Carl Dickson

When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves. They ask questions like “What do we do better?” and “How can we exceed the requirements?” But they are missing that they do not matter. The customer who will be making the decision matters far more than you do. A much better way to find your competitive advantage is to focus on what they prefer. For more information about how it impacts the pre-RFP pursuit phase, see also: 5 steps to gain an information advantage and turn it into a competitive advantage The truth about customer intimacy How do you win before the RFP is even released? You just found a lead. Now what? People are not enough for business development 21 tips for new executives with business development responsibilities Gaining a competitive advantage by understanding your customer's acquisition process Pre-RFP Pursuit: Discovering what it will take to win Turning an information advantage into a competitive advantage 11 ways to get ahead of the RFP Changing the dialog surrounding bid decisions For more information about how it impacts winning, see also: 7 objective signs that your company is not the winning organization it could be Attention Executives: If you only do one thing to win more business, it should be this 5 ways to become serious about winning business 8 things that impact your win rate the most 5 ways a small business can beat its much larger competitors For more information about how it impacts the proposal, see also: 9 things to know about your customer to write a winning proposal 4 things you need to do to win proposals consistently 4 things that are critical for winning large proposals How a proposal beginner can beat the proposal professionals 8 simple indicators that you’re going down the wrong path before you lose your proposal 9 places you should invest to increase your proposal win rate 3 more ways to use this clever approach to win your proposals that you probably haven’t thought of A competitive advantage is something that will make it more likely the customer will pick you over their other alternatives. The best competitive advantage is to discover your customer’s preferences. When the customer follows a formal evaluation process, an information advantage regarding what it will take to get the highest score can be decisive. When the customer will award to the lowest price technically acceptable offer, an information advantage regarding what they mean by "technically acceptable" gives you a definite edge. When there are trade-offs involved in fulfillment, an information advantage regarding which of the trade-offs the customer prefers give you a competitive advantage. Instead of looking inward for a competitive advantage, you should gain insight about the customer that amounts to an information advantage. When people turn inward to look for a competitive advantage, it’s often a sign that they are trying to identify their competitive advantages too late in the game. When it's too late to get to know the customer, all you can do is look inward for competitive advantages. That is one reason why many people favor not bidding when the company has no customer insight. In order to develop an information advantage, you should ask: What do we know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that others might not? What can we find out about the customer’s preferences, especially regarding trade-offs? How do we turn what we know into a better evaluation score? Your information advantage should be turned into a positioning advantage by presenting your company and offering in the context of what you have learned. Your information advantage may result in you developing a better offering, or it may result in a proposal that scores better with the exact same offering. An information advantage can help you make better trade-offs in developing your offering so that you come in at a lower price. Or it could help you target the right features to better meet the customer’s needs. Or it could give your offering strength where your competitors' offerings are weak. When the RFP requires everybody to propose the exact same thing, an information advantage can enable you to show your offering in better alignment with the customer’s goals. Often the same feature can be presented as having different benefits. Which benefits matter most to the customer? The exact same feature may be perceived as having better or worse value based on which benefit you present. An information advantage enables you to maximize the value to this particular customer. When it’s not clear whether the evaluation will focus on price or value, an information advantage can make all the difference. Should you emphasize value? How will the customer consider value? Or is the lowest price more important to them? What would make a low priced offering unacceptable to the customer? Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: The MustWin Process Architecture: How does it all fit together? Assessing the impact of the input layer on your process How information flows through the process to become what you need to win Business development, capture, and pre RFP pursuit Measuring readiness to win and your information advantage MustWin Readiness Reviews Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #1) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #2) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #3) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #4) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #4b) Proposal Startup Information Checklist (ebook with 135 questions in 9 categories) Your bid process should be structured around developing your information advantage. It is far better to start early, when you can take active measures to gain customer insight. But even when you start late, the process should drive you to make the best use of the information and knowledge that you have. Some companies make better use of what they know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment in their proposals than other companies do. We call these companies "winners." Some companies bid blind and send as many customers as possible the same proposal, reusing their proposal text as much as possible to keep costs low and bid at a high volume. We call these companies "losers." They celebrate when they win (on price), without realizing this can doom them to a future of declining margins. Your business development, sales, capture, and proposal activities and hand-offs can all be thought of as information hand-offs and steps toward adding to what you know and converting it into what you need to say and do in order to win. Your proposal process should not be a document assembly or production process. It should be an information advantage development and exploitation process. This is exactly what we have built into the MustWin Process that is available to subscribers on PropLIBRARY. The data you obtain, the reports you produce, the format you write things down in, how you assess what you’ve discovered, and what you do about it should all be done in ways that make it easy for your data to build and change into an information advantage. If your bid process is just about reports and reviews, it may not be doing everything it can to carry information forward and turn it into an information advantage.

Who do you need on your proposal team? The place to start is with what activities need to be covered and what skills are needed. The easiest way to account for all the activities and corresponding skill requirements is to categorize them by the roles that people play in proposal development. Proposal development roles See also: Proposal Management We prefer to define roles functionally. It doesn’t matter how many people you have doing the work, as long as you have every function covered. On a small proposal you might have one or two people doing everything. On a large proposal you might have someone dedicated to each function. Some functions might need multiple people. The roles we start with are: Business development manager: You need someone to find the lead, qualify it, and develop customer relationships. Without these you are likely to find yourself doing proposals without having an information advantage over your competitors. Capture manager: You want your business developers spending their time looking for as many leads as possible. If you want someone focused on winning this particular lead you need to assign a capture manager. Otherwise lead generation will grind to a halt every time a lead becomes a proposal. You need a capture manager to figure out how to win. Proposal manager: You don't need a proposal manager to do the proposal. You do need someone to define and lead the process of developing the document needed to close the sale, and to coordinate all the people who will be involved in the proposal. That will end up being far more people that you may realize. Proposal managers make all the people contributing to the proposal successful. If the proposal "manager" is one of the people writing the proposal, they aren't managing. You need a proposal manager to turn what it will take to win into a winning document. Proposal writers and contributors: You need proposal writers because writing and management are two different things. But sometimes the people involved in proposal writing don't actually do any writing. Subject matter experts and others can contribute to the proposal without necessarily writing sections. Depending on the nature of your offering, you may need highly technical people involved. Or estimators. Or experts who can address one specific requirement. The nature of what you offer, the RFP requirements, and the capabilities of the staff you have available will determine whether contributors prepared finished copy or not. Production coordinator and staff: Someone has to format it, print it, and stuff it in binders. If there are enough people involved, coordination becomes a full-time level of effort. Even if it’s just an electronic submission there is still significant production involved. Pricing and contracts: Someone has to prepare the pricing and business volumes. Someone has to read and understand the terms and conditions specified in the RFP. For a small business this might be one person. For a large business, this might be two or more departments with specialists like estimators, contracts, legal, supply chain and subcontract managers, human resources, facilities, etc. Reviewers: Not only do you need someone to double check everything, you need enough people to read both the proposal and RFP, understand the issues, and go beyond simply rendering their opinions about the proposal to validate the decisions, trade-offs, and presentation of your proposal. That takes time, experience, and knowledge. You may need technical experts in addition to the ones who wrote the Technical Approach to validate the approaches being proposed. People do not learn how to define proposal quality criteria or validate them in college. So you must find the people who are capable of doing this, and if you want objective opinions, you need to find people with this expertise who are not already working on the proposal. Organizing proposal staff If you have 2-3 people on the proposal team, organization is not that big a deal. If you count all the SMEs/writers, ancillary help, and review participants and realize that you have dozens of people touching the document, you need to bring some structure to the organization. Proposal writers are typically organized around their sections, and in large proposals a number of sections might be grouped into a volume. If you’ve got enough writers, you might want one person in charge of each section or volume. This person is typically called a Volume Lead. Once the proposal gets started, the Proposal Manager defines and leads the proposal process. The Capture Manager defines the offering and makes decisions regarding what to propose. The Capture Manager usually isn’t a writer and doesn’t usually manage the writing. The Capture Manager’s role is to figure out what to offer and how to win (leading and representing the technical staff). The Proposal Manager is in charge of getting it in writing. If you have one or more teams of reviewers, you should appoint a review leader to manage the participants and oversee the fulfillment of the review process. Even if the review team is small, it works best if the Proposal Manager defines the process and someone else takes over the job of making the reviews happen. If you don’t have a review process, then the Review Team Leader will have to make one up. This creates all kinds of problems and conflicts. A review process is a lot more than a box and a date that says “review happens here.” Your production staff will format and finalize the proposal for submission, whether electronic files or hard copies are required. This may require one person. Maybe a few. It depends on how complicated the proposal is. If you're lucky, it will include at least one proposal graphics specialist. Luckily submitting hard copies is becoming more and more rare, because they take more effort to produce. The level of effort for proposal production also depends on how complicated your layouts and graphics are. If you need multiple people to support production, you’ll probably want a single point of contact in charge of them and setting standards. All the others What about contracts? Supply chain specialists? What about pricing? What about other stakeholders? More people touch the proposal than you probably realize. I've seen people from facilities being involved. The core team may be small. Maybe you think it's one person. But there are many others who play small roles that are often vital and need to be accounted for. What does it all add up to? The number of bodies will vary. But people may cover multiple roles so long as they aren't overstretched. And that's the real challenge. Calculating the number of people you need to write a winning proposal has many factors and considerations. The level of effort for every proposal should be different. If it's not different, then you are not tailoring based on the customer, offering, and competitive environment, and your win rate is suffering as a result. Winning pays for all the effort many, many times over. Putting effort into winning has a better ROI than trying to reduce the effort it takes to submit. Instead of trying to calculate the fewest number of people, look at the roles, what should be accomplished by each, how well they were covered, and what the impact was on your win rate. Don't settle for we only have so many people to work with. Get data driven. You might find that by overstretching, you're losing far more than you are saving.

How we got started... Carl Dickson started CapturePlanning.com in 2001 as a membership-driven site to help people learn how to find business opportunities and win more contracts. He had some great content and wanted to sell it. But he wanted to take advantage of the web and not just put it out there as books. He went with a membership model so that he could offer an entire library and not have to sell every title separately. The site has grown every year since then. It went from a side gig to Carl's consulting work, to his primary gig leaving little time for consulting, and then to a mature publishing company. By 2008 CapturePlanning.com had published over a dozen tutorials and more than 200 articles. We lost track of the number of articles somewhere above 500. Along the way our site had attracted over 25 million visits and over 10,000 paying customers as of the end of 2015. The origin of the MustWin Process In 2008, Carl was doing regular speaking engagements and was doing one on the problems with Red Teams when he realized that those problems would never be solved. It was an awkward moment. He went on to publish a couple of whitepapers that spelled out the reasons why the way people were trying to do things would never work. He expected to encounter resistance from people defending the status quo, but instead Carl found a groundswell of le were tired of a review process that sometimes seemed like it wasn't even worth the bother. Naturally they challenged him to come up with a replacement. So CapturePlanning.com published the MustWin Process in 2009 and offered a new approach that showed what to do in order to be ready to win at RFP release, turn that into a plan for preparing the content of the proposal, and then validate that the content reflects what it will take to win. Instead of being based on phases or how things were typically done, it was based on what it takes to win. It seemed like such a simple things to build the process around the needs of the stakeholders. And yet... Launching PropLIBRARY By 2011, the membership side of CapturePlanning.com had outgrown it's original website. So CapturePlanning.com created a new resource for its members called PropLIBRARY. PropLIBRARY took all the content that CapturePlanning.com had published over the previous 10 years and turned it into a dynamic tool. Now the MustWin Process goes beyond it's book origins and provides just-in-time inspiration, guidance, and online training. In 2016 we launched a new and much improved version of PropLIBRARY. The user interface changed but the content remained. It just became more accessible. The CapturePlanning.com Network We currently reach over 100,000 professionals every week through our network of websites, the LinkedIn groups we moderate, mobile apps we've developed, and our email newsletter. This audience, vets our content, gives us feedback, and inspires us through discussion. And does business with us. Thank you for all of that.

Within a company, the staff that do business development and the operational business units that serve your customers often don’t get along. It’s not surprising, given that they’ve been set up to fail and organized to be in direct opposition to each other. It’s strange because they should have so much in common. If business development and proposal success require relationship marketing, then you would expect both to want to work together to grow the customer relationship. Business development can help the operational business units to grow their staff, resources, and scope of work. But the other factors in their environment usually far outweigh these considerations. Whenever they work together it usually means that the staff from the operational business units have been given work on top of their normal project workload. From the very beginning, business development is positioned as a distraction or burden. The business unit staff are sometimes uncooperative and disinterested, and business development can see them as an obstacle. And the operational business units see business development as uninformed and incompetent, making them a risk at best, a threat at worst. And the reward when the operational business units cooperate with business development is often to participate in a proposal — piled on top of their normal workload. Once the proposal starts, the conflicts can’t be ignored. They are set in writing for all to see. But the process of getting it in writing is stressful and painful, making it more emotionally difficult to deal with the conflicts. And often because the conflicts aren’t anticipated and resolved before the writing starts, resolving the conflict means rewriting, adding insult to injury on top of the now even more expanded workload. Business development is about reaching beyond your comfort zone. Operational business units seek stability and risk mitigation. Business development always wants more. But the business units must manage their workload so that they don’t get put into a position where there is more to do than they have people to accomplish it. See also: Roles Business development also forces the operational business units to confront their failures. Poor performance lowers the chances of winning. Overcoming poor performance must be part of the bid strategies. Nobody in an operational business unit wants to admit that poor performance occurred under their watch. You can use word games to call it something else (issues, incidents, whatever), but you can’t change the fact that it puts people on the spot. The biggest issues usually revolve around what to include in the offering and how to price it. Every bid has a price to win and a price to perform. The natural incentives are for business development to bid low and for the operational business units to bid high enough to cover every contingency that could impact performance. The right price depends on which risk and how much of it the company wants to take on. For this reason, neither business development nor the operational business units should control the final price. When a company holds a contract for a long time, rewarding their best operational staff can become a problem during a recompete. The competitors will bid staff who are qualified, but cost less because they haven’t received as many raises. They are like your staff was at the beginning of the contract. An environment like this magnifies the conflict between the operational business unit staff and business development. An institutionalized process of arbitration and transparent decision making can help mitigate the conflict. In most organizations this means someone sitting above both of them on the org chart with profit and loss responsibility making key decisions. But it should be based more on process than on authority. Risk decisions should be made explicitly, based on criteria you can articulate, the strategic plan for the company, and the circumstances of the bid. When you do this, you make the bid discussions about how decisions get made and not about what decisions got made or who made them. In addition to less confrontation among participants, you get better decision making as a result. Often companies try to fix the conflicts through incentives. Since BD is usually incentivized to win and operational business units are incentivized based on customer satisfaction, the incentives often get in the way of good relations between the two. Mixing the incentives, for example giving the business units some incentives based on wins, can help, but will still produce side effects. Incentives always have side effects. Intrinsic rewards often work better than financial ones. What fuels the conflict is basically insecurity. If you can’t give people direct control over their own destiny, then what does help is clear lines of authority and transparent decision making. Seek out what it will take to perform and what it will take to win, without ignoring either. Then make a decision based on which risks are in the company’s interests and explain it that way. Make sure that the staff stuck with the decision are managed based on how they handle the risk and not just on customer satisfaction.

When you get lucky and your customer reveals something they’re thinking about doing or buying in the future, your next step should not be to pitch them on selecting you as the vendor. Instead, what you should focus on next is: Gaining an information advantage Influencing the specification Building the relationship so that more revelations may follow Besides, any deal is weeks or months away. Maybe even years. And more importantly, the customer isn't ready to think about selecting a vendor. They're still trying to figure out what to get and how. At this stage, you'll get far more out of helping them then you will out of selling yourself. If something is big and complex, the customer can’t just go out and buy it. They’ve got research to do and an internal procurement process to follow. While the time is not right to sell them, the time is right to help them navigate their procurement process. You have probably heard about how important it is to start your pursuits before the RFP is released and to influence the specifications. Now is the time. First, you need to study up on your customer’s procurement process and buying habits. If they have a procurement manual for their own staff that is online or available, download and study it. Their procurement manual will describe the steps they have to go through. More importantly, it will describe the approval process and who will be involved. Studying their procurement process will tell you what they need to do next so that you can help them. It will also help you anticipate where the project could get sidetracked so that you can act to prevent it. The customer’s acquisition process will involve things like deciding what contract vehicle to use, budgeting, writing the RFP, performing market surveys of potential vendors, establishing the evaluation process and criteria, etc. Often a procurement specialist will get involved to guide the actual buyer through the process. You can help them by supplying the information they need to complete the process. Just simply understanding the steps will enable you to better track the lead and anticipate when the RFP will be released. At each step you should consider what you can do to help your customer, and how you can position for competitive advantage: See also: Influencing the RFP What contract vehicles can you offer that will streamline the paperwork for your customer? If the customer needs to conduct a market survey to establish things like the competitive range and the number of potential bidders, who can you recommend be included? What advice can you give them regarding the budget? An amateur will simply seek to make it as large as possible. An expert will show the customer what things will drive the price up or down and let the customer maximize their budget while influencing the requirements. If the customer’s process calls for issuing a “Sources Sought” notice to determine whether any small businesses are capable of being the prime contractor, what can you do to influence the specifications in either direction? What can you tell the customer about what’s important in selecting a vendor that might be useful when the customer has to prepare the evaluation criteria? What specification do you want or not want included in the scope of work? Can you help the customer by providing information in a white paper that they could use to help write the RFP? It’s all about being there at the right time with the right information. If you try to influence the contract vehicle after the customer has determined their acquisition strategy, you’ll encounter resistance. If you try to change the specification after the RFP has been written, you’ll encounter resistance. But if you show up with the information they need to complete the next step in their procurement process, you are being helpful. Being helpful grows the relationship and generates goodwill. But doing things to gain influence at the wrong time achieves just the opposite. How well you know the customer's acquisition process can make all the difference. Here is an article describing 24 Ways to Influence an RFP. It's taken from the get into position to win before the RFP is even released.

Most people overlook the best ways to speed up their proposals. They focus on having a faster start-up, having a re-use library, or automating document assembly. Or they look for AI to write their proposal for them, ignoring how that will never be competitive. But they overlook two critical approaches. What causes proposal slack time? See also: Faster Most of the slack time in a proposal happens when you are ready to take the next step, but can’t because you don’t have the information you need. So you spend some time trying to get the answers. Or worse, you spend more time trying to work around the issue because you can’t get the answers you need. The first problem is that it shouldn’t have taken you so long to ask the questions. The second problem is that you don’t have the answers you need. Speeding up proposal development If you want to speed things up... Start the proposal knowing what questions you’ll need answers to. The RFP doesn't supply them all. The RFP doesn't tell you all the customer's preferences, or everything that matters to them. It doesn't tell you how to position against the competition or how to make the many, many trade-off decisions you face. When questions pop up during writing, everything slows down. Even worse, you often have to backtrack when the answers force you to change what you've written. Be able to find at least some of the answers. You'll never get answers to all of the questions you have when writing a proposal. But the ones you do answer will not only speed up proposal writing, they will drive your win strategies as well. Waiting until the proposal starts to think about the questions you should have asked or delivering answers after the writing has started will slow proposal writing down and weaken the proposal. This is why it's good to build your entire pursuit process around getting answers to your questions. Getting answers starts with asking questions early. When proposal writers start already having the answers they need, it is much easier to build the proposal based on them. What questions should you ask? To create a list of questions to start the proposal with, ask yourself what you need to know about: The customer The offering The competitive environment How your proposal will be evaluated The trade-offs you will encounter The conflicts you will need to resolve The points you want to make What the customer will need you to say to conclude that you are their best alternative You may very well find that most of the questions related to these topics are applicable to all of your proposals. When you start a proposal, you should review the list of questions. You can accelerate the development of your win strategies and themes by assessing which you have answers for and which you don’t. Then when you start the actual writing, you know where the issues are. You may even have workarounds in mind from the start. An even better approach is to begin asking those questions the moment the lead is identified. This changes the pre-RFP pursuit phase from an exercise in fishing to see what you can catch into hunting for exactly what you need. It makes the pre-RFP pursuit about seeking specific answers so that when you start the proposal, you already have answers to many of your key questions. Bad signs If you are starting your proposals with an outline before you’ve asked the right questions, it’s a bad sign. What's going to happen when you get the answers? What's your win probability going to be if you don't? If you are trying to create a re-use library so that you can quickly reuse text before you’ve asked the right questions, it’s a bad sign. How do you know you've got the right content? Isn't there a conflict between building the proposal around what you already have written and what the customer wants and needs to hear to make a decision in your favor? If you are trying to speed up document production because you need more time to work on the text, if it's because unanswered questions are slowing down the writing, it’s a bad sign. It means you're trying to rush to finish after giving up on getting the answers that you needed to write the winning proposal. What to do instead If you want to speed up the proposal, start by knowing what questions to ask, and get at least some of the answers before you start the proposal. The rest is easy. If you think of the entire proposal process as a flow of information, assessment, and transformation ending with a decision support tool, that process is easier to build as a sequence or collection of questions than it is to build as a flow chart. During the pre-RFP phase of pursuit, we use Readiness Reviews to turn lead qualification and capture planning into sets of questions, with the goal to gather more and better information that produces an information advantage. At the start of the proposal, we use Proposal Input Forms, which are also based on questions, to aggregate intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Before proposal writing starts, we use Proposal Content Planning to identify instructions and questions for proposal writers to address in a way that accounts for everything that should be written and how it should be presented. When you start Proposal Content Planning with the answers to questions from Proposal Input Forms and Readiness Reviews, this is straightforward and goes quickly. When you gather the right information and assess and transform it into what proposal writers need to know, then proposal writing is not only greatly accelerated, but so are proposal reviews. Instead of going through endless iterations trying to change the proposal into something that can win, you start from an understanding of what it will take to win, build a structure for the document based on that, and write to produce something based on what it will take to win in the very first draft. Doing a losing proposal quickly is easy. This is how you quickly do a proposal that will win.

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From some of the BD databases I've seen, they go for around 10-20% of what you could hire a person for. But that's a single user. If you get a multiuser subscription, it could be a lot closer to the cost of hiring someone. With enough users, you'll exceed it. So what should you do, focus on hiring business development staff or purchase a database? A person and a database will always be better than either a person or a database alone, so it's no fun discussing which of those is better. But if you have one BD manager, a few executives, and a few key project managers, then you really could be looking at a choice between getting a BD database or hiring another BD specialist. That's worth discussing. Here are some key points to consider: Do you want primary source research (straight from the customer) and relationship marketing or do you lack the relationships and want an easy way to add leads to your tracking system? Do you want your BD staff at their desks or in front of customers? Will the database increase their productivity, or will it become a crutch that your staff will use to get their updates from the database instead of their contacts? If you don’t have the database, isn’t that like having a handyman without any tools? What advantage do you have over the competition when you’re all using the same databases? So is a database worth the cost? The answer is an equation. An ROI equation. The problem is we don't have all the variables (and maybe never will): Start with: The annual profit from the amount of new leads that you would not have found on your own that turn into wins Add: The annual profit from the amount of submissions won because of intel that you would not have found on your own Subtract: The negative impact of raising your overhead costs through an expensive purchase during a period of customer price sensitivity Note: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline The size/number of your bids and profit margins have a lot to do with the outcome. If you are in a competitive market with low margins, it will take a much higher number of leads to return a positive ROI. If you only bid into existing customer relationships, the database will have limited impact (it won't help you with your recompetes or natural project growth). However, if you are trying to establish new customer relationships, the data will have more value as a way to figure out which doors to knock on. Your ultimate ROI will be determined by how effectively you use the database, which has more to do with your BD process than the database. A more useful way of looking at it might be to first put in place BD staff who enable you to bid with an information advantage. Once that is in place, then you can ask yourself if you can significantly increase their productivity by giving them new leads to chase, or more advanced notice of leads. I know a company that was implementing the Readiness Review process we recommend for pre-RFP pursuit. They were in a small niche and sought to identify all the relevant contracts so they could target the recompetes, some 5 years in advance. It made sense for them to subscribe to a database that identified all the contracts that have been issued so that their BD Manager could focus on establishing relationships instead of finding the contracts. But I have also seen companies that purchased databases, where the BD staff spent their time copying leads out of the database and into their tracking system. They added little or no information advantage to win the proposals. But they had a lot of stuff to bid! If you are trying to figure out which database tool is right for you, here is a link to an article we wrote a few years back that is just as valuable today: 42 things to look for in a search tool.

Where do you spend the most time on a proposal? Most people think it’s writing. But if you watch people as they work on a proposal, you’ll find they spend more time on something else. If you look at a typical proposal schedule, you may see 50% or more of the time dedicated to writing. But most of that time isn’t spent on actual writing. It’s spent on figuring out what to write, with a healthy dose of distraction and procrastination thrown in. Distractions are really competing priorities. They are best addressed before people are assigned to a proposal. A big problem that's also completely solvable Outside of distractions, the biggest thing preventing people from quickly getting proposal writing done is not being prepared. When people are not sure what is expected of them, don’t know how to organize their thoughts, are not sure what to include, and are not sure how to express themselves they put off writing until they have better clarity. Most of the time spent “writing” is really a search for clarity. Clarity comes from having the information you need to write. It comes from not only knowing what to write about, but also knowing how it should be presented. And when people don't have this information, they start talking to try to find it. Or they procrastinate and hide. When they can't get good information, they talk in circles. On most proposals, more time is spent talking in circles than writing. To solve this problem, you need the right input. Proposal Content Planning not only organizes the writing, it gathers all the information stakeholders have, including pre-RFP pursuit intelligence and provides a way to ensure that the information becomes what the writers needs to take action based on it. This turns the company's customer, opportunity, and competitive awareness into instructions for proposal writers, allocated to specific proposal sections, instead of a bunch of talk that doesn't provide clarity about what to put on paper. Having a computer do the wrong thing for you will not help Your best opportunity to accelerate the proposal process does not come from automation. Editing past proposals takes far more time than people realize and results in a proposal that is written for the wrong context. Acceleration that hurts your win rate does more harm than good. The desire to see a sample before you start is really just part of the search for clarity. When you add in that you will likely put more time into creating and maintaining a proposal content re-use library than you will gain during proposal writing, it has a bad return on investment (ROI). Your best opportunity to accelerate proposals Your best opportunity to accelerate the proposal process is to accelerate the search for clarity before writing can start. Instead of leaving it to the authors to individually seek the clarity they need to write, before you start writing you should implement a planning process that defines what to include and how to express it. It should both inspire and guide the authors regarding what to write. It should enable them to begin writing immediately, without additional soul searching. If your company does a lot of proposals, then ensuring clarity before writing starts becomes: Your best opportunity to accelerate the proposal process is to accelerate the search for clarity before writing can start. A corporate core competency you should develop Your best chance to lower proposal costs, which in turn impacts your competitiveness The best way to stretch your staff to cover more proposals A great way to introduce inexperienced staff to proposal writing Your best chance to get your proposal right on the first draft Your only reliable way to consistently submit proposals based on what it take to win How you win more of what you bid So will your company put the least amount of effort into this while wishing it would go away, focus on it only until it gets distracted, leave it to staff to figure out themselves, or make it a corporate priority and keep at it until it's solved? Avoid the worst approach, because it will destroy your proposal See also: Reuse The worst way to approach a proposal is to seek clarity by writing until you find it. This results in an infinite number of draft cycles where the actual proposal is defined by whichever draft you are on when you run out of time. Searching for clarity by writing about it produces draft after draft, and never delivers the clarity. Avoiding this is the single most significant thing you can do to improve your chances of winning. If a company has this problem, then it will find its best ROI in eliminating it. You can put effort into other aspects of proposal development, but nothing will give you as big a return as implementing an approach that prevents seeking clarity through writing. This generally means implementing a process for planning the content of your proposals before you start writing.Time, motion, and ROI On your next proposal, pretend you have a stopwatch (or better yet actually use one!), and add up the time allocated to writing and the time spent formatting the document. Then look at how much of the time allocated to writing was actually spent writing and how much was really spent figuring out what to write about and how to express it. If you could bring a percentage of reduction to any of those phases, which would free up the most time? Of those phases, which has the biggest impact on your win rate? How does that impact what you should do during your next proposal? How does that impact where your proposal department should invest their time and resources for future proposals? How does the time spent actually writing when you have a content plan compare to when you don't? How much less time did you spend talking in circles after implementing Proposal Content Planning?

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When most people think of a proposal re-use library, they think of pre-written proposal sections. We’ve invented a new kind that can have a far greater impact on your win rates. Instead of trying to capture all of your proposal text and recycle it, which turns out to have a negative impact on your win rate, try focusing on your win strategies instead. When you do enough proposals, you start to see patterns emerging. In similar circumstances, you position yourself in similar ways. For example, when you are not the incumbent, you emphasize innovation. When you are the incumbent, you address innovation but counter with risk mitigation. Good customer intelligence could take you in a different direction, but when all else is equal, you tend to use the same tools. What we’ve found, in exploring how to combine our Content Planning Methodology with our Proposal Recipe approach to creating re-use libraries, is that you can recycle your win strategies. All you have to do is capture: See also: Differentiation On this topic, In this set of circumstances (customer, opportunity, and competitive environments), Here is how we positioned ourselves. What you get is similar to the Proposal Recipe format we recommend. You end up with a set of files, each one including: A topic A series of headings and text describing each set of circumstances An approach to positioning under each heading You can take this simple foundation further by also addressing: Resources that your company has (staffing counts, locations, equipment, tools, processes, data, etc.) Anticipated customer concerns, risks, and mitigations What matters (about the circumstances or offering) Differentiators Value propositions Your organization's preferences and why Relevant market research Relevant project/experience examples Testimonials Competitive issues Known trade-offs Relevant existing graphics Examples of potentially relevant graphics Points of contact and coordination If you mine your strengths for differentiators and prepare defensive positions for any weaknesses, you can help future proposal writers do a much better job of identifying the winning strategies. Anyone who is competent can write a proposal based on following the instructions. But coming up with the winning strategies is a challenge. This is where you can provide some inspiration. If you keep things short (at the bullet level), then you can easily copy from your win strategy library into future Content Plans in the form of instructions. These new instructions will explain how to position the other details already in the Content Plan. This will combine what to write with how to write it and produce a far better proposal far more quickly. And because this approach addresses strategy and positioning, it directly relates to your ability to win. Over time you not only accelerate the development of your win strategies, but you also strengthen them. When this will really help is when you are using junior staff to help prepare the proposals. In my experience this is, give or take, roughly all proposals. Being able to look up what strategies work best in which circumstances will help your proposal staff think strategically. Recycling proposal text only leads to staff getting the proposal done quickly by changing as little as possible. A win strategy re-use library gets staff thinking strategically, which can transform all of the text in the proposal. But it still accelerates things, because most of the time spent on a proposal is spent trying to figure out what context to put things in. And most of the time wasted on a proposal is a result of someone coming in after it’s written and asking pesky questions about strategy that should have been asked at the beginning. A win strategy re-use library can also help you get to the point where you are reviewing your strategies before you write the narrative. It can help you get to the point where you review what you are going to say in the proposal before you write it. That way you only have to write it once.

On a day to day basis people have to make decisions about resources like: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline How many people do I need for BD? How many do I need in my proposal department? Should I insource or outsource? How many project managers and other operations staff will I need? Can I afford to hire the staff I need? The answer isn’t some generic metric. The answer can be found in your business development pipeline. Your pipeline isn’t just how many leads you are tracking. It should also include how many leads you are targeting. With a little analysis you can figure out when those leads will arrive, whether you are on track to meet or exceed your target metrics, and what the impact will be. You should analyze your business development pipeline metrics based on two key targets: the minimum number of bids and the total revenue. You don’t want all of your target revenue to come from one bid. But you also don’t want it to come from too many low value bids. The right size bid depends on your company and what it offers. Once you know the target for your review and the number of bids, you can do a simple average to find out how much each bid should be worth. Then ask yourself if the number makes sense. If it’s too big or too small to be realistic for your company, adjust the number of bids, the target revenue, or both. When you settle on the average you can compare it to your previous bids to determine the number of people required per bid. Include everyone who is dedicated to the bid, such as the business development manager, capture manager, proposal manager, other proposal specialists, etc. If somebody works more than one at a time, then include them as a fraction. Now ask yourself what is the average length of your bids — 14 days? 30 days? Convert the number of bids projected for next year into the number of bids at a time (one approach is to divide it by 365 and multiply by the average number of days per bid). Now multiply by the number of people per bid. Round up. If you get a number far larger than the number of people you currently have, then either you set your growth targets higher than your resources can stretch, or you need to plan on hiring more staff in order to grow. This analysis can also help you decide when to use your own staff and when to outsource. Most of the calculations are based on averages. But the real world isn’t so neat and tidy. Instead of coming in at fixed intervals, your bids are going to come in a bunch at a time with dry spots in between. If you staff to the average, you will have surges that you can’t accommodate and dry spells with nothing to do. The dry spells will be where they develop their process and tools. The surges could be where you outsource. If your bids have high peaks and valleys, you may wish to do more outsourcing, so that you don’t have to cover the cost of the valleys. You should run several scenarios and really think this through. Assuming your staff will somehow stretch to cover the surges is really just planning to sacrifice quality to keep up. But in BD it doesn’t make sense to lower your win rate to accommodate more bids. So can you afford the number of staff your business development pipeline says you need to capture the leads you plan to target? To answer this, you may need your finance department involved, because you need to know about your company's profit margin and overhead to answer the question. Each dollar your company makes gets allocated by your accounting system to cover the costs of your business. Theoretically, each dollar coming in has a certain amount in it to cover BD costs. You need to assess whether if you hit the targets in your pipeline, you’ll be able to afford the staff your analysis says you’ll need to get there. If the numbers don’t add up, you’ll have to start over and reassess all your business development pipeline targets. If they do add up, then you need to address when to hire the staff. You want them on board and up to speed before they are needed. But you also need to cover their costs. If you measure your actual performance against the targets in the pipeline, you can do this. You can calculate what number of bids times what win rate is required to cover the costs of the next person you want to hire. Your pipeline should tell you how many leads you need to achieve that number of bids. When you do this kind of analysis, you should notice how important your win rate is. A slight change in win rate has a big impact on revenue. It also greatly reduces the number of leads required to achieve it. Pay careful attention to your actual win rate vs. your target win rate, because all of the other numbers will change when there is a difference. When you first start using your BD pipeline as a strategic tool like this, you will be making up a lot of the target values, because you don’t have the historical data to draw upon. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You can’t calculate your pipeline because you can’t calculate your targets, and you can’t calculate your targets because you don’t have any pipeline data. You have to short circuit this by making assumptions. However, you need to revisit those assumptions frequently. You may get to the point where you can set your targets once a year, but when you are first getting started you may need to reassess them every month, depending on your bid volume. In any event, your pipeline has the potential to be a business management tool that is far more significant than just being a lead tracking tool. It can help you make better decisions at all levels. That makes it worth understanding and developing.

The hardest part of proposal writing is not getting the words on paper, it’s figuring out what you need to say to persuade the customer. When you recycle the words, you submit something to your new customer that is persuasive to someone else. That’s not a good approach to winning. Instead, we recommend two things that when combined create a much better way to accelerate your proposal efforts. See also: Faster Use Content Planning to define what needs to be written. Content Planning is an iterative methodology we developed to provide instructions to proposals writers regarding what needs to be written. It enables you to describe the context and goals for the writing, as well as specifying the contents. The iterative process ensures that nothing gets overlooked or left out. Content Planning is how you make sure that what gets written reflects what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Instead of starting from a blank page, or even an outline, the author starts with a complete set of instructions that they can convert to a narrative draft much more quickly. Use recipes instead of recycling narratives. The proposal recipe format we created provides authors with the questions that need to be addressed on a topic, along with suggestions for strategies and approaches. They lead the author through the choices that need to be made so that what gets on paper reflects this particular customer and set of circumstances. They provide inspiration for the author and help them finish more quickly. When you combine the two, you start the proposal from a shell document that identifies everything that needs go into the proposal. It provides instructions. And it asks questions. It can ask the author about what matters to the customer and then instruct them to position the offering so it delivers it. It can ask which tradeoffs make sense in these circumstances. Or ask the author to explain how an issue will be handled in their circumstances. It can also deliver descriptions, facts, or details the author will need to put the proposal into the right context. But the best part is that you can save a copy of the Content Plan and safely recycle it instead of the narrative draft. If the outline of a proposal or section will be the same, you can recycle the whole thing. But even if the outline changes, you can quickly copy and paste the instructions and line items from the old Content Plan into a new one. If the context of the new bid is different, you can quickly adjust the instructions. And do it before the narrative is written. You can build a recipe library or even a Content Plan library. You can quickly review several Content Plans on similar subjects and mix and match instructions and line items to create something new based on what’s relevant to the new bid. Try doing that with several narrative documents. The most important result is that you accelerate and inspire, without running the risk that the customer will get something that’s in the wrong context. You ensure that your authors prepare content that is optimized to win every single time.

If you think that filling your pipeline should start by identifying leads, you’re wrong. Filling your pipeline starts by identifying where leads come from. If you start with leads, then you start after the customer knows what they want and has probably already written the RFP. If you start with where leads come from, then you have a chance to help the customer figure out what they should want and can even help them write the RFP. Figuring out where leads come from isn’t even the first step. You should start with what kind of leads you want. That starts with some key questions: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline What capabilities do you want to develop? What customer relationships do you want to expand? What competitive environment do you want to play in? Where do you see the best opportunities for growth? How much risk are you comfortable with? How do you want to segment or divide the marketplace? How do you want to position your company within the market you wish to capture? Based on the answers to questions like these you should prepare a strategic plan. Answering the questions should take considerable research, number crunching, and introspection. The strategic plan provides the direction, but not necessarily the targets. You need the strategic plan to take the next step, which is figuring out where to target for leads. The strategic plan also acts as a filter, helping you figure out which leads to pursue and which to drop. Your strategic plan is also the start of how you write your proposals. Long before you’ve even identified a lead, you should already have thought about positioning. The way you describe how your company should position itself should lay the foundation for the theme statements you will eventually write into your proposals. In fact, when you are finding it difficult to figure out what themes to put in a proposal, it is often because you haven’t done or communicated your strategic plans. Once you have a strategic plan, you’re ready to start targeting. Within each market segment defined by the strategic plan, who should you target? Depending on the nature of your business, you may target by location, demographics, organization, size, or anything else. Ideally, targeting should identify the points of contact and how you will get to them (email, postal mail, cold calling, etc.). Targeting may also identify certain projects, contracts, or initiatives that are likely to produce leads. Targeting turns the strategic plan into a specific effort to make contact with customers who are likely to produce leads, build a relationship with them, and help them to define their needs and prepare an RFP. Pursuing leads before the RFP is released requires more than simply calling the folks you know. It requires strategically targeting and building relationships where you expect the kind of leads you are interested in to germinate. Once you have done your strategic planning and targeting homework, then you are ready to start prospecting. Prospecting involves making contact with your targets and exploring them for leads. If you’re smart, you’ll look for more than just leads. You’ll look for the potential for leads. You’ll look for problems that need to be solved and people who have the budgets to solve them. And instead of simply looking for RFP releases, you’ll help them articulate the nature of the problem and figure out what to do about it. You might even send them suggestions for how to proceed that could end up in the RFP. By doing that, when the RFP is released you will already be in position, with an information advantage, and an RFP that has been influenced in your favor. These are the kind of leads that you want to fill your pipeline with.

Here's the problem with proposal re-use repositories. Imagine two customers who both want the same system, application, product, service, solution or whatever you offer. The specs are the same. However... One customer is decentralized, another is centralized. One customer has a formal culture, one is informal. One wants innovation, another is risk averse. One wants to manage the staff on the project, another doesn't want to be bothered. One is value conscious, the other is price fixated. One has clear authorities for making decisions, another tends to be consensus driven. One values punctuality, another has higher priorities. Now, how should you position the benefits of your offering? What results will it deliver? How will it be implemented? What does the customer care about? What do they want to see in your proposal? See also: Reuse Context matters. Go ahead and create your proposals from a re-use repository. I'll write a response that is compliant with the same specifications, only I’ll position things in the right context. My proposal will speak directly to the customer’s goals and desires. Mine will take longer to write. But which do you think will win? Pretend you are the customer. Which would you pick --- the generic repository response or the one from the vendor that did their homework, doesn't treat their customers like interchangeable parts, and addresses your specific issues? Never mind that having a re-use repository will probably result in submitting proposals that contain errors and will cost you far more to maintain than they will to create. It’s easy not to worry about it because most people don’t bother to maintain them! They are willing to spend money on software, but not on the data that will go into it. You can also ignore the fact that when you build your proposal process around having a re-use repository, you pretty much guarantee that people will never customize their proposals as much as they should. Forget about all that and just focus on whether it helps or hurts your ability to be competitive. When you send all your customers the same proposal text, you guarantee that it will not be written to the right context for every one of them. And yet the winner will be the one who does the best job of putting their proposal in context. Instead of submitting a proposal that is not competitive, you should just not bid. Then again, maybe the bid is not competitive. If all of your bids are not competitive and the proposal is just a formality, then setting up a re-use repository might make sense. Proposal re-use might also make sense if: Your margins are so slim that you can’t afford to prepare a proposal that is specific to each customer. What you are really trying to do is just take orders. If your customers are okay with that, then a generic proposal can result in orders. The customer doesn’t care about you. If you supply a commodity, such as a product that the customer can get from any reseller and they don’t already have a relationship with you, then they might not care where they get it from. They don’t want to read your proposal. They just want to get the product, and probably as inexpensively as possible. A generic proposal won’t offend them or lose you points so long as it satisfies their ordering process. Every customer gets the same offering. You might think that a description will be the same every time, but it really shouldn’t be. The goals, benefits, and results that should be addressed in every paragraph will need to reflect the customer’s specific context, just like in the example above. You don’t know your customers well enough to put things in context for them. For most companies this means that instead of using generic re-use material, you should get to know your customers in order to be competitive. However, if you are in a market where you can’t predict who the next customer will be and no one knows the customer, you may be able to get away with re-using proposal narratives. The evaluation is pass/fail. When the customer performs a pass/fail evaluation you don’t get any points for being better. Your customers require tons of data. Factual information can be recycled. You’ll still need to put it in context. You don’t win your proposals through positioning or strategy. This probably means that you compete on price. If how you strategize and position yourself in order to win is different for each customer, then each proposal must reflect that or else you have a strategy without any implementation. There is a “middle of the road” strategy. If the description of your offering is the same every time, then you might be able to separate where you talk about positioning and strategy from where you describe the offering. You might be able to address the customer’s specific context in the cover letter, or address benefits and results in a special text box at the beginning of each section. Maybe. The problem is that it is difficult to claim with credibility that your offering delivers specific benefits and results when the description of it is generic. You should never seek out a proposal re-use solution because you don’t want to go to the effort of writing a proposal or because you are understaffed. The former would be like saying you don’t want to go to the effort of competing, and the latter is like saying you’re not staffed to be competitive. Neither of those issues will be solved by a re-use repository. If your resources are strained, then you should consider not bidding. It’s better than submitting a bid that is not competitive. When you cut corners in order to respond to every “opportunity,” you respond to every opportunity with a less competitive proposal. Wishing it were otherwise won’t change the facts, nor will “trying harder” or wanting it more. The only way to compete against an information advantage that is delivered in writing is to deliver a better information advantage in writing. You will win more business by only bidding the ones where you have an information advantage and the resources to demonstrate it in writing.

Will your business grow, shrink, or stay the same next year? Are you chasing enough leads? Should you focus on finding more leads or on winning the ones you have? How many people will you need to chase your leads and prepare proposals? Will your win rate go up or down? How many leads can you “no bid” and still hit your numbers? There is a tool you can use to answer these questions and it’s not a crystal ball… We call this tool your pipeline. Others call it a funnel. The basic concept is easy to grasp. But it is a subtle tool, with hidden complexities. One simple way to create a pipeline is to start with how much revenue your company wants to make next year. Then figure out your average bid size. If you don’t know, make it up based on what it should be. From those two numbers you can estimate how many proposals you need to win. Next, take your win rate. Use it to calculate how many submissions you must make in order to win the number you are targeting. Then estimate how many pursuits you will “no bid.” Will it be 1 in 5? 1 in 10? More? Less? What should it be? Finally, estimate how many pursuits you will look at and discard without even pursuing. Will it be half of what you identify? More? Less? From these numbers, you can draw a bar chart. It will have a large bar showing how many opportunities you need to identify. It will have a much smaller bar with the number of opportunities you will actually pursue. It will have a somewhat smaller bar showing the number that you actually end up bidding. The smallest bar will be the number needed to hit the revenue target you started with. See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline Depending on how many qualification steps you plan to have, you can change the number of bars. But the concept remains the same. You can also change whether to focus on the number of bids, the number of dollars, or even something else (for example, the number of staff). We recommend rendering your chart every way you can think of, because you will gain insight from doing so. And because problems can hide if you don’t. For example, if you only chase one really large bid, you will either hit your numbers or have zero revenue. That’s not a healthy plan. And while you probably won’t do that, you might end up with a couple of pursuits dominating the numbers. A pipeline chart that tracks both the number of bids and the revenue would help you catch it if that’s the case. Likewise, it’s possible to have a high number of bids but very low revenue. If all you have is a pipeline chart that shows the number of bids, you might not realize it until it’s too late. You need both perspectives to make sure that you are pursuing enough of the right-sized leads. You can use a stacked bar graph to show both at the same time. Pipeline analysis is usually done with spreadsheets. You can have different tabs for different views. And you can use conditional formulas to select what to show in each view. I like to set up the main tab as a “dashboard” by putting the key charts there and putting the supporting data on individual tabs. This requires a little skill with using spreadsheets, but it’s well worth learning. When a company doesn’t have the right historical data, they have to make a lot of assumptions in order to draw a pipeline chart. This is better than doing nothing. You can revise the numbers once you’ve collected some real data. Once you can draw your pipeline, that’s when the analytical fun really starts. For starters, you can overlay the real numbers as they come in with their targets. You can also run the numbers forward to answer, “if we continue with this gap or surplus, where will we end up?” Are the totals flat across the top? This could indicate you’re bidding everything you find. This is not healthy. Flat bars mean that either people aren’t being selective, or that they are gaming the system by identifying and pre-qualifying leads without recording it, and what you are seeing is not accurate. If your company uses the Readiness Reviews from the MustWin Process in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase, you can also create a pipeline view to show the readiness status. Instead of the more traditional calendar view, this will show how many leads are at each Readiness Review stage. This will enable you to see whether your pipeline leans towards new leads or leads that will soon be ready to bid. You can also use a stacked bar to show the review score of the leads to see whether the leads you are tracking are strong or weak. You can test the targets in your pipeline for sanity by calculating how many people you need to pursue them. Take last year’s numbers and work out how many people you need to chase your pursuits and write your proposals. Will hitting the numbers you are targeting require more staff than you have to pursue the leads? Are you going to work them into the ground or hire more people? You can also use a pipeline to facilitate diversification. For example, if all your business is with one or two major customers, business lines, locations, etc., you might want to spread out in order to mitigate your risks. You can set up separate views of your pipeline to give insight into issues like this and help monitor your progress. Don’t forget to track the impact of teaming. If you team with other companies, you might show huge revenue numbers but end up giving it all away. You can add a different view of your pipeline to track which bids you pursue as a prime, which you pursue as a team, and which you pursue as a sub. Pipeline analysis can help you determine whether a company is healthy and well balanced. Financial statements and projections don’t give you the full picture of your business development efforts. Show me a company’s pipeline charts and I can tell you whether they have a problem with identifying leads, getting those leads ready before the proposal starts, or winning their proposals. If you are having a problem the pipeline charts can show you whether the problem is staffing or process. Your pipeline chart can also tell you whether to look forward to next year or whether you need to get serious and make some resolutions for this year. Click here if you'd like us to put you in touch with a consultant who can help you to implement a pipeline, build your strategic plans around it, and use it to grow your business.

This is an example of a solution that we prepared for someone else. The solution that we prepare for you will be based on your particular needs. However, it’s a good way for you to get an idea of how we work and a great way to start a conversation about how your needs are similar or different. The Customer’s Circumstances. There were two customers. One was a government contractor that wanted to see how their proposals stacked up against our standards. The other was a small mom and pop financial business that wanted an outside opinion on their proposals. Our Approach. When we do assessments we can do them formally or informally. Either way, they are based on a set of assessment criteria that in part of the MustWin Process available in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. Anyone who is a PropLIBRARY Subscriber can perform their own assessments using our criteria. When we do a formal assessment, we document the findings. This can be criteria by criteria, or it can be by using the Microsoft Word commenting feature to place our observations directly into the document. Or both. The more detailed the documentation, the longer it takes, the more expensive it is. But sometimes having it documented is the whole point. Once these options are finalized, the key variable becomes the page count. We like to use a total page count that can include RFPs as well as proposals. We also like to present our findings, usually in an online meeting. We use screen sharing software and go through the key points, showing the document and the comments and we describe them. . Our Solution. With the mom and pop business, they didn't need a formal assessment or documented findings. They just wanted us to tell them what we thought could be improved. With the government contractor, we proposed a fully documented assessment, because that would give them something to use to improve all of their other proposals. For the mom and pop business our proposal was based on two hours of time and a limit of 30 pages. There was no RFP to consider. We read their proposal and made notes, then we held the online meeting. We charged them $400. For the government contractor, we proposed an assessment of up to 100 pages of proposal material. They could decide whether to include whole proposals, sections, or parts. The could RFPs (or parts of RFPs) for context and to assess compliance and optimization against the evaluation criteria. We proposed delivering an Assessment Report that would include: Comments comments inserted into MS-Word files An Assessment Findings document that will use our quality criteria as the Table of Contents. The Assessment Findings will also include recommendations for improvements and a subjective assessment of the relative quality of the materials based on the many other proposals we have seen. Our fee for this assessment was a fixed fee of $3,000. Both customers were able to improve all of their future proposals as a result of the assessment. Both customers learned to see their proposals in a completely different way. Not even considering any improvement in their win rates, both customers probably learned enough about quality standards to prevent re-writes and changes that would cost them far more than what the assessment did. To discuss this solution and how it might be similar to or different from what you need, click here to set up an appointment.

This is an example of a solution that we prepared for someone else. The solution that we prepare for you will be based on your particular needs. However, it’s a good way for you to get an idea of how we work and a great way to start a conversation about how your needs are similar or different. The Customer’s Circumstances. A company with multiple business lines (B2B and B2G) wanted to improve the quality of their proposal writing and accelerate their proposals. Their initial plan was to implement a re-use library and contacted us to make recommendations and help improve the quality. Our Approach. Most of the time re-use libraries improve your chances of losing. We had to be very careful qualifying this customer. It turns out that at least one of their business lines was a potential candidate for a re-use library approach. We started off with email and then had a conversation with the customer. From there we made some recommendations and had another conversation. When we were discuss bid strategies, how they vary from customer to customer, and how they impact the proposal, the customer realized that how they planned the content of their proposals was central to the quality of the writing as well as a better way to accelerate things. We finalized our recommendations and sent the customer a proposal. Our Solution. This project fell naturally into several phases. We took advantage of this to mitigate the customer’s risks. In the first phase, we would re-write the introduction to a proposal they had submitted. If they went with a re-use approach, they could use this as a foundation for the new content. It would also give them a chance to see what kinds of improvements we could make. In the second phase, we would take the Content Planning methodology from the MustWin Process in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase and create something they could start their future proposals from. Instead of providing re-usable narrative text (which could not be optimized for every customer context), we would itemize everything that should go into and be addressed in their proposals. This way their writers could sit down and put it in the write context much faster than working from a blank page and achieve better quality than editing an existing narrative. In the third phase, we would take up to 100 pages of their existing proposals and insert them as fragments and instructions into the Content Plan. This way they could carry forward their past work, but not necessarily as an updated narrative draft. Finally, we also offered a vehicle for ongoing proposal review and support to help them continuously improve the quality of their proposals. The result was: For under $10,000 they’d have a baseline Content Plan to speed up the start of their proposals in a way that is driven by strategy and optimized to win for each new customer. For under $20,000 they’d have that plus their existing proposal material revised and inserted into the Content Plan to accelerate going from Content Planning to a narrative draft. For substantially under $30,000 they’d have all that plus support for three active proposals they were anticipating. They’d get all this along with a Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY and without any long term commitment and with opportunities to bail out if they didn’t like the way things went. To discuss this solution and how it might be similar to or different from what you need, click here to set up an appointment.

This is an example of a solution that we prepared for someone else. The solution that we prepare for you will be based on your particular needs. However, it’s a good way for you to get an idea of how we work and a great way to start a conversation about how your needs are similar or different. The Customer’s Circumstances. A company wanted training in proposal writing provided at their site. They were potentially interested in other services, but wanted to start off with the training. Our Approach. We started with email and progressed to a lengthy conversation with multiple participants that was almost like a job interview. We talked about what was driving their need for training, who the participants would be, what their backgrounds were, and what results they would like to see after the training. Proposal training involves some major trade-offs. For example, you should have lots of exercises. Exercises take lots of time. If you’re trying to cover everything in just a day or two you get a trade-off between exercises and subject matter coverage. There’s also a trade-off between packing the room with as many people as possible and keeping the number of participants low so they get more personal attention. We can discuss the pros and cons of either, but like the customer to drive how these trade-offs should be made. We knew the customer was speaking with other potential providers, but we don’t mind. The way we leverage PropLIBRARY makes for a unique solution and a number of the other things we do are disruptive to the competition anyway. Our Solution. We proposed a two day session that reflect our discussions about the trade-offs. Then we added some of our special techniques: We offered exercises that could be performed outside of the classroom and uploaded to PropLIBRARY for review. This had the effect of increasing the amount of training time by 50% while holding the actual classroom time to two days. We set up a series of post-training webinars for ongoing Q&A and support. We included a Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY that provides participants with an insane amount of takeaway value. We offered options regarding the training topics. Our curriculum is modular by design, giving us the ability to economically customize the presentation. No two are ever the same. Our training, and even our exercises, can reflect your lines of business, the backgrounds of your students, the types of bids you submit, etc. We laid the foundation for future support by including as options things like online training and support. This way they had a vision of the future that until then they only thought of as a potential. The two-day session itself ran $7,000 and included instructor travel and lodging. There was also a $65 materials fee for each participant, to cover our costs if they decided to pack the room with participants. To discuss this solution and how it might be similar to or different from what you need, click here to set up an appointment.

This is an example of a solution that we prepared for someone else. The solution that we prepare for you will be based on your particular needs. However, it’s a good way for you to get an idea of how we work and a great way to start a conversation about how your needs are similar or different. The Customer’s Circumstances. A company with international offices contacted us about proposal training for 500-600 people. They weren’t sure what to do because it just wasn’t economical to send an instructor to all of their offices. They also didn’t want the training to be one-time event. Finally, they wanted to build a repository for training materials and proposal support. Our Approach. We started with a conversation. We talked about the problems with each form of training and discussed how a combination approach might work best. We agreed to prepare some ideas and have a follow-up conversation. During the follow-up we went into details and verified the estimates (how many sessions, how long, how many participants, etc.). We talked about price ranges and value. After the second conversation we prepared a written proposal that they could share with their management. Our Solution. We proposed a combination of a PropLIBRARY Corporate Subscription, with customization and support so they could use it as their training, monthly continuous improvement webinars (that also provide an opportunity for live Q&A), and skills enhancement exercises to provide an interactive experience. We also set-up a vehicle for consulting support that they could use when they ran into problems and wanted some advice. With some of our other customers we have proposed spending a day or two at their site at the beginning to kick things off and provide some live training. However, in this case that didn’t make sense. We broke the implementation down into a pilot phase and a final roll out. The charge for each phase was approximately $6,000. For this they would get: An online tool that everyone could use as needed that was customized with their processes and materials. Remote instructor-led training spread over a year instead of a one-time event. Monthly opportunities to ask the instructor questions. Exercises that would not only reinforce learning but would demonstrate capability and provide a way to track individual participation. For what some companies charge for a single on-site instructor-led course presentation they could have an international solution with interactivity, quantifiable improvement, and fully access to the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase for 500-600 people. To discuss this solution and how it might be similar to or different from what you need, click here to set up an appointment.

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