Carl Dickson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When it’s time to begin working on a proposal, most people start by thinking about what they should write in their proposal. Then they begin creating an outline. And that’s where they go wrong... A proposal outline tells you the structure of the document and not what goes into it or how it should be presented. While you can annotate an outline, that approach can't hold everything that needs to go into a proposal and still be manageable. When you use an outline as your sole planning tool, you inherently limit the quality of your plans. A menu is not the same as a recipe. Giving your writers a menu and expecting them to prepare a gourmet meal they've never tried before is a recipe for losing. See also: Proposal Outlines The same is true if you create a compliance matrix. That will give you a more reliable outline and a valuable tool for create a compliant proposal. And that is all. Compliance is not enough to win. A compliance matrix is a table that is used to match RFP requirements with relevant proposal outline items. A table can only hold so much data in so many columns before it becomes impractical. You can put the outline, the RFP requirements, and a handful of other things into columns. But you won't be able to address everything that should go into a proposal and how it needs to be presented in order to win. A compliance matrix is better than a menu. However, a list of ingredients still is not the same as having a recipe and will not reliably produce what you need in order to win. A gourmet chef will not beat other gourmet chefs without better planning and meal preparation. For proposals, it helps if you think about gathering all of the elements required to win in a form that enables you to arrange them into a proposal. Only then can you: Figure out what should go where. Ensure that you follow the RFP’s instructions, address all of the RFP requirements, and are optimized against the RFP’s evaluation criteria. Ensure that you address what it will take to win, in every place and every way that it is applicable. Figure out where and how to address your customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence. Ensure that you have the right offering and can describe its features and benefits. Account for the key points, differentiators, strengths, and things you need to prove. Provide information and key details proposal writers will need. Anticipate your need for graphics. Anticipate any limits, assumptions to be made, or issues in addressing the requirements. Provide a means to validate what will be written before you invest the effort. Provide a means to validate what was written when the draft is complete. Based on the subjects that need to be addressed, identify who you need to write which parts. Provide a foundation for developing the schedule. Provide a means to measure progress to facilitate proposal management. Avoid putting effort into documentation that won’t be part of the finished proposal. You need these things to successfully write a proposal. An outline, no matter how annotated, and a compliance matrix, no matter how many columns it has, won't give this to you. You need to transition from the compliance matrix and outline into something else that will guide your proposal writers to the winning proposal instead of expecting them to stumble across it on their own by making it up as they go along. A compliance matrix and an outline are just the starting point for proposal planning. They define the structure of the document, but are not enough to plan its content. However, once you have the structure, you can implement a methodology that will enable you to plan the content. Proposal Content Planning is a methodology that efficiently lets you collect what needs to go into the proposal and how to present it so that you can organize all the ingredients into a winning proposal. Once you know the structure for your proposal, you can treat it as a container and start filling it up. To ensure that you fill it up with the right material, we created a set of eight iterations that walk you through what to consider putting into your proposal. The idea is to: Create a planning document that will become the proposal, so that no effort is wasted. Ensure that you address everything you should by going through the eight iterations. Provide a baseline that you can validate prior to writing, and then validate the draft against. Using a separate tool from the outline and compliance matrix enables you to do better planning. It also means that your outlining efforts need only to focus on the structure of the document. When you connect the dots, what you end up with is a compliance matrix to organize the RFP requirements, an outline to organize the document responding to those requirements, and a content plan that organizes everything you know related to what it will take to win. The result is a proposal completely built around what it will take to win. An outline, even a heavily annotated outline, is not enough to guide your writers to consistently achieve this.

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

One of the key goals of the MustWin Process is to design your proposal around what it will take to win. It starts with Readiness Reviews to help you collect intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Then you need to assess the intelligence you've gathered to determine what it will take to win. This assessment gives you what you need to incorporate what it takes to win into your Content Plan and to turn it into criteria that can be used to validate that the finished proposal reflects what it takes to win. The tricky part is the assessment, because that is where you turn it from a concept into the black ink on paper you need to win the proposal. Here is some material we have extracted from the parts of the 25cess documentation that guide you through figuring out what it will take to win. It helps to look at what it will take to win from several different perspectives. Here are four different ways to look at things to help you assess what it will take to win: See also: Winning What will it take to convince the customer to select you? What motivates the customer? What matters to them? What are their preferences? How would they like the trade-offs made? What impacts their decision making? Do they trust you? What evaluation criteria and procedures do they follow? What will it take to fulfill their procurement process? If they have no budget, then there is no opportunity. The same is true if they need an approval they can’t get. Even if they have a budget and approval, their process has to result in contract terms and an acquisition strategy that are favorable to you. Customers often get delayed or even stuck as a result of difficulty completing their internal procurement procedures. They may not know how to proceed. What can you do to help? It helps to know their procedures for issuing the solicitation, evaluating the proposals, and making the decisions. What will it take to design, deliver, describe, and price the best offering? When you are dealing with the details related to preparing a proposal and are dealing with things as they are, sometimes people forget how important it is for the customer to want what you are proposing. Keep in mind that the right offering has to have the right price/value trade-off from the customer’s perspective. Having sufficient knowledge of the variables will help you to price your proposal accurately. Finally, it’s not enough to have the best offering. You also have to do the best job of describing it in the proposal and the customer has to be confident that you will be able to deliver as promised. What will it take to beat the competition? Most proposals are competitive. Even if there are no other bidders, you are still competing against doing nothing. Your proposal must not only be great, it must be better than all the others. Don’t stop at compliant, keep going beyond acceptable, fly past good, and reach beyond great in order to offer the best in all ways. Everything from your offering to the presentation in the proposal adds up to a story, and the story you tell must be more appealing to the customer than the ones that your competitors tell. Keep in mind that the customer has to trust you more than they trust your competitors for your proposal to have a chance. These four perspectives reflect the distinction between what the customer needs or wants, and what they have to do in order to make a selection. What it takes to win results from satisfying those two considerations. We don't mind discussing the theory and foundation behind our process. But all the forms, steps, diagrams, and tools we have developed to take these concepts and implement them are part of what people get when they subscribe to PropLIBRARY.

Most proposal process "best practices" fail in the real world. In the real world, some companies are centralized and some are decentralized. Some companies are authoritarian and some are consensus driven. In some companies the pre-RFP pursuit and the post-RFP pursuit are organized under the same leadership and in some they are not. Successfully implementing a proposal process requires understanding which practices are a match for your company. So how do you design a proposal process to survive in the real world? See also: Process Implementation In some companies, the pre-RFP pursuit process is handled by different staff with different leadership than the post-RFP proposal process. This makes it hard for one to define the process followed by the other, and really difficult to integrate the two. This is a major impediment to companies being able to start their proposals before the RFP is released. When we designed the pre-RFP phase of our process, we designed it to show companies how to prepare for RFP release. However, if in the real world you can’t get the people who track the pursuit before RFP release to follow the process, it also works as a proposal readiness gap analysis tool at RFP release. You can use it to assess where you should be and where you actually are in terms of being ready to win the proposal. Sometimes after you go through that a time or two and people see that if they are not prepared it will show, and the proposal process shows them what to do to be prepared, you may be able to gain some cooperation. When a process adds value (or simply works without breaking) even though it is not properly executed, an engineer might call it “degrading gracefully.” That’s a concept that we also built into our process for planning the content of the proposal. Sometimes the people working on a proposal have no say when they are called in to start working on the proposal. They may not have time for niceties like “planning.” So we organized our planning into iterations and put them in priority order. If you do all the iterations, you reap tremendous benefits. But if you only do the bare minimum, you still add value. The proposal content planning process shows you how to get the most out of the time you have available. Lack of time is a common theme in the deadline-driven proposal world. It’s a major reason why instead of true quality assurance, most proposals are lucky to get a single review. One consequence is that they expect that review to do everything and in many cases it ends up adding less value than if the time had been spent working on the proposal instead of waiting for review feedback. Also, in the real world, all proposals are not the same. A proposal on a five-day schedule is different from one on a 30-day schedule. A proposal worth a billion dollars merits more attention than a proposal worth a million dollars. When we designed our proposal quality validation process, we focused on what needed to be reviewed instead of how to do the review. This way you can group many things together into a single review, or have several detailed and specialized reviews, depending on the schedule and importance of your proposal. Different companies have different pain points. Their problems might be related to the pre-RFP phase, the startup of the proposal effort, quality assurance, figuring out what to say, developing effective win strategies, getting people to work together as a team, or any number of other difficulties. Most companies have at least part of the proposal process in place and working acceptably well. So an effective process has to work in both whole and in part. We designed our proposal process to offer the most value when it's implemented start to finish, because that gives you the best data flow. But it can also be broken down into components and used to fill a gap in an existing process or environment. If a proposal process has limited scalability or if it can’t degrade gracefully, then it is liable to fail under pressure. We are in an unusual position, in that we design our proposal process for use by a range of companies. But even within a single company, the circumstances that impact proposal development can vary widely. This is a nice way of saying that you have to be prepared for anything. And having a proposal process that can survive the messiness of the real world is a good place to start. More information about our MustWin process is available here. More information about the real world is available all around you.

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It’s not a certain style. It’s not a great layout. It’s not enough time to do proofreading or to have one more draft. It's not even what words you should use. What you need is to know what to write about, the means to make sure it happens, and some way to know if what was written is what you want. What you really need is to: See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Collect the right intelligence. In order to do the best job of proposing the best outcomes for the customer, you need to have an information advantage. Collecting the right information is as much about knowing what information to collect as it is how to get it. What you need to discover is what the customer needs to see in your proposal to reach their decision. Turn what you learn into something you can use in the proposal. You may think you’ve done a good job of collecting intelligence, but how does the intelligence you've collected impact the proposal? How do you turn it into black ink on paper? What should you say about what you've learned? How will it impact whether the sale closes with a winning proposal? Instead of just seeking whatever you can find, you should seek specific information, collect it in the right format, and assess it with the proposal in mind. Have the right goals and action items, in the right sequence. The information you collect should build over time. But only if you keep gathering more detail as you go. For example, customer contacts and relationships, positioning, competitive assessments, and teaming are all inter-related. You need to do first things first. Start at a high level and then get more granular until you can answer all of the questions your proposal writers will have. Get everyone on the same page. More people will touch the proposal than you realize. You need to get them all working together, sharing the same vision, and knowing what to do. Even if they are willing, this won't happen on it's own. You need to coordinate and manage expectations so that each person gets the information they need to make their contribution. Have or develop the best offering. Pretty words will not help if you offer the wrong thing at the wrong price, or if someone else offers something better. Putting more effort into the proposal won't help if you are just selling what you've got instead of what the customer really wants or needs. Knowing what to offer takes you back to collecting the right intelligence. Remember, only the customer gets to decide what's the best offering. Your job is to know what the customer needs to see to decide that it's what you offer in your proposal. Have a means to measure progress. You need to know if you are on track. And if you get off track, you need to know by how much so you can do something about it. You need to know before you run out of time. That means you need to plan what is going to be written in such a way that you can measure progress against the plan. Measuring progress requires more than an annotated outline you can check off. It means you need to plan your proposal content in a way that provides traceability from the Define and measure quality. You need to know whether the proposal is any good while there is still enough time to do something about it. But it starts with being able to define what the right proposal is. If you can’t do that, then you’re not even aiming at the right target. This means you have to have the quality criteria defined before you start writing, so that the writers know what target to aim at. If you do this, then not only do writers and reviewers work with the same set of quality criteria, but those same quality criteria give you a means to measure proposal quality. Turn the art into a science. Measuring progress and quality means being able to quantify it. Both can be done if you have the right definitions. Collecting the right intelligence and turning it into something you can use in the proposal can both be measured. In addition to gaining progress and quality measurements, you also gain metrics that you can collect across a number of proposals to determine what correlates with your win rate. Instead of simply going by the gut feel of experienced people, you can actually make decisions based on hard data. So how do you get what you need? That’s where process comes in. You need a process to achieve the things listed above. Most companies don’t have a pre-RFP intelligence gathering process and a post-RFP proposal process, let alone a process that’s integrated. Most companies don’t actually have a documented process, they just have a way of doing things that evolved to deal with the pain caused by deadline pressures. When we created the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, we based it on achieving what it will take to win a pursuit: Bring structure to what intelligence you collect and provide a means to measure it Ensure that what you learn gets incorporated into the proposal Put everything into the right sequence Get everyone on the same page Get the information you need to present the best offering Measure progress to ensure that everything is on track Provide a workable definition of proposal quality and a means to measure it Turn the art into a science by giving you a platform to collect metrics The MustWin Process is at the heart of everything on PropLIBRARY. Instead of just providing a template, it shows you how to take what you know and use it to win.

Imagine that when the RFP is released, the customer already knows you, and they trust you and your capabilities because you've demonstrated that you have insight into what can help them. You've shown them how to get what they need. Along the way, you’ve made recommendations to ensure the RFP doesn’t contain anything that would be a problem for you, as well as inserting some things that give you an advantage. Most importantly, you’ve gained some insight into the outcomes they are trying to achieve and what their preferences are. You have also learned who else they do business with, what they are happy with, and what needs aren't being met. You have an idea of who else might bid. You’ve given some thought to how to position against those potential competitors, and have turned what you know into win strategies and themes for the proposal. You've even started identifying the staff you'll need. When the RFP is released, you’ll have an information advantage that enables you to show more insight about the RFP requirements than your competitors. No one will be able to write to the results the customer is looking for as well as you can. You’ll be starting the proposal with a competitive advantage. You'll be in position to win. There’s a good chance you will have already won. Making this dream a reality See also: Winning This dream can become real. It takes some work. But guess what? That work easily pays for itself many times over by increasing your win rate. How well you do at becoming like this is what determines whether a contractor is ultimately successful or not. If you don't achieve these things, you will be stuck writing a proposal based on only the RFP. Instead of being insightful, the best you can hope for is to be generically beneficial. No matter how much you claim to understand the customer, your proposal won't be competitive with someone who is prepared like this. Your proposal will be based on them being even less well prepared than you are. That's not a winning strategy. These things need to happen If you put each part of that first paragraph on a timeline, you'll find that winning depends more on what you do before you start your proposals than what comes after. Here are six areas to focus on, with links to more information about what to do to achieve them: Gather the right intelligence. To have an information advantage you have to collect the right information. The number one reason why companies are unprepared at RFP release isn’t because they couldn’t get the information, it’s because they didn’t ask for it. You won't gain good intel simply by fishing for it. You have to know what intel to seek and who to seek it from. To get the information you need, you must anticipate what will be needed to write a great proposal. Have the right pre-RFP goals and action items to achieve them. Instead of waiting for the RFP, you should influence the RFP and properly position your company against the competition. If you don't have clearly articulated pre-RFP release goals, then you are just waiting and not trying to win. If you haven't reviewed your positioning before you start writing the proposal, then how will your writers know what points they should be trying to make? Have a means to measure your progress and ensure it gets done. It's easy to look busy and sound like you are preparing when you are really just waiting. Instead of preparing, companies have "progress" meetings that reduce their chances of winning instead of increasing them. If you always end up at RFP release feeling unprepared, this could be why. Show up prepared. To achieve your goals, you have to do first things first. If you want to get customer insight, you have to engage them early in discussions that they find valuable instead of making it all about you. If you want to influence the RFP, you first need to know about the customer’s acquisition strategy and procurement policies and procedures, so you can show up with the information they will find helpful in the moment they need it. If you want to form a team, you need to understand the competitive environment first. You have to anticipate the information you will need and collect it so that you will have it when you need it. Most proposals are lost before they begin because they start without an information advantage. Turn what you’ve learned into something you can use in the proposal. It's not about who you know or even what you know. It's about how what you know impacts your strategies and the words you put on paper to close the deal. If you collect information in the wrong format, fail to turn it into something useful, or don’t pass it on to the proposal team, it has no impact. A status report to The Powers That Be is not the same thing as instructions that tell writers what to do about the intelligence you've collected. Intelligence on its own does not achieve anything. You need to convert what you have learned into win strategies, themes, differentiators, and positioning that define the winning proposal. Have a means to collect and track continuous metrics. How well are you doing at collecting competitive intelligence? Do you start your proposals with an information advantage? How much is it impacting your win rate? Can you quantify your readiness to win? How do you achieve all of that? We recommend implementing Readiness Reviews to provide the guidance people need to effectively prepare before the RFP is released. Each Readiness Review has a list of questions, goals, and action items to be achieved. The reviews track the progress and the scores provide the metrics for continuous improvements. They help you do things in the right sequence so that they build on each other and also track whether you are trending in the right direction to maximize your chances of winning. The result of Readiness Reviews is that before you start the proposal you not only have a bunch of juicy intel you can use to write a better proposal, you already have your plan for how you are going to win. On top of that, being able to convert the review scores into metrics gives you a way to continuously improve and unlock the hidden factors that are impacting your win rate. Readiness Reviews enable you to quantify how well you are "getting into position" to win before the RFP is released and to refine your techniques over time.

How you get people in the habit of following a process depends on how you roll out or introduce the process to them. Most people like change to be incremental. Focusing on one problem at a time is easier to swallow then changing how you do everything from start to finish. Here are five ways that companies can begin implementing PropLIBRARY, based on where they see their biggest needs for improvement. You don't have to start at the beginning, you can start with any one of the following: Implement Readiness Reviews to tell you what information to seek and to provide measurable progress checks that ensure readiness to win at RFP release. They are designed to make the best use of the time available, so if you start ahead of RFP release they define your preparation goals. If you start at RFP, they assess what you know in order to progress as best you can. If your weakness is knowing enough about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment to create superior win strategies and you have influence over how the pre-RFP process is conducted, this is a good place to start. Implement Content Planning to provide a better way to figure out what to write. If you lack inspiration, or if you find yourself creating an endless cycle of draft after draft seeking to stumble across what should go in your proposal, then by introducing our Content Planning methodology you can learn how to nail it on the first draft. Once you start using Content Planning, you set the stage for Proposal Quality Validation, and quickly realize that you need Readiness Reviews to provide the right information to complete the plans. Implement Proposal Quality Validation to achieve consistently effective reviews. Most companies review their proposals. But most reviews have questionable value because the approach to the reviews amounts to rounding up experienced people and asking for their opinions without any structure or guidance. The MustWin Process uses Proposal Quality Validation to define quality and measure it. It achieves consistently effective reviews. When combined with Content Planning, it enables writers to know how they will be graded while they are doing the writing so that reviews become less traumatic. Because Proposal Quality Validation links the narrative drafts to the Content Plan which is in turn based on the output of the Readiness Reviews, when you implement all three you get a fully integrated process. Implement metrics and measurements to get scientific about strategy. By far the best way to implement the MustWin Process is to implement it as part of a company-wide metrics program and then change the reports used in executive level meetings to include the metrics. The MustWin Process enables progress and quality to be measured in ways that have never before been possible. Instead of talking in circles about the leads you are tracking, start talking about your Readiness Review scores and watch you win rates soar because people will have to actually achieve goals in order to have the metrics to report. Content Planning will enable you to measure the progress of writing. Proposal Quality Validation will enable you to measure the quality of your proposals. Track the metrics over time and you’ll discover things about what increases the win rate at your company that will surprise you. The biggest problem with this approach is that it is top-down. It requires the executive level to adopt the process first. Just wing it. If you jump into PropLIBRARY and start anywhere, you can improve upon the status quo. Even if you skip all that process mumbo-jumbo and go straight to the Proposal Cookbooks to speed up the writing, you’ll discover the way they are structured makes the writer think about strategies and approaches. Once you get them thinking about it, it’s a small step to get them to think about it in advance and start using Content Planning, or to start doing Readiness Reviews to help them figure out which approaches and strategies lead to the best chance of winning. You can go slow or go fast You can implement the MustWin Process all at once, or phase it in over a year or two. You can implement it on a proposal-by-proposal or division-by-division basis. It can also be used in centralized and decentralized ways, with a central group issuing plans or all participants collaborating on them. You can even phase in the level of process formality. For example, you might implement Content Planning with the Proposal Group taking it down to a certain level, and then handing it off to the proposal writers. In the beginning, you might provide some guidance on how to take it further and not force it. Once they are familiar with it, you can raise the bar and implement reviews of the completed Content Plans. Still later, you can add Proposal Quality Validation and/or Readiness Reviews. You can do this by raising the bar on a monthly schedule, with webinars and guidance provided each month, or you can do it by raising the bar after the completion of each proposal. By phasing it in like this you give people a chance to get familiar with it and build their skills. But this also pushes out how long it takes to realize the benefits from the process. In some organizations it might be better just to go all in and implement the whole thing from the beginning. You have to decide what’s right for the culture at your organization.

Proposal development is about taking what you know about the customer, the opportunity, the competitive environment, and yourself, and articulating it as a story that will convince the customer to select you or do what you propose. Proposals are won through a combination of superior knowledge and superior processes. Getting better at winning proposals means getting better at obtaining the information you need and improving what you do to turn that information into a written proposal. What makes a process superior is not the number of steps, level of detail, or even how many people follow it. What makes a process superior is the results achieved by following it. Since most of the staff working on a given proposal are not specialists and usually do not have a lot of proposal experience, they may not know what information to gather or how to transform it into a written proposal. A superior process needs to provide two things: guidance and inspiration. Typically, a process shows you what to do. But a superior proposal process must also show you how to do it. And this has to be built into the process — it's not something that comes before or is seperate from the process. Note that I'm avoiding the word "training." A superior process doesn't necessarily teach you everything you need to know. If it did, then we'd be able to create winning proposals with people who have no experience whatsoever. There is not enough time in the schedule of a proposal to teach people everything about the subject. But you can give them enough guidance to get quality results from people within minimal experience. A superior process should provide sufficient guidance so that an educated, experienced subject matter expert can follow the process without training. That doesn't mean training won't help them improve, it just means that they will be able to achieve successful results following nothing but the process, whereas without the guidance they would likely get stuck. A superior process will help you gather the information you need to develop a winning proposal. But assessing the information you've gathered and transforming it into a persuasive proposal will still be difficult, even if you follow the steps of the process. What proposal contributors need, in addition the process, is inspiration. In addition to knowing what steps to follow, proposal contributors need help figuring out what to say. That's why we added proposal section recipes to the MustWin Process Knowledgebase on PropLIBRARY. Once the process guides participants through planning the content of their proposal, they still need to write that content. The recipes in our Proposal Cookbooks help inspire them regarding what to write. The process identifies the context, or what matters about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, so that when they work with the recipes, the combination gives them both the superior knowledge and the process they need to win. If you want to improve your win rate and the quality of proposals at your organization, think about how to achieve superior knowledge and processes. Then think about how to guide and inspire people to gather that knowledge and turn it into a winning proposal.

I had a discussion about an upcoming implementation of the MustWin Process at a large company that is one of our Corporate Members. The company has multiple divisions and well over 10,000 employees. It’s a non-trivial rollout. But we have their head of business development and head of proposals as sponsors. The biggest problem you face in a process rollout like this is user acceptance. It’s even worse when there are multiple divisions involved that over time have developed their own ways of doing things. You’re not just asking them to do something new (new process), but to give something up (their own way of doing things). And since it’s directly linked to the growth and success of their division, it can be really difficult to convince them to adopt a new process. Even if it’s a better way of doing things, you face user acceptance challenges, and if they're serious enough, they can lead to process implementation failure. Distribution of materials and training help reduce the barriers, but are usually not enough to win them over heart and soul. That’s when I had an idea that will make a huge difference: metrics. We tend to treat metrics as a beneficial side effect of implementing our MustWin process, kind of like a special bonus that comes with the process. But in this case, metrics are going to be the glue that makes everything work. Metrics will be vital because they are going to become part of the reporting system used in the company. The way our pre-RFP Readiness Reviews are set up makes it easy to quantify the review results at the individual question level as well as at the review level. We did that on purpose to make progress towards being ready for RFP release measurable. The numbers from the measurements can be formatted as a matrix and tracked using spreadsheets. They can be averaged in total giving you a single number that rates your readiness at each stage, or averaged by category (i.e., customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence gathering) to show where you have weaknesses. When senior managers and executives meet to review the status of pursuits, we’re going to modify the format of the reports to include the readiness metrics. Instead of just listing opportunities and subjectively describing their status, they’ll have to report their readiness metrics. In order for people to complete their reports, they'll have to have implemented the process. This is the secret sauce. You don’t convince them to implement the process, you convince the executives of the importance of reporting metrics and then people come to you to learn the process so they can complete their reports. In the short term, the reports will show their "readiness" to bid in a quantifiable way. In the long term, the metrics data will become an extremely useful analytical tool for bid/no bid, bid and proposal budgets, pipeline targets, and other key decisions. Only instead of having the metrics be a byproduct of the process, we're making the process a byproduct of getting the metrics they need for reporting. Instead of scheduling training, begging people to show up, and then hoping they practice what they learn, we expect to have people coming to us to get training in order to complete their reports. And in order to complete the reports, they’ll actually have to do the reviews. In order to show decent numbers on the reviews, they’ll have to be talking to their customers, gathering intelligence, identifying competitive advantages, and positioning their company to win. Life will become so much easier for the proposal managers when people start showing up ready to win their bids. And the best part is, when the win rates go up, they’ll know exactly which efforts drove the increase because of the metrics that they tracked.

Most companies know that to have the best chance of winning an opportunity, you have to start the pursuit before the Request for Proposals (RFP) is released. When you start prior to RFP release, you have better access to information about the customer, the opportunity, and the competition, as well as time to find out more. You also have a chance to influence the RFP. Finding out about the RFP prior to its release gives you a chance to tilt the playing field in your favor. Starting your pursuit early and ensuring that you are ready at RFP release is one of the most important things you can do to gain a competitive advantage and be positioned to win before you even start the proposal. While they put their best effort into it, most companies treat the pursuit as part of the sales process or some mysterious art that cannot be measured. The result is that most companies do not do a good job of taking advantage of the time before RFP release, even when they know about an opportunity in advance. They end up starting the proposal feeling unprepared and not being as well positioned or informed as they should be. Their win rates suffer as a result. This is often because they never define what "ready to bid" means. They don't have a specific plan of action for how to best take advantage of the time before RFP release, or any way to measure their progress towards being “ready.” Defining an opportunity pursuit process that ensures RFP readiness is difficult for a number of reasons: You don't know what will trigger the start of the process. You don't know how much time you will have --- it can range from days to years. The customer controls most of the milestones and they vary greatly from opportunity to opportunity. You will never be able to collect all the intelligence you would like to have. Instead of truly defining the process, most companies just ask for some kind of “Capture Plan” and then focus on their financial projections. There is a better way… The first step is to identify the information you need in order to be prepared for RFP release. Intelligence is generally broken down into categories such as: Scope of work Schedule Acquisition Strategy Evaluation Criteria Financial Points of Contact Competitive Intelligence Competitive Advantage Teaming Knowing what to ask is important, but you also need to have a process in place to ensure the questions get answered. The capture process is a disciplined process to ensure that you do what you should in order to win a pursuit. The MustWin Process lays it all out for you To track progress towards being ready, we divide the time before RFP release into four equal parts so that we can review the answers gathered at each point and measure the progress towards being ready for RFP release. Each part focuses on answering questions in the categories identified above and ends with a review. If you become aware of an opportunity a year in advance, you have three months between each review. If you become aware of it one month before the RFP is to be released, you only have a week between each review. The reviews ensure that progress is made in an orderly manner, without things being left to the last minute or forgotten entirely. Each review provides an opportunity to re-evaluate how you are going to get answers to the questions that you do not have answers for yet. The process starts with the discovery of a lead. The first part of the process focuses on identifying that lead. It establishes a minimum baseline of information that consists mainly of general information about the customer, their goals, your contacts, and the scope of the opportunity. After the lead identification review comes lead qualification. The objective is to continue gathering intelligence on the opportunity to determine how real it is, whether it is worth pursuing, or whether this is potentially a “no bid.” Begin looking at how good of a fit the opportunity is for your company and whether you have any gaps in your capability to do the work. You should also identify any competitors, and begin executing your contact plan. Once the lead has been qualified, you should focus on gathering the intelligence you will need to win the bid. In addition to gathering intelligence, you should also make it your goal to influence the RFP in order to change the procurement in your favor. The intelligence you gather should provide a clear understanding of what it will take to win and help you develop a competitive advantage. The final step is to take the intelligence you’ve gathered and prepare it for use in the proposal. This involves turning the data you've collected into win strategies, proposal themes and action items pertaining to the start of the proposal. The objective here is to do everything possible prior to the release of the RFP, so your team can truly hit the ground running. By this point, you should have a clear understanding of the project’s scope, have begun to develop your technical approach, and be able to articulate why the customer would choose your team versus a competitor’s. It’s also important to keep a finger on the pulse of the opportunity: Has anything changed that you need to make any final adjustments for?

Throwing out an existing process and starting over may be too traumatic for some people to contemplate. Because we designed the MustWin Process for customization, you can also selectively use certain parts. You can use it to cover a part of your process that either isn’t sufficiently documented or isn’t working as well as you’d like. Here are some of the ways this can work: Make sure your team is ready at RFP release. Most proposal processes start at RFP release. They also tend to start unprepared because they don’t address what you need to do before the RFP is released. The MustWin Process starts with lead identification and provides a process for ensuring that you are ready to write the winning proposal at RFP release. If you have a proposal process, but need a pre-proposal process to guide the pursuit, just use the pre-RFP portion of the MustWin process. Set standards for proposal planning. What items constitute a valid proposal plan? Do you have written specifications for each? If your proposal planning efforts are inconsistent you can use our section on proposal planning to guide your efforts. Replace storyboarding with something that works. Storyboards only work well for one kind of proposal and even then they work better for conceiving the solution than they do for planning the document. The MustWin Process helps you select the best approach to planning your content and gives you an alternative that works better for most proposals. Instead of calling for storyboards and then never actually doing them, you can replace that section of your process with ours. Have defined roles and responsibilities. You might know what everyone is supposed to do, but do they know it? Having written roles and responsibilities can help set expectations. Instead of starting from scratch, you can take ours and customize it to meet the needs of your environment. Provide guidance to writers. If all you give your writers is a copy of the RFP and maybe a style guide (that they’re not going to follow anyway), you’re just setting yourself up for problems. Our process gives authors guidance for completing their proposal assignments to help them avoid getting stuck on a blank page. Without making any changes to your process, you can make big improvements simply by putting together a proposal writers support package using our material (and anything of yours you want to add). Change how you do proposal reviews. If you are one of the vast majority of companies that can’t seem to ever achieve consistently successful color team reviews, don’t feel bad. It’s not you, it’s the approach to the reviews that’s broken. The MustWin Process offers a much better way to do proposal reviews that is based on IV&V (Independent Verification and Validation) techniques. Instead of punishing yourself by going through yet another proposal with a broken review process, there is a way out. Replace the review process with one that works. The MustWin Process tells you how. Use checklists. Instead of replacing part of your process or adding a new component, you may be able to improve your process simply by using one or more of the 16 checklists built into the MustWin Process. Track metrics and measurements. The MustWin Process makes tracking metrics and measurements easy. Over time it enables you to really understand what impacts your chances of winning. Our process includes not one but two appendices that deal with metrics and measurements. If you are looking to establish a real process of continuous improvement, the advice it offers will be invaluable.