Carl Dickson

monthly_2016_02/proposal-sight-reading_ppt.409bd6298a4c1bd7e998c43ec466b6a9

Consistently effective proposal reviews must start long before the document is even written. They should start by developing review criteria that are based on how you define proposal quality and what it will take to win. If you wait until a draft of the proposal has been written and then review it based on “best practices” and “experience,” what you will get is a generic review. The same shallow review that any other proposal would get. If what it will take to win this proposal is different from what it took to win your other proposals, why should every review be the same? What you don’t get is a review that is based on what it will take to win this particular bid. If the reviewers attempt it, what you are more likely to get is second guessing of your bid strategies by reviewers who are just now thinking about it and haven’t done their homework. At best what you will get is second guessing your bid strategies after the proposal has been written. Part of the problem is that you should split the review of your bid strategies from the review of the draft. If there are flaws in the bid strategies, you really want to know that before you start writing. This means you really need to have more than one review. Having only one review can be worse than have no reviews at all. If you want to make sure that you will have the information you need to develop effective win strategies, you might want to review your progress in collecting the intelligence you’ll need to formulate those strategies. We call them Readiness Reviews and they are a key part of the MustWin Process and are performed before the RFP is even released. In between your bid strategies and the draft proposal, you really should do some thinking about what should go into your proposal. If you turn that into a written plan and review it, then you not only lower your proposal development risk, but you also provide those who review the draft proposal with a benchmark to review the draft against. There is a flow of information that becomes the proposal. If you want to end up with the right proposal, you need to validate that the flow of information is on track to take you there. You need a series of reviews that validate the right things. See also: Proposal quality validation But many of those things are specific to the particular: RFP Customer Competitive environment Offering you are proposing Qualifications and capabilities of your company at the time of the bid While what you need to validate will be similar on every bid, it will not be the same. With every bid, you should reconsider what you need to validate to ensure that the proposal reflects what it will take to win. This consideration, along with defining the series of reviews you need to perform the validation, should be at the heart of your review process. For the MustWin Process we created a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation that guides people through what their review criteria should be on each bid. The result is that instead of a generic review, you get a review that measures the proposal against what it will take to win that particular bid. This is what leads to reviews that are not only worth the time and effort, but that consistently improve your chances of winning.

I know a lot of companies that consider it a big achievement to have a major review of their proposals before they submit them. You might think it is if you compare it to not having any review. But having one review can actually provide less quality assurance than having none. Having one review can do more harm than good. Consider: How can you remain competitive when you stick to an obsolete review methodology? You can’t possibly review everything at one time. You cannot look at strategy, compliance, what you’re offering, differentiators, customer insight, competitive positioning, proofreading, your projected evaluation score, and more all at one time. Even if you could make the review long enough to accommodate all that, you probably can’t find enough staff with the skills to evaluate the full range. If you try, your all-important single review becomes an exercise about what you are going to skip. With one review, your choice is to do a poor job of evaluating everything, or to ignore whole topics. It’s no wonder that review results are so inconsistent. If you wait until the draft is mature, it will be too late to make changes. But if you have the review early, the document won’t even be close to its final form. When you focus on having “a” review, you get caught in a trap between wanting to hold the review early enough for it to drive change, but late enough so that the document will be complete enough to review. You can’t resolve this trade-off. Your document will either be incomplete at review (potentially making the review irrelevant) or there won’t be enough time to implement significant changes. You can’t be early and late at the same time. There is no sweet spot in the middle. Pick how you want your review to fail. People will manipulate the review process. Proposal teams quickly learn how to game the system. If you don’t want the reviewers to make major changes, you run the clock out on them and hold the review when it’s too late to make them. Or you pick what you want them to review. And by extension, what you want them to ignore. Or you don’t give them enough time to get through the whole document, let alone consider everything. Reviewers play games too, but it’s usually unintentional — like providing contradictory recommendations, or focusing on proofreading when the strategy needs to be validated. Sometimes that’s what motivates the proposal team to want to game the system. And it’s all because you’ve got one big, overly complicated review that’s too late with too much riding on it. You can’t prevent problems with one review. Having a single review makes it about catching defects after they are made, instead of preventing things from going in the wrong direction before they get there. No wonder people run out the clock. It’s a major reason why you end up in final production, near the deadline, with too many changes and too little time. Everyone blames it on schedule management, but structuring the process around a single review is also a contributor. Having one review to catch defects can end up creating more defects than it prevents. Let that sink in because that makes it the opposite of the quality assurance you think you have. The results of a single review will always be inconsistent. Every review that makes a valuable contribution will be balanced by a review that is a waste of time. And ultimately, what you need out of a review process isn’t a contribution here or there. If you don’t get validation of specific decisions and results then you’re not getting what you really need. The damage from having a single review isn’t just from the waste of time; it’s that it gets in the way of achieving the validation you really need: Review your readiness periodically before the RFP comes out. Verify that you are collecting information you are going to need, that you are getting into the right position. Review this several times so that you establish whether you are trending toward being ready to win or away from being ready. This is exactly what the Readiness Review portion of the MustWin Process in PropLIBRARY was designed to do. Review what you plan to put in your proposal before you write it. This review, which can take place early, should get more attention than reviewing the draft that comes later. It’s where you resolve all the issues about your strategies and offering. The reviews that come later can focus on document production and be a lot easier if you nail down what you want the proposal to be at the beginning and get everyone on board with it. This is what the Proposal Content Planning methodology in the MustWin Process was designed to do. Split the draft review into two parts (early and late). You don’t need a final draft to review RFP compliance. You can confirm that you’re heading in the right direction from an early review. You can measure progress by comparing your Proposal Content Plan with what’s in (or not in) an early draft. Writing doesn’t even have to stop while you review an early draft. However, some things like completion, coverage, implementation of the Proposal Content Plan, things that span multiple sections or writer, etc., may require a mature draft. How many reviews do you need? See also: Why this goal is important Would two reviews be better? Not really. It’s still an exercise in what you want to give up. Do you want to give up making sure you’re ready before the RFP release? If you have a plan and a draft review, will it be an early draft or a mature draft? Are you still overloading the reviewers? What about a final review at the end? What about separating strategy, offering, pricing, and draft reviews? It’s not the number of reviews that matter. It’s what you validate as a result of having your reviews that matters. Instead of one big review, have lots of little reviews that validate specific aspects of proposal quality. The way you figure out how many reviews you should have is to start by thinking about what you need to validate. What you need isn’t a set number of reviews. It’s validation of specific attributes and criteria. You need a list of things to validate, that get allocated to a number of reviews. And the number of reviews might change. Some may be formal, some may be informal. But the result is that you validate your decisions and results. So after Readiness Reviews and Proposal Content Planning, the final piece of the puzzle was to add Proposal Quality Validation to the MustWin Process. We not only built the list of all the things you need to validate into the process, but we built the process to customize that list around what it will take to win a particular bid and then provide guidance on how to allocate the criteria to specific reviews. It resolves the problems we had doing reviews the traditional way for years. You can use it in combination with the Readiness Review and Proposal Content Planning methodologies to provide a total solution, or you can use the criteria from our Proposal Quality Validation methodology to enhance your own review process. Whatever you do, if you don’t change from having a single review you will continue to be stuck. Making the change will involve changing your vocabulary and corporate culture. As long as people expect there to be “a" proposal review they’ll tend to fall back on old habits. That’s a key reason why we started focusing on validation — we needed people to look past “the" review and focus on what they really needed to “validate.” It ends up being an effective way of getting people to actually think about what drives proposal quality and that alone makes the effort worthwhile.

If all of your proposals are not passing their reviews, then you are conducting your reviews the wrong way. It's a sign that you are figuring out what your proposals should be after they are written. The way most proposal reviews are conducted is like putting a blindfold on someone, asking them to hit a target, and then finding fault with them when they miss. In fact, it’s worse than that since most reviews are conducted at the last minute, with no time left to take another shot. Why do people set themselves up like that? If you want better proposals, try taking the blindfolds off and showing people the target they are supposed to hit. If you want better proposals, try taking the blindfolds off and showing people the target they are supposed to hit. The way you do this is by giving both the writers and the reviewers the same set of criteria that defines proposal quality. If you skip that step, then not only will you get inconsistent reviews, but the writers won’t know what to do to pass the review. You get changes in direction after the review which should have been communicated to the writers before they started. If you can’t articulate to the writers exactly what they need to do to pass the proposal quality review, then proposal quality is undefined. Leaving proposal quality undefined means that your staff can't see the target. Or they are making up one of their own. See also: Proposal quality validation And the same is true for the proposal review team. You may have some experienced staff who can recognize good proposal attributes, but if they are not all working against the same set of criteria, then who knows what they will find? You won’t know until you conduct the review and then it will be too late to do anything about it. Reviewing without being able to define what a quality proposal is cannot produce a quality proposal. Based on the strength of your staff, you might achieve good proposals, but you won't consistently achieve great proposals. Instead you are far more likely to get conflict subjective opinions and last-minute changes of direction. If you define what a quality proposal is and then give those criteria to both the writers and the reviewers, the writers will know what they have to do to pass their reviews. The focus of the reviews will change from catching mistakes or making random suggestions for improvement to making sure that the planned goals have been achieved in the best way possible. You will begin your proposal reviews with a better quality draft, and get more consistently constructive feedback from reviewers. Defining your proposal quality criteria can be better than training The discussion that you have about what it should take to pass a proposal review will do a better job of training your staff than any class you can take. It is a discussion that needs to take place before the proposal starts, with all stakeholders participating. It is a discussion that should not end until the answers are written down. What should the reviewers look for? What should they ignore? Which decisions should they second guess and which decisions should they accept and focus on how well they’ve been implemented? If you describe the criteria at too high of a level or in a way that’s too subjective, how can the writers know what’s required to pass the review? Getting this right and getting both the writers and the reviewers on the same page will do more to improve your chances of winning than anything that happens after the RFP is released. The MustWin Process contains a complete methodology called Proposal Quality Validation. It defines proposal quality and the criteria necessary to validate it. It gives writers a set of goals to achieve and brings structure to the review process to ensure that the focus is on the right things. While the full set of documentation for how to implement Proposal Quality Validation is only available to PropLIBRARY subscribers, you can check out the two white papers we wrote that started the ball rolling and ended up with us creating the MustWin Process. PropLIBRARY helps companies becoming winning organizations through a combination of online process guidance and training materials that are ready for immediate implementation. As the links above show, PropLIBRARY can help you win more business while also providing hours of online training to boost the skills and get everyone on the same page. You can start with a single user subscription and upgrade to a corporate subscription.

When you’re a small business that’s stretched thin, can’t afford specialized resources, and everyone is wearing multiple hats, it’s easy to be intimidated by larger competitors. But if you match your strengths against their weaknesses, you can consistently beat them. Here’s how: Have Stronger Relationships. Sure, big companies have a lot of staff, but they also have to be everywhere at once. If relationships are key to your line of business, then focus on developing particularly strong ones, even if it means having fewer of them. If you try to go after any RFP that comes your way, you’ll be bidding with weaker relationships and at a disadvantage to your larger competitors. But on the other hand, if you build strong relationships you'll have an advantage over all potential competitors. Simply having a contract does not mean you have a strong relationship. And just because you haven't heard any complaints doesn't mean the customer loves you. Strong relationships require hard work and offering more added value than any alternatives. Do work harder, but also work smarter to build strong relationships. Present a More Compelling Message. This is surprisingly difficult for large companies. They have too many people involved. No one person knows enough to develop the message. The right people aren’t always involved. Most of the time, they avoid strong messages because they are too hard to get a consensus on. They water themselves down to avoid taking any risks. Even if they somehow manage to identify a message, they have too many writers to get it into the document consistently. Very few large companies can overcome these challenges. Having fewer people involved gives you the opportunity to conceive of a strong, compelling message, and do a better job of making your proposal reflect it. Having a strong message isn't just about finding the magic words. It's about differentiation, positioning, and value. You're not stuck with meaningless corporate branding. You can provide a meaningful difference, communicate it better, and be the customer's best alternative. Follow the Right Process, Better. You would think that large, established companies would have comprehensive, established processes for winning bids. Most of them think they do. They often have dozens of them. For each pursuit, there will be many people involved who think they know the best approach. And they won't all agree. Proposal teams are formed with people who report to many different supervisors, and getting them all to do things a particular way can be a challenge. There is often a considerable amount of conflict, struggle, and politics involved. It doesn’t help that most large companies are really collections of projects and acquisitions (each one coming with a new set of processes). The result is that they have difficulty getting people to follow "the" process. You can have a better process than they do, and you can get everyone to follow it. Most companies that say they have a process really just have a way of doing things (and in reality it’s often a mess). You can have a real, fully documented, repeatable process that everyone involved supports. It can enable your team to outperform theirs. If you have the expertise in house, then dedicate the time to making it work. If you don’t have the time or expertise, PropLIBRARY’s off-the-shelf MustWin Process can give you a better and more thoroughly documented process than most large companies have, and ours comes with online training. Develop an Information Advantage. One of the most important things you can do to improve your ability to win is to develop an information advantage for each pursuit. If you are selective about your pursuits, you can do a better job of doing your homework than a larger competitor that is spread too thin and doesn’t place the same priority on the opportunity that you do. It is similar to relationship building, above. In fact, you can measure the strength of your customer relationships by how well they deliver an information advantage. It’s not just about gathering the information, it’s about taking advantage of it. It is not unusual for someone in a company to have information and either fail to pass it on (often the business development manager has a limited role in writing the proposal), put it in a report that no one reads, put the information in the wrong format so that it’s not clear how to best use it, or just have it get lost in all the documents and files that pass by. So it is also similar to developing a compelling message. The best way to make sure it happens is to have the right flow of information, from gathering, through assessing, articulating, and writing. That also makes it similar to following the right process and doing a better job of it. Provide a better offering. Tailor your approaches based on your information advantage. Don't just claim innovation. Deliver it. Leverage your better relationships that provide an information advantage into providing solutions that better meet your customers' needs. Instead of getting specific, large companies will most often resort to proposals based on "best practices" and vague promises of resource "reach back." You, on the other hand, need to be position to get specific about what you will do, how it reflects the customer's preferences, and how the customer will benefit. See also: Small Business These five items are related to one another. If you have stronger relationships that produce an information advantage that you turn into a more compelling message that you then turn into a better proposal by doing a better job of following a better process, you will have a significant competitive advantage. All your large competitors have is the appearance of resources. But all those staff are on contracts, and they have just as much difficulty finding relevant staff to bid as you do. And if you've developed a stronger customer relationship, then all those project citations they have will not be as relevant as the ones that you have. If you combine it all with a better offering, you can outscore your larger competitors in every category. But you don’t have the resources to apply your strengths to every lead you come across. It works best when you pursue leads that have related relationships, sources of information, and bid strategies. It works best when you are strategic rather than opportunistic. Being opportunistic seems like the easiest way to grab a lot of business quickly, but in reality it means that you match your weakness against your competitors' strengths, which always results in lower win rates. Opportunistic bidding is about trying to be lucky, when in reality you're just competing on price. Instead of trying to get lucky, small businesses need to be smart in order to win. It’s not hard to be smarter than a large dinosaur of a competitor. But it does take more discipline than being opportunistic.

Most companies think that the best way to win on price is to figure out what price your competitors will bid and try to come in below that. But that’s just believing the lie. It also doesn't point you towards any viable bid strategies other than lowering costs and hoping the customer lets you get away with it without destroying your past performance record. It sets you up to bid less for the same amount of work, and either make little or no profit, or to actually lose money. When it’s up to you to figure out the right approach and the right resources, then the most effective way to lower your price is to best understand how to limit the scope of the work. Bidding based on lower expectations reduces your price far more effectively than bidding lower rates. Bidding a lower price that results from a reduced set of expectations is much better than bidding a lower price against the same expectations. See also: Pricing But how do you bid based on a lower set of expectations? To achieve this, you have to understand what must be included and what the customer is willing to do without. You need to know what results the customer must have, as opposed to what they would like to have. The challenge isn’t to shave pennies off your rates. The challenge is to understand what your customer is willing to accept. The hard work that you need to do to win on price is understanding the customer's expectations and preferences, and the scope of work, not understanding what your competitors' rates are or how to bid less than them without losing money. When the customer tells you exactly what to bid and everyone will be bidding the exact same thing, then the best way to win on price is to have a lower overhead. With a low overhead, you can bid the exact same thing as a competitor with the exact same profit margin, but do it for a lower price. The hard part in this scenario isn't knowing your competitors' prices and being able to bid under them and get away with it. The hard part is reducing your overhead. Instead of trying to reduce overhead by cutting back a little, we recommend going for a ridiculously low overhead by doing things radically different. Instead of trimming, try eliminating entire categories of expenses. Outsource. Go virtual. Do without things that everyone else has. With the trend towards Low Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) evaluation criteria, you can expect customers to start specifying every little thing in order to make sure that contractors deliver as promised at the lowest possible price. As they do so, your overhead rates will become more important for all types of procurements. The trend towards LPTA requires the commoditization of everything, whether it makes sense or not. The winners will be the ones who bid the lowest acceptable set of expectations and have the lowest overhead. In addition to the two types of procurements we've considered, you also need to be extra careful when you are the incumbent. As the incumbent, salary growth over the life of the contract can make your staff more expensive than the staff that your competitors will bid (who are merely qualified). If the value of their experience will not be evaluated, then you may need to replace some of your staff in order to be price competitive for the recompete. To avoid this, you need to be close enough to your customer to change the staffing specifications, define price reasonableness, and better yet change the scope of work. In some ways, this is just a variation of the need to understand the customer's expectations. But as the incumbent, you may be better positioned to change those expectations. For both types of procurements, another important factor is to restructure your proposal process so that pricing starts before your proposal is written. This requires you to be able to articulate what you will be proposing before it is written, and to be able to change it based on your pricing evaluation, before it is converted into a narrative response. If you design your offering by writing about it and then price it, not only will you run out of time and not be able to do the best job of calculating the lowest prices, but you also will not have time to change your approaches if you find they cost too much. You need a process that defines your offering before you start writing about it. If winning on price is more about understanding customer expectations and having enough time to get creative with your prices and approaches, you need to modify your pre-RFP business development, capture, and post-RFP proposal processes to reflect that winning on price is not about shaving pennies from a spreadsheet at the last possible moment. The right process will not only increase your ability to win, it will increase your ability to win at an acceptable profit margin, while preserving your ability to perform without destroying your past performance record. This, in turn, increases your future win rates. If you've ever wondered why some companies seem to consistently win, this is their secret.

From time to time we get asked to “take a look” at someone’s proposals and tell them whether they’re any good. With the MustWin Process, we can do better than simply give our opinion. The MustWin Process includes a methodology for Proposal Quality Validation that is based on criteria derived from what it will take to win. The details for implementing Proposal Quality Validation are provided in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. They include a baseline set of quality criteria that are intended to be customized to reflect your company, offering, competitive environment, and more. From this foundation, we have created a set of assessment criteria that we use for proposal benchmarking. They can be used to: See also: Proposal quality validation Assess a past proposal to establish a benchmark to measure progress by. Assess a collection of past proposals for benchmarking purposes. Collect metrics on proposal quality (by establishing a numeral grade for each criterion). Identify areas of concern and focus for future improvement. Assess the trend towards improved or diminished quality over time. The criteria help you perform a more objective assessment. PropLIBRARY Subscribers can download the criteria and do their own assessment. But sometimes they still want our opinions as an objective party outside their own firm. We can do this with either a formal or an informal approach. Either way, we need to define a scope for the assessment. Usually we base it on a number of pages that can include material from one or more proposals and RFPs. That way you can decide whether it should be limited to one proposal or a collection of proposals, and whether you should include the RFPs for context. When we do an informal assessment, we review the material and then have a conversation or an online meeting with screen sharing. We use the criteria as a set of agenda for what to talk about. Depending on the amount of material to review, this can be as simple as an hour of reading and an hour of discussing it. When we do a formal assessment, we put it in writing. We can do this as handwritten comments on printed copies, comments inserted into MS-Word files, or even both. We also include an Assessment Findings report that uses our criteria as the Table of Contents. When the assessment is conducted this way, you get to see how your proposals match up against each of the criteria. This is a lot more detailed than simply sharing our opinions. It also goes a lot further towards making sure that the assessment is related to what it takes to win. After we deliver the written part of the assessment, we also hold an online meeting to discuss it. What most companies find is that once they see how we used the criteria to identify the issues, they can use those same criteria to monitor themselves in the future. Having the criteria puts them in a much better position to apply the findings, resolve the issues, and catch them if they ever show up again. They achieve better and longer lasting improvements. PropLIBRARY Subscribers are welcome to download the criteria and perform their own assessments. If you would like our help in performing the assessment, then contact us and let us know whether you want a formal or informal approach and how many pages worth of material you have. We’ll ask some questions and based on the answers give you a quote. We like doing assessments because it takes fewer hours than writing a proposal for you, and the way it enables your organization to improve its own future effectiveness provides much longer lasting value.

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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monthly_2016_02/proposal-specialist-assessment-tool_doc.93aaef77ef32dbf6a7fd16dd35d33e12

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 provide the big picture and define what your proposal means. Themes may be incorporated into headings, tag lines, text boxes, or just be the main point of a paragraph. They are the message and there are many ways to deliver it. 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. A lot of themes end up being claims, descriptions, or beneficial sounding statements that in reality do nothing to differentiate your proposal or help you win. 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 articulate 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 claims like "We deliver the best quality." Statements like these are intended to make you stand out from the pack, but in reality everybody makes claims like these and customers don't really pay much attention to them in a proposal. The problem with themes that are merely good is that being good is not enough to win. Good themes are not competitive. But good themes 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. Instead of focusing on how wonderful you are, they are written from the customer’s perspective and reflect what the customer needs to conclude in order to reach a decision in your favor. They help the customer to evaluate your proposal. 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. But most importantly of all, they differentiate. They are the reasons that the customer should accept your proposals, that no one else gives or can give. 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 and how well they differentiate your proposal. 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 sound good but fail to pass the "So what?" test. Even though they sound good to you, bad proposal themes are either ignored or fail to help the customer make their decision. While they might make you happy, they do not show up on evaluation forms or decision justifications. 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, inadvertently position your company as not mattering, and make you sound like a bad salesperson instead of a trustworthy partner. 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]," "We are fully committed to [insert promise here], or "We are fully compliant with the RFP requirements." If it matters, make sure you say why it matters. If it doesn't matter, don't say it. How do you go from writing good proposal themes to writing exceptional proposal themes? Most proposal theme statements we see when we review proposals 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 other proposals with ordinary themes. The company that wins will not just have good themes in their proposals, their themes will be extraordinary and make all the proposals with good themes look substandard. To dominate the competitive field you must reach beyond the ordinary and submit an exceptional proposal. If you really want to win, you should work hard to make your proposal better than any exceptional proposal instead of just better than the ordinary ones who should not be much competition. You want to raise the bar on what it means to be exceptional. Here are seven examples of things you can do to write exceptional proposal win themes so you can get there: Don’t talk about yourself. Don't make claims about yourself. Put everything about you into the context of how it impacts them. Say the things that will help the customer justify their decision in your favor. Imagine the evaluator explaining their selection decision to The Powers That Be. What words would they quote from your proposal? It won't be your bragging about how special you are. It will be your differentiators and proof points. Good proposals claim. Extraordinary proposals prove. Make every theme statement matter to the customer. Don't write to please yourself. Don't write to please your executives. Write to please the customer. If your themes don't matter to the customer, then you don't matter to the customer. Focus on results, benefits, and what the customer will get or can expect from you. Don't just have approaches that give the customer what they asked for. Deliver results and benefits that exceed their expectations. Ordinary themes are a sign that the company doesn't understand the customer, no matter how much they claim they do. Focus on why you do things instead of what you do. This is how you show that you have judgment. This is where you demonstrate risk mitigation and quality. This is where you add value. This is how you prove (instead of claim) understanding. This is how you prove that you are more trustworthy. Explaining why you do things is how you beat competent companies even though your approaches are nearly the same. Make sure that your themes impact your evaluation score. The wording of your themes should match up with the evaluation criteria in a way that makes it easy to give you the top score. A theme that won't end up on an evaluation justification 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 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 criterion in which they can give you points for it. Exceptional themes must be optimized to score well against the evaluation criteria. Don't treat themes as something you should add to your proposals. They aren't the sprinkles on the top. Sprinkles just add color and sugar. Instead, treat your themes as if they are the proposal. Themes come first and drive the proposal, which becomes a proof of your themes. Make your themes decisive and not just beneficial. When you list your theme statements, they should add up to compelling reasons why the customer will make a decision in your favor. If they don't, why are you bothering with them?

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.