhaps the most important thing it can do is give you a common basis to discuss opinions about decisions and resources that are probably more objective than how those conversations currently go. If it helps your company do a better job of getting right with reality, then it’s well worth the effort.

How do you get good at doing proposals? Where do you start? What should you focus on? You won’t get good at proposals simply by doing a lot of them. You might get more efficient, but being more efficient at submitting ordinary proposals is not the goal. Proposals are an investment that are expected to achieve a return. To maximize your investment and improve the win rate that has such a huge impact on your return, we’ve identified six simple, specific, and highly leveraged things to focus on. Here are five simple “yes’ or “no” questions for you to answer. If you answer “no” to any of them, then that is what you need to work on. See also: ROI Do you build your proposals around what it takes to win? To do this, you have to be able to answer what it will take to win. You have to do your homework before the proposal starts. Then you have to structure your proposal effort around what it will take to win and measure quality against it. Most people give it lip service, but don’t actually build their proposals around it. Do you separate designing your offering from writing the proposal? This is a clear line that if you cross it greatly increases your risk of proposal disaster. If you design your offering by writing a narrative about it, then every change will spawn a re-write cycle that only ends when you submit the proposal you have instead of the proposal you wanted it to be. Neither design nor engineering should be performed in writing. Once you can describe what you are going to offer and have validated that, then you are ready to describe it in writing. If you have learned what it will take to win, you can write about it in context and from the customer’s perspective. Do you plan and validate your content before writing it? It takes more than an outline to plan what should go into your proposal. It takes more than a compliance matrix to plan the construction of a proposal built around what it will take to win. And once you’ve got it all figured out, you need to validate it before you jump into writing. The good news is that when you do, the writing goes much faster and produces better results. Here’s something we wrote that explains without any defined scope, they may be worse than no having any reviews at all. You should start by defining what a quality proposal is, and then create quality criteria based on it. When you do it right, you’ll have traceability from your reviews back to what it will take to win. If the reviewers of the draft proposal think it’s their job to figure out what it will take to win, you’ve got a problem --- you’re addressing it way too late in the process. Do you prioritize your efforts? Why do so many proposal kickoff meetings address writing style? With so much to talk about at that stage having a much larger impact on whether you win or lose, and so little time, how does that make the list? There is a time and place to address writing style. In fact, there is a time and place to address everything related to the proposal. It helps to understand your priorities so you can focus on first things first. I like to think about it as being similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, applied to proposals. Do you raise the bar on a regular basis? Most companies work on their proposal process and training once every few years. They put it in place, and think they are done. Until the next time. Instead, try implementing your process continuously over time. Identify a set of principles and standards like those above, establish a baseline, and then every few proposals raise the bar. That planning before writing thing that everyone struggles with? Start off simple and once you’ve got expectations set and everyone able to achieve something basic, raise the bar. If you overload people at the beginning, your process improvements will fail. But the right process will survive in the real world. And over time, you can turn it into a science. When we work with our consulting customers, this is what we help our customers achieve. We introduce these techniques, often on a live proposal. Then we raise the bar. We not only make their submissions, but we help them develop their organization's ability to win future proposals. Getting a proposal submitted is easy. Winning them all is hard. If you treat proposals as an investment, then to maximize your long term ROI, you need to stop doing proposals in insolation, and instead continuously improve your win rate by raising your standards. But it all starts with getting the right foundation in place. If it’s not there, your win rate will be hit or miss. Mostly miss. What most people do to improve their proposal efforts is also hit or miss, mostly miss, because they focus on the most recent pain. The list above is about setting the stage to win and not about treating pain or symptoms. Becoming healthy takes more effort than swallowing pills, but it’s how smart people invest to maximize results and ROI.

Sometimes you know you have an opportunity coming up and you want to get a head start on the proposal. Unfortunately, what a lot of people do to prepare for the proposal actually does more harm than good. So here are 3 things people do to prepare for an upcoming proposal that are counterproductive, 3 ways to prepare that can help you win, and 3 that can go either way. 3 Ways to prepare for a proposal that are counterproductive See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Writing the proposal in advance. If you write the proposal without the requirements, keywords, and evaluation criteria from the proposal, how can you create a proposal designed to demonstrate compliance, and write it so that it's optimized to win? Preparing for the proposal does not mean writing. It means doing things that will make the writing go better and faster. Instead of assuming that there are sections of your proposal that are routine and won't change, try spending the time thinking about how to differentiate in those sections so that they are better than what your competitors will offer. Staging re-use material. If you make it easy to recycle your past proposals, which are not optimized to win the new proposal, there is a huge danger that people will start from those files instead of from what it will take to win. You might think what you are doing is research that will make the proposal go faster, but what you are probably doing is creating a path of least resistance that people will take instead of thinking through what it will take to win. Identifying reuse material is not the best place to start to get ready for a new proposal. Discovering and articulating what it will take to win is far more productive, and actually speeds the proposal up more. Preparing win strategies and themes that are all about you. When they don’t have the RFP, people are even more likely to focus “on their strengths” and begin defining their win strategies in terms of themselves. This makes it more likely that the proposal will describe the vendor instead of being written from the customer’s perspective. 3 Ways to prepare for a proposal that will help you win Discovering the points you want to make. What matters about what you plan to offer? What matters to the customer? What differentiates you? What is your value proposition? Winning requires not only writing a compliant proposal, but also addressing the RFP requirements in a way that matters to the customer. While you may not be able to itemize and address the requirements without the RFP, you can anticipate many of the points you’d like to make and perfect your ability to articulate them before the RFP is released. Then when you have the RFP, you combine your RFP responses with those points to create a proposal that goes beyond compliance and truly matters to the customer. Designing your offering. What approaches are you going to take? What staff will you bid? What configuration of products or services? What will the logistics be? What is your concept of operations? What issues will you face and what will you do about them? These are things you must be able to articulate before you start writing. If you try to figure them out by writing about them, you’re just asking for a disaster because each change in what you offer will spawn a re-write cycle that ends with submitting the proposal you have instead of the proposal you wanted. The more you can do before the RFP is released to figure out what you are going to offer, the better your chances of being able to articulate and validate your offering design before the deadline clock forces you to start writing about it. Designing your offering ahead of time means that your proposal starts with a gap analysis against the requirements instead of starting from scratch. Articulating your positioning. You should position everything against everything. Explicitly. Your company against each competitor. Your offering design against all alternatives. Your offering against the requirements. Your preferences against the customer’s preferences against your competitors' preferences. Trade-offs against each other. Price against value. Risk against reward. Etc. The better you can articulate your positioning, the more likely your proposal is to stand out. It will stand out because it’s clear why your offering is the alternative for the customer to fulfill their needs and achieve goals. Without the positioning, that would just be an unsubstantiated claim. Positioning isn't just for marketing. Positioning answers "Why?" and sometimes "Why?" matters as much, if not more, than what you are offering when it comes to getting selected. Positioning is where you demonstrate your insight, judgment, and trustworthiness. 3 Things people to do prepare for a proposal that can go either way “Engaging” the proposal manager. The success of this depends on how you define a “proposal manager” and how much time they can put into a pre-RFP proposal. Does your proposal manager help craft the message (very helpful pre-RFP) or just process the document workflow (can’t really fully engage until there is a document)? If your proposal managers are overloaded, they’ll most likely focus on the RFPs that are out and have deadlines rather than give much attention to something that will be coming out in an uncertain future. It’s not counterproductive to assign the proposal manager early, but in a lot of organizations the proposal manager can’t really do much until the RFP comes out. However, you need someone to lead the effort to craft the messaging in the way that is recommended above. It doesn’t matter whether that person is called a sales, capture, or proposal manager. A better title for what you need is a pursuit strategist. When no one else does it or knows how to do it, it often falls on the proposal manager. If the proposal manager crafts the message at your organization, then you might want to make sure they have the capacity (and budget) to fully engage before the RFP is released. Sending out data calls. Charts that show staffing counts, locations, or projects relevant to the statement of work can all be very beneficial to include in your proposal. Even when you don't use the data directly, it can often be turned into soundbites or proof statements. The data you need may also change based on the specifics of what’s in the RFP. But there is definite value in starting that research before the RFP is released because aggregating the data also can take a lot of work. When it comes to the statement of work, you stick to functional or high level terminology before the RFP is released. Simply having the data sources you'll need lined up can be a big help later. Drafting graphics. Doing graphics early can help you visualize your offering. But like text or data calls, a change in the RFP can result in a lot of wasted effort. Even if the RFP doesn’t change significantly, you can end up with a proposal that is not optimized to win. But a lot depends on which aspects you attempt to visualize. While procedures and solution details may be risky, graphics that deal with relationships may not be impacted by most RFP changes or be easy to update. You can prepare for the proposal by preparing graphics that demonstrate or help visualize the things that matter and the relationships between them, and use that to drive what you say in the proposal when the final RFP is released. Once you know what you're going to offer, the points you want to make, and how you should position things, writing will go much more quickly and the result will have a higher win probability. This is a much better way to approach your proposal than to write it in advance, recycling past proposal or boilerplate text, or preparing the same-old same-old theme statements that are all about you and don't even pass the "So what?" test. The key takeaway here is that the things that are best to do to prepare for a proposal do not involve proposal writing directly. They involve making proposal writing easier and more effective. They involve working through how you want to say things and how you're going to articulate your messages. While the final words that you put on paper may have to wait until you have the RFP, it's never too early to start figuring out how you're going to prepare a proposal that's not only better than the RFP, but better than anything your competitors have to offer. Once the RFP hits the street, people tend to become completely focused on responding to it in the limited time available, and may not take the time they should to ponder "secondary" issues like what it will take to win.

The RFP is just one source of requirements that drive what you should offer in your proposal. If all you do is design an offering that responds to what is in the RFP, it will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to a proposal submitted by someone with a deeper understanding of the customer and their requirements. To prepare the winning offer, in addition to the RFP, you need to consider: See also: Offering Design What matters to the customer? The customer will make their selection not only on what “meets their needs” but also on how they will be impacted or will benefit or perceive how your offering aligns with what they value. The requirements that show up in the RFP are only part of what matters to them. And it is incredibly difficult to read an RFP and discern what matters the most to the customer. You may think that your offering is technically superior, but if it does not matter to the customer it is an inferior offering. You may think that you have diligently followed the RFP, but if someone else better understands what matters to the customer, they will prefer the way they follow the RFP. To avoid this, treat what matters to the customer as requirements that drive the design of your offering. Discover what matters to the customer. And when you write about fulfilling the RFP requirements in order to achieve compliance, make sure you address how your approach to doing that will achieve more of what matters to the customer. What matters about what you are proposing? If there are aspects of your offering that are important or will benefit the customer, they should be emphasized. This is separate from or in addition to how you present what you are offering. Your offering should focus on what matters. At every trade-off, you will make decisions for reasons that matter. Keep track of those reasons. Your proposal should provide the reasons why you are the customer's best alternative. Those reasons will depend on the combination of what matters about what you are offering with what matters to the customer. Successful proposal writing requires more than just describing what you propose. Successful proposal writing is compelling because it matters. How much consensus does the customer have or need? Never treat the customer like they are a person. They are many people with many influences. They are stakeholders with different agendas. What matters to one may not matter to another. This makes it tricky to understand them and their requirements, especially if you only have one source at the customer. Don't assume you know "the customer" when you only know one person at the customer. Also, keep in mind that the proposal evaluators and decision makers are ultimately the opinions that have the most impact on whether or not you win. The RFP had multiple authors. Sometimes interpreting the RFP requires knowing who participated in writing it. If you simply read the RFP, you may be missing part of the story. What are the habits and preferences of the customer? Deciding what to offer in your proposal requires making many trade-off decisions. The customer’s preferences should be a factor in deciding which trade-offs to take. When trying to interpret what's in the RFP or how it will be evaluated, it helps to understand the customer's procurement and evaluation habits. How does your value proposition resonate with the customer? Just because you are impressed with your value proposition, that doesn't mean the customer perceives the value the same way you do. For example, you might be offering long-term value to a short-term focused customer. First make sure that your value proposition actually represents value and not some ambiguous unquantifiable advantages. Second, test your value proposition with the customer before you stake your proposal on it. It helps to understand what the customer values and what their priorities are before you try to substantiate your claim to representing the "best value" for the customer. How should you balance value and price? Will the customer select you over a lower priced competitor if you offer a greater value? Usually. Maybe. It depends on whether the customer perceives enough value to justify the difference. What you think about it is irrelevant. Note that the closer what you sell is to a commodity, the more important price becomes. The further you get from being a commodity, the more important value becomes. Striking the right balance for this customer with this procurement is critical for winning your proposal. What is your competitive positioning? What you offer in your proposal needs to be differentiated in a positive way from your competitors. Winning requires being the best alternative the customer to choose from. No matter how you claim to be better, the customer will focus on the differences and weigh them according to their preferences and values. Positioning your differentiators in alignment with the customer’s preferences and values is key to showing why you are the best alternative. If you don't know the customer's preferences and values when you start the proposal, all you can do is guess at how to differentiate your offering. These are things that the RFP usually won’t tell you. But separate from what you say in your proposal, they are all things you need to know to design the best offering. Think of them as things that need to be considered as part of conducting a requirements assessment. Engineering without a full understanding of the requirements results in bad engineering. Often the difference between creating a good proposal and creating a great proposal has nothing to do with how well you write it, and everything to do with how well you do your homework before you start writing. The same is true for figuring out what to offer. Your ability to design the winning offering depends on just how far your understanding of the requirements goes beyond the RFP, before the RFP is even issued.

Separating how you figure out what to offer from writing about it is critical to avoid endless draft cycles that only end when you run out of time and you submit the proposal you have instead of the proposal you want. But you still have the problem of how to design your offering. Designing your offering is an engineering problem. And the engineering approach depends on the nature of what you offer. There is no single engineering methodology that is best for all. But there are some things that they all have in common. Knowing what they are gives you the ability to start designing your offering early, while ensuring that what you come up with will be what you need to win the proposal. The items below are a combination of inputs and goals that should be a part of your offering design approach: See also: Differentiation The process and criteria that drive their decision. In an RFP this is usually described as the evaluation criteria. Sometimes this is detailed and formal, and other times it isn’t. Behind what it says in the RFP are interpretations and implementation procedures. Sometimes there is one decision maker, sometimes a consensus, and sometimes there are influencers. You top goal should be to design your offering to achieve the best evaluation. This requires treating the evaluation criteria as input requirements. Compliance with the customer’s specifications, typically found in the RFP. If your offering is not compliant with the RFP, you may have no chance of winning. And yet RFP compliance is not enough to win. RFP compliance is the baseline or starting point for a company serious about winning. If your offering is not designed to be fully RFP compliant, you’re not even in the game. Compliance with other directives the customer must comply with. They sometimes forget and leave these out of the RFP, but they matter to the customer. A lot. Technical issues and solutions. Will your offering actually do or deliver what it is supposed to? Management issues and solutions. An offering design should reflect more than just the technical details. Do you have the right organization, procedures, allocation of resources, and oversight to do or deliver those technical details? The easier the technical details are to achieve, the more important the management details become. The more complex the project logistics become, the more important the management details become. What matters to the customer? The customer will make their selection not only on what’s in the RFP, but also on how they will be impacted or will benefit or perceive how your offering aligns with what they value. If you are competing with other proposals that all comply with the RFP, but yours reflects things that matter to the customer more than the others, you have a distinct competitive advantage. What matters about what they are buying? The customer may not be experts in what they are buying. They may not know which features are important. By showing insight into what features matter, you also show that you matter. Trade-offs. All proposals are full of trade-offs. Your offering design should anticipate and decide how you will approach them. When companies second guess their offering, it often revolves around the trade-offs. Getting that out of the way so you can move forward with confidence will help you maintain a focus on winning instead of redesigning your offering during proposal development. Differentiators. Customers often make their selections based on what they perceive the differences between the offers to be. Your offering design should specifically call out those differences that are advantages. Designing differentiation into your offering is critical for winning. The reasons why. When the RFP requires all vendors to offer the same thing, they base their decision on other things like the way you will prepare or deliver your offering or whether they can trust you to deliver as promised. The reasons why you do things you do and made the decisions the way you did helps to establish your credibility, insight, and judgment. When everybody offers the same thing, addressing the reasons “why” can make your proposal the better value, even if you are offering the exact same thing. Whether it is compatible with the price to win and your profitability goals. Did your engineers come up with a Chevy or a Cadillac? Does it match the customer’s budget? Will it be competitive? If you wait until the end of the proposal to find out, you could be in for a nasty surprise that you don’t have time to correct. Designing to the right budget should be done at the beginning and validated before you start describing your offering in writing. How it supports your pricing strategies. It’s not enough to just hit the right number. You may also need to reflect the right pricing strategies. For example, do you want to focus on long term or short term costs? How do you want the pricing to scale with volume? What customer behaviors do you want to incentivize? Does what you plan to offer support your business unit’s strategies? What are the strategic goals of your business unit? What capabilities, technologies, territories, customer relationships, or staffing are you trying to develop? How does the design of your offering support that? What results will your offering produce for the customer? From the customer’s perspective, the best offering is often the offering that produces the best results and not necessarily the one with the best features. Beyond complying with the RFP, your offering design should specifically address and maximize the results it will produce for the customer. Why is your offering credible and why should the customer trust that you can deliver as promised? Why should the customer believe that your offer will do what you say it will do for the customer, or that you can deliver it? An offering design that is not credible cannot win. Believing in yourself does not make it credible. You need to be able to prove the credibility of your offering design. Performance risks, customer risks, scope creep, supplier risks, economic risks, staffing risks, and all the other risks. All customers care about risk. Some more than others. All offerings come with risk. Some more than others. The design of your offering will have a risk profile. If it is well designed, those risks will match the customer’s preferences. Matching the customer’s risk expectations should also be an offering design input requirement. The result of an offering design for a proposal is not just functionality, it’s a value proposition. You not only want to know what your value proposition is before you start writing, you want to validate that the customer perceives that value the same way you do. By making sure your offering design incorporates the considerations above, you provide the information you need to articulate your value proposition. Doing this separately from writing the proposal gives you a chance to change or perfect your offering before it’s tangled up in a narrative, where even small changes can be extremely disruptive to the proposal effort. It also sets you up to write a proposal that is focused on delivering your value proposition instead of one that is desperately focused on trying to discover a value proposition before you run out of time.

The proposal death spiral happens when you get to the proposal review and things are so bad that you have to have another review to make sure they’re better, only to find more things to change, and you enter an infinite loop that’s only broken when the deadline comes and you have to submit whatever you have at that moment. When it’s bad, the draft you end up with isn’t much better than the first one. When it’s really bad, people push the changes so close to the deadlines that even the illusion of quality control is given up. The death spiral is not caused by what you think See also: Offering Design You might see symptoms like missed deadlines, writing without any planning, failure to follow your proposal process, or an unwillingness to stop making changes. But the real cause is something else. It’s actually something quite simple and easy to catch. However, fixing it is a bit more challenging. The cause of the death spiral occurs before writing even starts. And once you’re sucked in, it’s almost impossible to escape. Even if you do escape, the proposal will be damaged goods. There is a line that if you cross it, your chances of winning drop and can never fully recover. There are two things going on at the start of a proposal. Most companies try to do them at the same time and that is what gets them into trouble. If what you offer is customized, complex, tailored, or a unique solution to the customer’s problem, then designing your offering and writing the proposal at the same time is what causes the death spiral. Don't engineer your solution or offering by writing about it It’s natural, once you have the RFP in hand, to think “Now we have to write the proposal,” and to write a response to each requirement in the RFP. If you do a good job, then when you are done you will have something that is compliant with the RFP. You may be expecting the proposal reviewers to want to add some marketing-speak to “make it sell better.” But you may not realize that you have another problem. Bad engineering, defects in your solution, and an offering that is at best ordinary. It can’t be fixed one requirement at a time or by adding some happy-words on top. That’s like fixing a machine by replacing one random part at a time. The reason you have defective engineering is because you had no engineering methodology beyond writing and the documentation of your design consisted of preparing a narrative. If you engineered a bridge that way, it would fall. When your reviewers read what you have and realize that’s “it’s not strong enough” they may comment on a variety of presentation issues because that is what they see. But if you fix the presentation, they still won’t be happy, and no one may know why. The real reason they’ll never be happy is that your approach or offering is the real problem. No matter how you dress up the pig, it’s still a pig. Don’t take that personally. The problem was that by doing what you were asked to do, you ending up performing engineering by writing narratives about it. Avoiding the death spiral is easy Design and validate your offering before you write about it. To design your offering, you need a methodology and some way to document it. Engineering methodologies may be formal or informal, and their selection depends on what you are trying to engineer and the people involved. But think like an engineer and don’t try to think in writing. Once you have your design, you’ll need to record it so that others can review and validate that it’s the best approach. How you document your design doesn’t matter and should avoid being burdensome. Some things may require blueprints, some may require diagrams, some may require a parts list, and some may require a work breakdown structure. If you have to collaborate with others, you should take that into account. Once you have a documented design, then you must validate that it will meet the customer’s needs and will be better than what any competitor will offer. This validation should involve key stakeholders, independent reviewers, and The Powers That Be so that everyone is bought in. Only then are ready to describe it in narrative form for the proposal. Once you have a validated offer design, then any changes to the narrative will be related to presentation and shouldn’t force a redesign. Any changes at that point won’t require restructuring your proposal, just how you articulate what matters about your design. Don't let the deadline trick you into jumping right into the death spiral Like a reality TV show, what makes waiting until you have a validated offering design a near insurmountable challenge is the deadline. Time management is harder than engineering or proposal development. You can’t spend all of the time available designing and validating your offering. You have to leave some time, probably at least half, to write and review the narrative. But if you don't allocate enough time to offering design before you write, you'll be jumping right into the death spiral. What makes the challenge even more difficult is that before you can jump into the engineering, you have to gather and assess requirements. You’ve got the RFP. But most RFPs are a horrible tool for understanding the customer’s requirements. They tend to be vague in key spots and sometimes contradictory in others. You may need to create a compliance matrix just to organize the requirements and work around RFP questions that go unanswered. Reading, parsing, and understanding the RFP takes time. And RFP requirements aren’t the only requirements. You should have information about your customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment that you have gathered outside of the RFP. They are also inputs into the design. If you don’t have input or strategies as inputs to the offering design before you start writing, you are inviting the death spiral. Having clarity about the requirements is a necessary ingredient for reliable engineering. On most proposal schedules you may only have a few days to achieve it. All of this should reinforce that having a draft offering design before the RFP is released is the crucial for ensuring that you beat your competitors. You don’t have to write a draft of the proposal before the RFP is released, but you can help solve the time management problem if you document what you plan to offer so that when the RFP is released you only need to validate the design and describe it. This in turn requires that you must understand the customer’s requirements before the RFP is released. At this point you should be able to see why the companies that do this have a huge advantage over those that leave themselves insufficient time to design a winning offering before they start writing and thus expose themselves to the death spiral. Whatever you do, don't cross this line The line that you don’t want to cross is writing the proposal before you can articulate a valid offering design. Once the offering design is entangled with the narrative, both changes and validation become much more difficult, risky, and time consuming. Because it weakens your ability to consistently focus on what matters in your proposal, any changes to the offering design once it has been turned into a narrative lower you chances of winning. Even if you escape the death spiral, you can’t escape that figuring out what to offer by writing about it produces a proposal that is not fully optimized to win.

There are lines you should not cross. If you do, your proposal will never recover. Cross them and the only way you can win is if all of your competitors mess up worse than you did. That is not a winning proposal strategy. The purpose of this list is to help keep you from crossing any of these lines. I challenge you to identify anything below that can safely be deleted without jeopardizing your ability to win. The following are things you should never do. They are all clear and objective to make it difficult to get into denial about them. When you find yourself doing them, you know that you're about to go down the wrong path and should consider changing your course: See also: Differentiation Bidding without an information advantage. An information advantage can be about the customer, the opportunity, or the competitive environment. An information advantage is what you need to show insight. It is also key to identifying a winning value proposition that is differentiated from your competitors. Everyone has the same RFP. Basing your response only on what’s in the RFP means that all you are really doing is competing on price, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself otherwise. Failing to plan your offering separately from your proposal. Planning a document like a proposal and engineering an offering or solution are two very different things. When you do them both at the same time, any change to one creates a change in the other that results in a vicious cycle that ends with submitting whatever you have at the deadline instead of what it will take to win. If you add to this the sin of writing without planning, what you really get is a combination of engineering by writing narratives and thinking at the speed of writing. Neither is good. If you don’t think through your offering separately from thinking about what you should write, you are setting yourself up to fail. Being unable to articulate what it will take to win before you start writing. You don’t discover what it will take to win by writing about it. You should write your proposals to substantiate how you have positioned yourself against what it will to win. You can’t do that unless you can articulate what it will take to win before you start writing. If you articulate it before you start proposal writing and it’s not compelling, don’t expect your proposal to somehow become compelling. But you can fix it before you start writing your proposal. Do yourself a favor and start your proposals with the sense of excitement that comes from knowing what the path to winning is before you start. Failing to consider what matters to the customer before you start writing. Everything you say in your proposal should matter. You may know what matters to you, but if you don’t know what matters to the customer, you’re going to have a tough time making your proposal matter to them. If you don’t know what matters to the customer, when you try to say something about the positive results or benefits you will deliver, all you will be able to do is guess. Lacking differentiators. You can’t be best without being different. And because being just a little better is a losing strategy, differentiation the most important thing to talk about in your proposal. Even when you are bidding the exact same thing as everyone else, you can still differentiate your proposal. In fact, it becomes even more important. Writing that is not from the customer’s perspective. Even when the customer asks you to describe your company and your offering, it’s not really about you. All the customer cares about is what they are going to get, whether they can trust you to deliver it, and what they have to do to get it. Their decision is all about them. Your proposal should be too. It should be written from the customer's perspective instead of describing yours. Failing to define proposal quality before writing. “I’ll know it when I see it,” is the worst sin in proposal writing. If you want to actually achieve a quality proposal, you have to know what you are aiming for from the beginning. Our entire process is built around our definition of proposal quality. Performing reviews without quality criteria. Forget about having generic proposal reviews. Instead, think in terms of validating the fulfillment of specific criteria. If you don’t specify the criteria for your reviews, the results will be hit or miss. I have never heard of a quality methodology that is based on a hit or miss approach. If you do the things above, you may still be able to write a decent proposal, but you will not be able to write a great proposal. And that's no way to compete and win with any consistency. These things ruin your competitiveness and lower your win rate. Fixing them has a great ROI because a small increase in your win rate will easily pay for the effort it takes.

Anyone can win a single proposal. What’s hard is winning consistently. Winning proposals consistently is different from winning a single proposal. You have to make your goal winning every single one. Sure, we say that's our goal when the boss is around, but then distractions and budget happen and we don't behave like it's true. Winning a single proposal is a simple matter of figuring out or guessing what the customer wants, presenting it as their best alternative, knowing what needs to happen for the customer to move forward, and earning enough of their trust through credible proposal writing that they do as you suggest. Or it's a simple matter of low-balling the price. Either can work. See also: Winning What makes winning consistently so hard is that you start the proposal as you are, with what you have. And a lot of the time, it’s not what you should have. Getting good at winning consistently means always showing up with what you should have, including an information advantage, skilled staff, and a process that produces proposals based on what it will take to win. You can’t win consistently if proposals require playing catchup while trying to beat competitors who aren't. When you play catchup, part of your effort goes into getting to where you should have started, and only part of your effort goes into taking it further. Winning consistently requires consistent over-achieving and not consistent almost achieving or good-enough achieving. To behave like you really are trying to win every proposal you have to consistently do these four things, and do them well: You need to start the proposal with an information advantage. If you don’t deliver the information it takes to write a winning proposal at the start, your only hope is to win on price or being a little better than your competitors somehow, and that's not much of a strategy. If instead of starting with an information advantage, you try to figure out something clever during the proposal, you will not be able to consistently beat those who do show up with some information beyond what's in the solicitation. If you want to consistently win you must, as an institutional doctrine, start every proposal with an information advantage. Instead of fishing for wins, try setting up a process based on the flow of information that a proposal needs in order to reflect what it will take to win. If you can't do that, you're not really trying to win. Follow-through. It's not enough to want to win. You need to invest in winning. It needs the right effort, from the right people, fulfilling the right expectations. If your organization consistently starves its proposals of resources, fails to set the right expectations, or simply fails to deliver, then it cannot consistently win. It can, however, consistently lose. Is your win rate above or below 75%? That's a big clue about how much effort your organization really is putting into winning. What is the ROI of increasing your win rate? If you don't know, you're not even trying to win consistently. The path to consistently winning is not throwing bodies at proposals, increasing your bid volume, or having a proposal process. It is having an organizational culture that identifies what it will take to win, successfully delivers the right resources, and completes assignments on time as if winning matters. Define proposal quality and have a way to measure whether you have achieved it. If you commit this sin, you will not consistently win. You must define proposal quality in a measurable way in order to know whether you have achieved it. You can't consistently win without knowing what it will take and measuring yourself against it. When you define what it will take to win for your writers so that they know what they need to do to achieve it and can compare what they’ve written against what it needs to be, then you can consistently achieve a quality proposal that reflects what it will take to win. No amount of reviewing on the back end, after the writing has been completed, can make up for knowing what it will take to win. It's not something you're going to trip over. Fixing the proposal at the back end is another variation of the catchup strategy. Once you can define proposal quality, then you need to make sure your contributors have the right skills to deliver it. Proposal writing is a combination of planning and articulating everything from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. It is not something that comes naturally to most people. But when the same exact offering is presented from the customer’s perspective instead of being simply described, it shows more value and will consistently score higher. If you aren't coaching people to develop this skill, you're not trying to win. If you aren't coaching them successfully, you're not going to be able to win consistently. Winning consistently is more about process than talent. It's about doing the right things in a verifiable way instead of finding people who just somehow already know. This means that companies can institutionalize the practices that lead to consistently winning. They can make it part of their culture. When staff are pulled in multiple directions and you know that proposals aren’t getting 100% of the attention of the people working on them, you know: You will go into every proposal giving it less than 100% Every proposal will be below your full potential You will enter into every competition with one hand tied behind your back Hoping for good enough is not much of a win strategy To win consistently takes more than just talent. The most difficult aspect of winning proposals consistently is that it requires things that are outside of the control of people working on the proposal. It requires contributions from other people with other commitments. Winning consistently means doing everything in your power to make sure that they don’t let you down, and contingencies so that you can still win even when people do let you down. You need a process that: Shows them what information they need, where to get it, what to do with it, and how to transform it into a winning proposal Tells them how to prioritize their efforts Lets them know what the expectations are and gets everyone on the same page Tells them how to achieve their goals and not just what to do Enables them to measure progress and quality Catches them when they get off-track with enough time to do something about it Having all that doesn’t mean that people won’t let you down. You won’t win every bid. But you will win more consistently. If you are winning less than half of your bids, you probably have some inconsistencies getting in the way. When you do what is needed to win consistently, you get the best from everyone on your team, which is far more than the talent of any individual can achieve. When your competitors rely on talent, they will win on their good days. But mostly they will lose. That means there is an opportunity for you to be the one who mostly wins. But you won’t get there by treating each proposal in isolation. You have to develop an organization that consistently does the things needed to win. You have to think that through, institutionalize it, and build it into your culture. That means you have to stop playing catchup and build things right from the beginning. Winning consistently is hard because it takes discipline, focus, and long-term effort. It’s so much easier just to show up and rely on your talent.

How much should you invest in your pursuits? How much time should you put into them? When should you hire more staff? When should you outsource? If you are deciding on a case-by-case basis, you are probably missing the big picture. With the right kind of analysis, you can make sure that you are putting the right resources into business development and proposals, improve your win rates, and maximize your return on investment. About eight years ago we created a spreadsheet model for one of our customers and we have been refining it ever since. We use it to answer key questions. They started with “How many leads will it take to hit your revenue target?” Then we added lots of other targets to show things like recompetes vs. new business, prime vs. subcontracting, and individual markets. Our most recent addition has been to add pursuit budgeting based on anticipated award values and spread that over the phases of activity. This enables you to see how much to invest in lead identification vs qualification vs pursuit. Or how much to invest in your proposals, on average. You can even weight the numbers based on the value of the pursuits. See also: ROI First you start with a percentage based on award value that gives you confidence that across all your pursuits your return on investment (ROI) will be profitable. Then by intelligently allocating that to individual pursuits across phases, you can ensure your ROI remains positive. By correlating your investments with your win rate, you can improve your ROI over time. We use the spreadsheet model to do a lot of “what if” analysis. For example, you might see that if your win rate is 25%, it takes three times the change in the number of pursuits to match a change in win rate. Or said another way, you can exceed your revenue numbers without changing the number of leads by focusing on what impacts your win rate. You can also translate your budget into time. When we do this, we discover some really interesting things. For example, we can see how many hours, on average, you should spend on a lead in each phase of activity. And again we can correlate that with your win rate, to see whether more time means more wins or not (which in turn indicates your efficiency and the effectiveness of your approaches). When you do this kind of analysis, instead of trying to hold back every penny, you may realize that if you don’t commit the right level of effort, it’s not even worth bidding. You start to look at what you bid and how you allocate your resources very differently and you can quantify your bid/no bid decisions. Forget about “rules of thumb” and conventional wisdom. What we see is that every company is unique. Every company is an exception. Your unique combination of offering, markets, and internal culture impacts the numbers in ways that are often counter-intuitive. Sometimes the numbers confirm what everybody expects. But there are almost always surprises that create opportunities for significant improvements. None of this is rocket science. Calculus is not required. It’s almost all basic multiplication and division. But it helps to know how to set up a spreadsheet so you can look at the numbers from different perspectives and make doing “what if” analysis easier. When you add in the leads you are tracking, you can compare your actual results against your targets (and refine your targets over time). You can also see how your pursuit efforts and resource needs stack up over time. Are you going to need the most resources in the third quarter or the fourth quarter? And how many resources should you anticipate? This is the kind of hard data you need to make hiring decisions. The spreadsheet model can tell you when you should hire staff and when you should have outsourced resources available. And you can correlate those resources with your win rate and target fulfillment to make sure they are delivering the right ROI. This is one reason why our favorite customer engagements usually start with a pipeline assessment. It not only helps our customers make better decisions, but it helps us make better recommendations. And it helps take the opinions and guesswork out of it. We both develop a deep understanding of what needs to be done, the best way to go about achieving it, and how to allocate the required resources. And perhaps the best part is that since we have a mature starting point, it usually only requires a day or two’s worth of effort to do a customized pipeline assessment. We spread them over a few sessions and conduct them through online meetings with screen sharing software. That way we can make some recommendations, give you a chance to gather some data so we can customize the model, and then take a look at the results together. Strategic business development is very different from hunting and hoping, and it’s far more reliable. We do demos. If you’d like to see how this works in action, contact us through PropLIBRARY or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Tell me something about your company, your goals, and your targets and we can see what it looks like and what a full assessment might show us.

Developing customer relationships and growing customer intimacy is time consuming, and that makes it expensive. Many companies fall into the trap of believing they can’t afford to develop relationships with all their potential future customers. They trick themselves into thinking that if they can land a contract with a new customer, then they can develop a relationship with them. What they don’t realize is that by doing this they doom themselves to low win rates, low margins, and shallow customer relationships. How do you win a contract with a customer who doesn’t know your value? You win on price. How do you build a relationship with a customer while managing the project to keep the cost below the ridiculously low price you bid to “get your foot in the door?” How do you build customer awareness, gather intelligence, and position for future work using the lowest cost project staff you can find? By falling into the trap of thinking that customer relationship building starts with landing a contract, you doom yourself to a future of just getting by. If you put the relationship first, things play out differently. By putting time into getting to know the customer, listening to them instead of talking, but giving them tons of advice regarding options for solving their problems, you gain an information advantage that translates into a higher win rate. You also gain influence over the requirements and evaluation criteria. By proving your value before you get a contract, you give the customer a reason to evaluate you based on value instead of just price. You can win with a higher price. You enter the project with an existing relationship and the margins to grow that relationship. However, this requires that you be willing to cover the upfront cost of the time it will take and have the patience to recover that cost over a time measured in years. How can you afford to invest like that in all your potential customers? That’s where strategic planning comes in. You don’t invest in all the potential customers, just the ones who meet your strategic objectives. See also: Information Advantage This is a very different business model. It’s more like product development than hunting. You invest in strategic targets and recover your investment with sales over time. You won’t get there by trying to avoid investing and only hiring staff who are billable. You have to not only identify strategic targets, you also have to determine how much investment each target is worth. When you decide to approach new customers as an investment instead of prospects, you begin focusing on smart investing. You not only have to select the right targets, you have to invest the right amount with the right timing. But keep in mind, your investing time. And how you manage and use time can be more important than how much time you invest. By making the most of the time you invest in developing customer relationships and growing customer intimacy, you maximize your return on the investment. When you take this approach, your success at business development is based on the wisdom of your strategies and how effectively you invest time in relationship building. This is a much better path to success than bidding blind until you chance upon a win and then hoping that the customer likes your low-price performance enough to want to do more business with you in the future. For some companies, this seems like too much work and too much risk. However, by skipping it they take on more risk with worse odds, bidding more with a lower win rate and ending up with lower margins. But at least they don't have to think so hard about it. If you start by hunting for contracts you’re going about it backwards. You won’t increase your win rate by hiring a smooth talking hunter/salesperson or submitting more bids until something sticks. If instead of looking for the right contracts you look for the right strategies and follow them up with the right approaches for relationship marketing, everything you do will increase your odds of success.

A proposal describes your offering, but writing a proposal requires having an offering to describe. Instead of being problems with your proposal process, many of the problems that occur during proposal development are really problems with your offering design process. The two easily get tangled up. Showing up with a non-compliant or merely compliant offering isn't going to maximize your win probability. Trying to figure out your offering in writing and then fix it by re-writing is a recipe for proposal disaster. So here are some indicators that can tell you the true nature of your problems. Indicators that the problem may be with your approach to offering design: See also: Offering Design You don't have enough detail in your approaches. This indicates that you have not put enough thought into your offering before writing about it. You change your approaches after you've written them. This indicates that you have not collaborated or reached consensus on what the offering should be before writing about it. It is important to validate that you have the right offering before you commit to writing narrative about it. You can't decide what your approaches should be until you see them in writing. This indicates that you are thinking in writing instead of thinking and then writing. Writers are responsible for figuring out what the approaches should be. This indicates that either you have no offering design before writing starts, or you are designing by writing narratives. Each new contributor changes the approaches as they re-think it from the beginning. This indicates that you have no process for collaboration, integration, decision, or consensus about what the offering design should be before you start writing. The only input is the RFP. If you figure out what to offer based solely on the RFP, it won't demonstrate any customer insight beyond the RFP. It will also tend to result in a solution that is merely RFP compliant and not competitive. It may also indicate that those designing the offering aren't trying hard enough. Indicators that the problem may be with your proposal process: You can't decide on the outline. This indicates that you don’t have a process for developing, validating, and approving the outline, which results in writing against a moving target. The proposal is not optimized against the evaluation criteria or an assessment of what it will take to win. This indicates that your process for determining how to position the offering is flawed. Writers don't know what is expected of them. This indicates that you either have not defined the role, have no process for planning the content before writing it, and/or have no criteria defining proposal quality. Assignments are late. This indicates that your management processes or techniques need improvement. It could be that your initial estimates or your progress assessments were off. Or it could be that contributors failed in performance. But part of the process needs to anticipate that as a contingency. Proposal quality is not defined. This is a very common process failure. When proposal quality is not defined, individuals will definite it differently and the content will fluctuate as a result. Figuring out what to write and figuring out what to offer are done at the same time. These are best done separately because engineering by thinking in writing has a high failure rate. This is also an indicator that you are rushing into writing without thinking things through. Indicators of problems that could have multiple sources: Non-compliance. Non-compliance can indicate an offering that was developed without consideration for the RFP in an otherwise compliant proposal, or it can indicate a compliant offering that was presented in a non-compliant proposal. Reviews lead to changes in direction. Reviews can take proposals back to the beginning to change direction because the offering is wrong or because of bad presentation. The schedule keeps slipping. Things are taking longer than expected. Is that because they can’t figure out the offering, because the proposal process did not account for everything, because resources aren’t available, or a lack of accountability? The document has holes, or portions that are incomplete. Do those holes represent an offering that is still being figured out, or a failure in assignment and resource management? The proposal is not well written. Is that because the offering design came so late that there was not enough time for editing? Or is it because the content planning or instructions to writers were insufficient? Is it a training problem or a process problem? Your win rate is lower than it should be. Taking the time to think things through and produce high win rate achieving proposals is very profitable. A small change in your win rate often pays orders of magnitude more than the additional time it took to do it right cost. Trying to minimize proposal effort at the expense of win rate can happen because of bad financial advice, people being pulled in too many directions with poor guidance regarding priorities, a corporate culture that doesn't integrate growth into all aspects of the company, a lack of executive participation, or a process that focuses on the wrong things. Problems involving offering design are generally a result of not thinking things through before you start writing. The result is figuring out what to offer by writing and re-writing. If you built a bridge by writing and re-writing narratives against a deadline, either it would never get built or it would collapse. It helps to realize that the workflow for creating the proposal document and the workflow for figuring out the offering design are very different. Both involve planning before writing, but the nature of that planning is different. Designing your offering is an engineering process. It needs to define what the offering is and its components so they can be described in writing. The offering design should be more like a blueprint than a narrative. How you define your offering design process depends on the nature of what your company does. The combination of what your company does, how it does it, and its culture is unique. These differences make it extremely different for an outsider to tell you how you should design and define your offering. But if you have experienced any of the offering design problems described above, you need a process for designing your offering that runs in parallel with the proposal process, but is separate and is not based on writing narratives. You need to show up for proposal writing with an offering design that is already figured out and has been validated. It is easy to assume that the problems that snowball at the end of a proposal and produce the train wrecks (to intentionally mix metaphors) are proposal problems. But often they are not. Instead, they are often the result of not having a methodology to design your offering (even though you probably have methodologies for design after the project starts). The process of writing a proposal is not a substitute for the design process you need to define your offering. If you are designing your offering by writing about it, that's a clear indicator that something is wrong.

Most businesses obsess over lead generation. Unfortunately they fail to realize there is something else that delivers 3-5 times the ROI. That’s right. They could be growing their business faster with fewer leads. It’s mathematical. And we have the proof. While we were doing a pipeline assessment for one of our consulting customers we discovered a remarkably simple mathematical relationship. But to understand it, you have to understand a little bit about the math that drives the business pipeline. You don’t bid all the leads you find. You only bid a percentage of them. If you’re smart, you’ll qualify your leads through several steps, with fewer leads making it past each one. The final step before you start working on the proposal is usually a bid/no bid decision that comes once the RFP is released. One of the things we do in assessing the health of a company’s pipeline is to determine how many bids they throw out at each qualification step. If they aren’t throwing any out, they aren’t being selective. When a proposal is complete and submitted, it doesn't always win. The percentage that wins becomes the revenue that drives your business. If you want a certain amount of revenue, you can backtrack the percentages and calculate how many leads you need to identify to hit your revenue number, even after you throw some out along the way. The key variable in this is your proposal win rate. If your win rate is high, then you need fewer leads to hit your revenue goal. If your win rate is low, you need more leads. Consider this scenario: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline You start off with $10M in leads and you drop some of them along the way and only end up submitting $7M in proposals Your win rate is 30% It took $10M in leads to score $2.1M in revenue If you change the win rate to 31%, you only need $9.67M in leads instead of $10M. Not impressed yet? What if I told you that for that 1% change in win rate, you needed 3% fewer leads? What if I told you that if you increase your win rate by 10% you’ll be able to hit your numbers with 30% fewer leads? Still not impressed? What if I said that increasing your win rate 10% would have the same impact on your revenue as finding 30% more leads? I call this “fun with math!” But if only it were that simple. If your proposal volume is low, you won’t be able to discern a 1% difference in your win rate. If you do five proposals a year, your win rate will only change in 20% increments! If you do 24 proposals, it will only change in 4.2% increments. However, the multiplier effect of win rate on ROI will remain true over time. If you only submit five proposals next year, going from winning one to winning two doubles your win rate (and potentially your revenue). If you focus on lead generation instead, you would have to double the number of leads to achieve the same thing. You would need an additional five leads instead of one more win. If you plan to submit 20 proposals next year, going from a 20% to a 30% win rate increases your wins by 50%, from 4 to 6. Achieving that through lead generation requires that you go from 29 leads to 42 leads you have to find. If you focus on win rate, you need two more wins from the leads you already have. If you focus on leads you need 13 more leads to achieve the same increase. A spreadsheet model PropLIBRARY Subscribers can download free of charge The custom models we create for our consulting customers can get quite involved, because they reflect the specifics of a particular business. We’re in the process of creating a generic model that you can use so you can see how it works and play your own “what if” scenarios. It will be free for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. If you are not a subscriber, you should join now so you can download it when we post it. Setting Priorities Leads are good. If you have zero leads, it doesn’t matter how high your win rate is. But the human nature mistake is to assume that each new lead is a new win and that adding more leads adds directly to your revenue. The truth is that each new lead adds a percentage chance at new wins and averages out. But increasing your win rate adds a much, much larger percentage, which means much, much more revenue. Leads are good and I wouldn’t give up on lead generation. When you’ve maximized your win rate, leads become the key to growth. But if you are like the vast majority of companies and haven’t come close to maximizing your win rate, leads may not be the highest priority for achieving growth. Plus, if you focus on your win rate it will tell you a lot about what kind of leads you want, and what kind of leads aren’t worth bothering with. Better quality leads produce an even higher win rate. What else can you tell from pipeline analysis? When we do a pipeline assessment for one of our consulting customers, we look at your targets and what it will take to achieve them. We create a mathematical model of your pipeline in a spreadsheet. We look at how many leads you need, how many proposals you’ll have to submit, and how many resources you’ll need to handle the volume. We look at how much time you should be investing in each phase of lead qualification and how that correlates with your win rate. And we look at what size proposal is too small to bother with, based on what it costs to produce a proposal. We also look at critical numbers like your win rate and what can be done to change them, so that everything you do is based on achieving the highest ROI possible. But instead of just discovering interesting facts about your business, we turn the pipeline into an ROI progress tracking tool. As leads come in and go through the qualification phases, you use the model to track whether you are on target to meet your goals. You can also see the impact of being above or below your targets, and what that means to your bottom line. We create a feedback loop so that any assumptions we make in the model are continuously refined by reality. It’s so much easier to look at your business development and proposal functions as an investment and not a cost when you can see that you’re hitting your numbers, and that the return will be far greater than the cost. Breaking out of the habit of chasing every lead you can find and submitting proposals just because you can is easier when you can see that mathematically there are better ways. It also helps with that human nature defect that wants instant gratification, when you can see that whether you pursue, no bid, win, or lose a particular lead, it’s all part of hitting your numbers and you can see that you are on the path to success. And if, just by chance, you stray from the path to success, it’s extremely helpful to be able to see exactly where it happened. At the end of the day it’s all about decisions and whether you make them informed or not. If you are a PropLIBRARY Subscriber feel free to contact us with questions about the model and how a little “fun with math!” can give you insight and confidence in the future of your business. If you’d like a private session to learn more about pipeline modelling and assessment, contact me through PropLIBRARY.

All the cool cats know that the best proposals tell a story. But no one can really explain how to do that, let alone actually consistently achieve it when working with a group of proposal contributors who aren't specialists. Usually they just emphasize that your proposal should have a message. But what message and how do you construct it and put it in writing? So the next thing they try is proposal themes. But while everyone says they know what themes are, everyone defines them differently. And being able to define them doesn't tell you how to construct them. Sometimes proposal managers put a placeholder for a theme statement at the top of each section because they doubt their proposal contributors will write thematically, but hope they can get at least one good positioning sentence out of them. People working on the proposal just want to know what to write, what words to put on paper. Most of the time they give up and just try to make positive sounding points. They don’t realize that approach is not competitive and just assume that if they stack up enough positives, they have a shot at winning. Unfortunately, the customer needs more than just positive sounding points to make their decision. Fortunately there is something that’s easier to understand than stories, messages, or even themes. One of the key questions a customer has when evaluating a proposal is, “What makes this proposal different from all the others?” They want to know, “What makes it best?” You don’t get there by stacking up positives when your competitors are stacking up the same positives. You win by: See also: Makin proposals simple Being different Explaining why those differences matter Showing the customer what they will get out of them If you skip all that storytelling and messaging stuff and just focus on having differentiators in every section, every paragraph, and even every sentence, the strengths in your proposal will be clear. Why the customer should select you will be clear. But the best part is that without doing anything special, your story and messages can emerge on their own. It happens because your proposal story should be about what makes you special, why that matters, and how the customer will benefit from it. When you focus on what differentiates your offering, even without thinking about your story, you complete the elements necessary to have one. It takes a lot of training to get your technical proposal contributors to be able to understand proposal storytelling and know what words to put on paper to make it happen. It takes little or no training to get them to understand differentiators. There is one big challenge when trying to implement extensive differentiation. Actually, it just seems like a big challenge. Really all that is needed is a little creativity. Sometimes it seems hard to find ways in which your offering is different. Sometimes that’s because the RFP says exactly what the customer wants you to do, so you assume that every proposal will contain the same approaches. Sometimes it’s because there are standard ways of doing things in your industry. Sometimes it’s because you are afraid of anything that might increase the cost of your offering. However, you can always find differentiators, if you know where to look. It may be that instead of differentiating what you offer, you need to differentiate how you design, create, or deliver it. Even when everything else is exactly the same, you can differentiate by focusing on what you think matters, or on how what you offer better aligns with the customer’s goals. If you explain what the customer will get out of your offering, and your competitors don’t, that alone can be enough of a differentiator to increase the perceived value in what you offer. When proposal contributors learn that if they can’t differentiate on the specs, they can instead differentiate on what matters about them and what the customer will get out of your approach to fulfilling them, they start writing proposal text that positions your company as offering something better. That is how the message can emerge, without anyone even focusing on it. If you really want to drive your message home, start discussing your differentiators before you start writing. Bring consistency and harmony to your differentiators across the proposal, by standardizing them so that everyone talks about the same or similar differences, why they matter, and what the customer will get out of them. If you are able to train your technical proposal contributors to become gifted storytellers, that’s great. But if you are like most people, and struggle to get what you need out of those contributing to the proposal, instead of confusing them with all that talk about storytelling, messages, positioning, and themes, try just focusing on differentiators.