Carl Dickson

Even when you can’t think of any differentiators, you can still show insight. And if you can’t do that, all you have left is to win based on a lower price. If you have no insight and your competitors do, maybe you shouldn’t bid. What is insight and why does it matter in proposals? See also: Differerntiation Insights are the realizations you have that show the customer you not only have a deeper understanding than your competitors, but that you know how to deliver better results. Your insights can lead to a better offering, better win strategies, or better pricing. But even when the customer forces everyone to bid the exact same thing, your insights can make the difference between winning and losing. In fact, that’s when you need them the most, because your insights may be the most important difference between you and your competitors. Insight is winning by being smarter. Even if you don’t know as much as someone else. How does insight become a differentiator? Results that matter. When the customer has told you exactly what to do or deliver and everyone will have the same approach and deliver the same results, showing insight about why the results matter may show that you know best not only how to achieve those results, but why to achieve them. Proving understanding. When the customer asks vendors to describe their understanding, it’s a safe bet that 100% of the vendors responding will claim that they understand. Instead of being one of them or focusing on your experience (which is not the same as understanding and is what most will do), try showing insight about why you do things and why you’ve proposed doing things the way that you have. The reasons why you do things will do more to prove your understanding than any claims. Earning trust. We all know from personal experience that customers prefer to buy from vendors they trust. But how do you prove that you are trustworthy in a proposal? Your insights can demonstrate that you have good judgment. Your insights can show that you are prepared, capable, and reliable far better than your claims about it. Examples! Here are a few, simple ways that insight can transform a proposal section from something routine and ignored into something the customer will pay attention to: When companies write about communication, they write about the tools they use, the frequency, topics, etc. This does nothing to prevent miscommunication, or prove that you will communicate as promised during a moment of need. However, showing insight regarding how communication can prevent problems or keep them from getting worse, innovative ways you’ve built communications into your everyday processes and procedures, or which forms of communication actually get used by people will do more to make you look credible than saying you have regular meetings in Zoom. Instead of talking about the same best practices that everyone else does, try showing some insight into which parts have the most impact on success. Instead of just talking about fulfilling the requirements, try talking about the impact you will have on all the stakeholders, including the ones you may never directly interact with. Don’t just show you know how to do the work. Show that you will do the work in ways that help everyone impacted. Instead of just describing what you are proposing, try explaining why you made the choices you made in order to select what you did as your offering. Instead of just showing the steps in your recruiting process, try talking about what recruiting challenges will be the most significant for this project. How does insight defeat the competition? Winning proposals requires more than just saying good things. It requires outscoring your competitors. Here’s how to leverage insight to do just that: Set yourself as the standard that everyone else gets compared to. When you show insight regarding why you do things and what the impact will be, you show that you know the best way to accomplish the project goals. Once the customer finds the best, everything else they read gets compared to that anchor point to determine if it is still the best. You remain in the front of their mind, even when they consider the proposals submitted by others. Ghosting the competition. In addition to explaining why you do things, you can also explain why you don’t do things the way your competitors to. You can position their approaches as inferior. Your insights about the problems with their approaches can help the customer understand why not to score them highly. Strengths. An insight that isn’t obvious that can positively impact the outcome is a strength. Even when the nature of the RFP means there are no differentiators, your insights can turn doing the same thing as everyone else into a strength for you that they did not score. Do you need to know the customer to show insight? If you are trying to show insights about the customer, such as their preferences and the reasons for them, you need to know the customer well enough to have those insights. But insights don’t have to be based on having a special customer awareness. You can also show insight by talking about what matters: What matters about your approaches, management, or experience? What matters about risk, quality, or performance? What matters about fulfilling the requirements, pricing, or evaluating the proposals the customer receives? What will impact the outcome of the project? What should the customer care about, consider, or be concerned about? What should the customer prefer? Becoming insightful Something matters about every single consideration that goes into creating a proposal. You just have to have the insight to see it. Cultivate insight. It’s not a process. It's a way of looking at things. It’s more like a dedication to considering things from many perspectives. It helps to have a culture that reinforces that particular kind of dedication. On second thought, only put as much effort into it as you think you need to. How well do you think you’ll do against competitors who put it at the top of their priority list?

Get people the inputs they need We wrote about converting the pre-RFP pursuit process into question-and-answer forms, and then using those forms to provide proposal input even when you start at RFP release, for more than a decade before we built MustWin Now. MustWin Now takes that concept and enables you to gather the inputs proposal writers will need and map them right into proposal sections and assignments. But the original concept remains. Great proposal writing requires input. If you want people to write based on: See also: MWN PM Customer awareness Positioning your company and offering in advantageous ways Making and proving points that support your win strategies Presenting things in effective ways Then you need a way to gather the information, decide what writers should do about it, and then deliver the guidance to them. Otherwise, they’ll just make something up that they think is good to fill the gap. Doing this has a major impact on your competitiveness. MustWin Now makes it much easier to do since it handles the production and logistics for you. Just answer the questions in the Proposal Input Forms, use the Win Strategies Tool to identify what writers should do about the input, and then map the instructions to the proposal outline using drag and drop. Map everything to the outline All those great ideas and details that everyone has will evaporate into smoke if they aren't mapped to the proposal outline, tracked, and driven into the document. Even if you don’t use the structure provided by the Proposal Input Forms, MustWin Now enables you to enter ad hoc information and insights and map them to the proposal outline so they become part of individual proposal assignments. My favorite way to use this is during proposal strategy and discussion meetings. Instead of having to publish action items lists after the meeting, I’ve been able to capture them during the meetings so that when people get back to their desks, they are already part of their assignments. During proposal development, if it’s not tied to the proposal outline, it’s much hard to assign and track. Even if it is mapped to the proposal outline, if it’s not a documented part of the proposal assignment, it may not happen. MustWin Now streamlines this so well it just happens. Drive your messaging into the proposal There are a lot of things you want to accomplish in a great proposal. A quick read of PropLIBRARY proves this and can leave you feeling overwhelmed. A little structure goes a long way. And that’s what MustWin Now provides. It gives you a way to implement all your good ideas and best practices in an easy and streamlined way. Let’s say that in your next proposal, you want your writers to focus on these six areas for improvement: Introducing by talking about what the customer will get Proof instead of claims Differentiators Writing from the customer’s perspective Showing understanding through results Talking about what matters If you call a meeting and tell this to everyone the impact on the proposal will be minimal. It’s too much to remember when you’ve got the RFP in front of you and you're trying to address the instructions, requirements, and evaluation criteria. The way this works in MustWin Now starts with mapping the RFP requirements to the proposal outline. The result is that the full text of the requirements show up in each proposal section. Then you can add instructions to each proposal section that say things like: Introduce this section by explaining what the customer will get, written from the customer’s perspective. Show understanding by linking what we do to the results or benefits our approach delivers. Focus on what matters or what should matter to the customer about what we’re talking about. Prove that our approach delivers these benefits to substantiate the section introduction. Make sure our approach is differentiated. Put this in every section. This only takes a few minutes. Better yet, tailor it to each section to give each writer some details to work with based on the proposal input forms, win strategies, etc. Ask questions, collaborate, interpret the RFP, and solve problems Surfacing issues before it’s too late is critical to proposal management. Doing this manually involves frequent meetings and countless emails. MustWin Now puts a quick and easy form on every page to make it easy for people to ask questions, report problems, collaborate on the proposal, figure out how to interpret the RFP, and track it all so you can solve the problems. The goal is to make sure proposal writers don’t stall or cut corners because of unanswered questions or issues. Make it personal Some people need to see everything and live, eat, and breathe every part of the proposal. Some just want to do their assignment(s) and go home. That’s why we added dashboards in MustWin Now so proposal writers can easily filter assignments and issues and focus on what they need to in that moment.

When the customer reads your proposal there are many reasons they might decide your proposal is their best alternative and select it for award. The goal of proposal writing is to enable them to reach a conclusion in your favor. Some of the reasons they might do this include: See also: Winning They can trust you to deliver as promised better than any alternative You know what needs to be done and how to do it better than any alternative You bring lower odds of failure or problems than any alternative You are ready to start when they need you to and able to deliver by when they need it Qualifications and experience that enable you to achieve the best outcomes for them You have the most resources You know how to overcome the challenges better than any alternative You bring the most insight into what matters and how to accomplish their goals You have the most strengths and the fewest weaknesses You offer the best value or the lowest price, depending on their preference You have something no one else has that they want They see how to give you the top evaluation score All of these require that they see what they need to reach that conclusion. When I review proposals what I usually see is… What the customer will conclude when they read your proposal depends on what they see. Here is what I usually see when I review proposals for companies: A lot of claims. Often about what the company thinks their strengths are. What I don’t see enough of are proof points. Often the strengths claimed are the exact same strengths everyone else bidding will claim. A lot of description. Usually about the company, its qualifications, and its experience. What I don’t see enough of are the reasons why those details matter or will impact the customer or the project outcome. A lot about what you will do or deliver. This usually covers the proposed approaches and things that will be done to fulfill the RFP requirements. What I don’t see enough of are the reasons why the company has chosen to do things that way and how that makes their approaches deliver better outcomes. Learn how to read your proposals Now read your proposal like a proposal evaluator instead of someone trying to point out everything great about themselves. Read your proposal like someone who depends on getting what they need and has to reach a decision about which proposal to select. This is important if you want to see things the way a proposal evaluation will. What you want the evaluator to see is: Proof points that support your strengths. Better yet, strengths that are differentiated, with a solid rationale for them, that prove that they deliver better outcomes. A minimum of description detail and more about why they matter and how you will leverage them to do things better than anyone else bidding. Being able to do what the customer asked does not make you their best alternative. Delivering the best outcome does. While you need to demonstrate that you can credibly fulfill the requirements to be considered, you really must prove you can deliver the best outcome to win. These are the things that will enable them to reach the conclusion that they should select your proposal. If you want them to see these things, you need to change the focus of your proposal writing. What you need to be able to give the evaluators what they need The process of preparing a proposal is not a production process. It is a process that starts by discovering what it will take to win, figuring out how to structure a document that enables the customer to select your proposal, planning not only what to write but how to write it, performing the actual writing, conducting quality validation to ensure that what got written reflects what it will take to win, then performing final production and submission. This is the full scope of the MustWin Process and what our MustWin Now software supports. Whether the proposal is small or large, all of this needs to be done. And done better than your competitors do it. If you are only doing a single proposal, you may try mightily. If your company does a lot of proposals, then you need to structure things so that you accomplish them every single time. The return on investment for winning more of what you bid makes it all worthwhile. So why will the customer select your next proposal? It’s not because of how great you are. It’s because of what they see in your proposal. Will they see what they need to conclude that you are their best alternative?

We tend to obsess over the technical approach and treat the management plan as if it's routine. Yet companies have won major proposals by focusing on the management plan instead of the technical approach. How do you know when the management plan is more important? It depends on: See also: Offering design The evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria sometimes favor either the technical or the management section. When they do, it is an indicator of which the customer thinks is more important. Since the evaluation criteria determine how you are scored and whether you win or lose, they should receive the most consideration. However, the closer to equal they are, the more you can show understanding and increase the credibility of your ability to perform by showing insight related to the other items in this list. What is the customer’s role? Will the customer be managing things and in control, or will you be? If it will be you, then how can they have confidence that under your management things will go well? Remember, it’s the customer’s perception of their role that counts. If they perceive themselves to be running things, then they may not want you go into detail about certain aspects of management and if you do you might conflict with the customer’s perceptions. What is the customer’s experience with what they are procuring? The more experience the customer has with what they are asking for, the more they will have their own ideas of how it should be managed. The opposite is also true. The less experience they have with it, the less confidence they’ll have in their own RFP and the more trust will be a concern for which proposal they select. Can they trust you to deliver as promised? How do they know things will go smoothly, on schedule, and within budget? Risk. How much risk is there in performance or delivery? The more risk, the greater the need is to manage things carefully. Risk itself may need to be managed. Quality. You can describe your technical approach in detail, but how will you ensure that every important part is done correctly? If there are major consequences, you might want to focus on managing quality. There are other reasons to manage quality, including efficiency. Span of control. The more people and moving parts, the more management effort will be required. Are logistics a concern? Supply chain and other logistics considerations require management and oversight. Simple logistics may not be a problem to manage. But even if the project is highly technical, if the logistics are complicated, then management can equal or exceed the importance of the technical approach. Predictability. When things are stable and predictable they are much easier to manage. But when workloads fluctuate, there are many changes, issues surface unpredictably, quality varies, risks are difficult to identify and mitigate, etc. The lack of predictability can make an otherwise routine project difficult to manage. Staff experience and training. If your staff have a lot of experience and are well trained, they may not need as much management and oversight. New, inexperienced, and untrained staff need more supervision. A corollary to this is that projects with high turnover need stronger management. But the bottom line is that your insights about the staffing profile for the project should inform the priority you put on the management and technical approaches. Process maturity and reliability. Are your procedures written or do you make them up as you go along? Are your procedures tested? Are staff trained in them? Do they account for all contingencies? Do they address all of the issues in this list? Do they operate routinely? Are they repeatable? If your processes are mature and reliable, you’ll need less oversight and supervision to run the project. If your processes are new and untested, you might want to focus on reinforcing them with other aspects of your management approach. Tools. The tools you use can mitigate management concerns. They can centralize or decentralize, improve coordination, track issues, provide automated oversight, eliminate the need for quality control by humans, accelerate performance, provide customer reporting, and so much more. If you understand which management issues will be the most critical for project success and select appropriate tools, you can make management more than just a set of promises. Level of innovation. Innovation is usually perceived as increasing risk. If a project requires innovation, the customer may also perceive the need for stronger management approaches.

The more proposals the customer has to read, the harder it will be to get their attention and keep it. This is especially true when the customer defines the outline and has a page limit so tight you can’t use layout design. How to get the customer's attention in a proposal See also: Proposal Writing Give them a path to get their goals fulfilled (instead of your own). When the customer reacts with “That’s what I want,” you’ve got their attention. But complex proposals require more than just saying something beneficial sounding. What the customer wants is not simple. If it’s sufficiently complex, they may not know how to achieve what they want. They are looking for something more than what they asked for, often because they didn’t know how to ask. Provide graphics that show insight and a better way to get what they want. Graphics speak louder than text. They deliver more detail and are easier to understand. If something is difficult to illustrate, it’s probably even more difficult to understand by reading about it. If you have a great solution and you want to get the customer’s attention, show it to them. Don’t tell them about it. Show insight. This means providing graphics that literally open their eyes to new realizations. But it also means saying things they hadn’t considered that prove you know what you’re talking about and are the kind of company they’d like to work with. The more difficult it is to find tangible differentiators, the more important it becomes to show insight. Help them understand their alternatives. What makes you their best alternative? What makes all other alternatives worse? Go beyond claims and provide an analysis that proves your case. Give them the reasons why you considered but intentionally didn’t select those other alternatives. If you show insight while doing this, the analysis will hold their attention. Use a layout design that directs their attention to the good stuff. Layout design can be very effective to lead the eye. This unfortunately doesn’t work so well when the customer specifies a page limit so tight that you have to suck all the whitespace out of the proposal. Matter. What matters to the customer? What matters about what you are proposing? What else should matter to them? If you don’t write about what matters, then you don’t matter. If what you write matters to them, it will grab their attention. Be foolproof. A cynical reader will be cataloging their objections to everything you write. But if you show no weaknesses, and cover every contingency and risk, you might just win their respect. Along the way, their attention will be yours to lose. How to keep the customer's attention once you’ve got it Proof over claims. Proof points and analysis will hold the reader’s attention. Simple claims won’t. Proof points get scored. Claims don’t. Why. When you show insight or are discussing what matters, the reasons why matter. Why are you offering that? Why will it work? Why is it reliable? Why should the customer care? Easy evaluation. Proposals are often scored and not read. If it’s easy to score, then they’ll be able to find what they are looking for. If it’s not easy to score, they may not try very hard. Consistency. If they see that every section and even every paragraph starts off with an insightful point that matters, you’ll be able to hold their attention while they go from one to the next. If they reach a lengthy section where this isn’t true, they may zone out. Don’t just follow the seven tips above as things randomly occur to you. Build a structure so that they are consistently addressed to hold the reader’s attention. 3 things to avoid so you don’t lose the customer’s attention Don’t make claims. Everyone knows unsubstantiated claims do more harm than good in proposals (except for the people who still write them). But really it’s all claims that are bad. The best you can hope for is that the customer will not get offended when you sound like a TV commercial and will ignore your claims. That’s not the impression you want to make, especially if you're trying to get and keep their attention. Don’t make a claim and then try to prove it. Simply replace every claim with the proof statement. Don’t build to the finish. Don’t fall into the trap of wanting to finish on a high note, or end with an impressive conclusion like they taught you in school. You’ll lose the customer’s attention before they get there and they may end up skipping over your impressive conclusion. So put it first and then prove it. Don’t make it a claim, but do make it the point of what they are reading. This will give them a reason to read and the proof points will give them a reason to keep reading. Don’t ignore the customer’s perspective. Quit talking about yourself. The proposal is not about you. It’s about whether the customer will get what they want. Make your proposals about the customer and not about yourself.

People make the mistake of thinking that proposals are about promotion. They promote in the way they see all around them. Advertisements are full of claims. But their purpose is to get the customer to enquire to find out what they need to know. Proposals happen after the customer has expressed their interest. When the customer asks for a proposal, it’s the last step before they agree to sign a contract. They need all the information required to examine, consider, analyze, and decide whether to sign. If you approach your proposal like an ad on TV, you will be saying things the customer doesn’t want to hear and not providing what they are looking for. Think about your proposal as a decision support tool instead of a promotional tool. What does the customer need to see in order to make their decision? Should you tell the customer about your company? See also: Customer Perspective The customer doesn't want you to tell them how great your company is. The customer wants to know what they will get, why what you are proposing is their best alternative, and whether you will deliver as promised. Your claims of greatness, qualification, RFP compliance, experience, etc. only get in the way of them finding what they are looking for. They will make their decision based on how well you prove your case and score against the RFP evaluation criteria. A claim is when you tell the customer what your capabilities are, how great you are, or what you’ll do. Do you want a salesperson to tell you how wonderful they are or do you want them to prove they have a better offering delivered in a better way that will bring better results? Do you want them to claim amazing results or provide the details that prove it? Do you want them to say what they’ll do, or why they’ll do it that way? If it will be a formal evaluation, for example like you see in government contracting, the decision itself will be based on evaluation criteria and proposals will be scored against them. Will they consider your claims to strengths worthy of recognition in evaluation? Or will they simply be disregarded? Will the customer react the same way to your proof points? Will they compare your claims to those of your competitors or will they compare your proof points to your competitors? Which will affect your win probability? Which deserves the most page space? Which should your writing focus on? Don’t tell the customer anything. Make a point that matters to the customer, and then prove it. Do customers care more about your approach or the results it delivers? When the customer asks what your approach is to something, they won’t be evaluating whether it’s a good approach. They’ll be assessing whether it’s the best approach. What would make it the best approach? People, process, or tools? Results? Do they merely need to conclude that your approach is adequate, standard, and just like everyone else’s approach? Or are they looking for the best approach? What does the customer need to see in order to conclude that what they are reading is their best alternative? Will they focus on the details of what you do or will they focus on the results it produces? The answer depends on what they are procuring. Are they procuring your approaches or are they procuring the results? If they are procuring your approaches, then what are their goals? Will they measure your performance by how well they accomplish those goals or by something else? Does the customer care about you? When the customer is buying a commodity, they can get the same thing from many vendors. Do they care which supplies it? When the customer is buying a solution or complex service, they know that they can’t get it from just anyone. They need to know that the vendor they select is capable of delivering what they need. They need to be able to trust the vendor. But it in either case, it’s not the vendor that’s important to the customer. It’s getting what they need. Don’t be fooled when they ask you to describe yourself and your qualifications. They don’t care about you. They care about whether you’ll deliver as promised. Accept the requirements or explain how you will fulfill them? Does the customer want you to accept the RFP requirements or do they want you to provide your own response to them? The answer depends on what matters more based on what they are procuring under the circumstances they are procuring it. On a simple bridge contract being sole sourced to the incumbent, they may only need blanket acceptance of the SOW. But a services procurement can go either way. Do they want you to follow their process and procedures or do they want you to tell them how you’ll do the work? All RFPs say that you shouldn’t merely restate the requirements, but sometimes it's truer than others.

Over time, best practices become simply the way things should be done. They become ordinary. Best practices are not competitive. Everyone claims to follow them. The use of the term “best practices” no longer adds value or conveys meaning. Proposing to follow the best practices is certainly not a differentiator. However, best practices are a good starting point — if you go beyond them. The more your proposal is better than the “best” practices, the more competitive it will be. Here are some ideas to inspire you to go further. Take the best practices and: See also: Offering Design Improve the reliability, performance, efficiency, responsiveness, accuracy, accountability, etc. Whatever the best practices say you should do, do that plus something else to make your approach better. Remove defects. The best practices are designed to help you avoid defects. You can do better. You can do so much to fixing them after they have occurred. Try preventing them on the front end, or even designing them away entirely. While the best practices minimize defects, you can aim to eliminate them entirely by making it impossible for them to occur. Reduce friction. There are always inefficiencies, extra steps, unnecessary effort, challenges to overcome, limitations, and other things that get in the way and slow things down. They may not show up as defects or prevent delivery, but they are annoying. Often it is friction that wears away at the relationship between customers and vendors. Can you identify it? Can you eliminate it? Can you turn it into better results? Can you turn it into a better customer experience? Prove your claims. Best practices are typically claimed. If you really want to be compelling, prove your claims. Instead of claiming to "follow best practices," prove your practices are the best. Prove they get results. Prove that you follow them. Prove that you continuously improve them. Claims are usually ignored, but proof is compelling. Use better staff. Whatever staff your competitors have, provide better. But you have to prove they are better. That is not easy. Start by defining what “better” means. Most people rely on qualifications. But what customers really want are results. Reengineer. Best practices get stale. Maybe it’s time to drop them and reengineer something better. Explain the problems with the ordinary way of doing things. Then show that you’ve eliminated those problems with a better approach that starts refresh and isn't tied to legacy assumptions. Tailor. The best practices tend to be generic. One way to improve them is to tailor them for the customer’s specific environment and needs. A purpose-built solution is often better than just doing the same thing everyone else does. Introduce better performance measurement. Even if you do the same things, you are more credible if you measure your performance. Continuous improvement backed by analytics that come from performance measurement is far more credible than unsubstantiated claims of “continuous improvement.” RFP compliance is more credible when backed by performance measures than if it simply claimed. The challenge to performance measurement is to make it unobtrusive, or better yet automatic. Use better tools. If your tools are better, then make sure the customer knows it. Make sure they know what the impact of your better tools will be. Technology refresh. “Cutting edge” technology is stale five years later. Any project that hasn’t been continuously refreshed is likely running on stale technology. But don’t just offer new technology for technology’s sake. Offer new technology that will have an impact. Better yet, solve the problem of irregular technology refresh to prevent it from being a problem in the future. Get full credit for what you are already doing. Most contractors are already doing things that add value. They do them so routinely they forget to mention them. Make sure you are getting credit for all the ways you’ve improved on the “best” practices in your day-to-day operations.

It can be said that proposal management is nothing but problem solving. And if this is the case, then proposals are really about issue management. One reason most companies don’t have a written proposal process is that they are always dealing with exceptions. Most of them are driven by the RFP. This turns proposal management into an exercise in adapting to the RFP. Every exception and adaptation can be thought of as another issue to manage. Some RFP issues require asking questions. Some require deciding on an interpretation. Some require changes in sequence, format, or scheduling. It turns out there are many potential issues to track, figure out how to resolve, and then implement a resolution for. And not all of them are driven by the RFP. They are also commonly related to: See also: MWN PM Staffing. Do you have enough people to do the proposal well enough to win? Availability. Just because someone has been assigned to work on a proposal doesn’t mean that they are sufficiently available, or that the proposal is their highest priority. Capability. Do all the people assigned to the proposal know how to complete their assignments correctly and have the required skills? Questions. Even people who are knowledgeable and highly skilled will have questions regarding what to offer, how to position it, and what to do about RFP issues. Approvals. Sometimes permission is required or things need to be escalated. Will the desired approval be granted? Until it is resolved, every approval needed is an issue. Issues often surface when: Reading the RFP. You want to respond with diligence to all the requirements. But sometimes you just can’t quite figure out what they meant, where they want it, what they are referring to, etc. Planning. While issues can be surfaced by planning, they can also be caused by defective planning. Only reviewing the draft proposal is a mistake. Review your plans prior to implementation. Fulfilling an assignment. Every challenge along the way to completion is an issue that needs to be resolved. Conducting a review. One of the goals of a review is to uncover issues, especially the unrealized issues that could be hiding. Randomly. By their very nature issues can surface at any time and for unpredictable reasons. Be prepared. Add them up and you can see where proposal managers spend most of their time. This is a key reason why having a proposal manager take writing assignments increases your risk of losing. The more things competing for a proposal manager's attention, the less they will be able to do to quickly resolve the issues. The more quickly they are surfaced, the better. But surfacing issues requires effort. It’s important to not only be vigilant, but to make it easier for issues to surface than it is for them to hide. Every assignment is basically an issue to be tracked. Often with sub-issues. And each issue needs to consider: Severity Impact Deadline(s) Contributors and stakeholders Related items Relevant tools and resources History Tracking all of this will quickly exceed your ability to keep it on paper or on a whiteboard. You can use the above to build a spreadsheet for proposal issue tracking. But you’ll quickly run into challenges: Either too many people have access to make changes to the spreadsheet, or not enough people do Either no one is updating their issues, or someone spends all day updating for everyone else You’re constantly scrolling to find what you’re looking for, either horizontally, vertically, or both It’s difficult to relate issues to the proposal outline and to other items like RFP sections and people all at the same time (spreadsheets aren’t effective for managing relational databases, although you can sometimes fake it). Honestly, managing proposal issues in a spreadsheet sucks. It’s the wrong tool for the job. The only reason to manage issues in a spreadsheet is that everyone already has them so they’re cheap and convenient because they can be accessed online without development (although you’ll burn some hours creating and maintaining it). You could try tracking your issues using help desk software. Help desk software is great for tracking, but requires setup and won’t be able to link directly to the proposal outline, RFP, proposal content plan, etc. In the last major upgrade to MustWin Now, we built in issue tracking to provide a proposal management layer on top of the planning and execution tools. We converted the spreadsheet formats we had used forever into a relational database and then hid that behind a web-based interface to make it even more convenient to use. In MustWin Now Issues are easily reported no matter what you are doing in the tool. Issues get automatically rolled up into dashboard views that tell people what they need to know in that moment. For example, what are the issues related to capture, the proposal outline, content planning, or writing? Issues can also be filtered to be specific and enable working on issues as a process of elimination. We filter by user (my issues, issues that impact me, other issues), status, severity, impact, and more. Every issue can be related to anything else on the proposal that’s relevant and is just one click away. Issues related to the RFP can show the full text. Issues related to phases, assignments, people, etc., can all take you there. The result is improved situational awareness, faster issue resolution, and elimination of issues that get worse because they weren’t tracked.

Solutioning is figuring out what to offer the customer to solve their problem or address their need. However, in practice, it really involves incorporating subject matter expertise to figure out what to propose. While the term implies creating the solution for proposals that address customer problems, it is similar to systems architecting or offering design. We’re using the term solutioning to cover all of them just to keep it simple. Solutioning may not be needed in every proposal. Sometimes the customer tells you exactly what you should propose. Some RFPs specifically ask for solutions to problems. Others ask for approaches to achieve the customer’s goals. The more complex, technical, or uncertain things get, the more likely you’ll need help from a specialist who can solve what to offer. How to tell when you need solutioning See also: Technical Approach Here are some signs that you need solutioning prior to proposal writing. Does the RFP tell you: How many people to bid? What the level of effort will be? Everything that your staff should do? Desired quality standards, but not how to achieve them? About problems the customer has with an expectation that you will propose how to solve them? Or does the RFP tell you what to accomplish but not: What approaches to take? How much effort will be required? How trade-offs should be made? If the RFP does not give you the answers, then the customer expects you to provide a solution that does. The more technically challenging the requirement, the more subject matter expert (SME) participation you’ll need. Another consideration is that the SMEs are often the ones who will be performing the work and are stakeholders in ensuring that what gets proposed is feasible. Even if you think you know what should be offered, it might be a good idea to involve the stakeholders. Solutioning and technical proposal writing are not the same While there are some SMEs who can do proposal writing, no one should do solutioning by writing about it. Figuring out your solution or what you plan to offer by writing about it is not only bad engineering, it’s a recipe for proposal disaster. If you don’t figure out what to offer and validate it before you start writing, you condemn yourself to re-write after re-write based on every change to your offering in search of something that will win. It never comes because you run out of time. Solutioning by writing about it can ruin a perfectly winnable proposal. Solutioning should be completed and validated before you start writing your technical approaches. This means that once you think you have a solution, you should have it reviewed to make sure it's what the company thinks will win and is what it wants to propose. You should do this before you invest in writing about it. Figuring out what to offer can be thought of as an engineering process. Or it can be thought of as a business process improvement effort. Or a design effort. Or an implementation planning effort. It depends on the nature of what your company does and what the RFP requires. The level and type of documentation required will also vary. When should you start writing about your solution? Proposal writing can start when you know enough about the components of your offering to describe them and you have validated that you have the right solution components. It usually does not require the same level of detail as pricing. It may simply require a few answers to questions or details that aren’t obvious. Having enough detail to illustrate your offering can help with both getting ready to write and with validating the solution. Working out at least a conceptual graphic is a great way to get started because it can show the components, what they accomplish, how they relate to the customer's needs, how they play out over time, and what the customer will get out of it all. A big part of Proposal Content Planning is figuring it all out and the relationships between everything before you start writing. Once you know what you will be offering, proposal writing can be done either by the SME or by a proposal writer. Proposal writing involves different skills than solutioning and not everyone has enough of both skills to do it all. Even when a SME is also doing proposal writing, the solution needs to be validated before writing starts in order to avoid unnecessary and risky writing and review iterations. What to do about it Make your assignments clear. People often assume that a proposal assignment is a writing assignment. This is not always the case. Consider: Someone needs to determine how the solution should be documented prior to writing. Less detail prepared at a high level quickly is better. It just needs to be enough to validate that the solution will not need to be changed later. This is what you should focus on because you want to avoid getting into the middle of the proposal and finding out you have the wrong technical solution. Someone needs to validate the solution. Is this a person, perhaps the executive sponsor, or is it a team? Who can decide that the solution is correct, competitive, and what the company wants to offer without the need to change it later? This is who you need to review and validate the solution before you commit it to paper in the proposal. A proposed solution might include a list of steps for an approach, the number of staff required, the tools they will use, the schedule, or implementation details. An assignment might just be providing details like these at the bullet level. What you don't want is paragraphs of text, at least not until the solution is validated. A proposal writer might be able to complete most of a section without input, but need answers to questions to complete it. A solutioning assignment might just be to provide answers to the questions. For more complex bids, a subject matter expert might be required to determine what needs to be done to be RFP compliant. Communicating and reviewing this should not require writing a narrative and should not take as long. How will you integrate the solutioning into the proposal content plan? Once you have a validated solution, it becomes part of the input into proposal writing. Ideally it should be part of the input or instructions to proposal writers. For this to happen the description of the solution should easily drop into the proposal content plan, and the timing of solutioning and validation should be synchronized with the proposal content planning schedule. Does all this really matter? Only if you want to win. Only if you want to avoid having your proposals turn into train wrecks at the end because someone decided late in the game to change the solution resulting in last minute re-writes without any quality control. If you’ve lived through a proposal delivered in the final minutes there’s a good chance it was because solutioning wasn’t performed and validated prior to proposal writing. I've taken to calling this the proposal death spiral — where each change to the solution initiates another rewriting cycle that concludes with another attempt to improve the solution and produces another rewriting cycle. This can continue without end until you run out of time and submit what you have instead of the proposal you wanted to have. Trying to figure out what to propose while solutioning by writing paragraphs about it is a primary cause of the proposal death spiral.

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Writing an RFP is harder than writing a proposal. And it’s even harder when you are not the expert in what you need to buy or are missing information. When customers and vendors work together, they can mitigate issues like these: See also: RFPs How to get the right vendors to bid. Who out there could add value or bring better solutions? How do they find them? Would they bid? Who will ultimately bid? If they put out an RFP, what are they going to get back? Should they get more vendors just to have “competition” or should they focus on getting to know select vendors (and allowing them to get to know the customer)? What should they do about all that? How to reconcile what they know about their technical needs with what they need to do to conduct the procurement. They know they’ve got needs, but they may or may not know how to get those needs fulfilled. But if they have to go through a procurement process, how do they translate what they need into something that will survive their procurement process? This is why it’s critical for vendors and customers to talk before the RFP is written. Customers should create opportunities for this, and vendors should seek them out. Whether what they’ve asked for is feasible. When the customer writes the RFP, sometimes they put everything they might want into it. But the combination might just not be feasible, and they may not even realize it. How much it should cost. As they put together the list of requirements, the customer may not realize what each should cost, let alone what it should all add up to. Depending on what is being procured, the rationale for the vendor’s pricing can be as important as the pricing itself. Inflexible RFP pricing formats can get in the way of bidding better solutions. And sometimes small requirements drive a disproportionate amount of the cost. If the customer doesn’t realize this, they can blame vendors for being too expensive without realizing they could have lowered the cost substantially by dropping a low priority requirement. This is another area where discussing the basis of the estimate and how to present pricing should occur in discussions between the customer and vendors before an RFP is issued. How to control costs over time. For many reasons, costs can change after RFP award. Controlling those cost changes is tricky. Sometimes vendors game the system. Sometimes requirements evolve as part of the project. And sometimes customers want things that weren’t in the RFP. No one knows how to best control costs over time and both customers and vendors are to blame. This implies that only a solid partnership between them can address it. Achieving a solid partnership between the customer and the vendor after award starts with an RFP that requires and rewards it. How to get the most for the customer’s budget without telling vendors what their budget is. The customer knows how much they can afford to spend. They’d like to get the most for that amount. However, they fear that if they tell the vendors what their budget is, all proposals will be scaled to consume the whole budget. But that’s the only way to get the most value for that amount of budget. Customers rarely know what to do about that. The better the customer understands how vendors will approach their basis of estimates, the better they can make this decision. The best approach may vary according to what is being procured, the customer’s desire for ROI, and the range of possibilities in what could be proposed. How to maximize ROI. Sometimes customers are flexible on the budget based on what they are going to get. They are willing to invest more to get more. But they have no idea how to achieve that, let alone how to assess vendor claims regarding it. What problems could come up during performance. If the customer isn’t the expert in what they are buying, they may not be able to anticipate the problems that a given vendor approach might run into. They can ask vendors to describe them, but can they trust the answers? What makes one vendor better than another. The customer may not know industry best practices or typical ways to cheat. They’re not in the vendor’s business. This translates into the customer not knowing what things to ask about or how to write evaluation criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you know your customer is going to release an RFP, you can educate them about these things. Tell them what to look out for. Better yet, word your recommendations in ways that can easily be used in an RFP. For example, if you know that some companies lowball their pricing in ways that cause the customer problems after award, give them the requirements language that will enable the customer to prevent the problem. What’s wrong with the RFP they just wrote. RFP writing is hard. It requires projecting unknowns into the future. There are all kinds of potential problems, and many of them are not obvious: technical problems, editorial problems, things that aren’t problems now but could be problems in the future, obsolescence, incompatibilities, inefficiencies, risk, leaving things out, disorganization, ambiguities, loopholes, requirements that get in the way of other things you want, etc. When you see problems in the RFP, you can’t assume the customer did it on purpose or is even aware of it. Pointing it out might help them. Giving them wording that could resolve it might help them out even more. But better than either of those is to help them get the RFP right before it’s released, because fixing it after release can be disruptive. How to determine whether vendors will deliver what they promise. RFPs invite vendors to make a lot of promises. They attempt to get vendors to substantiate their ability to deliver on those promises. But when the customer does not know how to do what you do, it’s hard for them to set procedures or ask questions that will verify that vendors will deliver what they promise. What might work better than what they asked for. The customer might not know the best way to get from where they are to where they want to be. They try to research it as best they can before they release an RFP. But once the RFP is out, vendors might not be able to propose an approach that is better if it contradicts the RFP requirements. This happens when the alternative didn’t occur to the customer. Customers concerned about this should actively seek alternative approaches before releasing the RFP. The challenge here is that vendors like to save their “secret sauce” for the proposal, don’t want everyone to be prompted to take their better approach, and may not discuss it before the RFP is released. The trick is for vendors to share enough so that their better approach isn’t ruled out by the RFP, while not turning their approach into a requirement for everyone. Vendors can help by crafting wording that opens the RFP to their approach without defining the approach or making it a requirement. How to compare one proposal to another. Some RFPs try to inappropriately force everything into an apples-to-apples comparison. RFPs like this are particularly susceptible to preventing vendors from proposing better alternatives or adding value. The more dialog between customers and vendors to enable them to determine what separates a good solution or vendor from another, the better. How different people in their own organization approach decision making. Some people want one thing. Some people want another. The chain of command can be unpredictable. What matters to the customer can depend on which people at the customer are participating in the decision, and how they go about making their decisions. The evaluation process defined in the RFP is just a tool. Different people may use that tool in different ways. And the person writing the RFP, the people who need something procured, and those involved in the outcome may not know how it all will play out. For better or worse. How to maximize competition. The customer wants the best deal. But what does that mean? The best tool they have is usually relying on competition. But in highly specialized areas, the number of companies who realistically can meet the requirements without disruption to the customer can be quite small. And introducing more companies is not always quick or practical. This leaves the customer caught between wanting to maximize competition and wanting to solidify its vendor relationships. They may not know how to get this balance right. How to balance the trade-offs. When you create a list of all the things you want and call them “requirements” it’s easy to overlook that each of them brings new trade-offs. We tend to obsess over the trade-offs that impact pricing, but there are many other trade-offs. Vendors want to make the trade-offs that the customer would prefer. But the customer often doesn’t signal their preferences. RFPs focus on objective criteria and requirements instead of subjective criteria like preferences. The best way to manage the work. The customer might understand the specifications, but not be clear on the implementation (and vice versa). They might not know how to validate quality or mitigate the risks. And sometimes asking vendors about quality and risk is frankly a waste of effort. They often do not understand how to measure performance or what benchmarks to use. Asking vendors to commit to meeting performance measures or benchmarks is practically begging for a half-hearted response. For astute vendors, this creates an opportunity and an easy way to differentiate. Talking to your customer about the issues before the RFP is released is the best way to mitigate these issues. Don’t expect the customer to tell you what they don’t know. But don’t let that stop you from discussing the issue and providing information that might fill a gap. Vendors who understand how difficult writing an RFP is should help their customers by providing information in ways that aren’t self-serving or aren’t specific to a single procurement. Complaining about the quality of RFPs after they are written is an admission that you weren’t helpful enough at the right time and just waited. Instead, consider changing your pursuit process to better anticipate your customer’s needs before the RFP is written. Customers who are trying to get past the things they don’t know and still get their needs met have to look for ways to get past their distrust of vendors so they can discuss issues like these. Many of these issues can be talked about in ways that aren’t specific to any one procurement, but can increase understanding and produce better procurement outcomes across all of them. When customers are seeking input ahead of RFP release, I don’t see enough questions that start off like “What would you do to...” or “If you were writing an RFP how would you…” Complaining about the proposals submitted by your vendors or differences after award is often just an admission that you didn’t do your homework or didn’t talk to vendors before you wrote the RFP. Instead, consider creating opportunities for vendors to add value before RFPs are written. Take advantage of them. They want you to. We’re all in this together. We want the same outcomes. Being adversarial to each other or opportunistic isn’t going create the best outcomes for either of us.

If your proposal messaging amounts to: See also: Examples We’re fully capable of doing the work because we have experience and bring qualified staff, so here’s our approach that fully complies with all RFP requirements… Then you're telling the customer you are merely acceptable and not competitive. Every other proposal that makes the competitive range will also be acceptable. And most will be better. Most will be competitive. Assume that every proposal submitted will meet the specifications. Some will and any that don’t are not your competition. The companies you need to beat will all have met the specifications. They will all have relevant experience. They will all be fully qualified. To get selected, you need to be better than all of the acceptable proposals. You need to be the best. And to be the best, you need to offer something more than mere capability, experience, and doing what the customer asks you to do. You need to meet the specifications in ways that are better. You need to deliver more value as a result of your experience and qualifications. Instead of writing your proposal like the example above, how about something like this: The reason our approach is better is because… Our experience proves this delivers better results. Here is an example… We don’t just simply hire the same qualified staff out of the same labor pool as everyone else. We support the staff we hire with better processes and tools that include… The combination produces better outcomes for our customers, like… Instead of featuring what is essentially what they asked for, just like everyone else, and instead of talking about the same things that everyone else will be offering, try featuring the extraordinary. Here are four ways to do that: Superior approaches. In addition to meeting the specifications, provide something else that matters. Better reliability? Faster? Improved results? Lower costs? Remember, everyone will propose the best practices. Best practices are, in reality, the minimum for doing things acceptably. To win, you must deliver something better. Experience that has an impact. Why does your experience matter? What does the customer get out of it? How does your experience translate into better results? What does your experience prove? Everyone will have experience. Make sure your experience has the most impact. Better results. If you provide services, you provide people. How can you credibly claim to deliver better people? This is even harder to claim when you haven’t even hired all the people you need. If your offering is more than just your people, then feature better results delivered in a better way. Proof instead of claims. Everyone makes the same claims. You may feel like your claims are better deserved, but one unsubstantiated claim is just as good as another. Besides, customers ignore them. All of them. You never hear them mentioned during debriefs or showing up on evaluation forms. What does get scored? Proof points. Every time you write a claim, replace it with a proof point. Doing this alone can greatly improve your win rate. It will transform your proposal from being ordinary to being full of substance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen companies who were confident in their ability to win write a pleasant sounding but hopelessly ordinary proposal. You are what the customer sees and not what you believe yourself to be. Learn to see your proposals the way your customer will see your proposals. Then learn to be extraordinary.

This surprised me, so I thought I’d share. I’ve published dozens of articles about how recycling proposal content can hurt your win rate more than any possible cost savings it provides. Then I stumbled on this quick and easy proof: Take 10% of txe litters in a documgnt and replqce them w&th gprbage or intertional typos. Then, tome how lonk it taker you to fnx all the tipos. The imterestIng thing is tkat the sintences with the typqs are 90% simalar to the ones wlthout the typoz. If yuur recvcled propisal contept is 90% simliar to what you nead for the nuw proposel it’s a faer comparsion to the levil of efort to taillor the boilerplate context. Osce you’ve cleened up this paragraf, than tyme yourself tipping it. See if “tailoring” the sumilar contempt is fast then writen when you need. The lessor to be leerned is…. See also: Reuse Similar is not the same. Not even 90% similar. A similar draft written for a similar RFP at a similar customer with similar needs in a similar competitive environment is not good enough. Because words. The words have to be identical to be useful. Anything in your content library is inherently written in the wrong context. It was written for the wrong customer preferences, with the wrong evaluation criteria, delivering the wrong benefits, for the wrong competitive environment. Even if it’s 90% right, optimizing it to win will take longer than creating something based on what it will take to win. You’ll spend far more time, effort, and cost creating your library and maintaining it (which is excruciating) than it is worth. It will constantly suck effort away from doing the things that do contribute to winning. But try the test and see for yourself. Why do people crave having a content library? People crave having existing proposal content they can use because they don’t know what to write. The solution to this problem is not to submit substandard proposals based on previous submissions. The solution is to build a process that discovers what it will take to win, inspires people with ideas, and then helps them understand how to quickly write a proposal based on them. Instead of giving them a content library to misuse, because you know some of the people who don’t want to be drafted into proposals or know what to write will not tailor sufficiently to maximize win probability, try giving them ideas for what to write about. Give them lists. Give them recipes. What are the steps in your recruiting process? Don’t write it out. Let them write it according to the type of recruiting needed for the future proposal based on the future evaluation criteria. But do give them the steps. The options. The considerations. The possibilities. Just give them a list of things that could go into their recruiting section. How will you achieve the customer’s objective? Teach them the who, what, where, how, when, and why technique. Maybe give them a list of possible objectives. Maybe give them the steps in your project management approach that identify customer objectives and measure performance in achieving it. But don’t prewrite it. Just give them a list of ideas. The previous customer may have high-level objectives. The next customer may want you to just do what you're told. The previous customer may have been risk averse. The next one might be seeking innovation. If you put your fulfillment of their objectives in the wrong context, it will hurt your win probability. But if your writers start from a list of possibilities, they can quickly determine what they need to write for the new customer. It helps if you’ve followed a process that is based on discovering what it will take to win, like the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. Show it to me Perhaps we should counter every time someone on a proposal says "but we've written it before" by questioning whether something has been written to match the wording of the RFP, the new customer’s preferences, changes in the instructions, the differences in the evaluation criteria, and the particulars of the competitive environment. Show me where we have that already written and I'll not object to reusing it.

There is a big temptation on proposals to get words on paper. The problem is that having too many words on paper too quickly becomes a problem when they are not the right words. The right words are very specific because a proposal doesn’t win by chance. Your proposal wins when the evaluators see what they need to give your proposal the top score. And that requires they see the reasons why your proposal is their best alternative. And that requires differentiation. And it requires RFP compliance. And that requires following the instructions and using the terminology of the RFP. And what one customer perceives as the most advantageous is different from what another customer will want to see. Add it all up and the words you need to win one proposal can be very different from the words you need to win the next proposal, even though the kind of services requested may be the same. So here are 11 key issues where you can see this in action. Most of them include alternatives that work better than starting from a draft proposal for addressing that topic. Before you start proposal writing, ask yourself: See also: Reuse What points do I need to make? Does your draft make the right points? Rewriting to change context like that can take more time than writing something that makes the right points. Be very, very careful about inheriting points of emphasis from past proposals because they could be all wrong for the new proposal. On any given topic, having a list of the points you might want to make, organized by their circumstances (Are you the incumbent? Is the customer seeking innovation or risk averse?) is often more useful than something previously written in a context that is not applicable to the new customer. What do I need to say to get the top evaluation score? If the old evaluation criteria emphasized experience, but the new evaluation criteria emphasize staffing or something else, you may have a similar problem. Every approach and every benefit needs to add up to the top score for this RFP. The start of every proposal should include strategies for obtaining the highest score and those strategies should be turned into quality criteria for proposal writers. What do I need to say to establish RFP compliance? When the words in the RFP are different, the words in the proposal need to change, even if you’re talking about the same topic. What you might think of as “the same work” will need to be described differently to be considered compliant. A change of sequence here, different terminology there, and a slight change in priority and you’ve got major rewriting to do to turn your draft into what it needs to be. What are our company’s strengths? The strengths you present should focus on what matters to the customer and getting the top evaluation score. The strengths in your draft might sound good in a generic kind of way, but are they the right strengths to feature in this proposal? How much will need to change as a result? Don’t just throw beneficial sounding strengths at the customer hoping something sticks. Hope is not a strategy for consistently winning. Like the points you need to make, having a nice long list of your corporate strengths with proof points can be very handy and improve your proposals. It’s much better than having to dig through pages of text to find them. How can we differentiate ourselves? Differentiation is critical for successful proposals. However, the way you differentiate should reflect the new customer’s preferences. If the previous draft was built around differentiators that mattered to the previous customer, they may not be effective for this proposal. Changing differentiators can change your entire proposal strategy and the context that everything is written in. Positioning strategies and differentiators depend greatly on circumstances. You can take a similar approach for creating a reference list as described in the bullet list about the points you need to make. Sometimes your differentiators are the point. How can we prove it? Claims are lame and don’t get scored as strengths. Proof points are what you need for the customer to pay attention. Data-driven proof points are gold in a proposal. But researching and establishing a proof can be challenging. Having a list of common proof points with the data supporting them as a reference can be much more useful than a narrative that you have to extensively edit and where the proof points might not be optimized for this bid. What is the best that we can offer? What was offered in your previous proposal should have been based on the RFP requirements, evaluation criteria, and competitive environment. All three of those may have changed. Is what you wrote last time what you need to win this proposal? Is it sufficiently strong and differentiated enough to achieve a higher score against these evaluation criteria than any of your competitors? Do you need to improve on it? Do you need to reengineer your solution? And how does that impact the writing? How should we position ourselves against the competition? For some companies, the competition is always the same group of companies. But if your company offers a wide variety of services, then your competitors may change from bid to bid. And if you are attacking an incumbent, that company will likely be different from the last time. When the competition is different, your competitive positioning should change. This impacts the language you use to describe the benefits of your approaches and the reasons why you do things. And this can be woven throughout your paragraphs making it difficult to change. What matters? What mattered about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment for the last proposal? What matters for this one? How much does the draft need to be changed to reflect what matters? What is the customer’s perspective and what do they expect? Different customers have different expectations. Some are formal, some are informal. Some are centralized, some are decentralized. Some are authoritarian and some are consensus driven. Some are innovative and some are risk averse. Some are specific and some are flexible. These differences affect what they expect from contractors when they evaluate the proposals submitted. The perspective your last customer had could be very different from the next. Is the draft written with the right perspective and does it fulfill the right expectations? What trade-offs were made? Every proposal involves countless trade-offs. But the trade-offs made for one set of customer preferences and circumstances could be very different. And it may not be obvious when reading the previous proposal what trade-offs were made or why they were made that way. It’s easy for proposal specialists to want to make everything a document. However, consider putting this information in PowerPoint, Excel, or something like Microsoft OneNote instead. For lists and ad hoc fragments, these can sometimes be easier to maintain and browse. The most challenging part of trying to tailor a draft is that it can be difficult to recognize which language was originally put in to ghost the competition, which was put it to optimize the score against the previous RFP, which was put in because it mattered to that particular customer, etc. If it sounds beneficial, your proposal writers might not refocus and tailor it, leaving you with a proposal optimized for the wrong customer and lowering your probability of winning. But the key question will be “How much does the draft need to change in order to become what is needed?” What I often see is that more words will change than will be left alone. And the effort it takes to change that many words through multiple change cycles ends up being more than the effort to write it correctly the first time. In fact, most proposals run out of time before they discover what it will take to win. To break the endless writing and rewriting cycles, you should start by defining what it will take to win and measure everything against it. Build your proposal around it. That’s the primary goal of the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. Whether you start from a draft, read a draft and use it for inspiration without recycling the text, or create focused lists of differentiators, proof points, etc., for inspiration, you should always be comparing the language to what it will take to win this pursuit.

I like to think of it as the “other people” problem. Proposals would be so much easier if you didn’t have to work with other people. If they would just do what you need them to do… At work we tend to think that working with other people is just a matter of management and leadership. But proposal specialists often (usually?) work with people that they have no direct supervision of. Proposals borrow people. And those people have other priorities. If the only techniques you have are management and enforcement, your proposals are going to be full of people problems. The only real people problem you have is yourself. You don’t need to make them change. If you change, then how they will respond will change on its own. Here are 8 areas where you can change the performance of an entire proposal team simply by changing yourself. See also: Successful process implementation Value delivery. All opportunity requires growth. Proposals are the primary source of growth for contractors. People need to get something out of their efforts. It doesn’t always have to be something for them personally. But make them aware that working on proposals creates jobs, promotions, and improvements for the customers and all of the customer’s stakeholders. Working on proposals often delivers more value to more people than people’s normal jobs. Make them aware of it. Allow them to be proud of what they are accomplishing. People shouldn’t have to work on proposals. People should get to work on proposals. Inspiration. Encourage people to think bigger. You don’t necessarily need a sense of aggression to conquer the competition. A better vision will do. A grand vision of what could be. Thinking out of the box and changing the rules. Going way beyond the routine. And then turning it into something completely feasible and even practical. Help people break out of their routine so they can create a proposal that is far better than what your competitors are capable of. Motivation. Sometimes people need a little extra motivation. Motivation can be tangible, but often intangible motivation works better. But be careful. Too much cheerleading can be worse than none. Lubrication. What are the sources of friction that impede people's ability to complete their proposal assignments? Sometimes it’s competing priorities. Sometimes it’s a lack of clarity regarding how to fulfill the assignment. Sometimes it’s emotional. Friction adds up and makes things grind to a halt. Apply lubrication and make the proposal run smoother by reducing or eliminating all points of friction. Expectations. People show up with expectations. You have expectations. Can they all be met? Maybe. Maybe not. But they do need to be clear. All kinds of problems lurk under the surface when they are not. The good news is that most of the expectations that most people have are at least somewhat flexible. By surfacing expectations you gain the ability to find workarounds that maximize fulfillment for all. If you articulate your expectations as mandates, you immediately reduce the room for compromise and innovative ways to maximize fulfillment. Encourage innovation. I like to tell people that I will gladly steal their good ideas for how to do things better. I want them to find a better way. I’d much rather be debating which way is better with people who only want the best than to be trying to force people to do things my way. Make it easier for people to be uncomfortable. Winning proposals means leaving your comfort zone behind in order to improve your win probability. Staying in your comfort zone is not competitive. This is true for you as well as your team. This does not mean to take stupid risks, but it does mean you have to rationally assess risks and commit to the ones you decide to take. And you have to do this as a team, because all will be impacted. Embrace it together. Revel in it. Reread the bullet about inspiration. Mitigate conflicts. There are going to be conflicts. Because other people have their own opinions and agendas. Approach each one not as an argument or debate, but as a chance for productive improvement. Mitigate your conflicts by anticipating them, preventing them where you can, and resolving them all. Start by defining the conflict. Then ask yourself if that’s true. You are part of the conflict. So own it by finding a path to resolution that makes the team and the proposal stronger than it would have been without the conflict. Enjoy the process because it is necessary and can be good. You do not have to transform yourself into a “people” person or learn how to be emotionally intelligent. I’m not. I’m simply someone who needs to get things done through other people against a deadline. Since I can’t just get rid of them all and do it myself, I have to make them productive. It’s good to understand management. It’s good to understand leadership. But it’s crucial to be able to make a team of strangers you just met of varying skills and personalities productive. When you do it all yourself, you can only win opportunities that are within your reach. When you work through other people, you can win opportunities of any size and complexity. And to do that, you have to solve the “other people” problem.

Here are some reasons why work on a proposal might slow down or even grind to a halt. You need to be on guard. You need to be on the lookout, always vigilant because the sooner you catch them, the better. Don't let them hide from you. And whatever you do, don't ignore the signs when they appear. See also: MWN PM Priority conflicts. People get pulled in multiple directions. Should they work on the proposal or do billable work first? Are people assigned to the proposal available to work on it? Sometimes priority conflicts might be possible to resolve if they are escalated. But for a variety of reasons, this might not happen. Days of proposal time can be lost to competing priorities. Days of proposal time lost are expensive. Multiply the reduction in win probability by the value of the pursuit to estimate how much not quickly resolving a priority conflict can cost your company. Lack of clarity. RFPs can be notoriously difficult to interpret. Maybe you can submit questions and get answers. But that takes time and you can’t wait. You can also lack clarity in other ways, such as what you should offer, what should go into the proposal, what reviewers expect, or the scope of an assignment. Sometimes a lack of clarity leads people to make bad assumptions. It can be as simple as someone assuming their job is to provide a solution that fulfills the requirements of the RFP instead of one that will win against your competition, simply because they thought all they needed to do to complete their assignment is respond to the RFP. Questions that people have. People working on proposals need to know all the possible variations on who, what, where, how, when, and why. For example, they might be unsure about how to make one of the hundreds of trade-off decisions that come up during proposal development. And if they don’t have a forum to ask their questions, they won’t get the answers they need and will either make assumptions, write around the issue, or just stop and wait. Failure to ask. Sometimes people don’t ask the questions they have. Sometimes they don’t report a problem. Issues are best surfaced early. But to achieve that you must overcome the failure to ask. Solution gaps. Sometimes the people involved won’t know how to fill gaps in approaches, capabilities, resumes, experience, etc. The more time that passes, the more likely you are to be unable to fill a gap. The worst gaps are the ones that look filled, but don’t actually fulfill the requirement. Discovering a solution gap may require changing proposed approaches, replacing staff, or even changing teaming partners. Sometimes an inability to fill the gap prevents further progress completely and everything grinds to a halt. Don’t wait until you have a draft of the proposal to search for, surface, and fill your solution gaps. Lack of subject matter expertise or input needed. When an RFP requires subject matter expertise that covers a range of topics, it’s not unusual for the person assigned to write a section to not be able to cover all the topics and to need help. Where is that subject expertise going to come from? If section completion requires this input, it may just wait until someone comes up with an answer. Lack of issue management. Sometimes people don’t know who to ask about a question or who to a report an issue to. Sometimes they tell someone, and it gets forgotten. Quickly surfacing issues, articulating them, prioritizing them, and tracking them to resolution is critical to prevent losing because an issue didn’t get the action it required. Lack of training or guidance. New proposal contributors do not automatically understand how to combine the RFP instructions, evaluation process and criteria, and technical and other requirements into their response in a way that will get the best score. They also won’t show up knowing the process or even how to manage their time. If they get stuck, they might not know what to do about it. Futility. It’s futile to ask for help when none is available, or for cooperation from someone who never gives it. Why put extra effort into winning a low-probability pursuit that shouldn’t even have been approved for bidding when it’s futile? When people feel things are futile, they stop reporting issues and focus on getting something on paper that looks good enough that no one notices. When people feel things are futile, they assume resolving an issue is someone else’s job. Futility is dangerous against a deadline. Heroism. Give me a proposal professional over a hero any day. Why try when you know someone who has ignored the proposal all along is going to come in at the last minute and change everything because they believe they are the only one who can save the proposal? Lack of approval. Indecision wastes too much proposal time. Are we going to bid? If that decision takes days, you’re already in trouble. The same is true of the proposal budget, assignments of people, review dates, etc. Every day lost to “waiting for approval” is a day that could make a huge difference at the end of the proposal. One of the key goals of proposal management is to avoid having people sitting around unproductive while the deadline clock ticks away. Sometimes they are waiting. Sometimes they are fruitlessly working around a problem instead of resolving it. It is better to surface problems early and focus on resolving them than it is to limp along. This is so important, that when we built MustWin Now, we decided to add tools to make it easier for people to collaborate without these issues getting in the way. We’ve made the Collaboration Toolbox always visible so that people can post a question or request faster than they could pick up a phone and text it. But we do it in a way that tracks issues to resolution. One of the things that results from this is that in MustWin Now you can manage your proposal as a process of elimination. But the real payoff is that when people get stuck, it’s easy to surface the issue immediately, ensure that it gets appropriate attention, and make sure it does not get overlooked.

“What am I supposed to do now?” That’s the question that people are often thinking when the content plan for the proposal is done and it’s time to start writing. They have a plan, but what are they supposed to do with it? How does the plan become a narrative? See also: Content Planning Box The closer your plan gets to the structure of the document, the easier it will be to follow. So starting from the outline is a good first step, but only a first step. To have a solid plan you need to show what each section in the outline should become so that they can see what they have to do. You want people to understand the expectations and not on their own separately make things up as they go along. Here are some tips for accomplishing this: Tell them how to introduce the topic and what points to substantiate. Tell them how to structure or approach the section to be written. Tell them what strategies they should use and what details they should provide. Make sure you tell them how to present things as well as what to write about. Along the way include what it should add up to, what it should emphasize, and how it should differentiate your offering. Help them pass the future proposal quality reviews on the very first draft Note that you do not have to know the details to guide someone else to supply those details. You can provide guidance in the form of requirements, or you can make recommendations. You can ask questions for them to answer. You do not have to know what to propose to make recommendations regarding what it should address, how it might be implemented, what matters about it, or that it should take into consideration the customer’s preferences. You don’t have to write their sections to help them understand what they are supposed to do about their proposal assignment. If all you do is give your proposal writers a copy of the RFP, don’t expect to get much back. Plus, expect it to be late since they’ll need to figure it all out and rewrite it again each time they learn something new. There’s also a good chance they’ll overlook things and misinterpret the RFP. Or overlook parts of it. How to make the transition using MustWin Now In MustWin Now, it’s quick and easy to provide guidance to proposal writers. Click, type, save, next. If you have time, you can include examples, attach files, and explain in as much detail as you want. You can go beyond a plan and give them a prototype. If you don’t have a lot of time, you can just jot a few notes down in each key section and move on. A little bit of guidance makes a huge difference. We like to use MustWin Now during the strategy meetings at the beginning of a proposal. Instead of walking out of the meeting with ideas but nothing tangible, we take notes in MustWin Now so that people leave the meeting with all their good ideas mapped to the document. They leave the meeting with a plan they can follow. We’ve also done something similar when interviewing subject matter experts. While we’re talking to them we capture the notes in MustWin Now. When we’re done talking, we’ve already got the information the person assigned to writing will need in the plan. Sometimes the writer is the one we just interviewed, and they can see how their knowledge, insights, and ideas can be transferred onto paper. Given a little structure, they often can take it from there and fill in the details. Proposal Content Planning is scalable. You can do it in 15 minutes. Or you can do it over 15 or more hours. You have to make the decision when to go from planning into writing, and that will depend on your circumstances, which vary from proposal to proposal. But even adding just a few points here or there can add tremendous value and have a major impact on what gets written. Keep in mind that when you make the switch from planning to writing, if you are using MustWin Now, your writers will have the content plan in one window and MS-Word in another. Will they know what to do next based on the words you put into your content plan? That is up to you to decide. But just imagine how much worse off they’ll be if you just hand them a copy of the RFP and they jump straight into MS-Word. Who can predict what you’ll get back doing things that way? Do your writers know what is expected of them? Have you defined proposal quality? Does your content plan's instructions explain what writers need to do to achieve it? Is it in writing? This matters, because everybody thinks they have defined proposal quality. It's just that everyone on the team defines it differently. Proposal content planning gives you the chance to get everyone on the same page. A successful transition from planning to writing means that the plan enables the writers to pass the proposal quality review on the first attempt. Writing depends on a reliable content plan. Even if it is a minimal plan prepared quickly, make sure your content plan is reliable before implementing it. Don’t give your proposal writers bad advice and start them writing against the wrong structure. The review of your content plan is even more important than the review of the draft proposal. Don't waste precious time by skipping the plan Give content planning whatever time you can afford. Add value and help your writers. Review the plan to make sure it is reliable. Then gain back the time you put into it when writers are able to work more quickly and produce better quality results. Having a plan for what to write and how to present it increases your win probability. Winning makes the time spent worthwhile.

See also: MWN PM A typical proposal has a lot of moving parts. More than most people realize. Hundreds or even thousands more. Keeping track of them all and making them come together before the deadline is enough to make your head spin. Most of what you’ll need to track to resolution will be issues and not just proposal section writing assignments. To complete their assignments, people will need things. Multiple things. Every assignment will need one or more reviews. Possibly with production support, which will have its own needs. Multiple needs. Every meeting will need an agenda. And follow-up action items. Multiple items. It adds up. Rapidly. Every assignment and issue is related to multiple things. One or more proposal sections. One or more RFP sections. One or more people. Maybe a deadline. Not all issues have the same priority. Risk can be higher or lower. The potential impact can be very different. Using MustWin Now to manage the proposal as a process of elimination In MustWin Now, we make it easy to report risks. The submission form is always present. We want issues to surface early. We don’t want people dwelling over whether to ask a question or declare a need. An issue reported is easily marked resolved. When an issue is reported, it shows up at multiple levels: The affected user(s) see it on their personal dashboards. If a proposal contributor needs to focus, they can work from their personal dashboard alone, fulfilling assignments and resolving issues. The proposal manager and others see it on the proposal-wide dashboard. This way you can get a sense for how much there is to be done and how much progress is being made. Within each proposal section, you can see what issues are related. This enables you to see what’s impacting section completion. Within each tool you can see issues related to that tool. This helps identify issues related to a phase of activity. When you look at an issue, you’ll be one click away from the people assigned to it, the sections impacted, the relevant RFP requirements, etc. You can also easily filter the issues on any dashboard, so you can see what’s new, what’s been resolved, what's past due, and more. At the proposal level, you can see who has the most issues, who needs help, what issues are the most severe, etc. The proposal manager can assign, reassign, edit, and manage the issue reports. People can also resolve issues. Easy issues resolve as quickly as they come in. Some take work. MustWin Now supports collaboration. You can resolve an issue and restore it later if you find out that it’s still a problem. Instead of a notepad or whiteboard, MustWin Now enables you to sort and filter issues in real time, with people reporting them directly through the tool. And through the dashboards, it makes communication about issues and collaboration to resolve them much quicker and easier. Issue tracking without using MustWin Now The next step up after notepads and whiteboards is a shared tool like Microsoft OneNote. For disorganized ad hoc notes, it’s a great tool. But it won’t filter and sort the way you need to manage a proposal with more moving parts than you can keep in your head. You can bring structure to your issue tracking by using a spreadsheet. This gives you some much-needed sorting and filtering. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are not relational databases. If you try to relate everything relevant to your issues, you’ll end up with lots of columns and redundant typing that’s difficult to keep up to date. Data entry and management will become a full-time job, and people will stop using the spreadsheet because it will grow too complex. You can create your own relational database. But then you’ll end up designing screens and writing code, when you should be working on the proposal. You can use “to do” list and help desk apps. But you’ll find they aren’t built with proposals in mind and the compromises will impact your ability to manage your proposals. Most people end up settling on spreadsheets for proposal issue tracking as a middle ground. They’re what I used before creating MustWin Now. With MustWin Now we’ve done the relational database work for you. Is it done yet? Everyone wants to know, “Is it done yet?” Is the issue resolved? Is the proposal ready for review or finished? You can track that with lists, crossing them out one at a time. With MustWin Now, you can see the lists grow smaller by contributor, proposal section, and overall. Each person working on the proposal can see when they have nothing left to do. And section-by-section, you can see when it’s done. Part of the fun of doing a proposal is turning the corner to where that list starts getting smaller instead of larger. And crossing off that last item is so very sweet. Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business Click here to start a conversation by email Or click below to get on my calendar to talk by phone

Here are a few dozen quantifiable ways to assess whether your proposal management function is accomplishing what it should. See also: Proposal Management Depending on your circumstances and goals, you might collect and review this data after every proposal. Or you might track it over time on multiple proposals to determine an appropriate baseline. If you were to implement all of these, you’d have a ton of data to track. The only way to realistically approach some of them is to use software to do the data tracking, and work off of real time reports that translate data into actionable information. Done extremely well, and you could use them to create a data-driven proposal winning monster of a company. But even if you don’t track the data with useable precision, you can treat these as a principles, goals, or targets. They can help you raise the bar on your proposal management from just doing things that you think are useful and productive, to having a rough order of magnitude way of approaching things in a quantified way. Some of these tips can be used to track personnel performance. However, first you need to explicitly decide what you want the proposal management role to accomplish and how much of it is distributed among contributors. Some of these are corporate measures, some are team measures, and some are individual measures. But which are which will vary depending on the nature of the collaboration on proposals at your company. Progress tracking and time management. Progress can be tracked by the number of content plan line items that have been addressed. For each review or milestone, what percent of the schedule did it occur at? For example, was Red Team at 60% or 80% of the available schedule? The more things pile up at the back end, the more time management needs to be improved. How many changes were made after pens down? Did the offering change more than 50% into the schedule? These are also signs of issues not being surfaced early enough. Compliance. Did you make the competitive range 100% of the time? Did any customer debriefs report a non-compliance? Surfacing and resolution of issues. You can also track progress toward proposal completion by the number of issues addressed remaining, weighted by severity. Issue aging is also good to track, as well as the percentage of issues aging by days, and the schedule days when issues were reported. This is much easier when you use software to report and track your issues instead of whiteboards. The combination tells you how long it took to surface issues, how long are issues sitting unresolved, and is the team being responsive to issue reports. Prevention of problems. Do you see a decline in issue reports over time? Do you see issue reports coming in sooner? Situational awareness. Do you see a decline in questions asked because they already have the answers and it was more convenient to access the information than to ask the question? This is especially true for questions like who is addressing what, when something is due, is something complete, are there any issues, and what should be addressed in a section. These are questions that shouldn’t need to be asked. However, you can provide reports, but if they aren’t easy to access, people will ask because it’s easier. Expectation management. Are they documented? Are they updated? Are they being treated like issues and getting resolved? Or are they expectations that can’t be resolved? Expectation can be treated like issue management and tracked. This can tell you whether you are surfacing them ahead of time or encountering conflicts because they were discovered too late. Quality control and quality assurance. Are quality criteria for each proposal defined? Are proposal writers able to use the quality criteria for self-assessment? Do reviewers use the same quality criteria? Could any of the issues reported have been avoided with the right quality criteria? Were all the quality criteria validated prior to implementation? Did any quality criteria require changing after being published? Was the document validated against the quality criteria? Was any self-assessment validation overturned by later reviews? Can you create a timeline (much easier using software) for when validation was performed at the criteria level? Collaboration and configuration management. Is access to information set appropriately and securely? Are people able to share information without conflicts? Are people able to access the information they need without asking for it? Can invalid changes be reversed? Can the proposal continue in the event of technology failure?

Proposal management involves doing a lot of different things. But the things that it needs to accomplish is a much shorter list. It’s easy to get lost in all the things that need to be done and the tools and techniques for doing them. It’s so easy that some companies build their organization based on those things instead of what those things should accomplish. Instead of starting from people, process, and tools, here are 9 things that proposal management must accomplish to be successful: See also: Proposal Management Progress tracking and time management. If the deadline for your proposal is absolute, then the first rule of proposal management is don’t be late. Accomplishing this requires more than just publishing a schedule. It requires tracking the progress of proposal writing and development in order to synchronize activity and bring everything together with absolute certainty by the deadline. Progress tracking should involve something more accurate than asking people how things are going and time management will be more than subjective reckoning. Compliance. The second rule of proposal management is don’t get thrown out. The proposal management function must deliver a proposal that meets the minimum requirements to be evaluated. While not ultimately as important as winning, winning won’t occur unless this is accomplished. Done well, and every proposal will make the competitive range and no customer debrief will ever cite a compliance issue. Surfacing and resolution of issues. During proposal development, people will have questions and there will be gaps in resources, the solution being proposed, and the company’s knowledge about the customer and opportunity. One key reason we need proposal management is to address these issues. Before issues can be addressed, they must be surfaced with enough time to resolve or mitigate the issue. Proposal management must implement the means to accomplish this. Done well, and the team will be not be surprised by any last-minute problems. Prevention of problems. The best issue resolution is the prevention of an issue in the first place. Preventing issues enables people to focus on writing the proposal. All problems that can be prevented should be. Preventable problems should never recur. Done well, and the proposal will look easy. Situational awareness. Who is doing what, when will it complete, and what follows? What contingencies are anticipated? What is the status of all of the moving parts that will become the proposal? Proposal management must accomplish a continuous situational awareness for everyone on the proposal team. Done well, and the team will have it without apparent effort. Lines and methods of communication. People working on the proposal should not have to figure out how to ask questions or get information. The lines of communication should be obvious and the methods should deliver the information needed. When this is accomplished, everything will flow better. Expectation management. Expectations should be clear, known in advance, and flow in both directions. Otherwise, conflicts will occur and dissatisfaction will settle in. When expectation management is done well, the conflicts get surfaced and resolved immediately. Expectation management does not mean that everyone always gets everything they want. It just means that no one is surprised or left with an unmet need that impacts the proposal. Quality control and quality assurance. Achieving proposal quality requires more than subjective reviews. It requires defining quality, enabling self-assessment, and validating that what gets produced meets the quality criteria. Proposal management is more than production or process implementation. It is also the application of quality control and quality assurance to the proposal effort. When done well, you produce the proposal you think is needed to win. When not done well, winning depends on luck instead of strategy. Collaboration and configuration management. How should people work together? On what platforms? With what standards and conventions? Proposal management should enable the team to be greater than the sum of its parts by enabling the members of the team to work together in ways that are frictionless. Done well, and people don’t have to figure out how to work together, they just do it. It also makes the other accomplishments easier, as situational awareness occurs without extra effort by anyone, lines and methods of communication are obvious, issue identification and reporting are timely and easy, progress tracking is effortless and continuous, and everyone knows what quality criteria they are trying to achieve. Plus 6 more things that are nice to have Don’t make the mistake of thinking the following are top priority items. They come after you’ve accomplished the above. But it is nice when your proposal management can also provide them: Inspiration and acceleration. Instead of leaving it up to proposal writers to figure out, it’s nice when proposal management provides guidance regarding what to write and how should they present it. It’s nicer still if that can be provided in ways that make writing go faster. Articulation. Optimizing your wording to reflect the instructions, evaluation criteria, win strategies, and RFP requirements is extremely difficult for people who have been drafted into proposal writing. It’s nice when your proposal management can help them figure out how to articulate things. Pursuit strategy. How should what you propose be positioned, taking into consideration the evaluation criteria, competitive environment, the RFP, and your strengths and weaknesses? Should this be left up to individual contributors to figure out? Ideally you should start your proposal with this positioning already determined and articulated. When this doesn’t happen, it’s really nice if your proposal management can help you get there. Training and guidance. The vast majority of proposals have a significant number of inexperienced contributors. It’s nice when your proposal management does more than issue and track assignments, and can help people understand the issues and what is required to be successful. BD/Capture/Proposal transition support. Business opportunity pursuit should start well before the proposal. Business development and capture efforts should provide input to the proposal. It’s nice to have proposal management actively participating in what form that input should take and creating process artifacts to make it easier to provide. Offering design. A major factor in what should be proposed is what it will take to win based on the evaluation criteria. And the information you need about what you are proposing will depend on the RFP instructions and requirements. It is nice to have a proposal management function that can have a seat at the table in deciding what to offer and guide the team to make the right choices and then provide the right information. And one thing we left out on purpose Winning. If a proposal manager doesn't have authority over who decides what to bid, what to offer, how to price it, and how to present it then they only contribute to winning and don't have control over it. They can’t be responsible for the win. How to best use this list All of these things can be used to define responsibilities. But they are better used for determining how to structure your team, how it should function, and what people need to successfully interact during a proposal. Most companies just leave it up to people to figure out or fight it out amongst themselves, often in unproductive, win rate reducing ways. If you figure them out ahead of time, you can watch your win rate soar. For PropLIBRARY subscribers, we’ve taken these necessary accomplishments and turned them into potential performance measures to take it to an even higher level.

A Business Development manager's job is to find as many qualified leads as possible. If you make Business Development cover lead identification through closing, Business Development will have to stop chasing leads when the proposal starts if they make it their job to win. Your company will see-saw between having leads to chase yesterday but none tomorrow because Business Development got sucked into capture or a proposal. If you want a continuous flow of leads, you need continuous lead identification and qualification. If you want to get ahead of the RFP you need to begin practicing relationship marketing. You won’t be successful doing this a few months here and a few months there. If you want to gain insight into your customers and the opportunities, you need to form relationships strong enough to produce an information advantage. If instead of waiting for procurements to appear, you want to initiate them so that you can shape the requirements and have the advantage, you need business development to form the relationships that can make this happen. This is their job. It’s a fulltime job. And it alone is a major contribution to winning. See also: Relationship Marketing Business development cultivates the leads and qualifies them. Keep in mind that it's your company's responsibility to define lead qualification criteria. The company shapes business development’s contribution to winning by setting the standards for lead qualification, and not simply chasing everything found. However, when a business developer spends a big fraction of time on capture or proposals, the company ends up less likely to have strong lead qualification. The leads found between pursuits tend to get less effort put into their assessment. There is also more incentive to chase them to get out of the “dry spell.” So not only do the leads come in spurts, but they also tend to be lesser quality. The company should set a high bar regarding what's an acceptable lead worth investing in winning. If that means hiring a capture manager because a lead is worth the cost of having put dedicated time into preparing to win the pursuit, then do that. Because the math shows it's worth it. Doubling your chances of winning a qualified lead doubles your long-term revenue. The cost of capture compared to that is peanuts. Increasing your win rate is one of the most profitable things a company can do. And the converse is also true. Allowing low win probability bad habits to set in will leave a ton of money on the table and suck the potential right out of your company. What you can do without crossing the line and making Business Development responsible for winning? Consider making part of Business Development's incentive package based on winning to encourage support and collaboration during the pursuit. Business Development does cultivate relationships that are vital for winning and you want their insights to show up in the document. You just don't want them to stop identifying qualified leads to provide them. What about capture management? Business development finds leads and qualifies them. They need to hand off those leads to someone who is going be dedicated to doing all the tasks needed to be prepared to win them. That is the role of capture, and it’s a vital role. You just can’t be dedicated to two different roles at the same time. A qualified lead is worth investing in winning. It’s worth dedicated attention. But continuous lead generation is also worth dedicated attention. Do the math. If the numbers don’t show having dedicated attention for both of these roles is worth it by orders of magnitude, then you have a strategic planning problem at the top level. Neither business development nor capture management can save you if your strategic planning does not lead to enough business to give dedicated attention to both lead generation and capture. If you are a startup, and haven’t reached the point where you have the cashflow to support both roles, then you have to be strategic about how you will get there. The size and profit margin of your pursuit determine whether you will need lots of leads or a high win probability on the leads you do have. You can start with someone capable of doing both business development and capture, but you’ll need to focus their attention strategically so that you can grow to where the two roles split. The same ends up being true for proposals. You need dedicated attention to all three to maximize your win probability and ROI. TL;DR Business development cultivates winnable leads, but only if you have strong lead qualification and strategic direction. The best ROI comes from having someone else capture them. Business Development makes a vital contribution to winning, but making winning their job gets in the way of maximizing your ROI.

There are so many directions I could take this. This is not a tutorial for being a consultant or being an employee. Or about whether you should hire proposal consultants or employees. This is about what it’s like to experience being an employee or consultant and work in proposals. None of what you see below are rules. There are no rules. There are just people trying to figure things out and this is just how it commonly goes. The proposal experience for an employee is to develop the routine and improve it over time. You know what you’ve got to work with and won’t lose time at the beginning figuring that out. Your tools are your own and this matters a lot (for both good and bad). Much of your success depends on how well the executives have defined organizational territories, put in place a growth-oriented culture, and how well thought-through their ROI strategies are. See also: Roles The proposal experience for a consultant is often to show up, discover what there is to work with, do a gap analysis, figure out the best way to proceed, and do it in minutes not days. For consultants, things start off with a written agreement and budget. This creates a scope that is far more explicit than employees typically have. Employees get a handoff and are expected to make it work. Consultants get high-level conversations, a written agreement, and budget scrutiny. That changes things. You get a chance to discuss the company’s capability and process gaps. For an employee, you find out that another proposal is going to start. Maybe you find out ahead of time and can prepare, and maybe you’re jumping right in. You look at the process as steps: Distribute the RFP, schedule the kickoff meeting, prepare the assignments and schedule, etc. Most of the people involved know what’s coming. And your boss has expectations. You are working to do the best you can within the routine. For a consultant every proposal can start off like a job interview to determine whether you and the client are a match. Part of this is an orientation to the pursuit. And part of it is a gap analysis to see what you’ve got to work with and what gaps you’ll have to fill in. Your preferred way of doing things may need to adapt to the client’s existing infrastructure and realities. Even though a consulting agreement may not have been signed yet, you are already working on proposal planning, if only to be able to prepare the estimates you’ll need. The company may or may not have much in the way of expectations. They may or may not be looking for you to define their process. The less mature their process, the more people will not know what is coming and the things you ask will be new to them. A major part of your efforts may go into explaining how to do things and not simply directing traffic. Your first couple of days will be largely consumed by discovery. Note that the size of the company doesn’t necessarily dictate this. I’ve parachuted into large companies and found that their process lacked key artifacts like written proposal quality criteria and that their review process amounted to simply having a specified number of subjectively defined draft reviews and had to put together training for the reviewers on the spot while managing the proposal. That’s the life of a consultant. Proposal employees are supposed to work this stuff out “in between” proposals during breaks that never come. Some of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY are consultants. They use it to educate themselves and their customers, and provide tools to fill gaps in their client engagements. Most of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY are employees. They use it to educate themselves and their coworkers, and to provide tools to fill gaps in their process documentation. I love that it helps people in both roles. There is also a form of working as a consultant that is a bit of a hybrid. Companies with mature processes often use consultants as staff augmentation. There is a lot less discovery and more routine when doing staff augmentation. You get an assignment and you follow directions. You may be doing the exact same work as their employees with the exact same expectations. I personally see benefits to being an employee as well as being a consultant. They are equal in my mind, even though my life has taken a path that keeps me in a consultant role. Employees can build glorious empires because they don’t start from scratch with each new proposal. Then again, just how glorious an employee’s empire can be is often limited by their boss or corporate culture. Your relationship with your company matters. If you didn’t negotiate a seat at the executive table before you were hired, you might be stuck in a support resource role. But that could be good or bad. Finding the right place for yourself depends on knowing yourself as much as it does knowing about the place. While it’s easier for a consultant to nudge a company in the right direction, it’s rare that you’ll get to stay involved over the years it takes to completely transform an organization. Your long-term success as a consultant depends on your ability to handle extreme peaks and valleys in your pay, or whether you need your income to be predictable. This in turn means success as a consultant depends on finding client after client. You need a strong sales pipeline right from the start. Only part of your experience will be parachuting into companies and turning chaos into accomplishment. A lot of your daily experience will be performing bookkeeping and sales instead of proposal heroism. Your ability to sell your services is more important to your success than your skills at doing the work. It helps to find your niche. Then again, this is somewhat true for employees as well. Only for employees it’s more like selling your ROI and avoiding getting confined to a niche. Both employees and consultants occasionally wonder what life’s like on the other side of the fence. Be careful what you wish for. You might just find out.

Take a step back from what you think you know about proposal management, if only for a minute. What you can learn from this grid is what information people need, and where to create information products that flow it to them. But studying it can also provide some other insights: Process, tools, and techniques combine and have a big impact on your ability to flow information and manage issues. It’s easy to fixate on a problem in the moment and think a tool can solve it. But your needs change over time. Any tools you implement have to be able to meet the needs through the proposal lifecycle. It’s easy to think of tools as labor saving assembly tools. But that’s not where process, tools, and techniques can contribute the most to your ROI. Much of your success depends on issue management. Assignments, questions, and gaps are basically all forms of issues and you’ll encounter hundreds of them on a typical proposal. Each one adds to your risk of losing. Your strategies and approaches for issue management will have as much impact on your win probability as your offer design and proposal writing. No wonder flow charts can’t adequately define the proposal process. It also shows why a success proposal process requires a lot more than just steps. There is no one answer or optimal approach. Even before you consider the differences between products, services, solutions, and industries, you can see that one company will be impacted by these things differently than another. Things change over the course of a proposal. Look carefully at the issue management row and how it changes over time. What you need to manage your issues during startup, planning, performance, and production are all different. If you try to manage your proposal in Excel, you’ll need a different worksheet for each stage. Excel might not be the right tool. MustWin Now As a PropLIBRARY Subscriber, you have access to MustWin Now, which is built around tools that flow information from one stage to the next while enabling you to manage the associated issues. This chart can be used as a test for process and tool functionality and applicability. It can also be used to bring improvement and better integration to your techniques. When I compare the latest version MustWin Now, it matches up pretty well. I see some ways to refine how issues are reported to streamline getting answers to these questions. But I really like the idea of being able to track your content plan, quality criteria, and issues in a window you open and keep right next to your proposal.

Writing a proposal requires transforming the information you have to enable the customer to make a decision in your favor. The larger and more complex the proposal, the more people that will be involved. Throw in a tight, unforgiving deadline and you’ve got a complicated undertaking that involves getting people to understand how the transformation will take place, being capable of making the transformation, doing it by the deadline, and doing it so well the outcome is successful. When herding cats and going from proposal to proposal, it's easy to forget the big picture. It's easy to slip into being a traffic cop instead of a guide. It's easy to start focusing on deadline enforcement instead of winning. It's easy to lower the bar by throwing re-use at it instead of raising the bar. Sometimes it's a good idea to take a step back and think about what you need to accomplish instead of how to turn the proposal process into a mechanistic, assembly line driven production effort. Here are six proposal management process considerations to help you focus on what's important: See also: Proposal process implementation Are you trying to manage people to assemble a proposal or lead them to the win? A good place to start is to determine what your role really is. What kind of proposal manager do you want to be? Are you simply trying to crank out submissions as quick as they throw them at you, or are you trying to change the company and everyone in it to turn it into a winning organization full of constantly increasing opportunity? That can be impossible to do if the organization has a culture that works against it, so it's a legitimate choice. Getting the information needed to do the job. Proposals will starve without the right input. But what is needed changes over the proposal lifecycle. Try creating forms, checklists, and other information products to collect the information that proposal writers will need to write a great proposal. Information products that assist in the transformation. Within each activity, information products can gather input, provide guidance, help achieve quality assurance, and prepare for the next activity. The proposal that gets submitted is the ultimate information product you produce, but it is not the only one. Proposal writing doesn't take place in one step. You can help people think through what the proposal should be and get it right on the first draft. You just have to guide them through it, by showing them what to consider and then turning it into a plan or blueprint for the proposal. An approach to issue management that is sufficient for the complexity of your environment. Proposals can be seen as an exercise in problem solving. Typical problems include, but are in no way limited to, tasking assignments, tracking progress toward meeting the deadline, answering questions that people have, filling gaps in the offering, interpreting the RFP, etc. Each issue must be discovered, tracked, and resolved. And the nature of those issues also changes with each stage in the proposal lifecycle. Successful proposal management is not simply a matter of issuing assignments. Issue management is required to mitigate the risks that can cause proposal failure. Where this often goes wrong is that people start with a simple list of items they cross off as they go. This breaks down if you also need to track who is assigned each issue, who they need helping them, whether there will be follow-up, what inputs they need to resolve it, deadlines, severity, impact, etc. It helps to be able to sort, filter, track aging, etc. Implementing the right processes, tools, and techniques required to create and validate the information products you create. This is the area that gets the most attention. But process design, tool selection, and technique development really depend on the nature of your proposals. What you need to track issues on a proposal with dozens of people involved is different from a proposal with three people involved. The same is true between a proposal with a table of contents that fits on one page, and a table of contents that requires five pages. The problem with most tools is that they don’t meet the needs of proposals because they don’t map to the outline and cover the needs across the proposal lifecycle, or they aren’t useable by the entire team. The problem with most processes is that they aren’t self-explanatory to the people doing most of the work and they aren’t consistently followed because the RFPs are all different. Techniques are usually a personal matter, leading to the illusion that winning proposals requires a hero instead of a routine. Implementing proposal quality validation. In each stage of the proposal lifecycle, what do you need to ensure everything is valid or was done correctly before you move on? How will you define quality and the quality criteria you need to do that? When in doubt, track goals and instructions instead of steps. Structuring your process around accomplishing goals instead of steps can enable people to flexibly figure out what needs to be done. Instructions provide guidance that steps do not. Every part of your process should address: What information do you need to accomplish the next goal? What will you do with the information? How will you store, transform, and present the information to make accomplishing the next goal easier? How will you track everything to completion? How will you define your proposal quality criteria and use them to validate the information products you create? For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, we have created a grid that shows the goals, input requirements, products, and issue tracking requirements across five stages in the proposal lifecycle. You can quickly build a proposal development operation off just this table alone, if you have to. But you can also use it to identify your gaps, set priorities, and mature your existing process.

Everything is a trade-off. You need to keep your overhead costs low, but you also need to win contracts in order to grow and increase the size of your overhead pool. A lot of companies make the mistake of treating the proposal function as an expense instead of an investment that can be approached mathematically. The purpose of this article isn’t to teach you that math. But you should know that going from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate will increase your revenue by 50% with the same number of leads you already have. That 50% increase in revenue will more than pay for giving your proposals the attention they need to increase your win rate. The purpose of this article is to show you how bad decisions will cause your proposal efforts to lose focus and hurt your win rate, so you can make better decisions. There is a natural tendency to want to wring more out of your staffing resources. And frankly there’s nothing wrong with that. But a small reduction in win rate will cost you far more than it would to staff the effort with the focus you need to win. Here are some considerations: See also: ROI How many people do you need to develop the solution or offering? The more people involved in defining what you intend to propose, the more complicated the proposal and the more moving parts. With each person added, the level of effort to track all of it doesn’t just add up, it multiplies. How much time needs to go into herding the cats? This is part assignment management, part progress and completion tracking, and part training. Either the content is planned, which takes some effort, or it is unplanned which takes a lot more effort. Where do you want to invest some time? How much control does your proposal specialist have over assignment completion? Control takes some time. But uncontrolled content development and unmanaged assignments take much longer. If you want the people working on the proposal managed, you can’t load the manager up with production tasks. When the proposal manager is writing and producing, they are not managing people. At some point this increases your risk and lowers your win rate, making it not worth the squeeze. Is the proposal manager in charge of the entire scope of the proposal effort? Is the proposal manager responsible for the pricing? What about the other parts of the business volume? Or is it just the technical proposal? The wider the scope, the weaker the focus. And that’s before you start adding in the other elements discussed here. How much time goes into figuring out how to win? And along with this, who should articulate the messages you need to get the top score? Do you just task this to your staff and expect them to figure it out? Or do you want someone who understands the evaluation of proposals involved to provide guidance? Do you really want everyone on the team to work on this separately and form their own opinion, or do you want coherent strategies figured out before writing starts and driven into the document by everyone involved? While this is a process question, it is also a staffing question. Who is the strategic planner and driver? Can they do that while also herding the cats and coordinating everything? How much time needs to go into assessing and cross-referencing the RFP? If you want someone to read and understand the RFP in detail, you have to give them the time to do that. If you don’t do this, you are relying on everyone else involved to not overlook anything. That can be a very high risk assumption and win or loss depends on the outcome. How much time needs to go into preparing the outline and proposal content plan? If you only allow time for a quick outline, don’t expect a winning outline. Expect the outline to have to change multiple times during the writing process, making things take longer and increasing your risk. Who’s responsible for defining quality and validating it? The review process is practically a separate process. Do you want to take your proposal manager out of everything else to plan the reviews, coordinate participation, set procedures, and train the reviewers? Or do you just plan to hand them a draft and ask their opinion? There are many things you might expect of your proposal specialists. But should you? Unlike many other tasks, if you overload your proposal manager with too many things to focus attention on, you will reduce your win rate. And this will likely cost more than adequately staffing the effort. Could you be better off with enough proposal staff to focus on each element that contributes to a high win rate? If you understaff these things it will impact your win rate. If you expect a single proposal specialist to track assignments, cross-reference the RFP, develop the outline, track progress, prevent disaster, and validate quality you are either going to get all of them done partially or some of them not done at all. That’s what kills your win rate. Everything is a trade-off. So do the math and understand what the value of a small increase in your win rate is. Then you can decide how to staff your proposal efforts.