Carl Dickson

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We get tons of inspiration for our articles from participating in discussions in our group on LinkedIn. We were thinking about something we posted there recently on the topic of what to do when you get an RFP. We realized that some people set themselves up for failure right from the beginning. When you get an RFP, do you do the things that lead to winning or the things that lead to losing? Do you assume you are going to bid and start work on the proposal or do you look for reasons not to bid it and only start work after it passes the test? Do you line up subject matter experts and start passing out writing assignments or do you put the SMEs on hold and talk to someone who knows the customer, their preferences, and concerns because you know you're not ready to talk to the SMEs until you understand the context? Better yet, do you hold the meetings and planning sessions before the RFP is even released because after release is usually too late? Do you build your proposal around your outline and offering, or do you develop an understanding of what it will take to win and build your proposal around that? Do you build your pre-RFP intelligence gathering and bid preparation efforts around what you can learn in meetings and surfing the web, or by discovering what it will take to win and positioning your company in the eyes of the customer? Do you track your opportunities and progress through regular meetings or do you implement a process that tracks whether you've collected the information related to what it will take to win and gives you the ability to quantify whether you will be ready to win at RFP release? Do you try to come up with some “themes” you can sprinkle around the proposal, or do you figure out how to articulate your understanding of what it will take to win? Do you create an outline and start writing, or do you identify everything that would go into a winning proposal and develop a content plan before you start writing? Do you focus like a laser on the Statement of Work and requirements, or do you assess the evaluation criteria and optimize what you plan to offer and write to score highly? Do you have some people review what you wrote without any structure or guidance, or do you lay the foundation for measuring what gets written against the content plan, which itself was based on what it will take to win? Do you base your reviews solely on the experience of the reviewers, or do you implement a review plan to validate that the proposal reflects what you said it needs to in the content plan as well as what it will take to win? Oh, and while you're at it, do you develop your offering by writing to meet the requirements of the RFP, or do you develop the winning offering in a parallel process because designing/engineering by writing about it is a bad way to go? Did we pass the test? See also: Winning After we wrote this, we thought should assess our own MustWin Process to ensure that our recommendations do indeed lay the right foundation for winning. Not only do we give you a checklist of things to verify when the RFP is released, we also give you a nice long list of reasons to consider no bidding, all of which are in addition to our pre-RFP Readiness Review process which qualifies the leads and provides several opportunities to no bid an opportunity, all designed to make sure that what you bid you have a better than fair chance of winning what you choose to bid. I think we passed this one. The pre-RFP Readiness Review process is designed to deliver insight about the customer, opportunity, and competitive involvement so that it is in place, in the right format, and ready to use to win the proposal. You won’t need to schedule any extra meetings to get this because if you follow the process it will already be there. I think we passed this one. That’s what the pre-RFP Readiness Review process is all about. But if you first learn about the RFP when it’s released and you still think it’s worth pursuing, you can still use the Readiness Reviews to quickly determine what you know and don’t know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment to accelerate the development of your win strategies. That’s another one passed. Outlining is the first of eight steps in our iterative Content Planning process. It’s designed to make sure you don’t overlook anything that should go in your proposal. Pre-RFP Readiness Reviews are designed to identify what it will take to win so that it can guide the Content Planning process and drive the creation of the proposal itself. So we cover discovering what it will take to win, outlining, and getting it into the proposal. That’s a check. The pre-RFP Readiness Reviews start by gathering intelligence and end with assessing it, formatting it, and turning it into what you need to articulate in the proposal. Each of the Readiness Reviews has clear questions to answer and goals to accomplish so that the time is not wasted. Check! Readiness Reviews get scored with a simple Red/Yellow/Green system that can be converted to numerical scores and turned into a full-blown metrics analysis system that can unlock the hidden factors driving your win rates. They also enable progress to be measured and the trend towards red or green determined so that the valuable time before RFP release isn’t wasted. No more meeting after meeting saying that “we’re tracking it” only to arrive at RFP release unprepared. Another one passed. The combination of Readiness Reviews and Content Planning takes what it will take to win and turns them from intelligence into instructions for what the writers should say in the proposal. They are also turned into criteria that are used to validate the quality of the draft after it is written. I think we passed this one. The Content Planning process starts with an outline and then adds to it everything that should go into the proposal through eight steps that make sure you don’t overlook anything. When completed, it provides a complete set of instructions that the authors can follow to write the winning proposal instead of a blank sheet of paper with a heading at the top. That’s one we definitely pass. One step in the Content Planning process is designed to specifically target assessing the evaluation criteria and how they should impact what gets written. Another step accounts for the requirements of the Statement of Work. There are six other steps that guide you through considering everything else that needs to go into the proposal. I say we passed this one too. The review process we recommend actually starts with the Content Planning process. We validate that the draft proposal follows all of the instructions in the Content Plan. We actually place a higher priority on reviewing the Content Plan prior to writing than we do on reviewing the narrative draft. The Content Plan is based on what it will take to win, which is discovered during the Readiness Reviews. The progress of writing can be measured by how much of the Content Plan has been fulfilled. Quality is validated the same way. I think we definitely pass this one. The goal of our review process is to validate that the proposal reflects what it will take to win, as documented in the Content Plan after being discovered during the Readiness Review process. How you validate each item depends on the size, scope, and nature of the proposal. So we prepare a Review Plan at the beginning of the proposal that covers how they will all be validated. Our process documentation turns this into something that’s checklist quick and simple so you can have a written Review Plan prepared in mere minutes. We pass this one as well. We think designing or engineering by writing about it is a horrible way to go about it, and is just asking for proposal failure. But what methodology you follow for design or engineering are particular to your company. So we give you the points where you should need to synch them up. Our Content Planning approach takes what you come up with as input and turns it into instructions for the writers. We wrap your offering in everything else needed to win the proposal. This is the last one and it looks like we passed them all. If you think the list we started with was a good list, then the MustWin Process is a good way to make sure you are doing the right things for every item on it. If you’re not doing the right things on the list, then instead of laying the foundation for winning, you may be starting off down the path towards losing right from the beginning. The MustWin Process and other materials in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase may give you the inspiration and techniques you need to turn that around.

One of the most important things to realize about proposal writing is that it is not about you, your company, or even your offering. It’s not about telling the customer anything. It’s about the customer, their decision, and what they need to hear to make it. It’s hard to turn your brain inside out and backwards to articulate things that the reader wants to hear instead of what you are trying to say. It is impossible to do this if you don’t know your audience. To better understand your audience, you should ask questions like: See also: Winning What matters to them? This is what you want to write about. Your offering is merely a way of fulfilling it. They don’t want what you're proposing. They want what matters. So give them that if you want to win. How will they assess what they are reading? Will your proposal be scored or read? Do they have written evaluation criteria? Can you influence their assessment by how you describe what’s important? How do they make decisions? Some organizations are consensus driven and some are authoritarian. Some are centralized and some decentralized. Most have policies, procedures, and various thresholds. How will these impact what you are proposing? Who is involved in making decisions? Is it a person, a committee, or a chain of command? What is the role of the person you’ve been talking to or submitting your proposal to? What are their preferences? In what you are proposing there are countless choices and trade-offs. Did you pick the ones that you thought were best or the ones the customer would prefer? What do they already know or believe about what you are telling them? What you are telling them will be compared to something they already know that can act as an anchor point. What will your offering get compared to? Changing a customer’s world view through a proposal is usually impossible. But if you understand how they view things you can position yourself in a way that is not in conflict with what they already know or believe. What alternatives do they have? Can they do nothing? Could they do it on their own? Do you have competition? Do they need to be motivated? What processes do they have to follow before acting on your recommendations? Do they have internal policies and procedures they have to go through in order to purchase something or act on your proposal? Is what’s in your proposal compatible with them? What are their expectations regarding format, presentation, and level of detail? Expectations can be written or unwritten. If they are written, they should be treated as instructions and followed. If the reader’s expectations are not written down, you need to discover them and then treat them like instructions. These are the things you need to learn about your customer. If you cannot answer questions like these, then your problem is with understanding how to develop audience awareness, not with knowing how to write a proposal. There is no writing trick that can overcome a lack of audience awareness, so the best place to start is to make sure that you understand the reader. In fact, you should put far more effort into understanding your audience than you do in the actual writing.

We’ve noticed a trend in proposal debriefs, where the comments are more and more likely to be based on black and white criteria like “did address” or “did not address.” Never mind whether what the proposal said made sense or is qualitatively better than what your competitors have offered. The criteria have been made objective so that the evaluation can’t be questioned. It’s been made black or white, with no protestable shades of gray. When this is the case, the evaluation is performed mechanically. There were always forms to be completed, but now instead of providing a rationale for a score, the evaluator may just be checking the boxes and going down the list. The evaluator could very well be a robot, and no one would ever know. When an RFP is written to make the evaluation of the proposal formal and objective, there’s a good chance that it will be reviewed by a robot. Or at least a human pretending to be a robot. Sooner or later they’ll get around to replacing that human with an actual robot. How you write your proposal depends on whether it will be evaluated by a human or a human pretending to be a robot. See also: Customer perspective This trend has accelerated recently, due to a focus on awarding to the lowest price technically acceptable offering. When these are the evaluation criteria, then the technical evaluation is pass or fail. The evaluation criteria are no longer about scoring the offers to determine the best, they're about creating an objective standard for what is sufficient. If a proposal meets the standard, then they evaluate the price and pick the lowest one. There are signs you can look for in the RFP that will help you determine whether your proposal will be evaluated by a human or a robot. If the evaluation score is turned into a label, such as “outstanding,” “satisfactory,” or “unacceptable” and the evaluations are performed on the labels, it’s a sign that robots have taken over the evaluation. There is no precision. All the bids fit into a few categories. Everyone within a category is treated equally. The next thing you will probably read in an RFP like this will sound like they are evaluating based on best value, but it’s just a ruse. It will say “price is not the most important factor” but when the evaluation scores are the same “price becomes more important.” Guess what? Everyone who has a chance at winning will be labeled “outstanding.” Or if they pick the lowest label then everyone who has a chance at winning will be labeled “satisfactory.” So what really determines who wins is the price. But if you really want to know for sure, you have to look at how they evaluate the assignment of the labels. If it’s based on “did/did not” or any other variation of Boolean logic or other objective criteria, then the robots are in charge. If the criteria require subjectivity or judgment, such as determining which is better, then there might be a human in the loop. The reason you need to know is that a human can be persuaded by providing a rationale. A robot is persuaded by the completion of their checklist. A human will be persuaded by what they want and what best meets their needs. A robot will be persuaded by the presence of keywords. We always hope there is a human behind the scenes ready to step in and apply some judgment. We try to fulfill the structure and keywords, while providing a rationale to persuade someone not to pick a proposal with better keyword stuffing. We hope that the objective criteria are just there out of protest paranoia. So the question remains, is the evaluator of your next proposal a human or a robot? Our MustWin Process, which is part of the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase, shows you how to plan the writing of your proposal so that it responds to the factors that drive what it will take to win.

When you are a contractor, sometimes deadlines are missed, budgets are exceeded, or specifications go unmet. Sometimes it’s because of an oversight, bad estimates, or mismanagement. And sometimes it’s because the customer was unclear or changed their minds. Either way, your past performance record may suffer. Customer complaints, cure letters, or termination of a task can do irreparable damage to your ability to win future work. It can be worse when you are trying to bid a recompete, because you can’t hide from it by not saying anything about it. The customer knows. So how do you win a proposal when you know you might have negative past performance information? Start by looking it at from the customer’s perspective. You have a vendor that had a problem. Do you care? What matters to you as the customer? Did they make things right? Did you have to drag them, kicking and screaming, to make things right? Or did they respond in a way that impressed you? What do you anticipate from them in the future? Do you still trust them? Are they better than your alternatives? These are the questions that you need to anticipate and have answers for. You may have noticed that a lot of them depend on what you did. What you say about it now may not matter. The problem is that if negative performance drove the customer to complain, the odds are that you weren’t being responsive and how you did respond did not impress them. The least effective way to address a past performance problem is in a proposal. And yet, that may be just what you have to do… Here are some of the proposal strategies we’ve tried with customers who had past performance problems: Change before the new RFP comes out Let them see the changes that are coming when the new RFP comes out Say that the new contract frees you from the restrictions of the old contract, so now you can bid the changes you wanted to implement all along Put the emphasis on how you responded instead of what occurred Show that you are an example of the right way to respond to a problem Show how the issue demonstrates that you are trustworthy Arrange for your president or a senior executive to meet with them, show commitment, and get feedback Talk about what changed during the course of the old contract Show that you proved your willingness to partner with the customer in difficult circumstances, even if it wasn’t in your financial interests Prove that every challenge you’ve faced has made you a stronger, better company Add staff Replace staff Add new resources, software, or tools Add or replace subcontractors If you can’t show a rapid response, show a thorough investigation and comprehensive resolution Explain why it can never happen again Put a new emphasis on prevention instead of repair Improve transparency and real-time status awareness Track metrics and then share the data Make everything new Give them a reason to believe things will be different, and give them something to want Show that how you have changed or responded makes you a better choice than any of your competitors who lack that experience and will show up unprepared Remember that when the RFP comes out, the question in the customer’s mind is who they should pick. If you have a negative issue you may not be doomed. It just makes it harder to be the better pick. It is critical that you show why you are the better pick. Out of all the things we’ve tried, what actually worked? The only time these techniques work is when: You have a positive relationship with the customer and they trust you The customer has seen the changes you describe Your competitors suck worse than you do If you don’t interact with the customer except when there’s a problem, then all you can hope for are competitors who have messed up worse than you did. That’s not a winning strategy. A winning strategy turns the negative into a positive by making it about a better future. A winning strategy makes the result of the problem something you can brag about. It’s not about hiding. It’s about using it as a stepping stone to becoming something better than your competitors. Many more strategies and tips like these are available in the PropLIBRARY MustWin and Recipe Libraries. Information about how to get access to them is available here.

I’m sitting here working on a proposal and I just realized that the way I was first taught how to write an Executive Summary is backwards. When I first started writing proposals it was considered innovative to have a box or section titled “Why Us” at the end of your Executive Summary. It was intended to itemize and spell out the reasons why the customer should accept your proposal. But as I’m writing today I realize that it shouldn’t go at the end. It should go at the beginning. The very first thing I’m writing in this proposal is what makes this proposal submission different (and better!) from all the others the customer will be reading. I’m going straight to what matters to the customer. And I’m following it by positioning the company according to its strengths and weaknesses. The company has some special qualities and does some things that really need to be called out. It also has some problems that need to be put in context. Along the way I’ve paid close attention to the evaluation criteria in the Request for Proposal (RFP). I’m saying things that relate to the most important evaluation criteria so that the customer can get a sense of how we’ll stack up when they score our proposal. This positioning forms the basis for the company’s bid strategies. And how we articulate those strategies in the proposal becomes our themes when we pick up that language and carry it throughout the rest of the document. And I’m doing all of this in the first two or three paragraphs. What I have, in essence, is the minimum someone needs to know about the company and its proposal in order to explain their decision. They won’t make the decision until they read the rest of the proposal which substantiates these points, but the context is there. Right from the beginning. See also: Executive Summary It’s a very useful tool for writing the rest of the document. It gives me the points I need to support and the context I need to use to frame the details. When I go to write each section, I can refer back to the Executive Summary and explain how the section-level details substantiate why the customer should accept our proposal. It also makes it easier to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective. I made sure that the Executive Summary is about what the customer will get instead of being about the company submitting the proposal. Now when people refer back to it to write their sections, they can pick up the context and way of articulating from the customer’s perspective. Instead of addressing the requirements by saying what the company will do, they can see how to address the requirements by explaining how the customer will get what they want and need as a result of what the company will do. When you address “Why Us” at the end of your Executive Summary, it means you’re putting a lot of words between the beginning and what really matters to the customer (and to you!). It also means that you are probably not writing from the customer's perspective. You may think that you’re making those points and just summarizing them at the end, but the customer doesn’t get to see the context of your proposal until the end. If you are the customer, you don’t want to read an entire section to find out what matters. If you’re the customer, that’s where you want to start.

Most proposals start off with outlines, compliance matrices, and kick-off meetings. If they’re smart, they plan the content before they start writing. Then they get writing. When they have a draft, they hold a review, usually called a Red Team. Then they do some more writing and editing, before going into final production and submission. They’d be better off if instead of starting by planning the content, they started by planning the review. Only it’s not the logistics of the review that you need to know. It’s the standards. What will the reviewers be looking for? What criteria will they follow? At the highest level, reviews are about providing quality assurance. So how do you define proposal quality? Then how do you validate it? How can you start writing without knowing these things? When you let the deadline pressure tempt you into writing before you’ve figured this out, it’s like hitting a moving target. Most writers don’t find out what’s expected of them until the draft gets to the reviewers. That’s when they find out they need to do it over because what they wrote isn’t what is needed. Only there’s not enough time to do it over, so they try to fake fix it. Unfortunately almost reflecting what it will take to win is not good enough and everyone knows it. So they make more changes (often introducing errors) as the clock ticks down and eventually they submit what they have rather than what it should have been. If they had started by defining the quality standards for the reviews, then the writers would have had a much better chance of getting it right in the first draft. Proposal writing is about understanding what it will take to win, and getting it in writing. One of the best ways to spend your valuable but limited time on a proposal is by discussing that. Starting from a simple outline or a compliance matrix is not enough for the writers to address everything that goes into what it will take to win. See also: Faster When the writers and the reviewers conduct themselves separately, then often you don’t get a definitive discussion about what it will take to win until the review — when the proposal is halfway over. That makes it impossible to build the proposal around what it will take to win. That discussion should be your first priority. It should not be left for individuals to figure out on their own while they do the writing, subject to correction later when there won’t be enough time to change it. Within the MustWin Process that's available on PropLIBRARY we define proposal quality as the degree to which the proposal reflects all of the things you have determined are necessary to win. The good news is that a lot of what it will take to win can be anticipated before the RFP is released. But some of it depends on what’s in the RFP. What we did was create a draft set of criteria and a process for customizing it. The idea is to enable people to put a written review plan in place in about 15 minutes. Then we channel that information into something called Proposal Content Planning. That’s our approach for figuring out everything that needs to go into the proposal and putting it in the right context. It provides a detailed set of instructions for the writers that matches the instructions the reviewers get. It gets the writers and reviewers on the same page regarding what it’s going to take to win and then verify that the proposal reflects it. The key takeaway is that if you get your proposal started and then turn your attention to the review process, you’re just asking to get hurt. Start discussing your review standards and process at the beginning. It’s one of the things that you can realistically start before the RFP is released. Because if you don’t start your proposal having already discussed what it will take to win, you’ll never be able to build your proposal around it.

Most proposal introduction paragraphs are wasted space. They are written like the writer needed to get warmed up while figuring out what to say. And yet when the customer looks at your proposal, wondering what’s in it for them, it’s the first thing they read. It's the first thing they consider when deciding whether to read further and whether to accept your proposal. An ordinary proposal introduction won't add value or help the customer. A proposal introduction is not for describing yourself before presenting the proposal. It's not about you. It's about whether the customer will bother to read your proposal and whether they will consider accepting it. When the first thing a customer reads is all about you, then you are just another self-absorbed vendor trying to sell them something. Your credibility is suspect. But when the first thing they see is that you've considered them first and the impact of what you are proposing on them, you better position yourself as a partner that they want to work with. Everything that you say in the introduction should be presented in support of what the customer is going to get if they accept your proposal and anything they might need to know before they get to what they think is the good stuff. See also: Customer perspective An ordinary proposal introduction won't add value or help the customer. They usually include a company's standard way of talking about itself instead of something that talks about what the customer cares about. Anything that doesn't help the customer understand: What they will get if they accept the proposal Why they are getting it What they need to know before they read further Why your proposal is the best alternative What action you want them to take should simply be deleted from the proposal introduction, or put elsewhere in the proposal. What remains will depend on the type of proposal and your relationship with the customer. What you need to include will depend on things like whether: The proposal is solicited or unsolicited There is a written RFP and evaluation criteria You have had previous contact with the customer and how well they know you Your bid includes teaming partners or subcontractors What alternatives the customer has What you are offering What the competitive environment is like Who will be reading the proposal The introduction paragraph itself should say as little as possible, to keep the customer reading further. It should promise the customer that they will get something that matters to them, and make them want to read further to find out more. If it does just that, then it has done its job. The problem with most proposal introductions is that the customer continues reading even though they don't want to because they haven't found anything of substance. They read your proposal wondering if there's anything in it for them, getting more doubtful with each line they read. With an extraordinary introduction, they immediately see what they want and read your proposal eagerly to find out how to get it.

Since we know that only the customer can decide what a winning proposal is, to increase our win probability we need to be able to guess what the customer will decide. To do that, we need to know what the customer: See also: Introduction Needs Expects Finds compelling Can afford You also need to know how they make decisions, what tradeoffs they prefer, and how they evaluate the proposals that they receive. If they formally evaluate and score the proposals they receive, you need to know not only their evaluation criteria but how they apply those criteria during the evaluation. Your only hope of gaining this knowledge comes from relationship marketing and asking the right questions. Relationship marketing is best pursued before the RFP is announced. The questions you need to ask to discover the answers you need are something that you should be able to anticipate. Making sure the questions get answered, accumulating knowledge in a useable form, and then assessing that knowledge for how to best use it in the proposal is what your process should do. You can create your own, or you can use the ones that we’ve developed in our Readiness Reviews to track, assess, and prepare to win before the RFP even hits the street. You also need to know: What your customer expects to see in a proposal What your proposal should look like How it should be organized What it should address How should you articulate what goes into your proposal What your proposal should look like depends primarily on the customer’s expectations, which you should discover before you even start the proposal. How a proposal should be organized depends primarily on how it will be evaluated. This requires understanding the customer's decision making processes, which you should also discover before you even start the proposal. What should go into the proposal is an iterative process. It is driven by what it will take to win, which you should also seek to discover before you even start the proposal. There are a number of subjects and sources of information that need to be addressed in your proposal. How do you account for them all? And at what level of detail? And in what context? Before you can write a complex proposal, you need a planning step to define and arrange all the contents. You can't just start writing and hope to address everything and present it in the way needed to maximize your win probability on the first draft. And if you start by writing instead of planning hoping to get there by rewriting and rewriting until it somehow turns into a great proposal, you will run out of time before that happens. You need Proposal Content Planning to make sure nothing gets overlooked and that enables you to validate that the proposal reflects what it will take to win before you convert the plan into a written narrative. The next thing you need to win is a process for making sure that you have created a quality proposal. To do that you need a definition of proposal quality and a methodology for conducting your reviews. Your review methodology should use your pre-RFP discoveries to define what it will take to win, and to turn it into criteria that can be used to both plan the content and measure the quality of the proposal narrative. What you don’t want is a review process that is based on finding fault and identifying corrections after the mistakes have been turned into a narrative. With a complex proposal and a tight deadline, your review methodology provides the structure that you build the rest of your proposal around. That’s what we did with the Proposal Quality Validation methodology that is built into the MustWin Process. It fully integrates Readiness Reviews and Proposal Content Planning so that all of your efforts to prepare the winning proposal reinforce each other. One theme you may have picked up on is that winning a proposal requires you to know things before you even start writing. Not knowing those things means that the only way you can win is by guessing. You should consider not bidding instead. But if you really must bid, there are techniques you can use. They involve asking the same questions and assuming the answers. This approach won't be competitive against someone who really does know the answers, but it easily beats the other companies who also do not know the answers and try to write a proposal without going through the process. The MustWin Process is designed so that you can maximize the value of what you do know, or assume, about the customer and drive it into the proposal so that you can still build a proposal around what you assume it will take to win when you can't confirm your assumptions with the customer. Another theme to take note of is that what happens at the end of the proposal depends on things you should have done earlier. The things you do build on each other and should have quality assurance built in. That is why developing a winning proposal management process increases your win probability over just jumping in and doing what you think should be done or sounds good. Having a proposal process becomes a competitive advantage because it enables you to beat the companies that just do their proposals without thinking through the process.

Our normal advice for beginners about how to format their proposals is to not make things worse by exceeding their capabilities. An overly ambitious layout can slow you down, introduce errors, and distract you from perfecting your message. We generally recommend that your goal should be a simple and elegant layout. See also: Faster But that’s our advice for beginners. If you are capable of reliably and efficiently producing advanced layouts, then you still need to give it some thought. The point of the proposal is not the layout, it's the message delivery. Your layout should improve your win probability, and the primary way to do that with layout is to reinforce the messaging and not through making it pretty. Sometimes you can do both, but prettiness is not the point. Winning is. You may have heard of the design principal that form should follow function. In proposals, form should follow strategy. What are your bid strategies? What is your message? What are the customer's expectations? What matters to them about what you are proposing? What will it take to get the customer to accept your proposal? What can your formatting do to reinforce your strategies and message, fulfill the customer's expectations, and help them accept your proposal? Before you start picking fonts, debating typography, or creating your layout you need the right win strategy. Then your formatting should reinforce your win strategies. Here are several ways to approach formatting your proposal to make it about the customer instead of trying "to look good." Strategy #1: Meet your customer’s expectations by formatting your documents to look like their documents If you want to know what a customer expects in terms of formatting, getting a peek at how they prepare their own documents can be incredibly valuable. Are they formal or informal? Are they precise or sloppy? Are they consistent? Are they complex? What fonts and margins do they use? Are their covers elaborate or functional? If you are not sure what a customer expects your document to look like, making it look like theirs is a safe bet. Just don’t get fooled by their marketing collateral — their internal reports and memoranda probably look nothing like their marketing materials. You may be able to improve on the customer's format. But should you? That's a tricky question. You may want to demonstrate your capabilities, but you might also look frivolous. You might be able to improve on readability, but it will come at the potential cost of looking different. Then again, different can be good as well as bad, and maybe the customer will be impressed by your formatting or aspire to the professionalism of your formatting. This is why your proposal formatting efforts need to be thoroughly grounded in win strategies that are informed by customer awareness. Do you want to look like part of them or are you an outsider who they want to bring in something better? Does the work you are proposing involve producing deliverables and do they give you any insight into how you should prepare your proposal format? Will your formatting impact your evaluation score at all or is proposal formatting and style a very minor consideration? Strategy #2: Ask a lot of questions If the goal is to format your proposal in a way that is compatible with the customer's expectations, you really need to discover what those expectations are. "How should we format our proposal" might not seem like a business development priority, but understanding the customer's expectations should be. It's nice when the customer spells out how to organize and format your proposal, but not all customers do that. Instead of asking what fonts you should use in your proposal, you might ask questions like: Do they handle proposals routinely or is it unusual for them? How will they perform the proposal evaluation? Do they have preferences or expectations? What questions would they like to have answered? Do they want all the details in writing or an overview? How long is too long? Do they have a formal or informal decision-making process? Do they have any file size limitations or issues? Do they have any copies of previous project deliverables that are relevant that you can review? Do they know what a style guide is, do they have one, and do they follow it? Can you get a copy? These are clever ways of asking if it should be simple, what length it should be, what it should address, if they expect you to put a lot of time into it, who the audience will be, and how they will approach reading the proposal. All these things impact the formatting. Strategy #3: Pay attention to their culture Is the customer formal or informal in their speech and in writing? Are they authoritarian? Hierarchical? Consensus driven? Chaotic? Inconsistent? Practical? Creative? Your win strategies should reflect their culture, and your proposal will be viewed in the context of their culture. To maximize your win probability, your proposal should reflect their perspective, their way of making decisions, and their expectations for what a proposal should be and look like. Strategy #4: Tell a visual story Mimicking their formatting is playing it safe. Maybe that's a good thing. But maybe the customer doesn’t want you to be just like them. Maybe they want something better. Maybe they want something innovative, creative, motivated, clear, intelligent, capable, insightful, competent, quick, or comprehensive. Maybe you should show that to them. Your layout can look traditional or modern, reliable or innovative, clear or detailed, comprehensive or simple, routine or extraordinary. What story do you want to tell based on your win strategies? If you have the option, make your proposal highly visual. If you have the skills you can make the entire proposal look like an infographic. Can it be so visual that they get your key messages just from looking at the graphics, without even having to read the text? If you can't visualize the story you're telling them, how will they be able to? If you are creative, you can make text visual and use it to reinforce your messaging. You can replace text with graphics, and given a choice it's probably better to do so. People comprehend better and faster through graphics than they do from text. But while you may aspire to make your proposals look good, it can get in the way of your win strategies instead of helping. And it can slow things down and introduce proposal-wrecking mistakes. You also may be limited by the formatting requirements provided in the RFP. Strategy #5: Go back to basics People almost never want to read a proposal. So keep it short and simple. Only say things that matter. Your slogans and unsubstantiated claims don't matter to someone making a decision. Your proposal is not a commercial, it's a decision tool. A decision tool that's too long to read won't help influence the decision, at least not in your favor. Sometimes the best proposal format is having the least amount of proposal to format. Focus on your message. Deliver it with formatting that is clear, simple, and elegant. Communicate visually instead of with text. Format it so that the headings pop and your customer can get the message by skimming. Formatting for clarity means making it simple to be able to find things. It means making sure there is no confusion about how to read the content. If you don't understand typography, then trust the research that Microsoft or Apple have done and go with the defaults. If you don't understand document layout design, then find something simple that you like and copy the layout. If you've never worked with multiple columns, keep it a single column. Remember that whitespace is your friend and have a lot of it. Don't add extras to the formatting if you're stretching outside your comfort zone. If you don't know the art of document design, then make your proposal layout invisible. Make it so routine that no one notices it and all the focus goes to the messages in your proposal. Your proposal messaging will do more to influence the customer's decision, anyway. A great layout with bad messaging will result in a losing proposal. Great proposal messaging with an invisible layout will result in a win. Can layout help? Maybe. But just maybe. If you have the skills to produce a dramatic layout, it can help with clarity, provide an impression, and call attention to your messages. But the messages have to be there. The job of a proposal layout is to reinforce that messaging, and sometimes the best way to do that is to get out of the way.

Sometimes hiring more people, especially people with proven experience, is not an option. Sometimes you just have to work with the people who are available, even if they are inexperienced. Most people learn business and proposal development on the job, starting off without any experience. But you don’t want them to fail while they are still learning how to win. The first thing that comes to people’s minds when trying to improve the skills of their staff is training. But there are a lot of other things you can do as well. If you are using inexperienced staff, then the most important thing to have is structure. You need a process that they can follow, and that others are required to follow. Inexperienced staff can manage within a structured environment, but even very experienced staff have difficulty producing in a chaotic environment. Training your inexperienced proposal specialists will not bring structure or enforce it. Structure has to be sanctioned or imposed at the executive level. This puts most companies in contradiction. They need the proposal specialists to define the process, but the proposal specialists aren’t sufficiently experienced to do that. Besides, they’re too busy working on proposals to document a process. One of the reasons we decided to sell the MustWin Process as an off-the-shelf set of proposal process documentation instead of keeping it to ourselves is to solve this problem. See also: Organizational development Inexperienced staff need more than just process and structure. They need to know: How to define quality How to achieve it How to know quality when they see it This is what having a process really should give you. If the process doesn’t do these three things, then it doesn’t do what you need. Your inexperienced staff need more than just process, they need a process that has been turned into tools. Incidentally, that’s why we turned our process documentation into a tool called PropLIBRARY. Inexperienced staff need quality assessment tools and procedures so that they know what they are trying to achieve. They also need them so they can determine whether something meets the required criteria. Most companies assume experienced staff can just do this on sight. But the truth is that most experienced staff can’t recognize quality on sight. Most proposals are ordinary. And if experienced staff can’t do it on sight, then inexperienced staff definitely can’t recognize quality on sight. They need guidance in the form of checklists, criteria, and assessment procedures. They need to be tangible so they can compare what they are doing with something that shows them what they are supposed to be doing. They need tools they can use at the beginning to define what they need to accomplish, they need inspiration and guidance in the middle to help them do it, and they need assessment tools they can use at the end to determine if what they did was correct. When they have this, many talented but inexperienced staff can perform as well as staff with much more experience. But ultimately, there is no substitute for experience. Especially when things don’t go according to plan. That’s why we’re also big fans of coaching. A few hours a week of a highly experienced person's time is the final ingredient that enables an inexperienced team of proposal specialists to function at a much higher level. With an experienced coach, instead of hiring a team of experts you can grow your own. And while you’re waiting for your staff to reach the expert level, you have your coach to fall back on. Over the course of a year or two, talented but inexperienced staff can grow to the point where they need little or no coaching and can stand on their own. If you take those same talented but inexperienced staff and just send them to a class, don’t expect it to make much of a difference. But if you give them process documentation and tools, and back them up with an experienced coach, it can not only make a difference, it can be a competitive edge. If you want some options for hiring a coach, use the contact link to the left to get in touch with us.

Hiring a great proposal writer means going past the interview and recognizing great proposal writing and the skills that produce it. Many well-spoken candidates for proposal writing jobs who give a great interview often end up being ordinary writers. Many, if not most, highly experienced proposal professionals are ordinary writers — it’s the law of averages at work. This is even true of consultants who are proposal writers for hire. However, if you want to win you don't want to hire the middle of the bell curve. How do you pick a great proposal writer? What doesn't work You can’t pick a great proposal writer simply by interviewing them. From an interview you can find out whether they are process oriented, what they focus on, and how they approach writing. But you can’t find out what they’ll put on paper if they get the job. I've seen many people who can describe the proposal process in extraordinary detail write ordinary copy for the proposals they work on. Unfortunately, if you ask the candidate to see samples, you won’t be able to rely on them. Most proposal copy is written by a collaboration of authors. So how much of what you’re reading is the contribution of the candidate? You could ask them to write something as part of the interview. The problem with this is that great proposal writing is based on customer, opportunity, and competitive insight. It also takes time. What you’ll get from writing during an interview will have no context, and context is what makes great proposal writing. If you ask the candidate about their win rate, you'll get a number that can't be trusted, even if they're being honest. How much does one person contribute to the win rate? Besides, everyone who quotes a win rate self edits which pursuits they include. Ask yourself what your win rate is, and watch yourself do it. Did you count the ones you led, the ones you contributed to, or the one that lost on price? Coming up with a solution Is the candidate’s first inclination is to focus on proofreading, pursuit strategy, RFP compliance, the overall message, or the technical details of the offering? A while back, one of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY asked us if we had an assessment tool they could use to evaluate candidates for a proposal writing job. We were skeptical at first, but then we had a couple of ideas and managed to come up with something. What we created has a few different options, ranging from an editing exercise to a writing exercise with the context supplied. With each different scenario, we expect the writer to ask questions. In fact, the starting points were designed to trigger questions, because which questions the candidate focuses on tells you a great deal about them. This makes it part of the interview. You get to interact with the candidate the same way you would on a proposal. See also: Organizational development For example, you should be able to discover if the candidate’s first inclination is to focus on proofreading, pursuit strategy, RFP compliance, the overall message, or the technical details of the offering. Depending on the nature of the position, you’ll probably have a preference, and the assessment tool is designed to help determine whether the candidate is a match for the kind of proposal writer you are looking for. It's also helpful to see the kinds of changes they make to something already written. Instead of giving them a blank page, we made it more like the real world, with some material to start with. Which things they choose to change (and which they don’t), along with what they do to improve them, also tells you a great deal about what they would actually contribute to your proposals. If you want someone who is going to focus on the editing and make what you’ve written grammatically correct it will show. If you want someone who is going to question the bid strategies, it will show. If you want someone who will accept whatever's been written and just edit it, it will show. If you want someone who’s going to question why you’re saying it in text and not turning it into a graphic, it will show. If you want someone who can work independently and do it all, that will show too. Then to make it easier to do the assessment itself, we went through the sample, and marked a couple dozen things that a candidate might change and why. We annotated the examples and exercises to prompt you with things to explore and help you interpret the results. The goal isn’t to see if the candidate “catches everything.” The goal is to see what kinds of things they focus on. You will find out more about a person’s writing ability in 20 minutes using this approach than you will if you spend 200 minutes talking to them. Do-it-yourself or off-the-shelf? Our proposal specialist assessment tool is only accessible for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. If you are a subscriber, you can download the assessment tool here. But we’ve told you enough about our approach that if you are a “do it yourself” kind of person, you can create your own assessment tool. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s better to download ours and put it to work immediately, or spend time creating your own.

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The habits that companies need to develop are different from the personal habits that people develop. Companies focus on things like policies and procedures, but habits usually don’t make the list. As a result, the habits they develop are usually the bad kind — the ones you fall into in the absence of having good habits. So we thought we’d take a look at what the good habits should be. The habits that a company needs relate to the things they need to do and achieve, but are different from the procedures themselves. If a company has the right habits, it forms a set of expectations, and the procedures become merely how they get fulfilled. The right habits put the focus on results, whereas procedures put the focus on compliance. When the people within a company automatically seek the right results and share the same goals, then the procedures to implement them come naturally. Here is a list of 10 habits that are critical for companies to win their business pursuits. We’ve divided the list in half, with the first half focusing on the pre-RFP business development phase, and the second half focusing on the post-RFP proposal phase. Before the RFP is released, be in the habit of: See also: Organizational Development Having a strategic plan that defines the targets for prospecting and using it as a filter to determine which leads to pursue. Not having a strategic plan is at the heart of bad habits that companies develop. It also leads to failure. But having a strategic plan does no good if it sits on a shelf. It has to be a guide and act as a filter to help lead your company to success. Doing your prospecting according to the strategic plan. Where do people go to find their leads? If you leave it wide open, start by searching databases, or expect someone’s Rolodex to deliver them, you’re setting yourself up for failure. A key purpose of a strategic plan is to guide people to the right territories to look for the right kind of leads. You need your staff to be in the habit of using the strategic plan to guide where and how they do their prospecting. If they ignore the strategic plan, you might as well not have one. Measuring how many leads you reject, get cancelled, or no bid and using this to refine future pipeline targets. The first time you chart your pipeline, you’ll have to make up a lot of numbers. But in the future you want to be able to base all the numbers on hard data. Getting into the habit of tracking that data will not only make future targeting more accurate, it will also keep people from developing bad habits, like bidding everything they find. Measuring progress during lead pursuit. If you don’t measure your progress during lead pursuit, then you have no way of knowing whether you are making any progress. Too many companies are in the habit of having regular meetings where they report on the leads they are tracking, but don’t actually measure the progress. All they do is talk about “what’s new” and pretend that they're on track because they can identify it as a lead. But when the RFP is released they’re never ready. The way to measure lead pursuit progress is to identify what it takes to be ready to win and measure how much of it you’ve accomplished. Our methodology for conducting Readiness Reviews is available from the win before the RFP is even released. After the RFP is released, get in the habit of: Defining quality, the criteria to use to assess it, and what it will take to win before writing starts. If you can’t say what proposal quality is, what you're looking for when you review the proposal, and what it will take to win, then you’re not ready to start writing. Think first. Write second. You can’t figure it out by writing about it. That just uses up time producing an inferior document. How to define proposal quality and a set of criteria for assessing it are both available in the generic proposal reviews do not lead to successful proposals. All of your work defining quality criteria and building a Proposal Content Plan around them provides that standard. All you need to do is compare the draft narrative proposal to the original Proposal Content Plan to make sure that they are all there. Proposal Quality Validation is another topic that is addressed in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. Establishing traceability from the draft to what it will take to win, all the way back to your strategic plan. This brings it all together so that each step reinforces the others. When you have the right habits, then doing the right things becomes easier. Each step helps the next and provides the feedback you need to continuously improve. If you can get away with ignoring or skipping any step, then that step wasn’t really vital. In the same way, having some good habits isn’t enough. Taken as a whole, they add up to success. Leave something out and it adds up to… well, something less than success.

Even though the bad business development habits of B2B and B2G companies are different, in many cases the cure is the same. Some of the bad habits that B2B companies tend to fall into include: See also: Organizational development Thinking that if they just build a great product, customers will happen. This is especially true of startups, who have a tendency to think about what they want to do or build instead of who is going to buy it. More businesses fail for this reason than because they had bad products. Not developing a pipeline because they see everyone as potential customers and they reach out to them all. A pipeline or a funnel works by reducing limiting the number of potential customers to the ones who are most likely to buy through a process of qualification. Once you start paying attention to your pipeline, it becomes clear that you don’t just want to feed it anything. It teaches you to become selective. More focused. Better. Thinking that advertising and marketing are the same thing. Marketing involves picking your potential customers out of the crowd and bringing them into contact with your sales force. Advertising is only one of the techniques that marketing uses to identify who the potential customers are. Thinking that sales and marketing are the same thing. Marketing is about identifying and attracting customers. Sales is about closing the deal. While they must work together, they use different messages and different techniques. Some of the bad habits that B2G companies tend to fall into include: Looking for RFP releases instead of customer relationships. Businesses that do this do not define themselves. The RFPs they stumble across are what defines them. Not developing a pipeline because all they think they need is a list of upcoming RFPs. For B2G companies, a pipeline can quantify the success of your lead qualification efforts. Companies that don’t pay attention to their pipeline tend to have poor lead qualification. Thinking that marketing means name recognition. B2G companies can often get away with not working to attract the customer. Instead they go to the list of RFPs and pick which ones to bid. They put little or no effort into marketing, and never develop any knowledge about it or expertise in it. What they call “marketing” is often limited to brochures and trade shows. At the same time, they have risk-averse customers where trust is critical to winning and an information advantage is a competitive advantage. Understanding marketing, especially relationship marketing, is important for B2G success. Being whatever they think they need to be to win the next RFP. Companies that offer services are especially prone to this. They can bid anything they can hire staff to do. This often results in the capabilities of the company being defined by what they bid and happen to win. What both B2B and B2G companies do and what is at the heart of their bad habits is that they jump straight into prospecting as a way to find customers. The cure for both B2B and B2G companies with these bad habits is the same. They need to look at getting customers as more than a single step. They need to develop customers through more than random contacts or picking RFPs to bid. It starts by looking strategically at where your customers will come from. Out of this analysis you select targets. You prospect for new customers within your targets. If your company jumps straight to prospecting, then not only is it missing a few steps, it's risking its future effectiveness. Your strategic goals and targets act as a filter, and focus your customer development efforts so that your relationships, capabilities, and presence reinforce each other. Your company will grow and best fulfill its potential when instead of randomly adding customers, you add customers better. You can improve your focus by charting and analyzing your pipeline. When you chart how many customers you've identified, how many are lost as you qualify those leads, how many remain when it is time to submit a bid, and how many bids you win, this forms your pipeline. Just simply having a pipeline forces you to ask: Where do you get the leads you start with? How many leads do you reject, and why? How successful are you at bidding what’s left? Those questions provide vital feedback for improvement. The Readiness Review methodology that is part of the premium content that comes with a PropLIBRARY subscription expands on those questions and shows you how to set up your pipeline. It also takes it further to show you how to turn it into a sophisticated metrics system to really get scientific about bidding. But simply charting your pipeline will force you to identify your customers and go after them in more effective ways. If you look at business growth as just a matter of getting more customers or submitting more bids, you never come to terms with how to do it effectively. If your company is struggling with its identity, is unfocused, or is too opportunistic, don’t try writing a new mission statement. Instead, try creating and understanding your pipeline.

Some companies are opportunistic and bid every lead they find. They think business development consists of looking for leads in databases and bidding everything they can. These companies aren’t selective, waste resources, have little or no process, and try to cram everything they can into their proposals at the last minute. They sometimes get just enough business to reinforce their bad habits. Most opportunistic companies are in wide niches where they don’t have to worry about whether enough business exists for them to prosper. A lot of them are services companies that will take on any type of work and then hire the staff to do it, or IT companies that are really services companies. They just go after all they can find and call it business development. Their only bid/no bid consideration is whether they can do the work (or more accurately, hire the people to do the work). People think the cure is to improve their bid/no bid decision making, follow an effective process, and get some discipline. But that’s just treating symptoms. The real problem is a lack of strategic planning. Creating a strategic plan means knowing something about segmenting your marketplace, targeting, positioning, and how you want the company to develop. It means understanding the business math that converts leads to resources to overhead coverage and profitability. Acting on a strategic plan means using it as a filter in your bid/no bid decisions. It turns business development from chasing leads into achieving strategic goals. See also: Strategic planning People love to trash strategic plans, because in many companies it’s a document that executives prepare and workers ignore. If all a strategic planning effort produces is a document that sits on a shelf, it deserves to be trashed. A strategic plan needs to be an assessment tool. It should tell you where to focus your efforts, what to bid, and what not to bid. A strategic plan should tell you how much of what you need to bid to achieve your goals, and where you’re going to find that business. Companies that don't do strategic planning never develop the skills required to understand the business math, goal setting, or what business development really is. This is the real problem. Strategic planning isn’t about feeling good because you have one, it’s about knowing how to make strategic choices and bringing them into your everyday operations. Because opportunistic companies don’t understand strategic planning, they don’t set the right goals or understand the true nature of business development. This is the real reason why opportunistic contractors are doomed to failure. It’s not because they waste resources pursuing too many leads with ineffective capture efforts. And maybe the cure isn't to lecture them about bid/no bids or relationship marketing, but rather to teach them how to create a strategic plan and follow it. When they understand what a pipeline is and the math behind it, that’s when they’ll stop focusing on their top end number and chasing every contract they find until they surpass it. The problem is they don’t know how to write that kind of strategic plan. That’s what they need to learn. Ultimately strategic planning isn’t about document production, it’s about learning how to make decisions. If you can’t write a strategic plan, then you don’t know how to make business decisions. Maybe you don’t even need to have a strategic plan, you just need to have the capability.