Carl Dickson

In most companies, proposal development is the most immature part of the company. But they don’t realize it because they’ve bought into myths that enable them to think all that work they’ve put in amounts to more sophistication than it really does. Often what they do is different from what they say they do. Because of the myths that people have bought into, management practices that would not be tolerated in any other part of the company become expected as the norm in proposal management. These are not all of the myths, but some with implications that less obvious and more interesting. If I keep writing to address the rest of the proposal myths, it will likely fill (another) book. Myth: Successful assignment completion is defined by meeting deadlines See also: Proposal Management A.K.A.: Your assignment is to complete this section by this deadline. If you ask someone to complete a section by a deadline that becomes their job and that is what they will focus on. That deadline could be a review it could be the final deadline or any milestone in between, but the way they measure their progress and performance is by completion. And completion is measured by how much ink is on the page and not by the impact on win probability. Their real goal ends up being getting the proposal out of the way. And this seeps into the corporate culture, resulting in people seeing the proposal as an interruption, an exception, and not part of their real jobs. When their job is completion, it becomes somebody else's job to win. It also makes the writer the person who determines what completion means and what a good enough response is. When people understand their assignments to be fulfilling certain quality criteria by the deadline, then that is what they will set out to do. Those criteria must define successful accomplishment and should define how you will determine whether they’ve created a proposal based on what it will take to win. This puts the onus on you to do a good job of defining the quality criteria. But the real advantage is that people are working to accomplish goals that are measurable and are based on winning. They are not simply trying to get the proposal out of the way. Myth: Everyone wants to win If everyone is trying to win and everybody knows what that means, then why do so many proposal experiences turn bad? Everybody says they are trying to win the proposal when they make contributions, and yet some people merely do what they've been told. Some not even that. Everybody says they are trying to win the proposal and yet the proposal is clearly not the top priority for some people. The people who are there to win are the ones who are participating in the discussions about what it will take to win. Those who are listening are not contributing. There are many possible reasons for this. Everyone does want to win. But some will be a part of making that happen, while others are there because it’s their job and believe that that job does not including figuring it all out. You may (or may not) get what you ask for out of them, but you can’t rely on them to be absolutely competitive in writing. They aren’t even trying to figure out what that means. Myth: Proposal writers should follow the RFP While the RFP may be the single written truth defining the requirements, it’s not enough to write a great proposal. And yet it’s often all proposal writers are given to work from. This results in bad solutions as well as bad proposal writing. Your opinion about what a good solution is or what good proposal writing is does not matter. Only the customer’s opinion matters. You need to know the customer’s goals, preferences, and reasons for why they wrote the RFP the way they did if you are going to write a proposal that the customer thinks is great. To understand how to make the trade-offs the way the customer would like them made, you need to build your solution and presentation on more than just what’s in the RFP. It helps to have customer and competitive intelligence, but guessing at what the customer prefers so you can attempt to write from their perspective is better than nothing. Just don’t expect each proposal writer to do this on their own. The entire team needs guidance and to share the same customer insights. People working on proposals should follow the customer’s perspective, and the RFP is only part of divining that. Myth: To follow the proposal process, you have to follow the steps The proposal process doesn’t lend itself to steps. This is the nice way of saying any proposal process based on following steps will break in practice. But it would be the wrong approach to take even if it could be made to work because you can’t be competitive when people simply do the steps the way they’ve been told. You want people to seek out what it will take to win and then adapt their approaches to deliver it. And what it will take to win changes with every new customer, set of evaluation criteria, group of evaluators, and change in the competitive environment. If instead of spoon-feeding people steps to follow you give them goals to accomplish then they have to actually apply themselves. The proposal process should be about accomplishment. It should define all the things you need to accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Some of this work is done in sequential steps, and some not. But it is not the steps that matter, it is what gets accomplished. People will, of course, try to skip steps. But if they can do that then you have not set the goals correctly. You can also offer your process, steps, and techniques in ways that enable people to accomplish the goals more quickly and with better quality. Because if your steps aren’t enabling people to work faster and better, then maybe they shouldn't be following those steps. Takeaways The way you give your proposal assignments determines what you get back. Merely giving writers a section and an RFP will not reliably produce competitive proposals. The way you measure progress, performance, and completion has a profound impact on how well people work. When they are working on a proposal, these things have a big impact on your win rate. Powering through is not the best way to be competitive. People need more than tasks, steps, and deadlines to perform well. If you go beyond just handing out an RFP, give people the right guidance, and get them involved in the act of winning, then they can power through to become champions.

Most people who want to win contracts realize they need a proposal management process. An unfortunate percentage think they have a proposal process when they really just have a way of doing things. But what really messes companies up is that they have the wrong goals for their proposal management process. Sometimes their process even works against what they should be trying to achieve. Here are 8 things that people often want from a proposal management process: See also: Steps Lowering costs and increasing efficiency. Proposal efficiency is a bit counter-intuitive. A proposal function is efficient when it hits its maximum win rate and not when it gets the maximum productivity out of the fewest resources. The reason is that wins are profitable and cost reductions tend to bring fewer wins. You achieve the best return on your proposal investment when you win the most of what you bid and not when the proposal function is the lowest cost. In fact, lowering the cost at the expense of win rate ensures that you will get less profitability out of the proposal function. A proposal management process that maximizes win rate is very different in both design and implementation from one that minimizes proposal effort and cost. Instead of implementing a proposal management function with the goal of making the proposal require less effort, try focusing on winning everything you bid. Do the math. This will provide much more funds to get help for overworked staff than you could possibly save by cutting costs at the expense of win rate. Guidance. It is better to think of the proposal management process as guidance than as an assembly line. A proposal management process shows people what they need to know, when they need to know it, so they can win in writing. The key is that they need to be shown how to do the things that need to be done. Repeatability. The reason we want repeatability in the proposal management process is to keep people from making it up as they go along. It also prevents you from being locked into a “proposal hero” who determines what to do, only usually at the last minute with great disruption. If your proposal management process can only be executed by a single person, then you don’t really have a process. Repeatability is not about creating an assembly line to crank out your proposals. Repeatability in the proposal process is about institutionalizing the things that lead to a high win rate. Quality assurance. How do you know whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win? If you leave it up to an experienced person, you can never grow beyond that person. The proposal management process should define proposal quality and enable anyone to know what to do to achieve it and assess whether they have. Progress measurement. Is it done yet? How about now? When will you finish writing that section? Questions like these are important and surprisingly difficult to answer. A proposal management process lays out the planning, writing, and quality assurance checkpoints. A good proposal management process lays them out with clever, objective ways to assess progress against the plan. Knowing the status of the proposal is vital to prevent a proposal from getting into trouble. Risk mitigation. A proposal management process ensures that you identify and mitigate the risks in bidding and of losing. Leaving this up to people in the moment means, well, increasing your risks. Risks that aren’t mitigated destroy your win rate, ruin your profitability, and kill your customer relationships. But aside from that, don’t worry about them. Scalability and adaptability. The proposal management process for a one week turnaround mid-value RFP should be exactly the same as a one month turnaround high-value strategic RFP. You don’t need two processes. You need a process that scales. The things you need to do to build a proposal around what it will take to win are the same no matter what the size or schedule. The amount of effort you put into a proposal, the delegation of authority, and the number and type of staff assigned will change. But the process itself doesn’t have to. In addition, the order that things happen in will change. RFP amendments can break any flowchart driven process. But if you build your processes on goals instead of steps you can have scalable levels of effort with a single process that scales and adapts. The proposal process is not about steps. It never plays out the same way twice. It is about achieving goals. Win rate improvement. To achieve maximum ROI, this will need to be the top goal of your proposal management process. If win rate improvement is important to you, you’ll want a process that enables you to discover what it will take to win, build a proposal around it, and then validate that your work on the proposal reflects it. This is what the MustWin Process is designed to do for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. You will need to be able to track your success with these things to correlate what has the most impact on your win rate so that you can focus more on it. And doing this tracking will enable you to direct your resources to the things that improve win rate the most. You’ll find you're focusing less on having “proposal heroes” and producing lots of cheap proposals with a low win rate, and instead focusing on maximizing your return by having enough resources to achieve a high win rate. You can have all of these things. But they can’t all be your top priority. And you really need to be careful about whether your goal is to lower costs or to increase win rate. A small increase in win rate will provide a much larger return than any cost reduction you can squeeze out of the proposal process. This is why we designed the MustWin Process for PropLIBRARY Subscribers around discovering what it will take to win and then building your proposal around it. If you are creating your proposal management process, or if you are updating or reengineering the one you’ve had, then don’t start by planning out the steps. Start by figuring out what the goals should be. You’ll be surprised how challenging it is and how many different points of view your stakeholders will have on the topic. What we’ve discovered at companies we’ve implemented the MustWin Process at is that simply getting everyone on the same page regarding the goals of the proposal process makes a profound impact. People focus their proposal processes too much on what to do than on what they should accomplish. Once you get everyone on the same page regarding what the goals for your proposal management process should be the steps will work themselves out.

Maybe you’ve got a great proposal process. Maybe you don’t. But when you’re in the middle of one, you’re stuck. You can't go back in time and prepare better before you start. The resources you have may be all you're going to get. You may not be able to get answers to your questions. And yet, you must conquer. So how do you figure out what to do when? How do you herd the cats to work like a team? Where should you devote your attention? How do you make the most of your circumstances? Is there anything you can do to make them better? Who are you? Keep in mind that sometimes “you” is just you. And sometimes it’s your whole organization. Usually it’s a mix of both. The following tips are written from a proposal manager’s perspective. Kinda. Even though they’re mostly about proposals, if we all did these things every day, at work and at home, we’d be better people and the world would become a better place. But even if you’re not that ambitious, just addressing them on a proposal can improve your win rate and make for a much better experience. Answering these questions can lead you to doing a better job on your proposal See also: Dealing with adversity Think carefully on the tips below, because many of them can be considered from multiple perspectives. In fact, gaining perspective might be worth adding as another tip. Use these questions to gain the perspective you need to help you do a better job on your proposal: How are you measuring your performance? How are you measuring progress? Do you understand what it will take to win? Are you completing a proposal or winning one? Are you making decisions based on their impact on the probability of winning or based on something else? Does everyone agree on what the customer expects? Have you figured out what to do to get the highest score? Do you have the same priorities as everyone else involved? When was the last time you spoke to everyone involved? Are you arguing over things that are worth arguing about? What have you done to force potential problems to the surface? What will the customer think of the work you’ve done? What have you done to make sure everyone else does better than they would on their own? Does everyone know how to pass their next review? Does anyone have an assignment they don’t know how to complete? Are you fighting fires or preventing them? Does everyone have the information they need to complete their assignments? How will everyone get the information they’ll need for their future assignments? Are you building without a blueprint? What needs to be done that hasn’t been accounted for? Is anyone going off script? What is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about? After identifying all the known knowns and known unknowns, have you eliminated the potential for surprises? Does everything above include your teaming partners? The answers to these questions will have a profound impact on your success, separate from which process you follow, your level of preparedness, or even your bid strategies. But if you use them to help you prepare, implement an effective process, and conceive your bid strategies the impact will be multiplied.

Sometimes the customer recycles their RFPs. They use generic evaluation criteria. They hurt themselves when they do this, but they still do it. The advantage of using generic evaluation criteria to the customer is that they can interpret them any way they want. They can select the bidder they prefer and then justify it. It’s not supposed to work that way, but when you see generic evaluation criteria, you have to wonder… The disadvantage to the customer is that generic evaluation criteria doesn’t tell bidders what the customer’s priorities are and what matters about what they are buying. This makes it more difficult for bidders to provide an offering that reflects the customers preferences and priorities. It makes it more likely that the buyer will get less of their needs met, even by the winning bidder. See also: RFPs Here are some examples of meaningless evaluation criteria: Bidder has sufficient capacity to deliver the project requirements. How does the word “capacity” apply to what is being procured? Are you supposed to guess? Is it a performance metric? Or is it having the staffing available, the right skill sets, sufficient financing, productivity, resources, span of control, or something else? Experience with the type of services specified in the solicitation. Does the customer care more about the size, scope, or complexity of the work you’ve done in the past? Are they looking for specific details, such as services performed or technology used? Do they care more about the amount of experience, the relevance of the experience, or what you actually achieved? Simply “having” experience doesn’t add much value or help the customer perform their evaluation. But what is it about your experience that they are concerned with? Objective and subjective criteria will be used to evaluate the proposals. Gee, I never could have guessed that. Does this say anything that can be used to ensure the customer gets what they want? How exactly will they evaluate these criteria? The answer is however they want. This is not a criterium, it is a justification for acting on a whim. Meeting the mandatory minimum requirements. I already understand that you have requirements. Because I want to win, I’d like to do more than the minimum. In fact, I’d like to give you more of what you want than anyone else, while still remaining cost competitive. So how will you score something that goes beyond the minimum? Addresses the issues discussed in the RFP. This is the same as telling me that I must meet the minimum requirements to win. The challenge for the bidder isn’t addressing the issues discussed in the RFP, it’s knowing what matters to you about the issues that matter to you and any preferences you might have regarding how those issues get addressed. When there is more than one way to approach an issue, we want to do in the way that you prefer. Illustrates a comprehensive understanding of work requirements and mastery of the subject matter. What do you, as the customer, consider to be a comprehensive understanding? Does that mean a proposal in which the bidder says “we understand” the most sincerely will win? Or should the bidder restate the requirements that you just gave them? Or repeat the mission statement you have on your website? Or will you score understanding based on which proposal has the most detail? Or select the bidder with the most experience? Or the staff with the most experience? Or does the customer want to see credentials and qualifications to establish “understanding?” Will the best approach prove understanding? Or will it be the proposal that comes closest to your budget? When you use a term like “understanding” without saying how you will assess it, you are more likely to get proposals that lack clarity and make a lot of claims. Overall quality of the proposal. This tells the bidder absolutely nothing about what you want to see in the proposals you receive. What bidders would like to know is what you think would indicate a quality proposal for this specific procurement. When bidders have to make a trade-off decision, and proposals often require hundreds of them, we’d like to make them based on your preferences instead of just guessing at them. When the evaluation criteria are this poorly defined, the customer will get proposals based on guesses instead of what they really want. The bidder that guesses the best may not be the best vendor and what they offer will not add as much value as they would have if the customer said what is important to them. Getting the best value is worth doing more than just releasing a generic or recycled RFP. So hopefully the RFP moves from these meaningless criteria into details that shed some light on what’s important and not just what’s required. How should you write your proposals when the evaluation criteria don’t provide any real guidance? If the RFP only provides meaningless evaluation criteria, bidders have to go beyond them to develop win strategies. This is where it’s really important to know the customer. You need to know what matters to them, how they make decisions, and what they need to see in a proposal to give it the top score. If you haven’t had a single conversation with the customer, you’re at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to interpreting what they wrote in the RFP. This is especially true when the RFP evaluation criteria are meaningless. If the customer gives you meaningless evaluation criteria and you don’t know how to interpret them, try explaining your rationale and why you’ve made the choices that you did. It is entirely possible that the evaluator doesn’t understand how to score against their own meaningless evaluation criteria, in which case your rationale will appear stronger than someone else’s claims of greatness. You’ll need to cover the bases on the more quantifiable considerations like qualifications and experience. But the reasons why your approaches are the best will give them reasons to give you a good score. Your reasoning about what matters may help them to apply their ambiguous evaluation criteria in your favor. In the absence of knowing what matters to the customer, focus on what should matter to them. And articulate all of your features, benefits, and reasons in ways that present them as strengths. You may not know how they’ll score their ambiguous evaluation criteria, but most scoring systems look for strengths and weaknesses in the proposal, even if they don’t use the terms “strengths” and “weaknesses.” And if you find out that the customer was looking for something else, you would never have guessed it anyway. If only they’d have told you, maybe you could have offered something better than what they accepted.

Most companies have their priorities backwards and it’s hurting their win rate. To show them, I like to tell companies that they should spend as little time as possible figuring out how to win, what they need to say to the customer to get the top score, and how they should present their offering. The much easier alternative is to write draft after draft until you run out of time without ever having figured it out. Do as little as possible to win. Of course, you’re not going to win if you don’t build your proposal around what it will take to win and say what the customer needs to hear to give your proposal the top score. When you think about what doing these “as little as possible” means, hopefully you’ll realize that they are critically important and should be what drives your proposal scheduling priorities. Beyond simply completing the proposal and making an on-time submission, where you should spend time on a proposal? Proposal writing can take a little time, or it can take a lot of time. When you prioritize the time to write and minimize planning, it means figuring out what to write by rewriting until you discover it. You’ll end up doing a lot of writing if you combine proposal writing with solutioning and figuring out what it will take to win, but you’ll end up creating a patchwork proposal and run out of time without achieving a proposal that is built around what it will take to win. To build your proposals around what it will take to win, you need to make figuring out that and what you should offer a higher priority than proposal writing. They should come first. To achieve this, you need to give planning your proposal more time and proposal writing less time. Minimize the amount of time needed for writing and not planning. This does not mean having less time for writing than it requires. It just mean spending less time writing in circles. How much time should you spend on proposal planning? See also: Successful process implementation Let’s look at a high-level textbook example of a 30-day proposal schedule: Day 2: Bid decision complete. Day 5: Compliance matrix, proposal outline, and kickoff meeting complete. Proposal writing starts. Day 19: Proposal section drafts finished and Red Team Review complete with 5-6 days left. Day 30: Submit proposal. Unfortunately, here's how it really plays out: Day 3: Bid decision usually complete. But sometimes not. Day 5: Compliance matrix, proposal outline, and kickoff meeting rushed, but complete. Just not reviewed. Proposal writing starts. Day 19: Red Team Review says the draft sucks. The offering is all wrong. Take 2 days to figure out what to offer. Take 5 days to rewrite. Day 26: Attempting to figure out what to offer and what to write. Hold a Redder Than Red Review and find out it's still got problems. Continue rewriting. Day 28: Give up on color labels but have another review to figure out what can be done in the time remaining. Day 29.5: Wrap it up, no matter what. 4 hours remain for production. Day 29.9: Submit minutes before it's due. No one knows what changes got made. Here is how it plays out when you reduce the time required for proposal writing: Day 3: Bid decision must be complete. Period. Begin proposal content planning. Day 8: Review the plan. Discover and fix the proposal approach and issues now. Day 12: Plan is done. Start writing. Day 19: Review to ensure the draft reflects the plan. Day 20: Draft is okay because the plan was reviewed. But there is room to improve the presentation. Day 24: Have a final change review to catch any remaining problems before entering final production. Day 27: Final production. Day 28: Review production draft and finalize. Day 29: Ready to submit, a day early in case of submission difficulties. Notes: With the emphasis on proposal planning, proposal writing starts 7 DAYS later and the time for writing is cut in HALF. But the draft review ends up on the same day. This is because having a fully validated Proposal Content Plan accelerates proposal writing. HALF of the time originally allocated writing is spent thinking things through and validating them before turning them into narrative. The Red Team Review recovery also takes much less time because the planning included an intensive review of the plan, which caught the major defects before the narrative was written. The quality of the proposal at submission will be much higher, because the changes at the back end represent presentation improvements instead of strategy repair. The most important dates for the proposal shift from being the Red Team, with 5-6 days left before submission, to the Content Plan Review with 11 days left. Normally you don’t find out whether the proposal is a disaster until the Red Team. But when you make the Content Plan review the priority, you find out before the document is even written. The wrong way to look at things Trying to maximize the time available for proposal writing because of the (inevitable) problems is the wrong way to look at things. You should minimize the amount of time it takes to write your proposal, instead of leaving it open ended. You should apply that time to: Accelerating how quickly you can surface the problems before you invest in writing narrative, when they are still easy to fix. Accelerating writing, by having a plan that provides sufficient guidance to turn it into a process of elimination. Accelerating proposal reviews by defining what the reviews should validate. Transferring time from endless rewrites to planning and reviewing the plan is how you achieve getting the proposal right on the very first draft and make the back end of the schedule about improvement instead of recovery. For the best success, try this… Double down and put more time into reviewing the plan than you do into reviewing the draft proposal. Challenge your reviewers to validate that it's right at the beginning. The draft proposal can be quickly reviewed by comparing it to the plan, but only if the plan is valid. Reviewing the draft should be an afterthought and a mere quality control double check. Reviewing the plan should be where you determine whether the proposal will reflect what it will take to win. The rest is just presentation. If you're waiting until the draft and reviewing it to figure out if the proposal can win, you did something wrong before you even got there. This is a key, objective sign that your current process is not maximizing your potential win rate. Since reducing the time to write will be counter-intuitive for some, you can: Ask people if the outcome was critical, would they start any other valuable project without a plan and start building right in order to complete the project on time? Track the data comparing the amount of time spent planning, the amount of time spent writing, and your win rate. Turn it into a chart that shows where the curve that maximizes win rate. You can also use this chart to refine how you do your content planning. Don’t be pushed around just because people are nervous about something they are not good at. Instead, you have to help them overcome their fear and do the right thing instead of following their panic reaction. And yes, people who are not confident writers panic at the thought of having a deadline to complete their writing assignments. Some will even admit it. Guide them. Nurture them. But be strong my proposal warriors. Don't settle for table scraps when it comes to proposal planning if you care about winning.

My wife broke the screen on her phone recently. The repair turned out fine, but her experience with the vendor wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad either. But listening to her describe it, all I could think of was what a great teaching moment it was for proposal writing. Yeah, I’m wired that way. The vendor didn’t have the right screen replacement and had to order it. When it came in, it sat until my wife called to see if it came in when it was supposed to. When she got home after she dropped her phone off to be fixed, she realized that they had no way to contact her and tell her that it was ready for pickup. The only phone number they had for her was the phone they were fixing. When she just showed up later, the person who helped her pulled out a phone and asked her if it was hers. It was. When she got her repaired phone home, she noticed it had adhesive marks on it that hadn’t been cleaned up. But the cracks in the screen were gone and everything went pretty much as promised. However, I couldn't help but notice some opportunities for improvement. And if I was writing a proposal for one of their competitors, I would offer a process that: See also: Examples Minimizes wait times by proactively calling the customer when parts arrive Includes multiple ways to contact the customer, and for them to contact us, so that communication is always timely Maintains the chain of custody to prevent loss or theft Cleans and packages completed work to provide a new purchase experience Follow-ups afterward to ensure customer satisfaction, collects feedback for continuous improvement, and maintains the customer relationship for the future Tracks repair time planned vs actuals and reports on any differences The beauty of this is that it would cost the vendor nothing. They’d need a few forms that could easily be automated. But they are already doing the work. It won't take any more effort to do these things and deliver more value like minimizing the repair time, ensuring things don’t get lost, accelerating response times when things go wrong, and quality assurance and continuous improvement. Not doing these things makes them vulnerable to a competitor who does and delivers more value. The reality is that both the product and the service are exactly the same regardless of who provides them. It’s the same repair, the same level of effort, the same staffing, with the same level of training. However, if you were the customer receiving proposals for a repair service like this, and one proposal offered simply to perform the repairs and the other proposal addressed the bullets above, which would you select? If the incumbent was the vendor and you showed up with a proposal that addressed the bullets above, could you steal the opportunity away from them? The current vendor may be competent. But you could be so much more in your proposal. All you have to do is care a little more. Proposals aren’t just about coming up with fancy words that hypnotize the customer. Proposals are not just about doing the work. They should be about doing the work reliably and effectively in ways that will delight the customer and that you can document and prove. You can differentiate what you offer, even when you offer the exact same thing. You can win without offering anything different, simply by addressing the customer’s concerns and demonstrating you do the things needed to make sure everything goes as promised. Pay attention to your vendors, because they can teach you how to beat your competitors.

Victory for a proposal means that the customer accepts your proposal instead of their other alternatives. Depending on the customer, there are different paths that can get you there. And sometimes getting there means taking more than one path. The paths to victory include: See also: Winning Getting the top score. This is not nearly as straightforward as it sounds. First you have to assess the categories that get scored, and then what you have to do to maximize your score in each category. If the language is simple, bland, and generic, it won’t help you understand what is important to the customer. But sometimes you will gain insights that are tremendously helpful. For example, if they assess your ability to perform by giving points to experience, and they assess the quality of your staff based on their experience, and they assess your ability to manage the project based on whether you’ve managed projects of similar, size, scope, and complexity, and they have a separate experience section with a point score of its own… what do you think is most important to the customer? What do you think the entire proposal needs to be about? What context should everything be written in? Even if the evaluation criteria aren't this obvious, you should still write to put everything into a context that best reflects the evaluation criteria they gave you. Try looking at various combinations of the evaluation criteria and how they add up. You might find that a certain combination of evaluation criteria guarantees a win. When that's the case, guess what your proposal should focus on? Reflecting the customer preferences. The fewer details provided by the evaluation criteria, the more being able to write in a way that reflects the customer’s preferences matters. And on occasion, customer preferences matter more than the evaluation criteria. But either way, to maximize your score your offering has to reflect the customer’s preferences. The way you become the vendor that the customer prefers is when what you offer is what the customer prefers, the trade-offs you select are the ones the customer prefers, the approaches you take are the ones the customer prefers, the benefits you deliver are the ones that the customer prefers, what is in your proposal is what the customer prefers, and it is presented in the way that the customer prefers. If you read the evaluation criteria and can't find any particular path to victory, then look to what you know about the customer's preferences. If you read the RFP and you still don’t know the customer’s preferences, you will have to guess. But it’s much better when you know the customer well enough that you don’t have to guess. Having competitive pricing. Sometimes this means having the lowest pricing and sometimes it doesn’t. If pricing only counts for 10% of the evaluation, you can win by having a score that is less than 10% higher everywhere else. If pricing counts for 30% of the evaluation, your pricing is the second lowest, and the lowest price gets 30 points to your 25, you only need to be ahead by 6 points elsewhere to win. If pricing the most important evaluation criteria, then being competitive means having the lowest price and it’s not worth trying to maximize your score elsewhere if it means increasing your price. When trying to figure out what to say in your proposal and how to present it, search for the path to victory. The path to victory will be what the customer needs to see in your proposal in order for it to be the one selected. When you can see what has to happen during evaluation in order for you to be selected, you can use that path to guide how you build your proposal. Start by figuring out what the RFP tells you about how to win. Fill in the blanks with what you know about the customer’s preferences. And make sure you are competitively priced, realizing that can mean something different in each new RFP. Treat each one of these paths as a journey of discovery. Don’t assume you know the path before you read the RFP. The RFP contains clues, but they can be cryptic. Look for the new twists and turns hidden in the RFP, and plot a path to victory that takes them into account. The customer is waiting for you. You just have to find your way there. Otherwise, you're just writing while wandering around hoping you end up in the right place.

There’s a line that you should not cross. It’s hard to tell exactly where that line is. But once you cross it, your proposal manager is no longer focusing on increasing your win rate and instead is simply getting proposals out the door. At the simplest level, a proposal manager is responsible for implementing the process. And being the heroes they are, they tend to fill gaps. But each gap they fill means giving up something else. And when they cross the line from overseeing the process into being part of production, they put the proposal at risk because while their attention is on writing, teaming issues, pricing, tool implementation, staffing the proposal, etc., their attention is not on things that have a major impact on whether you win. When the proposal manager is overloaded, these are some of the things you give up: See also: Proposal Management Defining what it will take to win. The biggest pursuits have dedicated capture managers to figure this out. Mid-sized pursuits sometimes have a business developer or project manager assigned as a “capture manager.” But most of the proposals submitted have a bunch of people sitting around a table shouting out potential “themes.” If the proposal manager doesn’t structure the proposal around what it will take to get the top score, who will? If the proposal manager isn’t putting time into this, it’s because they’re too busy fighting fires. Where do you want them to put their attention? Planning the proposal content and not just producing an outline. If the proposal manager is too busy planning a kickoff meeting, checking the status of teaming agreements, and building a compliance matrix so they can build an outline so they can start tasking assignments and discover just how short they are on resources, they are not likely to be focusing on planning the content of the proposal before people start writing. The result is that the proposal will be what you have when you run out of time instead of something planned and built around what it will take to win. Defining quality criteria. If your writers and reviewers aren’t given a set of written quality criteria to guide their efforts, why not? The answer will most likely be that the proposal manager “didn’t have time.” But what priorities are so important that they could take attention away from defining what it will it take to win? Only things that could prevent the proposal from getting submitted at all would come first. And if your proposal manager is responsible for production, writing, etc., they won’t have time to define quality criteria, let alone structure a review process that validates the proposal fulfills them. Providing coaching for writers and SMEs. Every proposal has a mix of people who have proposal experience and people who do not. Subject matter experts, in particular, can make great contributions. But they need coaching in the evaluation process and how that impacts what matters. This coaching simply involves a lot of discussion before writing, during writing, extra informal reviews, and help responding to formal review comments. The first thing that happens when the proposal manager is overloaded is that this coaching only happens when it’s requested, instead of being a constant presence. Tracking everything in real time. When the proposal manager is overloaded, they naturally focus on the critical path. When they are extremely overloaded, they do their best to make sure that they can see the critical path to an on-time submission. If your proposals lack thorough coordination and status awareness for everyone, the problem isn’t that it hasn’t occurred to the proposal manager. The problem is that they can only do it when they can get to it, and it has to wait in line. Production and review checklists. When you see people performing reviews and flipping through the RFP, it’s a sign that the things they should be checking haven’t been distilled into a checklist. By the time you get to the review and production stages, you will be pressed for time. Do you want people working inefficiently when they are trying to rush through quality assurance? Reviews focused on quality validation instead of opinions. When proposal reviewers are handed an RFP and asked for their comments, you’re not going to get the best quality. In fact, what you get might be worse than not having any reviews. You certainly won’t get past subjective opinions about how to win that come too little too late. Good reviews are based on a written definition of proposal quality, have well defined proposal quality criteria, and validate that the proposal is what it was supposed to be. This takes more than just a copy of the RFP that too many reviewers don’t even read to achieve. Who is going to provide that guidance? I’m all in favor of having a review team leader take on that responsibility. But how many companies do that? In the absence, it’s one more thing that lands on the proposal manager’s to do list. Consider the sunk cost of the total proposal effort and the revenue lost if you do not win. When you see these things not being done, it’s a sign that you are trying to skimp on costs, not adequately staffing your proposal effort, and reducing your ROI. Which of these things do you want to give up? How does the lack of having them impact your win rate? What is the cost of that reduction in win rate in terms of lost revenue? Proposal staffing decisions should be ROI decisions. If your proposal function isn’t delivering these things, you’re not achieving your maximum ROI, and you won’t get there with resources allocated the way they currently are.

It is possible to start at RFP release and win. It may be challenging, maybe even extra challenging. It’s not something you should attempt if you’re going to be ordinary in your approach. It’s not something that should be your routine. But it is one of those things that if you are going to do it, you better seek to do it better than the folks who had time to prepare. But how? See also: Dealing with adversity Avoid being disqualified. Do you have the minimum registrations, certifications, and qualifications for their purchasing department to be willing to contract with you? You can’t count on them working with you to fill in the gaps after they select you. They are far more likely to reject you without any further consideration. So find out before you write your proposal what those minimum requirements are before you bother to prepare a proposal you might not even be eligible to win. Understand how what the customer is buying impacts what they are concerned about. If the customer is buying a solution to a mission-critical problem unique to their organization, they are really going to have to trust the provider. And they are a lot less likely to trust a stranger to be that provider. If the customer is buying a commodity, they may only care about the price and not care about who provides it at all. If it’s labor intensive, they may be concerned about your ability to quickly provide enough people. If it’s specialized, they may care about your ability to provide people with the right qualifications. If it involves their legacy systems, they’ll likely want experience with them. To win, you’ll need to provide more of what they care about than anyone else. Even if you start at RFP release, you can anticipate what that will be. Give the customer a reason to select you instead of the company currently doing the work. Don’t bid because you can do the work. Bid because you can prove your ability to do the work so much better the customer will be impressed. When the customer already has someone capable of doing the work, they need another reason to switch. And that reason must be compelling enough to make switching worth it. Be easy to work with. Contract the way they like to contract, on the vehicles they prefer to use. Allow payment the way they like to pay. Don’t create extra steps. Don’t try to change the customer. Anticipate their needs and provide the information they need before they ask for it. An outsider showing up at RFP release who is more work than the companies they already know is not likely to win. Assume the competition has problems. If the incumbent or other competitors are perfect, then you’ve already lost. If you don’t know the competition, make assumptions. Solve the problems you imagine them having. When you show up with a solution for something that’s caused the customer pain, they might see you as a better match for them. Bid as if your competitors are unresponsive, lack innovation, have fallen behind the times, missed opportunities to excel, have quality problems, aren’t efficient, are too expensive, don’t produce the best results, are slow to improve, and anything similar you can think of. Then prove that you are not. Sure it’s better to have intelligence that tells you what their problems are, but not all problems get reported. Sometimes a less than satisfied customer can be lured away when they realize something better is available. Only they won’t be impressed by claims and promises. They need proof. So show up with solutions to the problems you assume they have. Eliminate their worries. If things are going well enough, the customer may not want the hassle of changing vendors. Your mission is to prove that there will be more hassles if they stay with the status quo than if they select you. You need to show that not only have you anticipated and eliminated all the hassles, you’ve made improvements that will make their future even more hassle-free. Get the top score. In a formal evaluation with written evaluation criteria, the company that gets the top score wins. Before you decide whether to bid, determine whether you can outscore everyone else who might bid. If the evaluation criteria put weight on qualifications, staff, or experience you don’t have, walk away. But if they put weight on your approaches, you have an opportunity to prove that you’ve got the best way to do things. Don’t propose being capable. Be the company that matches the evaluation criteria perfectly. Avoid killing your past performance record. You can always skip everything above and simply win by having a low price. But then you have to deliver. Every proposal you win is a chance to fail in performance. If you want a top past performance record and a customer that will write you testimonials so you can continue to beat future competitors, you must deliver. Past performance that is merely satisfactory is enough to hurt your win rate. If you can’t win and then perform in a way that the customer will love, you shouldn’t bid. If you can do the work, that’s not good enough — don’t bid. Only bid if you can get the top score. You won’t get the top score by watering down your message and sounding just like everyone else. You won’t get the top score by claiming to be great. Your greatness will either be proven or you will lose to someone better prepared. Maybe today will be the day they didn’t try hard enough, and your hard work will pay off.

It’s a mistake to have the same person providing proposal management and proposal writing. Not only will it increase your failure rate, but it will also decrease your company’s ability to write great proposals. No matter how many times people say this, you still see companies thinking they can get away with having the proposal manager write small proposal sections. Here are the risks: See also: Proposal Management Stand-up and progress meetings. If I’m the proposal manager and I take on a writing assignment, then instead of monitoring progress, surfacing issues, checking other people’s work, and providing them input to help them do better, I’m trying to complete my writing assignment before the next status meeting, just like everyone else. That status meeting ends up becoming about issue discovery instead of resolution. And in fact, you routinely see standu-p meetings conducted as if their only purpose is to have people self-reporting issues as a safety net because the proposal manager isn’t able to talk to each person every day. Driving win strategies into the document. If the person responsible for proposal management is writing, they are not helping the people who are not proposal specialists implement the techniques that drive win strategies into the document. If they aren’t doing that, how is it supposed to happen? How do you build a proposal around your win strategies if they haven’t been articulated before they get to the writers? Do you tell writers what win strategies apply to their sections or do you expect the writers to just figure it out? Preventing people from making it up as they go along. Who is going to put the time required into figuring out how to structure the content, how to allocate the win strategies to the document, and what points should be made throughout the document? If you say “everybody” what you will really get is “nobody.” Proposal writing is a structured process. Remove the structure and what you get is a herd of cats making it up as they go along. When this happens, the proposal review process tends to become a way of trying to define what the inconsistent proposal should be instead of a tool for double checking that nothing got missed. And when this happens, it’s often because proposal management and proposal writing were combined instead of being kept separate. Preventing the proposal manager from making up the process as they go along. What evidence is there that you actually have a proposal process? Is it written down? Is it more than a chart? What checklists, quality criteria, guidance, and tools are provided for every step? If your process definition is lacking, it’s because the proposal management function is putting its attention elsewhere. Defining proposal quality criteria. Who is going to define proposal quality criteria and when? Will it be done before proposal writing starts so that it guides the proposal writers, or will it come after the draft review? Or not at all? If you do define proposal quality, who is going to oversee how it gets applied to the proposal? Proposal content planning. One of the responsibilities of proposal management is to plan what the proposal should become instead of letting that happen by chance. But once you have a plan for the proposal content, who is going to make sure it gets implemented? Waiting until there is a draft to discover that a section is off-track is a great way to ruin a proposal. Once the proposal content plan is complete, do you want proposal management providing oversight, or off on their own being one of the writers? Proposal reviews. The main reason that most companies have highly subjective and ineffective proposal reviews is that there is no dedicated review management function. In the absence of having review team leadership, the role of proposal management needs to fill the void. When proposal management and writing are combined, the proposal manager tends to assign some people to the review and let them figure it out. Wouldn’t you rather have quality criteria defined, a structured process like Proposal Quality Validation for performing the review, and training provided to the review team? How are you going to get that if the proposal manager is spending their time leading up to the review writing? Subcontractors and teaming partners. It is a law of nature that subcontractors will always be late with their proposal assignments, and what they turn in will have problems. When you are bidding as a team and your teammates are contributing to the proposal, the need for oversight goes up. You might think you’ve made things easier by finding a sub who can contribute, but managing subs on a proposal is more work than managing your own staff. Don’t water your proposal management down with writing assignments when you need them providing extra oversight and coordination. Flying solo. When the entire proposal is prepared by a single person, the proposal management process tends to become a highly personal and informal thing. Maybe that’s okay. But just because someone can do a proposal on their own, doesn’t mean they rustle up a herd of cats using the same techniques. In fact, attempting to do so typically results in people making things up as they go along. To prepare proposals bigger than a single person requires guidance, coordination, oversight, and quality assurance. All of those are weakened when proposal management and proposal writing are performed by the same individual. The real driver for what the proposal manager should take on is the number of people involved in the proposal. If the proposal effort only requires one proposal specialist and one or two subject matter experts, maybe you can get away with the proposal manager doing some writing. Quality will take a small hit, but maybe it’s survivable. Maybe it has to be on a small proposal. But once you get to three or more contributors or proposals with teammates, the risk skyrockets. But the real problem isn’t writing, it’s attention. Who is going to give attention to these things? And what will happen if these things don’t get enough attention?

1) Is what you’re offering really the best? See also: Content Planning Box Having the best people is not good enough. You need the best people with the best processes. But even having the best people and best processes isn’t even good enough. You need the best people and the best processes supported by the best: Quality assurance Tools Executive oversight Issue resolution Resource allocation Communication Oh, and you need them to have the best impact on the stakeholders and deliver the best results. If you merely propose the most qualified people and don’t demonstrate the rest, your proposal will be vulnerable to someone who is more competitive. Claiming it is not enough. If you "already do these things" you may need to formalize your processes to make what you do tangible in your proposal. To design quality into your proposal you must think through how all these impact what you need to say in your proposal before you start writing it. Can you show how your approaches to these things reinforce each other to provide a better solution for the customer? Will your approach deliver more of what the customer wants than anyone else’s proposal? To design quality into your proposal, what you write must be based on a winning design. If you write your proposal in hopes of discovering what it will take to win, you’ll never find it. Design your offering based on what it will take to win and then design your proposal around it. 2) Do you have more insight than anyone else? Is what you’re proposing based on better ideas? Have you applied your awareness about the customer to creating a better offering? Do you see opportunities to more reliably achieve better results than anyone else? Do you have the kind of ideas that make the customer want to do business with you? Instead of claiming understanding, are you demonstrating understanding by offering something that will deliver more of what the customer really wants than anyone else? Or are you merely responding to the same requirements that everyone else is responding to, and hoping to be just little bit better? To design quality into your proposal, show insight in every paragraph. Show insight in what you choose. Show insight in why you do the things you do. Show insight in how you will deliver. And show insight about what the customer will get as a result. 3) Are you delivering what the evaluator needs to see to do their job? If you are writing in hope of saying things the evaluator will like, you are not designing quality into your proposal. You are fishing and hoping for a bite. To design quality into your proposal, before you type the first word you should understand how the evaluator will do their job. Will they divide the proposal into sections? How will they approach establishing RFP compliance? How will they score it? What will they be looking for? What will they consider a strength? Or a weakness? Do they care about you or just the offering? What are their concerns? To design quality into your proposal, build it around the evaluation. Help them do their job by giving them the information they need to conclude that you are their best alternative. What you want to say about yourself is irrelevant to them. 4) What makes you so special? Are your approaches more than the same “best practices” everyone proposes? Why should the customer care about what you are proposing? Why should they care about your company? What is it they do care about? To design quality into your proposal you should build it around the things they care about. To win, they must care more about your proposal than anyone else’s proposal. This starts with giving them a difference to care about. What differentiates your proposal? What will turn your proposal into the one they compare all the others to? To design quality into your proposal, you need answers to questions like these. But you will only have limited information. Focus on what matters about what you do know. Simply responding to the RFP is not enough to be competitive. What is the process for designing quality into your proposals? It really just comes down to not trying to think things through by writing about them. This only ensures that you figure it all out after the proposal is written, when there isn’t enough time to do anything about what you’ve learned. Half of having a proposal process is simply thinking things through before you write. The method you choose for this hardly matters. But we recommend Proposal Content Planning because it’s got the flexibility you need to survive the messy real world of proposals. It amounts to a minimally structured approach to identify the ingredients that should go into your proposal before you write it, including not only what you should write about but also how you should present it. Doing this is actually more important than reviewing the draft proposal on the back end, even though that’s what amateurs obsess over.

Better proposals require becoming a better company. The question “How can your company do proposals better?” starts by asking “How can your company do the things you write about better?" and that in turn becomes "How can you be a better company?" Want a better management plan? Start by determining what better management would look like. Ask yourself what you have to do to deliver that. Then become that kind of company. Want a better technical approach? Start by determining what a better offer might be and what you have to turn yourself into to in order to deliver it. Want better pricing? Quit asking how you can shave another nickel and ask what you can do to disrupt how performance is accomplished. Then become an insightful company like that. At all levels. Every day we encounter friction. Problems that are easy to ignore or put off until tomorrow to solve, but ultimately that wears us down. If we take the path of least resistance today and are able to get by and pay our bills, we can create a nice little comfort zone for ourselves. While it lasts. But changing that would risk today’s comfort. And so it becomes easier to look for neat, tidy, and low-risk incremental improvements that don’t rock the boat. People have their jobs and it is work. But steady work. If that’s where you want to stay, you can stop reading here. Doing things better starts with articulating how. Proposals are a great place to start becoming better because they require you to articulate how you are going to do things better than your competitors. Maintaining a high win rate requires constant evolution. Better proposals come from becoming the solution and not just going through the motions See also: Organizational Development A company that defines itself by how it is now, is not thinking about what else it could be. Instead of thinking about what they could become, they just want to be more. The proposals they create simply describe themselves as they are. However, a company that defines itself by what it wants to become, writes proposals based on how they can be better. They win more and are far more likely to become something great. This is why companies end up submitting proposals written from their own perspective instead of the customer’s perspective. They write about what they can do, what their qualifications are, what their approaches will be. Companies focused on becoming what the market needs or what will help their customer write about what problems they will solve, how their qualifications result in better deliverables, and how customers will benefit from their approaches. While this wording sounds subtle, in the proposals I review the difference is striking and has a major impact on their success. The problem runs deeper than simply whether a company is focused on evolving, changing, and becoming better. It impacts staff as well. Are the people working on your proposals empowered to change the company in order to win? Sure that might need to be discussed first, but do they spend their time thinking about better approaches, or do they spend their time living within a structure they can’t change, typically focused exclusively on RFP compliance? Do your staff see their mission as doing proposals or as winning proposals? This is the stuff that culture is made of It starts with how the company hires its staff. Does it hire people to do a task and lighten everybody’s load? Or does it hire staff to make the company better? Is it hiring proposal staff to enable the company to do more proposals? Or is it hiring staff to help the company become what it needs to be to win its proposals? This is the stuff that culture is made of. Is the role of executives to run the company or to transform the company? Are they incentivized to become a little more of what they are, but to stay in their comfort zone? Or are they incentivized to make the changes needed to disrupt the competition? If you are an executive reading this, what kind of company are you creating? This is the stuff that culture is made of. Transforming your proposals can transform your company, but only if you let it A company that describes itself, is what it is. But a company that is not satisfied with being what it is now and wants to evolve writes proposals that redefine the limitations. Proposals can be the tail that wags the dog. They can change people, processes, tools, and even policy. They can change priorities. They can change how people interact. But this is only true for companies that don’t ignore their own proposals. Staff working on proposal can be change agents. But only if they are allowed. If they’ve never been allowed, they won’t even know how. It will take a lot of encouragement. And it will only succeed if the staff who perform the work if you win don’t ignore what it said in the proposal. Writing proposals from the customer’s perspective is not simply about getting the customer to like you more. Writing proposals from the customer’s perspective is the first step in gaining insight about what you need to become. So who are you? And more importantly, who will you be tomorrow?

I’ve seen way too many proposals produced by experienced people that were thoroughly ordinary. In my worldview this means they sucked so bad it was embarrassing, because ordinary isn’t competitive. When your job is cranking out proposals at high volume under adverse circumstances, people tend to give up polishing them. If people do this long enough, they sometimes stop trying. But they continue to reliably crank out acceptably adequate ordinary proposals that they try really hard to make good. But the reality is they are full of bad habits that pass all the reviews and are easy to beat. Having lots of experience with proposals like that does not make someone a great proposal writer. The problem is that instead of looking at trying to do better as polishing or something that comes at the end and is easy to skip, we should be designing the proposal to win from the beginning so that it’s the clear winner, even if it doesn’t get polished. But when you don't control the win strategies, don't have adequate input, and are struggling just to make the deadline, or are pigeonholed into back-end production, that doesn't even get considered or is treated like it's someone else's job. The list below shows the difference between focusing on completion and focusing on winning. The thing that I find striking about it is what it implies about the things that need to be done before the writing even starts, how the proposal function should be organized, and how to create the culture needed to win consistently. If you look carefully, you’ll see the core principles behind the pre-proposal and proposal processes behind the differences. See also: Great Proposals Doing a proposal means responding to what they asked for. Winning a proposal means offering a response that the customer thinks is better than all the others. Doing a proposal means offering something based on the best practices. Winning a proposal means offering something that will beat the competitors who merely propose the best practices. Doing a proposal means complying with the RFP requirements. Winning a proposal means applying your compliance with the RFP requirements to achieve more of the customer's goals than anyone else. Doing a proposal means proving you are qualified. Winning a proposal means proving that your qualifications will provide superior results. Doing a proposal means making claims about your company and your offering. Winning a proposal means writing proof points to demonstrate instead of claiming. Doing a proposal means declaring your intentions and promising to do great things. Winning a proposal means delivering results and deleting the promises. Doing a proposal means saying you understand the customer and what they want. Winning a proposal means proving you understand the customer by offering the results they want delivered in the way they want. Doing a proposal means talking around the subject to sound like you know it. Winning a proposal means giving the evaluators what they need to see without distractions. Doing a proposal means following the instructions in the RFP. Winning a proposal means showing the evaluators what they need to decide you are their best alternative and to give you the highest score. Doing a proposal means stating your case. Winning a proposal means passing the “So what?” test. Doing a proposal means telling your story. Winning a proposal means telling a story about the customer that happens to have you playing a starring role. Doing a proposal means carefully crafting the outline before you start writing. Winning a proposal means identifying the points to be made and how to present them in every section and subsection. Doing a proposal means carefully reviewing the draft proposal. Winning a proposal means validating the proposal against written quality criteria based on what the proposal needs to be. Doing a proposal means carefully producing the final copy without defects. Winning a proposal means prioritizing your efforts based on what it will take to win. Doing a proposal means making the most of what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Winning a proposal means developing an information advantage and using it to show more insight than anyone else. Doing a proposal means getting the writing started so you have enough time to do all the revisions you’ll need to turn it into something good before you run out of time. Winning a proposal means discovering what it will take to win, figuring out what to write about, and how to present it all before you start so that the very first draft reflects it all and you can improve from there. Doing a proposal means writing it all out in text because you don’t think you have time to prepare graphics or consider yourself an artist. Winning a proposal means figuring out which parts of the proposal are potential graphics before you start writing so that you can build the proposal around them. Doing a proposal means trying hard to write something that wins. Winning a proposal means winning before you start to write. Is your company focused on doing proposals or on winning proposals?

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Pre-Proposal Capture tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal is to try every feature without impacting a real pursuit, think of this as training and remove the pursuit you create by following the script when you are done. Pre-Proposal Capture This tool is for collecting information about a wide range of topics. It is intended to guide intelligence gathering during the pre-RFP phase of pursuit. It is especially useful when combined with the win strategy tool because it enables you to drive your insights into the proposal. It is based on completing question and answer forms. # Feature Instructions 1 Go to the Pre-Proposal Capture Q&A Tool On the main dashboard for your pursuit, the list of tools available is in the column on the left. Click on a tool to go to it. Some tools have prerequisites. For example, it doesn't make sense to enter the Cross-Reference Tool if you haven't imported the RFP yet. Find the Pre-Proposal Capture Q&A Tool and click on it. 2 Add a new form to the pursuit Under the "More questions you can add to this pursuit tab" in the left sidebar, click the "+" icon to the right of the name of the form you want to be used for on this pursuit. Then, select the people that you want to assign to the form and click "Continue". If you have not been assigned a form, you won't be able to contribute to answering the questions. For now, just assign it to yourself. 3 Complete a pursuit form On the left sidebar under "Assigned to you", you will see which forms you should be working on. Click on any of them, type your answers into the text boxes and click "Save." The goal is not to answer every question, but to answer those you can. A useless or obvious answer doesn't help anyone. But it's okay for training purposes. 4 See the forms with unanswered questions Select the green "Show me.." button and select "Unanswered questions". Now you can see and work on the forms that haven't yet been completed. Click "all questions" to go back to seeing all of them. 5 Expand/collapse the category of forms To choose which types of forms you can see at any time, click the banner with the arrow. You can focus on "Assigned to you," "More questions you can add to this pursuit," and "Pursuits you are assigned to". 6 Edit a Q&A form Choose any form from the left sidebar. Then click on the "Form Actions" dropdown menu and select "Edit form". This enables you to tailor the questions and guidance on the forms. For example, you might have customer or pursuit-specific questions you'd like to add. Only Configuration Managers can change the Q&A Forms. 7 Delete a form Choose any form from the left sidebar. Then click on the "Form Actions" dropdown menu and select "Delete form." Now this form will no longer appear. 8 Hide a form Choose any form from the left sidebar. Then click on the "Form Actions" dropdown menu and select "Hide form". This enables you to hide the form from your users without deleting it. 9 Save a form as a System Form Choose any form from the left sidebar. Then click on the "Form Actions" dropdown menu and select "Save as System Form". This is used to (…) 10 Change the form assignments Choose any form from the left sidebar. Then click on the "Form Actions" dropdown menu and select "Form assignments." This is used to edit who can edit/complete the form.

Here is a list of all the features you can use in the MustWin Now Proposal Input tool and how to use them. They can be combined with the other tools in many different, creative ways to help you with your proposals. If you want to explore you can use this list to make sure you know how it works. If you find something isn't self explanatory or confusing, just let us know and we'll walk you through it. To work through the script, select an RFP. Which one hardly matters. Since the goal is to try every feature without impacting a real pursuit, think of this as training and remove the pursuit you create by following the script when you are done. Proposal Input Forms This tool is for quickly assessing what you know at the start of the proposal effort to inform proposal writing. It is similar to the Pre-Proposal Capture Forms tools, only its intended to aggregate what you know instead of guiding research. The two can be used separately or together. Proposal Input Forms can also be combined with the win strategy tool to enable you to drive your strategies into the proposal. # Feature Instructions 1 Work on one of the Proposal Input Forms Proposal Input Forms work exactly the same as the Pre-Proposal Capture Q&A Forms. The lists of questions and the purpose are what's different. Instead of prompting research, the goal of the Proposal Input Forms is to assess what you know that can be used in the proposal. To try using the Proposal Input Forms Tool, follow the same script provided for the Pre-Proposal Capture Q&A Tool.

If you ever find yourself competing against me, please use these themes! I want you to use these themes because they are easy to beat. They basically promise the minimum. They demonstrate insecurity, lack of insight, and zero initiative. They sound like the claims people expect to hear made in bad commercials. They get ignored. They will never increase your evaluation score. They usually find their way into proposals when the writers haven’t received any better input and have to make something up on their own. So if you and I are ever working on competing proposals, I would love it if you use these themes. Because I won’t… See also: Themes We have the capability to fulfill all of the requirements. I have the capability to run 50 yards. Does that mean I should be in the Olympics? Even when the customer asks about your capabilities, that’s not what they really want to know. They only ask to weed out people who aren’t qualified so they don’t have to evaluate those proposals. Out of the ones that are remaining, the ones that all meet the minimum qualifications, they can take your capability as a given and instead want to know if you can deliver as promised and if you have more value to offer than any other alternative. In my proposal, I will deliver results because of my capabilities and deliver options because of them that go beyond the requirements. I’ll make sure our proposal is qualified and compliant, but that’s not what I’ll focus on. You can focus on merely being capable of fulfilling the requirements all you want. Our proposal is fully compliant with all requirements of the RFP. Compliance is critically important. It’s how you get a chance to compete. It is not how you win. Everyone who makes the cut will also be fully compliant. Featuring compliance is a bit like saying you’re willing to do the minimum. I’m going to focus on differentiation and adding value. Above the minimum. Way above it. As far above it as I can drive it. We are the industry leader. Most of the proposals the customer evaluates will make this same claim. And none of those claims matter one bit. I doubt a single customer anywhere has cited “they are the industry leader” on a proposal evaluation form. Hardly any customers reading that believe you, unless it’s so true it doesn’t need to be said. This means that what most of your customers learn from this theme is that you are not trustworthy. Please use it when competing against me. I’ll find something of substance to say. We are highly experienced. Everyone who is a competitor will be sufficiently experienced. The number of years beyond sufficiency is hardly worth mentioning. Amongst those sufficiently experienced enough to be worthy of consideration by the customer, experience does not matter. Unless you make it matter. What is it about your experience that makes you a better selection than someone else who is also sufficiently experienced? That may be a difficult case to make. But unless you can make it, featuring your experience will not be enough to win. If I decide that experience is a differentiator at that stage of evaluation, it will be on how the customer will be impacted by my experience. And it will matter. We understand. “We understand the work.” “We understand you.” “We understand the importance of [fill in the blank].” The only problem is you haven’t actually said you’ll deliver anything of value to the customer. And you haven’t proven anything. All of your competitors will be able to make similar claims of understanding, and most probably will. Saying that you understand because you are experienced won’t help either. Because they will be similarly experienced. Understanding is best proven and not claimed. When I want to show understanding, it will be by delivering the results the customer wants, delivered the way the customer wants them delivered. Take one of your past proposals and count how many times these claims were used. These five claims seem like they matter. They sound good enough to pass many internal proposal reviews. But if you use these themes you will not be competitive. Because everyone who is competitive will be able to make these claims. You need something better to win. While you focus on claims like these, your competitors will be focusing on things that matter more.

Submitting low quality proposals and making it up in volume is a bad strategy. A better strategy is to target doing the least costly things that return the most revenue. When it comes to proposals, the things that generate the most revenue may not be what you think they are. A key lesson for companies that depend on proposals See also: Successful process implementation Preparing a proposal can be costly. But preparing a winning proposal returns a large amount of revenue. The problem is that not every proposal wins. When you increase your win rate, you gain revenue without additional cost. If you produce 5 proposals in order to win one, and you make improvements so that you only need to produce 4 proposals to win one, you will increase your company’s revenue 25% on average (the increase from a 20% win rate to a 25% win rate). That 25% increase in revenue will come without producing any extra proposals. The only cost will be what it will take to improve your chances of winning. That will be much, much lower than the 25% increase in revenue it returns. Maximizing your proposal return on investment Is there any other way to increase your revenue by 25% with a lower investment? If so, do that too. But still focus on improving your win rate. The flip side of this is that by under-resourcing proposals and cutting costs in a way that impacts your win rate, you could be losing 25% of your future revenue. Test it. Track it. Measure it. If you aren’t tracking how the things you do and the decisions you make impact your win rate, you’re really not trying hard enough to maximize your return on investment. How do you improve your win rate? There are lots of little things you can do. But instead of focusing on techniques, it’s better to start by focusing on strategy. Your win rate depends on the customer giving you the best score. Your proposal must be constructed to maximize this score. Your proposal must present what the customer wants to see in such a way that they can give it a top score, rather than presenting what you want to say about yourself. This in turn makes the entire proposal process about discovering what the customer wants to see and then building your proposal around that. Your revenue depends on getting both sides of the last item right: Discovering what the customer wants to see requires insight that comes from making contact, doing your research, and developing empathy for the evaluator. Building your proposal around what the customer wants to see requires developing a content plan for your proposal that positions your strengths in a way that supports the customer’s needs and preferences. So how do you achieve these things? You've come to the right place! We've been writing about how to discover what it will take to win for decades. We've spent a similar amount of time writing about how to refactor and reengineer your proposal process. And all along we've focused on maximizing win rates and return on investment. Signs that you're doing it all wrong If your proposals are very descriptive and procedural they tend to be all about you and what you do, instead of being about the customer. Search your proposals for the word "will" and you'll see what I mean. If your proposals are based exclusively on the RFP, they don't show any real insight into the customer, their environment, stakeholders, or their concerns. How can you expect the customer to accept your proposal if you don't talk about what the customer is trying to achieve or anything beyond doing what they asked for? If you don't position your proposal in any particular way other than as competent, then all you are doing is competing on price. If you don't provide input to the proposal team that includes insights about what matters regarding the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, then no matter how they try, you'll end up with a mediocre proposal. You can expect to lose more proposals than you win. Probably a lot more. Maybe you can get by like that, but you won't prosper to your full potential. You won't maximize your ROI. Proposal cost and benefits The cost of doing what it will take to win is less than what your business loses through not doing it or minimizing the effort you put into your proposals. Discovering what the customer wants to see in your proposals before you write them is one of the lowest cost things you can do to maximize your revenue. If you are going to be in the business of bidding competitively proposals, then be in the business of preparing proposals that better reflect what the customer wants to see than those of your competitors. Being in the business of preparing low-cost proposals based only on what’s in the RFP and saying great things about yourself will not turn you into a competitive company. Or maximize your revenue. No matter how many you submit. You can’t make up for mediocre proposals by doing them in volume. Keeping proposal costs low so you can do more of them will actually increase your costs and lower your ROI because you’ll be paying to lose more often. Your competitors will submit fewer proposals and end up with more revenue. And you’ll be left desperately searching for more RFPs to bid, as long as you try to make up for it in volume.

A simple guide to what to write about in your proposals. Good things to write about in your proposals See also: Proposal writing These are the things the customer is looking for, the things they want to see. Instead of talking around them, make a point related to them at the start of each paragraph. Explanations and reasons “why.” The reasons why you do things show more insight and depth of understanding than a claim about what you do or how great you are. Proofs. Proof points can be evaluated as strengths. Things that are unproven are often just noise. Details. Providing details can earn confidence and show that you know what to do. It’s not the claim of having a process that matters. It’s the steps. It’s not the claim of being qualified that counts. It’s the details. Differentiators. You must be different in order to be better. Customers often evaluate by looking for the differences between your proposal and the others. Visuals. Seeing is believing and an illustration is easier to process than a bunch of text. Replace as much text as you can with visuals. Bad things to write about in your proposals The evaluator doesn’t want to read your proposal. So filling your proposal with things that sound good to you but don’t actually help the evaluator assess your proposal may make you feel good, but it won’t help you win. In fact, it may hurt your credibility and do more to lower your score than raise it. No matter how beneficial it sounds or how pleased with yourself you are for writing it. Claims. Look carefully at what you just wrote. What did you claim? If you claimed anything without an explanation or proof, consider deleting it. Unsubstantiated claims are not likely to be evaluated as a strength. And because they hurt your credibility, they are more likely to hurt your score than raise it. Descriptions. Descriptions may inform, but they do not show insight. Sometimes they are really just claims. Don’t let the RFP fool you by asking you to “describe” your approaches. What the customer really needs to know is whether you are credible and whether your approaches address their concerns and will deliver the results they are looking for. Beliefs, commitment, intentions, or values. Not only will these never get scored as strengths, but they can take something that might have been a strength and water it down. Instead of being committed to something, just do it. Talking around the point. Instead of building their proposals around the points they want to make, stating those points, and then substantiating them, many people talk around the subject until they find a point and don’t make it until the last sentence. The customer may have skipped to the next paragraph by then because you weren’t saying anything they could evaluate. Get straight to the point you want to make in the very first sentence, and then substantiate it. Anything that does not pass the “So what?” test. After each sentence ask “So what?” If the sentence doesn’t pass the test, it needs to be deleted or fixed. Every single sentence in a proposal needs to pass the “So what?” test. If it doesn’t, then either delete the sentence or fix it. Plus some things you can skip writing about in your proposals These subjects are important. But you can’t simply make claims about them. Focus on what you do about them and not claiming the word. Compliance. Your claims about it or your intention to deliver it simply do not matter. The customer will be the judge of compliance. The things you do to achieve it, on the other hand, do matter. "We will comply with everything in the RFP" will not score highly (or at all). Proving that all requirements will be fulfilled, checked, and double-checked will improve your chances greatly. Strengths. You don’t need to tell the customer your strengths. You do need to prove that you have them and what the impact will be. Proof can earn you recognition. Customers pay attention to proof statements. Claims about your strengths are often ignored. And when they earn you an eye roll, they do more harm than good. Your understanding. Your claim about understanding or description of the customer or project do not demonstrate understanding. You are not helping the customer perform their evaluation by telling them things they already know. Besides, understanding needs to be demonstrated and that’s best done through results. If your approach delivers the right results, in the right way, and addresses their concerns, then it’s obvious that you understand. Show your insights and the reasons why you do the things you do. That is how the customer can see you understand what you are doing.

When the customer asks you to describe your experience, what should you write about it? Should you describe the work you did? Should you describe the results you achieved? Should you talk about something else? It turns out that when the customer asks for your experience, they could be could be asking for many different things. Past performance See also: Themes Past performance is something different from corporate experience. Past performance is a reference check to discover whether the customer was happy with your performance, with some additional information requested so they can determine if it is relevant to them. They often define relevance as size, scope, and complexity. So was it comparable in size, were the type and extent of the work similar, and was it just as complicated or difficult as what they need? They are not interested in your claims of greatness. It’s a reference check and they’ll check that for themselves. They do want to know whether the reference is for a project that is similar to theirs. Sometimes customers ask for experience as a proof of capability. They know that companies will say anything about their capabilities to win a proposal. So a request for past performance is a reference check. And while, as they say in the stock market, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” it does demonstrate that at least you’ve done it before and presumably are capable of doing it again. It’s a more reliable indicator than a vendor’s claim of capability. Corporate experience Corporate experience is more broad than a reference check. It can be anything from a citation or anecdote, to a project description. Corporate experience opens up the discussion to projects that don’t have to be exact matches. Corporate experience can be meaningful if it demonstrates you have relevant resources, capabilities beyond what they’ve asked for, coverage of their requirements, or other beneficial considerations. When the customer asks for your corporate experience with no further explanation, take a look at the evaluation criteria in the RFP and see what they are focusing on. Is it results? Is it relevance? Or knowledge, resources, staffing, innovation, or something else? What one customer might care about regarding your experience may be different from what the next customer cares about. Be very, very careful reusing your project descriptions. When they ask about the experience of your staff, they are asking for whether they’ve ever done what they’ll be doing on the new project. They could be looking for proof of capability. Or they could be looking for insights and lessons learned. They could be looking for how they work and not just what they’ve done before. They could be trying to gauge whether they’ll speak the same language and what they’ll be like to work with. If they ask for a resume, they might be looking for something specific. So don’t assume that they just want a work history. Making the evaluation objective Customers struggle with comparing apples to apples and with justifying their decisions. So they frequently ask for things that are easy to evaluate, even though they have other concerns. For example, they might ask for your years of experience. That's nice, objective, and easy to evaluate. Unfortunately, it's also nearly meaningless. Just because the company did a project, doesn't mean that anyone involved in it will be involved in the new project. It doesn't mean that any of the policies, procedures, or information assets developed from the old project will transfer or even be relevant to the new project. So give them what they asked for. And do it well. But also address what they are really concerned about and what really matters to them. Focus on getting the top score You should always write about your experience so that the new customer will give you the best score. If you talk about the things you did but the new customer is more concerned with your ability to overcome the challenges and risks, you won’t get the best score. And vice versa. Just don’t assume that writing about experience is cut and dry — even if the RFP makes it seem so. If you think you know what "experience" is, there’s a good chance the customer is concerned about something else. So drop your preconceptions and discover what the customer is really looking for when they use the word “experience.”

How should you position your experience to get the best score? You may need to position things differently in different sections of the proposal where experience is relevant. Make sure you thoroughly tailor any experience write-ups you might be reusing to match the way you will be positioning it. You can’t be all things to all people. What matters about your corporate experience to the new customer? Don’t try to position against all of these that sound beneficial. Carefully select the ones that will have the most impact on the proposal evaluation and tailor your write-ups around them. Examples of ways to position your corporate experience: Capabilities. Capabilities are easily claimed but difficult to prove. Customers often turn to experience as a proof point for capability. When this is the case, write about your experience as proof of your ability to do the things required by the RFP. Innovation. How do you prove your claim that you will be innovative? One way to do that is through past examples of things you did that were innovative. Responsiveness. If the customer is concerned about responsiveness, then a demonstration is better than a claim. Show that you’ve been responsive in the past. Size. Is your experience relevant? Can you show past projects that were comparable in size to the new project? Scope. Is your experience relevant? Can you show that your past projects covered the same range of work, skills, locations, or other scope attributes? Complexity. Is your experience relevant? How did the difficulty and complexity of your past projects relate to what the RFP requires? Coverage of the SOW. Can you show that you have done everything required by the RFP? Achievement. What did you accomplish that’s noteworthy and relevant to the new RFP? Accomplishments trump claims. Proven approaches. Can you show that you have implemented all of the approaches that you are proposing, and that they have been proven under similar conditions? Resources. Do you have sufficient depth and breadth? Do you have enough depth of resources to cover all contingencies and to deploy them quickly when needed? Do you have breadth of resources to cover every type that might be required? Proof. What claims in your proposal can you use experience to prove? Can you make the proof itemized, quantified, or evidence-based? Customer satisfaction. Was the customer happy with your performance? Would they do business with you again? Did they ask for more? Did they see a positive return on their investment? Did they say nice things about you that you can cite as testimonials? Risk mitigation. Everyone claims to be the low risk provider. What does your experience demonstrate about your ability to mitigate risks? Challenges. Every project has challenges. Have you overcome challenges like the ones the new customer is concerned about? Sometimes how you handle challenges matters more than how you handle the day-to-day routine. Examples from your experience can carry more weight than claims about your ability to meet the challenges. Surges. Everyone says they can handle the peak workloads. But that’s just talk. What kind of surges have you handled in the past? Quality. Everyone says they will deliver the highest quality. Can you prove the quality of your past work? Speed. Can you deliver quickly enough? Can you meet the deadlines? Is your project schedule real or a work of fiction? What is your past track record? Make sure you provide details and don’t just claim you have a great track record of on-time delivery. Exceeding the specifications. How many times have you written that you will “meet or exceed” the specifications in the RFP? How many times did you prove it? If you have actually done it, then you should consider featuring that in your project descriptions. Formalization and maturity. If your new customer is looking for the kind of expertise that helps the customer formalize and improve the maturity of their processes, helps them reduce chaos, improves repeatability, traceability, and all that process goodness, then instead of simply describing the tasks you performed on previous contracts, consider describing how you introduced more formal and mature processes and the benefits they brought to your previous customers. Executive oversight. I’ve seen a lot of proposals say that some high-level executive will be personally responsible for customer satisfaction or similar words. Quite often the customer may only interact with that executive once or twice a year. If that level of responsiveness will matter to your new customer, then show how actively involved your executives have been in the past and what a difference it made. Improvements. Sometimes a customer needs to make improvements or turn things around. The work you’ve done that brought benefits to previous customers can often be positioned as similar improvements. You might even be able to position the improvements as change management. Solutions. There is a big difference between services to operate or maintain something and services needed to solve a specific problem. This is true even though many projects contain elements of both. Because of this many projects could be positioned as either one. Stakeholders. Some contracts benefit the customer’s stakeholders more directly than they do the customer. And sometimes there are a number of stakeholders who interact with a project. Make sure you are positioning your experience to focus on the right parties. Foundation building. If the customer is preparing for the future, they may see value in experience that shows you built a foundation for your previous customers and how it benefited them. Flexibility and adaptation. Sometimes the customer isn’t sure what will happen over the life of the contract. And even though there will be a contract with pricing based on the requirements in the RFP, they may desire flexibility. Flexibility is easy to promise, but challenging to deliver. Examples from your past can help you substantiate that you really are flexible. Claims that you will partner with the customer and work collaboratively are similar. Staffing. I have seen a lot of proposals promise that a company will fully staff the project on-time because it has dedicated recruiters. But how reliable is that? If on-time staffing is important to your new customer, consider citing examples of how quickly you’ve staffed previous contracts. The same applies to retaining the incumbent contractor’s staff or retention in general. Lies, damn, lies, and statistics. What can you quantify? What can you aggregate across all your projects? Or your entire team? If you can’t roll up the numbers and show statistics, then cherry pick the numbers or provide anecdotes. Sometimes a single example is more credible than all your claims. Tools. If specific tools are important to the customer or critical to the success of the project, instead of organizing your experience by the tasks performed, consider organizing it by the tools you used and the benefits that resulted from how you used them. Budget. Every customer is concerned about cost overruns. Some projects are particularly susceptible to them. Saying you won’t go over budget just won’t cut it. Showing examples from your past projects where you’ve come in under budget is a lot more credible. A few more considerations Consider showing your experience in a table or matrix. Projects in rows and SOW requirements as columns. Or projects in columns and skills as rows. You can use dots or colored backgrounds at the intersections to show coverage, depth, or breadth. You can also add dates or quantities. A matrix makes for a great introduction or summary of your experience. Consider using the examples above for competitive positioning. All of the examples above can be used to show why you are better than your competitors, and not just for positioning your experience. They are even potential ways to differentiate your proposal. This is because it's really a list of things the customer might care about. Everything in a proposal should be positioned against things that the customer cares about. You want to submit the proposal that the customer cares about the most, because it best reflects the things that matter to them. Make sure the previous customer agrees. It is entirely possible when writing positioning copy to turn something minor into the primary focus. If there is even the potential for a reference check, make sure that the previous customer agrees with how you have characterized your experience. If there is any disagreement, no matter how defensible you think your claims are, it could damage your chances with the new customer. Positioning your experience should be about perspective and not completely changing the nature of what you did.

What goes through the customer’s head while they’re evaluating your proposal? In addition to all of the distractions like what time they have to pick the kids up from school today or what they’d like to do after work, the customer has a lot to consider when deciding whether to accept your proposal. Even if the evaluation is conducted formally by a robot, with forms and detailed procedures, they will still consider the big picture. But what’s in that picture? The customer will consider your approaches, qualifications, and pricing. But they will also consider: See also: Information Advantage Is it enough? Big enough, small enough, cheap enough, expensive enough, fast enough? Their own environment The risks they face Whether they can trust you Their preferred approach or solution How much confidence they have in your proposed offering What the future will be like if they accept your proposal Their aspirations for the future Their disappointments Their questions Things they’d like to try Things they’d like to avoid Whether you speak the same language they do (and nationality might have nothing to do with it) What they’ll have to do if they accept your proposal Whether they want to work with you Things that have changed or are going to change Whether they want the kind of change you are proposing Pricing and financial considerations Contractual matters Rules and regulations Standards, measures, and specifications Conflicts for their attention The problems encountered with other vendors in the past External pressures Input from all of their stakeholders Timing Trends What they know. And what they don’t know. The path of least resistance Whether they could be making a mistake Whether there will be resistance to their decision Accountability What their organization needs What they as an individual prefer When a company that thought they had the opportunity wired loses, there’s a good chance it’s because they missed one of these. When someone tells you "they know" what the customer wants, ask them questions based on these. We rarely know the customer as well as we might claim. But the better way to look at it is as ways to get to know the customer. I mean really get to know them. Think of this list as discussion topics. When the customer sees you as an asset instead of a vendor and cares enough about you as a person to share their world, these are topics to explore. However you approach it, your win probability is determined by how well you know all the things the customer will consider during evaluation. The reason we use terminology like “discovering what it will take to win” and “building an information advantage” in the MustWin Process that is available to PropLIBRARY subscribers is that knowing more of these things than your competitors gives you a critical advantage over them. Of course, that’s only true if you: Convert the intelligence you gather into insights that will impact the proposal Use your insights to position what you offer in your proposal in ways that prove you are the customer’s best alternative Demonstrate to the customer that you are the most thought through vendor Add the most value Prove that getting to know each other is worth the investment you both made and point to the even greater things your continued partnership will achieve in the future The premium content PropLIBRARY subscribers gain access to shows you how to do all these things as well. Or you could just wait for the customer’s announcement, put effort into a proposal without any customer insights, and hope that today’s the day that all of your competitors' proposals will somehow be weaker than your proposal.

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Claims are lame. After having sat through countless debriefs, especially the ones where the customer evaluated based on strengths and weaknesses, I’ve realized some things that explain a lot about proposals: I have never seen a customer agree that any of the thousands of claims made in those proposals were a strength. The strengths cited by customers are almost always simple facts, like something you have or have done. The weaknesses they cited were usually things that weren’t said that the customer thought was important. It’s as if they didn’t even read your claims. It’s as if they only read your proof points. See also: Customer perspective That’s because the proof points are what they write down to justify giving you the award. They can’t take your claims to The Powers That Be and say they’re why they want to give you a contract. They need proof. That’s all they are looking for. Claims are statements of identity, self-descriptions, or self-assigned attributes. They are usually about your company or about what you are proposing. Any sentence starting with “We are…” is probably going to end with a claim. The worst claims are comparisons or statements of superiority, like “We are the industry leader in…” Or the dreaded “Our unique solution will…“ They often are slogans or sum up what you want people to believe about your company or solution. They are usually unsubstantiated and commonly used as introductions. Don’t. Just don’t. Don’t make claims. Don’t introduce yourself that way. It’s okay in commercials or in a brochure. It’s not okay in proposals. That’s because there is a difference between selling like you see in a commercial or in person, and selling in a proposal. Selling to an anonymous person who will make their purchase some uncertain day in the future is different than selling to a specific organization who is investing time to read the details and compare you to their other alternatives. Here is an example so you can see for yourself. Proposals get scored and not read. Claims get in the way of the things the evaluator can score. Claims detract. They hurt your credibility. From the evaluator’s perspective, they amount to saying a bunch of things that don’t matter instead of saying what does matter. As proud as you are of the things you claim, those claims are not going to increase your score, but they may reduce it. The details that prove your case, if they are also differentiators, are what add to your evaluation score. What about making a personal connection? If you drop all your claims, you can still show emotions, have charisma, and make a personal connection in your proposals. You do that by how you present your facts and proof points and not by making claims about customer satisfaction, commitment, understanding, or anything else. You can make an emotional connection by explaining why you do the things you do. The reasons why you do things demonstrates your understanding and intentions far better than claims of understanding or intentions. What about influencing the evaluator on a subconscious level? Most proposal evaluators don’t want to be there any more than most proposal writers do. What do you think they are concluding at a subconscious level if they have to read through a bunch of claims to find the details they can evaluate? Besides, why put effort into trying to “make an impression” or influence their subconscious when you could spend that effort focusing on the details they need to perform their evaluation? I think it’s the companies that don’t know how to prove their case that try to make nothing into something through some kind of subconscious influence. Trying to subconsciously influence the evaluator who has published their evaluation criteria and is required to follow it is demonstrating that you don’t listen and would rather try to talk yourself in the door than to do your homework. Besides, most claims will at best get an eye roll. I imagine the eye muscles of some proposal evaluators must get tired from all the claims they see. Try it. Read one of your past proposals, and every time you see a claim, roll your eyes. See how tired you get. What about branding? Branding takes on a different form in proposals. While in most places, branding can be described, in a proposal branding must be demonstrated. In a proposal, part of the evaluator’s job is to not take your word regarding who you say you are. Slogans will not hold up to that level of scrutiny. However, you can demonstrate your branding by how you position what you are offering the customer and how you deliver it. The reasons why you do the things you do can add up to what you’d normally claim in your branding, without ever making the claims. The proposal evaluators will assess what you will do, why you will do it, its relevance to them, and what it all adds up to. If you merely claim your branding, it will not be scored as a strength. But if you demonstrate your branding it can contribute to winning. What about making an impression? You have to at least be in second place before there is any hope of an impression making the difference in whether you win or lose. On the other hand, you can have a poorly formatted but well written proposal and still win. I’m not saying don’t try to make a good impression. But I am saying not to bother until after you’ve made your case. Proof points make your case. Once you’ve achieved the top score by proving your case, it’s nice to remove any doubts that might be lingering by having a polished presentation. A polished presentation can help demonstrate that you are the competent, quality minded company your proposal indicates. But a polished presentation can’t prove your competence or replace having a solid quality methodology. What should you do instead? Instead of making claims, make proof points. Proof points can turn your claims into strengths. For each claim you might be tempted to make, start over and make it a proof point. The need for the claim might even disappear. Do this in every section and every paragraph. Make a point that is proven in every one. Try it and see what it adds up to. Compare that to a past proposal that made a bunch of claims. Your customer’s proposal evaluators will silently thank you. In proposals, we talk a lot about making it easy for the proposal evaluators to do their job. We focus on structuring the proposal to put things where the evaluators expect to find them. But if you really want to make their jobs easier, give them the proof points they can score instead of a bunch of claims.

With government multiple award RFPs of huge value becoming routine, this is a good time to reflect on the customer and how the number of proposals they receive impacts how they make their selection decisions. What if they only get one proposal? If the customer only expects to get one proposal, or if that’s just the way it turns out, they approach the proposal with a few considerations: See also: Bid Strategies and Proposal Themes Does it meet their requirements? They have no other proposals to compare it to. So they compare it to themselves. Will it meet their needs? Can they do better? With no other proposals to compare it to, this is guesswork. Do they believe that they might find a better offer with some time and effort? Do they have the time to cancel and conduct another procurement? Should they cancel the procurement? Do they have rules that require more than one vendor response? What do they need to do to satisfy their procurement process when they only have one proposal? Do they need to go find someone else to bid? Will they consider the other bids or are they just to enable them to move forward with the one they really want? Winning when you are the only proposal is typically about showing them that you meet all of their requirements, do it effectively and competitively, and represent far more value than cost. It's only if the customer can get by without what they are procuring that you may also have to convince them to complete the procurement. What if they get several proposals? The first consideration if they have several proposals, is whether any fail the minimum requirements for consideration. If they do, and they follow “the rule of three,” they can consider the bid competitive and more easily move forward. But now they have to do a real evaluation and select one from amongst the alternatives. How do the bids compare to their evaluation criteria? Will they compare the bids to each other? Will they pick based on the differentiators? How will they handle any cost differences? This is the majority of procurements. It is why we focus on not merely being compliant and put so much focus on differentiation, relationship marketing, and developing an information advantage. You want to be the proposal they compare all the others to. Even if they don’t compare them, well-written differentiators are far more likely to register as strengths during evaluation. It also helps to be the company that they already know and trust, and not the ones that are unknown risks. But this is also where bad habits tend to set in. If you are compliant and there are only a few bids, you can win some of them just based on your qualifications, without putting a lot of effort into strategy or proposal writing. You won’t have the best win rate, but maybe you’ll get by and convince yourself that your bad habits “work” because you win one in five and are profitable. Some companies stay like this because they think it’s the best they can do in their circumstances and it becomes a comfort zone. The majority of companies are like this. It's easy to find a comfort zone and get distracted by everything else that goes into running your business. Comfortable and distracted, they don't realize that they aren't winning nearly as much as they could. Until something goes wrong. And then all those bad habits catch up with them. PropLIBRARY helps companies that want to be strategic and stay competitive. It contains so much information about win rates and return on investment and it shows how a little bit of effort can lead you to winning two to three out of five. The difference from one in five and three in five is huge and well worth the effort. PropLIBRARY shows how easy most companies are to beat. What if they get dozens of proposals? Now the customer can’t just read a few and compare. They need to be organized about it. The level of formality goes up. They need evaluation forms and scoring tables. They need excuses to throw some out to lighten the load. They need a team of evaluators. To win, you need to be compliant and not get thrown out. But compliance is not enough to win. You need differentiation. But you also need a scoring strategy. If your proposal is not intentionally optimized to maximize your score, your win rate will suffer. Having an existing relationship with the customer will give you some advantage, but the more bidders the more chances there are that someone new will score high enough to win. However, if you are to turn your relationship into an information advantage, you can also turn it into a potential scoring advantage. PropLIBRARY also contains dozens of articles to help you maximize your score. Winning a procurement like this usually involves focusing on the win strategies that separate your proposal from the pack and enable you to outscore the competition. It helps to have a solid proposal process that surfaces win strategies and focuses your team on getting the highest score and not just getting something submitted. What if they get hundreds of proposals? Now the customer needs an enterprise approach just to simply evaluate them all. They need to process the proposals and not read them. They will have a rubric for what they are looking for. How do you stand out from the pack? Ease of processing. If you're facing this kind of competition, don't put all of your effort into telling a story. Prepare your proposal for easy processing. Can the customer find what they are looking for? Have you anticipated what will make a difference and matter to the evaluators? If they are well organized, the RFP will provide their rubric. If not, you’ll need to guess it. The more narrative you have to supply, the more important it becomes to know how the rubric applies to the text. Once you know what they need to see in the text of your proposal, then you should ask yourself whether you buried it in a bunch of irrelevant self-gratifying noise. Or did you stick to RFP terminology and design your proposal to highlight the details they need to process your proposal quickly? Can they evaluate the text by processing it instead of reading it? Can you make it checklist-simple for them? Don’t expect to win based on claims. Expect to win on proof points. If each proposal makes dozens of claims and there are hundreds of proposals, the evaluator will gloss right over claims. Descriptions are almost as bad. Most descriptions, whether they are about your company, its approaches, or its experience, say very little that would actually impact the evaluation. Take any page from one of your past proposals, and highlight all the things you said that wouldn’t typically appear in the proposals of competitors responding to the same RFP, and aren’t just minor details or your grand aspirations. Everyone will be experienced. Everyone will have qualifications. Everyone will be compliant. The things that everyone claims will not get you the top score. But facts, numbers, examples, and details that matter and are succinctly highlighted get attention and are scored. You help the evaluator process your proposal by pointing out the details that are worth taking note of because they differentiate your proposal and make you worth selecting. The easier your proposal is to evaluate, the most like a checklist they can process, the more differentiated it is, the better your chances of winning. An example of this is the recruiting process. If you give them the typical sourcing, screening, selecting, and onboarding process, you’ll be just like everyone else. It probably won’t matter much if you’ve added more detail to each phase. With hundreds of proposals, they may not be drilling down to details like that. However, if you cite statistics and examples that demonstrate your ability to quickly hire and retain your staff under adverse circumstances, the numbers and details that make up your proof points will get noticed more than the same process noise everyone else will submit. If you hide the good stuff in the middle of paragraphs, they might never see it. But if you put things in tables, lists, or other visuals, or even just bold them, they stand a better chance of being seen. Just make sure they are not only worth being seen, but are also worth taking note of and awarding them evaluation points.

All proposals are competitive. Even if the RFP is completely wired to give the advantage to one preferred company and no one else bids, that company is competing against themselves. They can still blow it. And a naïve upstart can always come in and steal it away because they don’t know they can’t win. It may be rare, but it does happen. And customers are sometimes ready for something new. Which will the customer select? See also: Winning You should go into every proposal assuming it’s competitive and pushing to be better than you were yesterday. If everyone proposes the same best practices, who would the customer choose? You need to push past the same best practices so that what you propose is better than the “best” practices. What do you do that’s different from everybody else? And most importantly, why? The reasons why you do things differently are also the reasons why the customer should select you. Why is your approach better? Winning is competitive. Customers often select the winner based on what’s different about their proposals. They look for the differences and consider whether those differences make one vendor more attractive than the others. By highlighting the things that make your proposal different and the reasons why, you are halfway to articulating your differentiators and why you are the customer’s best alternative. The customer will compare your proposals to the other proposals It helps to do a competitive assessment, so you know who you are competitive against. After all, the customer is going to compare you to them. A competitive assessment will help you can position your strengths in contrast to their weaknesses. If you really do a good job of explaining yourself, you can turn their strengths into weaknesses. When you discuss why you chose the trade-offs that you did, there is nothing wrong with comparing the negative outcomes of selecting differently. And if a competitor happens to be taking a negative approach, that’s too bad for them. To do this, you need to know what your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses are in relation to the RFP requirements. You also need to know your own strengths and weaknesses. But most importantly, you will need to know why your strengths matter. It’s not enough to have a good approach, you need to explain why your good approach matters. Figuring out what to propose is full of trade-off decisions. Should you emphasize speed, performance, or cost? It helps greatly if you can make trade-off decisions that give you strength where your competitors are weak. It helps even more if you are sufficiently aware of the customer's preferences to choose the side of each trade-off that reflects the customer’s preferences. Why? But ultimately you’ll need to know why your approaches should get the top score. If you have the customer’s evaluation criteria, you need to describe your approach in ways that will maximize your score. A “best practice” that does not get the top score is a losing practice. The evaluation criteria are even more important than the SOW in determining what to offer. If you are figuring out your approaches based solely on the SOW and not on the evaluation criteria, your win probability will suffer. This is why winning competitive proposals has more do with the reasons “why” than the features you propose. Spend a little less time obsessing over your qualifications and the features of your approaches, and a little more on why those qualifications and features make what you are proposing the customer’s best alternative. After all, that’s what the customer is trying to figure out. The winner is usually the company who helps them with that the most.