Carl Dickson

See also: Successful process Implementation I tend to focus on winning proposals instead of efficiency. One more win can produce enough revenue to cover the inefficiency of many proposals. If you want more revenue, you are better off focusing on winning than reducing proposal effort. Unfortunately, many organizations treat proposals as a cost instead of as an investment (let alone the core competency of the organization). Proposal costs are covered out of the overhead portion of the budget, and that’s always under pressure for reduction. But the best ways to reduce effort on proposals have very little to do with proposal production. Here are eight ways companies waste a ton of money on proposals: Not being selective in what they bid. Fooling yourself into thinking a bid is an “opportunity” just because you have an RFP and think you can do the work does not mean that you are prepared to win it. Fooling yourself into thinking you can win it, even though you’re not prepared, only makes it worse. Each low probability bid that loses adds the entire cost of the proposal to the efficiency equation. Just one can do more damage than buying magic proposal software can fix. Not being ready to win at RFP release. If you are not ready to win at RFP release, it means you’ll be trying to figure out what it will take to win while writing. This means you’ll have to do re-writes every time you figure out something new. It means you won't be able to write to prove the points you want to make because you'll be figuring out those points as you go. Those points will be less numerous, weaker, and torn up during review without time to fix it. Your win rate will suffer accordingly. To save the cost of losing proposals, try investing a much lower amount in pre-RFP preparation. Changing the outline. Nothing is as disruptive to proposal writing as changing the outline can be. It can burn a huge number of hours. Far more than setting aside a little bit of time to review and approve the outline. Reviewing the outline should be given the same priority as reviewing the content. Never leave it to one person to determine the outline. Discovering their bid strategies by writing about them. If your proposal is going to accomplish your bid strategies, they need to be known before the writing starts. You can’t sprinkle some "themes" on at the end and expect them to win it for you. When you change your bid strategies after proposal writing has started, you’ve changed the thesis or the point you’re trying to make. This can cause a complete do-over because everything in your proposal should be trying to make that point. Change the point and you should have edits everywhere. If you don’t, it literally means your proposal was pointless. An investment in content planning prevents this and saves far more than it costs. Proposal content planning can actually be seen as a profit center, since it will increase your win rate and bring you revenue you would have lost in return for the investment. Not being able to decide their approaches. When people don’t know what to write, it often has more to do with not being able to decide what to offer than it does with the writing. What are you going to offer? How are you going to do it? Why are you going to do it that way? When you can answer those questions, writing it down becomes straightforward. When you can’t answer those questions, you waste time getting started and then every reconsideration spawns a re-write that wastes even more time. Don't waste effort writing in circles if you want to lower your proposal costs. Not being able to answer the writer’s questions. Would the customer prefer this or that? How should we position our offering? What matters to the customer? When the writers don’t have answers to questions like these, they either Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business Click here to start a conversation by email Or click below to get on my calendar to talk by phone stop and wait, write something lame with the intention of re-writing it later, or simply pull their punches and not bother making the point. This leads to waste when they don’t have the answers before they start writing. Not defining proposal quality until the review. Proposal writers should start with the same criteria the reviewers will follow. If the reviewers make up their criteria at the time of the review, you are guaranteed to introduce unnecessary and costly re-writes. Not reviewing the proposal until all the narrative is in place. Waiting until all the text is in draft form before you start reviewing means the review takes place later than needed and the changes will spawn more extensive re-writes with less time to accomplish them. It’s wasteful. By the time you get to a draft, you should have already reviewed your outline, bid strategies, approaches, positioning, and many other things, leaving only wordsmithing and presentation to be reviewed. Add up all the delays and re-writes and it’s not unusual for companies to waste more than half their proposal effort. How much effort should a company go through to prevent some of that waste? It’s an 80/20 problem. For 20% of the effort, you can reduce 80% of the waste. Why don’t more companies invest in that 20%? Looking back on what I just wrote I find it very interesting that by reducing the waste, you’ll also win more proposals. The things you do to eliminate the waste are some of the same things you should do to increase your win rate. Reducing cost at the same time you increase revenue is a fantastic way to increase your ROI. If you do the math and compare the costs to the benefits of reducing a percentage of that waste while increasing your win rate by a percentage, it’s not hard to see benefits that are orders of magnitude greater than the costs. But what I like best is that instead of having to psych yourself up to invest effort to achieve your gains, by eliminating waste you’ll actually be putting less effort into achieving your gains. Or you could just wastefully muddle through like you are now.

The proposal becomes part of the conversation when it responds to something the customer said, usually in the form of an RFP, and then gives them an opportunity to continue the conversation, usually by accepting your proposal. But there is more to it than that. When making the proposal part of a conversation is part of your strategy, you have to be the company that the customer would most like to continue the conversation with. That means you have to put things on the table to discuss in a way that engages the customer and makes them want to participate and hear more. The conversation that the proposal is usually a part of, is a conversation about what you and the customer can accomplish together and how to make it happen. The customer will want to continue that conversation if it involves great things that are feasible from someone who is credible. Making a proposal part of a conversation is a bid strategy. It is a conscious choice to engage with the customer in a certain way because you think it will make them more likely to accept your proposal. It is a strategy that does not apply to every proposal. It is best suited for: See also: Customer perspective Proposals to provide solutions, things that must be developed, or complex services An RFP that provides goals instead of specifications or one that asks you to tell them what the best approach is When you have questions that the RFP and/or customer can’t answer When both you and the customer will have to puzzle through questions as part of doing the work proposed In other words, when there are a lot of unknowns and the two of you really need to talk instead of exchange documents, turning the documents into a conversation is a way of demonstrating that you are a good pick for the customer to talk through the issues with. To make the proposal part of a conversation you pick up from the last customer communication, possibly the RFP, and provide a framework for continuing the conversation. The project becomes part of the conversation, just like the proposal. But the conversation must involve discussion in both directions. You must both take turns speaking for it to be a conversation. You have to provide opportunities for the customer to have a voice. Everything that goes into making a verbal conversation successful also applies to a written one. The key difference is that it is less interactive. It is similar to a discussion that takes place in email, but even less interactive. But just like there are things you can say in writing that encourage conversation, there are things you can say that discourage conversation. Personality counts as much in a written conversation as it does in a verbal one. When you successfully position your proposal as part of an ongoing conversation, then from the customer’s perspective, they see that you’ve listened to them and responded with something interesting. You’ve shown that something special can be achieved if the two of you work together. You haven’t nailed down all the details, but you’ve shown how the two of you can work them out. You’ve backed up what you’ve said to make it credible. When they look at the other proposals, they see plans and details, but they have no idea what the other vendors will be like to work with. And since the nature of the project involves some uncertainty, that’s a big deal. Who will the customer pick to work through the uncertainty with? You might assume it’s the incumbent, but if the incumbent hasn’t been completely responsive, there’s an opening for someone who is demonstrating their responsiveness, as opposed to simply claiming it. If the incumbent submits a proposal that is not engaging, and you submit one that is engaging, credible, and feasible, you can steal it away from them.

We usually think of a proposal as a tool to close the sale. Does that mean it’s an ending to the conversation you’ve been having with the customer? Or is the start of another conversation? What if you go into the proposal and you haven’t had any conversation with the customer? Can you have a conversation on paper? How does that work? We discover the customer’s needs, we brainstorm solutions that match our capabilities, and we offer them to the customer for consideration. We really want to ask questions that drill down to a deeper understanding of those needs. After we do some brainstorming of our own, we’d like to do some more with the customer. When we offer them things for consideration, we’d really like to hear their feedback. That sounds a lot like a conversation. But too often, we start with an announcement or statement of requirements that we get either by email or on a website. We respond to that in writing. Sometimes, without any discussion beyond some minor negotiation, we find out that we won or lost in writing. Contracts are signed and people start working. Then we actually start having real conversations with the customer. When your conversation is mostly on paper, you can see why having verbal conversation prior to the announcement is so critical. It’s your only chance. And you can see how those who have actually spoken to the customer have a very real competitive advantage. One way to mitigate this is to better understand what a conversation really is, and build your business development practice around it. Conversation is more than just telling. It is more than just describing. Having a conversation with someone who just talks about his or her self is boring. Conversation is interactive. If you are stuck in a procurement process that is turn-based (on my turn I release an RFP, on your turn you submit a proposal), you can still demonstrate your conversational skills. Part of having good conversational skills is recognizing the needs of the other person. It’s adapting what you say and how you say it to what you know about them. See also: Relationship marketing When your conversation is on paper, you need to do the same thing. Part of having good conversational skills is asking questions and listening to what the other person has to say. When your conversation is a proposal, you can offer approaches that will give the customer an opportunity to speak and demonstrate your skills at listening. When the proposal is part of the conversation, it shows that you listened to what they said (even if it’s in writing), provides things for them to consider, invites them to share their thoughts, and then seeks an opportunity to resolve those considerations in person. This is a different style of writing than most people are used to. You may not actually propose doing anything differently, but you must communicate it with a different attitude, desire, and intent to escape the trap of describing yourself and invite the customer to participate in a conversation. Instead of fronting like you’re omniscient and hiding what you don’t know, in a conversation you feature it. Share what you would like to learn more about the customer in the proposal. Don’t patronize them by telling them who they are or what they need. Tell them about what you see and what the possibilities are. Tell them what their options and choices will be if they accept your proposal. Show them that you have an approach for getting to know them and adapting your offering to their preferences. Focus on how you will be able to deliver better results because your approach involves listening to them. If you are bidding against someone who has already had a conversation in person with the customer and earned their trust, the odds are stacked against you and you may not even want to bid. But if the customer found them unresponsive, there’s an opportunity to demonstrate your responsiveness in your proposal. When a customer considers a vendor unresponsive, that means they weren’t available for conversation or didn’t take action in time. Instead of telling the customer your approach and describing your qualifications, try setting up a conversation. If you are the customer and your choice is between: A vendor who says the same-old things, restates the customer’s requirements and says they understand, makes many promises, brags, flatters, and sings their own praises with unsubstantiated claims; or Another vendor who shows they have listened to the things you’ve said, demonstrates that they actually listened with insightful comments and options for you to consider, is up front about what they don't know but has an approach to finding it out, and then invites you to a real conversation so that the things they do will reflect your preferences Who are you tempted to pick? The best thing about the conversational approach is that it doesn’t involve doing anything differently than how you otherwise should be doing them. You need to discover the customer’s needs and preferences. You need their approval for what you intend to do. You want their feedback along the way. Instead of hiding behind meetings, reports, requirements analyses, surveys, and other process instruments of customer interaction, approach it all like one big conversation. Keep all the process instruments, just recognize that a conversation is bi-directional and interactive. Each meeting and each deliverable is just one part of a larger, ongoing conversation. When you remove the conversation, you are just pushing paper. When you make it all part of an ongoing conversation, then you have a relationship. If you go into the bid without an existing customer relationship, you have a critical weakness against someone who does. Your only shot at overcoming that weaknesses is to become a better conversationalist than your competitors. Even if you have to start the conversation in writing.

Customers ask for descriptions, even though that is not what they really want. They are not being sneaky, they just don’t know what to put in their RFPs, so they ask you to describe things they think are relevant to what they are trying to do. If you understand the decision they have to make, then you can address what they really need to know when you respond to what they asked for. When they say: See also: Customer Perspective Describe your company. They mean, “What can you do for me?” They also mean, “Can I trust that your company is able to do what I need?” Describe your qualifications. They mean, “Can I trust that you know what you’re doing and will you be able to deliver on your promises?” What is your transition plan? They mean, “Will you be ready on time and will you meet our deadlines?” They also mean, “Can I trust that there won’t be any disruption and that I won’t be worse off by selecting you?” What is your approach? They mean, “What am I going to get if I select you?” They also want to know if they can trust that you know what you are doing. They also mean, “Why should I pick you? What will I get that’s better than if I pick someone else?” What is your experience? They are thinking, “Maybe if you’ve done it before I can feel confident that you’ll be able to do it again.” But what they really mean is, “Can I trust you to deliver on your promises?” They do not want your experience. They want to know what they will get out of it. Describe your understanding. They are wondering, “Do you know what I mean, as opposed to what I’ve said?” They are concerned about whether you know what they need better than they were able to explain it. They want to know if your interpretation of their requirements reflects what they really want. They want to know if they can trust you to do things the way they would like them done. They also want to be sure that you know what matters to them and have good judgment. Describe your management approach. They want to know if they can trust you to actually deliver the results you’ve promised. They want to know if your experts will stay focused on delivering the right results. They want to know if they’ll have all the support, resources, and processes needed for them to receive the results you’ve promised. Describe your staff approach. Regardless of what you’ve promised, they want to know that the people who will be doing the actual work can be trusted to deliver the results they need. Describe your quality approach. They want to know what you’ll do to prevent mistakes and whether they can trust you to catch them when they occur. Describe your approach to risk mitigation. They know that things go wrong. They want to be able to trust you to deliver anyway. They are not looking for empty promises about some abstract concept of risk or lame examples. They want to know what they can trust you to prevent and what you will do to fix things when they go bad. Provide proof of insurance and a performance bond. They’ve had bad experiences with vendors they thought they could trust. They need more than just empty promises to be convinced. Did you notice that every example of what the customer really means has the word “trust” in it?. Every one. Maybe you should stop loading your proposal up with sales slogans and unsubstantiated claims. Maybe instead you should focus on being trustworthy, and the things you do that impact it. And just maybe, instead of describing yourself you should give them what they really want.

I know it’s fun to complain about the boss, but if you want to get things done, you need to think like the boss. There are reasons why you are encountering friction. It’s not as simple as they are micro-managers or ignoring you. You can use this list to anticipate their concerns and improve the chances that they’ll listen to your concerns. Why your executives won’t list to you: See also: ROI You’re not thinking in terms of Return on Investment (ROI). Executives spend money and allocate resources in order to achieve certain goals. In business and proposal development those goals are usually related to revenue and profit. Companies will spend more to make more. They usually won’t spend more to make people happy. Appealing to ROI only works when it’s quantified. If you say “we should invest effort in following the process because it will boost our win rate and the company will make more revenue,” then what you are saying will be true but unconvincing. But if you show mathematically the difference between raising win rates by 10% vs. increasing the volume of bids by 10%, it’s a lot more compelling. You are not the only stakeholder. You’ve got your needs. So does the subject matter expert who doesn’t want to help with the proposal. So does the CEO. So does everybody who touches or is impacted by the proposal. For executives it can be like having a bunch of noisy kids in the back seat of the car, and they often react accordingly. Budget and incentives distort the picture. Nearly all executives are on some kind of incentive plan. So are many business development and even proposal staff. While having people on incentive plans benefits the company, all incentive plans distort behavior and have negative consequences. It is entirely possible that what you are asking makes complete sense but goes against their personal incentives. If they are aware of it and it really makes sense, they may do what you want anyway. But they may not even be aware of it and are just acting on what they feel are the company’s priorities. They have goals you are not aware of. Your company may be pursuing financing or an acquisition (maybe of itself). There may be legal issues. Or results of an audit. Or informal agreements between teaming partners. Or other reasons that the company doesn’t want to discuss that impact its decisions for better or worse. You’re bringing them problems instead of solutions. If you bring your executive a problem, they have to invest in finding a solution and will probably incur a delay. If they have other fires to fight, yours may not be the highest priority, from their perspective. They’ll get to it when they can. If you bring them a solution, they just have to make a decision (which is painful enough). Bringing them a solution means bringing them the whole cost/benefit analysis and implementation plan so that if they approve it, they can turn their attention elsewhere. You are limiting their freedom to act. When you tell them when they must participate and how, you box them in. If they are in fire-fighting mode, they may just ignore your guidance or attempt at restrictions since from their perspective, they need to juggle competing demands for their attention and act when they have time to do so. You haven’t set expectations. If an executive doesn’t know what to expect in terms of process or results, they may perceive a need to intervene. Or have their attention focused elsewhere when there is a need for their intervention. You’re adding uncertainty instead of clarity. When you speak of issues or risks, you add uncertainty to their considerations. This is true even if you are just the messenger and not the cause of the issues. You are something else that requires attention. If instead you bring clarity to the issues, you focus that attention. Sunk costs. It’s hard to walk away from what you’ve already spent or invested in a pursuit. To avoid seeing it as a loss, it has to be framed as an investment. Fixed costs. Whenever you have fixed costs, you want to maximize their productivity. A salary is a fixed cost. Dumping more pursuits onto someone on salary seems like maximizing productivity. Arguments about opportunity costs, or the fact that if you put effort into a low probability pursuit, it takes effort away from higher probability pursuits are unpersuasive. If, at that particular moment, there are no other higher probability pursuits, they are completely unpersuasive since there appears to be no added cost to pursuing, but there is a slight chance of a payoff. If you think like an executive yourself, you’ll do a better job of providing the right information to achieve the outcome you desire. It’s really the same thing as writing a proposal from the customer’s perspective. You’re just applying it to selling within your company instead of to a customer. The MustWin Process in PropLIBRARY is designed around managing expectations and coordinating the efforts of all the stakeholders, including your executives. It directly addresses most of these considerations, and will help strengthen your position for the rest.

The easy answer is all those regulations. Another good one is whether full compliance is mandatory or not. But the real answer is something different. It’s something that people struggle with. You can look up the regulations. You can learn to comply like a robot. But the most important difference will determine whether your proposal is a success or a failure. How do you get your proposal started? In both government and commercial proposals, the proposal should really start before the RFP is released. But let’s put that aside for a moment, along with other steps like kickoff meetings, etc. Also, I’m going to lump all proposals written against RFPs that are formally evaluated by the customer into the same category as government proposals. Most people start their proposals with an outline. But how do you prepare your outline? In a commercial RFP, you pretty much make it up. Most commercial proposals are evaluated with a great deal of subjectivity and are not formally point scored based on written instructions and evaluation criteria. In fact, most commercial RFPs are more of a wish list, starting point, or framework than a set of specifications that must be followed exactly. When this is the case, and it varies all over the place, the goal is to give the customer the information they need to see you as their best alternative. This information may be in addition to or instead of whatever was in the RFP. What makes government proposals so different and challenging isn’t just that you have to give them exactly what they asked for in the RFP. What makes them so different is that your outline must match what is in the RFP exactly. This must be true even if the RFP is ambiguous, contradictory, out of sequence, outdated, or flawed in some other way. Resolving those issues to come up with the right outline is difficult and stressful. Government proposal specialists use a compliance matrix to match the requirements from different sections of the RFP. When an RFP is well written, everything matches and the sequence is in synch. When the RFP is not well written, things don’t match and you have more than one sequence that you have to somehow resolve and make compatible. I’m coaching a company that is dealing with this right now. I feel bad because she has a really convoluted RFP that she’s trying to make sense of. Instead of being a nice, neat case where you just follow the rules and use the outline provided, it requires judgment calls. Things could go in more than one place and we struggle to determine where the customer expects to find them. What they say they want to be in the proposal, how they say you should organize things, and what they are going to evaluate do not match up. But regardless of whether there is a place specified for everything or if there is more than one place, every requirement must be addressed somewhere. And it has to be where the customer expects to find it. That is what a compliance matrix is designed to resolve. But when the RFP is poorly written, it requires more judgment calls than it should. I’m helping her put things where we think the evaluators expect to find them. In some cases we have to guess. I hate it when customers do this to themselves. The evaluators are going to have a hard time because every vendor will make different judgment calls and each proposal will be organized differently. In a commercial proposal that is not going to be formally evaluated, you might organize things in a logical fashion because the customer is subjectively looking for the best proposal, and not usually trying to point score against the RFP. In the commercial world, you can propose whatever you want and the customer might just go for it if they think it makes sense. But in government proposals, you must propose exactly what they ask for and prepare your proposal exactly the way they asked for it. These different approaches to preparing the outline have major implications. If you try to respond to a government proposal like you would a commercial proposal, your proposal may get thrown out without even being evaluated. And if it does get evaluated it will be at a disadvantage because it will be hard to score if it didn’t follow the RFP exactly or if you didn’t understand how the evaluation process impacts the outline. Learning to prepare an outline for a government proposal is one of the most difficult parts of responding to a government RFP, and if you don’t get it right you won’t win regardless of what’s in your proposal. Getting the outline right is the first step in realizing that your proposal is not about you. It’s not about whether you think it’s well organized or how you would like to present your offering. Getting the outline right for a government proposal is all about putting information where the evaluator expects to find it so they can find the right words to complete their evaluation forms. Your proposal is about them. Commercial companies that want to do business with the government may get past the registration requirements, survive the lengthy sales/RFP process, find a way to meet the past performance requirements, and then blow it just because they didn’t understand how much needs to go into thinking through the outline for a government proposal. So it may not be the first thing you think of when you imagine the difference between writing government and commercial proposals, but the getting the outline right is definitely one of the most important.

Why do so many businesses set themselves up to fail? Just because you are capable of doing the work a customer needs does not mean that you matter. If you don't matter, the only way you can be competitive is on price. The closer you get to a commodity, the more important price is. With a commodity, every vendor is providing the same thing and which vendor you get it from does not matter. The closer you get to a complex solution or services, the more price gives way to credibility and value. If your customers do not care about you as a vendor or do not care about value, then you can: See also: Great Proposals Compete on price alone. Doing this successfully is mostly a game of keeping your overhead low. That makes it really hard to invest in growth. Seek other customers. Is a customer that doesn’t care about you and isn’t going to care about you worth having? For how long? Is a customer that won’t talk to you before RFP release worth having? Every customer relationship is an investment. Invest wisely. Educate the customer regarding how they are impacted by other considerations. If the customer connects with your value proposition, then you matter to them. If the customer is open to a conversation about what impacts them and how you can make a difference, you matter to them. If the customer is not interested in learning how to get better service, see Number 2. If your customers do not care about you as a vendor I would also take that as a sign that you've failed to matter to them. I would want to fix that. To matter to the customer, all you have to offer is: Something that will positively impact them that’s also the best alternative available to them The right value proposition so they can afford it Credibility and trustworthiness so they’ll believe they’ll actually get it from you If it's a customer you already have, the list remains the same, it just gets evaluated with more of a focus on your performance than what you say in the proposal. If you have no credibility, you don’t matter. The smaller the impact the less you matter. The more alternatives they have, the less you matter. If they can’t afford you, you don’t matter. If you don’t matter to your customers and you want to reverse that, you need to offer a substantive positive impact, be the best alternative, be affordable, and for the customer to believe in you. The best way to achieve all of that is not to focus on yourself. Focus on your customer. Ask yourself, from their perspective: What would positively impact them? What alternatives do they have? What can they afford? What represents the best value? What would prove a vendor’s credibility and trustworthiness? Then help the customer discover the answers. Not by telling them about yourself, but by helping them get what they need. It’s not about you. It’s about what matters to them. You can do this in person. And you can do this on paper. It’s just a lot harder to do it on paper, if you haven’t achieved it in person. But it has to be achieved on paper to close the sale with a winning proposal. If you don’t matter, then you can still win. If you don’t matter, then you’re just a price. Price always matters. It’s just not always the most important thing. Now you know what to do about that. And oh, by the way, the entire MustWin Proposal Process is about the steps required to discover what matters to the customer and get it into the proposal so you can go from writing ordinary proposals to writing proposals that are great.

Ordinary proposal writing is about the steps in the nearly mechanical process of responding to an RFP. Ordinary proposal writing is about trying to win more points in evaluation and have the lowest price while competing against others who are doing the same thing. Ordinary proposal writing comes down to competing on price while telling yourself that you’re competing on points. Ordinary proposal writing results in companies whose strategies are based on what they happened to win in the past. You can make a safe living by being just enough better than your competitors to keep the machine going. You will never be great, but you can pay the bills that way. Until your lack of competitiveness catches up with you. Let’s put aside the steps in the proposal process, gaming the RFP for points, and competing on price for a moment. Let’s talk about the three things you can’t do without if you want to write great proposals. These three ingredients are simple to describe and hard to achieve. That’s why most proposals are ordinary. They are: See also: Great Proposals You must anticipate the questions you will need to answer when writing a great proposal. When the proposal starts, more time will be wasted on not being able to answer important questions than on anything else. Proposal writing means making choices about what to offer and how to position it. Choices like “Should we bid this or that?” and “Should we position it this way or that way?” depend on knowing what the customer prefers and what matters to them. You must be able to answer those questions. If you get to the proposal and don’t know what the customer prefers, you’ll get stuck and won’t know what to do. In almost every case, if you get to this stage it will be too late to get the answers you need and you’ll end up writing a watered down proposal that dances around the issues. It will be less competitive than a proposal written by people who have the answers. You must anticipate the questions you will have in order to show up at the start of the proposal already having the answers. If you understand the customer’s preferences, you’ll be able to write a proposal that not only offers something compliant, but offers something that matters more than what your competitors offer. You might even be proposing the exact same widget, but your offering will matter more to the customer. That’s the difference between ordinary and great when it comes to proposals. You must be able to present your proposal from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. If you simply describe your company and your offering, your proposal will be ordinary. A great proposal is about the customer and not you and your offering. Never describe. When you describe you are writing about yourself. The customer does not care about you. They care about what they will get and how they will benefit from accepting your proposal. They do not want your qualifications. Your qualifications and the details of your offering only serve to make your ability to deliver what they do care about more credible. Make your proposal about the customer, what they are going to get, and why it matters --- even the parts where they ask you to describe yourself! You still need a process so that you do the right things in the right order. You still need to address things like proposal quality. You still need to be compliant with all RFP requirements and to optimize your response against the evaluation criteria. But all of that will just make you ordinary. Even if you are the best at being ordinary, your proposals can’t compete against a company whose proposals are also great. If you find your company gets stuck during proposal writing, or it finds itself backing up and re-doing things, the real underlying failure is that you either didn’t ask the right questions or you didn’t get the answers and continued to try to write a proposal anyway. When we created the MustWin Process that’s available on PropLIBRARY, we started by identifying what questions you need to know the answers to in order to create a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. Then we set things up to guide participants through discovering the information needed, assessing it, and turning it into a winning proposal. If you want to create your own list of questions, just pay attention during your proposals. When you see people getting stuck trying to make choices, determine strategies, or write their sections, create a question that would deliver the information they wish they had and add it to your list. It will take time to create a list that way, but you can accelerate things by anticipating what those questions will be. When you get to the point where you can start a proposal already having the answers, people won't get stuck and will be able to complete their assignments more quickly. Plus, they'll do a much better job. They’ll have what they need to know to write a great proposal.

Almost every proposal we review has the same problems, whether it was written by a billion dollar company or by a single person company. They are ordinary. They all sound the same. Some are more detailed than others. Some show promise and pique my interest. But I almost never get surprised and see one that’s great from cover to cover. What that really means is that you have an opportunity to consistently beat your competitors. All you have to do is make the leap from writing an ordinary proposal to writing a great proposal. Here are 20 examples of the differences between them to help you get started: See also: Great proposals An ordinary proposal introduces things by saying how pleased you are. A great proposal introduces things by describing how much better things will be for the customer because of the results you are going to deliver. An ordinary proposal says you’ll fulfill the customer’s requirements. A great proposal talks about the results you will deliver as a result of your meeting the requirements. An ordinary proposal is about your commitment, recognition, desire, intent, etc. A great proposal drops the promise words and just delivers the results. An ordinary proposal describes who you are. A great proposal explains why you matter. An ordinary proposal describes your qualifications. A great proposal tells the customer what they will get as a result of your qualifications. An ordinary proposal describes your experience. A great proposal explains the benefits you will deliver as a result of your experience. An ordinary proposal describes how you will fulfill the requirements. A great proposal tells what you will accomplish as a result of fulfilling the requirements. An ordinary proposal describes what you will do or deliver. A great proposal explains why you do what you do or how you will deliver it. An ordinary proposal describes your team. A great proposal explains why your team is structured the way it is and what the customer will get as a result. An ordinary proposal starts sentences with “We,” “Our Team,” or the equivalent. A great proposal makes the customer the subject. An ordinary proposal is about you and why you're so great. A great proposal is about the customer and how much greater things will be for them when they accept your proposal. An ordinary proposal is about what you have done that’s similar. A great proposal is about why what you have done matters to the customer. An ordinary proposal shows understanding by restating the customer's requirements and telling the customer what you know about them. A great proposal demonstrates understanding by describing the results you will bring and the improvements you offer over the current state. An ordinary proposal tells the customers what their needs are. A great proposal tells how you will fulfill their needs. An ordinary proposal says you are capable, qualified, experienced, etc. A great proposal explains what matters about your capabilities, qualifications, experience, etc. An ordinary proposal has graphics to make the proposal more visually interesting. A great proposal has graphics to make the proposal more meaningful. An ordinary proposal responds. A great proposal make a point. An ordinary proposal is compliant and optimized against the evaluation criteria. A great proposal is about something meaningful to the customer, while being compliant and optimized against the evaluation criteria. An ordinary proposal is about the things you will do. A great proposal is about what the customer will get out of the things you will do. An ordinary proposal is about how you are the best choice. A great proposal is about how the customer will be better off by selecting you. If you noticed that they are all similar and have something in common, you are right. They are all about whether you are writing about yourself or what matters to the customer. The examples above are really just a bunch of different ways that can play out in a typical proposal. But some of them are pretty deep. You might need to ponder them for a moment while you discover the Zen of proposals. If you propose the same thing as your competitors but your proposal says what matters about your offering and your company, and your competitors describe their offerings and themselves, your proposal will sound superior. You might even win with a slightly higher price, because your proposal will appear to offer a better value, even though it’s for exactly the same thing. Your ability to deliver will be more credible and will also appear greater, even though you’ll be delivering the exact same thing. Your competitor offers what they offer. You are offering to fulfill the customer’s goals. If you are responding to the kind of RFP where everyone proposes something different, then this approach makes proposal writing itself a competitive advantage. Luckily, it looks like very few companies have discovered that, so you’ll probably have this advantage all to yourself. That’s a great way to win.

I love talking about proposal win rates. They are vitally important and complete B.S. all at the same time. Because they are so important, proposal specialists talk a lot about win rates. They usually obfuscate the numbers because the numbers are B.S. We need to be concerned with win rates, but we just can't get around the problem of comparing apples and oranges. Your win rate is vitally important because: A small improvement in your RFP win rate makes a huge difference in your profitability Win rates can tell you which of your business development efforts are working and which aren't Win rates can tell you whether you are improving your ability to win or not If you submit a certain number of proposals at a certain cost, what is the difference to the company's bottom line between winning 30% vs 50% vs 70% of them? Compare how hard is it to increase your number of leads by 20% to how hard it is to increase your proposal win rate by 20%. When company leaders do that exercise with real numbers, they often become obsessed with win rates. Unfortunately, proposal win rates are also meaningless because nobody calculates them the same way. Ask for the formula used for RFP win rate calculation and everyone will tell you something mathematically equivalent to wins/submissions converted to a percentage. What they won't tell you is what they left out of the number of submissions: See also: ROI Did they count every pursuit they contributed to? What counts as a contribution? Did they only count the ones they played a "major" role on? Did they only count the ones they had decision making authority on? Did they count recompetes? Did they only count the ones their company was the prime contractor for? Did they leave out the "unimportant," "minor," or "low value" bids? Did they count task orders as well as RFPs? Did they count the ones that weren't competitive or business obtained without a proposal? Did they count the ones that started late? Did they only count the ones where they were involved "from the beginning?" Did they only count the ones where they agreed with the "bid/no bid" decision? Did they count the ones that were cancelled before submission? Whenever you see a proposal win rate, you should ask these same questions. Of course they didn't count them all. It wouldn't make sense to count all of them. So they edit the number of submissions. They make subjective judgment calls regarding what "counts" and what doesn't. They have to in order to make the win rate calculation meaningful. And let's not even talk about whether one company's proposals are similar to another's in size, complexity, duration, value, and volume. Or whether one company's customers are similar to another's in procurement strategy, evaluation practices, decision making, technical expertise, budget, culture, etc. It is next to impossible to compare apples to apples when it comes to win rates. How can one person's subjectively fudged proposal win rate be compared to another's? They can't. Unless they count things the same way. Even if they did count every single one of them, you still couldn't compare one company's win rate to another unless they are in the same industry with the same customer. This would probably be a good place to point out that, at a minimum, you need to calculate win rate twice. It should always be two numbers, and never one. You have to calculate it based on the number of submissions as well as on the value of submissions. And if you care about ROI, you might want to add a third that addresses profit margin. If you don't have at least the number and the value, things can hide. For example, you might win a bunch of little bids but lose the big ones and still show a high win rate based on the number of submissions. Or you might win a huge bid, lose everything else, and show a high win rate based on the value. You need both to see whether they are in balance or something is hiding behind the numbers. An alternate title for this article might be "How to hide behind your win rate." When win rates are used to compare companies, products, or consultants it's just marketing of the worst kind, completely lacking in credibility. I'm sure everyone who does it offers their win rate with complete integrity, believes it to be true, and has well-earned pride in their success. I'm equally sure every one of them has self-edited in a different way rendering the numbers meaningless and incomparable. I'm much more impressed when someone explains what went into their win rate calculation than I am by the meaningless number they arrived at. What they included or excluded tells you a lot about their judgment. Or better yet talk about why they lost the ones they did. It may give you enough confidence to accept the number as an approximation, just not as a numerically comparable value. And win rates should never be used to compare individuals, especially to assess their performance. How much of the proposal did each person contribute? How much of the win rate is to their credit or shame? You might assume it averages out, but that assumes we're all working in the same environment with the chances of winning only impacted by the skill of the participants. This is never true. The most accurate win rate calculations are when an organization uses the same method of calculation on their own bids. Within this context, you can compare your present and past win rates, so long as the method of calculating the win rate has remained the same. You can use this to determine which of the things you do best correlates with your win rate, and what has caused your win rate to change over time. This is extremely valuable. But it is rarely done because of the difficulty of getting enough data over a long enough period of time for it to be statistically significant. I highly recommend it for organizations that have the discipline and endurance required. But even then it's only useful for internal comparison and not for comparing to other organizations. So win rates are both vital and meaningless at the same time. This makes them something we proposal geeks can discuss and debate all day long, going around and around in circles that lead nowhere. If you believe win rates are vital, then put the effort they deserve into creating numbers with fidelity and only use them in the right context. The amount of effort you put into calculating them and how carefully you present them tell the world a lot about how well you really understand them.

Throughout my entire career, business and proposal development specialists have argued that bidding everything results in lower profitability than bidding less and winning more. While this happens to be true, throughout my entire career I have never seen this argument win over anyone who didn’t already believe it. It’s time to change the dialog. See also: Bid/no bid decisions Bidding less to win more sounds too much like bidding less. It’s time to drop that phrase from our vocabularies. Instead we should be advocating bidding everything where you understand what it will take to win better than your competitors. To achieve this you have to have: A superior understanding of what it takes to win An information advantage Some insight into the competitive environment You can actually quantify all three of those. Quantifying them provides useful bid criteria. But you don’t want “bid/no bid” decisions. “No bidding” sounds like bidding less. What you want are something like the Readiness Reviews we’ve built into the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. You need to assess what you know regarding the three bullets above, so that you can identify the opportunities that you want to bid. And you want to bid every one of them in which you have an advantage. Note the three highlighted words. They change the dialog from a negative one (“no bidding”) about bidding less, to a positive dialog about bidding more (“every one” with an “advantage”). Here’s a little something we wrote that can help. It provides 135 topics in 9 categories that all relate to what you need to know about a pursuit in order to win it. You can use it to quiz people about what it will take to win. It’s set up like a checklist and if you give it to them to complete they can prove that your company has an information advantage. But the real power behind shifting the dialog and staying positive is that it changes the arguments. It’s no longer an argument about whether to bid, in which you show up as the bad guy saying they can’t have what they want. Instead, the argument is over what it will take to win and whether your company has an information advantage. Let folks argue against you all day long that they have an information advantage. Invite them to prove it in the form of winning bid strategies that differentiate you from your competitors and reflect the customer’s perspective. It’s not about who wins the argument. No matter what, you win. Because they are now trying to demonstrate that they know what it will take to win and have an information advantage. Even if their win strategies are lame, they will try harder. Over time they will get better. They now have goals. They now go into a pursuit knowing what they have to do to win the argument. It’s a beautiful thing to see play out. It’s still a bad sign if no pursuits get cancelled. But even if they don’t, your win rates should go up because you’ll be getting more of what you need to write winning proposals. All you have to do is change the dialog. That can be hard to do, and will take time. I know because I sometimes fall back on talking about “bid/no bid” decisions the way I’m used to. You have to start correcting people who talk about not bidding things, and switch them to the positive by teaching them that we want to bid everything in which we understand what it will take to win better than our competitors. You have to teach them by asking about what it will take to win each new bid and challenging them if it doesn’t differentiate your company or show any insight that your competitors won’t have. And you have to do it all while staying positive.

There are a number of ways to look at the size of a proposal, but one is more helpful than the others. Page count doesn’t necessarily translate into difficulty or effort. Nor does the number of items being proposed or the dollar value. You could focus on the difference between the way large companies do proposals and the way small companies do proposals, but that’s an illusion. The things you do to win a proposal remains the same regardless of the size. Large companies and small proposals follow pretty much the same steps because they have to. The dollar amounts are different, and maybe the number of people involved, but the approach is the same. See also: Small Business If you think the difference between a large proposal and a small proposal is the number of people involved, you’re getting close. But where do you draw the line? When does a proposal become large? Is it three people? Five people? Fifteen people? A hundred and fifteen people? How about when the person managing the proposal can’t write it all because one person can’t possibly know about everything that needs to be written about? Some companies (or business units within larger companies) have one or a few people who write their proposals, and they know enough about what the company does that they can write it themselves. They operate very differently from a company where the proposal staff have to bring in subject matter experts to help them figure out what to write. A small company might offer services in several different domains, or in just one domain that requires a high degree of expertise to figure out what to do, resulting in proposals that the proposal team can’t write without contributions from subject matter experts. A large company is more likely to cover multiple domains, but that doesn’t mean that all large companies do. When the proposal specialists can write the proposal on their own, instead of focusing on discovering what to write, they focus on aligning the offering with what matters to the customer. When they can’t do it all themselves, they have to work through other people. This changes things dramatically and most companies do a poor job of making this transition. When the proposals specialists have to bring in subject matter experts, the proposal effort becomes far more complex. It is no longer about just doing the proposal, instead it is about: Discovery. Resources and information need to be discovered. What do you need to know? Who needs to be involved? Where do you get what you need? Management. Somebody needs to assign, coordinate, and set expectations in order to get people to work together as a team and produce a winning proposal. Collaboration. How do multiple people work on the same document? How do you get information out of multiple people and onto the same page? How do you manage schedules and availability? How do you handle the logistics of working together? Culture. Does the organization buy into the effort? Do people work as a team or as individuals? Are there territories in conflict? Is the organization in transition? Does it function by consensus or authority? Is it centralized or decentralized? All of this is driven by the need to have multiple people contributing to the content of the proposal. It does not matter whether that proposal is being done by a large company or a small company. Okay, but so what? This impacts you because what you need to be successful with a proposal you are basically doing yourself (maybe with a little help) is different from what you need to be successful when you need to discover, collaborate, manage, and work the culture of the organization. For a small proposal, you need things that will help you. You don’t need it all written down if you can keep it in your head. With a few reminders you can make it up as you go along. All you really need are some checklists. You don't need to explain everything or check anybody else's work. For a large proposal, you need things that will guide everyone else to bring you what you need. You need a process that can set and communicate expectations. You need guidance strong enough for your weaker writers to deliver content as good as your stronger writers. You can’t just make it up as you go along. You can't just talk your way through it. You have to check everybody's work. A small proposal needs someone who understands proposals and who can write and produce the document. A large proposal not only needs someone who understands proposals, but someone who can manage people across organizational boundaries. They need a combination of writers and subject matter experts. They need production specialists. They need solution architects. They need review teams. They need a leader who can get the team where they need to be to win, even though no one on the team may report to them and everyone has competing priorities, differing levels of skills, and may not share the same level of interest in the effort. If you are currently doing small proposals, but you want to do much larger proposals because they also bring much larger revenue, be prepared to invest in people, processes, tools, and your future win rate. You can't achieve a high win rate on the cheap or by doing things the same way you've done your small proposals. Making the transition from small to large proposals Making the transition from a company that does small proposals to a company that does large proposals is traumatic. You may have the wrong type of proposal specialists. Doers are not necessarily the best managers, and vice versa. The people you need to contribute to the proposal may not want to or know how. Culturally you have two different worlds — one world that does the proposals and one world that doesn’t think they do but now is being asked to contribute. You don’t have the process you need. And if you try to create it “in between” proposals you may never get it. Even if you can document the process, it takes a lot of work to get the organization to buy into it. People do not change easily. But the real secret behind all of this is that there is no such thing as a small proposal. Read that again because it’s important. The reason is that we’ve left something rather important out. You don’t just need subject matter expertise, you need customer and competitive awareness. If you have a proposal specialist and work in a single domain, they may know enough about it to write a proposal. But how well do they know the customer’s preferences? How well do they know the competition? If you do business in a single domain, have only one major customer, and always compete against the same players, then maybe, just maybe there is such a thing as a small proposal. But for everyone else, you still need someone who knows the customer and the competitive environment involved in the proposal to shape the context that all the text should be based on. And then you need reviews to make sure it’s right. Pretty soon you need a process, discovery, collaboration, management, cultural awareness and all the other attributes of a large proposal. You also need a culture of growth. This is something you should have had from the beginning. A culture of growth is different from a desire for growth, or even a need for growth. A culture of growth makes it clear how everyone benefits from growth and what their role is in helping the company achieve it. When it's time to start doing large proposals, it's so much easier to get past the resistance if the company already has a culture of growth. If you wait until a large proposal to start putting that in place, it's just one more change to resist. Whatever you do, don't just skip it. If you do, the business development or sales staff will avoid playing any role in the proposal. Maybe they'll drop by to add a few words of wisdom before they run away. Or maybe the company just waits until the RFP is released and doesn’t really have much in the way of customer or competitive awareness to share with the proposal writers. Then the proposal team works as if they are on their own. Because they are. Winning proposals need contributions, sometimes from technical subject matter experts, but always from those who have customer and competitor awareness. And they need to discover, collaborate, manage, and work their organization to get it. If you don’t institutionalize how they do that, people will act as if they are doing small proposals where it's someone else's job, the proposal team will be on their own and working in insolation, and your win rate will suffer. You'll be doing large proposals with a lower win rate. Then as your company begins to recognize the need for a proposal process, your proposal team will join legions of proposal specialists who complain that their organization won’t follow the process. This is because you company still thinks it does small proposals. But the truth is they never did. Start doing proposals as if they are large. As if there are many roles and people involved. Create a culture of growth. Learn what information about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment is needed to win, and how to obtain an information advantage. And above all focus on win rate and the things that drive it. Just being aware of these things and doing them at a small scale will make a huge difference when you decide it's time to go large.

monthly_2016_02/56c47970dbfbe_ProposalStartupChecklist_docx.da2201c6b7a14e6f1060c2c897d74be7

Companies often put more emphasis on making proposals easier than they do on winning them, while at the same time trying to do as many as possible. If they calculated the ROI, they'd realize that the investment in doing proposals right is tiny compared to the huge returns it delivers. Instead of trying to find twice as many leads, mathematically they'd be better off trying to win twice as many. But instead, they try to minimize what they spend on proposals so they can afford to pursue as many as possible. This results in them lowering their win rate and lowers their ROI even further. It makes me shake my head. Companies like this aren't serious about winning RFPs. If they were serious, they'd pay attention to their ROI and choose the path that best maximizes it. They'd discover that it's better to invest in doing proposal well than in doing lots of proposals. They'd discover that to be serious about winning RFPs means being serious about understanding what it will take to win. See also: ROI Ways that companies respond to RFPs The approach you take to bidding RFPs demonstrates the maturity of your company. Which approach do you take? Bid any RFP that you can and try to find them all Try to convince yourself that you're being selective by bidding RFPs where you have some experience or can do the work and the hope you can win, while in reality you are just bidding any RFP you can and trying to find them all Bid only the ones in which you have insight into the customer’s perspective and what it will take to win Bid only the ones that meet your strategic planning and lead qualification criteria that are based on having insight into the customer’s perspective and what it will take to win Hope is not a strategy for winning RFPs. Desperation is not a strategy for winning RFPs. Ways that companies hurt themselves by bidding every RFP they can When you bid every RFP you come across, your business will suffer in many ways: Lower margins due to a lower win rate Even though the per-proposal price might be lower, you'll have higher proposal costs per win, since each win has to pay for all the losers Lower margins over time because you are competing on price instead of value driven by customer insight Even lower margins over time due to lacking economies of scale because your business is a random collection of wins instead of a strategically reinforcing collection of core competencies and relationships Poor past performance because of all the times you underpriced, failed to meet customer expectations, or simply delivered the minimum needed to get by Lower revenue because all those losses represent money you've left on the table and add up to far more money than new leads at a low win rate can ever deliver Lower staff satisfaction and higher turnover due to the low pay needed to stay under the low rates you bid This is when you'll be tempted to try to control costs by minimizing the cost of bidding so that you can afford to submit more bids. This means doing more proposals of lower quality, resulting in an even lower win rate that will continue to spiral down, and ensure that future margins will be lower still. Or you'll try to bid more opportunities in the hope of being able to win more in spite of your low win rate. Making up for low quality proposals by doing them in volume is a great way to destroy a company. Why do businesses set themselves up like this? It’s primarily because they've been taught that doing proposals well is expensive instead of an investment that can be measured. Doing proposals well requires: Relationship marketing, followed by a Sales process aimed at gaining customer insight and discovering what it will take to win, followed by a Major effort to produce a high win probability proposal All of these costs come up front, before you see any revenue. The temptation to lower those costs is extremely strong. But first you should consider: If you have a 30% win rate, you’ll have to go through it all three times just to score a win If you have a 20% win rate, you’ll have to go through it all five times for each win If you have a 10% win rate, you'll have to go through it all 10 times for each win Now, look again at the difference between a 20% win rate and a 30% win rate. It’s only a 10% difference in win rate, but the difference in cost and time is almost double. The difference between a 10% win rate and a 30% win rate is just 20%, but it returns triple the revenue. If you're already at 30%, simply getting to 40% is a 33% boost in revenue. How much relationship marketing and proposal development costs could be covered by tripling your revenue? How many times those costs does it return, 100x? 1000x? If that's too much math for you, try simply dividing your proposal costs by the number of wins. With the same costs but more wins, the cost per win goes down fast. Not only that, but with more wins you can increase your proposal costs per win and still be lower than where you started. By investing and achieving more wins, you end up decreasing your proposal costs more than if you lower your proposal costs in a way that also lowers your win rate. You can't put less effort into what it will take to win and make up for it by wanting to win more. If your business depends on RFPs... If your business depends on RFPs, it's time to get serious. Don't take my word for it. Measure it. If your business depends on RFPs, your top priority should be to achieve a high win rate. It is worth more investing in a higher win rate than in lower costs or bidding more questionable leads. Setting your priorities this way and managing it like an investment will actually produce a lower proposal cost per win. And like any investment, you should be selective. Bidding everything should no longer be a priority. Bidding everything where you have more insight into what it will take to win than your competitors should be your priority. Maintaining that high win rate by not gambling on low probability RFPs just because they are out there should become your priority. If your business depends on RFPs, you best control your costs by spending strategically and not by spending less but losing more. Spending strategically means actually having a strategic plan, having a sales process that produces the information needed to win the proposal, and a proposal process that can articulate what it will take to win from the customer’s perspective. If your business depends on winning RFPs, it means your business depends on doing these things effectively. If your business depends on responding to RFPs, it means you can’t just throw your least expensive staff at the effort or let people think that contributing to proposals is not their real job. It means that responding to RFPs is everyone's real job. It means you can’t afford to make up how you do things as you go along. If your business depends on responding to RFPs, it means your entire business should serve the process that wins your RFP responses. Think about what that means and your business will prosper. If you need any help making it happen, let me know.

When we realized just how much of the MustWin Process already consisted of checklists we decided to create something new that would consist only of checklists, without all the extra process language. Instead of thinking of it as a process checklist, it's more like the checklists are the process. We’re transforming what we have into a Checklist-Driven Proposal. We're creating something you can just pick up and use to win an RFP response. Here’s how it’s going to work… See also: Reuse Our Readiness Review methodology tht brings structure to the pre-RFP phase and ensures that companies arrive at RFP release ready to win. We're converting it into a monster checklist that shows what needs to be accomplished before the RFP is released and can be used as a bid/no bid gateway into the proposal or as an information collection tool at the start of a proposal. We’re transforming our Proposal Quality Validation methodology into a set of checklists that proposal writers can use to self-check and proposal reviews can use to do a much better job of ensuring that the proposal reflects what it will take to win. Think of it as a proposal review checklist. We recently published an ebook describing our recommendations for planning the content of your proposals. It is essentially a methodology for creating a checklist that the proposal writers can follow to create a winning proposal. We're going to transform the Proposal Recipe Library on PropLIBRARY into a checklist for the proposal content itself. What we need is already there, it’s just in a different format. It will provide checklist simple inspiration for what to write about and what your win strategies and themes should be. We’re also going to convert our proposal logistics, management, and final production checklists into a master proposal coordination checklist. Put them all together and you get a true checklist-driven proposal. From the pre-RFP pursuit, to proposal startup, through writing, to the quality validation reviews, and all the way to submission. Pretty ambitious, huh? It helps that all those lists have already been created and are in PropLIBRARY. We’re just consolidating them, repurposing them, and separating them from the process. By the way, everyone who is a PropLIBRARY Subscriber when we release each of the new lists will get them all free of charge. We’re going to create a new Checklist Library, add it to the menu, and make it just another benefit of subscribing. We’re starting with the Proposal Startup Information Checklist that extracts all of the questions, goals, and action items from our Readiness Review methodology. So far we have over 120 items spanning 20 pages. And it’s just one of the checklists. We’re pretty excited about how comprehensive and useful these will be. The final item and page count will probably come down a bit in the final release since we’d rather consolidate and tighten it up as we go instead of padding it out for larger numbers. But the release is just a couple of weeks away… For those of you who are inclined to build your own, here are the categories we’re using for the first checklist, to ensure that it captures all of the information you need to start your proposal: What you need to know about the opportunity What matters about the size, scope, and complexity? What you need to know about your own offering What do you plan to propose and why is it the best alternative? What you need to know about the customer’s procurement process How will they prepare the RFP, perform their evaluation, and make an award? What you need to know about the customer What matters about them as an organization and as individual people? What you need to know about the competitive and teaming environments What matters about the competition and should you team, who with, and why? What you need to know that’s specific to your line of business What do you need to decide what to offer, make estimates, and prepare pricing? What you need to know about your own organization and resources What procedures do you have to follow and what resources are available? What you need to know about proposal preparation The better you anticipate what will be needed to prepare a winning proposal, the more likely you will be able to get it. What you need to know about the RFP What should you focus on and how will it impact your proposal? Other things you need to know In addition to all of the above, there are still more things you should know… You can create your own Proposal Startup Information Checklist by writing down everything you need to know in each of these categories. If you know everything you should, you’re ready to bid and win. You’ll have something to give those involved in the pre-RFP pursuit that will make it more likely for them to bring you the information you need. Then you’ll have the information you need to determine the right bid strategies. When proposal writers try to make the proposal reflect the customer’s perspective, they’ll have what they need to know about the customer to do it. People will be able to work much quicker when they don’t hit a wall because they can’t answer a question. And you won’t need to call meetings to talk around an issue because you don’t know the answer.

I’ll give you three hints: It’s the most frequent cause of the proposal death spiral, that cycle of endless rewrites that are never good enough and only end because there’s a deadline, resulting in delivering the proposal you have instead of the proposal you wanted to submit. Usually typified by trying to fit in one re-write too many and having a train wreck at the end where errors are likely to be introduced, but no time is left for quality assurance. It’s a major reason why the proposal reviews at most companies are inconsistently effective at best and often not worth the effort. While the intent might be to do things faster, it makes proposal writing take longer and cost more. By trying to make things easy, it ends up taking a lot more effort. The worst sin in proposal writing is the phrase “I’ll know it when I see it.” “I’ll know it when I see it” means that you should just start writing so someone can tell you that it’s not good enough and then write some more. The worst since in proposal writing is worse than it sounds “I’ll know it when I see it” is the short form of the phrase. The part that is usually left unspoken is “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.” Letting the words “I’ll know it when I see it” come out of your mouth is like admitting your ignorance in public. You should avoid doing that. The unspoken part means "I don't know how to win, but I want you to do it and I'll be the judge of whether you did it right." Whether it’s spoken or not, the problem is that you should never start writing the narrative part of your proposal if you don’t know what you want it to be. “I’ll know it when I see it” goes against every quality methodology ever created. It not only fails to define proposal quality, it’s anti-quality. “I’ll know it when I see it” is what someone says when they think they don’t have enough time for quality but think that if you try hard enough you will somehow achieve it anyway. Ignoring every best practice and quality methodology ever created is not a recommended way to achieve something important to your organization. Let alone to do it consistently. The worst sin in proposal writing is usually followed by a rush to starting writing the proposal because the writers know they only have a limited amount of time before the deadline and know they will need every single minute so they can do more drafts until they figure it out. It is an approach based on fear instead of intent. It results in a final production ruled by panic instead of one that puts polish on top of confidence. Why "I'll know it when I see it" fails You will not discover what you want it to be when it somehow appears in front of you. That’s like waiting for monkeys at a keyboard to write a Shakespearean tragedy (although it does create a tragedy of a different kind). Here’s why: See also: Proposal Quality Validation The writers don’t know what you are looking for, so they will not be aiming for the right target. The reviewers do not know what they are looking for so they will misdirect (often contradicting each other in the process). The second draft will have no better direction than the first, often resulting in people saying “it was better the first time.” But the truth is nobody knows what better is, let alone best. That is no way to reliably beat all of the competition and come out on top. This makes quality defined by opinion and in a political hierarchy that makes quality defined by whoever has the most authority. The re-writes will only stop when you run out of time, resulting in submitting the proposal you have at that point instead of the proposal you wanted it to be. You’ll try to fit one too many re-write cycles in, resulting in a train wreck at the end of the proposal. If you think it’s normal for proposals to have a train wreck at the end then hopefully this article will lead you to think twice about that. You should not attempt to engineer your solution by writing a narrative about it. You should not attempt to figure out what ingredients should go in your proposal by writing until you’ve found them all. You should not engineer your solution or offering by writing about it. You should not attempt to discover what it will take to win by waiting until the proposal is written, reading it to discover the strategies are wrong, and then re-writing and re-reviewing until you trip over what the strategies should be. The problem is that narratives are a bad way to collect, identify, account for, discover, and track things. Break and fix almost always takes more effort than doing something right the first time. This is particularly true with narrative text. Narrative text is messy. It’s full of connections and references, and it’s hard to parse. Ripping apart narrative and putting it back together after changes takes a lot of effort. People try to minimize that effort by making as few changes as possible, resulting in the minimum improvement instead of what it really should be. It will take longer to break and fix narrative than it will to think it through before you start writing. You are much better off identifying the ingredients that should go in your proposal and making sure you know how to articulate what it will take to win before you start writing narrative text. That way, your revisions focus on improving your wording and not on discovering what your strategies should be. Changing strategies by re-writing narrative text is what leads to the proposal death spiral. “I’ll know it when I see it” leads people to jump into writing before they are ready. It also leads people to bid things they shouldn’t, because they can’t show the gap between what they know and what they should know when the only way they have to discover it is by writing about it. The worst sin in proposal writing leads to arbitrary reviews instead of reviews that compare the proposal to what it will take to win. Let’s see… Not knowing you’re bidding the wrong things until you write about them, writing before you know what to write, re-writing until the deadline and submitting what you have, and not defining proposal quality. Does anybody think this is how you should improve your win rate? The people who do this repeatedly do it because they don’t know any other way to do it, which brings us back to the part about it being driven by ignorance. Go and sin no more Intentionally going into a proposal without thinking things through and expecting to rely on an infinite number of re-writing cycles to save you before the deadline is no way to achieve proposal quality. Expecting the reviews to somehow trip over what it will take to win without defining the criteria that the reviews should use to define quality is a major source of proposal disaster. Start by defining proposal quality. We define it as what it will take to win. First we articulate it, then we review how we’ve defined what it will take to win to make sure it’s what we want to build the proposal around, and then we turn it into quality criteria. We use the same criteria to drive the writing that we use for the draft reviews. We do not surprise the writers with arbitrary reviews. We review the proposal to make sure that what got written reflects what we agreed is what it will take to win. If you think about it, this does not add any effort to what you need to do anyway. Watch out for the second worst sin in proposal writing What it will do is make a fearful person nervous. Before someone says or thinks “I’ll know it when I see it,” they often first ask why they are doing all this thinking when “they could be writing.” They are not afraid that they’ll run out of time to write the proposal. They are afraid that they’ll run out of time to re-write the proposal as many times as they think they’ll need to in order to discover something good enough to escape blame. The worst sin in proposal writing is compounded by leading to the second worst sin. That is skipping figuring out what you are going to write because it "takes too much time" and wondering why we are doing this planning when "we could be writing." All that planning is really just figuring out how to make what you are going to write add up to what it will take to win before you start writing. The worst sin in proposal writing is a thought crime Carefully watch any proposal produced anywhere. More time is spent thinking about it than writing it. The difference is whether that thinking is circular or whether it is productive. All thinking is helped by inspiration. Seeking inspiration by doing without thinking and expecting it to get better with repetition is folly. So seek inspiration without creating narrative. Think until you’ve got valid strategies and everyone you’re working with agrees that they reflect what it will take to win. Then write with confidence. If you throw out scary terms like “process,” “quality,” and “validation,” then all you really need to do is focus on identifying the ingredients and being able to articulate what it will take to win before you start writing narrative. How you go about doing that, whether you use a “methodology” or the back of an envelope, matters less than that it gets done some way, somehow. There is no way to successfully write proposals that are based on what it takes to win and include all the ingredients they should unless you identify them before you start writing. Never handicap yourself by skipping that, jumping straight into writing, and saying (or even thinking) “I’ll know it when I see it.”

The best way to create a checklist driven proposal is not what you think. See also: Making Proposals Simple It’s not about checking off which content to include in a template. At least not if you want to win. A checklist driven proposal should be about what you need to write or do in order to win. A checklist driven proposal should help you figure out what you need to say in order to win instead of picking from a list of things said in the past to other customers in other contexts. When you know what you need to talk about in order to win, you'll discover what you need to know before the RFP is even released. You'll also know how to measure proposal quality. All you have to do is turn what it takes to win into a checklist. This sounds simple, but try it. Everyone thinks they know what it will take to win until they have to write it down in a way that provides the guidance that proposal writers need. Most attempts that I've seen talk around what it will take to win, while providing little or no guidance that proposal writers can actually follow. What should writers accomplish in order to produce the winning proposal? How can that be turned into a checklist? Start by identifying considerations and results. At each step, what should they consider? What should they achieve? How do they know when they've achieved it? If you tried to create a flowchart or decision tree of all the considerations, you’d end up with a mess of conditional spaghetti, overlapping considerations, and if/then/else exclusions. And that’s before you start applying the peculiarities of a given RFP. So don’t chart them. Just list them. And keep them short, like bullets. The person reading the checklist can decide what’s relevant and skip the ones that are not. They can very quickly size up all the considerations and figure out what they need to do. In addition, your quality reviews can double check to make sure anything important wasn’t left out. And if something on the checklist is not quite right, or it needs to be modified because of the RFP, or to take into consideration some juicy piece of intel you’ve discovered, it’s no big deal to make the change. Proposal managers (and this includes me) tend to obsess on the proposal process. But if you think about it, the entire process is basically a bunch of considerations. Instead of trying to map it, all you need to do is create an organized list of goals for people to accomplish and the considerations that should go into achieving them. When you approach the proposal process as a set of goals, you don't need a checklist to itemize every step in every procedure. You need a checklist that reminds people of things that can help them to fulfill the goals. In writing this article, I realized that in creating the MustWin Process I had already done this, without intentionally trying to create a process based on checklists. Our Readiness Review approach to the pre-RFP pursuit phase provides a list of questions, goals, and action items to guide business developers to gather the information that proposal writers will need after the RFP is released. Maybe we should have called it a Pre-RFP Checklist. Our Proposal Content Planning methodology is really a checklist that guides you through planning the content so that proposal writers can make sure what they write includes everything it should. It enables you to turn the writing into a process of elimination. Like following a checklist. We definitely should have called it a Checklist Simple Proposal Writing Methodology or some such instead. The Proposal Recipe Library we created that provides inspiration through questions instead of recycling narrative is exactly the kind of checklist we described above. It tells proposal writers what to consider to accelerate their ability to complete their assignments. Maybe we should have called it a Proposal Content Checklist Library instead. The checklist we create to plan the content serves double duty as a quality validation tool. Instead of calling our criteria-based approach Proposal Quality Validation, we should have called it Checklist Simple Proposal Quality Assurance. And the way it enables you to trace the quality criteria/checklist back to the content plan/checklist back to the pre-RFP readiness review/checklist creates traceability for your checklists all the way back to what it will take to win. The checklists don’t write the proposal for you, but they make creating a proposal based on what it will take to win checklist simple. Maybe instead of calling it the MustWin Process we should have called it the Checklist Simple Approach to Proposal Management.

I remember early in my career working on a proposal with someone who was complaining that it “didn’t sell!” Unfortunately, he couldn’t say why. It turns out that what drives selling in writing is how well your writing reflects the right win strategies and themes, and whether they are written from the customer’s perspective. There are a lot of things to consider and approaches to take when thinking about which themes you should use in a particular proposal. We’ve taken those considerations and turned them into a 12-item checklist that you can use four different ways: See also: Themes To help you get into position to win before the RFP is released, by gathering information, developing your positions, and communicating them to the potential customer. Without the checklist most companies won’t cover half the things on it (and that’s probably being generous). To help you decide whether to bid. If you can’t articulate your positioning in each area, that’s a really bad sign. To improve the instructions you give to your proposal writers, so that in addition to responding to the requirements, they put things in the right context to substantiate why the customer should select you. To provide criteria to validate the draft proposal against. Both proposal writers and reviewers know that the draft has to pass the checklist. In each of the following areas you need to be able to articulate how to position your bid in order to win. So how do you position your bid against? Your company’s strategic plan Price and ROI The customer’s perspective Technical issues Management issues Experience Locations, resources, and/or staffing Risk Trust Alternatives (including but not limited to competitors) The customer’s decision making or evaluation process External issues and trends Our Proposal Recipe Library contains an elaboration of each of these topics, to help you articulate your positioning in each one. Making sure you got it right... When you run down the list, two critical things will become immediately apparent: Does it add up to anything? Is it a random collection of shallow slogans or do they relate to each other in a way that adds up to something compelling? The checklist will show whether you are telling a story or not. If they are all related, there’s a story there. They must add up to something meaningful for the customer to care about what you have proposed and select you from amongst their alternatives. Does it differentiate you? If they all say the same things that every bidder will say, then there’s nothing special about your bid and no reason for the customer to select you. Have you said anything more than that you’ll give them what they’ve asked for? If you haven’t then you are at best equal to your competitors, and at risk to any who are the least bit compelling. The easiest way to make it add up to something and to differentiate yourself is to focus on the things that matter. If you go through the checklist and can articulate something that matters to the customer for each one, it should add up to something compelling. It will “sell!”

Does your proposal even have a point? Is it a meandering response to what was in the RFP, shifting from requirement to requirement, with the only point being that you'll do whatever they want? Is the point how great your company is? Does it scream “Pick me! Pick me!” If it does have a point, is it the same point other companies bidding will make? For example, is the point that your company has experience or that you can do the work? See also: Great Proposals If your proposal doesn’t have a point, then what exactly do you expect the customer to conclude from reading your proposal? A proposal should have a thesis. It should have a premise that you go on to prove. And it should establish a hierarchy from the first sentence, to the section level, to the individual paragraph level. Everything you write should lead to a conclusion. That conclusion should be the point of your proposal. It doesn’t have to be one thing that you are trying to prove, but it shouldn’t be too many either. You want the customer to finish reading your proposal and say, “I get the point. I see why they said what they did. No one else made any points as strong as theirs. That’s why I want to select them.” Some points are broad and can be used throughout the proposal. Points about risk, trust, and quality often fall into this category. Some points are specific to a given section, such as a point about why your technical solution is superior. You should make sure that your points reflect any evaluation criteria included in the RFP. How the evaluation criteria are structured is what should guide you to decide whether you address something like “quality” throughout the proposal or in a specific section. You should make points where they’ll earn you the highest evaluation score. Make sure the point the customer gets is what you thought it would be. If you make your proposal about yourself or why your company is so great, what the customer hears might be that you are shallow, self-absorbed, and just want their money. The best way to avoid this is to make your proposal about the customer. If your point is that the customer is going to get something great by working with you, then all you need to do is prove it. Every section and every paragraph becomes about what they will get and why they should believe it. The points you want to make give you something to prove, and makes figuring out what to write so much easier. When you have something to prove, you can build your entire proposal around it. Instead of simply telling your proposal contributors to respond to what’s in the RFP, you can instruct them to respond to the RFP requirements in a way that proves the points you want to make. It also helps you when you’re starting a paragraph and you’re not sure what to say. Ask yourself, “What’s the point that I need to make here?” If you’re trying to prove the point that your company is responsive, you’ll write your response one way. If you’re trying to prove that you’re more efficient, you’ll write it a different way. And if you’re trying to prove that you can anticipate and prevent potential problems, it will be different still. Etc. It is much easier to find inspiration when you have a point to make. If you are starting the proposal and you don’t know what the point is, you should reconsider whether you should be bidding. Think about it. Is a customer going to accept a proposal that is, quite literally, pointless? How can you beat a competitor that does have a point to their proposal, let alone one whose point is a result of conversations with the customer and reinforces their existing customer relationship? Sometimes you can overcome all that and steal the contract away, but you can only do this if the customer is more comfortable with the points that you make. If you don’t have a point, you can’t get there. What is the point in bidding? You shouldn’t start writing until you know what points you’re trying to make. It will take less time to figure out your points and then write it, than it will to write it and have to rewrite it to address the points after you figure them out. If it seems like it’s taking too long to figure out the points and you’re starting to feel the deadline pressure, re-read the part about reconsidering whether to bid. Once you know what points you want to make, you should review those points and validate that they are the ones you should make before you build your proposal around the wrong points. Reviewing the points you want to make is more important than reviewing the draft proposal. The review of the draft proposal is simply to see whether you did a good job of proving the points. If people want to start writing because it’s taking too long to figure out what points you need to make in your proposal, that’s a really bad sign. The problem isn't with planning before writing. It means that you have no positioning, no strategies, no themes, and no opinions and are struggling to find some. You are hoping that your proposal writers will somehow trip over the right points to make. That’s not a recipe for winning. Sometimes people have trouble committing to a point. They worry about whether the customer will agree. You might lose the proposal if you emphasize the wrong points. But you’ll definitely lose if you don’t make any points. So think about what matters and why it matters, take a stand, and prove your point. And sometimes people aren’t sure what points to make. Focus on what matters to the customer instead of what matters to you. What is important to the customer and about what they will get? What should they consider? What do they need to know to make a decision? Do they have evaluation criteria or a process to follow? Can you make your proposal easier to evaluate by matching your points to their criteria? When you have a point to make in a proposal, it should not be about you. It should be about what you can do for them. When you have a point to prove, it should demonstrate to the customer that you’ve already starting thinking about their needs and are already providing them with service. Just pretend like you’ve already won and put your creativity and energy into showing the customer how helpful you are and excited about how much better off they are going to be. To the customer, that's the whole point behind the procurement in the first place.

When you do a lot of proposals, it’s easy to find yourself starting with the RFP. After all, you can’t really start proposal writing until you know what’s in the RFP. You can’t create the outline. You don’t know what the schedule is. You don’t know how many people you need to help. Etc. Unfortunately, I've seen the notion that the proposal starts with an RFP actually destroy entire companies. It tricks them into building their business around looking for RFPs they can respond to. Since thousands of RFPs come out every day, their staff can spend all their time doing just that. And in so doing, they limit their companies’ potential to somewhere between failure and meeting payroll. They limit themselves to low margin bids with low win rates. They never develop what it really takes to be successful, but they keep busy doing it. To break out and be successful, you need to realize that a proposal should start with an understanding of what it will take to win. Nobody can read just an RFP and understand what the customer is really looking for and how they will reach their decision. All you can do is play games with the scope and evaluation criteria, and hope to win on price while claiming how important quality is to you. When you think of the proposal as starting with an understanding of what it will take to win, the first thing you realize is that you need some input. You need information about the customer’s goals and preferences. You need to understand how they go about making decisions and what impacts them. You need to understand what matters to the customer. What it will take to win should drive everything you do in your pursuit See also: Proposal process implementation The pre-RFP phase becomes about leveraging relationships to provide the information you will need to win the proposal. The proposal phase starts with turning the information you have into quality criteria and instructions for proposal contributors. The RFP merely provides structure, specifications, and details that need to be responded to. You will win or lose based on what matters to the customer about those details, which won’t all be in the RFP. You want your writing assignments to substantiate the reasons why the customer should select you. Those reasons will be based on what matters to the customer and what it will take to win. For the assignments to reflect them, you must start by articulating them. You start with what it will take to win. You also want the quality of your proposal to be measured by how well the writing reflects what it will take to win. Two things result from this: You need to turn your understanding of what it will take to win into quality criteria. Your proposal reviews should not be open-ended subjective inconsistent efforts. They should be driven by quality criteria based on what it will take to win. You should give your writers the same criteria that the later reviews will use. You should build those criteria into their assignments in the form of instructions. When you do this, you achieve traceability from the draft proposal all the way back to your customer contacts, regarding what it will take to win. So not only should the proposal effort begin with what it will take to win, it ends there as well. This is a good thing. We use the Readiness Review methodology to guide people to collect the right information during the pre-RFP phase. We use the Proposal Content Planning methodology to turn what it will take to win into instructions and writing assignments. And we use Proposal Quality Validation to turn what it will take to win into quality criteria and conduct proposal reviews based on them. All of these methodologies can be found detailed in PropLIBRARY in a form that is ready for immediate implementation. To become an extraordinarily successful company, always start your proposals by assessing what it will take to win. If you start the pursuit before the RFP is released, then the pre-RFP phase should be about discovering what it will take to win. If the RFP has already been released, then the first step should be assessing what it will take to win. No matter when you start, the first step is assessing what it will take to win. If you are having difficulty articulating what it will take to win, or if what you come up with matches what it says in the RFP, those are indicators that you lack insight and aren’t competitive. It is an indicator that you should not bid. Think about it: If you don’t know what it will take to win better than what’s in the RFP, you lack a competitive advantage. You should never bid on a level playing field. Cancel a few bids like these and instead of people coming to the table saying they have something they want to bid, they’ll start showing up explaining what it will take to win. That’s the transformation you want.

There are some words you should avoid in your proposals, but most of them simply relate to unsubstantiated claims. A list of words that you should use in your proposals is a lot harder because every customer is different. If you focus on the words that should go in your proposal, you might overlook the power of a word that might not actually appear in the proposal, but that can make all the difference regarding what you do put into it. Most people only think about “what” should go in their proposals. “What” they should offer. “What” they need to say. By focusing on “what,” they are overlooking a word that is even more important to the customer. That word is “why.” Why you chose to offer what you did is extremely important to the customer. When you talk about “why” you are talking about the reasons behind your value proposition. When you talk about “why” you are talking about what matters about what you are offering. Explaining why can be much more important that explaining what you will do. This is especially true in services bids. The customer is usually the most concerned about results. They only need enough details about your approaches to establish that they are credible. Describing "what" you do does less to establish your credibility than describing "why" you do it that way. See also: Making Proposals Simple The reasons why you chose the approaches you did are the reasons why you think they are the best approaches. They are the reasons why you are doing things out of all the other possible ways there are to do them. And those are the reasons why the customer should select you. They also demonstrate your judgment and demonstrate how well you understand the customer, and that's what establishes your credibility. If you have good judgment, then the customer will be more comfortable with your ability to deliver results even when things don't go according to plan. What I like most about asking why is that it helps you drill deeper, past a simple statement about what you will do, and say something that matters to the customer about it. Every single paragraph of the proposal should answer at least one “why” question. When you are preparing the outline for your proposal, trying building “why” into it. Add headings and content that dig deeper. Here are some “why” questions to get you started: Why is it the best approach? Why does it matter? Why should the customer care? Why do you care? Why does the customer require that? Why does the customer approach things that way? Why did you make that choice? Why should the customer select you? Why are you different? Why do your qualifications matter? To really transform your proposals, you should build “why?” into the instructions you give to your proposal contributors. And do it before you start thinking about “what” to offer or how you are going to respond to the requirements. Instead of asking them to describe what you will do, ask them to explain why you will do things that way. The reason this is effective is that it transforms the nature of the writing assignment. It gives you the information you need to ensure that what gets written puts the details into the right context. The context of a proposal can be more important than the details themselves. Instead of proposal writing assignments being to respond to the requirements, they become responding to the requirements in a way that supports the reasons “why.” The assignments become about substantiating your value proposition and explaining the things that matter to the customer. This will beat any other proposal that simply explains what the other company will do. If you compare a proposal that says what one company will do against a proposal that explains why the company made the choices that led to its offering and why it matters, the one that explains “why” has a major advantage. Explaining “why” results in giving the customer the reasons why they should select you, even if you never actually say “why you should select us.” It makes the entire proposal about why they should select you. And that is far more powerful. P.S.: It occurred to me in writing this article that all we really need to know about proposal writing can be learned from a 2-year-old. That's about the age they discover the word "why" and ruin everyone's lives for the next year or so by asking it constantly. Just think of that 2-year-old as your customer, anticipate every "why," and answer it before they actually say it. That 2-year-old is wise enough to know what the most important question is.

It’s hard to get an early start on a proposal, and not just because you don’t know when the RFP will be released. You often get advance notice of RFP releases. When the pursuit is a recompete, you can anticipate the release years in advance. If it's the result of a sources sought notice, request for information (RFI), customer forecast, or other announcement, you may get a notice a month or so in advance. So what do you do? With the time you have available, how can you maximize your win probability? How to get started when you have ample advance notice Companies often research pursuits like they are fishing. They see what they can find out. Sometimes they get some bites, but often all they get are nibbles and catch nothing. This tends to result in intel full of generalities and broad concepts that may have little, and sometimes no, impact on what gets written in the proposal. The entire sales process should be about closing the sale. In effect, this means the entire sales process is about proposal writing. Only instead of the act of proposal writing, it’s about preparing to be able to write the winning proposal. Your business development staff may not participate in proposal writing. But they play a critical role in informing proposal writing, and that has a major impact on the win or loss. Great proposal writing doesn’t fabricate the message and the proof points out of nothing. It requires information about what messages matter to the customer and the details to substantiate those messages. What defines “What it will take to win?” for a given pursuit? It shouldn’t be things your proposal writer just made up based on what they saw in the same RFP all of your competitors have. Proposal writers merely help articulate your messages based on the information you provide. Closing your leads with a winning proposal requires your lead generation and pursuit staff to deliver an information advantage to your proposal writers. But what information is that? And where can you get it? Winning a pursuit starts with research. And that research starts by asking the right questions. Those questions should form the basis of your pre-proposal pursuit process. When we created the MustWin Process, we created Readiness Reviews to assess your progress toward answering those questions, to ensure that you develop an information advantage sufficient for winning. When we moved that process online and created MustWin Now, we made it even easier to collect the answers and turn them into something that can drop right into the proposal. How to get started when you have a little advance notice See also: Proposal Startup Sometimes you are lucky to get a month or two’s notice of an opportunity to bid. It’s probably too late to get deep intel about the customer or the opportunity. Maybe you can scope out the competition, but you probably won’t be able to do a very deep assessment, or even identify all of the players. You may need to jump right into finding potential teaming partners, with limited intel and opportunities. You have very little time for research and the customer is far less likely to share anything of substance with you that they don’t share with everyone bidding. You need to focus more on what matters about the information you have. What matters about it that could impact what you have to say: • In the technical proposal? • In the management proposal? • About your staff? • About your experience? • About your qualifications? Don’t drill all the way down to everything you should say. Don’t try to write the sections. You can’t finish the wording of the proposal until you have the wording of the RFP. But you can figure out things that matter about each of these sections and determine how you should position against what matters to the customer. This will be a huge accelerator when proposal writing starts and will provide the information the proposal writers need to turn a simple compliant response into a compliant response that will be better than your competitors. How to get started with no advance notice When you start the proposal at RFP, you have to work with the information you already have. But what is that? And how many people can contribute to it? This is another place where you need to ask the right questions. Most of them won’t get answered, because you don’t have time for research. But you still need to ask. However, those question are a bit different from when you are starting with advance notice. You need to ask questions that: Don’t require research. They should be questions about what you know instead of what you can find out. Are specific to the proposal. These are things like what past performance references should you use, what staff will be bid, who is on the team, etc. You also need to know what matters about the answers. Think in terms of the “So what?” test. If you have the name of the project manager you intend to bid, so what? What matters about having that person to the customer? One of the ways we enhanced the MustWin Process after we launched it was to add Proposal Input Forms. We created them by modifying our Readiness Review questions to meet the needs described above. How to turn what you know into a winning proposal What do you do with this information once you’ve gathered it? You shouldn’t assume that proposal writers will be able to read it, assess it, and remember to incorporate it everywhere it can have a positive impact while writing a response to all the RFP requirements. What you should do is design things so that the answers drop right into your proposal content plan. Instead of an assignment to write whatever should go under a heading, you should create a proposal content plan that guides proposal writers to use the information you’ve gathered. You can think of proposal writing as coming in two parts. The response and what matters about it. Your content plan should contain guidance like: Address the requirements in section... Make sure you emphasize… [this thing that matters to the customer] Explain how our approach to… will result in… [this thing that matters to the customer] Demonstrate how the way we… addresses… [this issue that matters to the customer] Even better, you can reverse them to guide your proposal writers to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective. Your proposal writers can come up with the words, if you give them the prompts in a form that they can use like a checklist to make sure they don’t overlook anything. That is what a proposal content plan does for you. And by answering the right questions to surface what matters, you’ll have more awareness of how to write sentences like these than you would have if you don’t itemize what you know. Or said another way, your win probability will go way up because you’ll be better using what you know in ways that make your proposals matter more to your customers. By moving the proposal process online, what we’ve done with MustWin Now enables you to not only easily answer the questions and collect the answers, but also to allocate those answers to the proposal outline. In fact, we’ve added a tool that enables you to turn your answers into proposal win strategies and themes, and then allocate those to the proposal outline and then automatically generate a proposal content plan. As soon as the cross-referencing is done, you have a content plan. And you can then click through to each section and add even more guidance. The result is that your proposal writers start creating the narrative proposal with everything they need to write a great proposal on the very first draft.

monthly_2016_02/ABetterWaytoFigureOutWhatShouldGoIntoYourProposal_pdf.c790792a67c99347023fc7e1004073cf

When you subtract the companies that don’t bother writing down their strategic plans and the companies that write them down but leave them sitting on a shelf, what you have left are the companies that usually win. Having an effective strategic plan won’t guarantee that you win, but it does mean that you will be more focused, better thought through, and as a result the odds will skew in your favor. Over the long run, having the odds in your favor leads to consistent growth. It's not a question of whether you think strategically, but when you think strategically that makes the difference. If you only think about your strategic plan once a year, it is more likely to sit on shelf. It is also more likely to devolve into just being a budgeting exercise that sets the target numbers for the year. Everything else is given lip service or ignored until next year. Strategy becomes defined as a once a year activity, and never makes it into the corporate culture. If you only think about strategy at the beginning of your bids, you are more likely to lose your corporate identity. Doing this makes strategy about your bids instead of long term positioning. It also makes the strategy change from bid to bid. The company becomes about being whatever it will take to win the next bid. It also makes bidding more opportunistic because there is no filter or criteria to determine which bids to pursue, other than the whim of the moment. The companies that win through strategy make thinking strategically part of everyday life for their staff. And the best part is that it really doesn’t take any more work than creating a strategic plan once a year. It can become part of your culture and the way your company does things. It’s really the only way to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are two alternative approaches that we’ve used to help companies become more strategic: See also: Strategic planning Update monthly instead of annually. Instead of creating a whole new strategic plan once a year, try breaking it down into twelve topics. Then just do one topic a month. We’ve guided companies through implementing this approach. Each month the company is thinking about a different topic related to their strategic plan. They have a whole month to consider and document it, and it’s easier to work into their schedules than doing the whole plan at one time. The way we do this is to first finalize the twelve topics and what they need to include. Then each month, we facilitate a meeting at the beginning of the month to make sure everyone understands the issues and then create assignments. We hold a review in the middle of the month to ensure the strategies are the right strategies, and we set a deadline at the end of the month to complete the assignments. It only requires about two hours of our time each month, but the results transform a company into one that is constantly thinking strategically. The long term positive impact this has had on our customers far exceeds the impact when we win a proposal for them. It’s also a concept that companies can easily implement themselves. But there is value in having an outside facilitator and in having an outsider asking difficult questions and challenging you to improve your strategies. Update quarterly instead of annually. We have a few customers that like to hold quarterly off-site management meetings and have asked us to be involved. If we divide the strategic plan into four chapters, we can create homework assignments for people to complete in between the meetings. At the quarterly meetings we review the updates and discuss their implementation. It’s not as constantly in-your-face as doing it monthly, but it’s better than once a year and works well for collaborative companies that like to shut down for a day each quarter and think about the big picture. It helps to turn your strategic planning document into tools that people use to facilitate execution. If you define strategic targets, then supplement the explanation of why those are your targets with a checklist that turns them into bid criteria. If you want the company positioned in certain ways, give them sample themes to use in your proposals and marketing collateral. This will help bridge the gap between strategy and performance. It will also turn the strategic plan into an asset that makes it easier for people to do their jobs. This is ultimately the best way to ensure that it doesn’t sit on a shelf and actually gets implemented. When you conduct strategic planning on a more regular basis, have regular assignments, and turn the document into a tool, you subtly change the culture of the company. What, where, and how people pursue bids becomes more focused. The company develops an identity. People know how to position the company in various circumstances and do it more consistently. More people spend more time thinking about strategic issues. The result is that instead of making it up as you go along to win the next bid, the company gets into the right position with a more focused message that is better supported. That is how you become a company that wins through strategy.

Companies misdiagnose their problems all the time. They often see a problem, they try to fix it, and end up struggling because they don't realize they are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause. Sometimes the real cause goes all the way back to their approach, or lack thereof, to strategic planning. It's easy to get caught up in the daily routine of doing what seems to make sense in the moment, following along with what you think should be done and what you see other people doing. The problem with this is that why you do things is more important than what you do. If your attention just goes from problem to problem, you may never get to the strategic issues that are causing all the problems. And if you don't even recognize the flawed strategies at the root of your problems, then when your fate comes to be you may have no reason why it turned out that way. To avoid these horrible fates, it's not enough to create a strategic plan once a year that sits on a shelf. It has to be an effective plan that people use like a tool. See also: Strategic Planning Examples of how ineffective strategic planning can doom you to a horrible fate When companies don't do effective strategic planning, they: Become the kind of company that bids anything. One of the things a strategic plan should do for you is provide the criteria that define what the company wants to bid. If you are bidding anything, it’s because there is nothing telling you not to. Or more accurately, nothing telling you what criteria an opportunity must fulfill, in order to be worth pursuing. Without specific criteria that are used like a filter, companies often behave as if they are incentivized to bid everything they find. The reality is that they never reach their full potential because their experience, staffing, resources, and qualifications end up being a random collection that was chosen for them, instead of a strategically chosen collection that positions them for market dominance. End up with no differentiators. What strategic planning does is define the differentiators the company should develop in order to achieve its market goals, and provide new business targets that will enable it to develop and reinforce those differentiators. When everybody is free to define the company’s identity to be whatever they think will win each new proposal, the result is that every bid carries a different message and the company's growth is directionless. By being everything to everybody, they end up being nothing special. Can't come up with good themes for their proposals. Most proposal teams start from scratch trying to figure out their message, when they should be starting from a playbook called a strategic plan. They should be referring to the strategic plan for descriptions of how the company should be positioned in various circumstances and then applying that to their proposals. Another outcome when companies don't do this is that their messaging depends on who wrote the proposal. Don’t create any barriers to entry for competitors. When you have a wide variety of customers and business lines, you end up with no real depth and no barriers to entry that would prevent other companies from competing with you. By strategically developing and reinforcing your differentiators, you increase the level of difficulty for other companies to steal your customers and prevent your growth. Run out of money chasing low quality leads. If you don’t strategically apply a filter to what you bid, then it’s easy to wake up and realize you have no budget left to pursue more leads, because you wasted it all chasing low-hanging fruit that turned out to be the most competitive kind. Now you have no wins, and no budget to go after better leads. You end up having to go after new leads in panic while pinching pennies instead of being in an advantageous position to beat your competitors. Graduate their size standards without having a reason for companies to continue to team with them. Companies often realize that they need to be strategic when they are about to exceed their small business size standard. Once they cross that line, they need to have strong reasons for companies to team with them. But those reasons (customer relationships, technical capabilities, infrastructure, etc.) take time to develop and by then it’s usually too late. Get stuck with the work more strategic companies avoid. Strategic companies have higher win rates. Opportunistic companies usually lose when they compete with them. What this really means is that the bids the opportunistic companies usually win are the ones that the strategic companies didn’t want. This usually translates into high risk and low margins. Opportunistic companies have more risk, lower win rates, and are less profitable than strategic companies as a result. Become limited to competing on price. If you don’t have a competitive advantage or a strong value proposition, all you can do is compete on price. If you are Walmart, you can grow a business through high volume and low margins. If you are competing against Walmart, then good luck. However, your overhead is too high. You aren’t Walmart. Suffer from overhead rates that creep higher and higher. One of the things strategic planning does for you over time is create economies of scale that help to keep your overhead down. When you are spread out with lots of different customers, lots of different business lines, and no economies of scale, your overhead will creep up over time making it more and more difficult to compete on price. Miss positive trends and end up stuck in negative ones. A key part of strategic planning is choosing where to go next. Opportunistic bidding is about ending up some place that looks comfortable (but never is). Opportunistic bidding results in jumping on trends that are fading. A trend that is fading is a declining market. When you go from one to the next, it makes it even harder to break away from opportunistic bidding and become strategic. Let their contracts define them, instead of defining themselves to attract more contracts. Whatever contracts you win define the composition of your company's staff, its capabilities, and its references. Without a strategic plan, a few years down the road you'll have a random collection of projects. Who knows what company you will be? And while you may think you're building qualifications for future bids, the reality is you're building a weak foundation that won't support what you want to build and are more likely to end up with a pile of rubble than a palace. Occasionally get lucky, convince themselves that they’re smarter than they are, and never are able to repeat it. Sometimes an opportunistic company shows up when a customer is ready for a change and gets lucky. This makes it easy to convince themselves that what they are doing is working and that their insight is so good they don’t need formal strategic planning. They win just enough business to get by to convince themselves of how smart they are and to reinforce their bad habits. But they don’t prosper and they don’t have the strength to weather bad business cycles. When budgets are rising they can get by. When budgets are being reduced, they are the first to wither. Realizing a better fate requires more than a quick fix The biggest problem with the horrible fates that await companies that don't do effective strategic planning is that the only cure is to stop how you are bidding now and bid strategically. This can be very disruptive and it's hard to get your staff who have been trained into bad habits to go along with it. It can even result in a drop in business for a year or two while you make the investments needed to be a strategic company in the future. When companies start to realize that they've grown like weeds and it's holding them back, they often try to implement better bid decisions. The problem is that better bid decisions aren't something you can just do. They are one of the the end products of strategic planning. You can't just wake up and start doing better. You have to rethink everything. Remember, it's not the things you do that matter, it's why you do them. Unfortunately, by that point the problem won't be your ability to think strategically. The problem will be that all of your internal processes, the way your staff goes about doing their jobs, and even your corporate culture will all work against trying to do things strategically. Failure to have the courage to face this pain only means that your fate will get worse. It's far better never to let yourself even get into that position.