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  • Carl Dickson

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    Everything posted by Carl Dickson

    1. Proposal development is about taking what you know about the customer, the opportunity, the competitive environment, and yourself, and articulating it as a story that will convince the customer to select you or do what you propose. Proposals are won through a combination of superior knowledge and superior processes. Getting better at winning proposals means getting better at obtaining the information you need and improving what you do to turn that information into a written proposal. What makes a process superior is not the number of steps, level of detail, or even how many people follow it. What makes a process superior is the results achieved by following it. Since most of the staff working on a given proposal are not specialists and usually do not have a lot of proposal experience, they may not know what information to gather or how to transform it into a written proposal. A superior process needs to provide two things: guidance and inspiration. Typically, a process shows you what to do. But a superior proposal process must also show you how to do it. And this has to be built into the process — it's not something that comes before or is seperate from the process. Note that I'm avoiding the word "training." A superior process doesn't necessarily teach you everything you need to know. If it did, then we'd be able to create winning proposals with people who have no experience whatsoever. There is not enough time in the schedule of a proposal to teach people everything about the subject. But you can give them enough guidance to get quality results from people within minimal experience. A superior process should provide sufficient guidance so that an educated, experienced subject matter expert can follow the process without training. That doesn't mean training won't help them improve, it just means that they will be able to achieve successful results following nothing but the process, whereas without the guidance they would likely get stuck. A superior process will help you gather the information you need to develop a winning proposal. But assessing the information you've gathered and transforming it into a persuasive proposal will still be difficult, even if you follow the steps of the process. What proposal contributors need, in addition the process, is inspiration. In addition to knowing what steps to follow, proposal contributors need help figuring out what to say. That's why we added proposal section recipes to the MustWin Process Knowledgebase on PropLIBRARY. Once the process guides participants through planning the content of their proposal, they still need to write that content. The recipes in our Proposal Cookbooks help inspire them regarding what to write. The process identifies the context, or what matters about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, so that when they work with the recipes, the combination gives them both the superior knowledge and the process they need to win. If you want to improve your win rate and the quality of proposals at your organization, think about how to achieve superior knowledge and processes. Then think about how to guide and inspire people to gather that knowledge and turn it into a winning proposal.
    2. I had a discussion about an upcoming implementation of the MustWin Process at a large company that is one of our Corporate Members. The company has multiple divisions and well over 10,000 employees. It’s a non-trivial rollout. But we have their head of business development and head of proposals as sponsors. The biggest problem you face in a process rollout like this is user acceptance. It’s even worse when there are multiple divisions involved that over time have developed their own ways of doing things. You’re not just asking them to do something new (new process), but to give something up (their own way of doing things). And since it’s directly linked to the growth and success of their division, it can be really difficult to convince them to adopt a new process. Even if it’s a better way of doing things, you face user acceptance challenges, and if they're serious enough, they can lead to process implementation failure. Distribution of materials and training help reduce the barriers, but are usually not enough to win them over heart and soul. That’s when I had an idea that will make a huge difference: metrics. We tend to treat metrics as a beneficial side effect of implementing our MustWin process, kind of like a special bonus that comes with the process. But in this case, metrics are going to be the glue that makes everything work. Metrics will be vital because they are going to become part of the reporting system used in the company. The way our pre-RFP Readiness Reviews are set up makes it easy to quantify the review results at the individual question level as well as at the review level. We did that on purpose to make progress towards being ready for RFP release measurable. The numbers from the measurements can be formatted as a matrix and tracked using spreadsheets. They can be averaged in total giving you a single number that rates your readiness at each stage, or averaged by category (i.e., customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence gathering) to show where you have weaknesses. When senior managers and executives meet to review the status of pursuits, we’re going to modify the format of the reports to include the readiness metrics. Instead of just listing opportunities and subjectively describing their status, they’ll have to report their readiness metrics. In order for people to complete their reports, they'll have to have implemented the process. This is the secret sauce. You don’t convince them to implement the process, you convince the executives of the importance of reporting metrics and then people come to you to learn the process so they can complete their reports. In the short term, the reports will show their "readiness" to bid in a quantifiable way. In the long term, the metrics data will become an extremely useful analytical tool for bid/no bid, bid and proposal budgets, pipeline targets, and other key decisions. Only instead of having the metrics be a byproduct of the process, we're making the process a byproduct of getting the metrics they need for reporting. Instead of scheduling training, begging people to show up, and then hoping they practice what they learn, we expect to have people coming to us to get training in order to complete their reports. And in order to complete the reports, they’ll actually have to do the reviews. In order to show decent numbers on the reviews, they’ll have to be talking to their customers, gathering intelligence, identifying competitive advantages, and positioning their company to win. Life will become so much easier for the proposal managers when people start showing up ready to win their bids. And the best part is, when the win rates go up, they’ll know exactly which efforts drove the increase because of the metrics that they tracked.
    3. Most companies know that to have the best chance of winning an opportunity, you have to start the pursuit before the Request for Proposals (RFP) is released. When you start prior to RFP release, you have better access to information about the customer, the opportunity, and the competition, as well as time to find out more. You also have a chance to influence the RFP. Finding out about the RFP prior to its release gives you a chance to tilt the playing field in your favor. Starting your pursuit early and ensuring that you are ready at RFP release is one of the most important things you can do to gain a competitive advantage and be positioned to win before you even start the proposal. While they put their best effort into it, most companies treat the pursuit as part of the sales process or some mysterious art that cannot be measured. The result is that most companies do not do a good job of taking advantage of the time before RFP release, even when they know about an opportunity in advance. They end up starting the proposal feeling unprepared and not being as well positioned or informed as they should be. Their win rates suffer as a result. This is often because they never define what "ready to bid" means. They don't have a specific plan of action for how to best take advantage of the time before RFP release, or any way to measure their progress towards being “ready.” Defining an opportunity pursuit process that ensures RFP readiness is difficult for a number of reasons: You don't know what will trigger the start of the process. You don't know how much time you will have --- it can range from days to years. The customer controls most of the milestones and they vary greatly from opportunity to opportunity. You will never be able to collect all the intelligence you would like to have. Instead of truly defining the process, most companies just ask for some kind of “Capture Plan” and then focus on their financial projections. There is a better way… The first step is to identify the information you need in order to be prepared for RFP release. Intelligence is generally broken down into categories such as: Scope of work Schedule Acquisition Strategy Evaluation Criteria Financial Points of Contact Competitive Intelligence Competitive Advantage Teaming Knowing what to ask is important, but you also need to have a process in place to ensure the questions get answered. The capture process is a disciplined process to ensure that you do what you should in order to win a pursuit. The MustWin Process lays it all out for you To track progress towards being ready, we divide the time before RFP release into four equal parts so that we can review the answers gathered at each point and measure the progress towards being ready for RFP release. Each part focuses on answering questions in the categories identified above and ends with a review. If you become aware of an opportunity a year in advance, you have three months between each review. If you become aware of it one month before the RFP is to be released, you only have a week between each review. The reviews ensure that progress is made in an orderly manner, without things being left to the last minute or forgotten entirely. Each review provides an opportunity to re-evaluate how you are going to get answers to the questions that you do not have answers for yet. The process starts with the discovery of a lead. The first part of the process focuses on identifying that lead. It establishes a minimum baseline of information that consists mainly of general information about the customer, their goals, your contacts, and the scope of the opportunity. After the lead identification review comes lead qualification. The objective is to continue gathering intelligence on the opportunity to determine how real it is, whether it is worth pursuing, or whether this is potentially a “no bid.” Begin looking at how good of a fit the opportunity is for your company and whether you have any gaps in your capability to do the work. You should also identify any competitors, and begin executing your contact plan. Once the lead has been qualified, you should focus on gathering the intelligence you will need to win the bid. In addition to gathering intelligence, you should also make it your goal to influence the RFP in order to change the procurement in your favor. The intelligence you gather should provide a clear understanding of what it will take to win and help you develop a competitive advantage. The final step is to take the intelligence you’ve gathered and prepare it for use in the proposal. This involves turning the data you've collected into win strategies, proposal themes and action items pertaining to the start of the proposal. The objective here is to do everything possible prior to the release of the RFP, so your team can truly hit the ground running. By this point, you should have a clear understanding of the project’s scope, have begun to develop your technical approach, and be able to articulate why the customer would choose your team versus a competitor’s. It’s also important to keep a finger on the pulse of the opportunity: Has anything changed that you need to make any final adjustments for?
    4. Throwing out an existing process and starting over may be too traumatic for some people to contemplate. Because we designed the MustWin Process for customization, you can also selectively use certain parts. You can use it to cover a part of your process that either isn’t sufficiently documented or isn’t working as well as you’d like. Here are some of the ways this can work: Make sure your team is ready at RFP release. Most proposal processes start at RFP release. They also tend to start unprepared because they don’t address what you need to do before the RFP is released. The MustWin Process starts with lead identification and provides a process for ensuring that you are ready to write the winning proposal at RFP release. If you have a proposal process, but need a pre-proposal process to guide the pursuit, just use the pre-RFP portion of the MustWin process. Set standards for proposal planning. What items constitute a valid proposal plan? Do you have written specifications for each? If your proposal planning efforts are inconsistent you can use our section on proposal planning to guide your efforts. Replace storyboarding with something that works. Storyboards only work well for one kind of proposal and even then they work better for conceiving the solution than they do for planning the document. The MustWin Process helps you select the best approach to planning your content and gives you an alternative that works better for most proposals. Instead of calling for storyboards and then never actually doing them, you can replace that section of your process with ours. Have defined roles and responsibilities. You might know what everyone is supposed to do, but do they know it? Having written roles and responsibilities can help set expectations. Instead of starting from scratch, you can take ours and customize it to meet the needs of your environment. Provide guidance to writers. If all you give your writers is a copy of the RFP and maybe a style guide (that they’re not going to follow anyway), you’re just setting yourself up for problems. Our process gives authors guidance for completing their proposal assignments to help them avoid getting stuck on a blank page. Without making any changes to your process, you can make big improvements simply by putting together a proposal writers support package using our material (and anything of yours you want to add). Change how you do proposal reviews. If you are one of the vast majority of companies that can’t seem to ever achieve consistently successful color team reviews, don’t feel bad. It’s not you, it’s the approach to the reviews that’s broken. The MustWin Process offers a much better way to do proposal reviews that is based on IV&V (Independent Verification and Validation) techniques. Instead of punishing yourself by going through yet another proposal with a broken review process, there is a way out. Replace the review process with one that works. The MustWin Process tells you how. Use checklists. Instead of replacing part of your process or adding a new component, you may be able to improve your process simply by using one or more of the 16 checklists built into the MustWin Process. Track metrics and measurements. The MustWin Process makes tracking metrics and measurements easy. Over time it enables you to really understand what impacts your chances of winning. Our process includes not one but two appendices that deal with metrics and measurements. If you are looking to establish a real process of continuous improvement, the advice it offers will be invaluable.
    5. The MustWin Process is an approach for capturing leads that require the submission of a proposal. It makes proposal development more efficient, sets expectations, enables progress and quality to be measured, and increases your chances of winning. It focuses on getting the right information and going through the steps to turn it into a winning proposal. The MustWin Process is for those who want to win and realize that a one-size-fits-all fill-in-the-blanks template is not the best way to go about it. The MustWin Process offers ways to accelerate the process, but not at the expense of doing what it takes to win. It provides guidance and helps you figure out what to say and write, but does it in a way that is completely customized around winning a particular opportunity at a particular customer. It’s the sort of thing a small business can use to outcompete much larger companies — or the sort of thing a big company can use to revolutionize itself. It’s currently in use at companies with only a handful of people as well as at companies with more than 10,000 employees. The MustWin Process starts by getting you ready to win the proposal, before the RFP has even been issued. As soon as the lead is identified, the MustWin Process guides you to gather the right information and position your company to win. During the critical pre-RFP phase of activity, it provides an innovative structured approach called Readiness Reviews that enables you to measure your progress toward being ready to win at RFP release. Once the RFP is released, the MustWin Process provides guidance for planning and developing your proposal. It uses an innovative technique called Content Planning to provide a link between pre-RFP intelligence gathering and post-RFP proposal writing. Another innovation provided by the MustWin process relates to quality assurance. Instead of focusing on poorly defined milestone reviews that produce inconsistent results, the MustWin Process implements a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation that focuses reviews on specific criteria that correlate with what it will take to win. The MustWin Process is innovative in a number of important ways: See also: Introduction It’s available and ready to use off-the-shelf. In addition to providing unprecedented economy, it gives you a way to quickly get everyone on the same page — literally. It’s easy to customize and integrate. You can use parts of the MustWin Process to supplement an existing process or implement the entire thing in an organization that doesn’t already have a capture process. It defines roles functionally. The process adjusts to the number of people available. Individuals can cover more than one function so long as everything gets covered by someone. The MustWin Process ensures that everyone involved knows what is expected of them, with clear descriptions of the functions they’ll be expected to perform. It manages expectations. Every topic or step addresses who is responsible, what they must do, what the goal is, and when it must be done. It enables pre-RFP progress to be measured. It ensures that you arrive at RFP release ready to win by providing specific questions to answer and goals to achieve. Progress toward finding the answers and achieving the goals is measured over a series of structured reviews. The metrics provided by the reviews can be used over time to unlock what is impacting your win rates. When combined with proposal Content Planning, Readiness Reviews also solve the problem of how to make a smooth transition from pre-RFP pursuit to post-RFP proposal writing. Finally, it provides an objective basis for bid/no bid considerations. It implements proportionate scheduling. The scheduling of Readiness Reviews adjusts to the time available. Whether you have a lot of advance notice or very little, the MustWin Process shows you what to do and makes the most of the time available. It provides an efficient workflow. Information collected during the pre-RFP phase flows into post-RFP proposal plans, to ensure the proposal reflects everything you know about the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment. Documentation of the proposal plans actually starts prior to RFP release. Proposal plans are forms-based to lower the level of effort. The MustWin Process also ensures that little or no effort is wasted on unnecessary steps by constantly moving information forward and by storing it in convenient, reusable formats. It makes writing easier while improving its quality. The Content Planning methodology introduced by the MustWin Process provides a way to ensure that the proposal addresses everything it should, provides guidance to proposal writers, provides a vehicle for collaboration between stakeholders, and establishes a baseline for measuring proposal quality. It turns the actual writing into a process of elimination. Writers don’t have to start from a blank page, or waste extra effort on planning deliverables that are destined to be orphaned, so writing is greatly accelerated. Writers also get a rubric that shows them how they will be graded long before their sections are ready for review. It defines quality in a measurable way. The MustWin Process first defines what a quality proposal is, and then aligns what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment around it. It turns win strategies and themes into quality criteria that the proposal can be measured against. It validates that the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win. The MustWin Process double checks everything that is necessary to win, and does it continuously instead of just at certain milestones. The MustWin Process ensures that reviews are effective by identifying what is necessary to win, turning those items into criteria, building plans around them, and then measuring drafts against them. It solves the problem of reviews that are not consistently effective and it makes quality and progress measurable. It also solves the problem of reviews that can’t adapt to different circumstances, by enabling you to adjust the criteria as well as how and when reviews are performed. It is highly scalable. Readiness Reviews scale to the time available. Content Planning is an iterative approach that can be rationally scaled back. Proposal Quality Validation can rationally scale both what gets reviewed and how it gets reviewed. The MustWin Process solves the problem of how to use the same process on five-day quick turnaround task orders and 60-day strategic proposals. It lays a foundation for metrics and analytics that can revolutionize your business. Progress toward RFP release is measured. The quality of the draft proposal is measured. The resulting metrics, when correlated over time against your win rate, can provide true insight into what is helping and hurting your business. The MustWin Process can enable you to know what to do, based on hard data, rather than going on experience and conventional wisdom alone. In short, the MustWin Process tells you how to gather what you will need to know and put it in the right format so that when you sit down to write you know what to say to win. It does it in a way that facilitates collaboration and provides a much more effective approach to ensure quality results. It’s available off-the-shelf, is fully documented, customizable, ready for immediate implementation, scalable, provides real metrics and measurable progress, improved readiness to win, improved content planning, and improved quality validation. Better, faster, and cheaper — what’s not to like? The MustWin Process forms the core of the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. It was originally published as a hardcopy binder and shipped via snail mail. But now that it's electronic its grown in both depth and breadth, as well as far more useful. PropLIBRARY Subscribers get the MustWin Process along with our recipe library and much, much more.
    6. People often assume that because the topic of a proposal is similar to an earlier proposal, that earlier proposal can be easily recycled just by “changing a few words.” This is hardly ever true. We call pre-written ready to re-use proposal sections “boilerplate.” Working from boilerplate is supposed to save you time because editing is assumed to be easier than writing. But unfortunately, the level of effort required to transform the focus, goals, win strategies, themes, results, keywords, and points of emphasis into another document can easily exceed what it would have taken to write it the way you need it. See also: Reuse Part of the danger with recycling proposal content is that writers won’t review and rewrite everything they should, and will instead just update names, numbers, and key details. But it’s an even bigger danger that the authors won’t optimize every part of the proposal to reflect what it will take to win the new bid. Winning is more important than finishing quickly. Boilerplate that isn’t both updated and optimized can cost you the bid. So what do you do when your authors are complaining that they have to start from scratch writing something that “must have already been written” before? First, you need to understand the real reasons why people crave samples, templates, and boilerplate: They don’t want to do their proposal assignment If they have to do it, they’d like to finish quickly They don’t know what to say What it really boils down to is a cry for help — “Help me do the proposal faster” and “I’m stuck! Help me figure out what to write.” There are better ways to speed things up and inspire proposal writers. People who are looking for a boilerplate solution are balancing their desire to win against their desire to save time. For many people, the idea that boilerplate will save time is just an excuse. The truth is they don’t know what to say and rationalize that boilerplate will help them figure it out quicker, thus saving time. A lot of people fear writing, don’t know how to get started, and are afraid of getting stuck. But rather than saying they need help figuring out what to write, it’s safer to say that they want boilerplate to speed things up. Faster than a template, and more powerful than a proposal template Instead of trying to maintain a boilerplate library, we think Proposal Cookbooks are a better way to provide inspiration. A Proposal Cookbook contains recipes that make writing easier, but the writer still has to do their own cooking. The recipes in a Proposal Cookbook provide: Questions to answer. A recipe provides a list of questions for the author to write answers to. It is similar to an outline, except that the question format prompts the writer to provide the information that a customer needs better than a heading does, and the list is not sequential. Related questions can be grouped or re-sequenced based on the new RFP. Approaches. Since there is usually more than one way to approach a topic, your recipe should address common circumstances, possible points of emphasis, contingencies, and other considerations for writing the section. For example, you might discuss when it is best to include resumes, use biographical summaries, or use a table to describe staff. Strategies. When writing proposals, the context depends heavily on your win strategies and themes. For example, when you are the incumbent you will write about staffing very differently than when you are not. You should anticipate and recommend strategies for certain circumstances. Writers need to know more than what technical subjects to write about — they need inspiration for how to win in writing. Examples. You can give examples for items that are always the same from proposal to proposal, or for when you are describing a topic that is difficult to visualize. An example can be just a short paragraph instead of a whole section. Sometimes an example is all the writer needs to get started. The idea is to help the author without crossing the line by doing the writing for them or exposing the proposal to the risks that result from recycling proposal content. By providing a Cookbook, you help your writers make sure they don’t overlook relevant topics, improve quality, and speed up the process of figuring out what to write. But most importantly, you keep them focused on creating a proposal that is optimized to win instead of on editing a narrative from one context to another. Instead of templates PropLIBRARY comes with Cookbooks that you can use to inspire your proposal writers and accelerate their efforts.
    7. I've never seen a good WBS for the proposal process. I think the reason is that too much is conditional (sequence, duration, contents): You do the steps in the specified order, most of the time, unless you need to make an exception, which in reality happens all the time. Each step usually takes a certain amount of time and effort, but these vary with every proposal depending on circumstances too numerous to list. Which steps you include also varies on every bid, depending on the type, value, staffing available, and other circumstances too numerous to list. We tried automating our off-the-shelf MustWin Process using one of the most sophisticated proposal workflow platforms on the market and found the software wasn’t up to the task. In the MustWin Process we recommend doing things like: Scheduling pre-RFP reviews proportionately (based on the time from lead identification to anticipated RFP release). Planning with a process that lets you tweak the balance of starting quickly vs. taking the time to plan differently on each pursuit and that lets you implement it in either a centralized or decentralized management model. Using criteria-based quality validation that lets proposal planners arrange any number or type of reviews so long as they cover the criteria that need to be validated. Rendering things like these as a sequential workflow becomes really complicated. But if you don't make it complicated, the process won't reflect or survive reality. That's what you see with just about any proposal process flow chart. It gives people a conceptual framework, but in reality, no one actually can actually follow it. One of the things I learned when I created a workbook for our process was that it helps to skip the idea of flow charting the process, and instead focus on topics. This lets people go to a topic when it's relevant. When you define all the conditions needed to render the workflow, the resulting diagram resembles spaghetti and ends up being too complex to be helpful. You see this happen with processes that end up with 90+ steps and diagrams that few people understand and even fewer follow. At best you might define phases like pre-RFP release and post-RFP release. But when you try to break the phases down you run into trouble. Does proposal planning happen before, during, or after the kickoff meeting (or all of the above)? Does quality validation come after the writing, or in a loop with writing, or in parallel, or what? The truth is that every proposal has variations based on staffing availability, the importance of the pursuit to the company, and other factors. In our original hard copy workbook we got around this by using tabs. We have tabs for things like: Pre-RFP Pursuit Readiness Reviews RFP Release/Kickoff Meeting Proposal Planning Proposal Management Proposal Writing Proposal Quality Validation Proposal Production Readers can switch between proposal planning, management, writing, and quality validation as needed. We put them in the book in the general order in which they happen, but in truth they are not sequential. One of the tasks sitting on my “to do” list is to define some graphics that better illustrate the MustWin Process. I have some ideas, but haven't yet solved how to illustrate it end-to-end. I may just illustrate units and not tie them together sequentially. That seems to reinforce the utility of topics over steps.
    8. monthly_2016_02/ContentPlanningGuide_pdf.dc16213cbfcefb80f70fc2cabe8a0f99
    9. monthly_2016_02/doing_proposals_the_wrong_way_pdf.4d64457d0bb414a9a2b7cee22463d127
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    11. monthly_2017_04/Proposal-Sample-Makeover_zip.e521bf08c86b36c7483241c524bc62c9
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    13. monthly_2016_02/your_first_proposal_pdf.53060297916bdf4870f5ab3e12ceda65
    14. monthly_2016_02/Proposal_format_guide-inside_pdf.8ab7d386fc4d6456221d059d90c06992
    15. monthly_2016_02/bizdev4pms_pdf.46369e29ba2bb4701f41a13490d2432a
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    21. monthly_2016_02/TimeToReengineerTheProposalProcess_pdf.424dc928f059808cc9a7ecaaceb5e920
    22. monthly_2016_02/CP-MustWin-Workbook-2010b_pdf.70733abf0309f5e43e86f481b896bcfe
    23. monthly_2016_02/How_to_write_an_executive_summary_pdf.1227b616707fdff05b3181784c19bee2

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