Carl Dickson

The way we think about proposal efficiency has a major impact on the results we achieve. Instead of managing proposals as a cost to be minimized, we should manage them as an investment. Let’s start with how NOT to measure proposal efficiency When we think of proposal efficiency as doing more proposals with less effort, we ignore ROI and focus on lowering costs using an equation like: See also: ROI total cost of proposals divided by the number of submissions total value of wins divided by the total number of submissions total value of wins divided by the cost of all proposals number of submissions divided by the number of proposal staff total value of wins divided by the number of staff The first equation shows you the cost of each proposal. This is the most common way people think of proposal efficiency and yet it completely ignores ROI. This is a huge problem, because winning proposals typically return orders of magnitude more than their cost. As we’ll see, there are much better ways to measure proposal efficiency. The second equation shows you the value of each proposal. The value of each proposal is an important metric, but it does not tell you anything about how to improve. In fact, it implies that improvement comes from bidding more, but as we’ll see, this is not the best way to maximize ROI. The third equation shows the ratio of dollars won to dollars spent on proposals. If it’s not greater than one, your proposals cost more than your revenue. That should never happen. Your revenue should be much greater than the cost of your proposals, because when you take all of the cost of fulfillment into consideration, including both direct and indirect costs, you could still operate at a loss even though revenue is greater than the cost of your proposals. This is a good metric to track, but it tells you more about what you are pursuing than how well the proposal function is doing. The fourth equation shows you the average number of proposals prepared by your proposal staff. It’s a measure of volume. We tend to think of productivity in terms of volume. But it tells you nothing about value. A single win that doubles the company’s revenue can be much better than a hundred wins that increase revenue 20%. Which staff performed better? The fifth equation shows you the average value returned by your proposal staff. It can be used to approximate your ROI. It would be more accurate to compare revenue (or even better profit) to the salary cost of the staff. But headcount can be used as a crude estimate if you don’t have the salary data. This gets you closer to ROI, but still tells you more about what you are pursuing than whether the proposal function is efficient. Win rate matters A big problem with the five equations above is that they ignore the win rate. They focus on submissions. When you do that, you tend to reward doing lots of proposals instead of winning them. Win rate should be plural. You need to calculate win rate by the number of submissions/wins and well as by the value of those submissions/wins. You also may want to compute separately proposals in which you are a subcontractor vs being a prime contractor, those for current customers vs new customers, those for particular contract vehicles, different customers, and other distinctions. Two basic equations for win rate expressed as a percentage are: (Number of wins divided by the number of submissions) multiplied by 100 (Value of wins divided by the value of submissions) multiplied by 100 It’s better to focus on wins than submissions. But if you’re trying to track performance you need both. Win rate tells you how you did. But it doesn’t take the cost of proposals into consideration. A better way to define proposal efficiency We should start thinking of proposal efficiency as: (value of submissions * win rate) divided by the total cost of the proposals The win rate used should be the first example above, based on the number of submissions and wins. This equation shows the ROI — the amount won for the amount expended. Suddenly the most important number becomes your win rate and not your cost. Without increasing cost, an increase in win rate dramatically improves ROI. A cost increase that improves your win rate likely improves ROI more than the cost increase. ROI is the “efficiency” that matters. Here's why… Example 1 Take 100 submissions with a total value of $100 million at a win rate of 20%, produced at a cost of $300,000. This is a high-volume proposal shop. You can see they have a team of three people submitting about two proposals per week. The staff are making somewhere around $60,000/year depending on the company’s overhead and benefits. The cost of the staff used should be their fully loaded cost. $100,000,000 in submissions * 22% / $360,000 = $61.11 won for each dollar spent If they increased their win rate to 30% the amount won for each dollar spent would be $100. This is a 33% increase. If they increased their win rate to 35%, they’d increase revenue by $13,000,000. That’s a 63% improvement in revenue for the same number and value of bids. Win rate is that important. But how would they increase that win rate? Maybe they’d need to hire an additional person. This might increase their cost to $480,000. But if they did, their ROI would still go up a bit to $62.5. This is important. They spent more, but also increased their ROI. The company made more for each dollar it spent because it was a successful investment and not strictly a cost. Example 2 Now let’s look at what might have happened if they somehow increased bid volume with the same staff by 10%. But their win rate went down by 3% because they were stretched too thin and cut corners. $110,000,000 * 19% / $360,000 = $58.06 won for each dollar spent Even though they submitted $10 million more in bids, their total revenue actually slipped a bit over a million dollars and their ROI went down. This is the power of win rate. Reducing proposal costs at the expense of win rate is rarely worth it. Reducing costs without reducing win rate requires looking at things differently. It requires looking at the ROI impact of your win rate impacting decisions. Example 3 Now just for fun, let’s imagine the example above where we decrease the proposal costs by 33% and win rate only goes down by 7%, but volume remains the same. Unless you do the math, you might conclude that losing 7% of win rate in exchange for a 33% reduction in proposal cost is a good deal. However... $110,000,000 * 12% / $240,000 = $55 Not only did ROI go down in spite of the massive cost savings, but revenue declined by $7.7 million. How’s that cost reduction working out? Using ROI to make better decisions Don’t just compute your ROI. Track your ROI. Use it to inform bid decisions. Before you create a proposal reuse library, think about whether reuse will hurt your win rate enough to make it cost you money instead of saving you money. Use it to inform decisions about whether to build a proposal assembly line or to invest in extensively tailoring your proposals around what it will take to win. Track your ROI so you can see when it goes up or down and what's driving it. Instead of getting more effort out of your staff, focus on getting better win rates out of your staff. Include your business development and capture managers in this, since many bids are won or lost before the proposal even starts. Discover what it will take to win and then how to build your proposal around it. Everything you see on PropLIBRARY is based on improving how you do these two things. Maximizing ROI The right definition of proposal efficiency shows that focusing on win rate is more profitable than focusing on cost. Instead of thinking of proposal efficiency in productivity measures, think of it in terms of ROI measures. Instead of trying to get more proposals out of the same staff, take the same number of people and improve their ability to discover what it will take to win and build their proposal around it. Maybe even invest a little in that. Obsess over and improve your win rate. Even obsess over win rate more than lead generation. If you’re still not convinced that capturing the leads you have is equally important to lead generation, redefine how you calculate proposal efficiency and then run the numbers for every scenario you can imagine. Let that convince you and help you make better decisions.

I blame Henry Ford for the idea of the proposal assembly line. Although a case could be made that it was Frederick Winslow Taylor and the time and motion study method for management. But hardly anyone recognizes Frederick Winslow Taylor, and sooner or later everyone working in proposals meets someone who suggests setting up an assembly line. Using the assembly line model for proposals is a great way to lose money on proposals. It puts the emphasis on getting proposals out the door instead of winning them. It treats every proposal as the same lowest common denominator instead of a custom creation optimized for winning each pursuit. An assembly line ignores the mathematics of win rates. You can’t make up for losses by losing in volume. Each proposal win brings orders of magnitude more revenue than the proposal cost. Improving your win rate increases revenue more than building an assembly can save in costs. Should you lower costs in ways that will reduce your win rate? Or should you invest knowing that each additional win will return orders of magnitude more than the proposal cost? An assembly line mentality leads to several win rate destroying approaches to proposal development: See also: Improving win rates Templates. Instead of designing the form and content of each proposal to optimize its chances of winning, a template results in sending every customer the same good proposal. Good proposal aren’t competitive. You need great proposals to maximize your win rate. Content reuse. Recycling your old proposals results in proposals that are optimized for the wrong context. The things that matter the most to the previous customer are not the things that matter the most to your new customer. Starting from reuse does more to encourage people to submit “good enough” proposals that are less likely to win than it “saves” in effort. Measuring efficiency by piece work. Which proposal shop is more efficient? The one that submits 200 proposals with three people, or the one that submits six? Before you can answer that, tell me what the revenue won by the first group is and what the revenue won by the second group is. Which is the better proposal writer? The one who spits out 100 pages per day, or the one who writes eight? Again, it’s a meaningless comparison. Proposal efficiency is not determined by the quantity produced, but rather by the amount won. Do you want your proposal staff to see their goal as getting proposals out the door, or as winning them? Opportunistic bidding. When a company has a proposal assembly line, the goal becomes to bid at maximum capacity (or it build its assembly line to keep up with a large volume of bids). This encourages bidding low probability pursuits. It raises costs and lowers revenue instead of doing the opposite. Companies with proposal assembly lines tend to either never develop lead qualification criteria, or to water down the ones they have. Either way the culture shifts to bidding everything they find, ignoring how that lowers their win rate and trying make it up in volume, lowering it even more. Bidding without an information advantage. While an assembly line may accommodate tailoring proposals to win, they also make it easy to bid proposals without the information needed for tailoring. Having a proposal assembly line may even incentivize bidding without tailoring in order to keep up with the volume of bids. This in turn enables a business development and capture function that never develops or loses the ability to cultivate an information advantage prior to the start of the proposal. This also lowers your win rate. Overloading staff. When feeding the assembly line is the standard, overloading staff just isn’t a consideration. When win rate is the standard, companies will drop a lower probability bid in order to maximize the chances of winning a higher probability bid. Making up your process as you go along. When you have an assembly line, that is the process. You don’t need to set expectations, fine tune the flow of information, discover what it will take to win, plan what you write, validate that what you write reflects what it will take to win, or any of the other aspects of process designed to maximize win rate. Instead, companies with assembly lines allow their proposal process to degrade to just having a subject draft review before they submit what came off the assembly line, while trying to convince themselves that it was sufficiently tailored and trying to ignore their win rate. Standardization of proposal content means reducing the relevance to each individual customer. And that will reduce your win rate. The cost of reducing your win rate will exceed, by many times over, the cost savings through standardization. Cost savings shouldn’t even be the goal. The goal should be maximizing wins. An assembly line mentality leads to the wrong definition for proposal efficiency. There can be times when improving production efficiency helps to maximize your win rate. But setting win rate as the standard has to come first. The issue here isn’t whether templates, reuse, and productivity measures have value, the issue is what is your management model for assessing value. What is your standard? What is your priority? Is it to get the most proposals submitted using the staff and process you have turned into an assembly line, or is it to maximize the wins by putting the effort into creating proposals based on what it will take to win each pursuit? It can’t be both. What’s the alternative? Instead of looking at proposal development as a mechanical assembly process, look at proposals as information development for a decision support tool to give to the customer and build a process that supports doing that and is measured by how often the customer makes the desired decision. That is not an assembly line driven process. At the corporate level, measure the proposal function by its ROI. Treating it like an expense will result in bad resource allocation decisions. When you treat the proposal function as an expense to be minimized, an assembly line sounds like a good idea. However, your company’s future potential depends on winning proposals and not just submitting them. You need a business model based on winning and not only submitting. Win rate is a good day-to-day proxy for measuring performance against ROI. Within a pursuit, we recommend making the standard discovering what it will take to win and organizing the proposal effort around using what it will take to win as the standard for process, decisions, and resource allocation. We used what it will take to win as the standard when we created the MustWin Process. When the primary standard for business development, capture, and proposals is to discover what it will take to win and build a proposal based on it, you’ll still have challenges, but you’ll have a clear basis for making decisions about approaches and resources. And you’ll be better able to avoid the temptation to build a proposal assembly line. Instead, you’ll be growing the company and increasing the resource pool instead of minimizing it.

While proposal management obsesses over process, advanced proposal management focuses on maximizing ROI and realizes that requires more than process alone. We love to obsess over the proposal process. We talk about it as if it is how proposals are done. However, once a proposal manager gains a few years’ experience, every one I’ve ever spoken to realizes that success requires a lot more than just steps. A lot of proposal issues relate to working through other people, especially across organizational boundaries. But some of them have to deal with the inadequacy of the process itself in an environment where customer changes to RFP requirements forces the process to manifest differently every time. Most proposal “processes” are really a collection of techniques stitched together differently for each proposal. Winning proposals requires more than just steps. It requires a broader view of process and realization that process is not the goal. ROI is the goal. And the most important driver of ROI is your win rate. Advanced proposal management requires a framework that addresses everything that impacts proposal win rates. The process we obsess over is really just a small part of that. To maximize ROI, advanced proposal management must address: See also: ROI Organization. Organization is not limited to an org chart. Organizing the proposal function requires thinking through connections to stakeholders, how decisions are made, resource allocation, strategic planning and positioning, setting quality standards, prioritization, and more. Resourcing. How many staff? Which staff? And how do you sustain that over time? How do you nurture staff to improve resourcing over time? Inputs and the flow of information. How do you discover what will it take to win and turn that into ink on paper? Along with that, how do you flow customer insights and win strategies into the document? And how do you design your offering without writing about it, but then use that to write the proposal? Performance. Performance is not simply execution of the steps. Performance is maximized when you support people so they can be more successful than they would be on their own. This requires addressing assignments, progress tracking, process tailoring and implementation, collaboration, issue resolution, tools, conventions, expectation management, feedback mechanisms, and more. In effect, this becomes the user interface for the proposal experience. If you don’t think about the user experience for your proposal, you are likely not maximizing the performance of those you are depending on to win. Quality validation. You need more than subjectively reading a draft to achieve proposal quality. No quality methodology I have ever seen defines quality as the opinion of a few people, no matter how experienced they are. You need to define proposal quality and the criteria you will use to validate it if you are going to maximize your win rate. The more things you ignore in the lists above, the less advanced your company's proposal management, and the further from maximizing your potential win rate you will be. To achieve advanced proposal management, you need to see past document production and defining success as another on-time submission, to develop an organizational solution to maximizing the ROI of the proposal function. Advanced proposal management is about integrating all the elements that impact your win rate and not just following the steps. This is beyond the charter and job description of most proposal managers. In many organizations, they are not allowed to do what this will take. Even if you are high enough on the org chart to consider it, you’ll need to work with other executive stakeholders. It is an organizational problem and not an individual or even department-level problem. Organizations that approach proposal management in an advanced way like this have the potential to greatly improve their revenue and profitability. Simply going from a 20% to a 30% win rate increases the company’s revenue by 50%. This makes the extra effort of herding the cats to an integrated approach so worth it. It makes the direct involvement of the CEO and the entire executive team worth it.

See also: About MustWin Now This is an opportunity for consultants who want an easy way to promote themselves. We want to expand the Inspiration Libraries we’ve added to MustWin Now. We're looking for consultants who know how to do things like plan a construction job, build rockets, run a project, manage software development, do engineering, manage supply chains, operate a help desk, do recruiting, implement quality methodologies, provide janitorial services, develop curricula, perform maintenance, design systems, provide acquisition support, implement testing protocols, and all the other things customers procure. In all their variations. Our audience is huge and covers every industry in B2G and B2B. We're looking for people to write simple instructions at the bullet level to help other people figure out what to write about and how to present it. In exchange, we'll provide attribution and a link back to your website. It's a chance to demonstrate your expertise to people actively working on proposals and give them a way to reach out to you to get more help. The instructions will be added to our inspiration library along with your information. The image up top is a screenshot from one of our inspiration library topics so you can see what we're talking about. Each topic should target about 30 items. Those items should include: Instructions for proposal writers on your chosen topic that help them know what to write about and how to present it Questions for proposal writers to answer about your chosen topic that can help them figure out what approach makes sense for their proposal Options, suggestions, and things for proposal writers to consider on your chosen topic that might help them with their proposal People using MustWin Now will be able to search the topics available, browse ones that are relevant to them, and select items to include in their proposal content plans to guide proposal writers. A topic like "Construction proposals" or "ID/IQ proposals" can easily reach hundreds of items. If you have more than 30 items, we'll split the category. Think about how many different kinds of construction, or phases, or activities there are. Or how many ID/IQ contracts with differences in their task order responses. Whatever your chosen topic, think about how it can be broken down. Each category page will include your information. We really are interested in covering all the topics as deeply as possible, so if you're prolific, you could show up all over the inspiration library. We're fine with that. We'll retain editorial control and make final decisions on what to include and how to word things. You should ask about a topic and write some examples before you get started to make sure we understand each other and so we can prevent redundancy or wasted effort. Since no money is being exchanged, we can get started very quickly. When potential customers contact you, they will be yours to nurture and you'll keep all the revenue. Got a topic? Got questions? Want to know more? Click a button below to reach out to us.

See also: About MustWin Now The Inspiration Libraries we’ve added to MustWin Now can have a huge impact on your proposals, by changing how they get written in a way that can radically improve win probability. MustWin Now’s Inspiration Library helps people understand what should go into a proposal content plan and greatly accelerate creating one. It sets your proposal writers up for success by enabling you to rapidly describe what should go into each proposal section and how it should be presented. The Inspiration Library is accessed through a new menu bar in the Proposal Content Planning tool: Simply click on a topic Select the instructions you’d like to add the content plan Save Currently we have dozens of topics in the Technical Approach, Management Plan, and Other categories. Within those topics we have over 700 possible instructions, questions for proposal writers to answer, and options for consideration. And they can all be tailored to match the specific needs of the proposal you are working on. You can also add your own instructions to the Proposal Content Plan. Use the combination to drive your win strategies and guidance into your proposal content plan and help your writers figure out what they should write more quickly and more reliably. Step by step use of the Inspiration Library To try an example, click on "Other" and then "Win strategies." Then select one or more instructions to drop into your content plan. This will provide a prompt to help shape the proposal when it is written. You may be tempted to select them all, but that could overwhelm your proposal writers. Just give them the minimum guidance they'll need to write the winning proposal. This may vary depending on the skills of your proposal writers. Maybe spend a minute or so on each to tailor them after you click the button. For example, you might change “What does it all add up to” into an instruction saying “Explain how this all adds up to a lower risk solution” because the evaluation criteria in this RFP emphasize risk. If the RFP emphasizes quality you could say “Explain how our approach results in quantifiably better results.” The goal of the inspiration library is to inspire. Don’t take our suggestions as how you have to write your proposals. Instead, let our ideas prompt you to think of something better that helps you win your proposals. If you don’t use any of our suggestions but they help you articulate your own ideas for what your proposal should become, we consider that a success! In addition to picking items from our Inspiration Library, you can also provide guidance to your proposal writers by typing some instructions of your own into the entry fields. This also only takes a few seconds. Maybe a few minutes if you want to give it some thought (and you should). Put in five minutes per section and you’ll end up with a content plan that greatly improves your chances of winning. Hold a review of your content plan prior to writing and you can eliminate unnecessary revision cycles and save many hours of proposal writer time. You can save more time doing this than you would starting from the text of a previous proposal. We have similar inspiration library items for the technical approach in areas like cybersecurity, training, administrative support, construction, and other topics. Plus we’re adding more over time. Our goal is not to replace your subject matter expertise, but to help inspire you to quickly figure out what to write and how to best present it. Instead of a blank page, your proposal writers will get prompts, reminders, suggestions, and details to include. If you do a good job of planning the content of your proposals, your writers should be able to prepare a great first draft with a much higher probability of winning. You must be a PropLIBRARY Subscriber in order to use the Inspiration Library. You can subscribe here. Special note for consultants who are current subscribers to PropLIBRARY We are going to be greatly expanding the breadth and depth of the topics in our Inspiration Library. If you have content or subject matter expertise and want to contribute, we'll add your name, phone number, email, and a link to your website to the topic page with the items you contribute. This will put how to reach you right in front of people working on proposals in the topic areas you can support. Reach out below and we can discuss it.

Maximizing win probability requires going beyond simply trying to provide the best response to the customer’s requirements. This is because: The customer is more than one person. Evaluators often have different ideas about which submission is “best.” We often do not know who will be participating in the evaluation. And yet, we know we need to write our proposals from the customer’s perspective instead of our own. This makes understanding the range of perspectives that the evaluators might bring important. You can’t write to their perspectives unless you can empathize with them. Unfortunately there is a whole range of potential perspectives to consider. This requires advanced empathy in order to write proposals with the maximum win probability. Advanced empathy requires going well beyond what does “the customer” want. It requires understanding that there are multiple stakeholders in making an organizational decision, and what matters to each of them as individuals. Here are some ways to apply empathy to winning proposals: See also: Customer Perspective Roles. A Contracting Officer plays a specific role that is very different from a Program Manager or a Source Selection Officer. And they are all different from the end user. Each brings a different perspective regarding what they want to accomplish. The result is that what they want to see in the proposal is different. You should write your proposal to satisfy the needs of all the potential evaluators. Stakeholders. Some stakeholders will participate in the evaluation. Others may not participate in the evaluation, but may influence the decision. These stakeholders can even be people outside the customer’s organization! It depends on the nature of the customer’s mission, how strong the voices of their stakeholders are, and how much this procurement will impact those stakeholders. If the customer cares about keeping its stakeholders happy, your proposal may need to address that. Goals. Goals occur at multiple levels. There can be individual goals and organizational goals. There can be personal goals and business goals. There will be unstated goals as well as stated ones. And within an organization, every territory can have different goals. But when the individual sits down to evaluate a proposal, they are looking to fulfill their goals. Put yourself in the place of all the possible individuals and imagine what might be shaping their goals. Maximizing your win probability depends on figuring out which goals of which individuals to address. Agendas and motivation. Similar to goals, each person participating in the decision will have things they want to accomplish. Those are the things that motivate them. But they are never clear and can sometimes contradict those of other evaluators. It can be as simple as wanting to complete the evaluation so they can get back to their “real” job. Or it can be as big as reshaping their own organization by impacting how this procurement plays out. You will do better if you help them get what they want. Culture. The culture of the organization strongly impacts how it makes decisions. Is it hierarchical? Is it chaotic? Is it serious? Is it deliberate? Is it accountable? Is it the opposites of these? How will that impact the individuals participating in the customer’s decision? How can you write the proposal to be a better fit for the customer’s culture? Attitude. We are rational animals. We are also emotional animals. Each individual participating will be a mixture of both. What attitude will they bring to the evaluation and what can you say to influence it? Processes. Formal evaluations follow a process. Proposal evaluations are conducted according to that process. So how closely will they stick to their process? And how does that change what the evaluator needs to see? How does that change the evaluator’s attitude, preferences, goals, and agenda? The more you understand about the customer’s acquisition process, the more influence you can have on it. Training. Do the evaluators know what they are doing, or are they making it up as they go along? Do the evaluators understand what matters about what is being procured? Do they even understand the terminology? Who are you writing for? Should you be subtly training them through your proposal? Or would that be patronizing? What do you know about who will participate in the evaluation and how should that impact the way you present your proposal? Regulations, directives, policies, etc. Rules are rules. Usually. We think of proposal compliance in terms of the RFP. But the customer thinks of compliance in terms of all the rules at all the levels that impact their organization. The RFP is just a small part of that. Showing that you are not only aware of that but will make it easier for the customer to achieve compliance at their level can put you ahead of your competitors. The great unknown. Does the customer know what they should ask for? Or even what the implications are of the requirements they wrote? Do they know how to achieve their goals? Do they even know what their goals should be? Do they even know what they don’t know? How can you help them face the great unknown? You do that without making them admit what they don’t know, simply by explaining the trade-offs and why you recommend the approach you chose to offer. This gives them something to rally around. Conflicts. The individuals that comprise the customer may not all agree. They may not agree with what’s in the RFP. They may have conflict between what they want and what they can afford. They may have conflicts with their end users and other stakeholders. They may be indecisive. Proposing something that helps the customer unravel their own conflicts is a great way to leap ahead of the competition. But being in the middle of their conflicts is a great way to lose if the turf battles don’t go your way. I have seen more than one customer lose because they thought they knew the customer, only to discover the one person they were talking to was on the losing side of a conflict inside the customer’s organization that played out during proposal evaluation. Aspirations and the future. Beyond this procurement, how do they want the future to turn out? How do they see themselves in that future? Do you understand your customer well enough to know? Can you paint a picture of that future? How will that vision impact how they evaluate your proposal today? I have helped companies win with customers who didn’t know how to get there, but knew where they wanted to end up by focusing on their future aspirations and being flexible about the steps required to get there. Take all that into consideration before thinking you know what the customer will find compelling. Taking it all into consideration is basically, trying to understand what the evaluator thinks and feels. That’s empathy. Trying to do that across the customer’s organization or even just the team of evaluators is advanced empathy. Turning what your empathy tells you into compelling proposal messaging is where great proposal writing comes from. It’s also why actually talking to your customer before bidding is so important. You can project what you might think if you were in their position, and it’s good to be able to do that. But your accuracy will be questionable if you haven’t actually interacted with them. Building an information advantage is important for winning. But right behind it comes building an empathy advantage.

Effective proposal management requires thorough expectation management. But while some expectations will be the same for every proposal, many will change. Many will need to be determined, figured out, or updated as things change during the proposal. But with a little structure, you can improve how you communicate expectations and do a better job of making sure everything is covered. Remember: If you overwhelm people with too much information about expectations, they will not absorb it all and even though you think you’ve communicated it to them, your expectations will not be met in full. Expectations are bi-directional. The proposal manager has expectations. So does everyone receiving their assignments. So does every other stakeholder. They all need to be communicated for expectations to be met. Not just yours. How you articulate your expectations matters greatly. If you expect participation, that’s what you’ll get. But you might get better results by defining outcomes that you can objectively assess and the full scope of contributions. The structure for proposal expectations below can be documented in different ways, depending on your goals. For example, you can implement this structure as a: Matrix in Microsoft Excel. This is great for consolidating your view across all the roles and phases, but less useful when you are trying to focus on a particular role or phase. Series of slides in PowerPoint. This works well during online meetings, giving you talking points for setting expectations. Series of handouts made in Microsoft Word. This gives you something to attach to assignments or pass out at the beginning of each phase that defines expectations. The structure for proposal expectations should be tailored to fit your stakeholders. Start by focusing on the roles people play and the phases in your pursuit lifecycle. Identify the key roles people will play For example: Business Development Manager Capture Manager Proposal Manager Coordination Proposal Writer(s) Graphics Production Pricing and Contracts In some circumstances, you may need to consider stakeholders who are not part of the proposal team, and issues like whether to include subcontractors. Create a list of phases for your proposal, based on deliverables For example: Pre-proposal pursuit and preparation. What is expected of each role before the proposal starts? Proposal startup. What is expected of each role immediately after RFP release? Content planning. What is expected of each role during content planning? Writing. What is expected of each role during proposal writing? Production. What is expected of each role during production? Every phase, or even every step within a phase, can be thought of as being wrapped in planning, execution, and quality assurance. Each of these can have their own set of expectations. For each phase, create a list of categories for expectations For example: Deliverables. For each role, what deliverables are expected? Who is responsible for those deliverables and who makes what contributions? Deadlines. When are assignments expected to be complete? Formatting. What format must deliverables be in? Communication. When, where, and how should notifications, updates, and other information be communicated? Responsibilities. Who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed? Procedures. What steps must be followed in order to perform a task? Guidance. What information can you provide to help the contributors? What policies must they be made aware of? Resources. What tools, facilities, equipment, staff, or other things are available or must be located? In some organizations, during some phases contributors will be expected to submit deliverables in the required format. In other organizations, during some phases writers will not be expected to perform formatting at all. This structure gives you the means to define expectations for that particular pursuit, in that particular phase, under the particular circumstances you find yourself in. Simply as “what do we expect?” And then document it. Pro tip: If you want your expectations to be met, you should make sure your expectations are feasible and those making the contributions are capable (available, sufficiently trained, etc.).

Proposal content planning should give a lot of guidance to proposal writers regarding what to write and how to present it. They should be able to follow the content plan like a set of instructions, that they can follow to create the right proposal on the very first draft. You can anticipate many of the things that will need to be addressed in your future proposals, based on the nature of the work that you do and how you manage it. The problem is that unless every RFP really is the same, and not merely similar, reusing the text from your past proposals can easily do more harm than good. The good news is that it is far easier, and safer, to reuse your content plan instructions. You can think of them as recipes for your proposals. And you can quickly pull them together and greatly accelerate preparing the level of guidance needed to raise the bar on your proposals. When you practice proposal content planning, you will discover that sometimes you know just what to specify for the proposal, and sometimes it must be figured out by other people. This directly impacts the guidance you can provide. In addition, sometimes you have options, choices, and decisions to make between alternate approaches. Some may work better in certain circumstances than others. Or you might have recommendations to make but don’t want the writers to feel like they have to take the advice if they have something better in mind. This can all be confusing, until you realize that it’s the secret to organizing the guidance you give to your proposal writers. Whether you implement a proposal recipe library or are simply giving ad hoc guidance, here are four ways you can organize the guidance you offer to your proposal writers: See also: Guidance for Using Recipes Instructions. These guide your proposal writers regarding what to write about and how to present it. They focus on things like what to include, what to leave out, what points to make, how to differentiate, what to emphasize, what not to forget, and how to incorporate your customer, opportunity, and competitive awareness. If you explain what matters, your writers can put things in the right context on the very first draft. This is a huge accelerator for proposal writing and can turn it into a simple process of elimination when done thoroughly. But it requires knowing how you want to shape the proposal, knowing what should be offered, and already having the necessary details. Questions for your writers to answer. When you don’t know what to offer or have the details, you can still provide guidance in the form of questions they should address when they write their sections. You can still lay out what should be addressed in each section, without knowing the details. For example, you can prompt them to address features and benefits in a particular way, without knowing what the features or corresponding benefits might be. This can point them in the right direction and still provide some acceleration. Even if you don’t completely frame each section, just pointing out a few key questions ensures they get attention and leads to a better proposal. Options/ things to consider/ recommendations/ examples. A little inspiration goes a long way, providing both acceleration and raising the bar. You can inspire your proposal writers with ideas and choices, with them even being required to do the things you’ve cited. If you leave the door open, you might even inspire them to think of something better than what you recommended. Options, examples, and considerations are eye openers that can prevent writers from getting stuck by not knowing what is expected of them. And that turns them into potential accelerators. How to guidance. When you hear the word “guidance” one thing all people think of is “how to” guidance. As in “Proposal Writing 101.” This kind of guidance can be good, especially when you have inexperienced writers. It embeds training into the document specifications. But it’s not the only kind of guidance, so I put it last. “How to” guidance can encompass the proposal process, writing techniques, task procedures, goals, domain knowledge, institutional knowledge, and more. At a minimum, you should provide sufficient guidance so that those assigned to the proposal can complete their assignments. An example of how they can be combined When you combine these, you might get guidance like this: An instruction regarding how to introduce the section. Options for potential win strategies depending on whether your company is the incumbent or not. Questions about what matters to the customer so they build the section around it. Instructions for how to set up a table as part of the response. “How to” guidance related to meeting proposal writing expectations and proposal department procedures. Compare what you can anticipate getting back from your writers when you provide guidance like this to what you can expect to get from proposal contributors when all you give them is an outline and a copy of the RFP. Should you create ad hoc or pre-written guidance? If you build a library of instructions, questions, and options, you can very quickly assemble your proposal content plans. This can be important for adoption if you are currently struggling to plan your proposal content before you jump into proposal writing. You don’t need complete coverage for your content plans to have a large, positive impact on how your proposals turn out. A recipe library like this is much easier to both create and maintain than a content reuse library based on pre-written narratives. And pre-written instructions won’t hurt your win rate the way recycling narratives will. Even if you don’t have a recipe library, you can use this as a technique to focus on the guidance you conceive of in the moment of need. Building a library Start with your subject matter or other domain topics and drill down. When you get to the lowest level, organize the guidance items you have by these four categories. This will stage your material according to your future needs. When you can specify what should go into the document and how it should be presented ahead of time, you’ll have instructions to pass on. When you don’t know the details and you need your writers to figure things out, you’ll have questions to guide them. When you have potential approaches that are good in the right circumstance, you’ll have the options category to draw from. What we learned by following our own advice This is exactly what we’re doing in MustWin Now. We’ve built an online tool that accelerates proposal content planning by enabling quick lookup of pre-written instructions, questions, and options that you can drop right into your content plans. But which category you use will depend on the nature of what you offer, your personal knowledge of what’s being proposed, your company’s preparation, and the circumstances you are bidding in. The goal is to have the right type of guidance ready. In fact, it was in creating MustWin Now and having to figure out an interface that would enable people to deliver pre-written guidance without knowing their circumstances that we discovered this approach to categorization. If you ever want to reimagine the proposal process or how you can support it, try imagining your process as a user interface for other people to implement and you’ll gain tremendous insight into how to improve their performance.

Instead of focusing on document assembly from lowest common denominator reusable parts from past proposals that were optimized in all the wrong ways for the current pursuit, MustWin Now focuses on helping you create a better proposal than your competitors. The design of MustWin Now puts the priority on doing whatever is necessary to win by supporting people working on proposals with the guidance, information, and management they need to write a better proposal than their competitors. It definitely makes things quicker and easier. But our priority is winning because that makes any effort required profitably worth it. A big challenge with being competitive is that you start the proposal as you are, instead of how prepared you’d like to be. From the moment you start the pursuit, MustWin Now helps you be more effective, and that’s what makes you more competitive. 1) Increasing competitiveness before RFP release Most pre-RFP efforts get bogged down in teaming and end up contributing very little to the proposal. If you’re lucky, you get a list of themes. Sometimes you don’t even get that. MustWin Now increases your competitiveness during the pre-RFP phase in four ways: See also: MWN PM It prompts people to think about dozens of questions like what matters, what your differentiators are, how you should position or ghost against your competitors, how what you know about the customer should impact what you write, etc. It guides you to turn what you know into instructions for proposal writers. This is crucial because it’s the bridge from “we know stuff” to “we know how to win.” After RFP release, it provides tools to drive those instructions into the document in all the right places. Its collaboration toolbox enables you to manage pre-RFP assignments, track progress, review results, ask questions, get help, and make the most of the time until the RFP is released. 2) Increasing your competitiveness when you start at RFP release The challenge to starting at RFP release is to make the most of what you know. This requires quickly surfacing what you know and then figuring out how to make use of it in your proposal in ways that maximize your evaluation score. The Proposal Input Forms in MustWin Now are a variation on the pre-RFP forms designed for use at RFP release. They can increase your competitiveness in the four ways described above, even when you get a late start by quickly assessing what you do know about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and your own strengths and weaknesses. The quicker you can get this information to your proposal writers, the better. And MustWin Now lets you map the implications of what you know to individual proposal sections and assignments. 3) Increasing competitiveness by making your proposal about things that matter If your writers don’t know what points to make, you are likely to produce a proposal that is, quite literally, pointless. You often see this when proposal teams put all their struggle and focus into creating a proposal that is merely RFP compliant. MustWin Now increases your competitiveness by: Whether you start before or at RFP release, bringing forward your team’s knowledge about what matters to this particular customer and about this particular procurement. Enabling you to quickly articulate the points you want to make in each proposal section before the writing starts. Keeping the full text of the relevant RFP requirements in front of proposal writers, so they are writing compliant approaches, but doing it in the context of the points you want to make. 4) Increasing your competitiveness with better management and problem solving Sometimes increasing your competitiveness means removing the problems that reduce it. Proposals frequently encounter problems. Your ability to deal with those problems quickly and effectively impacts your competitiveness. In MustWin Now we include the collaboration toolbox on every page as a reminder and to make it easier to surface issues. Once an issue has been reported it shows up in a dashboard where you can sort and filter by section, severity, user, deadline, and more. Users can click a single button and switch between whether they see the issues that affect them or all issues. A calendar view shows when things are due and what things are overdue. People can ask for help or a quick review of something they’ve done. You get continuous, real-time progress tracking and status awareness. You’ll find yourself conducting meetings with MustWin Now open to add or update issues, manage resources, and more. You’ll save time through quicker response, but more importantly, you’ll prevent last minute surprises and unresolved issues from damaging your competitiveness. 5) Increase your competitiveness by making sure nothing got overlooked Between the Content Planning Tool and the Collaboration Toolbox, you can itemize what should get written, how it should be presented, who should be doing what, and any issues that have been encountered. Instead of open-ended subjective proposal reviews, you can validate that everything that was supposed to go into the proposal made it in and in the way it was supposed to be presented. You can track and work the issues through a process of elimination. But nothing hides. Nothing gets forgotten. Beating your competitors Let your competitors struggle with immature paper-based processes that don’t really work in the real world. Let them fail at planning before they write. Let them make all the same excuses people have been making about proposals for decades. Regardless of what position you are in at the start the proposal, it’s the ink that makes it onto paper and gets put in front of the customer that counts. MustWin Now can help your people prepare a better proposal than they could have without it.

Before you begin proposal writing, you should prepare a proposal content plan that accounts for everything that should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Here is some inspiration for writing the instructions that should go into your proposal content plan. Decide what type of guidance you can provide See also: Content Planning Best Practices Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say Provide instructions to guide the writers to figure out what to offer or say Provide details the writers will need or options to consider Provide instructions that identify the details others should find and include Provide instructions to proposal writers regarding the key points they should make How to achieve the best score against the evaluation criteria The results of your approach/how the customer will benefit Your strengths Your differentiators Things they should prove Information/data they can use when making proof points Providing instructions related to positioning How they should introduce the section, offering, etc. How to present things How to talk about features, issues What to emphasize or focus on Why you’ve chosen this approach or made trade-offs Competitive positioning, ghosting, or comparison What matters The impact Provide instructions related to anticipated customer fears, concerns, and risks What are they aware of What are they not aware of What you plan to do about it (risk identification/mitigation methodology) Provide instructions for research they should do or things writers need to figure out Qualifications Certifications Related details Names to name Capacities Amounts Dates or schedules Provide instructions related to using graphics in this section Guidance or examples regarding the use of graphics and tables Suggestions for graphics to use Instructions for them to figure out what graphics to use Describe the conclusion you want the reader to reach Provide instructions to help the writers figure out what to offer or how to fulfill the requirements What we should offer/do/deliver Achieving RFP compliance Features/benefits/proof What to include Phases or steps in your proposed approach Components of your offering Capabilities Solution architecture People, processes, and tools to propose Roles that project staff or stakeholders will play Who, what, where, how, when, and why Deliverables Estimates Availability or use of resources Provide instructions related to proposal concerns Assumptions Limits in what can be done or amounts Issues Dependencies Proposal risks Mitigations Definitions RFP interpretation Alignment with the pricing or other proposal sections Provide instructions related to discussing your experience/ past performance/ citation/ testimonials Relevant project experience Details about experience Important things about your performance Stories/Anecdotes Accomplishments Testimonials Instructions related to proposal writing Writing from the customer’s perspective Conventions Procedures to follow Style guidance Instructions related to contracting Procurement rules and advice Relevant FAR Clauses and what to do about them

If you need to write a winning proposal to close the sale, then the pre-RFP pursuit phase isn’t just about lead identification. The pre-RFP pursuit phase becomes about preparing to win the proposal. People can’t achieve the goal if they don’t know what it is. If you have more than one, they need to be prioritized. See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Qualify the lead. Does it fulfill for the company’s lead qualification criteria? Discover what it will take to win. Can you articulate what it will take to win? How will the customer make their decision? What must the customer see in your proposal in order to conclude it is their best alternative? Develop an information advantage. What matters to the customer? What are their preferences? How should you interpret the things they say? What do you need to know to design your offering? Turn your information advantage into a competitive advantage. What are you going to do about it? What should you say in your proposal based on what you’ve learned? How should you present what you have to say? Influence the future RFP. If you are serious about winning, you can’t just be passive and wait for the RFP to see what’s in it. If you are serious about winning you should be helping the customer understand their needs and how to articulate them as RFP requirements. If you’re not trying to influence the RFP, you’re just waiting for someone else to. To support this, your pre-RFP pursuit process should be built around: Discovery. What information should you seek? Consider building your pre-RFP pursuit process around questions instead of charts. Positioning. Articulating how you will position against the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and other potential considerations. Guidance. People perform better when they have good guidance. The challenge is to deliver it in a form that doesn’t tie their hands, is accessible from where they happen to be, is useful when they are in the field as well as at their desk, and scales to the time available from start until RFP release. Guidance should cover what to discover, how to do it, and what to do about it. Development. Developing your offering design and validating it with the customer before RFP release is a huge advantage. This assumes you have a process for designing your offering and a way to discuss it with the customer. But even if you can’t validate it with the customer or even complete your design without the RFP, the more you document what you plan to propose and why, the better off you will be at RFP release. If your pre-RFP pursuit process is built around lead identification and bid/no bid decisions, then even though leads are passing the decision-gate, you likely aren't doing a lot of the things needed to maximize your win probability.

Marketing is often poorly defined. What one company calls “marketing” can be very different from another company. Business development is often poorly defined. What one company calls “business development” can be very different from another company. This makes comparing them fun. They overlap so much that some companies don't really do marketing. And that makes understanding the comparison important. See also: Roles What is marketing? What is business development? Marketing is what brings people to your sales process. Business development is that sales process. Except when it’s also marketing. It’s more like business development contains a little of both marketing and sales. And that’s the problem. Business development overlaps with marketing when it is responsible for identifying new markets and customer segments (as opposed to individual customers). For example, by partnering with other companies to bundle their offerings, a business developer might gain access to their partners' customers as well as their own. Or by figuring out that if it develops a new solution, the company can win new business. However, when business development is also responsible for identifying new individual customers, it also overlaps with sales. When business development is responsible for hitting targets based on closing sales, it is a sales function. How much of that marketing do you think will really get done? The overlap between marketing and business development is mostly at the front end. The central issue is what needs to happen before you start prospecting, and who should be responsible for it. There is another set of issues at the back end, revolving around who leads the pursuit once a lead is qualified, who decides what to offer, and who is responsible for proposal development, Where do you want people to spend their time? Do you really want your business development staff spending time on marketing? Do you want them designing a web site to attract the right customers and figuring out how to flow them to the information that will convince them to make contact, or do you want them spending time with the customers that do make contact? Do you want them spending their time crunching analytics to determine what kind of customers to chase, or do you want them selecting individual customers to pursue? Do you want them segmenting markets to determine the right composition to fill your pipeline, or do you want them identifying specific customers to fill those segments? If your business development staff are incentivized based on deals, that’s where they will spend their time. And you will get no marketing. But you definitely do need marketing. And for a lot more than just “branding” or name recognition. Even if you can get by just responding to publicly announced RFPs, you need marketing to figure out which market segments to target and where it’s worth developing relationships. If you just turn your business developers loose, what you’ll get are the low hanging fruit. And over time you’ll grow like a weed instead of growing strong. Beware the seesaw effect When business developers are incentivized based on leads and sales, they won’t start marketing until they run out of leads. Marketing requires time to pay off. It won’t pay off fast enough when you’ve run out of leads and then start. I’ve seen companies go up and come right back down because of this. Marketing would have saved them by creating a continuous funnel of leads for their business developers to spend their time qualifying and pursuing. Instead of an either/or approach or a relationship based on territories, consider having an integrated approach. Ultimately the goal isn't to have marketing, or to have business development. The goal is to win and win big. This requires skills and effort that are beyond what we can reliably expect of one person. It's so much bigger than one person that it really should be the corporate culture and not simply roles that people play.

The problem with planning a Black Hat review is understanding what people’s expectations are. Everyone defines it differently. I’ve never seen two practiced the same way. The very name tells you nothing about its scope. But it does sound cool, and everyone wants to have one. So let me start off with a definition: A Black Hat review is a (preferably pre-proposal) competitive assessment. But that doesn’t tell you what should go into it or how it should be conducted. See also: Capture Management Learn what your stakeholders' priorities are To get to that level of detail, you need to know your priorities. Is the "Black Hat" going to be about: Articulating language for the proposal? Uncovering what your competitors might propose so you can better position against them? Assessing competitors' strengths and weaknesses? Maybe a SWOT chart? Assessing competitive pricing ? When is a Black Hat really a Price to Win? Attempting to score the competitors against the evaluation criteria as if you were the customer? Before conducting a Black Hat review, I recommend circulating a list of possible goals to be discussed and ranked first by all of the stakeholders to the review. Some people want everything. But you need to prioritize. One reason I’ve never seen a Black Hat review done the same way twice is that doing them well is time-consuming and expensive. You can’t just show up to the review, throw some opinion bombs, and pat yourself on the back for not needing to do any research. Building your Black Hat review around your goals Once you have defined and prioritized the goals, a "Black Hat" is just intelligence gathering and strategy development to achieve the goals people said were important to them. How to plan and implement your Black Hat review becomes a solvable problem once you know the goals. Keep in mind that the goal is not going to be to prepare some wicked PowerPoint. The ultimate goal is to impact the proposal. The Black Hat review deliverables should provide guidance to the proposal writers regarding what to talk about, how to position things, and how to present them. Use the Black Hat to determine where you need to change your offering, your team, or your messaging. Then section by section drive those changes into the proposal. Instead of making your Black Hat review about aggregating data about the competitors that none of the proposal writers will know what to do with, try making your Black Hat about discovering and articulating what it will take to win.

I was recently asked about what’s changed in the proposal industry over my career. My response was that what strikes me far more is how little has changed. It’s not just that we have the same problems we had decades ago, it’s that there are viable solutions just waiting to be implemented. Every other part of the companies that depend on winning proposals for their revenue have developed and matured their practices. Except the proposal function. Please read the following as motivation and focus on what to do about the need for change instead of making excuses. This isn't venting. We’ve heard all the excuses and done our share of venting. Note that I haven’t pointed fingers. It’s not the proposal department’s fault. Or sales. Or the executives. The fault belongs to all of us. But fault doesn't matter. Only progress does. I'm sure not all of these apply to every company. But consider just how many of them do still plague your company… See also: Successful process implementation Why are we still doing proposals without defining what proposal quality is? Instead companies still practice “I’ll know it when I see it” quality management. But only on their proposals. Is there any quality methodology in existence that sets that as its standard? Why does every aspect of what we do have actual standards but the critical proposal function which impacts, give or take 100% of the company's ability to generate revenue, does not? Why aren’t we giving writers and reviewers the same set of quality criteria? Why are we surprising the writers with what the proposal should be or say after they have prepared their draft? Why after all this time are we still expecting writers to guess what will be required to pass proposal reviews? How do we ever expect this to work? This is a completely solvable problem. So why haven’t we implemented the solutions? How often are we still beginning proposal writing with little more than the RFP to guide the writers? Even when you start at RFP release, you should have some ideas about what it will take to win that you can use to guide people. Why are we still throwing RFPs at people and expecting them to just figure it out? How is that we’re still getting little or no useable input from business development or capture effort? It’s always amazed me how little the business development briefing or capture plan had in it that helped put the right words on paper during proposal development. Why haven’t we helped them prepare better and create more useable inputs that would have a greater impact on the win rate? Why aren’t we giving them input forms for what we need to know in order to write a winning proposal, and why aren’t they building their processes around delivering it? How is it even possible that engineers and subject matter experts who know better are designing the offering or solution to be proposed by writing narratives about it? This is a major cause of the proposal death spiral. What engineering school or best practice recommends designing things by writing narratives about them? Why do we still do this? Are we really incapable of figuring out what to offer and validating it before we starting writing? When are we going to starting measuring proposals by ROI instead of cost? Going from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate would increase the company’s revenue by 50% and pay for all the effort required to do it many times over. So why are we still under investing in the proposal function instead of tracking its ROI? Is there any other business line or function with the potential to increase the company’s revenue by that much which isn’t tracking its ROI? How much would the company pay for a sales function that could increase revenue by 50%? Increasing your win rate can do that with the leads you already have. And yet, we get stingy with proposals. Maybe it’s because companies don’t know how to increase their win rate. And maybe that’s where they should start. Why haven’t win rates changed? Separate from the ROI issue above, why haven’t companies improved their ability to win proposals enough to change industry average win rates in an amount that’s noticeable? If our “best practices” really are such, shouldn’t there be a quantifiable impact? Why are we still preparing “lists of hot buttons and themes” that do not map to either the proposal outline or the evaluation criteria? We’ve convinced ourselves that we have a process because we have themes. By why do those themes never seem to actually cover the outline or relate to how we’re going to maximize our score against the evaluation criteria? And why are so few themes differentiators? Why can so many of the themes on the lists I see companies preparing be claimed by any company that makes the competitive range? Weak themes are not a best practice, do not mean that you have a process, and are ultimately uncompetitive. Why are they still tolerated, let along offered as something to brag about? Why are people still giving more attention to proposal content reuse than proposal content planning? We all know that content reuse does more to lower win rates than improve them. So why do we focus on that while assuming that planning before writing is just too hard to achieve? Still. By now, we should all know that we spend more time thinking and talking about the proposal than actually writing it. So why do we continue to believe that recycling content is a better way to accelerate things than speeding up figuring out how to prepare a proposal based on what it will take to win? Still. Can we finally kill the meaningless color team labels and milestone-based proposal reviews that don’t actually validate proposal quality? Why can I still ask everyone at the [insert color label here] review what the scope of the review is and get a different answer from everyone participating with nothing defined in writing? And if it is defined in writing, why does everyone still define the scope of the review differently? And regardless of the scope why do we simply ask reviewers to tell us whether the proposal is “any good?” Still. And why do we think that reviewers can read the entire RFP and the entire proposal and assess everything that needs to be validated in a few hours? And do it without any written quality criteria. Are we really still giving assignments to writers with the only guidance amounting to heading titles and the RFP? Why do we still say “write this section” without providing any guidance regarding what to write about and how to present it? Still. Why do companies still treat business development/sales, capture, proposal, contracts, and pricing as sequential silos instead of fully integrating them into winning proposals? Is it because we still try to staff everything proposal related with people who have day jobs and the proposal isn’t their top priority? See the items about ROI and win rate above. Why do we tolerate people expecting the proposal to magically appear without them touching it or learning about it as little as possible? What kind of win rate is that supposed to generate? With everyone claiming to know the “best practices,” how is it that we continue to tolerate train wrecks at the end of proposal production? Why do I still find people who think that a train wreck at the end of the proposal is just the nature of the universe? What other function potentially increasing revenue by 50% or more is allowed to continuously have obviously disruptive results because “that’s just the way it is” and “we can’t do anything about it?” Why are (unsubstantiated) claims still showing up in proposals? We’ve known that this is the most common and curable win rate stealing worst practice for decades. Why is it still showing up? We talk about it. Everyone knows about it. And yet companies have done nothing to eliminate it. Do we care so little about win rate that we can’t even fix this? Since you’re on PropLIBRARY, you probably are not the source of these problems, and if you are a subscriber you have access to solutions for all of them. But the Powers That Be have some mighty bad habits. They’ve accepted these problems for so long they may not even be looking for a solution. Or they’ve institutionalized these problems for so long they’re afraid of what it would take to tear down and rebuild. Or maybe they’re just afraid to admit they don’t know how to solve these completely solvable problems. You can help them with that. But they have to show up motivated and with the will to make it happen. None of these problems are technical. All of these problems are habits. Habits may not be easy to change, but these are opportunity stealing, growth limiting, and revenue reducing habits that are within your power to change. Everyone says they want to win. Now’s the time to finally prove it.

It may seem a bit counterintuitive, but streamlining your proposal management process starts by writing down your proposal quality criteria. In fact, it’s the quickest and easiest way to launch your process. It works better than starting at the kickoff meeting and trying to chart the steps. See also: PQV Quality Criteria Just simply having proposal quality criteria gives you a way to: Provide guidance to your proposal writers Enable reviewers to validate the quality of what your writers produce Inform the activities before the proposal starts about what information will be needed to successfully complete the proposal Ease into proposal content planning by establishing a framework it needs to accomplish. People can attempt proposal content planning without any other guidance beyond the quality criteria, and mature the planning process over time. Enable performance metrics and the discovery of what impacts what it will take to win the most Basically, having proposal quality criteria makes every step better and can be implemented before you’re ready to formalize all the other steps. That’s the sophisticated-sounding way of saying that in the beginning you can make do without having any other process details, if you’ve got your proposal quality criteria figured out. What do you need to get started? To create proposal quality criteria you must: Have a written definition of proposal quality. You don’t know what to achieve if you can’t define it. And oh by the way, proposal quality is not defined by whether it wins. That is out of your hands and can’t be used to guide the people preparing the proposal. Be able to articulate what it will take to win. If you do want your proposal quality criteria to be based on what it will take to win, you’ll have to discover that and be able to itemize the components of it. But if you can’t do that, how are you going to be able to prepare a winning proposal other than by luck? Use that to validate what you’ve written. This means you have to get The Powers That Be who participate in your proposal reviews to accept the quality criteria and use them to conduct a review that is not subjective. Hint: You might want to get them involved in creating your proposal quality criteria. Incidentally, the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY is built around defining proposal quality and having quality criteria. It has all the details needed for immediately implementing a proposal management process that does all these things. How does this streamline your proposal process? Having proposal quality criteria sounds sophisticated, but turns out to be easy to implement and acts as an accelerator for other parts of the process: Your proposal quality criteria can be presented as a checklist. This checklist is usable by proposal writers and reviewers to accelerate and improve performance in both areas. Your proposal reviews are planned by allocating quality criteria to reviewers and dates. This is something that can easily be turned into a form, producing a written proposal review plan in minutes. With slight modifications your quality criteria become a set of pre-RFP goals. This can also take the form of a checklist. Doing this helps ensure that the information you need to fulfill the quality criteria is delivered to the beginning of the proposal effort. With some other changes, your quality criteria become worksheets for planning themes and win strategy development, proposal section planning, offering design, and more. The things required to fulfill the quality criteria can be turned into worksheets for proposal writers. This provides a little structure that helps ensure what they write passes the proposal reviews. It shows what the proposal content plan should result in, providing a defined scope for the planning. Between the checklists and worksheets, you can accelerate proposal content planning, which accelerates proposal writing, and helps ensure you get the proposal right on the first draft. It makes all the other parts of the proposal management process easier to implement. But the most important thing having written proposal quality criteria does is: It enables the people doing the work to know when they’ve succeeded. It increases the likelihood of passing quality validation on the first draft, eliminating unnecessary revision cycles and saving far more time than it took to create the quality criteria in the first place. It pays for itself many times over by improving your win rate. If defining and achieving proposal quality doesn’t improve your win rate, you have the wrong proposal quality criteria. If you want to streamline proposal writing in addition to the proposal process, focusing on reducing revision cycles will save far more time than increasing the amount of proposal text reuse (which can actually increase revision cycles). So why is it that… Nearly every company out there with a proposal process has it backwards? Why do they have the steps, but no written definition of proposal quality and conduct their reviews without any quality criteria? Like I said, it’s counterintuitive. When someone asks you to create a process, people naturally start with the steps. However, in this case, it’s better to start in the middle. The steps should be driven by itemizing what is required for success. When you start with the steps, you get a process designed to make a submission. When you start with defining success, you get proposals designed to win.

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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