Carl Dickson

Somebody actually said the following in our discussion group on LinkedIn: Both parts of this statement are so incredibly harmful to people working on proposals and have probably cost companies billions of dollars over the years. And yet, some people actually believe it. So as we worked up a good rant in response, we decided to turn it into an article where we could make it beneficial and useful. In my experience, most business development and proposal processes are not sufficiently well defined to work consistently. In reality they are ways of doing things, which is not the same as a process. The line between management and process can be fuzzy. It gets extremely fuzzy when the process is not adequately defined. So fuzzy that many proposal managers forget there is a difference. Most of the commonly practiced or traditional bid "processes" contain elements that have not consistently worked anywhere I've seen them practiced. And the only time they do work is when they are bent so far they've basically redefined everything and can only be implemented by the brilliant mind who conceived how it was bent. Color team reviews are just one example. understanding what you need from the process. For example, people do not need proposal reviews. They need to validate quality. Reviews are a tool for achieving that validation. But what you need to achieve and how you go about achieving it are two different things. In another discussion on LinkedIn, on the same day no less, someone else gave this reason for ignoring process altogether: See also: Organizational development Saying process is a crutch is like saying education is a crutch. There are definitely ineffective processes, and most processes can be subverted or weakened through lack of management endorsement or oversight. But that doesn't make all processes bad. The best processes add value. To beginners. To experts. To the executives. And to stakeholders especially. If a process is being used as a crutch, then it needs to be reengineered because it is not guiding people to do the right things. If you had no process, do you think that the people using it as a crutch would do any better? People alone are not enough for business development. Recognizing when it's time to reengineer your BD process, and creating one that is effective, are critical skills. Many of the people in charge of the BD process are good at doing BD but really don't know much about creating an effective process. Individuals won't achieve their full potential without a process to inspire, guide, coordinate, validate, and improve efficiency. And companies inevitably degrade over time without processes. Perhaps that is because even if you don't have a process, you still have a process, it's just unwritten and inconsistent. But the worst part of a lack of process comes when you hire people at multiple locations. Over time, they evolve different ways of doing things. Then when you try to make improvements, it becomes like herding cats. We've also written about this business development trap. But process alone is not enough either. Processes won't work without skilled people. But processes are not supposed to make people irrelevant. They are supposed to make people better. Just like education. Instead of asking which is more important, it's better to ask how you can achieve both so that you can beat your competitors. But if your process isn't consistently working, don't blame it on your people or throw it out. Instead, reengineer the process, because people alone will not be able to compete with a company that has effective people supported by an effective process.

It’s important to be able to define proposal quality if you want to make sure that the proposal you develop reflects it. We define it as a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. We define what it will take to win as part of our process, reaching all the way back before the RFP is released so that the questions we ask and information we gather enable us to say what it will take to win. We use Proposal Content Planning to bring what it will take to win together with the other things that should go into writing the proposal. What integrates writing about fulfilling the requirements and addressing what it will take to win is how you position yourself. You must position yourself against several things in a proposal: See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria The RFP The evaluation criteria The competitive environment The customer’s preferences and issues The requirements of the opportunity itself The results desired from what is being procured The resources required Your own strengths and weaknesses Your history and experience The customer’s history and experience Pricing Terms and conditions Depending on how granular you make it, this list could become infinitely long. The short list is positioning against: The customer Opportunity Competitive environment Your strengths and weaknesses The RFP Everything else fits under these five. This makes them easy to remember and use. Because positioning is how you implement what it will take to win in writing, it becomes a shorthand for proposal quality. In the formally identify the elements that drive what it will take to win and then turn them into quality criteria that we use to validate the proposal. But you can do a quick and easy informal assessment just by looking at the positioning. Ask yourself how your proposal is positioned against: The customer’s preferences and issues The requirements and desired results The competitive environment Your own strengths, weaknesses, and history The RFP, especially the evaluation criteria In many of the proposals we have reviewed for our customers, it’s really a question of “if” there is any positioning instead of “how” the proposal is positioned. If you read the proposal and it isn’t clear how it is positioned, then it’s not well positioned. If positioning is hidden or subject to interpretation it isn't positioning. If you read the proposal and it: Doesn’t address the customer’s preferences or issues Only addresses fulfilling the requirements, without addressing the results or benefits you will bring Ignores the competition or the fact that the customer has alternatives to consider Treats the customer like a stranger or only addresses your strengths Positions yourself against the RFP as being (merely) compliant Then your proposal does not reflect what it will take to win and is a low quality proposal. If it reads positively for some, but negatively for others, then it is only partially positioned to reflect what it will take to win. In other words, it's vulnerable to losing. Because positioning is the context for your proposal, it is critical to review your positioning before you begin writing. If you try to change the positioning after the proposal is written as a narrative, it will be extremely labor intensive to change the context of every sentence. If you try to discover the right way to position your bid by writing and re-writing, you will likely run out of time and submit whatever you have, instead of a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. In the a review of the Content Plan before turning it into a narrative, so that we can make sure the positioning is correct. This is also the reason why recycling narratives usually hurts a proposal more than it helps. When you re-use a narrative, it will not be positioned correctly. All five of the key positioning areas described above should be different for every customer, and probably every bid. Changing the positioning means changing the context of the narrative. This requires changing most of the words, and not just some of the words. But the good news is that if you start writing the proposal understanding how you want to position your bid, then it is much easier to know what to say about each requirement. And instead of a proposal that merely meets the requirements and is full of unsubstantiated claims, you get a proposal that substantiates the positioning and shows how your approach to meeting the requirements adds up to the best alternative for the customer.

The best way to win a proposal is to write about what matters to the customer. But there is another, even more powerful way to win. Unfortunately, it’s dangerous. If you don't get it exactly write, you'll probably lose. If you do, you'll probably win. While writing about what matters to the customer is what everyone aspires to, it is at best the second most powerful form of proposal writing. The most powerful form is writing about what should matter to the customer. Writing about what should matter enables you to sell a story about what is possible for the customer, that they might not even realize themselves. Writing about what should matter means writing about what’s possible, and how the customer can fulfill their destiny. It also means that you can alienate the customer, get their goals all wrong, and appear completely out of touch. That’s why it’s dangerous. The thing is, sometimes you’ve got nothing to lose: See also: Customer perspective If you are not the incumbent, and you think the incumbent has all the advantages, don’t position yourself as the same but a little better or cheaper. Try positioning yourself as delivering something that should really matter to them, that the incumbent will never provide. If you don’t know what matters to the customer, you can play it safe, but it’s hard to be the best alternative that way. Another option is instead of talking about what matters to the customer (because you don’t know what that is), try talking about what should matter. You might get it wrong. But if you get it right, you’re very likely to be the best alternative. If you are a small company competing against much larger competitors you can take risks that they never will. In a big company it’s acceptable to lose with a proposal that looks like every other proposal. You can always blame the loss on price. Big companies can’t bring themselves to take a chance on getting it wrong by proposing what should matter to the customer. Even if they tried, their internal proposal reviewers would all yell at them for proposing something that “might offend” the customer. They just can’t do it. But you can. You can offer the customer something they never will. Something that really, really, matters. At least it should. When you write about what should matter, you can’t think small. It’s not about being a little better. It’s about painting a picture of the future that’s extraordinarily better. It’s not about bringing improvements to the customer. It’s about enabling them to exceed what they thought their maximum potential was. It’s about greatness, pure and simple. When you write about what should matter, write about something great. Greatness has appeal, even when it’s not your flavor. Greatness will get the customer’s attention. Greatness will make the customer want to select you, even if you got some things wrong. It’s entirely possible that you’ll paint a picture of greatness that just doesn’t reflect the customer’s priorities (even though you thought it should), or takes them in a direction they don’t want to go. You may lose because of it. It’s dangerous. When Apple was tiny next to Microsoft, Steve Jobs designed computers around what he thought should matter. He didn’t even ask his customers. But what Apple said should matter about computers resonated with a large share of the market. It also turned some people off. And the things they got wrong (Apple Lisa, the Newton) their customers didn’t hold against them because they weren’t part of what mattered. Had Apple chosen a strategy that didn’t push away some customers, they would never have become great. But it was a dangerous approach. For every Steve Jobs, how many failed visionaries are there? Ultimately, your win rate will be the highest when you discover what matters to the customer and base your proposals on that. But if you don’t know, can’t find out, and have to beat someone who does, you can always take a chance and play dangerously.

Subject matter experts or project managers often write the technical approach in response to the statement of work in a proposal. The Technical Approach volume addresses what you propose to do or deliver to the customer. Writing the technical approach often requires significant technical subject matter expertise. What the subject matter experts may lack in writing and fine art skills, they often make up for with enthusiasm for their subject. When they bring that enthusiasm to the proposal, the result is mostly positive. People debate whether proposal writing specialists interviewing technical subject matter experts is a better approach, but either way, the subject matter experts are involved. They just need to be guided in the right direction to end up with a winning proposal. Project management training helps people understand planning and execution, but doesn't teach how to help someone else make a decision. Throw in a complicated RFP that's difficult to interpret, and it's easy to see why technical staff focus on the wrong things in their proposal contributions. So what should the best technical approach focus on? For more information about preparing your technical approach: Technical Approach Technical subject matter experts often come into proposals thinking: It must focus on the technical details. It must be all meat, with no fluff — which to them means be all technical. It must show the right way to do things, regardless of what it says in the RFP. All of these common answers are wrong. Worse, they are wrong on their technical merits. They are a result of enthusiastically sticking to what you know, instead of solving the problem. What the customer needs from a technical approach document is to determine which offering is their best alternative. The technical details play a role in this. But the real focus for a technical approach should be on what the customer will get as a result of what is being offered. They need to see that what they get will fulfill their goals. Accomplish those goals matters more to the customer than the technical details of how those goals are accomplished. They need to see why it is their best alternative. Often the explanation of why you do things or chose what you did matters more to the customer than what you will do or the procedures you will follow. Once the customer sees what they will get, then how the work will be done becomes part of how they assess whether you will deliver as promised. All the technical details are part of establishing your credibility, but that comes after you’ve demonstrated that the technical details deliver what they want. This is also why you shouldn't follow a template to write your technical approach, and why a technical approach example can lead you astray. A technical approach is not a description of something done the same way every time because each customer has different goals. Even if your procedures remain the same, the goals they should accomplish for this particular customer will be different. The technical approach should not be presented the same way or in the same sequence every time. What makes you the customer's best alternative may also be different for each proposal, requiring changes in the reasons why you are proposing what you are. And that's what you should build your technical approach around. You should end up with a highly personalized proof of why your approach is the best way to go for that particular customer, and not a generic template description of what you do. What is the goal? For the customer, they are procuring something to fulfill a purpose. One that they’ve put a considerable amount of effort into pursuing. The goal of a technical approach is to demonstrate fulfilling that customer’s goal better than any alternative. The goal is not to explain how you would do things. The difference is subtle, but it matters. A lot. It's the difference between winning and losing. When you are on the receiving end, do you evaluate a technical solution by the approach or the results? If it delivers the wrong results, who cares about the approach? If you focus on the details instead of the results and a competitor focuses on the results, then their technical approach will likely be seen as the best alternative, even if your approach is technically superior. Your goal in writing a technical approach is not to be technical superior, but to explain why your approach should be chosen. Being technically superior may or may not be part of that rationale. Your technical approach should talk about results because ultimately that is what the customer wants. It should explain what the customer is going to get, why your approach matters, and why you made the choices you did. Understanding “why” you do things is more important to the customer than understanding “how” you do things. The customer will say to themselves, “If I select this proposal, I will get [fill in the blank] because [fill in the blank]. I believe they will be able to achieve that because their approach is credible.” The approach is actually the last thing they consider. Even when the evaluator is technical. It’s easy to understand why people get tricked into believing that the approach is the most important thing. For starters, there’s the name, “Technical Approach.” It does not accurately describe either what information the customer needs or what they are trying to do. Then there’s the way that customers write their RFPs. They ask you to describe your approach for doing what they ask. They really make it sound like they want to hear all about your approach and will make their selection that way. Only they didn’t write the RFP because they want to purchase an approach. They wrote the RFP to fulfill their goals. And their best alternative for achieving those goals will be the proposal that best demonstrates how what the vendor does results in achieving those goals. That is the most important technical requirement. That is what the technical approach should be about.

Strategic issues and how well a proposal reflects customer concerns beyond what it says in the RFP usually have more to do with whether a proposal wins or not than the quality of the writing itself. However, when two proposals offer the roughly the same thing, the quality of the proposal writing can determine whether you win. So how do you know whether a proposal is well written? A lot of things go into a winning proposal. It must be RFP compliant, reflect your win strategies, present your themes, answer all of the customer's questions, be optimized against the evaluation criteria, and more. But how can you assess the quality of the proposal writing, separate from the offering, pricing, or win strategies? Let’s start with some bad signs: See also: Great Proposals The first paragraph doesn’t actually say anything. The fact that you’re “pleased to submit” does not add any value to the customer. The first paragraph is followed by a description of your company. The customer doesn’t see anything about what they are going to get from what you propose until midway down the page. The text contains unsubstantiated claims or universal statements that would be true regardless of who was submitting the proposal. The proposal claims understanding without demonstrating it or makes patronizing statements telling the customer what they require. The text explains what you do, without explaining what matters about it and why you do it that way. The text does not contain insight beyond what is in the RFP. The text is written to tell the customer about the company instead of what the customer will get as a result of selecting the company. The proposal does not contain the answers to questions you should expect the customer to have. The terminology used is different from the terminology that the customer uses. The proposal is not organized according to the RFP or optimized to reflect the RFP’s evaluation criteria. The proposal contains few or no visuals (graphics, tables, etc.). I’m willing to bet a free beer (although you’ll have to visit me to collect it) that if you pull any proposal your company has submitted off the shelf, you’ll find at least four of these problems in it. In addition to being free of the problems above, a well written proposal would: Say what the customer is going to get right from the beginning. And remain about what the customer is going to get throughout the proposal. Show insight that goes beyond what is in the RFP. Include as much (or more) about why you do things, why they matter, and what the customer gets out of it as a result, as it does about what you do, your qualifications, your experience, or your capabilities. Say something that matters to the customer in every single sentence. Demonstrate understanding, usually through results, rather than simply claiming it. Provide answers to common questions (who, what, where, how, when, and why). Use terminology that matches the RFP, be organized according to the RFP, and be optimized against any evaluation criteria. Be highly visual, with graphics and tables replacing text as much as possible. You need at least half of these, and preferably all of them, if you want your proposal to win. If two companies submit the same offering, then the one that does a better job of these eight things will have a significant competitive advantage. If you compare a proposal that fails all 12 bad signs with a proposal that passes all eight of the things a winning proposal should do, even though they offer the same thing, the proposal that passes the eight items will read like it provides a superior offering. If you are in a market where the RFP forces everybody to bid the same thing, you should take note. Strengthening your company’s skills in this area is directly related to your competitiveness. If you are in a market where everyone proposes a different solution or approach, consider how much stronger your approach will sound if you pass these eight items. We took the list of eight things above that you should do when proposal writing, provided some guidance on how to achieve each one, and added it to the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase for our subscribers. PropLIBRARY Subscribers can read it in the MustWin Knowledgebase.

Sometimes it’s good to put the proposal management process aside and just look at what is the minimum required to write a proposal. While there are a lot of logistical and other considerations for a proposal that should be addressed early, today we are just looking at it from the perspective of the proposal writer. The proposal writer just wants to focus on completing their assignment. So can we start writing now please? If you start by putting some words down on paper, anticipating that you’ll add to them as you discover new things that should be included, and changing what you wrote as you discover new things to focus on, you’re going to make proposal writing take longer and produce a lower quality proposal. You are going to end up with a proposal that is patches on top of patches as you figure out what the proposal should have been from the beginning. You need to work through all the considerations so that you can put every sentence in the right context. If you don’t, you will have to go back and change the context of every sentence. Don't start proposal writing until the writers have what they need to get it right Don't write in order to find what you should be writing. This is a bad mistake. There are things that you need to do first, before you start writing. They involve gathering information and putting it in the right form so that you are prepared to write the proposal. And only have to do it once. The good news is that doing these things will make proposal writing go much faster. Before you start writing, make sure you: Fully understand the reasons why you are bidding. Each bid decision should start off as a "no bid" by default. Most companies are the opposite, and as a result, most companies have a win rate under 50%. Sometimes under 10%. When you start at "no bid" the burden of proof is on those who want to bid. This requires them to articulate strong reasons why your company can win. This discussion provides information that proposal writers need in order to explain your strengths and overcome your weaknesses. Make contact with the customer. Ideally you should have a relationship with the customer. But sometimes it makes sense to bid on something you found out about when the RFP was released. But even then, you should at least make contact with the customer. You might not learn anything, but then again you might. Usually people are unable to get the customer to respond. But I have seen this work and a single call provide information that made the difference between winning and losing. It's well worth the cost of an attempt. And you’ll be more than a document to the customer. You'll be a company that is interested in them and willing to put some effort into getting to know them. Don’t bid without attempting to make contact. Maximize your information advantage. Gather what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Assess the information and convert it into conclusions you want the customer to reach, differentiation strategies, things that matter, and details to include in your response. Put special emphasis on what you know that your competitors might not know. Make sure that every part of your proposal shows the customer that you know more than what was in the RFP. Proposal writing shouldn't start until you know what points you want to make, so that the act of proposal writing becomes proving those points. You can't write the proposal and do this in a second pass. Be able to explain how the customer’s evaluation process will impact what you need to write. If they included their evaluation criteria in the RFP, how does that impact what you say and how you say it? What does it tell you about the process the customer will go through in evaluating the proposals? Can you anticipate what their evaluation forms will look like? What should you say throughout your proposal that will help them evaluate your proposal so that you earn the highest score? Your proposal should be based on the customer's evaluation process and not on what you feel like saying. You can't say what you want to say and then reorganize it effectively and you certainly can't do it without wasting a lot of time. So consider the evaluation process before you start proposal writing. Demonstrate that you understand what it will take to win. What would the winning proposal say? Do you know? You need to figure this out before you start proposal writing, even if you have to make it up based on assumptions. You can't write a proposal where every sentence is based on what it will take to win by starting with the basics and then going back and improving what you said. If you start proposal writing trying to discover what it will take to win you likely won't, and even if you do, you'll have to rewrite everything when you do. You are much better off figuring this out before you start writing. Be able to explain what the customer is going to get from what you are offering. The customer wants more than something that meets the specifications. They want their goals fulfilled. So beyond the specifications, what is the customer going to get as a result of what you are proposing? How does every sentence you write relate to what the customer is going to get? Don't start proposal writing based on what you are going to do, start writing already knowing and being able to articulate what the customer is going to get. Be able to articulate the reasons why your proposal is the best alternative for the customer. The customer always has alternatives, even if it’s to do nothing. So why is what you are proposing their best alternative? Is that enough to motivate them to take action? Every single sentence in your proposal should be part of the explanation for why the customer should select you. Be able to explain why your offering matters. It is not enough to give the customer what they asked for. You need to make it matter to them. So what is important about your offering? Why is that important to the customer? What do they get out of it? Every single sentence in your proposal should say something vital or get deleted. Identify and make decisions regarding each of the trade-offs involved. There are always trade-offs to be made in deciding what to offer the customer. So which trade-offs will you make (i.e., speed, quality, cost) and why? Being able to explain why you made the trade-offs you did is critical. Sometimes being able to explain "why" is more important than being able to explain "what" you are offering. Knowing this up front enables you to write something that explains what matters and why you are the customer's best alternative, instead of simply describing what you will do. When you work through this before you start proposal writing, it becomes a competitive advantage. Practice articulating it all from the customer’s point of view. You don’t want to describe what you are proposing, even if the RFP asks for a "description" of your approach. Instead you want to show the customer what they are going to get as a result of what you propose and why that matters. Describing what you propose or are going to do makes the proposal about you. Showing what the customer will get and why makes it all about them. The only reason they will read your proposal will be to see what they are going to get. So avoid using language that's merely descriptive and instead focus on what they need to see in order to accept your proposal as their best alternative. As a proposal writer, think about what it will take to fix things later if you skip any one of these. Imagine all the changes that you would need to make throughout your proposal to address something you skipped. How many cycles of re-writing would each skipped item cause? How much extra time will it take? How badly would that impact your win probability compared to getting it right from the beginning? That is why you need to make sure that you can do each of them before you start proposal writing. If you do your homework and think through these things before you start writing, then the act of writing will go quickly and smoothly. Better yet, what you will write will stand a much better chance of winning.

When you have been blessed get stuck with a proposal assignment or decide to pursue a bid where you’ll be doing most or all of the work yourself, it’s natural to look for ways to make it easier. Here are seven things you need to do to successfully complete your proposal assignment and what you need to make them happen. After that, we explain our approach to make doing those things easier so that you can quickly complete your assignment and deliver a winning proposal. To successfully complete your assignment you need to: See also: Faster Get the information you need to complete your assignment. To get the right information, you have to know what to ask for. If you wait until the start of the proposal it’s probably too late to get what you need. Assess the information and turn it into win strategies. To assess the information, it helps to have some guidance regarding what to consider. A checklist for your bid strategies can be even more useful than one for the writing. Figure out what should go into the proposal. To figure out what should go into the proposal, you need a checklist of considerations combined with a way to organize it all, before you start writing. There are better ways to accelerate proposal writing than using a template. Create a well written narrative proposal. To create a well written narrative proposal, you need organized source information as well as the right technique. Format and produce the proposal. To format and produce the proposal you need some basic skills. Validate the quality. To validate the quality of the proposal, you need criteria based on what it will take to win and a baseline of comparison. Make it all add up to what it will take to win. To make it all add up to what it will take to win, you need to be able to define it and turn it into specifications for the writers as well as criteria for the reviewers. Most of the time spent on a proposal is spent thinking. It is spent gathering information and figuring out what to do with it. It is spent discovering what it will take to win and then figuring out how to get the words on paper to achieve it. If you are spending the majority of your time re-writing, it’s because you didn’t spend enough time thinking. Since this is where you spend the most time, this is where you should focus in order to make it easier. If you focus on formatting, production, or automation, you may make some things easier, but you’ll be missing out on your biggest opportunities. To make your proposal assignment easier you need the right information and some guidance for converting it into copy for your proposal. To get them, you need: A list of questions so that you ask the right ones. Like the ones we provide to help with pre RFP pursuit. Guidance on how to turn the answers into win strategies and themes for the proposal. A way to collect and organize the information so you can account for everything before you start writing. Techniques for assessing the quality of your proposal writing as you go along so you get it right the first time, using the same criteria that anyone else reviewing your proposal will use. If you have the perspective of a proposal manager, you are probably thinking about ways to extend your process so that in addition to giving assignments, you deliver what the authors will need to complete them successfully. But if you have the perspective of someone who is working on their own to complete a proposal or an assignment, you don’t want a process that serves everybody else’s needs, you just want to get started and complete your work. What you need to make your assignment easier is the same process, only you need to approach it differently. For someone just trying to get a proposal done, what you need is to treat the process steps as a checklist. Instead of going through things methodically, one at a time, while documenting each step so you can coordinate with others and manage expectations, what you need is to be able to see the considerations as a list of ingredients. You need to be able to preserve the inspiration while combining all the steps. If you have the perspective of a business owner, then you should put something like this into place early. That will lay the foundation so that as you grow, you can turn the checklists into steps in a process with multiple participants. If you wait until you have multiple participants to build the foundation, you will lose proposals while you struggle to get everyone on the same page.

Winning proposals is about information. But that knowing that fact alone is not enough to produce a competitive advantage. Gathering a bunch of information does not magically lead to winning. Winning is not even based on who gathers the most information. Here are five steps to gain an information advantage and turn it into a competitive advantage. See also: Information Advantage Figure out what information you need and get it. The secret here is that you need to develop the right relationships and ask the right questions. Having a good customer relationship is not enough if it doesn’t produce the right information. And you’ll never get enough of the right information without a good customer relationship. You can measure your success by the degree to which you are able to develop an information advantage over your competitors. The best way to identify the information you need is to start with a winning proposal and work backwards to identify the information you need at each step. Deliver the right information to the proposal. The information you gather must make it to the proposal in a form that can be used in the proposal. Customer documents, presentations, notes, or knowledge in someone’s head are not enough unless they get incorporated into the proposal document. At each step, the information should be assessed and stored in a format that is useful. This may mean using the information to answer questions and storing the answers, or it could mean assessing the information to draw conclusions and storing those conclusions in a format that will help to produce the proposal. Figure out what to do with the information you have. How does what you have learned impact what you know about what it will take to win? How should you translate it into winning bid strategies and themes? You must assess the data you collect in order to turn it into information that you can use. This assessment results in turning your information advantage into a competitive advantage. The best way to conduct this assessment is to look at it from many different perspectives, and see if it indicates how you should position yourself regarding the competitive environment, the customer’s preferences and needs, the evaluation criteria, utility, value, etc. If the bid strategies and themes aren’t turned into action items and carried forward, then it was all just wasted effort. Get it on paper. This is where you figure out what to say in your proposal. A lot of people start here. When they do, they usually lack the right information or the information they have is not organized. Getting it on paper should be done in two steps: 1) Account for everything that needs to go into the proposal, and 2) Turn that itemized list into a narrative draft. This is another place where people like to skip to the second step and just start writing, without planning what their proposal content should be. Proposals are usually driven by thousands of requirements like “we know this… therefore we should say this…” or “the customer needs this… therefore we need to say that…” Until you have identified and untangled all of these and turned them into a Content Plan for the proposal, you are not ready to start writing. When you have a Content Plan, then you are ready to figure out how to articulate and present a story based on what you have learned, which has now been carried forward and turned into the Content Plan. Get it delivered. Coordinating all the resources to get the proposal written, printed (if needed), and delivered on time is a major challenge. But the flow of information is not complete until the proposal is delivered. If you skipped steps like those described above, this may turn into a train wreck. However, if you identified and obtained the right information, and carried it forward in a form that makes it useable in the proposal, then turned it into a plan so that the narrative draft accounted for everything, it is an orderly process. How do we do it? Before the RFP is released, we use a structured approach called Readiness Reviews that identifies what information to pursue and what to do with it when you get it, and provides a means to measure your progress in obtaining it. The questions, goals, and actions items from the Readiness Reviews are designed to give you the information you need to complete the Content Plan when the RFP is released. Our methodology for Content Planning is iterative and accounts for everything that should go into a winning proposal. We use a quality assurance methodology called Proposal Quality Validation that compares the narrative draft to the items you previously identified as being part of what it will take to win. The entire process is based on discovering what it will take to win and carrying that information forward so that your information advantage becomes a competitive advantage that is realized in the form of a winning proposal. Readiness Reviews, Content Planning, and Proposal Quality Validation are all part of the MustWin Process and are explained in detail, along with the forms, checklists, and instructions for implementation, in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. We use them on our own proposals, and have helped countless other companies use them to improve their proposals. It can be very challenging going from doing proposals in an informal way to doing them in a careful, methodical, and sophisticated way because you're betting your company and your career on the outcome. PropLIBRARY gives you the process in an off-the-shelf form that would take years to develop and document on your own. Plus it's been vetted by thousands of users. If you need our help implementing PropLIBRARY or winning your proposals you can contact us here.

What do each of the following proposal problems have in common? Every one of the problems described below have something in common. There is a single solution that can address them all. All the overlapping and confusing needs have the same origin. To get good at consistently winning proposals, you not only have to realize what it is, you must make it happen. We'll share what it is, but for you to believe it you have to understand the issues first. See also: Content Planning Box Q) What is the fastest way to speed up proposal writing? A) People spend more time thinking and talking about a proposal than they actually do writing. Speeding up figuring out what to write about and making sure you have the information you need are the best ways to speed up proposal writing. With the right approach, this can be made checklist simple. Q) What is the best way to win proposals? A) Writing based on what it will take to win. As important as relationship marketing and intelligence gathering are to understanding what it will take to win, if they don't get turned into black ink on paper, they're not part of the proposal. Successful proposal writing requires making this connection. You won't get this from templates, magic words that hypnotize the reader, descriptive copy, or having stylistic flourish. It requires discovery, assessment, strategy, and mapping the points you need to make to the document. Winning in writing requires being methodical. Q) What is the best way to achieve quality assurance for your proposals? A) Asking people, even experienced people, for their opinions after the document is written does not provide quality assurance. It provides merely opinions. To get quality assurance, you have to define quality and the criteria you will measure it by before you start writing so that you can create a proposal that fulfills those criteria. You must explicitly validate the content of the proposal against what it is supposed to contain. It takes more than just having a review. Q) What is the best way to get the most out of inexperienced writers? A) Make sure that proposal assignments come with guidance in both what to write and how to write it. Simply giving them a heading and an RFP and calling that a "proposal assignment" is not the best way to get winning results out of any writer, but especially the inexperienced ones. Q) What is the best way to balance the time needed to plan against the time available to write? A) Use an approach to planning that is scalable and puts as little time into creating things that don’t go into the proposal as possible. Turn a big chunk of the time spent thinking and talking instead of writing and turn it into a plan that accelerates proposal writing. Turn a big chunk of the time spent rewriting over and over again, and prepare so you can write it once. All it takes is a little bit of time to think things through before you start. Q) How do you measure the progress of writing? A) If you account for everything that needs to be written, emphasized, explained, etc., then writing becomes a process of elimination. As you convert instructions into narrative, you can measure progress by how many of the items you have completed. You can say what percent of your goals have been achieved as opposed to how many pages you have written. It is much easier to achieve this if your approach to planning the content of your proposal facilitates itemizing the instructions. Peter Drucker said, "If you don't measure it, you can't manage it." Are you really managing your proposals if you don't account for everything that needs to be written before you start? Q) How can you measure the quality of proposal writing? A) If your approach to content planning enables you to track how many of your goals you have achieved, then you can take it a step further and assess how well you've achieved those goals. The right approach to content planning puts you into position to say not only whether you have achieved your goals, but also how well you have achieved them. Q) How do you measure your use of visual communication? A) Everyone knows their proposals should have more graphics. Many try to get them by creating some quota, like one graphic for every three pages. But did you realize that with the right content planning approach you can actually measure what percentage of your message is communicated using graphics? Q) What is better than a template? A) Proposal templates and assembly lines do more harm than good. On the other hand, re-using your content plans is a wonderful way to accelerate your proposals without having to extensively edit text to match the new context. Or you can create a bid strategy re-use library or a proposal recipe library. Just don't recycle your narratives. Q) How do I ensure that my proposals reflect our strategic plans? A) Before you insert your win strategies and themes into your proposal, you can map them to your company's strategic plans and include instructions to guide authors regarding how they can work together. Q) How do I balance between centralized control over proposals and distributed input? A) Proposal Content Planning can be implemented as a centralized model, with a manager or core team preparing the instructions and then assigning them, or as a collaborative model where everyone contributes to the plan. Most organizations are hybrids, and not at either extreme. You can balance control vs. consensus. Q) How do I facilitate proposal collaboration? A) The vast majority of what is said at proposal meetings never makes it into the document. There are better ways to collaborate on proposals than sitting around a table or video conference talking about it. Subject matter experts and proposal writers need to exchange ideas. Executives need to be able to perform oversight and make corrections and contributions. Authors of different sections need to deal with overlap. The time to discover these issues, figure out what to do about them, and make sure the right information flows to the right people is before it is turned into pages of narrative. The right approach to proposal content planning can also be used for asking questions, surfacing problems, and managing issues. A Content Plan can be used as a container to hold data, thoughts, and ultimately decisions that then can be turned into the right narrative. Q) How can I improve the quality of proposal writing? A) Planning proposal content can be more important than reviewing it. Planning the content of a proposal can also be about more than just what goes into the proposal. It's an opportunity to explain to the authors not only what to write, but how it should be written. You can remind them to use the RFP's terminology, optimize a section against the evaluation criteria, demonstrate understanding through results instead of empty claims, etc. You can use a proposal content plan to drive solutions to proposal quality problems into the document. Q) What is the best way to stay below page limitations? A) Combine the ideas of a proposal compliance matrix with an annotated outline, and put it in a document shell. This can help you make sure that what needs to be written fits the space allocated before you start writing. This can enable people to see how much space is available for what they need to write. It can be used to make an assignment about delivering something that fits and not just slinging a bunch of words at it Here's what they all have in common: We knew it was important, but we didn't realize until we started writing this article just how central Proposal Content Planning is to proposal success. It boils down to these three things: Planning the content before you write is the best way to speed up proposal writing Planning the content before you write is the best way to achieve a proposal based on what it will take to win Planning the content is what connects relationship marketing, intelligence gathering, strategic planning, proposal management, team collaboration, proposal execution, and quality validation That sounds too important to ignore, which is what most companies do because it's so hard to get people to plan their proposals before writing them. It also tells us that instead of picking the low-hanging fruit by focusing on everything else first, that no matter how painful it might be, most companies should focus on how they plan the content of their proposals until it's solving problems like those described above.

See also: Content planning box Everyone acknowledges the importance of having proposal reviews if you want to win. What most people don’t realize is that reviews are not the most important thing you can do if you want to improve your proposal quality and your win probability. How well you plan the content before you start writing has more to do with whether you win than having proposal reviews. Planning the content of your proposal before you write it is about preventing mistakes in the first place. Reviews are about catching mistakes after they have been made. Relying on reviews means trying to fix the proposal by writing and re-writing until you run out of time and submit what you have instead of what it should have been. If you review without defining what the proposal is supposed to be in sufficient detail for the writers to act on it, you are doomed to running out the clock without ever being satisfied you have the winning proposal. How can you have an effective review if you haven’t thought through what should go in your proposal? And why would you wait until the review to think that through? When you plan the content of your proposal, you make critical decisions like: How should the proposal be organized? What are your win strategies? What should you emphasize? How should you present it? What trade-offs do you face and how should they be handled? Have you accounted for everything needed to reflect what it will take to win? What do you need to do to achieve the highest evaluation score? Reviewing that you've got these things right is vital and the time to do that review is before people turn it into a narrative draft. If you've done that, reviewing the wording of the draft is secondary. Instead of thinking of the red team as the most important proposal review, you should start thinking about the review of the content plan prior to the start of proposal writing as the most important proposal review. So why is it that there are far more companies that jump straight into writing and then try to fix it with reviews, than companies that carefully plan the content? Maybe it’s because it’s a lot harder to achieve a good, reliable content planning methodology than it is to get some people to read the proposal and give you their opinions of it. The best way to win proposals is to put the emphasis on content planning and the review of your content plan. The review that happens later, after the draft is written, is mainly to make sure that the writers stuck to the plan. Reviewing the content plan is more important than reviewing the draft. You review the content plan to make sure the proposal will win. You review the draft to fix mistakes or deviations from the plan. When you approach it this way, the writers and the reviewers all get the same set of criteria to use in assessing the quality of the proposal. Those criteria are incredibly important and what you should make the focus of your effort, struggles, and debate. Those criteria define what it will take to win. Doing a proposal without them is like not even trying to win. When you approach it the other way, and focus on reviewing the draft proposal, you risk getting a proposal that was written without thinking through what it will take to win, assessed by reviewers who have not thought through what it will take to win. Differences are bound to happen. Re-writing the proposal in the hope that both groups will somehow stumble across what the proposal should be before the deadline is not a good way to consistently create quality proposals. If that is how you are operating, then the best way to fix it is to change the emphasis from reviewing the draft to reviewing the plan. If the powers that be insist on reviewing the draft instead of the plan, then slip this article under their door. They have some explaining to do.

If we had to pick one thing to change that would have the most impact on an organization’s ability to win, it would be how they approach bid/no bid decisions. If you think of them as just being about deciding whether to bid, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity, because they can have a much greater impact on how you bid, than just on if you bid. See also: Bid/no bid decisions Do you know what percentage of bids you drop at each stage or do you never drop anything? Do the things you bid reinforce your strategic plans or ignore them? Do you arrive at RFP release with an information advantage or just knowing what’s in the announcement? Are you tracking metrics that can quantify what’s driving your win rate? Or are you just assuming that conventional wisdom applies to your circumstances? Do leads go immediately into your tracking system? Or do you sit on them until you know you’re going to pursue them before you make them “official?” Do you put every lead you can find into your tracking system, no matter how weak or unqualified they are, to boost your numbers? Can you articulate what it will take to win before you start the proposal, or do you just base it on what is in the RFP? Do you know your win strategies and themes before you start the proposal? Or do you struggle to define your win strategies and themes during the proposal? Do you have a bid/no bid decision, or a bid/no bid process that defines standards and has steps, goals, and criteria as well as reviews? All of these problems are made worse by an ineffective bid/no bid process. It doesn’t even have to be broken. A weakness on any one of these issues can be addressed by improving how you approach your bid/no bid decision process. Another way of saying this is that you can improve you win rate by focusing on your bid/no bid decision process. If you already have a bid/no bid process, then you might want to add, “Has it become watered down over time by people who have learned how to game the system, or by people who just want to be nice and get along rather than make tough decisions?” And, “Is it driven primarily by financial considerations, or is it driven by the need to discover what it will take to win?” A lot of people assume that a bid/no bid process boosts win rates by dropping the low probability pursuits. While this is true, the real way that the bid/no bid process boosts win rates is by making people do the right things to position the company to win. You can change the behavior of people by changing the bid/no bid process. It’s also a way that you can introduce process without a lot of steps. If you just define the standards, the goals, and the criteria for meeting them, your staff will figure out what they need to do to fulfill them. Without even realizing it, they’ll start implementing process on their own. By paying careful attention to the bid/no bid process, you can set the stage for continuous improvement in your win rate, and do it through tiny steps instead of a major overhaul.

Most of you know us as the company behind PropLIBRARY that publishes a newsletter that some of you have subscribed to for 10 years. We had a couple of conversations last week with potential customers that made us realize that we've also worked on quite a few projects, usually with some twists that made them interesting. We’d like to share them with you because they really show the variety of challenges that companies face and provide some creative ideas for how to overcome them. As always, you can take our ideas and run with them on your own or ask for our help. Proposal Reviews We performed an assessment of 200 pages worth of proposal material for a B2G company so they could benchmark how good their proposals are. This was an assessment based on written quality criteria instead of what it will take to win a particular pursuit. But the results settled some internal conflicts regarding where to put effort to improve their win rates. This cost several thousand dollars, but it helped get everyone on the same page regarding priorities and set the right direction for their collective future. We reviewed a small proposal for a B2B company that performs market research to help banks decide where to open branches. It was just a few hours of effort and cost them just a few hundred dollars, but helped them figure out how to better approach winning new business. We reviewed a draft B2G proposal based on a draft RFP to help a company decide how much more effort to put into it when the final RFP hit the street. It required reviewing the proposal and the RFP, as well as a couple of online meetings, but still cost them less than a thousand dollars. Recently we've started doing reviews followed by training. This ends up working really well when we point out problems with the way it is written. We can teach them how to fix it. We modify the exercises from our library to use text from their proposal that they can work on in a classroom setting until they understand what they need to do to fix it. The training is less abstract and more relevant to the participants because it is based on their own words. It leaves the company with a better capability to get it right from the beginning on future proposals than if we went in and re-wrote it for them. One company sends us one of their proposals to review every month or two. Over time, we have helped them continuously raise the bar and make sure they are trending in the right direction. Not only has the quality of their proposal writing improved significantly, but the strategic questions we raise when we see their proposals have led to them doing a better job of upfront strategic planning and integrating those plans into their proposals. Over the course of a year this costs about as much as sending a team out for two days of training, only the impact on specific proposals and win rates is much more direct. A company that had been a long time PropLIBRARY Subscriber asked us to review their storyboards for an upcoming proposal. We were quite pleased when the “storyboards” turned out to really be a Content Plan based on our MustWin Process. They just called them “storyboards” because that's terminology some of their executives were familiar with. More importantly, we were pleased that when we reviewed the Content Plan the problems with their proposal were immediately apparent. The Content Plan made them visible and correctable before the writing started — just like it's supposed to. A small B2B company wanted to see if they were on the right track, so they sent us a few pages from a proposal that they were just getting started. Our comments helped them correct mistakes before they made those mistakes throughout the proposal. More importantly it showed them how to position things and articulate them correctly so that the rest of the proposal would be much stronger. Since it was only a few pages and an online meeting to discuss them, it only cost them a couple hundred dollars. Writing and Re-writing We worked with a company to re-write and improve their proposal copy, which changed very little from proposal to proposal. When it does change they send it to us. Now their staff focuses on coordinating business development and production instead of writing. It’s not an arrangement that we’d recommend to most companies, but it makes sense in their case. We re-wrote the main shell that a B2B company used for its proposals, with inserts for where customized copy would go. This cost a few thousand dollars, but was used hundreds of times. Almost 20 years ago, we helped a company win a government proposal. Every five years, they track us down to help them win the recompete. This one contract represents a big chunk of their revenue and the majority of their profit. We've never let them down. The truth is their performance counted more than our proposal writing, but we helped them beat their competitors and not make any mistakes that could have lost it for them. We helped one company get their proposal started right by helping them write the Executive Summary. We spent more time talking to them than we did writing. But that helped them gain the ability to articulate their win strategies and themes. They saw what we wrote and understood why we wrote it that way. They knew which parts they should use to drive the content in each of the various proposal sections. Depending on how you want to look at it, either we created the four most expensive pages in that proposal, or a very economical improvement to the 50 pages that followed them. Training and Process Development A company contacted us after losing five proposals in a row. We essentially recreated their business development function. It took a lot of effort. But they won the next five in a row. And a couple years later are still winning close to half their bids. We didn't charge them nearly enough. A company approached us to get help identifying the themes and win strategies they should base an upcoming proposal on. We spent a day in a classroom setting. We did a little training about themes, but mostly we helped them look at things from many different directions and inspired them in ways they hadn't considered. They went into the proposal with a much better understanding of their message and with a story to tell. All it cost was a day of our time. Annual meeting 1: A company that was planning an annual meeting asked us to provide a day of training. They had project managers from all over the country flying in and wanted to take advantage of their presence to boost their skills and get them all on the same page regarding what goes into winning proposals. They packed a large room with 50-60 people, most of whom had limited proposal experience. Since we only had a day, we didn't try to turn them into experts, but instead made sure they knew what would be involved and what to expect. Annual meeting 2: A B2G company asked us to provide a day of proposal training after their annual meeting. But this group was small and a lot more advanced. We focused on writing instead of process. It was basically a day of exercises and show-and-tell. They got to see, compare, and contrast different approaches in writing to solving the exercises. They walked away feeling inspired with lots of new ideas that they could use to improve their writing in general and not just on proposals. Annual meeting 3: A large A&E firm holding an annual meeting asked us to speak to their proposal department. There were eight people covering various roles (proposal management, writing, graphics, editing, production). We focused on increasing the value-added offered by the proposal group. Some of the things they were looking at as problems became opportunities to increase their value along the way. Things went so well that we stayed another day so we could spend an hour addressing their project managers. For them the topic became how to get the most value out of the proposal group, with the result being that both groups had a better understanding of where the hand-offs were and what to expect from each other. For an organization that helps small businesses, we set them up with a Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY that they could then offer to their members. Then we went out to their site and performed a day that was a combination of process training and how to best make use of PropLIBRARY. We’d like to find more associations and organizations willing to partner this way. Every few months we do an onsite training session for one company or another. We have a ton of curricula that are very modular that we pull from and customize. Most end up being two-day sessions. One day is too short to cover much ground and still have exercises. In three days we can cover most topics quite well with just the right amount of exercises. But most end up settling for two days in order to limit the cost. Sometimes instead of doing onsite training, we break the material up into 1-2 hour pieces and do it as online meetings spread over weeks or even months. When done this way, it becomes more about continuous improvement and skills development than an event. It's also a lot easier for participants to fit into their schedules. Since we launched the Exercise Library on PropLIBRARY, we have done a few courses for companies that involved a series of exercises where we do some training followed by a "homework assignment" and a date when we review them. This is a very cost effective way to develop skills over time, since it costs about as much as a one-day class but results in improvements every month for a year. We spent a couple of years supporting a billion dollar company that was creating a new business line and needed a new proposal group to support it. This group would do quick-turnaround proposals that were very different from the hundred million dollar 45-60 day proposals the rest of the company did. The staff they had assigned were very junior level. We acted as experienced coaches and they did all the work. We helped them implement the right processes and solved problems, and provided quality assurance. At first we worked with them several times a week. By the end of the first year that was down to once a week, and then once a month until we were no longer needed. We had a similar coaching relationship with another company, but this one was a small business that wanted to increase their competitiveness. They couldn't afford to hire someone full-time with extensive experience, so they asked us to spend a few hours each week with their junior level proposal specialist, business development lead, and CEO. Over the course of the next year, we implemented strategic planning, pipeline development, lead qualification, compliance matrices, content planning, proposal quality validation, etc. For much less than the cost of hiring a single person, their entire company became more competitive and built lasting capabilities. We set up a point scoring system for a company doing quick turnaround task order proposals so they could make instant bid/no bid decisions. We worked with a company that wasn't doing the strategic planning they should. They asked us to help them put together a strategic plan to start their upcoming fiscal year. Instead we implemented a series of monthly strategic planning exercises that had their executive staff doing homework assignments in each of 12 key areas related to the strategic plan. This meant every month they were addressing strategic issues and implementing what was being discussed, instead of writing a document in one month and putting it on the shelf for the rest of the year. At the end of the year, after they'd addressed all 12 topics, they started over, revisiting them and improving upon them for the next year. But this time did it on their own. The cost of us sitting in on 12 online meetings, incidentally, was comparable to us spending a week writing the document for them. But they got so much more out of it. Some of our best relationships have been with companies that volunteered to be our guinea pigs. We test all of the recommendations we put in writing in the field every chance we get. There are companies who have read enough of our material to trust us and when we have new techniques we take them there as a form of "beta" testing. We treat our friends well, giving them access to all of our goodies and much lower rates than we charge others. We regularly go back and change our forms and instructions based on what we learn while watching others fill them out and use them in practice. One of the companies we worked with on pipeline development needed something to use to track their leads. What started as a simple spreadsheet became a metrics tool. We added a highly visual dashboard to it so that you could see at a glance the key performance indicators along with their targets. The dashboard took the concepts of lead tracking, pipeline development, and reporting and turned them into visual communications that they could use to make decisions and manage performance. A company asked us to review their win rate data and provide recommendations for improvement. When they sent us their data, it turned out they had created a dashboard of their own. It was quite good and it gave us the information we needed to identify patterns and issues that were impacting their win rates. Along with suggestions for how to improve their win rate, we made a few suggestions for improving their dashboard. We don’t take on just any project. We’re not interested in staff augmentation or billing as many hours as possible. We like to focus on developing the content in PropLIBRARY, but we do support implementation. And since we started offering Corporate Subscriptions, we’ve increased the level of support we can offer. The projects we're most interested in involve helping people solve problems and seeing how well our recommendations are working in the field. We've taken on tiny projects as well as extremely large scale ones. Most of them have come to us from people who have read our articles for years and wanted to get our help directly. If you like what we have to say and want to see if we’ll take on your project, you can find out by clicking here and getting in touch with us. PropLIBRARY Subscribers always get moved to the head of the line and get well taken care of.

Very few companies have effective bid/no bid decision making. They muddle through. When they do implement a bid/no bid process, it is usually flawed. The desires of participants carry more weight than any other criteria. Most find it extremely difficult to not take a chance at winning something. Some even have bid/no bid decision meetings, but they don't actually change anything. Below are several ways that companies approach the bid/no bid process. See also: Bid/No Bid Decisions Leave it up to business development. A lot of organizations assume that they wouldn’t pursue an opportunity if it “didn’t look good.” The problem with this is that they tend to not put in place the systems that ensure their opportunities are golden. A bid/no bid process pushes information along to the next decision point, where you can see whether sufficient progress has been made toward being ready to win it. It also forces you to explicitly consider more reasons to not pursue the effort. It makes you more selective and increases your win rate. But even if you can never bring yourself to reject a bid, having a bid/no bid process will make your pursuits more effective, simply by providing goals and deadlines. A variation on this is to incentivize business development on wins and then leave it up to them what they pursue. Pre-RFP bid/no bid decision. A lot of companies hold a bid/no bid decision meeting shortly before the RFP comes out. The problem with this approach is that it is reactive — it assesses what has been done with no ability to influence what will be done. In addition, it often doesn’t result in an actual decision since the verdict often degrades into “let’s wait and see what it says in the RFP.” RFP Release bid/no bid decision. When a company starts to formalize its proposal process, if it lacks a bid/no bid decision process, the proposal process will often impose one when the RFP is released. The idea for this review is to avoid spending effort on pursuits that can’t be won. The reality is that by this point the company is invested in the pursuit and reluctant to drop it. Like the pre-RFP bid/no bid decision, this one also comes too late to effect any positive change. Step reviews and gate systems. These approaches are basically synonymous. A gate system identifies milestones with requirements that the pursuit must fulfill in order to pass each “gate.” A step review is a series of reviews held at each step in the pursuit. Both are usually about the bid lead demonstrating to the company that it’s a qualified lead. Gate systems tend to be financially oriented, focusing on resource allocation. Setting the milestones can be tricky. Point scoring. Awards points when a pursuit matches certain criteria that are customized to the company’s offerings. For example, the number of staff, lead time, points of contact, frequency of contact, value, etc. could all be criteria that get assigned a certain number of points. You can create a bid/no bid matrix or scoring sheet to make it easy. Point systems are great if you need to implement objective automatic bid/no bid decisions, such as for quick turnaround task orders. However, they don’t work as well in environments where offerings can’t be qualified using predictable criteria. Readiness Reviews. Uses a series of reviews with specific questions to answer, goals to achieve, and action items for each review. This is the approach we recommend as part of the MustWin Process. The scoring system help make decisions more objective. It also lends itself to tracking metrics in a matrix that can help you make your bid decisions. Because the questions, goals, and action items are known in advance they help ensure that nothing gets overlooked. They provide a way to track whether the pursuit is trending toward being ready to win at RFP release or away from being ready to win. You should have a bid/no bid decision when a lead is identified. You should have a bid/no bid decision when you want to put resources into pursuing it. You should have a bid/no bid decision when you want to check the progress that you’ve made. You should have a bid/no bid decision at key milestones. You should have a bid/no bid decision when you finally get to see the RFP. You don’t need a bid/no bid decision, you need a bid/no bid process. The trick to having a good bid/no bid process is that it must: See also: Information Advantage Start early enough to facilitate positive feedback and change Have a sufficient number of reviews to track trends Incentivize dropping leads as much, if not more, as it does identifying and pursuing them Be helpful to those who have to implement it, and not extra effort Set expectations between business developers and reviewers in advance Encourage developing an information advantage and not just satisfy financial criteria Result in the information needed to win the proposal Be objective enough to overcome the human desire not to drop something labeled an “opportunity” Have a feedback loop or metrics tracking component that improves future decisions Require the metrics generated by the reviews to be used in executive reporting When you examine the approaches to bid/no bid analysis with these in mind it becomes apparent why many companies’ bid/no bid decision making is so flawed. Part of the problem is that it requires the active participation of those identifying and pursuing the leads. Convincing them to drop some of the leads they discovered is a challenge. If you set up your bid/no bid decision as adversarial, or use a consultant or service to challenge whether you should bid, you'll face internal resistance. Implementing a bid/no bid decision process is most effective when the incentives for dropping leads equal or exceeds those for pursuing them. This can be done by setting “no bid” targets, limiting the amount of funds for pursuit, making reviews as objective as possible, and incentivizing reviewers based on “no bids.” It may be better to engage a bid/no bid consultant or service as a coach to help qualify your leads than as a hurdle to be overcome. In any event, a bid/no bid decision process can’t be mandated from the proposal back-end. It has to be desired by those involved in business development. The best way to achieve this is to create a system that is helpful to them. The way we do this is by making it easy for them to complete the Readiness Reviews and ensuring that they know exactly what they need to do to pass those reviews. The idea is to make it so that as they collect intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, they only have to record or store it once and that’s what is used for the review. We avoid asking them to sum everything up in some kind of report that they have to prepare. We also designed the scoring system so that the review produces the metrics without any extra effort and the metrics can be used to show them whether they are hitting their targets. It also helps if the metrics from your bid/no bid analysis are required to complete executive reports. This is a little trick we developed to help a billion dollar company implement Readiness Reviews. They were decentralized, with locations worldwide, and had hundreds of people who would be involved. Gaining process acceptance was their number one concern. By changing the formats used for executive reporting, the executives pushed the requirements down to their organizations and their staff started asking for training. This put the staff doing the implementation in the position of offering help instead of demanding cooperation.

After you do a few hundred proposal reviews, they can become like déjà vu. Here are 10 problems we see over and over: See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria A lack of differentiators Poor strategic or competitive positioning Copy that isn’t written from the customer’s perspective, that focuses on your own company’s attributes (qualifications, approach, capabilities) instead of what the customer will get as a result of them Claiming understanding by stating it, instead of demonstrating it through results Using universal statements, truisms, patronizing statements, and passive voice Statements without explanations of why they matter or how the customer will benefit Failure to comply with the RFP instructions Failure to address the evaluation criteria and optimize your score Failure to communicate visually and use graphics Building to a strong finish instead of having a strong introduction and substantiating it But identifying the problems is the easy part. The hard part comes when the people who wrote the original proposal have to fix it. Most of the problems in the list above are a result of bad habits. You can describe the problem and point out the exact location in the proposal where it exists, and a writer with bad habits may not be able to fix it. That is why we’ve started conducting our reviews a little differently. We don’t just describe the problems, we teach the writers how to fix them. After the review, we hold a training session that is based on the exercises we have on PropLIBRARY targeting the problems described above. But instead of using the exercises “as is” we use statements taken from the proposal so that they have to correct their own words. We pull out problem sentences or paragraphs from the proposal, and have each person on the team re-write them. We put the re-written statements on a document projector so that everyone can see. Then we compare and contrast to see what works well as what doesn’t. Everyone writes. Everyone sees. They learn to recognize the bad, as well as the good. We get to see which writers are able to break their bad habits, and which are still struggling. We stick around for another day and provide one-on-one coaching to make sure they can make the changes needed. When we do this on site, it typically takes about three days with this approach, to review, debrief, teach, and coach. That means it’s only applicable to proposals written by a team that is collocated and can schedule a three-day review cycle. But the result is a much higher probability of being able to successfully implement the changes, which results in a proposal with a much higher probability of winning. It also benefits future proposals. It changes the expectations of what a well-written proposal looks like and it enhances the skills of the staff you use to write your proposals. Future reviews with the same staff will see better results and faster recovery times. The same approach can be implemented remotely. It’s a little cheaper, it’s a little less effective, and it’s a whole lot more flexible and convenient. You can implement this approach on your own. The key is the exercises and being able to customize them using content from the proposal. It may help to use the exercises available on PropLIBRARY as a starting point. You can also engage us to conduct the review with integrated exercise-based training. If you bring us in for a three-day review during the month of May, we’ll throw in a free PropLIBRARY Corporate Subscription to increase the takeaway value and long term benefits.

As companies grow, they go from figuring out how to close their sales as they go along to putting it in writing, to putting in writing in a more reliable way. They reach a point where their proposals are getting more and more complicated, the volume is increasing, and the value of the proposals is not only larger but more critical to the company. However, because they remain entrepreneurial they don't feel ready to slow down and focus on structure. Consider the following company as an example: See also: Process Implementation They do some government business, but are mostly B2B. Their market is becoming more heavily regulated and customers are passing on their compliance issues in their RFPs. They don’t do a good job of creating proposals that reflect their win strategies. A lot of their proposals consist mainly of recycled marketing materials. They hired someone to do their proposals and put them under the VP of Sales. It didn’t improve the quality. They don’t want or need a complicated process like the “government contractors” have. My first reaction is that they have three problems going on at the same time: They need a process that will set expectations, manage the flow of information into the proposal, and help participants assess proposal quality as they go along. They need training in what a quality proposal is, and what is involved in producing one. They need to change their culture. They need to evolve how they view sales to reflect the changes in their market and develop their organization from one where customer relationships are about taking orders to one that is more solutions oriented. But where should they start? The best, obviously, would be to do all three. But what if they can only do one? They could hire someone to come in and do training. But while that will improve overall awareness, it won’t give them a process that is right for them and ready to implement. A better approach is coaching, but while that will increase the expertise available, they’ll still need to develop their process. By embedding training in the process they can start there. The right process will also embed expectation management and help participants understand what information is needed to win a proposal. This will begin the process of changing how the organization views sales. You don’t create a proposal function and implement a new process that impacts other departments in a single step. It’s better to start simple and increase the sophistication over time. But where do you start? What is the least amount of process you can get away with? To understand this, you have to change how you think about process. It’s not about steps. You don’t start with fewer steps and add more over time. Instead, it’s about starting out with the right principles and improving your ability to fulfill them over time. The basic requirements for a winning process What is the bare minimum that you need from a proposal process? Here is a list that can get you started: Start the proposal with the information required to win it. Define quality as a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. Be able to articulate what it will take to win. Turn what it will take to win into instructions for writers and criteria for reviewers. Start with a compliance matrix to plan your content and evolve into ever more detailed Proposal Content Planning. Review what was written to ensure that it reflects the compliance matrix/Content Plan as well as what it will take to win. The ramifications of each of these items will guide future improvement efforts. To simplify the process even further, simply remove items from the list. Take a look and see which items can be deleted. If you can find any. To implement the process, start by doing things according to the list. In order to set expectations, you’ll need to document the process. Forget formal process language or telling people every little detail. Start with what goals to achieve and questions to answer. Give them checklists, examples, and suggestions for inspiration. Each time you successfully prepare a proposal using this approach, raise the bar. Improve your approach. If you run into problems or challenges, then focus on applying the principles to solving them. If you want to cheat, you can just use our process library. Then skip most of it. Just pick out the items that you are ready for. If you read up on the MustWin Process, you’ll know how sophisticated it can get. But you don’t have to start there. You can use it to define and clarify your goals and accelerate the implementation. And then when you are ready to raise the bar, you can add more. If you need help implementing it, we can even come out and do the training or provide you with coaching. But you can also use it without paying for any help. Think of it as a huge toolbox that will make it much easier to improve the quality of your proposals.

Sometimes you have to bid when you don’t have a previous relationship with the customer. So how do you write from their perspective, when you don’t even know what that is? While you may not know them directly, you may know people like them. You can ask yourself questions like: What matters to people in their environment and circumstances? What would they find useful, helpful, or beneficial? What are their characteristics? Your goal is to build a profile that will help you visualize what you think the customer is like when you don’t really know them that well. Make sure that you separate the people from the organization: What matters to people like them? How does a person like that tend to make decisions? What matters to organizations like theirs? How does an organization like that tend to make decisions? This approach gives you someone to visualize so that you can write from their perspective. It is better to write about results and benefits that are relevant to people like the customer, than to not write about results and benefits at all. If you really don’t know the customer, their organization, their industry, their type or anything about them, then all you can do is use yourself as an example. Write about the results and benefits that would matter to you if you were them. Even though we vary a great deal as individuals, we all share a human nature. Just don’t write it about yourself, make it about what the customer will get and how they will benefit from it. There are some writing techniques you can use when you don’t really know the customer. These tend to water your proposal down and make it weaker. But using them is better than not making your proposal about the customer. You can hedge your bets by using words like “usually” and “most” when you want to say that something matters to a lot of people, but don’t want to say that it matters (to all people) just in case the person reading isn’t one of them. You can also use examples of things that matter, such as how you take customer concerns into consideration, without saying that those concerns matter to the customer (even if you suspect that they do). Another approach you can take is to make your submission the first step in a conversation. Even when there is a written RFP and everything is set in stone, once the contract is awarded there will be plenty of discussion. By making the proposal conversational, you can show your expertise by addressing important considerations, while maintaining flexibility with regards to the options, trade-offs, or approaches favored by the customer (as soon as you find out what they are). While you may not know the individual or company's details or specific concerns, you can still write about organizations like theirs. By focusing on issues that matter to most people and subtly hedging your language, you can prepare a proposal from the perspective of a typical customer and still be superior to one that simply describes the company submitting the proposal.

In publishing our email, we have distributed a couple million emails. This has given us some insight into the nature of “spam.” You may think that spam is something specific to email, but the truth is that a lot of people write their proposals as if they were writing spam. One of the things that we have learned is that the reader gets to decide what is spam and what is not. In publishing our newsletter, we have achieved an extremely low rate of spam rejections. We know this because our email service provider keeps benchmarks. But if someone gets our newsletter and decides it's spam, then it’s spam. We don't get to correct them. We don't get to remind them that they signed themselves up for it. The reader gets to decide. Most people define spam as unsolicited commercial email. But some spam isn’t commercial. And readers often reject email they have requested as spam. Why is that? Because what really drives people to consider an email spam is when: It's not what they expected It's not relevant to them It's not what they want Some people have a lower threshold than others, but usually it’s one or more of these that turn the relationship from something they wanted to something they reject. When you write a proposal, you want to be the opposite of spam. To achieve this, you need to provide: Exactly what the customer expects (or better) Something directly relevant and useful Something they really want When you write your proposal based on who you are, what you do, and why you are better, you risk getting the same reaction that people have when they receive spam. This will happen when they don’t want you, they want what you can do for them. If you don’t focus on the results and how they benefit, then all those impressive details about you aren’t relevant to them. They were expecting a solution and not a description of how great you are. That is not what they expected and now instead of a partner they see you as trying to sell something to them and they sense a bait and switch. Your proposal is spam. To avoid that you have to anticipate what the reader expects and values. And you have to make everything you say about yourself relevant to them. The best way to achieve that is to avoid being descriptive. The reason why it is relevant is more important to the customer than whatever fact you are describing. This is especially true with your qualifications. They don’t want your qualifications, they want what will result from those qualifications. So the next time you are trying to figure out what you want to say in your proposal, remember that it’s not about you — the customer gets to decide what’s spam.

Definition: Proposal triage is a best practice for when you have too many proposals, get a late start, or have proposals that are broken. Proposal triage is based on prioritizing effort based on the urgency of your needs. It often involves exceptions and doing things in streamlined, accelerated ways that would not be ideal under less adverse circumstances. It may involve focusing on submission instead of winning, or it may involve preserving a lesser chance of winning over a very real risk of not being able to submit at all. Proposal triage requires making quick decisions that are good enough and seeking the best compromise for best fulfilling your priorities under adversity, instead of the normal best practice and normal priorities. It starts with a rapid, intense, and brutally honest assessment: See also: Dealing with adversity Are you sure you should bid? If not, can you get out of it or are you stuck with it? How many and what kind of writers do you need vs. what do you have available? What do you have to do to get more? What, if anything, has already been done to prepare for the proposal? How much time do you have between now and when it’s due? What do you have to do in that time, and what can you skip? What does the schedule look like? What can you get people working on right now? Who should you assign to what? What is the least amount of planning you can get away with? What guidance, coaching, or training do you need immediately so people can be effective? What kind of review process should you put in place? What problems can you anticipate and mitigate early? As if these questions aren’t hard enough, once you get past them you have to grapple with what will go in the proposal. What content do you need? How should you plan and organize that content? Which parts are well known, and which parts need to be figured out? How do you discover and integrate what is known about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and company submitting the proposal, along with the RFP and subject matter expert input based on the schedule and specific characteristics of this bid? How much time and attention can you give to figuring out what it will take to win before writing starts? How are you going to deal with the reviews and inevitable changes that come from an unprepared, poorly planned, rushed effort? Deep in the back of your mind, you also have to ask yourself whether your goal is to just get something submitted or actually win the darn thing. Answer honestly because it will impact the risks you face and the decisions you make. Saying that you are going to submit the proposal while attempting to make it as winnable as possible is a meaningless rationalization. It could mean: You just want to submit but have to tell your stakeholders that you're trying to win it. You believe in winning no matter what. But this one might be out of your hands and you have competing priorities. Winning is not possible but you have to submit something. For reasons. Winning might be possible if you had the input and resources required, which you don't. Winning might be possible if you hadn't started so late. Maybe you'll win on price if your proposal doesn't get thrown out. Let's just see how things go. In order to pull as much success as possible out of adverse circumstances, try sizing up what you must produce and deliver against: What information you have to work with How much time you have until the deadline What resources you have to work with Then allocate the time and resources to a series of steps that converts the information into what you must produce in way that minimizes risk of loss while also maximizing your chances of winning where you can. It is in this last step that you succeed or fail. You should approach proposal triage with your procedures and tools ready for immediate use (and not in your head, ready to be written, or anything else a step or two away from immediate use) just like a hospital emergency room has theirs. In our toolbox, we have the MustWin Process, fully documented and ready to go. At a moment’s notice, we can use the checklists, forms, etc., without necessarily implementing the whole process. In proposal triage, you have to take shortcuts. Here is some of what we use from our MustWin toolbox: We take the four lists of questions, goals, and action items from the Readiness Review methodology and treat it like a checklist for rapid assessment of what information we have to work with. We use Content Planning to provide a way to integrate everything into a plan for writing that scales according to the available schedule. Content Planning incorporates the outline and compliance matrix, but can add a lot more depending on the time available. We can collapse the eight iterations into a single pass and quickly drop RFP requirements, instructions, questions still to be worked out, boilerplate, and anything else we can copy and paste into the Content Plan. We use Proposal Quality Validation to provide a semblance of quality assurance to the chaos of proposal triage. We use it to track what we should be validating, and then to decide what we think really needs it. It helps us balance between skipping reviews and slowing down to take a detailed look at something. A set of prepared templates for proposal logistics. Proposal logistics covers assignments, resource allocation, scheduling, and production. You may know how to prepare a schedule, but you shouldn’t have to slow down to format the document that wraps around the schedule. If you don’t have these items ready for immediate implementation, then on the spot and under pressure you have to: Know what questions to ask to find out what information you have to work with and spend time in discussion assessing it. Find a balance between planning and writing by the seat of your pants. Hold a review or two and figure out what that means when you get there. That’s not only a high-risk approach to proposal triage, it also means you will be slowed down by figuring it out as you go along. It’s easy to say that proposal triage should not be necessary and that any opportunity that needs triage should not be bid. But that’s not reality. And if you know it’s going to be required sooner or later, you should be prepared when that day comes. If you are practicing proposal triage on all of your proposals, then you do not have an emergency room. What you have is dysfunction in something that should be a core competency for your company. In the medical world they’d call that malpractice.

Once you understand what proposal themes are and how they contribute to winning, then comes the hard part: articulating your message in the form of theme statements. When we review people’s proposals we see a lot of theme statements that are either: Grandiose statements that sound like bragging and are completely unsubstantiated. Like being the largest, best-industry leader ever. Or: Bland, boring statements that the customer should pick the company submitting the proposal without explaining why. So much blah, blah, blah. Both of them are a result of trying to describe yourself in favorable terms or how you want to be seen. They don’t provide any value to the customer or help them make their decision. They do nothing for you and can actually work against you. They come from not understanding how to articulate your message. The best way to approach writing theme statements is to give the customer information that they can use. See also: Themes Theme statements should focus on reasons. When you try to write a theme statement about why you are better than your competitors, instead of focusing on claiming that you are better, focus on providing reasons why you are better. Instead of saying that your offering is great, explain how it is great. When you are the customer, you don’t care if the sales person thinks their product is great. You expect them to think it is better than everyone else’s. But you ignore that and make your decision. You make your decision based on how it is great or why it is better. Your theme statements should provide that information to them. The best theme statements tell the customer what they are going to get. They don’t offer commitment, understanding, enthusiasm, flattery, promises, universal statements that apply equally to your competitors, or even attributes like quality. They don’t tell the customer what they require or patronize them by telling them who they are. The best themes offer results. They make the customer want you by telling them what they will get if they select you. If you leave out what they are going to get, then there is nothing there for them to want. The next time you are trying to formulate the message you want to deliver to the customer, focus on what the customer wants from you, instead of what you want to tell them. Theme statements should say things that matter — to the customer. Unsubstantiated claims do not matter to the customer. In fact, they get in the customer’s way when they are looking for what matters about your proposal. A good test for whether you are successful is whether you can delete the theme statements from the proposal. If you can delete the theme statements without removing something vital from the proposal, then your theme statements do not matter. If your theme statements do not matter, then there is no reason to select you. That is the strongest argument I can think of for why you should write your theme statements first, before the text of your proposal. If you need the text of your proposal to articulate the reasons why the customer should select you, this means when the proposal writers started they didn’t know either.

First you need to qualify it. Qualifying a lead means making sure that it’s worth pursuing. See also: Information Advantage Is it real? Is it big enough? Is it the right type? Is it worth pursuing? Can you win it? But the truth is that you should be qualifying the lead continuously. You should be constantly proving that the lead is worth pursuing. Once you qualify the lead, you need to prepare to win it. This is a combination of things you need to do and things you need to find out. You do this by seeking the answers to more questions. When most companies get a lead, they ask themselves what they can find out about it. They go fishing. Sometimes they discover good information and are quite pleased with themselves. But usually, when the RFP is released and they start asking the real questions that they need to answer to guide the proposal writing to the win, they find that they are unprepared. This is because they have not used the time before RFP release to the maximum advantage and because the information they stumbled across did not add up to what they need to know to win. The only way to overcome this is to bring some structure to how you approach the pre-RFP pursuit. Start by breaking down the time before RFP release into parts, so that you can allocate action items and information gathering activities and then hold reviews to track their progress. Tracking the progress of leads means you need check-in milestones and some way to measure progress. Monthly business development meetings tend to become routine and ineffective. The way we approach this in our process is to break the time before RFP release down proportionately into four reviews. We take the questions that articulate what we need to know in order to write the winning proposal and allocate them across those four reviews. When we get to a review date, we grade whether the answers we’ve gathered are sufficient for us to be ready to win at RFP release. We call our approach to the pre-RFP pursuit phase Readiness Reviews. They enable you to measure whether you are becoming more or less ready to win before the RFP is even out. Even if you have passed a prior review, if you find that it's no longer worth the investment to continue it may be best to drop the pursuit. When you assume all leads should be pursued and are incentivized to show a full pipeline, companies have a difficult time dropping the pursuits, even when they haven't succeeded at developing an information advantage for them. But when you see the Readiness Review scores, it’s a bit more objective. If you track the metrics, it becomes concrete. Grading your progress at set reviews enables you to collect metrics that can help you determine exactly what drives win probability. If you divide the questions and action items into categories like customer awareness, opportunity awareness, competitive awareness, and self-awareness, you can measure how your score at each phase in each area correlates with your win rate. Over time, this can help you decide how to prioritize your efforts. Holding onto every lead means your win rates will go down and those you do win will have lower margins. But to develop an information advantage and be able to know which leads are on track you need to implement a structure like we’ve described. In a more competitive environment, those that do will gain market share. Those that don’t will starve and fade away.

A key part of winning in writing is having the ability to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. Not everybody can write from someone else’s perspective. It turns out that seeing things from other perspectives can also help with other parts of the process. Here are five different ways of looking at your pursuits and how they impact your ability to win: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline The forward perspective. Looking forward is about anticipating and preparing for what to do next. It is about starting from where you are and saying "what do we need to do?" Looking forward is the easiest perspective for most people, what they focus on, and some never look at it any other way. It works great, until you run out of time or get to the end and find out that you don’t have what you need. Most people start their proposals feeling unprepared. Do you think there might be a connection? But looking forward also means laying the right foundations. It means creating a strategic plan that tells your staff how to position the company. It means collecting intelligence so that you’ll be able to articulate what it will take to win. It means having the right processes and methodologies for pre-RFP pursuit and post-RFP proposal development. Looking forward should not mean making it up as you go along. The backward perspective. Looking backward means starting by thinking about what it will take to win your proposal. Each item you think about will lead to more things that you need in order to get there. Each step you take will take you further back in time. Looking backward tells you what you need to do at each step to arrive at the winning proposal. It is a good perspective for showing people why they need to take action early in the process instead of waiting until the end. The information perspective. Winning proposals is all about finding and assessing information so that you can articulate what the customer needs to hear in order to win. Most people just take what they know and try to present it well. Winners base their presentations on better information. The entire process can be looked at as a flow of information that gets assessed, converted, and ultimately becomes the proposal. Instead of thinking about gathering intelligence, obtaining a competitive advantage, or writing a winning proposal, consider looking at it from the perspective of where you have an information advantage. Then translate your information advantage into winning strategies and themes for your proposal. The progress perspective. How do you know if you are on track to be ready to win when the RFP is released? The only way to track your progress to ensure that you accomplish everything you need to before time runs out is to start already knowing what steps you need to follow, questions you need to answer, and goals you need to achieve. Then you can measure their completion. Another perspective is to look at your pursuit not in terms of time, but in terms of progress. How much have you completed out of what you should have? To visualize this, you need a process that is measurable. The scientific perspective. If you have a process that is measurable, you can track metrics. If you correlate those metrics with your win rate, you can determine which things have the most impact on your win rate. If you’re going by conventional wisdom, you’re probably wrong. One of the best things that result from this perspective is better bid/no bid decisions. The hardest part about bid decisions isn’t deciding which leads to pursue, it’s deciding which pursuits to pull the plug on because the pursuit has fallen too far behind. Metrics and a scientific outlook take the emotion out of that decision.

Is your company’s ability to develop business based on people or processes? Many companies assume that all they need to do is hire the right salesperson and then wait for the money to start pouring in. They think that if they hold monthly meetings for their sales staff to tell them what they’ve been up to, they have a process. They might even prepare an agenda for the meeting, use a standard PowerPoint template, and require reports to be submitted. But that is not a process. That is just trusting people to do the right thing with a little collaboration thrown in. If that was sufficient, there would be no need for any processes or quality methodologies. But how do you turn relationship marketing into a process, let alone a process that can be quantified? Most people assume that you can’t. But they give up too easily. Business development is really about developing an information advantage. The information you see can be itemized and the information you obtain can be measured. Progress can be quantified. More importantly, results can be validated and correlated with the desired outcome. Companies that do this have a process for business development. The reason they have a process is that it enables good, solid, trustworthy people to perform at their full potential. When you do this in business development it produces a competitive advantage. Companies that have a good process for business development have a competitive advantage over companies that hire good people and leave them to do their thing. So how do you create a process for your business development efforts? Start by: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline Itemizing the information you need in order to scope, price, and win a proposal Bringing structure to the period between lead identification and RFP release that monitors whether you have obtained this information Quantifying how much information you have obtained and its quality through a review process After measuring your progress, comparing how the results correlate with your win rate for past pursuits The key elements in a business development process are: The itemized list of information you seek The structure you create for the pre-RFP pursuit The review process and grading system Turning review results into metrics The success of the effort will be determined by how well you convert the information you gather into an awareness of what it will take to win that can guide the development of the proposal. In our case we created a process that we call Readiness Reviews. They take the questions, goals, and action items needed to discover what it will take to win and allocate them to a series of reviews. The result enables you to measure your progress towards developing an information advantage so that you are ready to win at RFP release. A full off-the-shelf set of documentation for implementing it comes with PropLIBRARY. You can use it, or you can follow the same approach to build your own. Here’s a hint: Start with what it takes to prepare a winning proposal and work backwards. For each item you identify, ask yourself what you need in order to get it. Allocate the results to a series of reviews and create a grading system. If you do an exceptional job of it, what you create will inspire your sales staff and help them remember everything to ask the customer or that they need to do. It will carry the results forward so that they are assessed and transformed into what you need to win the proposal. Instead of making extra work and imposing structure, it can help your staff be more successful.

One of the most common questions we get is, "What should my proposal look like?" So when a company we’ve teamed with many times in the past started talking about producing some templates to help people format their proposals, we told them we have a few thousand friends who might be interested. As a result of that conversation, we now have a bunch of proposal formats available. Only these aren’t just any proposal formats. These are designed by the 24 Hour Company. If you don’t know them, they practically invented proposal graphics. When companies going after billion-dollar proposals want the best possible graphics and visuals to deliver their message, this is the company they turn to. I know them personally and know the quality of their work. The reason this matters isn’t just that their templates are better looking (which they are), but that they are also better constructed. They are in the right formats for MS-Word, they correctly use style sheets, and they have both single and double column layouts. They come with an instruction sheet that explains it all. And because of who developed them, you can have confidence that they were done right. The templates can also be used with the MustWin Process that we recommend. One of the best ways to streamline your proposal planning is to do it in the format of the document you are trying to produce. Our Content Planning methodology starts with an empty shell of a document that has all of the formatting in place. You can use these templates to instantly complete this step and go straight to planning and writing your document. This would be a good time for me to stop raving about them and get out of the way so you can go look at them. Before I do I want to tell you how we’ve organized them. They are mostly in packages. Pick a type of template (financial, medical, technology, business, etc.) and a package contains a variety of templates in different colors all ready to use. If you do a lot of proposals across different areas, or you just can’t decide which is best for you, we have a discounted package that enables you to just get them all. If a package is more than you need, we even have a basic single template that you can purchase that is less expensive than a full package. Take your choice, there should be something in there for you. Okay, now you can click here to see them all.

The best way to determine how many people you need to write the proposal and what skills they should have is to thoroughly plan the content before you start writing. Only when you know exactly what it is that you plan to write can you accurately determine how many people you need to write it. Unfortunately, you usually need to estimate the number of writers far in advance of having a Proposal Content Plan. The budget for a proposal is often submitted before the RFP is even out. That is why a lot of people do their bid and proposal budgets based on a percentage of anticipated revenue (typically 1-3%). It’s easier to say what the company is prepared to invest in the proposal than it is to say what the proposal will actually require. See also: Proposal management From this number you can take out the core staff (typically a Capture Manager and a Proposal Manager but sometimes others) and any production staff required at the back end. Next add in reviewers and ancillary support (contracts, pricing, etc.). Take out any resource and travel costs. Whatever’s left is what you’ve got to cover the writing. The last step is to figure out how many people that will cover. It helps to be able to anticipate whether the proposal will be under 50 pages, 500 pages, or 5,000 or more pages. It also helps to have some idea what subject matters you will have to cover, so that you can identify subject matter experts (SMEs) and decide whether to have the SMEs write the proposal or work with a proposal specialist to get the proposal in writing. Trying to estimate the amount of writing and how long it should take is where people get into trouble. I have heard many people cite benchmarks like it will take a day’s worth of effort for every page in a proposal. But it’s really elastic. The time per page for a 50-page proposal due in 30 days will be very different for a 500-page proposal due in 30 days, even if they are otherwise for exactly the same bid. Other factors, like the speed and experience of the writers, whether the proposal is on a familiar topic, whether the customer is well known, whether staff are dedicated or distracted, etc. also impact it. You should keep in mind that on a 30-day schedule, the time available for writing may only be 15 days, with 10 of them before the major review. On a 10-day schedule, the time available for writing may only be 5 days, with 3 days to get to a first draft. Incidentally, you should clarify whether you are counting calendar days or business days. What really determines the number of people you need is whether one person can write a section in the time scheduled. This in turn depends on whether that person is dedicated or distracted. Small page counts vary less in the number of writers required than large page counts do. A 50-page proposal due in 10 days will most likely require 2-4 people, not counting review or ancillary staff. It will most likely have two main sections of 10-15 pages, and a couple of smaller sections. So it will probably need 3 writers producing about 5 draft pages per day. But a 500-page proposal would have a wider range due to having more variables. When you have a detailed Proposal Content Plan, it is easier to estimate with precision, because you have accounted for everything that needs to be written in advance. But a Proposal Content Plan will not be ready until several days after RFP release. In fact, you may need your writers before the Proposal Content Plan is complete, because you might want them to contribute to the plan. So it is difficult to estimate how many writers you will need before you know the schedule or have the RFP. But what I can say is that it only takes one proposal specialist to screw in a light bulb — unless you want to have someone review the quality and someone to price it. It may also vary depending on how much time is given. And to make it more realistic, it will also depend on how many light bulbs you need to screw in, which you will not know until you are finished. All I can really say is that the budget for this task will be one-half of what it actually costs. If you’re lucky. Hope you’re lucky with your proposals!

Here is a nice long list of topics to discuss and things to discover when you are talking with your customers. While they are presented as questions, you should not necessarily ask them directly. Rather you should weave them into your conversation and relationship. Obviously you won’t be able to touch on all of them in a single meeting. But they can help you create a contact plan, inspire you to dig deeper, and give you targets for follow-ups. All of them have the potential to produce intelligence that can help you win the pursuit. The Customer’s Priorities and Preferences See also: Relationship marketing 1. What are the customer’s priorities? 2. How do their own goals relate to their organization’s goals? 3. What are their preferences? 4. What trade-offs do they anticipate? 5. Are they risk tolerant or risk averse? 6. What alternatives does the customer have? 7. What is the most meaningful in terms of value to the customer? 8. Does the customer prefer a single award or multiple awards? The Customer’s Environment 9. What is their culture like? 10. What sources of pressure do they face? 11. What else do they have competing for their time and attention? 12. What problems do they anticipate? 13. What changes do they anticipate? 14. If they could do anything differently, what would it be? 15. What kinds of deadlines do they face? 16. Do they usually stick to their deadlines? 17. What kinds of hassles do they have to deal with? 18. What kind of challenges do they face? 19. What do they look forward to? 20. What do they dread? 21. What are they sensitive about? 22. What steps do they go through to get something new? 23. Do they have any insight into who/what/where/how/when/why? 24. Do they like their boss? 25. Are they centralized or decentralized? 26. What would they like to change? 27. What would they like to stay the same? 28. What platforms, formats, or standards are relevant? 29. What social networks does the customer participate in? 30. What trade shows or events does the customer attend? 31. Are there any ethical considerations you should be aware of? The Competitive Environment 32. What companies have they worked with? 33. What are their positive/negative experiences with their vendors? 34. Are they satisfied with the current performance on the contract? 35. What do they think about teaming between contractors? 36. Do they like working with small businesses or large businesses? Decision Making 37. How do they make decisions? 38. How do they evaluate RFPs? 39. Do they buy on price or value? 40. How will price be evaluated? 41. What does the customer consider to be the minimum that is technically acceptable? 42. How does their approval process work? 43. Are they consensus driven? 44. Who participates in making the selection/decision? 45. Who influences the selection/decision without actually participating? 46. Do they prefer off-the-shelf or customized solutions? Executing the Process 47. Is their procurement process documented? 48. Do they have training materials you can download or view? 49. Do they have any other information you can take? 50. Do they have to issue an RFP? 51. How many different ways do they have to buy things? 52. How do they select an acquisition strategy? 53. What options do they have for making a purchase or getting a contract signed? 54. Do they already have a budget? 55. Is their budget funded? 56. Do they participate in RFP writing or evaluation? 57. What step are they on/what is the next step? 58. Do they have all the information they need? 59. Is there any information you can provide to facilitate the process? 60. How do they like to buy things? 61. Are there any potential conflicts of interest to be managed? 62. Would a demonstration be relevant? 63. Is a site visit an option? 64. Will the customer issue a Request for Information, Market Survey, or Draft Request for Proposals? 65. How well do the programs, procurement, and executive levels work together? 66. Do you have contacts to cover the programs, and procurement, and executive levels? Expectations 67. What result is the customer looking for? 68. Do their expectations match what it will actually take? 69. How long until they expect to be ready to make a purchase? 70. How long after the purchase do they expect to take delivery? 71. How do they prefer delivery to take place? 72. How will they measure or define a successful outcome? 73. What do they expect regarding how the project will operate or be managed? 74. Does the customer expect to directly manage any staff involved? 75. Is the customer looking for a partner, or someone to take direction? 76. What action items are next for the customer? 77. What action items are next for you? 78. Are there any important dates to consider? 79. What deliverables will the customer expect? 80. When should you follow up? 81. Who else should you talk to? 82. Is there anyone else within your own company that you should introduce to the customer? Readiness Reviews give you a structure into which you can insert questions like these to ensure that you are making progress toward being ready to win your pursuits. The Readiness Review methodology is part of the MustWin Process that we developed. It is fully documented in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase, along with many other items that provide inspiration, guidance, and acceleration for your business development efforts.