Carl Dickson

Not everyone can write. And people who write well in other areas may not write great proposal copy. The law of averages means that not even every proposal specialist is exceptional. So how do you win using people who are not great proposals writers? First, you should start thinking in terms of contributions instead of sections. Just as there are many ingredients that go into a winning proposal, there can be many contributors. And a contribution to the proposal doesn’t necessarily have to involve any writing at all. Some contributors may be technical subject matter experts (SMEs). Others might be proposal specialists or other kinds of specialists. There is an ongoing debate about whether it is better to train SMEs to write proposal copy, or to pair them up with a proposal specialist who interviews the SME and writes the copy. We think the right answer for any given company depends on the organization, the skills of their staff, and their availability. See also: Winning But regardless of the approach you take, there are some things you can do to get more useable content out of each contributor. The way we approach proposal writing is to start by figuring out what all the ingredients should be. We use a methodology we developed called Proposal Content Planning that is fully described within PropLIBRARY. It guides people to not only identify what they need to write about, but how they should write it. It enables you to collect and pass instructions to the author(s). This creates an opportunity to reach out in different ways to all potential contributors. You can ask people who have had customer contact to address things like customer preferences and what matters from their perspective. You can ask technical SMEs to address why the approach they recommend is the best alternative in addition to what that approach is. Someone might contribute a sentence, someone else a paragraph. From others you might want raw data, a chart, a graphic, or just a list of steps or bullets. A Proposal Content Plan can even function like an interview that is conducted on paper. Responses can be rough or finished copy, depending on the capability of the person contributing. You can even go back and forth for follow-ups or bring in another person to add to it or finish it. What makes it work is that each person knows what is expected of them. Asking someone, especially a non-specialist, to write a proposal section without defining your bid strategies, positioning, customer intelligence, and other details is just asking for trouble. That’s how companies get to their proposal review and have to start over. But even when you have defined them, you need something to bring them all together so that the writer can incorporate everything. A Proposal Content Plan contains the instructions that define your expectations. If all you expect of someone is to answer a question, provide the question. If you expect them to share insight about a topic or describe something, be specific about what you want to get back from them. When you insert instructions into a Proposal Content Plan, make sure you phrase it in a way the receiver will understand. If you are dealing with technical SMEs, instead of asking them to explain things from the customer’s perspective, you might want to ask them how the customer will be impacted, what the customer will get out of it, or why the customer should care about it. In addition to using something like Proposal Content Planning to enable you to deal with contributions instead of drafts, you should also separate designing the offering from writing about it. Designing the offering by writing about it is just asking for re-write after re-write while you search from the right offering only to run out of time before you find it. There is a reason why engineers do not build bridges by writing narrative prose about them. You should encourage your technical SMEs to plan and validate what they are going to offer to meet the customer’s specifications before you start describing it in writing. They can use diagrams, blueprints, data sheets, design processes, storyboards, checklists, forms, or whatever they prefer to identify the components of what you will offer. Only after you have validated that it’s the right solution --- that it’s cost competitive and compliant with the RFP requirements --- should you describe it in narrative writing. And when you do, it shouldn’t be a simple description, but rather an explanation that shows the customer what they will get out of it and why it’s the best alternative. The last step will be to transform what you have into something that incorporates your bid strategies, is optimized against the evaluation criteria, and is written from the customer’s perspective. This is what will take your proposal from being merely compliant to being exceptional. It is what you need to outscore your competition and win. Maybe your SMEs are up to that kind of writing, maybe not. Maybe your proposal staff will produce something exceptional, maybe they’ll be struggling to meet deadlines and only produce something compliant. But when you implement Proposal Content Planning, you can see what they were supposed to do. And you can assess whether what they produced is what it was supposed to be. Instead of expecting contributors to intuitively guess at what an exceptional proposal might be, you can actually instruct them to combine the components of the offering with the description of what the customer will get out of it into a narrative that is about the customer and shows why your offering is the best alternative when looked at from the customer’s perspective. Instead of expecting people to just somehow know (and all agree!) on what a good proposal is, you can identify the parts and how they should be assembled. And that is something your technical SMEs should be to able wrap their heads around more easily than writing something that “sells.”

These tips are not about doing the same things a little better or more efficiently. They are not about which steps you should follow or which steps you can leave out. These tips are about changing the fundamentals to maximize your chances of winning with the resources that you have. See also: Proposal management 1. Figuring out what to write takes longer when you do it by writing and re-writing. If you jump into writing your proposal and then review it, you’ll find you overlooked things. Or you’ll find that it’s based on what you wanted to say instead of what the customer needs to hear. You’ll try to fix it by making the smallest changes possible. And then review it again. And find more things to fix. You’ll keep doing this, never finding satisfaction, until you run out of time and submit what you have instead of what the proposal should have been. It ends up being faster to start by thinking through what the proposal should be before you start writing. People often say that because their team is so small, they don’t have time for a lot of planning. But the truth is that small teams need planning the most. They just don’t have the resources to make an attempt and then do it over to get it right. 2. Make discovery of what to write about easy. It takes longer to figure out what to write about than it does to write it. The best way to accelerate things is not to focus on the writing, it’s to focus on figuring it out quicker. Figuring out what should go into a proposal is a process. It can be made checklist simple, and there are ways to accelerate it. Most organizations focus on recycling the text, which is just a quicker variation of #1 above. Instead, you should accelerate figuring out what should go into your proposal, and what your bid strategies should be. Once you know them, you can turn writing into a simple process of elimination. Time for planning should be balanced against time spent re-writing. Spending half of the time available planning is not the same as losing half the time you have for writing.Spending half your time planning and half of it writing is better than spending half your time writing and half of it re-writing over and over until you run out of time and submit whatever you’ve got instead of what it will take to win. 3. Focus on enabling people to check their own work instead of reviewing and re-writing. Writers should be working from the same criteria the reviewers will use later. This will enable them to aim for the right target. But it also means that you can’t ignore how reviews are done and leave it up to the reviewers to make it up as they go along. This in turn means that establishing the criteria for reviews before the writing starts is more important than the reviews themselves. Especially when you are short staffed. If you are short staffed and the writers expect the review process to randomly create change (more work) that they can’t anticipate, they will undermine the review system. However, when you give them the same criteria that will be used in later reviews, you give them a tool that will help them write more quickly and with more confidence. 4. Separate figuring out what to offer from what to write about. Because your offering must comply with the RFP requirements, it is tempting to design your offering by writing to each requirement. This is a huge mistake. It means every design change spawns a re-write cycle. Designing by writing and re-writing will never be the most efficient approach. So first figure out what you are going to propose as your offering or approach. Do this separate from writing about it. Review your offering or approach for compliance with the specifications. Review your offering or approach for price competitiveness. Review your offering or approach to make sure all of your stakeholders agree. Then write about it. 5. Have the answers you need when the questions get asked. This sounds simple, but it requires the ability to predict the future. Since no one can reliably do that, you have to anticipate everything you possibly can. During the proposal you will make dozens of trade-off decisions. How will you know which trade-off is best? In every part of the proposal, you will want to emphasize the things that matter most to the customer. How will you know what they are? Ultimately you want your proposal to score the highest during the evaluation process. What is that process? Those who anticipate best and have answers to at least some of these questions will have a huge competitive advantage over those who do not. Those who don’t have the answers will have to do last minute research, try to work around what they don’t know, and endure extra re-writes as people try to cope with a lack of information. A streamlined flow of the right information can not only make it easier to get by with fewer people, but can also give a smaller team an advantage over a larger one. It can also enable beginners to beat more experienced professionals. 6. Wear multiple hats but don’t drop any balls. As humans, we like each person to have a role. But small teams can’t dedicate a person to each role on a proposal. Sometimes the business developer is the capture manager and the proposal manager. And sometimes the lead writer as well. Sometimes that makes sense, and sometimes it does not. The trick is to define the roles functionally. If you know the responsibilities for each role, then when one person has to wear multiple hats, they know everything they have to cover. If balls get dropped, it will be because you asked them to wear too many hats. But balls should never be dropped because someone overlooked something. 7. Be decisive. Indecision is a huge time waster. A major cause of indecision is a lack of information. See #5 above. When it’s time to make a decision, the decision should be made quickly. The fewer the resources you have to make up for time spent deliberating, the more important it becomes to decide quickly. Making decisions and then revisiting them is also a form of indecision. So when you decide something, make sure you stick to it. This also means you should ensure that your key players are not commitment shy.

To write a proposal, you must overcome eight challenges. You can’t avoid them. You can’t skip any of them. You just have to face them. To help out, we’ve included links to many other articles we’ve written that are relevant to the individual challenges: See also: Winning Complying with the RFP. First you have to read it and understand it. Then you have to cross-reference all the requirements across the various sections. Even if your assignment is for a single section, there may be requirements in other sections that are relevant, especially the evaluation criteria. Achieving RFP compliance is part using the customer’s terminology and keywords, part cross-referencing, and part understanding their evaluation process. Cross-referencing can be tricky and often requires interpretation. Figuring out what to write about. Writing is easy. Knowing what to write about is hard. If you want to win, it’s important to avoid the temptation of starting from another proposal. Once you know what should go into the proposal, writing it is pretty straightforward. What we do is follow a process that quickly guides people through considering everything that should go into a proposal and sets them up with a plan for writing it. Figuring out how to say what you want to say. Some people get stuck in the mechanics of putting the words together. They are sure how it’s supposed to sound. We usually pay little attention to style. But we pay a lot of attention to whether it is simply descriptive or whether it says something that matters from the customer’s point of view. The most important thing to accomplish in proposal writing is to make it reflect the customer’s point of view. What the customer sees on the paper should be what they need to get answers to their questions, complete their evaluation process, and be persuaded that you are the best alternative. You have goals to accomplish, terminology from the RFP to use, and have to put it in the reader’s perspective instead of your own. That can be difficult, especially for people new to proposal writing. But when we review proposals, we often see problems in proposals written by people with many years of experience as well. We publish lots of guidance on every aspect of proposal writing to help people find their voice. Figuring out what to offer. Whatever you do, don’t figure out what to offer by writing about it. This is a recipe for proposal disaster. Figuring out what to offer and figuring out what to write about should be done in parallel. Only after they have both been figured out and reviewed to ensure they aren’t likely to change should you start writing. Figuring out what to offer by writing about it does incredible damage to proposals. We have seen it cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars. Articulating your bid strategies. The truth is the bid strategies for the proposal should be figured out before the writers ever get their assignments. Bid strategies should be just one of the ingredients that go into what you need to write. If you get your assignment and it includes figuring out the bid strategies, you need to do that before you start writing or designing your offering. The proposal should prove the bid strategies. It’s difficult to write like that if you don’t know what they are. Meeting deadlines. Even when you know everything that should go into your proposal, getting it all down on paper before your deadline can make it a huge challenge. However, there is a difference between knowing the kinds of things that should go into a proposal and having a list ready to go for this particular proposal. The best way to accelerate proposal writing is to accelerate figuring out what to write and to have writers who understand how to write from the customer’s perspective. Figuring out what to write can be done as a part of a process that makes writing go faster, with much less risk than handing writers a copy of the RFP and telling them to have at it. Passing the review. Most companies review their proposals before they finish them. If you start focusing on winning your proposals when the writing starts, you are too late. You should focus on winning when you figure out what should go into your proposal, before the writing starts. You should focus on winning when you figure out your bid strategies and offering, before the writing starts. When you do, you’ll realize that in order to incorporate what it will take to win into your plans for the proposal, you’ll need answers to questions that should have been asked before the RFP even came out. The pre-RFP stage should be driven by what you will need to know to close the sale in the form of a proposal. That is when you really should have been focused on winning.

In business development, companies often have one person managing the customer relationship. All relationships are personal, so companies tend not to think about making them process driven. But this causes problems in business development because over the life of the pursuit, many people will get involved. Relationship marketing is not about having relationships. It’s about winning because of your relationships. For relationships to lead to business, they must be productive. The goal of the customer relationship is to supply what is needed to turn customer contacts into contract wins. This means it must produce the information that will be needed to win the proposal and accomplish certain goals. There are multiple stakeholders whose needs should be addressed. To actually accomplish what you need to be ready to win at RFP release you need to guide that relationship to ensure that it delivers what is needed to address everyone’s needs and to close the sale with a winning proposal. If you just leave it to people, then no matter how hard they work or how smart they are, the results will be hit or miss, uncoordinated, and ultimately unreliable. If one person owns the customer relationship, is the sales person, writes the proposal, and specifies what will be offered, there is no need for formal coordination. But once you have multiple people involved, you’ve grown beyond the point where business development is just about people. When you make it a people problem, what you see at most companies is: See also: Information advantage They get to RFP release feeling unprepared because they can’t answer some of the questions other stakeholders have in order to write a winning proposal They measure the strength of their customer relationship and progress towards being ready to win by how recently they’ve contacted the customer instead of what information they got out of those contacts Regular business development meetings are about status and not about discovering what it will take to win Those involved in business development disappear once the proposal starts Bid strategies and themes are not developed until the proposal starts or those that are developed before the proposal starts are abandoned The proposal team doesn’t know what matters to the customer and is not sure how to position what they are writing about When any of the dozens of trade-off decisions come up during the development of the offering or proposal writing, they don’t know which side of the trade-offs the customer prefers So what’s your score? How many of these occur at your company? How often do they occur when it’s your own recompete? If you think you have solid customer relationships but still have many of these issues, your relationships are not productive. The problem isn’t that people aren’t working hard enough to get the information, the problem is that a lack of structure is making results hit or miss and failing to deliver what stakeholders really need. In this environment, some have better luck than others. Some work harder and some work smarter. They can win by making the best use of what they know instead of having what they really need. This is enough for the business to continue operating, and maybe even to grow by a contract here or there. If it’s a big contract, they can convince themselves they know the recipe for success. A large percentage of the proposals you are competing against are made up by proposal teams without any real customer insight, often written by companies who are sure the strength of their customer relationship will win it for them. You can boost your win rate simply by being better than that. And the way you do that is to bring just enough structure to your pre-RFP business development efforts to ensure that you deliver the information that all stakeholders will need later to close the sale. This makes it more than just a people problem. You need to: Anticipate what information will be required to win Manage the relationship to obtain the right information and accomplish your other goals Coordinate with the other stakeholders about that information Communicate progress towards being ready to win as well as status Convert what you discover into a useable form If you leave business development to your people, you’ll get their best efforts, just like all your competitors. But if you take the path less followed and create a structured approach to discovering what it will take to win, and then convert what you discovere into a winning proposal to close the deal, your win rate will reflect it.

If your proposal lessons learned focus on steps in your process or pursuitpspecific things you should have done differently, you may be missing the big picture. Instead of asking “what can we realistically do to make things better next time” you should try asking “why did we end up where we did.” If you dig deep, you’ll probably find the cause happened long before the proposal even started. Whenever you have more than a few people working on a proposal, you have grown to the point where it takes more than just good people to get the job done. People are not enough. No matter how hard they try. Doing more by working harder breaks down at a certain size when you are trying to win. This is because you don’t need more effort or to do a better job of telling people what to do, better discipline, or for people to follow orders better. What you need are systematic approaches to things like collaboration, coordination, and quality assurance. You need people to: Know what to do Know how and when to do it Be able to work in synch with others Be able to tell when it’s been done right Checklists, systematic communication, just in time guidance, expectation management, and quality validation may be all that's needed for a bunch of individuals to work like a team. A team that is in synch and plays strategically will beat a collection of individuals, no matter how hard the individuals try. If you have a collection of people working on a proposal, you need to get them in synch and give them strategic direction so they can play like a team and beat the competition. See also: Proposal management Instead, what we see at most companies is: One person claims to have a process. It’s not fully documented. In reality it’s one person with a concept, making up the details as they go along. The result amounts to people being asked to do what they are told by the deadline. Process advocates wonder why everyone resists, or ignores, their instructions. Evangelists without any real authority must resort to pleading to gain buy-in. People go along with it only if it doesn’t conflict with their own priorities or vision. Management talks about the importance of the bid, without providing strategic direction. The proposal is staffed with people who happened to be available. It may not include anyone who actually knows the customer. Individuals write the sections they are assigned, with some trying really hard to deliver a good message. The collection of messages they produce is uncoordinated. There is no structure or criteria to determine what the right messages are, let alone get them in synch. There is no time to do anything about this before the proposal goes to an internal review. Few people worry about that because most have little or no message and merely address the minimum requirements, fulfilling their writing assignment with the minimum of effort. Management reviews the proposal late in the game and is surprised when it has no strategic direction or it differs from theirs. The do-over they require destroys what was left of any process being followed. So what’s your score? How many of these occur at your company? The problem isn’t that you aren’t telling people to do the right things or that people aren’t doing what they’re told. The problem is that you’ve outgrown your whole approach. In an environment like the one described about, some will have better luck than others. Some will work a little harder and some will work a little smarter. They can win by failing less than their competitors, and this is enough for the business to continue operating, and maybe even to grow by a contract here or there. If it’s a big contract, they can even convince themselves they know the recipe for success, and continue doing what they’ve always done. Because so many companies go down the path where the approach to proposals amounts to little more than assigning some people, a large percentage of the proposals you are competing against will be last minute do-overs, with little or no message that’s substantiated in the proposal. They are uncoordinated messes that only have a chance at winning because the customer has to pick someone and they might just accumulate enough points to win on price. The secret to having an above average win rate is to enable people to perform better than they would on their own. Think about what helps individuals perform better: Knowing what’s expected of them Knowing how to achieve it A little strategic direction Being able to work in systematic coordination with each other Quality standards and criteria that aren’t moving targets Answers to their questions If you leave it to your people, you’ll get their best efforts, just like all your competitors. But if you take the path less followed and create a systematic capability to win based on more than just people, your win rate will reflect it. PS: If you think you have all that because you’ve assigned smart people to it, you need to re-read the article.

You can't credibly claim thought leadership in a proposal. It’s too late. If the customer doesn't already think of you as a thought leader, what will they think about that unsubstantiated claim? At best it won't affect your evaluation score one bit. At worst it will hurt your credibility. Doesn't being a thought leader require providing leading thoughts? What does claiming leading thoughts and not providing any do for your image? Thought leadership is more about trust than knowledge and not at all about image. Simply claiming it can backfire. When you get to the proposal phase, instead of claiming thought leadership you must demonstrate thought leadership. The way you demonstrate it is through insight. And the only insight that matters in a proposal is that which impacts your evaluation score. How to demonstrate thought leadership in a proposal See also: Proposal Writing Insight means going beyond simply responding with something that addresses the requirements. Insight involves explaining what matters about the requirements and why your approach to fulfilling them has advantages that aren't obvious. It requires delivering on being innovative right there in the proposal instead of claiming to be innovative. When you can explain what matters about something instead of simply describing it, and point out things the reader didn't realize are important, that's insight. Your demonstrated awareness of things the reader didn't realize that will make them better off in ways no one else has thought of makes you an invaluable asset. This is why people want to work with real thought leaders. When you go beyond simply identifying a trend and explain what to do about it, that's showing insight. When you go beyond describing a problem and explain how to solve it, that's showing insight. When you explain why the best practices are insufficient and what to do in addition or instead, that's showing insight. Showing insight is about adding value by pointing out things that matter to the reader that the reader hadn't thought of. This is how a thought leader demonstrates value. This is what makes thought leadership important in proposals. The customer needs the vendor to help them realize the value being proposed because the company is the only one with the insight for how to achieve it. Thought leadership like this can make a company the customer's best alternative. In a field of competing proposals, where they all describe their approaches because that is what the RFP asked them to do, a thought leader will not simply describe, but will explain why their approaches matter. In a field of competing proposals, a demonstrated thought leader has an advantage and earns the customer's trust. Claiming thought leadership without showing insight is just being a salesperson trying to sell something. And the customer knows it. Becoming a thought leader without claiming to be one For a thought leader, “why” you do things is more important to the customer than “what” you do. “Why” shows that you have good judgment and deliver value. "Why" shows that you are trustworthy and reliable. "Why" demonstrates your value instead of merely claiming it. If all you do is describe “what” you do, then you have shown that you can follow directions and the customer will get what they ask for. But you haven’t shown any value beyond that. "What" you will do shows that you have a plan. But we all know how long a plan lasts. "What" might be good enough for a customer who's not worried about the risks or only wants you to do what you are told. But if the customer needs something they don't understand, is depending on the outcome, and is concerned about things going wrong, focusing on "why" is how you win. It doesn’t cost you anything more to explain “why.” By explaining “why,” you show the customer that you can deliver greater value than those who simply explain “what” they will do. By explaining "why," you can even beat competitors with more experience if they merely say "what" they will do. If all they do is cite the fact that they have experience without explaining "why" that experience matters, you have an opportunity to beat them. When everyone else writes about "what" they will do, if you write about "why" you do it that way, you become the thought leader. For vendors to become thought leaders, they must earn the customer’s trust through their insight. Some types of bids require more trust than others. When the customer is purchasing a commodity, it barely matters who supplies it. But when the customer needs a solution, they must be able to trust that you will be able to deliver, often with insufficient time, information, or unexpected complications. The higher the risk of the project, the more the customer must trust its vendors. Thought leadership and trust go hand in hand. When the customer requires a vendor with solid judgment and awareness of the issues, they tend to look more favorably on thought leaders. But they won’t select you because you self-identify as a thought leader. They will select you because in your proposal you demonstrated good judgment when you explained “why” you chose the approaches you did. They will select you because when something unexpected happens, they can trust you to figure out what to do about it on their behalf. When the customer is concerned about risk (and all customers are concerned about risk), and they have to pick between one vendor who describes what they will do for their price, and another vendor who describes why they chose their approach, what matters about it, and what the customer will get out of it for their price, which vendor do you think has the advantage? A thought leader may not even need to describe their approach in as much detail as their competitors to have the better approach. Extra detail that is not insightful doesn't demonstrate much. However, a demonstration of good judgment regarding an approach can eliminate the need for details that don't ultimately matter. Using thought leadership to win your proposals If you started the proposal at RFP release and have a weak customer relationship, but are trying to somehow win the pursuit in the proposal phase, then demonstrating thought leadership can be how you do it. The customer needs more than just claims to select you. They don't know you, but they must learn to trust your judgment in order to select you. They need more than procedures and qualifications to trust your judgment. Demonstrate your judgment by focusing on what matters and why the approaches you selected make you their best alternative. When the customer is following a formal evaluation process, scoring your proposals against written evaluation criteria, and filling out forms that justify their selection, a proposal that demonstrates thought leadership has the advantage. The reasons "why" you do things make completing the evaluator's justification an easy copy and paste. They score better than descriptions of what you do. The vendor said they will do what we asked them to do never shows up as an award justification. Being a thought leader during the proposal phase is very different from what people think of as how you become a thought leader during the pre-proposal marketing phase. This is because marketing is about how you get introduced to the customer whereas the proposal is the last thing you say to them before they make their selection. During marketing, if the customer is intrigued, they may talk to you to learn more. You don't have to prove it upfront. However, during the proposal, when you're trying to close the sale, the last thing you say shouldn’t be an unsubstantiated claim. Instead, the proposal should demonstrate what you'll be like to work with after award. The best way to become a thought leader is to do it without ever claiming to be one or using the words "thought leader." If you truly are a thought leader, the customer will use those words on their own in their award justification. If the reader doesn't conclude that your insight is superior when they read your proposal, this will never happen.

In business development, thought leadership is really about trust. That is why thought leadership is best demonstrated, and why simply claiming it can backfire. Thought leadership is about who you trust to guide you through the issues and find solutions. If you want to be a “thought leader,” you should: Show insight that helps your customers achieve their goals in ways they may not have thought of on their own Demonstrate customer service before the project even starts Do your homework so that what you say demonstrates that you are informed Not only identify the trends that could impact the customer, but help them figure out what to do about them In business development, thought leadership requires two-way communication. Thought leadership is not only about what you have to say, it’s also about how well you listen. You must listen so that what you say and recommend will be relevant to the customer. A thought leader who is not relevant is not a thought leader in the customer’s eyes. Relevance is also critical to being a thought leader. In business development, relevance is often a matter of timing. You should anticipate what the customer needs to know so that you provide the right guidance at the right moment. If you make recommendations before the customer is prepared to act on them, it will be premature. If you make recommendations after the customer has reached a decision, they will not want to revisit the topic. See also: Relationship marketing You can see how this works during the pre-RFP acquisition process. If you try to influence the RFP when the customer is trying to decide which the best contract vehicle will be, they won’t even know what to do with your recommendations. And no one will want to listen if you try to recommend a different contract vehicle when the customer has already determined their acquisition strategy and is getting ready to release the RFP. However, if you are there to help them figure out what contract vehicle will best meet their needs for what they are trying to procure, and if it requires an RFP you are there with recommendations for the specifications that they can copy and paste right into the RFP, you will be demonstrating: The kind of customer service they can look forward to Your ability to anticipate problems and solve them before they become issues That you listen, understand your customers’ needs, and do your homework That you add value If you want to show the kind of insight that will also make you a thought leader, your recommendations need to anticipate and solve problems that the customer would have struggled with on their own. If the customer doesn’t have the expertise to write the RFP or isn’t sure how to resolve the trade-offs that are inherent in specifying what they want to procure, this is a golden opportunity for you to help them figure it out. If the customer is facing change but is not sure what form it should take, this is a golden opportunity for you to help them figure it out. When you are consistently there, with the right advice at the right moment, then you are the contractor that the customer goes to for answers. You are the contractor that the customer trusts to talk about their issues because they know you’ll have something constructive to say that will help them achieve their goals in spite of the challenges. Whether you use the label “thought leader” or not, being a thought leader can put you in the best possible position to win your customer’s business.

Almost everything I learned about proposal writing early in my career turned out to be wrong. My success with proposal process and techniques started when I grew confident enough to abandon what I had been taught. But what has really advanced my career has been the subjects I learned about while writing proposals. If I had known about them at the start, my early proposals would have been much better. Here are six subjects that I learned about and how they impact the way I do proposals. As those of you who are already experts in them will see, I am not an expert. I know enough to write about them, not enough to get a job doing them. But that just goes to show that learning a little about these things can help you write better proposals. See also: Great proposals How help desks work. When delivering services, customers expect things to go wrong. They often want to know what you are going to do about it. That’s where being able to describe issue tracking, assignment, escalation, follow-up, reporting, and related matters is really useful. If you take a proposal that doesn’t require a help desk, and insert help desk techniques without ever using the term “help desk,” you can sound really sophisticated in your approach to customer service. ISO 9000. ISO 9000 was a quality methodology that I got some exposure to. Since then they’ve upgraded and changed the numbers. But that doesn’t matter. What matters are the basics. If you have a process, you need to be able to prove that you’ve followed the process. Sign-offs, forms, checklists, etc. can be used to demonstrate that you are delivering the way you said you would. Auditing is also necessary to verify that people have implemented a process. External auditing is even better. Quality must be defined so that you can validate an end product by measuring it against the definition/specifications. How will participants know if what they’ve done is free of defects? How does the organization know that what participants have done is free of defects? Progress must also be measured. You can take any process and if you define quality and add validation and proof of process execution, you can make it better. Six Sigma. Another quality methodology. You are better off building quality in at the beginning than by verifying it at the end. Everything is a matter of statistics and measurements. Hat tip to Peter Drucker who said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Elementary school rubrics. When I went to school we didn’t get rubrics. Grades were subjective. When my kids brought home rubrics I had no clue what they were. Rubrics tell a student exactly what they have to do on an assignment to get an “A,” a “B,” a “C,” etc. What a genius concept! I stole it and built it into our MustWin Process to solve the problem of proposal writers getting to a review and having the reviewers tell them it’s all wrong and to do it again. If you tell proposal writers what criteria their sections will be measured against, they can build the quality in from the beginning. But for it to work, you have to do it in enough detail to take most of the subjectivity out of it. If elementary school kids can have rubrics, proposal contributors can too. Capability Maturity Model. People don’t usually go from a total lack of process and quality systems to a full blown implementation in one step. Process improvement comes in stages. Get something in place that makes people’s lives easier, and then take them to the next level. Repeatability is something important to achieve. I mainly use what I learned here when implementing business development and proposal processes, but being able to describe the level of maturity in your operational processes can enable you to put some detail behind all those unsubstantiated claims about being “committed to the highest levels of quality.” Various engineering and lifecycle models. The systems development lifecycle (requirements, design, build, test, repeat or some variation) can be useful terminology whenever you have any kind of deliverables. Engineering methodologies are also useful. For example, they can enable you to describe in formal terms how you do an alternatives analysis. Being able to drop in a table that shows the possibilities along with the criteria you will use for assessing them and the grading system you will use for selection can make it look like you have a clear, objective, and verifiable approach to decision making. There are many, many methodologies that can probably help your proposal writing. As soon as I publish this article I’ll probably think of some I left out. I find it interesting that many of them work both to help you figure out what to write, and how to improve your proposal process.

You don’t have to be a proposal specialist to win. In fact, a non-specialist can easily beat a specialist. All you need to do is have a better understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences. That is more important than your proposal writing skills. Far more important. If you do a good job at gaining an information advantage regarding the customer’s needs and preferences, you can often win, even though you did a mediocre job of putting it in writing. But if you don’t have an information advantage, then you better do a great job on the proposal. And even then you’ll be at a disadvantage compared to someone whose offering will meet the customer’s needs better because they understand them better. The sweet spot is to have an information advantage and a great proposal. But that’s actually rare. Even for the specialists with lots of resources at their disposal. The specialists usually start off by complaining that they don’t have the information they need to work with. That’s why you have an opportunity to beat them. If you’re not a proposal specialist with a lot of experience, then you have to beat them by being more insightful about the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment. Play to your strengths. Your challenge is to gain an information advantage and then build a proposal around it. If you’re starting late, such as after the RFP has been released, the deck is already stacked against you. If you don't have a relationship with the customer before the RFP is released and can’t quickly develop an information advantage, you should consider not bidding. If you think you have a shot because the customer asked you to submit a proposal, then start asking questions. Lots of questions. If you can’t translate your customer relationship into an information advantage, then it’s a shallow relationship, and the opportunity may not be real either. If you think the customer likes you, the way to measure it is by how well you can turn it into an information advantage. If you think they like you, but they won’t share or discuss any insights about what they really need, then it doesn’t translate into any competitive advantage. In fact, anyone else who does have that insight has the competitive advantage over you. If you can gain the insight required to make it worth bidding, then it’s time to think about the proposal. If there is a written RFP with a formal evaluation process, it will drive the structure of the proposal. If there is no written RFP or if the evaluation is informal, then Don’t just start writing. In each section, you will have multiple goals, and you can’t anticipate them all until you’ve mapped them out. If you have a written RFP, you follow the outline suggested by the customer and tailor it for each evaluation according to their evaluation process. If the RFP is not organized according to a point by point or question and answer structure, you will probably need to cross-reference all of the RFP requirements to the sections of the proposal where they will be addressed. If there is no RFP then you should organize it according to how you anticipate the customer will make their decision. See also: Customer perspective Once you have the organization you need to think about all the things that should go into each section, like: Fulfillment of the requirements Win strategies and themes What matters to the customer What you are offering and why it’s their best alternative What the customer will get out of what you are offering Graphics, visual communication, and navigation aids When there is a written RFP with a formal evaluation, compliance with all of the customer’s requirements can be extremely important. Use their terminology and not your own. When the customer publishes written evaluation criteria, proposals are not read, they are scored. So carefully consider their evaluation criteria, and make sure that your response scores the maximum points. Everything you write should be put into the context of the customer and the competitive environment. Even if you do the same thing for every customer, you should position what you do differently. The things you do can have multiple results and benefits. For example, is the result of automation an improvement in speed, quality, or efficiency? Your proposal should reflect the customer’s preferences and how you want to position yourself against the competition. In addition, everything you write about should reflect the customer’s perspective and not your own. The easiest way to achieve this is to make every single sentence about what the customer is going to get out of whatever qualification, approach, or item you are writing about. You should avoid describing things, even when the RFP asks you to, and instead show the results of things. If you are starting most of your sentences with your company name, “we,” or “our,” you are probably writing about yourself instead of writing about what matters to the customer. If you are making bold, unsubstantiated claims like they do on television commercials, you probably aren’t writing from the customer’s perspective. Think about what the customer needs to hear in order to make their decision. That’s what you should focus on. When you write from the customer’s perspective and show insight about them and their requirements, what the customer reads will show how your offering is the best alternative for achieving the results they are looking for. Customers pay less attention to style than they do to picking the proposal that looks like it will give them what they want. That’s why your best chance for beating the competition is to start with an information advantage.

Most people are a mix of all three perspectives. This is especially true in organizations that don’t have someone assigned to each level. You will substantially improve your value if you can at least look at every issue from all three perspectives. People who like the comfort and security of staying within the box of their chosen level are not people needed to drive the organization to win. So what we’ve done is start with the Executive, Manager, and Worker’s perspectives, and then applied them to both business development and proposals. You can really see from the results, the different ways that people look at these functions and their roles in them. If you don’t have someone in your organization (regardless of their title) asking all of these questions, your organization’s ability to win business will be negatively impacted. That is because each organization has to strike the right balance. If a perspective is not present, then you can’t strike the right balance. Even when all three are present, it can be difficult to get them into the right balance. The Executive Perspective: What should we target? Where should I invest resources to get the best ROI? What should I expect? How can I influence events? What should the plan be? How do I measure progress? How do I know if the results are right? The Manager Perspective: How do I achieve my target? How should I coordinate my team? How do I execute the process or plan? How do I make sure everyone is doing what they should? The Worker Perspective: How do I complete my assignment? How am I required to coordinate with others? What process or plan should I follow? What am I supposed to do? Business Development See also: Roles The BD Executive Perspective: What customers and core competencies should we target? Is our pipeline healthy? Where should I allocate resources to improve our win rate? What is our contribution to the company’s strategic plan? How do we implement the company’s strategic plan? Are our bidding strategies profitable? What should we be doing to better position what we offer? How do I know if we are on track to be in position to win our pursuits? The BD Manager Perspective: How do I hit my numbers? Are the leads we’re finding valid and worth pursuing? Where should people prospect and how? What processes do I have to get people to follow? How should I flow down the strategic plan and corporate positioning to our pursuits? What plans and reports do I have to submit? How should I track process toward being in position to win and how do I verify everybody is doing what they should? The BD Worker Perspective: What numbers do I have to hit? How should I go about prospecting? What do I need to do to qualify each of my leads? What will it take to win each of my leads? What do I have to do to comply with our process? How do I know if I’m on track? What do I have to do to pass my reviews? Proposal Development The Proposal Executive Perspective: What bids should we anticipate? What do we need to do to be ready? What information do we need to flow into the proposal process? Where are we going to get it and how? How should proposals reflect the company’s strategic plan and positioning strategies? Does our process match our business needs? Where should we focus to improve our win rates? How should we allocate resources? How do we address issues that cross organizational boundaries? The Proposal Manager Perspective: What bids do I need to prepare winning proposals for? What resources do I have to work with? What information does the company possess that will impact the proposal? Who should I assign what? What can I do to maximize their effectiveness? What channels do I need to go through to coordinate with all of the stakeholders? What strategies and positioning will drive each bid? How do I apply our process to the particular bids I have to pursue? How do I balance process, resources, and my deadlines? What reviews should I plan for and how? How does it all get integrated into the final document? The Proposal Worker Perspective: What are my role, responsibilities, and assignments? How do I fulfill them? How am I required to coordinate with others? What process or plan should I follow? What am I supposed to do? What needs to go into it? When is it due? What is my role in the review process and how will I be impacted?

In our continuing series on how to do proposals The Wrong Way, we’ve seen the power that comes from doing the opposite of what the best practices say you should do. In the webinar we did last week on the topic, we showed 20 different techniques for doing proposals The Wrong Way. These techniques are for dealing with adverse circumstances where the best practices don’t apply. Use them inappropriately and they can cause you to lose. But if you have no choice and may otherwise be unable to submit anything, they can potentially save the day. Or at least let you submit something so that the loss isn’t entirely your fault. One of the benefits of learning how to do proposals The Wrong Way is that forever after, you will recognize when someone else is trying to pull those tricks on you. Most of the time, people do it subconsciously and not on purpose. But either way, you don’t want to see them in a proposal you are trying to win. So now we’re going to turn things around again and talk about what to look for when you are trying to win a proposal and some well meaning fool is taking a shortcut that can undermine your chances of winning. Learn to see what the writer is focusing on and question whether it is the right thing. Most of the techniques are forms of misdirection aimed at avoiding writing about what you don’t know. Are they: See also: Dealing with adversity Writing about intent and commitment instead of what they will actually do? Writing about experience instead of how they will fulfill the requirements? Writing about capabilities instead of results? Using the words “like, about, nearly, almost, more than, less than, etc.” to avoid commitment? Simply stating that they will comply with the requirements, without saying how? Positioning to hide their weakness, as in "being innovative and bringing fresh insights and new ideas" because in reality they don’t know the customer or their environment? Dropping in words and phrases they found using Google instead of showing real insight? Using things like “flexibility,” being a “partner,” or preparing for “all contingencies” as a way of being everything to everybody and hiding that they don’t know what the customer really wants? Redefining the requirement or limiting it with assumptions because they don’t know the real scope? Writing about things instead of actually identifying them? Using passive voice to hide that they don’t know how something actually happens? Planning to have a plan instead of actually saying what they will do? Focused completely on compliance instead of the customer’s goals? When you’ve used these techniques to cover your own lack of information or weakness, it becomes much easier to recognize them in someone else’s writing. That can help you get rid of them and replace them with something that will help you win. Turn the statements above around and you’ve got a good list of what you should write about in order to win.

This article is another in a series we've written on Doing Proposals The Wrong Way. They describe very powerful, but dangerous, techniques that turn the best practices on their heads. The most powerful proposal writing aligns what you are offering with the customer’s vision. The customer’s vision for themselves is about what they want to become. It tells you how they want to change. If you get their vision wrong, then you could very well be suggesting that they change in a way that is not what they want. This is not a recipe for winning. If you avoid the issue by not writing about how your offering relates to their vision of the future, then what you offer will not be compelling. It will not be a necessary part of that future. You will lose to a competitor who addresses that alignment. See also: Customer perspective So how do you write about the customer’s vision when you aren’t really sure what it is? You can get a glimpse from their website and by doing research, but unless you’re talking to them about it you’re probably not going to learn how they intend to change. It’s not the sort of thing people write down until they’ve turned it into a specific plan. Some customers may even have an internal consensus on their vision. The vision one person shares may be different from the vision the evaluator or decision maker has. If you think you’ll lose to someone who can write about how their offering supports the customer’s vision, but you don’t know enough about that vision to write about it yourself, then one option is to do your proposal The Wrong Way. If you don’t know the customer’s vision for themselves, then write about your vision for them. That’s right, ignore their vision and give them one of your own. If you paint a vision of their future that’s better than any alternatives they are considering, it will be extremely compelling and move your proposal to the top of the ones being considered. It’s hard to do this and be realistic. But it can be done. The reason it can work is that while sometimes the customer has recognized the need for change, they haven’t yet figured out how they should change. If you solve that problem for them, there’s a good chance they’ll select you to make it happen. Another reason it can work is Fear Of Missing Out. If your vision is that good and they can’t get it anywhere else, they’ll be missing out if they don’t select you. You can beat incumbents, larger companies, and better prepared competitors with this strategy. But it’s a long shot. There’s a good chance that your vision won’t take everything into account that the customer is aware of. If it conflicts in any significant way with their other considerations, instead of moving you to the top, it will move you straight to the bottom. It's a very high risk strategy. But then again, if you have stronger competitors who know the customer’s vision better than you do, you probably weren’t going to win anyway. This is not something you can do halfway, or water down. You either paint a bold, unique vision that’s only possible through your offering, or you describe how your offering best supports the customer’s vision. If you try to drop hints, allude to things without saying them directly, hedge your bet by offering them options or in any way make the vision appear optional, then it will be less compelling. Less compelling is no way to win, especially when someone else has the advantage. Customers sometimes pick vendors more for their vision than their offering. In a commodity market or in services where everyone is hiring from the same labor pool, your vision may be your only real differentiator other than price. An ordinary vision is not compelling. If you are going to ignore the customer’s vision and give them one of your own, it better be extraordinary.

This is an article about doing proposals The Wrong Way. That is what you have to do when you are required to submit a proposal your company is not prepared for and you don’t have the information you need to win it. With all the problems and weaknesses that you have to overcome, maybe your company shouldn’t be bidding it at all, but that decision isn’t up to you. The best practices are all about preparation and won’t help you in adverse circumstances like these. So you’ve got some challenges. It’s too late to fix your weaknesses, and you’ll just have to write around them. Ugh. That’s no way to win. It results in an evasive, unimpressive proposal. But sometimes that's all you can do. Sometimes, you just have to get something submitted and survive the experience. We feel your pain, and have been there ourselves, too many times. So here’s a list we put together with a dozen examples of how to take those weaknesses and turn them into strengths in your proposal: See also: Dealing with adversity If you lack relevant experience, explain how the experience you do have will give you unique insights. Instead of focusing on the quantity of experience, and who has more of it, focus on the relevance of your experience. Turn your experience into a strength that has prepared you for success instead of a weakness. If you don’t have the required staffing at the time of submission, then talk about how that enables you to right size the project or seek new expertise. If you do this well, you can turn your competitions strengths into a weakness by showing that their staffing is actually not what is needed. Insufficient knowledge becomes a strength when you focus on what you do know. Who, what, where, how, when, and why. Make your proposal about the ones you know and skip the rest. For this to become a strength, you must demonstrate that what you do know is critical for the success of the project. When you have options and aren't sure which to choose, you can still position as an expert on how to choose. Simply focus on both the pros and cons and leave the trade-offs unresolved. Show that you understand the issues and can help the customer make more informed decisions. The more insightful you can be about the trade-offs, the better your chances of making not knowing which to choose a strength. If you don't know anything about the customer's needs beyond what they've told you, you can still position as an expert in relevant matters. This becomes a strength when you can show the impact of your knowledge. What do you know that can affect the results? The bigger the impact, the more important your knowledge becomes and the more likely the customer will see it as a strength. If you can't be an expert, be experienced. If you can't be experienced, be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be capable. If you can't be capable, be compliant. If you can't be compliant, be fun. At each level, be a company the customer would like to work with. That is your strength. If you lack information about the customer and opportunity, position as being innovative (and risk conscious at the same time!). If you're not sure what your win strategies should be, steal your competitors' win strategies (or what you imagine they might be) and be more of whatever they are. If they are strong, steal their strengths. If you can't give the customer what they want, give them what they should want. Maybe they don’t know what they want and will like the way you describe it better. The relevance of your past performance is what you make of it. If you don’t have relevant past performance, that just means you haven’t thought hard enough about how the experience you do have is relevant. Just hope the customer goes along with your rationalization. If the customer does not know you, then make it all about reputation. Focus them on the fact that others know you and think well of you. Make the evaluation about your reputation so that they have to think about you. By thinking about you, they are getting to know you. Make them doubt how well they know the incumbent. If your weakness is time and you just don't have enough of it, focus on compliance. Roll as many RFP requirements into tables as possible. If you can't describe how you comply, then simply state the RFP requirements that you comply with. This can get you thrown out, but (especially when the proposal pages limit is much lower than the length of the Statement of Work and the evaluation criteria emphasizes price) sometimes you can get away with it. If all of that fails, then go all Sun Tzu and the Art of War on them. Instead of confronting on ground where you are weak, go somewhere else. Find ground where you have strength and make them come to you. If you have less technical capability, emphasize management, and vice versa. The trick is knowing when to do proposals The Wrong Way. If winning is your highest priority, you should do things the right way by preparing and following the best practices. If you do things The Wrong Way on a bid you think you have a shot at winning, it just might ensure that you lose instead. If the biggest risk you face is that you might miss your deadline or not have anything to submit, then doing things The Wrong Way may keep things from falling apart.

Enough of all these best practices already. While we write a lot about them, it’s a whole lot more fun to write about how to cheat. What do you call it when the best practices no longer apply? Worst practices? That's not right. Best practices for adverse circumstances? That's too long. We call it cheating. When you can't do proposals the right way, you have to do them the wrong way. You have to break the rules. You have to cheat. Sure, if you want to win you need to do everything you can to achieve the best practices. But what about when you’re starting late on a bid where you don't know the customer, aren't sure what to bid, can't get the information you need to write a winning proposal, have to bid because someone in authority says you have to, and it's all you can do just to survive the experience let alone win it. When people tell you that you should “no bid” that really doesn’t do you any good at all. It’s not like it’s your choice. When you're caught in a circumstance like this, the best practices aren't going to help. You have to know how to cheat. Remember, we're not talking about lying, breaking laws, failing to comply with regulations, or ignoring ethical standards. We’re talking about doing the opposite of the best practices. See also: Dealing with adversity If the best practices say: Avoid passive voice, but you aren’t sure who is going to do what, then embrace passive voice and use it on purpose. Be direct and specific, but you don’t have the information you need, then talk about numbers without providing any, have a plan to have a plan instead of providing the plan, and avoid commitment. Make sure you address the benefits of your approach, but you don’t know what matters to the customer, then just try to sound beneficial. Compliance is not enough and you should exceed mere compliance, but you have no idea how that will be achieved, then just cite examples from the past where you have exceeded compliance. Show insight into the statement of work beyond what’s in the RFP, only you don’t know anything about the customer or actual scope, then talk about the kinds of things you do instead of what you actually will do. This stuff is so much more fun to talk about than best practices. But first a word of warning. The worst possible outcome for a proposal specialist is not losing. It’s failing to submit the proposal on time. Cheating can help you make the submission on time. But if you cheat on a good proposal, you will probably ruin it. Cheating, by definition, means turning the best practices on their head. Cheating means turning your back on the best way to win, in order to get something submitted. If by some quirk of circumstances you cheat and win, that’s just luck. You can’t cheat on every proposal and be competitive. At least not against companies that are employing the best practices. On the other hand, when all the best practices in the world won’t save you, all you can do is cheat. Just have fun with it and don’t be consumed by the dark side.

Ordinary proposal writing is not competitive. Ordinary proposal writing fulfills the customer’s requirements. If you want an ordinary proposal, you can recycle something already written that fulfills the requirements. In competitive proposal writing, fulfilling the requirements only means that you get evaluated and compete against other companies that also fulfill the requirements. In competitive proposal writing, the reason why behind the requirements is more important than the requirement itself. In competitive proposal writing, what will result from the requirement’s fulfillment is more important than the requirement itself. In competitive proposal writing, context is everything. The reasons driving the requirements and the results desired are rarely the same, even when what is being procured is the same. The result is that every proposal is different. Every proposal has a different context. Consider the write-up for one of the most boring parts of a proposal, the “Organization” section within a Management Plan. If you just grab the corporate org chart and drop it in, you may have fulfilled the requirement, but you will not be competitive. Not only should the org chart be redrawn for every proposal, but the explanation of it should be re-written as well. Consider the following questions. See also: Reuse Does the RFP require you to name names? Does the RFP require a project level, corporate level, or both? Does the RFP require you to show where the customer fits in? Does the RFP require you to show points of contact? Does the RFP require you to show teaming partners? Does the RFP require you to show all staff? Where does the evaluation criteria provide you with opportunities to score points through how you depict your organization: technical capabilities, experience, management, quality, staffing, or something else? How does the customer’s unwritten requirements impact how the project should be organized? Does the customer prefer a flat chart or hierarchy? Would the customer prefer to see capability, functionality/roles, or qualifications? What does the customer like or not like about their previous vendor relationships that you can address in how you organize for this project? What matters to the customer? Is the customer concerned about authority or lines of communication? Does the customer seek partnership or control? Does the customer see the organizational chart as a demonstration of your functional capability? Is the customer concerned about scalability? Is the customer concerned about coverage? Does the customer care about the corporate level, project level, or both? What will your competitor’s organizational structure look like? How should you position your organization against your competitors? Do you still think you should just drop in a “standard” organizational chart? Can you see why the context matters more to the customer than the fact that you’ve provided an org chart as required? Can you see why every customer will be different? Can you see why even bids to the same customer often have a different context? If you think there is a lot to consider regarding the context of a boring organization write-up, imagine how important the context must be to other sections of the proposal. What should drive your response is what you want the customer to conclude about you when they review it. The answer to this will depend on the: Reasons why driving the customer’s requirements Customer’s preferences Competitive environment Customer’s desired results from the procurement Customer’s evaluation criteria Maybe you can start from an existing write-up and customize it. Or maybe having an existing write-up will prevent you from seeing when the context has changed enough that you should throw it out and create something specific to the context of this bid. It’s safe and easy to recycle something that is compliant. It’s just not competitive.

People sometimes struggle with addressing benefits when they write proposal copy. They stumble over what words to use and how to say things. One way to overcome this is to do away with most of the words. With a features and benefits table you focus on the key items and not sentence construction. And because they are visual and less wordy, they are friendly to the proposal evaluator as well. A features and benefits table itemizes the key elements of your approach or offering, and turns them into reasons why the customer should select your proposal. At first glance, they appear to be simple. They can consist of just two columns, one for the features and one for the benefits. All you have to do is list your features and then write a corresponding benefit to the customer for each. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It sounds easy until you try it. At some point when writing your benefits, you’ll start to realize that they sound like features. Or vice versa. And how many features should you list? How granular should they be? Should you add other columns? Should it be "Issues, Features, Benefits, Proof?" Should you include RFP references? Behind their deceptively simple appearance, features and benefits tables can lead to mind-numbing confusion. Just simply deciding whether something is a "feature" or a "benefit" can be challenging. So before you hurt your brain over whether something should go in the features or benefits column: See also: Technical Approach Start by defining what a “feature” is. Features are attributes of your offering. They are typically the things you do or offer to fulfill the customer's requirements. The best features are also differentiators, or things that no one else is likely to do or offer. Then define what a “benefit” is. A benefit in a proposal is what the customer gets as a result of the feature. While customers need to have their requirements met, the reason they issue a procurement is because they are seeking certain benefits. Once the requirements are met, they make their decision based on the benefits. If the word benefit troubles you, then think about what the impact of a feature will be or why it matters. Why does your approach or offering include that feature in the first place? Note that some things can be both a feature and a benefit. Speed is an example of something that can be a feature or a benefit. A new computer may have a faster processor. The new processor is a feature with the benefit being that your computer will be faster. But a faster process can also be a feature, with the benefit being that you’ll be more productive. What you include as a feature is less important than that the benefit, impact, or reason why it matters and is compelling to the evaluator. What best determines whether something should be a feature or a benefit is whether it is a requirement or whether it is a result that makes your offering better than your competitors’ offerings. Customers make their decisions based on what an offering will do for them. When they shop for features, it is because they know those features will meet their needs. If something fulfills a customer need, you should explain how or why in the benefits column. To make the right decision you have to understand the customer’s needs. It helps when you are responding to an RFP with written evaluation criteria. In the example above, if the customer is buying a computer and making their selection based on the specifications, then the speed goes in the benefits column because that is what the customer is looking for. If they are seeking to improve their overall systems and your approach might be better because it’s faster (making it a feature), then what the customer will get out of it is improved productivity (the benefit that is the reason they are interested in a new system). In addition to the basic two-column approach, there are other ways to format a “features and benefits” table. And sometimes, they make it easier to understand what goes in each column. Reasons to Select Us/Features of Our Offering. There’s no reason why you should limit yourself to the words “features” and “benefits.” You could also substitute words like “Results” or “Benefits to You.” Features/Advantages/Benefits/Proof. A feature is the attribute, an advantage is what it does, benefit is what the customer gets out of it, and proof is how you substantiate that. Requirements/Features/Benefits. You can include RFP references in the table to demonstrate compliance. This helps link your features and benefits to the RFP, making things easier for the RFP evaluator. It can also help make evaluating RFP compliance as simple as a checklist. You can even expand this one to be Requirement/Features/Benefits/Evaluation Criteria, to show the customer that you are not only compliant, but deserve to receive the best score according to their own criteria. Features and benefits tables (in whatever variation you choose) work best for proposals where you determine what to offer. If you are bidding a solution or a design, then features and benefits tables can make it easy to see the key aspects of what you are proposing and why they matter. See also: Great Proposals However, when the customer tells you exactly what to propose and is seeking to compare apples to apples, the primary difference between bids tends to be price. However, if there are important differences between you and your competitors, such as in how you will deliver what the customer is asking for, then a features and benefits table can help call out the differences and why they should impact the customer’s selection. In some proposals, you might only have one features and benefits table, typically at the beginning. In others, you might have one in every section. Where you use them, or how often, should depend on what the customer has asked for in each section. If a section contains multiple features or presents multiple reasons why they should select you, a features and benefits table can help summarize them. If you have multiple features and benefits tables, you may need to establish a hierarchy and have high-level features identified in the introduction, with each item expanded into multiple more detailed items in each section. In the end, features and benefits tables become more of a thinking and presentation tool than something to make things easier. They help you puzzle through figuring out what you have to offer and what the customer will get out of it by focusing your thoughts like a laser. You can even use them as a pre-writing tool, then convert them to a narrative response and throw away the table. As a presentation tool they help summarize and make things stand out. What you want to avoid is having a features and benefits table just because you think you’re supposed to. If you load it up with unsubstantiated claims, or make RFP compliance the primary benefit, then what stands out is that you are not competitive. When in doubt, focus on differentiators, and don't forget the proof points. When you use them regularly, features and benefits tables end up being something that reinforces the importance of everything you do before you start the proposal. If you are having trouble completing your features and benefits tables, it’s a good indicator that you started the proposal unprepared. When this is the case, features and benefits tables can be used to drive recognition in your company about what information needs to be brought to the start of a proposal. The deceptively simple features and benefits table can become a tool of change management and process adoption.

One of our better ideas has been to replace recycling previous proposals with a win strategy library. A win strategy library can inspire people to prepare more strategic proposals and accelerate their efforts. Recycling previous proposals makes it easy to create proposals that are written for the wrong context. We got the idea when we experienced déjà vu helping a customer plan their proposal. We had done proposals for companies in similar circumstances and were suggesting similar strategies. We realized that a lot of what we do is help customers through situations we’ve seen before, and since we’re a company that focuses on publishing, we had the idea of publishing something that would help them. Thus, the idea for a bid strategy library was born. We’ve already written to introduce the idea here, how to formulate your win strategies here, and how to organize your win strategy library here. Today we’d like to share what’s in our win strategy library. By its very nature, a win strategy library must be company specific. It should reflect your strategic plan and offerings. But we can describe the topics we have in ours that companies use as starting point. The content itself is only for PropLIBRARY Subscribers, but the topics can give you an idea what to put in your win strategy library. Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) Evaluations. What strategies can you use to minimize the impact? When the Customer Tells You What to Bid. It’s really hard to stand out and differentiate yourself when everybody must bid the same exact thing. But that’s also where small differences can have a big impact. Strategies for Offering Solutions. Offering a solution is very different from offering a commodity, and that impacts your strategies. 11 Topics That Drive Win Strategies. Where do win strategies come from? You have to look at many different things, so we identified the key items to consider. Differentiation. You can’t be the best without being different. Being the best at complying with the RFP's requirements is not enough to be competitive. So we put a recipe together to help people who are trying to figure out how they should stand out from the pack. Confounding The Competition. Winning a proposal means beating your competitors. If you are in a fiercely competitive market, this can help you out-compete them. How to Tell Your Story in a Proposal. If you are trying to raise the bar beyond simply being descriptive, you need to consider what story you are telling the customer. But how do you write a proposal that tells a story? We created a recipe to help. Transparency. We like it when our vendors, leaders, those we depend on are transparent. We like to know what to expect. Customers are the same way. This recipe will help you build transparency into your proposal as a theme. Escalation Plans. Customers expect things to go wrong and want to know how you will handle them. An escalation plan is a common way of doing that. This recipe will help you figure out what should be in yours. Inspiration for Positioning to Win. How do you get your company and offering into position to win? This recipe provides a number of ideas to help you do just that. What Matters to the Customer About What You Are Proposing. We’ve written a ton about how important it is to focus your proposals on what matters to the customer. But what exactly is that? How do you know what matters to your customers? This recipe contains a bunch of things that matter to most customers that can help you figure out what matters to yours. 23 Topics to Inspire Features. To go along with something we just wrote on creating features and benefits tables, we created a recipe to provide some inspiration for what should go in your features column. We are constantly growing our library. Our “to do” list currently has these win strategy topics on it for development: trust, quality, support, incumbency, new customers, team composition, past performance, resumes, and common RFP requirements and evaluation criteria. The easiest way to approach building a win strategy library is to look at what issues you commonly face and what you typically say or do about them. Then simply capture them at the bullet level. Remember, the idea isn’t to write the words that people will use, but rather to inspire them with ideas about what to do. Once they figure that out, the words come easy and need to be tailored to their circumstances anyway.

Instead of reinventing the wheel every time and having every team start from scratch figuring out what their win strategies should be, you can create a cheat sheet that helps them figure it out faster. The goal is not to identify the wording or control future responses. The goal is to help people more quickly identify the strategy, the approach, or the positioning that fits their particular circumstances. They’ll have to come up with the wording based on the specific issues they need to resolve. See also: Faster Topics: Management plan. What management structures and procedures do you typically respond with for different types of projects? Offering features and benefits. What features do you typically include and what benefits do they typically deliver? You can always expand them later and tailor them for a specific bid. Pricing. How do you typically try to position on pricing, and what strategies do you typically follow in various circumstances? Terms and conditions. When the customer requires a certain term or condition, how do you typically respond? Staffing. Like your offering, what are the features and benefits of your staffing? What are your typical approaches to staffing? Schedule. Too short, too long, or just right? What strategies do you typically employ for various scheduling contingencies? Circumstances and contingencies related to: Customer attributes, preferences, and issues. While each customer is different, they often share some similarities. Which customer attributes, preferences, and issues can you anticipate and how do you typically respond? RFP requirements and evaluation criteria. Some RFP requirements appear frequently. Sometimes the evaluation criteria emphasize this or that, but you can anticipate both. Sometimes RFPs have problems, like when they lack detail or are ambiguous. What do you typically do in response to the things you often see in RFPs? Competitive environment. You may not know the names of the competitors on your next pursuit, but you may know the types. You may not know whether you’ll be on top or the underdog, but you can anticipate being both at some point. How do you position or what do you typically do in each competitive circumstance? Team composition. Sometimes you want a big team. Sometimes you want a little team. And sometimes you go it alone. In each circumstance, you need to explain why and ghost your competitors. And many of the circumstances you can anticipate. External issues and trends. Things go up and things come down. The pendulum swings. People react. Things change. What should you do when faced with things you can anticipate coming up sooner or later? Other. Sometimes things are unpredictable or something completely new comes up. By its very nature it can’t be anticipated. And yet what you do when faced with something new, both good and bad, might be anticipated. Within each topic and circumstance, identify the things you can anticipate coming up and what strategies to employ or ways to position your company and offering in each. Many things come in pairs (big/small, centralized/decentralized, fixed/variable, positive/negative, etc.), so remember to address both possibilities. Basically you’re trying to help people out by telling them that you’ve seen something before or thought something might happen and here are some approaches that may or may not fit. Even when they don’t fit, they can help people zero in on something that does more quickly. One way to approach this is to make it an attachment to your company's Strategic Plan and update it annually. While a Strategic Plan normally deals with positioning at a fairly high level, a Win Strategy Cheat Sheet can show how to connect the high level positioning to what people will face on a day-to-day basis. A little bit of inspiration goes a long way. And since we’re talking about win strategies, anything we do that strengthens them increases your win rate.

We make a distinction between win strategies and themes. Win strategies are what you do in order to win, and themes are what you say in order to win. Win strategies often imply what your themes will be about, and may include delivering certain messages. But sometimes they are action items that have nothing to do with the document. Win strategies are mostly about how you should position yourself and how to get into position. But there are a lot of different ways to position your company and your offering, and many factors to consider. A remarkably simple formula can not only help you figure out what your win strategies should be for a particular bid, but can also show you where your proposals are lacking. Consider: Strategic Plan + Offering + Circumstances = Win Strategies Your strategic plan should define not only which markets you wish to target, but also how you should position your company within them. That high level positioning provides a framework for your win strategies, as well as a direction that your proposal win strategies should explore in more detail. Your offering itself should imply win strategies related to features, benefits, requirements, pricing, management, staffing, schedule, and performance. See also: Themes Your "circumstances" is the tricky one. The subtlety of the formula hides the complexity of understanding your circumstances. Are you the incumbent? How well do you know the customer and their preferences? What is the competitive environment? What is happening in the world around the project that might impact it? What is your relevant history and experience? Are you bidding as a team? If so, who’s on it? Are you ready? What issues need to be resolved? What don’t you know? How should you position your company and your offering? What alternatives, choices, preferences, and trade-offs need to be addressed? What does it say in the RFP? How will this customer evaluate and decide on this particular bid? What trends will impact the decision? Pondering these and similar questions about your circumstances is where people often get lost. It’s easy to forget the other parts of the formula. This is especially true about the part dealing with the strategic plan, since a lot of companies don’t have one or ignore it when they write their proposals. You could break down “circumstances” into categories: The customer’s preferences and issues The RFP The nature of the opportunity The competitive environment Your self-awareness, strengths, weaknesses, and history Teaming Any external issues and trends Other But you always have to have that “other” category to cover the unpredictable things that come up. By breaking it down, we’ve made the problem smaller, but haven’t completely eliminated it. That’s okay because we’ve made it easier to make sure we’ve covered everything we should when trying to conceive our win strategies.

Customers don’t see your company as a whole. They only see what you send them, the people they interact with, any products you install, and the results of your efforts. Before they meet you, they might hear about your reputation, but unless what you do is important enough, or widespread enough, they probably haven’t heard about you at all. When they get a proposal from you, they see what you’ve put in writing. And that’s it. All those unsubstantiated claims that you think are credible, they see as unsubstantiated noise. What they see is whether you: See also: Customer perspective Describe yourself or focus on what matters to them Include stuff that’s not relevant to them Are careful and have thought things through Are formal or informal Appear trustworthy Focus on technical details or functional details Have an approach or solution that appears credible Are different from your competitors Follow instructions Can meet their schedule and other requirements Make the right trade-off decisions Have a price that fits their budget Have a better value than your competitors Present the best alternative It’s when they’ve met your staff that things really get interesting. Then what the customer sees is whether you are: Acting as individuals or as a company Making it up as you go along, or you came prepared More concerned with doing or selling Limited in what you can do or acting like a partner Solution oriented Doing the things you said you would Doing the things your proposal said you would (or even know what’s in it) Focused on your own concerns or those of the customer Confident and competent Showing good judgment Trustworthy Helpful and appear to be an asset The kind of people they’d like to work with The kind of people that listen more or talk more The main thing to focus on is whether they see your company the same way you perceive it. You think you know yourself. Putting aside the question of whether you really do, the customer can only perceive what they see. They may have no idea what you are really like, unless you show it to them. Actions do speak louder than words. When there is a disconnect between what you say and what you do, it hurts your credibility. But for that to even be a concern, you actually have to say who you are and what you will do. It all starts with whether who you say you are is actually who you want to be. This, in turn, should be determined by your strategy and positioning. If haven’t thought through your strategy and positioning, you won’t be able to articulate who you want to be so that you can drive that into your literature and proposals. And if you don’t do that, the odds of the customer perceiving a disconnect go way up. The way you prevent this is to look at yourself through your customer’s eyes and make sure they see the right things. Doing this in writing means planning the content before you write it. Doing it in person means having strategies and processes, and training your staff in them. The alternative is simply taking a chance. The alternative means that while you might think of your company one way, you have no idea what the customer will actually see, let alone conclude about you.

When you sit down to write a proposal, you start asking questions so that you know what to write. Inevitably you ask questions that can’t be answered, but that could have been answered had they occurred to you earlier. At the tail end of the process, proposals tell you what you should have been doing all along. See also: Organizational development When you sit down and write the proposal, you describe your approaches and what you will do if you are selected. This is where one little writer, often at a junior level, can change how the company does things and interacts with its customers. What gets said in the proposal can impact how the company approaches things like quality, transparency, oversight, partnership, collaboration, etc. When you sit down and write the proposal, you need to create bid strategies, put things in context, and position the company and offering. Unless there is direction from The Powers That Be telling how the company should be positioned in the marketplace, the proposal teams usually make it up based on what they think they need to say to win a particular RFP. One of the most important reasons for executives to be involved in proposals before they get written is to prevent the proposal team from reinventing strategy or just making it up to fill perceived gaps. If you don’t tell the team how they should position the company, they’ll figure something out themselves. For the staff involved, it can be a really rewarding experience. It’s fun just being involved in the thinking process and helping to articulating the company's strategies when you normally aren’t experienced enough to even be in the room for those kind of discussions. That basically is what drives the career of a proposal specialist. But if you are The Powers That Be, do you really want people who probably got assigned to the proposal because they were unimportant enough to be available redefining the company’s identity? Then again, you might embrace this. We’ve worked with several companies to help them become more strategic and used their proposals as catalysts to raise the issues and make sure that new approaches actually get implemented. When your proposal review process is based on waiting until a draft is written and then correcting it, you often get a train wreck because the team made up strategies that are in conflict with what The Powers That Be have in mind, but didn’t make part of the proposal plan before the writing started. The approach we recommend for Proposal Content Planning gives you an opportunity to drive this into the proposal from the beginning. It turns proposals into vehicles for strategy implementation. But while the opportunity is there, it’s up to the company to take it. Proposals give your company an opportunity to look at what it will take to win new business, what kind of business you want to be, and how you want to be positioned. Planning what should go into the proposal before you write it gives you a way to make sure that the writing reflects those strategies and positions. If your company is not as strategic as you would like it to be, or isn’t doing a good job of positioning to win, you can use a series of proposals to change all that. If you need help, let us know.

It seems counterintuitive. It sounds like something your boss would never go for. But there is a better way to ensure proposal quality than by having reviews. What do you really get from having a proposal review anyway? Especially if it’s one of those big fat sit around a table reviews? In the name of “making sure it’s correct,” they usually end up rethinking the message. That’s another way of saying they wait until after the proposal is written to figure out the best strategy. Huh? Does that sound like a great way to achieve proposal quality? Let’s try another perspective and look at what you need for a quality proposal. You need input. But you need it on the strategy. And maybe to make sure you’ve covered all the details. You need some validation to ensure you haven’t made any mistakes. In industrial processes, the best way to achieve quality is during the design phase. Instead of adding reviews on top of a process to catch defects, they eliminate defects through design. Why can’t we eliminate defects during the design of our proposals? You might still need a little quality assurance to catch mistakes, but the level of review needed to catch typographical errors and omissions is minor. And it doesn’t need the most expensive labor in the company to spend hours doing it. So how do you design defects out of a proposal? it comes mostly from how you specify and measure what should be written, with a pinch of making sure you deliver the information that people will need to write a winning proposal. That’s right, you can’t just sit down and write about whatever’s on your mind, and writing can be measured. Writing gets measured by comparing it to what was supposed to go into the proposal. What is supposed to go into the proposal needs to be thought through before you start writing. If you do this correctly, you get a feedback mechanism and a tool for validation. The writers can self-assess whether what they have written does everything it was supposed to. Quality assurance reviews become checklist simple. See also: Proposal quality validation Here are a few articles that describe our approach to planning the content of your proposals: How to make proposal writing faster and easier The secret to solving 14 proposal problems at the same time What is the best way to accelerate proposals? What this really means is that you shift time from reviewing and rewriting at the back end, to making sure you write the proposal the way you need it to be written the first time. Most people would like to achieve that, but aren’t confident enough, so they leave some time on the back end for “risk mitigation” and end up causing what they sought to avoid. Go back and re-read the second paragraph. If you make the most major review of the proposal after it is written, how will you ever achieve quality? But what will really put you in a Catch-22 is when The Powers That Be tell you that “I have to see it before it goes to the customer.” The only people who should be allowed to read the proposal after it is written, are the people who actively participated in defining what the proposal was supposed to be. In other words, only people who reviewed and approved the Proposal Content Plan have any business reading it after it is written. Explain the second paragraph to them and pose the same question to them. If they get it and support you by participating in defining and reviewing the Content Plan, it will go a long way toward shifting the focus of the organization to the front end of the proposal instead of the back end. Then they can see it after it’s written, and while some changes will occur, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Some things are vital for proposal reviews to be consistently effective, and other things depend on your circumstances. People mix them up all the time because they're focused on their circumstances. They're so focused on how they’re going to get the proposal done that they overlook that what they review is more important than how they review it. Changing your focus to what really matters means changing your whole approach. You can let your circumstances and judgment determine: See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria How many reviews you have How many people are involved in the reviews Whether the reviews are conducted in person or remotely When the reviews are conducted If you put all your attention into the items above, and then leave it up to the reviewers to figure out what to focus on, you’ve got things backwards. What you focus on in a proposal review should be determined by what it will take to win. You review to validate that the proposal reflects what it will take to win and not just to get some opinions about the proposal. What you look at to provide this validation is far more important than the decisions you make on the items above. What it will take to win is discovered by converting what you know about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and your own company into bid strategies. These should in turn be converted into review criteria. A lot of people want to spend all their time writing, and just hand the document off to someone for a review. But figuring out the review criteria is part of figuring out what you should write. If you convert what it will take to win into review criteria and give it to those proposal writers, then the writers and the reviewers have the same goals and those goals are far more likely to be achieved. We call this Proposal Quality Validation and it’s part of the MustWin Process that comes with PropLIBRARY. We define proposal quality based on what it will take to win, then we validate that the proposal reflects those criteria. We are far less concerned with how many reviews, how many reviewers, when the reviews are, or how they are conducted than we are with what criteria they use to perform the reviews. Once the review criteria are identified, people can parse them out to different people at different times based on our judgment and the circumstances of the bid. Proposal Quality Validation changes how you approach proposal writing, regardless of whether you have a large team of writers, or it’s just your. Instead of writing, reviewing, and rewriting until you stumble across something that’s good enough to submit and hoping that you discover it before you run out of time, with Proposal Quality Validation you have to think through what it will take to win before you start writing. The good news is that you can write much more quickly (and better) when you know how it’s supposed to turn out. Within the MustWin Process Library we provide the forms, sample criteria, and instructions to implement this approach to reviewing proposals.

Some companies do too much teaming, and some do too little. What’s usually missing in both cases is the right teaming strategy. Some companies team on every bid. When it becomes routine, there’s a good chance they’re giving away up to half their revenue. Their best growth strategy might not require any new leads. All they may need to do is less teaming. Seriously — I’ve seen companies struggling for year-over-year growth double their goals simply by doing less teaming. But some companies find success through nothing but subcontracting. They are usually product companies with unique offerings, or extremely specialized services providers. Because they are the only ones who can fill a particular set of requirements, they are brought in by the prime contractors and the two don’t have to worry about stepping on each other’s toes or competing with each other. Some companies never team. They do what they do, and it just wouldn’t occur to them to include another company. They probably aren’t government contractors. But they are potentially missing the chance to expand their market reach and offer more complete solutions to their customers. Teaming is full of potential problems and risks. Some of the risks after an award can be mitigated through careful contracts. But not all. Leverage ends up being more important than contracts. Leverage comes from strategy. But your team needs to be in place at the time of proposal submission and well before award. Companies write teaming agreements to try to document their intentions, but if a teaming agreement is merely an agreement to agree later, then it may not even be enforceable. And again, leverage ends up being more important than what it says on the paper. There are really only three times when you should team with another company to win a bid: See also: Strategic planning When you are forced to. Small business set-asides can make it necessary for larger businesses to team if they are going to play at all. Sometimes companies can't do everything that is required by an RFP, so they are forced to team with other companies in order to submit a compliant bid. When it increases your chances of winning enough to justify the risks. Sometimes it’s worth it to give up a slice of the pie in order to improve your odds of winning the rest of it. But this is also the most common reason given for unnecessary teaming. When it increases your chances of winning other/future opportunities enough to justify the risks. If teaming can get you into new markets (new customers, new industries, new territories, etc.), it might be worth it. For leverage, it helps to think in terms of checks and balances: When there is just one contract and one source of revenue at stake, both parties have more incentive to act selfishly. But when they team strategically, on multiple contractors with more than one customer, then neither wants to let something bad happen on one contract because it might affect the others. A truly unique product or extremely specialized service means the prime has to come to you to get it. Most services do not fit in this category, because the prime can hire staff to gain the capability. Just because you might be better qualified doesn’t mean the prime can’t live without you. Whoever owns the customer relationship owns the business. If you are a sub and the customer never sees your face, you can be dropped and they may not care at all. If you are a prime and you let the sub have face time with the customer, you have to worry about them trying to replace you. Are you both incentivized to do things that end up making you both money? If the things you want to do make your partner profit in addition to yourself, and the reverse is also true, there’s a good chance you’ll get along just fine. For other sources of leverage, think about why your teaming partner should care if you are unhappy. If you find yourself resorting to contracts and legal actions, then you don’t have any leverage. But if you can do things that will make them equally unhappy, you have the basis for a nice, smooth, working relationship. You are co-dependent, integrated, and not in a position to even think about being exploitive. In fact, just the opposite becomes true. If you aren’t sure whether to team or not, consider strategies that increase your leverage. If you’re having trouble finding those strategies, you may want to avoid teaming because you don’t have what you need to mitigate the risks.

See also: Great proposals A company recently contacted me because they weren't winning any business from a new customer. The reason the customer gave them was that their task order responses were being evaluated as high risk. They asked me to review their proposal template and make recommendations to improve it. The proposal was limited to three pages. As I started reading, I started deleting everything that wasn’t vital. That was when I realized that this is a very useful technique for improving proposals. Simply delete everything that isn’t vital. I was doing it to see how much space I had to work with to write something that would add substance to improve their risk score. But every proposal can benefit from the same approach. In the past, we’ve told people to just skip the steps in our process that weren’t needed in order to win. It’s a trick, because we’re confident that they won’t find anything that’s not directly relevant to winning. But it’s a great way to achieve process buy-in. If they can’t find anything that’s not needed to win, then everything left must be crucial to winning. This same approach can be applied to the text of your proposal. If a statement doesn’t absolutely need to be there, it should be deleted. If your introduction says “we are pleased to submit the following proposal,” that’s not information that is vital for the customer to make their decision. Delete it. If you’ve made statements that are universally true and apply to everyone equally like “Quality is critical to the success of this project,” delete it. Some things can go either way, like the year you were founded. If it’s vital, then you should say why. If it’s not vital, then delete it. Whenever you aren’t sure whether something is vital or not, it needs to be fixed. There should not be an ambiguity. Either make it say something vital, or make the reason why it’s vital clear, or delete it. It’s very important to assess what’s vital from the perspective of the customer. It’s not about what you think is vitally important to say. It’s about what the customer thinks is vital to making their decision. Either it’s information they need, or it’s not. What you think is vital really isn’t — unless you can position it as vital to the decision that the customer has to make. If you are struggling with what is vital and what isn't, figuring out the difference may be the most important thing you can do to improve your proposals. If your proposal drops in length because you deleted a significant portion of what you had written, that’s not a bad thing. But it’s also not necessarily the goal. Maybe you’ll make room for something else that is vital. Or maybe you’ll make room so that you can better explain why some of the questionable statements really are vital. Maybe when you’re done, it won’t be any shorter. But what it will be is vital.