Carl Dickson

More goes into selecting someone for a proposal-related position than most people realize. The normal titles, like proposal manager, bid manager, proposal writer, editor, or capture manager only tell part of the story. What can really impact your needs may never show on a position description. You need someone who is going to be compatible with the way your organization approaches its proposals, and someone whose personal approach is compatible with your needs. How do you find someone who is the right match? It starts with understanding how your organization wants to approach doing proposals. Keep in mind that how the organization currently approaches doing proposals and how they want to do it are often two different things. Also, how you think proposals should be done and how other stakeholders think they should be done may be different. When it impacts your job, differences of opinion over these issues often become personal. Also, your needs will be very different if you are looking for your company's first proposal specialist than if you are looking to add the fourth person (or the fortieth) to the proposal department. If you are looking for someone to come in at the tail end after everything is written and "pretty it up" before it goes to the customer, your needs will be different from those of an organization that is looking for guidance on how to improve their win rate. It will help you understand your needs better if you can say whose job it is to: See also: Organizational development Figure out what to say in your proposals Figure out what to offer Make something written by others grammatically correct and properly formatted Identify the win strategies and what is required to win Articulate the win strategies as themes in the document Take ownership of both the content and presentation Take ownership of what to offer Take ownership of winning Define the process to be followed Enforce process compliance Review proposals to identify ways to improve them Oversee the efforts of those involved A major reason for friction between the proposal function and the rest of the company is that you've got a clash between who you have and what you need. It has more to do with style, approach, and personality than it does with qualifications. I know that I would be a bad match for a company that wants their program staff to write the proposal and then hand it off to someone to edit and submit to the customer. I can't edit without re-writing. I can't re-write without getting involved with the win strategies. I can't formulate win strategies without being involved pre-RFP. I can do it once as a consultant. But put me in as an employee and it would grow old real quick. Because I'd recognize it if it couldn't be resolved, we'd soon part ways. But someone else might stick around and find themselves in constant turf battles. It would all be because the company made a legitimate decision to structure its proposals in a certain way and only provide support at the back end. But they hired the wrong person to provide that kind of support. They needed someone who could be happy being an editor or production support. The opposite is also true. Put someone who sees their role as finalizing a proposal in a position that is supposed to drive strategy and you probably won't get the results you are looking for. They may tend to refine existing strategies instead of reinventing them. The roles of proposal manager, bid manager, proposal writer, editor, and capture manager can all be interpreted in different ways. And while the position descriptions describe the qualifications and "responsibilities," they usually don't tell you what kind of personality you really need. When you understand the approach to proposal development in your company, you can determine whether you need someone to: Lead or provide support Do a job that you'll define for them Define their own job Get involved in all aspects of the problem Focus on solving a specific aspect of the problem Define the process Follow the process Provide guidance to others Accept guidance and follow instructions When you hire someone to support your proposal efforts, make sure you look beyond their qualifications and capabilities, and look at whether they are the right match. Need an assessment tool for hiring proposal staff? When we wrote this article we also created an assessment tool. It includes a proposal sample for editing, reviewing, and/or rewriting by candidates with some guidance for how to use it. It can tell you a lot about the natural inclinations of a candidate as well as their capabilities. PropLIBRARY Subscribers can download the assessment tool here.

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After losing a proposal most companies request a debrief from their customer and hold a lessons learned meeting. Usually in the debrief companies either fail to ask the right questions or don’t get answers, and in the lessons learned meeting they focus on the wrong things. This can only work if you are honest with yourselves and are willing to address issues that cross organizational boundaries without getting caught up in the blame game... During the debrief companies tend to look for politically acceptable reasons for the loss, like losing on price. When most people say they lost on price, it's really a lie. During the lessons learned meeting they tend to focus on the easy things instead of the things that matter. The easy things are cut and dry, like whether deadlines were met. They look for ways to improve their proposal process because that's something they can control, instead of looking to improve their customer engagement process, which is a lot harder to clarify but has a bigger impact on whether they win or lose. Companies tend to ask the wrong questions about why they lost. The list below includes questions people might not want to look into. Sometimes this is because they don’t want to admit they don’t know the answers to them. Sometimes it's because it makes them look bad and they are afraid of being blamed for the loss. Sometimes it's because they don't want to change. Focusing too much on avoiding blame and finding something to CYA makes it easy to overlook the things you need to know to win your next bid. So here's a list of the hard questions to ask after losing a proposal: See also: Pricing Were your estimates off? Why? Did you misunderstand the scope of what they wanted? Did you select, design, or recommend the wrong offering? Did the winner offer something the customer thought was better? Did the winner bid less labor, lower rates, or do something else to lower their pricing? Is your overhead too high? Did you make the wrong trade-off decisions? Did you assign the wrong staff to prepare the bid? Did you hold your reviews too late to make a difference? Did you review the wrong things? Did you have too many or too few teaming partners? Did your teaming partners turn out to have high pricing or poor past performance? Did you bid the wrong staff? Was your past performance worse than your own staff led you to believe? Did you pay attention to the wrong person in the customer’s organization? Was your customer relationship as strong as you thought it was? Did you educate the customer regarding price reasonableness? Did you start the pursuit too late? Should you have even bid at all? Did you follow the customer’s instructions? Did you overlook or forget something in the RFP? Did you intentionally ignore the RFP? Did you misinterpret the RFP? Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: 38 questions to ask during a proposal debrief Introduction to proposal lessons learned Lessons Learned Checklist In a customer debrief, the answers to questions like these are what you really need to find out. Unfortunately, most of them are questions the customer won’t answer, at least not directly. You may be able to get some answers by focusing on what the customer is willing to tell you and asking something like which things had the most impact on your score and giving examples from the list above. It may help to let the customer know why you want to know these answers. So tell them. For example, if you are trying to determine why your pricing was so far off you can tell them you are trying to figure out if you have an overhead problem or an offering design problem. It may also help to position your company as one that wants to do business with them and will be submitting more bids in the future, so the better you understand the customer, the more they will benefit. If you can't get insight by asking the customer questions after losing an RFP regarding why you really lost, you may have to resort to asking yourself these questions. As you go from identifying the problems to identifying solutions or preventive actions, you may be able to refine your process to address the weaknesses. But this can only work if you are honest with yourselves and are willing to address issues that cross organizational boundaries without getting caught up in the blame game.

There are several ways to approach using the PropLIBRARY and the MustWin Process to capture a specific pursuit. You can use it: As a formal process, to guide your actions from start to finish. To fill gaps in your current process and add additional guidance to help you win. As a collection of forms, checklists, and information that you can use in an informal way to provide inspiration and acceleration. Timing is everything One important factor that has a big impact on how you use it is timing. Are you before the RFP, at the RFP, or after the RFP? Will you use it to guide how you get ready before the RFP release, or just use it for the proposal after RFP release? While you can get some value out of it at the last minute by using the checklists, etc., to get the most value out of it you need to have time to read the materials and understand how to apply them. You might be able to skim it in a day, but full understanding will take at least a few days, and getting ready for actual implementation will take longer. If you are starting before the RFP is released, the MustWin Process gives you a set of questions, goals, and action items so that you will be ready to win at RFP release. It provides a structure in the form of Readiness Reviews that enable you to maximize the value of the time available, and achieve an information advantage that you can turn into a competitive advantage. If you are starting at RFP release, you can use the same questions, goals, and action items to clarify what you know and what you don’t know so that you can more quickly identify the appropriate strategies for your circumstances. It enables you to bring what you do know into alignment with what you'll need to write the proposal. Once the RFP is released and the proposal phase is started, the MustWin Process will help you plan what should go into your proposal in an innovative way that will save you time while making it easier to achieve a quality proposal on the first draft. Big team, little team, or flying solo? The MustWin Process is intended for proposals that require the efforts of a team of people. Because it defines roles functionally, it can adapt to whatever size team you have to work with. You can use it with a large team to set expectations and make sure everyone is on the same page. You can use it with a small team to achieve the same goals, with each person wearing multiple hats. The level of formality in how you conduct the process depends largely on the size of your team, your experience, and your corporate culture. If it’s just you, or you and two co-workers doing everything, then reviews will be a bit less formal than if you have a team of reviewers that is separate from the team doing the writing. But in both cases, you’ll need to consider the same issues that impact the quality of the proposal. PropLIBRARY and the MustWin Process can even be used by an individual to better understand everything that can go into a proposal effort and give you a different perspective on what should be considered during proposal development. Getting ready To get ready to use PropLIBRARY and the MustWin Process, the first step is to read. You can try it in our demonstration area. At a minimum, you need to read the introduction and orientation, but you should read ahead so that you understand what is coming. If you don’t have time to read, then it’s probably too late for PropLIBRARY, the MustWin Process, or anything else for that matter, to help you. Many of the topics also have recorded presentations that help explain them. After the introduction, you should focus on these areas: Defining the roles that people will play so that everyone has the right expectations Understand the Readiness Review process for pre-RFP pursuit and determine how you will apply it. This will also help you understand what information you need to bring into the proposal process for it to be successful. Understand the Proposal Content Planning process and determine how you will implement it Understand Proposal Quality Validation so that you can approach the writing already knowing what it will take to pass the reviews This will put you in a position of knowing what checklists, forms, and materials are available to help you so that at the moment of need you will know what to look for. Then when it’s time to act, instead of having to figure everything out, you will already know who is responsible for what, what the expectations are, and what it will take to achieve success.

We’re big fans of coaching. It’s a great way to have high levels of expertise available without breaking the bank. It’s also a great way to start a new proposal group and get it up to speed. One way we found success with coaching is with weekly meetings (usually by phone, but also online, and occasionally in person) where we discuss the status of pursuits and the process for capturing them with a team of 1-4 people who are fairly junior level and sometimes even entry level who do all the work. The reason it works is that it points inexperienced staff in the right direction, makes sure they’ve got the right approaches, and helps them solve problems. It avoids problems like the 20-year small business trap. If you start out with the wrong foundation, it can weaken proposal after proposal for years to come. Over the course of a year or so of coaching, the new staff gain the skills they need to fly solo, and we either cut back the frequency of our sessions or eliminate them completely. Sometimes we get involved with the pursuits themselves, usually as a reviewer. But that depends on the budget. The goal is to get the company's staff to do all the work and become independent so that the company develops its own capability to effectively pursue and win their bids. When we first tried this approach it was at a billion dollar company that wanted to start a new business unit pursuing task orders. It needed to create a new proposal group that could respond to 10-day turnarounds instead of the +30-day turnarounds of their normal pursuits. They started with three people, one with an administrative background and a little proposal experience, and two with technical backgrounds and no proposal experience. Over the course of a year they became a capable proposal manager and two writers, and we went from meeting with them a couple of times each week to making contact just once every other week. They started winning a lot of business. When the company lost some of the staff in its main proposal group, the staff we coached ended up basically taking over. In a year they went from having little or no experience to taking over proposals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. PropLIBRARY provides a great starting point and a huge accelerator for a new proposal group. With PropLIBRARY, they start off with a fully documented process and a library of resources. They don’t have to figure it all out on their own and are much more effective from the beginning. Depending on the experience and skill level of the staff, sometimes we start a new group off with some training hours that we use to provide an orientation and get things started. We’ve done this in person and we’ve done it remotely. The early focus is usually on establishing the pipeline and both pre-RFP and post-RFP procedures. We want to make sure that the flow of information is right, especially when it crosses organizational boundaries. We also focus on customizing the process. The best way to do that is to run through a real proposal. Rather than invest a ton of hours upfront with an inexperienced group to try to reach perfection on the first attempt, we start simple and raise the bar with each bid. We phase in the best practices, identify and implement customizations, and raise the standards with each bid as the staff gain capability and experience. Here is what implementing this approach ends up looking like: A Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY Weekly online meetings Maybe some upfront in training, either delivered in person or remotely Maybe a small budget for proposal review and support The result is that your own staff perform much more effectively. A few hours of coaching improves the performance of several of your own staff and positively impacts thousands of their hours. And you end up with an organization that knows how to win, with the right foundation of resources and processes. To explore something like this, contact us and we’ll give you the formula. You plug in how many meetings, how much upfront training, and how much to budget for proposal reviews and support. Then play with the numbers until it fits your budget. Each company is different because some have a lot of proposal experience and some don’t. The number of proposals and their size varies. The type of proposals also makes a difference. To find the right solution for your organization, we need to get to know each other. Once you’ve had a chance to play with the formula it will give us something to talk about.

The number one reason why proposals lose is price. It is also a lie. It seems like every proposal that loses, loses "on price." It's politically safe. No one is to blame when you lose because of the price. The other company must have “low balled” it, or bid below their costs. They played dirty. It’s not fair. The client must be dumb to award it at a price so low. There’s no way they’ll be able to perform. The truth is that most price losses are due to scoping the project wrong. It’s just not politically correct to say so. You probably bid too many staff or resources, or offered more than the customer thinks the project requires. The solution you thought of as comprehensive, the customer thought of as more than they need. Your competitors’ labor rates may actually be higher than your labor rates, they just bid a lot less of it. They may even be able to do the project with less labor because they bid a smaller project than you envisioned. And the customer may even be happy with that because they chose the smaller proposal over yours. Some other reasons why companies lose proposals and blame “price” include: See also: Pricing Allowing the company to develop bloated overhead rates. Overhead adds to your price. When your overhead is high, it means you have to charge more for the same labor and resources. A lower overhead competitor can offer the exact same thing, and win with a lower price. The problem isn’t that your competitors bid below their cost, it’s that you spent too much on people and things that aren’t billable. Running out of time so that final pricing got rushed. Pricing can’t be finalized until all the decisions about what to offer are finalized. While there are many reasons why designing your solution by writing about it is a bad idea, it also means that you can’t price it until you are done writing. And any pricing issue that impacts what you offer potentially means last minute re-writes. The result is that pricing can’t be completed until the tail end of the proposal effort and there is tremendous pressure not to change anything “substantial.” With writing taking up all the available time, nothing is left for getting creative with pricing or trying a lower priced approach. Bidding the wrong staff or the wrong offering. When you want to win, it’s easy to bid the best staff. Unfortunately, they are also the most expensive. Finding the right balance is hard. Finding the balance the customer prefers is even harder. Retention raises that enable non-incumbents to underbid you. When you are the incumbent, it’s easy to give your staff raises so that you maintain continuity of service and customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, that makes it possible for competitors to find staff who are qualified, but don’t have the same history and are therefore cheaper. It’s sad, but sometimes the best way to win is to replace your own staff before your competitors do. Losing due to price happens far more often as a result of bad estimates (project size, labor mix, and requirements) than it does because of costs that you “can’t do anything about.” But if you point that out when your company just lost a proposal, be prepared to get the stink eye. It’s better if no one is to blame because you lost “on price” and that’s outside of everyone’s control. Unless you want to win the next one.

After you identify what things matter to your customer, you can start exploring how they matter to the customer. Then you can choose what to focus on in your proposal. That’s when you find that you have choices, and those choices are what become your bid strategies. Below we show some of the things that matter to customers, explore how and why they matter, and discuss how you can use them to create bid strategies and competitive advantages, and articulate why the customer should select you. See also: Proposal Management Price matters Does anything matter other than price? It might. A lot will depend on whether the customer has alternatives that meet their needs. The closer your offering is to a commodity, the more price will matter. How does the price relate to their budget and funding? Does the way it is priced matter? Price can be more than just a number. It can come in phases, be financed, include options, be fixed or variable, be discounted, have time limits, be based on assumptions, have limits, be complicated or be simple, be linked to other purchases or activity, come with guarantees, etc. It can be presented the same way your competitors do, or it can be presented differently. You can make it easy to compare apples to apples, or you can make it impossible. You have choices. And out of those choices, come strategies. Will what they get matter more than what it costs to get it? Is your value proposition so superior that instead of looking at it as a cost, the customer looks at it as an investment? “Investment” isn’t just a word you can stick in your proposal and make it so. Does your price, the way you have presented it, or the return on investment you offer give you a competitive advantage or present the customer with reasons to select you? Have you articulated them? What the customer is getting and/or the results of what you are proposing matter Does it meet their requirements or specifications? Does it exceed them? Is it critical to their operations? Can they function without it? Does it offer benefits the customer does not anticipate? How will selecting your offering make a difference to them? How long will it take to get it? Does the customer have the technical or subject matter expertise to understand what about your offering should matter to them? Have you explained it to them? Will it open up new possibilities they can’t achieve on their own that make them excited about the future? Will what the customer is going to get from you give you a competitive advantage or present the customer with reasons to select you? Have you articulated them? Achieving the customer’s goals matters How does what you are proposing impact what they are trying to achieve? Does everyone at the customer (or at least those participating in the evaluation) share the same goals? For example, does your contact at the customer share the same goals as the decision maker? Does the customer even know what their goals are? Will your offering help them figure it out? Does your ability to achieve the customer’s goals give you a competitive advantage or present the customer with reasons to select you? Have you articulated them? Risk matters One customer’s innovation is another customer’s unacceptable level of risk… The customer will anticipate many risks: risks that you won’t perform, that your offering won’t meet their needs, that it won’t be delivered on time, that you will cheat, that things will break, that costs will inflate, etc. What have you done to address their concerns before they have a chance to realize them? Why should the customer believe that something unexpected won't prevent you from fulfilling your commitments? Does your awareness of the risks and ability to mitigate them give you a competitive advantage or present the customer with reasons to select you? Have you articulated them? Trade-offs Matter The customer wants it all, including a low price. Some realize they can’t have it. But all realize there are trade-offs: fast, well built, or cheap — pick any two. Have you picked the same side of each trade-off that the customer would? Have you explained why you made the trade-offs the way you did, and how the customer benefits? Does your approach to these trade-offs give you a competitive advantage or present the customer with reasons to select you? Have you articulated them? Trust matters People do business with companies they trust. People trust people they know. Why should the customer trust you? If the customer doesn’t trust you before they get your proposal, do you have any chance of winning? Making unsubstantiated claims and saying things that don’t matter to the customer hurt your credibility. Is your proposal credible? What can you say or do in your proposal to make your company more trustworthy? Can you make your offering and pricing more reliable, provable, or transparent? Can they verify your claims? Can they contact your references? Do trust issues give you a competitive advantage or present the customer with reasons to select you? Have you articulated them? What the customer has to do to get the purchase approved matters You may have nothing to do with this. But it will impact you nonetheless. Can you anticipate their evaluation or approval process? Can you give them everything they need to process your proposal to eliminate any difficulties or hold-ups? The concerns and perspectives of those reviewing, evaluating, or approving a proposal may be different than those of your contact or those who will receive your offering. Does your proposal speak to them and answer their questions as well? Whether they have a better alternative matters If your proposal is competitive, the customer is considering other offers. What would they see as a better offer? Does your proposal match up to it? If your proposal is not competitive or is unsolicited, then the other alternative may be to do nothing. Does your proposal provide sufficient motivation for them to take action? Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business Click here to start a conversation by email Or use the widget below to get on my calendar for a telephone conversation so we can discuss whether we're a match.

Proposals should be meaningful. But what does that mean? The best practices say that proposals should address all of the customer’s “hot buttons,” but what exactly are they? And about those win strategies and themes… where are they supposed to come from? We’ve been working for a couple of years to bring structure to helping you figure out what to focus on in your proposals. We generally advise people to focus on what matters to the customer. That’s bit easier to define than “hot buttons.” But it's still too broad. Instead of saying that your proposal should have themes and that the themes can be headings, subheadings, pull-quotes, or topic sentences and embedded in every paragraph, we find people understand better when you advise them to say something that matters in every sentence. People write a lot less unsubstantiated fluff when they’re trying to make every sentence matter to the customer. And when it comes to figuring out what to say, it’s a little easier to think of things that matter and to focus on them. But that's still not enough structure. What matters to the customer? We set out to define it and came up with the following list: See also: Faster Price matters What the customer is getting and/or the results of what you are proposing matter Achieving the customer’s goals matters Return on Investment (ROI) matters Risk matters Trust matters What the customer has to do to get the purchase approved matters Whether they have a better alternative matters Everything else about you and your offering is evaluated by how it relates to those things. This list is how you connect all of your qualifications and attributes, like experience, quality, evaluation score, budget, relationships, innovation, competition, etc. to what it will take to win. But how much does each of these matter? Sometimes one of them is more important than all of the others to a particular customer on a particular bid. It’s critically important to focus on the right one(s). Otherwise, what you say won’t matter to the customer. The way you make every sentence in your proposal matter to the customer is to: Turn the items in the list above into questions and action items Discover how the customer perceives them Determine how to best position your bid by focusing on them Assess them to determine how what matters to the customer relates to what it will take to win Articulate your positioning in the form of proposal theme statements Use the theme statements to drive the content of your proposal and make your proposal matter to the customer This approach fits in nicely with the MustWin Process that is described in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase: It shows you how to discover what matters by using Readiness Reviews, which bring structure to the pre-RFP phase of pursuit. It helps you get it into the proposal using Proposal Content Planning, which gives you a methodology to ensure that your proposal says everything it should. It shows you how to use Proposal Quality Validation to ensure that the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win. The result is a proposal that is meaningful because what it says matters to the customer. And that will do so much more to boost your win rate than a catchy slogan.

Proposal theme statements are how you articulate why the customer should select you. They deliver your message, tell your story, and flow through the proposal document. They may be incorporated into headings, tag lines, text boxes, or just be the main point of a paragraph. You need to be able to articulate your proposal win themes so that you can build the proposal around them, substantiating the reasons why the customer should select you. Proposal win themes work best when a few themes drive the points you make across the entire proposal. This helps the points you make add up to a message or story that the customer sees substantiated in every section. Unfortunately, none of that helps you write them, let alone write good ones. Here are some win theme examples that show what separates good, bad, and exceptional proposal theme statements: For more information about proposal themes: Themes Examples of Good Proposal Themes. Most proposal win themes make the points you want to make about yourself. They are positive and beneficial sounding, but self-descriptive and about you. They tend to sound like something out of a brochure, focused on claims about how wonderful you are. Good proposal themes are based on the hope that the customer will see something they like. A good proposal theme might be "We bring [number] years of experience to this this project," "Our approach mitigates the risks of [insert type of risk here]," "By selecting us, you will receive [insert benefit here]" or "We deliver the best quality." Statements like these are intended to make you stand out from the pack, but in reality everybody makes claims and customers don't really pay much attention to them in a proposal. But they are better than nothing. At least they show that you aspire to be wonderful, even if they don't prove that you really are. Examples of Exceptional Proposal Themes. Exceptional proposal win themes make and prove the points that matter to the customer. They are written from the customer’s perspective. They help the customer see a future they want to be in that needs your help to realize it. They tell the customer what they are going to get and show why selecting you is the customer's best alternative. Great proposal themes might be "We will enable you to overcome the challenge of [identify trade-off] by [insert differentiated approach]," "By [insert what you'll do] we mitigate the risk of [identify risk] in such a way that [insert differentiated outcome]," "By anticipating [insert something insightful] we are able to [prevent|mitigate] [identify problem] resulting in improved [quality|outcome] that delivers [identify benefits]." The effectiveness of your proposal theme statements will directly depend on how much what you say matters to the customer. Examples of Bad Proposal Themes. Bad proposal win themes make points that don’t matter. These are often the same points that everyone else will be making, or things about you that you think are impressive but fail to pass the "So what?" test. Even though you might think they sound good to you, bad proposal themes are either ignored or fail to help the customer make their decision. To avoid bad proposal themes, you should only say things that matter to the customer and focus on proposal themes that differentiate your proposal. Delete everything else. Bad proposal themes are worse than nothing because they hurt your credibility and inadvertently position your company as not mattering. If it does not matter to the customer, then at best it’s noise, a possible eye-roll, and extra work they have to do to read your proposal. If it doesn’t matter because it’s just an unsubstantiated claim or full of bravado, it can do real damage. Examples of bad proposal themes include "We are the industry-leading provider of [insert claim here]," "We were founded in [insert year here]," or "We are fully committed to [insert promise here]." If it matters, make sure it says why it matters. How do you go from writing good proposal themes to writing exceptional proposal themes? Most proposal theme statements make points, but they are not exceptional. In spite of how you might feel about them, they make your proposal look ordinary, just like all the others. The good news is that most of your competitors have the same problem. But you don’t want to count on being just a little better than ordinary competitors. You want to dominate the competitive field, by reaching beyond the ordinary and submitting an exceptional proposal. Here are six examples of things you can do to write exceptional proposal win themes: Don’t talk about yourself. Don't make claims. Put everything about you into the context of how it impacts them. Say the things that will help them justify their decision. Imagine the evaluator explaining the selection to The Powers That Be. What words would they take from your proposal? It won't be your bragging about how special you are. It will be your proof points. Make every statement matter to the customer. Focus on results, benefits, and what the customer will get or can expect from you. Make sure that your themes impact your evaluation score. A theme that won't end up on an evaluation justification decision is a waste of everyone's time and potentially does more harm than good. Differentiate. The proposal that wins will have differences from all the others. Don't leave that to luck or load your proposal up with beneficial stuff hoping they'll stumble across something they like. Differentiate on purpose. Differentiate based on the things that will demonstrate you are their best alternative. A simple way to approach this is the “So What?” test. Read each proposal theme statement while pretending to be the customer and ask, “so what?” If the theme statement says “We bring X years of experience in …” ask yourself, “so what?” What are the results that the customer can expect as a result of your experience? What will it do for them? It’s good to have experience, but what they really want are the results you can deliver because of that experience. That’s what separates a good theme from an exceptional theme. Throw out everything in your proposal that does not pass the "So What?" test. Making win themes matter to the customer is different than saying what you think matters. To make your themes matter to the customer, you have to understand how they make decisions, what they think is important, what their preferences are, and how they would make the inevitable trade-offs. This requires knowing the customer quite well and is a key part of why the odds of winning improve so much when you practice relationship marketing and only bid when you have an information advantage. When you write themes for your proposals, make them matter from the buyer’s perspective instead of being what the seller wants to say. If you are a government contractor, or if your proposal will be formally evaluated and point scored, the reasons you give for why the customer should select you also need to match up with the customer’s scoring system. A really good theme may have little or no impact if it doesn’t result in the evaluator matching it to an evaluation criterium in which they can give you points for it. Exceptional themes must be optimized to score well against the evaluation criteria.

Win strategies and themes for your proposal aren’t created. They evolve. They don’t come from a sudden inspiration. They come from finding positions that match the customer’s needs. They start from looking at areas of customer concern and matching them with approaches to fulfillment that match your attributes. As you learn more about the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment and as you go from general to specific, you modify your positioning. It’s much easier to understand if you think of it as evolution. You start with the areas of customer concern and over time refine your positioning. Of course that’s not what most people do. What usually happens on most pursuits is that win strategies and themes are created at the last minute: By making something up because someone realizes that you’re supposed to have some themes and you don’t. Because your bid justification report is supposed to have some, but you don’t have an RFP or any evaluation criteria to base them on. By trying to come up with something for each heading in your outline. By trying to be whatever will score the highest with only the evaluation criteria to go by. Based on your own capabilities, qualifications, and strengths. Because your template has placeholders for them and you have to fill them in. Win strategies and themes come from many sources. So it’s good to consider things like your capabilities, qualifications, and strengths, or the evaluation criteria. It’s good if each section of your proposal substantiates one or more reasons why the customer should select you. But they should also be based on the customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence you’ve collected. And they should be written from the customer’s perspective instead of from your own. Ultimately, you need your themes to add up to what it’s going to take to win. To do that, you have to discover what it will take to win. As you uncover things that are part of what it’s going to take to win, you identify areas where you should explore how to best position your company. That is where the evolution of your win strategies and themes should start. This exploration often starts with questions. What matters to the customer? What matters about how this project will play out? What will be needed to achieve success on the project? What will be needed to win the procurement process? The initial answers will be at a high level and will start to form categories like: The best offering The lowest price or the best value The highest evaluation score Being perceived as trustworthy by the customer Exceeding mere compliance in a way that differentiates you from the competition As you explore each category, you define what it will take to win in more detail, leading to more detailed win strategies and themes. When the RFP is released and you have a proposal outline and evaluation criteria, you can match what you have against the structure of the document. When you have gaps, you don’t just make something up out of thin air, you see if any of your categories can be extended or applied to cover the topics addressed in that section of the proposal. This is also how you achieve a hierarchy of themes and commonality of message from the Executive Summary down to each section, without having to wait until you know the document structure to work out your messages. The key to implementing this approach is to treat win strategies and themes as something that evolves and not as something that gets created. Think of them as categories and not as statements. Think of them as areas of concern and focus. Then when you start each section, start by considering how the section relates to the areas of concern and what message that section needs to deliver, then write the section by substantiating the message. The result will be a proposal that actually says something that matters because it was written based on areas of customer concern. If you are careful with the writing and you make sure that the proposal is written from the customer’s perspective, then your proposal will end up being about how you satisfy their concerns. If you are the customer and you have to pick between that and a document full of platitudes that aren’t based on anything or shallowly parrot the evaluation criteria published in the RFP, which would you pick? That's why when we created our MustWin Process we set it up so that the pre-RFP intelligence gathering activities result in an awareness of what it will take to win. Then our Proposal Content Planning methodology can take that awareness and turn it into themes for the proposal. The result is that the win strategies and themes evolve over time and everything in the proposal can be traced back to what it will take to win. What I have found since creating it is that it helps inspire me when I write proposals and I can more quickly get into a groove because I know what to write about. The details that go into the proposal are easy. It's getting the context right so that you know how to express those details that's hard. Instead of trying to create win strategies and themes that are both persuasive and fully integrated in one step, the process enables them to evolve in a way that is more natural and more productive.

The Score program is a way for people to demonstrate their business development and proposal capabilities. Participants in the Score program get points for taking exercises that prove what they can do. Each exercise you complete adds points to your Score. The Score website builds an electronic transcript that shows what you are actually capable of doing, because the exercises reflect real life skills you need to develop business and write proposals. Participants can choose to keep their Score private, but they can't edit their grades or transcript. Because participants can't choose what to show or spin the results, people can rely on your Score. Each exercise is designed to take approximately one hour to complete and may involve a mixture of research, analysis, writing, and other activities. Each exercise comes with detailed instructions and is provided in a Microsoft Word file. All participants need to do is follow the instructions, complete the file, and upload it back to the website. If you have questions about how to complete the exercise, you may email the instructor. When the instructor gets the exercise, they review it and provide constructive feedback, so you can learn, grow, and improve. It's not just about the points, it's about improving your skills and your ability to win business. The exercises are not intended to be a replacement for classroom instruction and personal instructor interaction. However, they do allow for more exercise detail than is possible in classroom settings, and are a better way to learn skills as opposed to just gaining information. And they can be completed from anywhere, and scheduled at your convenience. If you are new to the program, your Score is 0. To boost your score: Complete exercises and submit them for review. There is a small fee to cover the cost of the instructor’s time to review the exercises. Create exercises and review them when someone takes them. In addition to earning points for submitting exercises and reviewing them, you’ll be paid for reviewing the exercises. Contribute to the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase or Proposal Recipe Library. You’ll demonstrate your knowledge and ability to write, and earn points for your contribution. If you are an instructor with your own existing curriculum, or someone who can add to our Knowledgebase or Proposal Recipe Library, contact us to find out more. Do you have to be a PropLIBRARY subscriber to participate? No. However, we do subsidize a portion of the exercise review fees for our subscribers, and subscribers can take a couple of exercises free of charge. Subscribing has many benefits, including access to online training materials that will make achieving the highest Score considerably easier. But it’s not a requirement. Click here to see the exercises, participate in the Score program, enhance your skills, prove your capabilities, and boost your Score...

In order to win in writing, it’s crucial to be able to read your proposal the same way your customer reads it. The customer doesn’t read a proposal like a book. They probably won't even read parts of it at all! Customers read proposals with one or more purposes or goals in mind. The customer might score your proposal, compare it, or look for answers to the questions they have. What you put into your proposal should not be based on what you want to say. It should be based on what your customer needs to see. Writing better proposals starts with learning to see through your customer's eyes. Would you want to read your proposal? If you look at your proposal like a customer and are honest with yourself, the first truth you run into is that the customer doesn’t want to read your proposal. They only want to look for and find what they need to make their decisions. They do not read it cover to cover. They’d like to fulfill their goals without any of that inconvenient reading stuff. That’s a strong argument in favor of: See also: Customer Perspective Using lots of graphics that communicate your message with pictures instead of words Keeping it short Making it easy to skim with headings, call out boxes that tell the reader what they need to know, and other visual clues Deleting all those unsubstantiated claims, slogans, universal truths, and filler words that make it harder to find the stuff that matters, turn evaluating the proposal into work, and weaken your credibility Structuring your proposal to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for Getting to the point. If there is something they need to know to reach their decision, tell them it first. If they don't need to know it or already know it, leave it out This goes well beyond design and also impacts what you write and how you write it. You are not writing for yourself. Writing better proposals is about fulfilling someone else's needs. It's not about you... If you don't know their needs and what they want to see, then why would you send them a proposal? How can you win against someone else who knows their preferences and how they make their decisions? How can you win against someone who knows how the customer will read the proposal and what they need to see in it? Proposal writing starts with knowing what the customer needs to see in the proposal to reach a decision in your favor. What the customer needs to see in your proposal is information that will help them make decisions like: What do they want? What matters to them? What are their options? What do they prefer? What can they afford? What are the trade-offs? Why should they continue reading? What is their best alternative? What do they have to do to get what they want? How difficult will it be if they want to move forward with your proposal? How can they explain this to their boss? Will they be better off? Is it worth bothering with? Why shouldn't they do something else? Why shouldn't they just do nothing? Reading your proposal the way the customer reads your proposal To read your proposal like the customer, you should ask yourself, “If I was the customer…” What would I be looking for? What information would I need? What would I need to get what I want? What would I be willing to consider? What would I need to fill out any forms I may have to complete? What approvals would I need? What would I want to see first? What would add value? What would make this proposal my best alternative? Then ask yourself what you should put into your proposal to deliver this information, where you should put it, and how you should present it. If you were the customer, you might need... To see that the proposal is compliant with the RFP and fulfills their requirements To fill out their evaluation and procurement forms To score your proposal against their evaluation criteria To get their questions answered, believe they can trust you, and see something they want in your proposal To be able to afford what you are proposing To see what makes this proposal different from the others To decide whether your proposal is their best alternative. If this is a competitive environment, they are comparing what they see in your proposal to what they see in proposals from other vendors. If this is not a competitive environment, they are comparing you to their budget and to doing nothing To explain and justify their recommendations to The Powers That Be within their own organization What do you see in your proposal? So when you look at your proposal through the customer’s eyes, do you see what you need? Or do you see what the vendor wanted to say, or worse a bunch of beneficial sounding but ultimately meaningless unsubstantiated claims? Is it all about the vendor and how great they are, or is it about how great things will be for you, the customer, and does it tell you what you need to know? The best way to produce a proposal that reads well from the customer’s perspective is to do all of the research and reflect on what the customer needs to see before you start writing. Then you should construct your proposal around that. This is very different from writing narrative that describes your own company and says what you want to say. Selling in writing is different from selling in person. To intentionally deliver the right information in the right sequence, in the right context, and present it from the customer’s perspective requires you to plan what you are going to write so that each and every part of your proposal has specific goals. You need to capture those goals and assess what gets written against how well it achieves them. This is what makes your skills at reading equally, if not more, important than your skills at writing proposals.

If you write your proposal by simply following the RFP, you will not only create an uncompetitive proposal, you will create a proposal that is boring. It will be boring to the customer, boring to your reviewers, and boring to write. I have reviewed a lot of boring proposals. See also: Winning But this article is about how to write proposals that are exciting to review and exciting to write. It helps when instead of simply following RFP instructions to describe things, they focus on what matters about those things. The more a proposal matters, the less boring it is. The emotion that wins proposals If you don't know what really matters to the customer, what their concerns, fears, interests, agenda, ambitions, goals, preferences, etc., are then in order to write an exciting proposal you have to write about the next best thing: passion. If you don't want to bore yourself to tears writing a proposal, then starting by finding your passion. Passion for the subject. Passion for the outcome. Passion for the possible future. It's good to write about benefits. But if you want to write something compelling, first find your passion and then write about those benefits. What is your company passionate about? What gets you excited about fulfilling the customer's needs? Tell them. Just do it from the customer’s point of view. What gets your company fired up? What breaks the routine and makes everyone suddenly motivated? Tap into that and write from the heart. Winning proposals are not routine. What about your work are you passionate about? What do you like about it? What is important about it? Put your cynicism aside for a moment and remember what it's like to believe you can change the world through your work. Then describe that much better world for the customer. Make your proposal about how you are going to deliver just that. Write about what the customer is going to get and why it passionately matters. Show your excitement for how wonderful it will be. If you can't get excited about it, how can you possibly make the customer excited about selecting it? How finding your passion wins proposals You can try to win your proposal by being similar to but a little better than your competitors. Or you can get so fired up and show your love for achieving things that matter that it will wake your customer up from their boring job of evaluating proposal after proposal. Instead of doing what everyone else does a little better, write the proposal the customer can fall in love with. In school you were taught to write like journalists — to be objective and unemotional. Business speak is intentionally bland, inauthentic, vague, passive, and unaccountable. If you are a technical specialist, then you were likely taught that engineering is not about emotion. You were taught wrong. If you care about what you do, and you want to do a good job, and are pleased with the outcomes and you know the customer will be too, those are all emotional responses. And it’s good to show them in your proposal. You just have to go beyond business-speak in order to do it. Turn your feelings into something that matters However, while you want to show what you care about, you don't want to write about your feelings. Your feelings don't add any value to the customer. Don't write about your intent, your commitment, or your desires. Instead, show your feelings through how much the results the customer will get are going to matter. The more something matters or the more important it is, the better the results should be. Talk about what approaches are better and why, or about how much better the results can be instead of telling the customer what you think or feel. Your proposal should be about what the customer will think or feel. Only you can’t tell them what they will or should think or feel without being patronizing. By describing the results, you let the customer experience the feelings naturally. When you find your passion about what you are offering, you can inspire the customer about the possibilities. An exciting proposal is about unexpectedly wonderful improvements, the results, the aspirations that will become real. It will inspire them to feel great about your proposal without telling them what to feel. If you have to pick a vendor, and one is passionate about what they do and the other is dry or formal, which is more likely to get the job? Do you want something important built by someone who is passionate about the engineering, or someone who is uninspired? If one proposal is about how important what the vendor does is and how much better it makes things for the customer, while the other proposal just describes what the customer will pay for, which will inspire more confidence in the customer? But your passion has to be genuine. You can’t fake it. And it can’t be about you, what you’re going to get, what you want to do, or how good you feel about doing it. Your proposal should be about sharing how wonderful the results will be and your passion for the things that matter. In each section of your proposal, think about the things that really matter and then focus on why they are worth feeling passionate about. Then show your passion for what matters by proving you're willing to go beyond the ordinary and deliver amazing results.

Like the chicken and the egg, proposals suffer from a “which came first” problem. Does the story come first so you can build the proposal around your story and then you develop the offering and work it into the story, or do develop the offering first so you know what your story should be? Just like with the chicken and the egg, there’s no right answer and you’re left with the paradox. We were looking at a couple of proposals that are in progress and stumbled right into an approach that mitigates the problem: See also: Content Planning Box Start by developing themes based on what the customer wants. This assumes that you know what the customer wants. If you don’t, then you should consider not bidding. If you still must bid, then fake it by asking what a customer in their position would probably want. Just remember that what the customer wants and what you want are two different things. Articulating the customer’s desired results, goals, and/or outcomes before you have defined your offering will help you design that offering. By starting with themes based on what the customer wants, you define what your offering should do or deliver. Plan your offering separately from how you plan the writing. They are two different things. You don’t want to conceptualize, plan, or engineer what you are going to do or deliver in the form of a narrative. Let your technical, operations, or fulfillment staff determine how they are going to fulfill the requirements the way they normally would. Validate the offering to ensure that it is the best price/value trade-off to fulfill the customer’s requirements. Simultaneously and in parallel, define the structure and plan the content for the proposal. Then combine the two by summarizing the offering design within the content plan for the proposal. Now you are positioned to develop themes based on your offering. These include themes based on things like features/benefits and value proposition. Your offering is also the main reason why the customer should select you and therefore a key part of your overall message. You are now in a position to say why your offering is superior and the best way of delivering what the customer wants. Because this approach falls into a sequence, you can build it into your proposal process. The MustWin Process that is available on PropLIBRARY has an iterative approach to planning the content of your proposals that can be used to quickly implement it. The MustWin Process already provides the sequence, calls for separating the design of your offering from the design of the proposal, provides for validation, and gives you a means to integrate the two into a single content plan to guide the writing. Splitting the themes into those that are based on what the customer wants and those that are based on the offering is a new twist that we will be adding back into our Knowledgebase. When you build these three things into your process, the flow of information builds naturally and reinforces the outcomes. You get the messages and information you need to develop your offering, and then you tie the offering right back into those messages to expand and improve them. This also mitigates the risks of proposal failure by preventing changes in the offering from spawning endless cycles of rewrites. When you have planned and validated your themes, offering, and the rest of your content, you are not just ready to start writing, you are ready to start writing a proposal that is based on the results the customer wants and provides the reasons why the customer should select you. You have overcome the problem of which should come first, the offering or the story. And you are ready to write the winning proposal.

With a complicated Request for Proposals (RFP), it can be hard to figure out what the customer wants. You can create a compliance matrix to allocate the requirements to your proposal outline, but with a complicated RFP there can be a combination of broad items that apply to whole sections, ridiculously specific items that are hard to integrate, contradictory items, ambiguous items, poorly explained items, items that use questionable vocabulary, etc. No amount of questions you can ask, even if you could get decent answers, will enable you to decipher it. All a compliance matrix does for you is tell you which indecipherable items to address for each item in your outline. A compliance matrix will show you what to address in each section, but it won’t help you to understand how everything relates to everything else, or even what the customer really wants out of a messy RFP. It can still be difficult to figure out what to offer, let alone what to write. The first thing we recommend for dealing with a complicated RFP is to separate the planning of your offering from the planning of the document. You need an offer that is compelling and compliant, but designing your offering by writing about it is the wrong approach to take. How you design the offering depends on the nature of what you do. However, you’re the expert. So design your offering using whatever approach or methodology works best. Then test it against the RFP requirements (it must be fully compliant), what you think will be compelling to the customer (based on any intelligence you’ve gathered), and what will be competitive (you should begin pricing it to verify its competitiveness). As a parallel activity, begin planning the proposal document. The approach we recommend in our MustWin Process is called Proposal Content Planning. Because it is based on allocating the ingredients that make up the proposal into a shell document based on the proposal outline, it can help you see how the various pieces will look when presented as a document. Taking the RFP requirements and allocating them to the document can enable you to see what sections you have and how they fit together. This, in turn, enables you to see: See also: Compliance matrix How the requirements group so that you can speak to them in a logical or functional way. Where you tell your story and say the things you want to highlight. How to position what you plan to offer and present against the evaluation criteria. When you look at the RFP on a section by section or item by item basis, you will see opportunities to deliver certain messages. But you won’t know where to do that in the proposal until you develop your Content Plan. That’s where you discover: Too many of your highlights or messages fall into one part of the proposal, leaving other parts uncovered. Some of the things you want to highlight either have multiple places or no place at all to address them within the document. Without the plan, this is where your RFP frustration can boil over. With a Content Plan, you can take a step back and think about how to deliver your message across the document. Something else Content Planning will do is enable you to see how your offering fits into the document. Once you’ve validated what you plan to offer and it’s stable, you can add high level placeholders into your Content Plan so that you know where to discuss each aspect to achieve RFP compliance. It also gives you a mechanism to reconcile your messages with the offering, before the actual writing has started. You can then validate the whole proposal prior to the writing to make sure you have accounted for everything. If you take a complicated RFP and start writing, then try to change the offering and/or the message, you’ll enter an endless cycle of trying to fix the document by re-writing it. You’ll never get it right because you’ll run out of time. With a complicated RFP it will seem like the planning takes forever. It will seem like you should be allocating more time to the writing because you have a complicated proposal to create. But like any engineering project, you should invest more in planning when things get complicated and only build it once. When faced with a complicated project, no engineer is going to recommend skipping the planning because it takes too much time and instead jumping right into construction so you can “see it” and then make changes until it’s right. You shouldn’t approach your proposal that way either. You not only need to assess and integrate the requirements by bringing them together in a way you can understand, but you also need to bring meaning to them and a rationale that was missing in the RFP. Demonstrate to the customer that you can bring meaning to the project and not just simply respond to individual line items. That’s what a proposal plan should do for you. If all your proposal plans do is turn the RFP into line items that you can write to, it’s not enough. Your plan should help you understand the requirements so that you can bring meaning to them. The way Content Planning does this is by helping you visualize how the requirements and your response come together. You can literally “see” where and how to add something to your response to give it meaning, and how to integrate the various sections of the proposal so that they add up to something that matters to the customer. With Content Planning you can see where you need to ask questions like: What is the purpose of this section or requirement? How does it relate to the others? What does the customer really want or need out of this? How should we position ourselves? The result is that a story starts to surface. Out of chaos comes order. And not just order, but something that gives your offer a clarity that your competitors will lack. Instead of simply struggling to respond to the complexities of the RFP, Content Planning gives you a competitive advantage.

Some people talk a good game and can be very persuasive. But they write a lousy proposal because they think all they need to do is sit down at a keyboard and hook the customer. Winning in writing has nothing to do with talking a good game. While a conversational style in proposal writing is a good thing, there are so many ingredients that have be prepared in just the right way that winning in writing more closely resembles cooking than speaking. Winning in writing is not about getting the customer to take what you’ve got. Winning in writing is about the customer making a selection from among other alternatives using an evaluation process. To select you, they need to: You need to deliver the meal the customer wants, and impress them with how well prepared it is Have their expectations met See the things they need in your proposal Understand the value you are offering See what makes you different and accept those things as advantages Make favorable comparisons to their other alternatives Be confident that all of their requirements will be fulfilled Have everything they need to fulfill their procurement policies and procedures See also: Winning Believe they can trust you Convince others that it’s the right choice Accept your terms and conditions Be able to afford what you’ve proposed And they need to see it all in writing. That’s a lot of ingredients to keep organized in your head and get onto paper in the right order and in the right context. Winning in writing is a combination of fulfilling their expectations, satisfying their evaluation process, and giving them the best alternative. So you have to prepare the ingredients correctly. For winning in writing, this preparation generally involves: Research and intelligence gathering, to develop an information advantage Assessment, or figuring out what to do with what you've learned Offering design, to show up with the offering they want more than their other alternatives Strategy, to position everything both good and bad in ways that are advantageous to getting selected Assembly, or getting the right things into the document in the right order Communication, which for a proposal is a combination of articulation and graphics design You can’t just sit down and write or talk your way out of it. That’s why proposal writing doesn’t just need a process. It is a process. If your process involves someone figuring it all out in a single step while typing a narrative response, then it’s a bad process. But it’s still a process. A better process would collect the ingredients, assess them, and prepare a plan for what needs to be written, so that when you sit down to write it’s already mapped out for you. But a lot of people see writing as difficult, and don’t want to stray out of their comfort zone. For most of them, their comfort zone involves trying to write it like an essay in school, usually at the last minute with little or no planning. If you try that on a proposal you will leave ingredients out. And the ones that you include will not be prepared properly. And you won’t be able to fix it because you can’t un-cook something. The kind of proposal you get without planning is like a soup made with whatever random ingredients the cook had available. Even if the soup is tasty, if the customer doesn't want soup the customer will not be pleased. To win, you need to deliver the meal the customer wants, and impress them with how well prepared it is. To do that you have to not only take the order, but understand their preferences, have the ingredients, and figure out how to best prepare them. To do this in writing, you have to break it down into steps: Understand the customer's preferences Gather everything that will need to be written about and how Assess what you know and what you want to offer Determine what your bid strategies and positioning should be Prepare a plan for how to combine your ingredients into a winning proposal Validate that you’ve accounted for everything and have the right plan And then you can start cooking. I mean writing. Skip any one of these items before you start writing, and the quality of your proposal will suffer. You can't just talk your way through winning in writing. While we're on the subject of cooking... PropLIBRARY Subscribers can access our Proposal Recipe Library for providing inspiration and acceleration to your proposal writers.

Visual communication is more effective than text. Studies show that graphics get read first and lead to faster and better message comprehension. Most proposal specialists know that and seek to use a lot of graphics. They usually start by asking questions like “How many graphics should I have in my proposal and where should they go?” Some don’t get any further because if you don't have the skills needed to create the graphics, it seems difficult and time consuming. Plus it's hard to make it high enough up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals so you can focus on graphics. See also: Proposal Writing People toss around ratios, like one graphic for every three pages, or even one graphic per page. If I could make my entire proposal a graphic, I would. While those are good goals, the truth is they are artificial and the message should drive your use of visual communication and not some ratio. And besides, the ratios don’t help you conceive the graphics. Proposal Content Planning helps you figure it all out When we developed the Proposal Content Planning methodology as part of the MustWin Process, identifying graphics was just one of eight steps. But since then, we’ve found that Proposal Content Planning helps with developing graphics in a number of unique and interesting ways. Content Planning involves using a document as a container to hold instructions and placeholders for things while you are trying to figure out what should go into your proposal. It provides an information flow from pre-RFP intelligence gathering into proposal writing. It provides a means to ensure that you consider what it will take to win and build it into the proposal. It also gives you the foundation you need to decide what graphics you should have, what should go in them, and what points the graphics should convey. Because Proposal Content Planning involves creating bullet-level instructions for proposal writers, it is easy to scan a content plan and look for items to convert to graphics. Instead of trying to read a draft proposal and find inspiration for graphics, Content Planning makes it quicker and easier to see the lists, sequences, comparisons, and relationships that could be shown visually. And because your content plan should provide the points your proposal writers should substantiate, it also sets up the points your graphics should make. If you start the planning by thinking of the graphics first, Proposal Content Planning gives you a mechanism to track what will be communicated via graphics vs. what needs to go into the text. It’s much better to replace text with a graphic than it is to add a graphic and keep the now redundant text. Content Planning gives you a way to achieve this without the extra effort of writing text and throwing it away after the graphic is ready. Content Planning also enables you to flag the items that are potential graphics, without having to draw pictures (yet). You can track them, pass them around, get input, and even show them to graphics designers if you can’t figure out how to render them as graphics. So it makes it easier to collaborate as well. When you have a potential graphic, the Content Plan gives you a place to collect the information that the illustrator will need to render the graphic. So it not only facilitates tracking, and collaboration, but also communication and specification. Because the Content Plan gets reviewed before being converted into a written draft, it also provides an easy method for obtaining approvals. If budget is a concern, you can see how many graphics are planned and how complicated they are. But wait, there's more... Proposal Content Planning lets you go way beyond simply figuring out what graphics you should have. It enables you to quantify how much of your message will be communicated visually. You can see how many items in your content plan will be communicated via graphics vs. how many will be communicated in text. Forget about crude graphics per page metrics. You can actually derive the percentage of your message that is communicated visually. If you actually track this metric across multiple proposals, you can formally establish the amount of impact that graphics have on your win rate. You can also use Content Planning to prioritize your use of visual communications. Are you using graphics to address routine or unimportant items, or are you using them to address the items that are on your “what it will take to win” list? This can also be turned into a ratio or percentage, tracked across multiple proposals, and then correlated with your win rate. Once the plan is complete and the writing and illustration have begun, the Content Plan gives you a better way to track progress. In addition to the simple metric of how many graphics out of the total are complete, you can track how many items in your content plan have been addressed and what percentage of your total message has been addressed. What if you can't draw? All that is great, but it still leaves you with the problem of how to actually draw the graphics. Once you identify the graphics, getting them rendered is a solvable problem. If you don’t have the resources to do it yourself, you can always outsource it to a company like the 24 Hour Company. But when you use Content Planning, you can flag all the potential graphics, and then render only the ones that you are capable of drawing or have the time for. Out of all the potential graphics, you can pick and choose which ones to take on. Flagging potential graphics in the content plan means that when reviewers compare the draft to the plan, they also see whether people followed through on the development of the graphics. It also gives you a better way to evaluate the quality of your graphics, by assessing how well they reflect the messages you want your proposal to convey. And instead of this being a matter of opinion, this can be assessed by comparing what got written to what was put in the content plan.

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What is PropLIBRARY? For each step in the proposal, people go to PropLIBRARY and look up what they need to know and download forms, checklists, templates, and recipes that will help them. The material in the Knowledgebase includes the MustWin Process, something CapturePlanning.com first released in 2008 and has been refining ever since. It is broken down into 1-2 page topics that cover everything from lead identification to award, so that staff can execute the process by going to the beginning and working through it topic by topic. Or they can use what’s there to fill a gap or enhance their own process. All of the material can be viewed, printed, and saved to your own computer, and it’s designed to be customized. PropLIBRARY is an electronic Knowledgebase with lots of searching, filtering, linking, and interactivity. For ease of use, we made the user interface similar to that of a book. People can browse the Tables of Contents and even page through the topics if they wish. But they can also filter out the topics that aren’t relevant to them, go straight to something they need, ask questions, discuss the topics, view online training, and do other things that just aren’t possible with a book. PropLIBRARY is a learning platform and a performance tool. The Goal That Has Driven Us When we created the MustWin Process, our real goal was to solve many of the problems related to business development and proposals that most people just assume are part of doing proposals. Instead of starting from the ways things have always been done and recreating the same problems, we took a fresh look at what people really need and found better ways to meet those needs. What evolved out of that was a new vision for how to win business. Our Vision: Clear Expectations Everyone starts the pursuit knowing what you’re getting into and what to expect, because it’s in writing. As a group, you get to make an informed decision to either do it the way it says, or not. It’s designed to be customized, so if you want to you can change it. But you change it in writing. Everyone knows what to expect because it tells them. If there’s any question about who should do what and when, they can look it up. Smart participants will look it up ahead of time and know what’s coming. Our Vision: Executive Opt-in (or Opt-out) This goes double for the Executive Sponsor. You, most of all, need to know what to expect from the people preparing the proposal. The MustWin Process tells you what you can expect, how things will be done, and who will do what. All we ask is that, if you decide you want your proposal done according to the MustWin Process, you help redirect any staff who don’t feel obligated to stick to it. If people don’t do what’s expected of them, then no one knows what to expect. Including you. Our Vision: Discipline Proposal Managers often say that things would go much better if people had more discipline and the process was enforced. We mostly disagree because we believe people should want to follow the process. They should immediately see how it will be easier to follow the process than to make it up as they go along. If this isn’t the case, then maybe the process can be improved. But some people catch on quicker than others. When we observe people implementing the process, the first time through is often an eye opener — even though the process tells them what to expect, some people don’t fully realize how what the process recommends at the beginning impacts things at the end until they get there. But the next time through they get it and participate enthusiastically, because it all fits and makes sense. Nothing is wasted — if you leave something out you’ll end up needing it later. We often challenge people to point out and skip any steps that aren’t absolutely needed. Our Vision: Getting Ready for RFP Release The pursuit of a lead is guided by a written list of questions, action items, and goals to fulfill prior to RFP release that are downloaded from PropLIBRARY. This list is put through four Readiness Reviews that will tell you if the pursuit is trending toward or away from being ready to win at RFP release. For markets where you can’t start a pursuit until the RFP is released, you can still use a variation of Readiness Reviews to help you quickly assess what you know and what you don’t know in order to formulate your win strategies at RFP release. Readiness Reviews are aimed at achieving an information advantage over your competition and the ability to articulate what it will take to win. They also provide a foundation for in-depth metrics assessments that can unlock the hidden factors impacting your win rate, without adding extra effort to track the metrics. The combination of Readiness Reviews and metrics provides a quantifiable basis for tracking progress toward readiness and for whether to invest in further pursuit. Our Vision: What Happens at RFP Release Our vision for RFP release is that everything is staged for rapid response. The Readiness Reviews have prompted the identification of staff and resources as well as the preparation of the information you will need to win. Numerous checklists, forms, and templates are used and partially pre-populated to move quickly without overlooking anything. The information gathered during the Readiness Review phase drops right into the various places it is needed to develop the proposal. Our Vision: Figuring Out What to Write We believe that editing and re-editing a narrative is a lousy way to design anything, especially a proposal. So the MustWin Process provides a better way to figure out everything that needs to go into your proposal, before you turn it into a narrative. But it’s hard for people to think about writing, without actually writing. And more importantly, if planning adds to the effort of writing the proposal instead of making it easier, people will question whether it’s worth it. We treat the Proposal Content Plan as a container into which you put all the ingredients you want to go into your proposal. A Proposal Content Plan acts like a rubric that tells the writers exactly what they need to do to pass the proposal review. We combine it with an iterative approach that ensures you don’t leave anything out. The PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase contains explanations for what to do in each iteration, and checklists to make sure you covered everything you should have. Our Vision: Planning vs. Writing We believe that you should make the trade-off decision between how much time to allocate to planning vs. writing. A Proposal Content Plan can be quickly prepared in less than a day, you could spend a week on it and do a thorough job, or you could fall somewhere in between. Depending on your circumstances, one of those will be better than the other. A more detailed plan will add value and improve quality, but it does take time. PropLIBRARY gives advice, but you are in control. We believe that PropLIBRARY should support you and not force you or break when circumstances force you to adapt. The good news is that having a Proposal Content Plan can greatly accelerate the writing, compensating for the time spent on planning. It turns writing the narrative draft into a finite process of elimination. It also prevents re-writes and endless editing cycles. PropLIBRARY contains guidance for how to make this trade-off so that if you are pressed for time, you sacrifice the things that add the least value to the plan. Our Vision: Proposal Writing Instead of being set aside when it’s time to go from planning to writing, the Proposal Content Plan becomes the proposal without any wasted effort. Our approach to proposal planning enables you to quantify both your progress in writing and the quality of your proposal. Re-read that last paragraph because it’s innovative and incredibly valuable. It’s also crucial for both process acceptance and expectation management. As the Proposal Content Plan is transformed into the draft proposal, it provides writers with guidance regarding what to write about. They still need guidance on how to write from the customer’s perspective. PropLIBRARY gives them that guidance, along with inspiration and self-review checklists. The writing goes faster, the results are more reliable, and everything is focused on what it will take to win. Our Vision: Quality We believe that it is critically important to define proposal quality and can’t believe how many companies do proposals without a written definition for it that they use to guide their reviews. So we give you one. And it’s linked to the discovery of what it will take to win during the Readiness Reviews and the insertion of those elements into the Proposal Content Plan. We believe that it doesn’t matter how you do your proposal reviews, but that it’s extremely important what you review. For each proposal, we offer templates to help you to put a written Review Plan into place in as little as 15 minutes that addresses what to review and how to review it. We focus on what needs to be validated to achieve proposal quality and not so much on the number of reviews or even their timing. We identify what needs to be validated based on the Proposal Content Plan and the Readiness Reviews. But what we really do is link what gets reviewed to what it will take to win. We articulate it, define it, and then validate that the proposal reflects it. We do it explicitly in writing and not just by assuming that’s what reviewers will look for. That’s what you can expect from following the process. Our Vision: It’s a Science and Not an Art From the upfront customer relationship and intelligence gathering, to figuring out what should go into your proposal, to writing the copy, to reviewing it to assure quality, we believe in a scientific approach. Decisions and reviews are criteria based. Goals and action items are written down, with guidance and checklists provided. Progress is measured. Reviews are scored. All of them produce metrics which can be correlated with win rates. Follow the process over a series of proposals and you can see which things have the most impact on your win rates. Don’t assume you already know and throw conventional wisdom aside, because the results we see in the field are often not what people expect. Our Vision: Everyone Has Access We structured our Corporate Subscription so that you don’t have to count heads or worry about who should get access. We want everyone who ever touches a proposal to be able to sign in to PropLIBRARY when they need to, and don’t want you pulling your punches. But you control who that is. Corporate subscribers manage their own access list and can update it any time. Our Vision: Winning as a Team Our vision is that information builds over time, until it becomes an information advantage. The accumulated information is turned into win strategies and themes, that themselves become the proposal, and you can validate that the proposal contains everything it should and traces back to what it will take to win. Our vision is that people can sign into PropLIBRARY any time they need to, to find out what comes next, what they should do, what they can expect, and how to make sure they are doing things correctly. Our vision is that the less experienced staff, the technical staff, and the staff who go years between proposals aren’t just thrown into the proposal. Our vision is that they get guidance that helps maximize their ability to contribute toward winning. Our vision is that they are all able to get on the same page without having to backtrack, re-write, or waste effort. Our vision is about ensuring that everyone involved discovers what it will take to win, can articulate it, knows how to figure out and plan how to put that into the proposal, and to validate that it’s there as planned. Our vision is how to win. Intentionally. Every. Time. If you'd like a peak at the demo area for PropLIBRARY, click here. It has a few topics out of the hundreds that constitute our Knowledgebase. If you'd like pricing and purchasing information, click here. You'll also find a couple dozen articles with more information about our approaches.

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When it’s time to begin working on a proposal, most people start by thinking about what they should write in their proposal. Then they begin creating an outline and start putting it all in the outline. And that’s where they go wrong... An outline tells you the structure of the document and not what goes into it or how it should be presented. While you can annotate an outline, that approach can't hold everything that needs to go into a proposal and still be manageable. When you use an outline as your sole planning tool, you inherently limit the quality of your plans. A menu is not the same as a recipe. The same is true for the compliance matrix. A compliance matrix is a table that is used to match RFP requirements with proposal outline items. A table can only hold so much data. You can put the outline, the RFP requirements, and a handful of other things into columns. But you won't be able to address everything that should go into a proposal you want to win. A list of ingredients is not the same as a recipe. It helps if you think about what your proposal planning needs really are to: See also: Proposal Outlines Figure out what should go where. Ensure that you follow the RFP’s instructions, address all of the RFP requirements, and are optimized against the RFP’s evaluation criteria. Ensure that you address what it will take to win, in every place and every way that it is applicable. Figure out where and how to address your customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence. Ensure that you have the right offering and can describe its features and benefits. Account for the key points, differentiators, strengths, and things you need to prove. Provide information and key details proposal writers will need. Anticipate your need for graphics. Anticipate any limits, assumptions to be made, or issues in addressing the requirements. Provide a means to validate what will be written before you invest the effort. Provide a means to validate what was written when the draft is complete. Based on the subjects that need to be addressed, identify who you need to write which parts. Provide a foundation for developing the schedule. Provide a means to measure progress to facilitate proposal management. Avoid putting effort into documentation that won’t be part of the finished proposal. You need these things to successfully write a proposal. An outline, no matter how annotated, and a compliance matrix, no matter how many columns it has, won't give this to you. You need to transition from the compliance matrix and outline into something that meets the needs of your proposal writers. A compliance matrix and an outline are the starting point for proposal planning. They define the structure of the document, but are not enough to plan its content. However, once you have the structure, you can implement a methodology that will enable you to fulfill all your proposal planning needs. That is the way we set up our Proposal Content Planning methodology. Once you know the structure for your proposal, you can treat it as a container and start filling it up. To ensure that you fill it up with the right material, we created a set of eight iterations that walk you through what to consider putting into your proposal. The idea is to: Create a planning document that will become the proposal, so that no effort is wasted. Ensure that you address everything you should by going through the eight iterations. Provide a baseline that you can validate prior to writing, and then validate the draft against. Using a separate tool from the outline and compliance matrix enables you to do better planning. It also means that your outlining efforts need only to focus on the structure of the document. In order to outline the document structure, you typically start with the RFP. You need to cross-reference the instructions from the RFP along with the evaluation criteria and requirements. The tool for analyzing this is the compliance matrix, and you can use it to produce the proposal outline. The first iteration in our Content Planning Methodology is to create a compliance matrix in order to discover the structure or outline that is required to address all of the RFP requirements. Then we take an empty shell or template and begin filling it with instructions for the author. The remaining iterations ensure that you address everything that should go into your proposal. The result is a blueprint that describes what needs to go into each section of the proposal. It provides instructions for authors and a baseline to validate against. And it becomes the proposal by replacing the instructions with responses, providing a means to measure progress along the way. Going beyond what you can do on paper One of the things we've learned from creating MustWin Now is that there is a lot of benefit to leaving paper behind when it comes to planning a proposal. MustWin Now moves creating your outline, compliance matrix, and content plan online. But it does them in ways that can't be done on paper. It changes cross-referencing from something spreadsheet-centric, to something where the RFP, the document, your win strategies, and what should go into the content plan just show up in your proposal writers' assigned sections. They never have to deal with issues related to having an annotated outline or a compliance matrix. They just plan and do. Which is exactly what you want.

Turning the art of winning proposals into a quantifiable science is more possible than most people realize. It requires making data driven decisions. And to do that you have to thoroughly embrace performance measurement for the pursuit process. As Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The trick to it is to have a process that gives you the data you need without it becoming extra work. One of the things we find when implementing the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY is that not only does it lend itself to performance measurement, but with forms based on criteria the data practically jumps right out at you. This can be used to provide an unprecedented level of metrics that you can analyze for correlations with your win rate. When we say unprecedented, we mean that it enables you to track metrics and quantify business and proposal development in ways you didn’t even know were possible. We mean that you can elevate the way your company does proposals to a level beyond what your competitors think is even possible. It means you can gain better insight into which of the things you do impact your win rate, and which do not. Making it easy to become data driven See also: Winning The best part is that you don’t have to do anything extra to generate the numbers. They are produced by simply following the process. By simply following the process and assessing the data it produces, you can take a lot of the opinions and arguments out of what you should do and make better decisions. The way the MustWin Process achieves this is through four key areas that build on each other. They relate to what you do before the proposal starts, how you plan the content of your proposal, how you manage proposal writing, and your approach to assessing proposal quality. The way we do these things in the MustWin Process makes it easy to quantify things. The MustWin Process starts with Readiness Reviews during the pre-RFP pursuit phase. Then it turns what you do there into a Content Plan for the proposal that turns the art of writing into something measurable. Then to cap it all off, it uses a review process that validates the draft and demonstrates that it fulfills the definition of proposal quality. Along the way it measures progress and validates results. Here’s how it plays out: Metrics During Pre-RFP Readiness Reviews Identify the questions you need answered, goals to achieve, and actions to take before the RFP is released, starting with an off-the-shelf set for guidance. Then review their fulfillment using a simple grading system (red/yellow/green) that converts to numerical analysis. The relevant metrics that result include the number of items sought, what percentage were completed, and how well they were completed. Assessment should focus on whether the trend is up or down over time, benchmarking against past pursuits, and correlating the results with your win rate. Articulate what it will take to win in the form of criteria that can be used to assess the draft proposal later. Your goal is to be able to determine whether you are on track to be ready to win at RFP release, and to be able to define proposal quality based on what it will take to win. Metrics During Proposal Content Planning Identify what should go into the proposal before writing it using the 8 iterations defined in the MustWin Proposal Content Planning Methodology. This will include the items you identified as being needed to win as well as instructions related to your evaluation criteria, goals, win strategies, and themes. The metrics that result from Proposal Content Planning include the number of items included in the plan (broken down by iterations), the number of changes made during plan validation, and the number of planned items that are addressed in the narrative draft. The result is the ability to quantify progress during proposal writing and whether the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win. Metrics During Proposal Writing We recommend tracking metrics related to how well you are delivering your message in the proposal. These may include metrics like the ratio of sentences that are about the customer vs. those that are about your company, sentences that include the results or benefits vs. those that do not, graphics vs. text, and the number of times the items on your “what it will take to win” list are mentioned. Your goal is to gain the ability to quantify the effectiveness of the proposal writing and to give writers tools to help them do a better job (before it ever gets to the reviewers). Proposal Quality Validation A criteria driven review process not only produces metrics, it also forces you to define proposal quality, understand what drives it, and measure whether your proposals reflect it, resulting in better, more consistent reviews. Some of the metrics that can result include both the raw number and the ratio of suggested improvements vs. planned items missing or not addressed, and the anticipated evaluation score. Your goal is to determine whether the proposal fulfills the Content Plan and what it will take to win. The result is the ability to quantify proposal quality and whether you have achieved your goals (which are traceable back to what it will take to win). Automating data collection When you have a traditional paper-based process and you use forms as process artifacts, they collect the data you need. This does simplify things. However, you still have to aggregate the data in something like a spreadsheet. Luckily this is simply data entry. Data collection is hard and expensive, but the forms do it for you. Data entry is easy, cheap, and well worth the payoff. But if you automate your proposal process (as opposed to proposal file management or proposal production), the system can automatically collect the data for you. This is what we do in our tool, MustWin Now. It transforms the MustWin Process from something paper-based to one where the process becomes invisible and the users don't have to give it much thought. When people add criteria, report or resolve issues, update the status of things, and review them, all that data is in the system. Do enough proposals using MustWin Now and without any extra data collection or entry, you'll have a wealth of data that you can correlate with your win rate. Why all this matters Rules of thumb aren't. Through PropLIBRARY I get insight into how people do all kinds of proposals. I see all the exceptions. People reach out to me daily about best practices that just don't apply to them. And they're often right. If you practice winning like it's an art, you are at the complete mercy of subjective decisions that are likely based on the wrong circumstances and unproven assumptions. When I see conventional wisdom put to the test, I often see it fail. What's your company's win rate? Not the one you tell other people based on cherry picked data, but the real win rate. If it's less than 50%, then what you think you know about what it will take to win could use some objective improvement. And that objectivity comes from being data driven. In every other aspect of business, we strive to be scientific, efficient, and measurably effective. And then there's how we do proposals, which is closer to being based on superstition than science. The reason all this matters is that the difference between a 20% win rate and a 30% win rate is 50% more revenue. Each 1% improvement brings a 5% improvement in revenue. You may add some single digit improvements by giving it more attention. But imagine having the 150% improvement in revenue that would come from getting your win rate up to 50%. How much effort is that worth? Maybe getting a little more data driven is worth it.