Carl Dickson

Don’t start your proposal by thinking up everything that’s good about yourself that you should tell the customer. This can actually lead to bad proposal writing. Instead, start your proposal by think about what the customer needs to hear. But before you can do that, you have to know the customer. And before that, which person at the customer will be reading? Will it be the one receiving the services? The one who understands what is being procured? The one who runs the procurement process but isn’t involved with the services themselves? Will it be an executive? Or some other stakeholder? Will it be a junior staff member drafted into participating in the evaluation? What will their background and level of expertise be? What will their concerns be? Will they process your proposal like a robot, or read it like a human? You also need to determine what process they will follow to perform the evaluation and make their decision. Who will be involved? What will the level of formality be? If it is a government customer, then the process will be highly regulated. Your proposal may be scored instead of read. But whatever the process, it will be implemented by people. People who need certain information from you presented in a certain way in order to reach their decision. That’s where you should start your proposal. What do they need to see in your proposal in order to reach their decision? Keep in mind this happens in a competitive context. They need to see: See also: Great Proposals That the RFP instructions were followed That their performance requirements will be met What matters about what they are procuring and what they should consider That their goals will be accomplished by accepting your proposal The text that is relevant to the evaluation criteria so they can score it Proof that they can trust you to deliver on your promises What about your proposal makes it their best alternative That they can afford it and it’s worth any cost difference between your proposal and the others There are also some things they do not need to see: Unsubstantiated claims of uniqueness and greatness that make them roll their eyes, wish the evaluation was over, and damage your credibility. And cheesy slogans. Statements of “understanding” that don’t demonstrate any real understanding because they could have been copied from their website, even if paraphrased Any proposal writing that is not what they need to see that gets in the way of the things they do need to see. Also known as "fluff." Pages of proposal writing that are all about you, your qualifications, and what you will do, but are not about what the customer will get or how they will benefit from accepting your proposal Anything that fails the “So what?” test It’s not about you So forget about what you want to say in your proposal and instead help them evaluate your proposal and reach their decision. Make it easy for them. Format and present your proposal so they can find exactly what they are looking for. Drop all the noise that gets in the way. It’s not about your story Once you show the customer what they really need to see, you can focus on your message. Although you probably won’t have to, because it will already be there. If you give them what they need to see, not only will the attributes you would want some kind of “message” or “story” to deliver already be there, but they’ll already be in the right context for the customer to accept your proposal. The story that will be told will not be about you. Because you don’t matter. The story will be about the customer, what they will get by accepting your proposal, and why it’s their best alternative.

Early in my career, after a terrible proposal experience, I’d focus on improving the proposal process because that is what I had control over. I thought with the right procedures and enough dedication to them we could fix any problem. There are a couple of problems with that: The proposal process is not sequential. It is goal driven. You won’t be successful focusing exclusively on the steps. There is more to success than following procedures. Over time I discovered that what you should do to try to prevent a terrible proposal experience from recurring depends on the type of problem that caused it. Here are 5 things you can do based on the root cause: See also: Successful Process Implementation If you didn’t have the resources you needed, learn to speak the language of return on investment (ROI). Properly resourcing a proposal will return far more than the cost. Under resourcing a proposal will lose far more than it saves. This can be proven mathematically if you understand ROI and the math related to win rates. If you started at RFP release or got a late start, consider how you approach capture management. Being ready at RFP release requires a leader who can integrate every part of the company in the solutioning. This is what a capture manager does. Introducing capture management involves more than just hiring someone. Done properly it changes how a company goes about preparing to win a proposal. If assignments were late, consider all the possible reasons. It's not simply a matter of having better enforcement of deadlines. There are many reasons why proposal assignments don’t get done properly and there is no single answer for what to do about it. Cracking the code on effectively tasking and performing proposal assignments is critical to proposal success. If the proposal writers produced non-compliant or inadequate drafts, consider your approach to planning the proposal content. Did they have anything beyond the RFP to guide them? Did they have all the ingredients they needed? Did they know what they were supposed to prove? Did they know what context to put things in or how to position them? If they couldn’t answer these questions before they put pen to paper, they were destined to fail. Writing draft after draft until you run out of time is not a recipe for proposal success. Just a couple of hours spent on proposal content planning can have a huge impact on the outcome. If the proposal blew up during the review process, consider creating quality criteria to guide the review process. Doing this works best if you also address your approach to planning the proposal content before writing it. Can the proposal reviewers articulate what they should be looking for? If they can, why can’t they inform the writers before the writing starts? Proposal reviewers will rarely admit they don’t know what they are looking for, so instead involve them in the effort to create a set of proposal quality criteria for the proposal. They may be learning instead of contributing, but we don’t have to dwell on that. Let’s just be collaborative and involve the stakeholders to define quality in terms of what it will take to win this proposal. Once on paper, your proposal quality criteria can be used like a checklist to validate proposal quality by both writers and reviewers. What about training? Training helps with everything, but solves nothing. Training will make your future proposal experiences somewhat better, but will not eliminate the problems that lead to proposal tragedies, like resourcing, late starts, inadequate drafts, and disruptive reviews. The amount that training helps will depend on whether the training focuses on knowledge of the process and awareness, skills enhancement, or cultural issues. The wrong focus will reduce the effectiveness of the training. Don’t ignore culture The culture of the organization has a major impact on how people set their priorities. No amount of process or training can overcome a flawed culture that sets the wrong priorities. And while proposal management can influence the culture, at least as it relates to proposal development, cultural change requires executive leadership. Even if the executive leadership has ignored corporate culture in the past, good executive leadership will recognize the importance of creating a culture of growth. Achieving real change You can’t achieve real change without changing the culture. To change the culture you’ll need to retrain everybody, but this does not necessary mean doing it in the classroom. Real change rarely starts there unless it’s initiated at the executive level. Grassroots change happens by shifting the language people use to one based on ROI, introducing capture management, learning how to make assignments effective, figuring out how to plan your proposal before writing it, and defining proposal quality criteria. Focus on these things and you lay the foundation for cultural change when people recognize the need.

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First a little history: The first version of MustWin now came out two years ago. It started out as an R&D discovery that enabled us to turn Proposal Content Planning into a streamlined online activity. It opened our eyes to completely new ways of doing proposals long after we thought we knew what we were doing. The second version of MustWin Now then expanded the features to cover the entire process from lead identification through proposal writing. From it we learned how to design a platform that makes the process disappear for users so that they can just focus on doing what they need to do. We saw ways to reinforce that and that's what drove the third version. The new version of MustWin Now takes the previous toolset and adds a collaboration layer that addresses some of the key challenges people face when working together on proposals. MustWin Now is becoming a tool for managing the proposal effort, as well as a tool for driving your win strategies into the document. No, that’s not quite right. MustWin Now is Becoming a place to figure out what you need to do to win, how to work together on a document against a deadline, and how to drive all of your aspirations into your proposal. In addition to enabling you to make and track assignments and activity, it can be used to coordinate effort, collaborate on fulfilling assignments, schedule formal and informal reviews, ask questions, get help, and more. MustWin Now will track all these things so that you can see what has been done and what still needs to be done, much like an online whiteboard. Only it's a dynamic whiteboard that changes for each individual. If you want to focus only on your assignments, you can. If you want the big picture, you can see what's going on. If you want to approach things with a process of elimination, you can see just the things that are left to do. And for each thing that needs to be done, you can use the tools in MustWin Now to gather the information you need and figure out what to do with it to prepare a winning proposal. You can even use it to track and coordinate offline activity related to the proposal. It’s incredibly flexible and handles RFPs and proposals of just about any shape and size. For most users, they'll just do and interact. For proposal managers, they can shape the activity and the message. We like using what we built and that's a really good sign. How do you get your hands on it? All PropLIBRARY Subscribers will have access to MustWin Now. We’re going to give PropLIBRARY Subscribers a chance to get to know the new version by doing a simulated proposal. If you subscribe you'll be able to throw one of your RFPs at it and we'll walk you through all the new features. Got questions about the MustWin Now or want to participate in a simulated proposal with the new version? Click here to ask a question or get on the list to participate

It's true that the odds of winning a proposal when you have never even talked to the customer go down so much that it may not be worth bidding. But the fact is that sometimes companies win them, so let's look at when it's possible to win and what you can do to increase your chances. Occasionally, in some markets, no one gets to know the customer before they surprise the world with an RFP. It largely depends on the nature of what they are procuring. Bidding blind is not worth it. Except when it is. That’s a judgement call. It’s hard to be prosperous when the deck is stacked against you. When you bid a bunch of things with slim odds, it doesn’t increase your chances of winning anything. Each time you bid, the odds remain slim. If you have to write 20 proposals just to win one, it’s going to make proposals seem a lot more expensive than they should be. And you will be tempted to take shortcuts in proposal development that will lower your odds even further. Or fail to invest in doing things better. But sometimes you have reasons to bid even though you haven’t talked to the customer. And when that’s the case, you want to do it well and not hold back. I’ve won proposals for companies that had no prior relationship with the customer and hadn’t talked to them at all. Here are some of the things you can do to go from having a slim probability of winning to having a probability of winning that’s still slim but maybe a little bit better: See also: Dealing with Adversity Price always matters. How many times have you bought something from a new vendor simply because they had what you needed at a cheaper price? One strategy for winning a new customer is to intentionally undercut your competitors on price. But keep in mind that every proposal is a chance to ruin your past performance record. Winning a proposal but getting a bad reference can cost you more business than you might gain by winning this proposal. The secret to winning with a low price is to have incredibly low overhead. That’s easier to want than it is to achieve. Think about what it will take to get the customer to trust you more than the companies they already know. Even though the customer doesn't know you well enough to trust you, there's always the chance that the incumbent has lost the customer’s trust. Probably not, but what approaches can you offer that would make you more trustworthy than the incumbent they already know the limitations of? Think about what it would take for you to accept somebody else's proposal when you've never met them or never even talked to them. Then make sure that your proposal does all the things needed for you to be that company. Think about the specific things you can do to be more accountable and transparent. What can you to do make it impossible for things to go wrong? And if not impossible, then what you can do to catch and correct it immediately? You need your proposal to demonstrate that your approaches are so much more reliable that you are more worthy of your customer’s trust than the companies they already know. This is not easy, but it is sometimes possible. Can you get to know the customer after the award? While you are bidding without having any special insight into the customer or their requirements, you may be able to put in place a process for discovering their specific needs and applying what you learn to a specific plan of action that is more detailed and credible than any other proposal. A thorough discovery process that makes performance reliably traceable to requirements can be effective if the incumbent sleepwalks through their proposal and just says they’ll do things without explaining how or why. Prove everything you say. Don’t expect the customer to accept anything you say. You are a stranger coming in at the last minute with expectations of winning. Prove everything you say. Hopefully the other bidders will write an ordinary proposal full of unproven claims. Don’t claim you understand. Prove it. Don’t claim to be compliant. Prove it. Don’t claim to have the best solution. Prove it. Don’t claim to be qualified. Prove it. Prove everything. Align everything in the RFP. Show how your solution integrates the RFP instructions, performance requirements, and evaluation criteria. Use tables and illustrations to match everything they’ve asked for, and then match them to your key strengths. Achieving this will make you look more insightful and responsive to their needs than a competitor who doesn’t. Understand the difference between selling a commodity and selling a complex service or solution. If a commodity meets the specifications, the provider may not be that important to the customer. However, with complex services and solutions, the customer really needs to trust a vendor in order to accept them. Match your proposal strategies to the nature of what the customer is procuring. Profile the customer. You may not have met or talked to the customer, but you may be able to make educated guesses based on customers like them, the environment they operate in, their history, or their culture. Those guesses will have better odds of being right than if you avoid trying to write from the customer’s perspective because you’ve never met them. Do your homework better than companies who think they already know the customer. Put a ton of effort into writing from the customer’s perspective, and hope that those who do know the customer will get lazy and just write to the RFP. Study their stakeholders. If you can’t talk to the customer, talk to their stakeholders. Who do they serve? Who do they partner with? Who do they report to? How are those interactions? What issues do they face? How does this impact the customer’s needs and their decision-making processes? Gain insights. Use them to demonstrate that your proposal reflects a deep understanding of the customer’s environment. Talk to their exes. The customer may not be willing to talk to you. But what about people who used to work for the customer? Can you find any on LinkedIn or through networking? Can you hire them? Will they participate in your proposal as a consultant? Even if they can’t help you earn trust with the actual customer, can they help you gain the kind of insight into them that will enable your proposal to read like someone who’s not a stranger? Give them a path from where they are to where they need to go. Provide them with a change management solution that minimizes the impact of selecting a new vendor. Maybe even propose an approach that never mentions the scary word “change.” But do give them the path and make it look easy and reliable. If the incumbent offers continuity and the same great status quo, you can offer them a non-disruptive way to improve and meet their changing needs. Why would a customer that's not inclined to change, change anyway? Sometimes people and organizations change, even if they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to it. Why do they change? You may not have to convince the customer to change. You just have to provide them with an easy way to get their needs met. By understanding the reasons why they change, you can position your proposal to support what you hope they might already be thinking. “Hope” isn’t the best proposal strategy. But if it’s all you’ve got, do it well. Give the customer options. Demonstrate flexibility. Give them things to consider. Show that you are willing to consider the possibilities. Show that you are willing to adapt to their preferences. The incumbent might already know the customer’s preferences. Or they might not. Maybe they just did what they were told to do. Maybe you can discover a preference going unmet. Maybe. But it won’t happen unless you uncover and articulate it. It won’t just happen by them randomly seeing it in your proposal unless you intentionally put it there. Be responsive to their RFP and make no mistakes. Don’t screw up your proposal. Maybe the incumbent will screw up theirs. It’s not much of a strategy. But if you screw up your proposal you won’t even have that. Don’t: Kill your credibility with empty slogans, statements of understanding pasted from the customer’s website, unsubstantiated claims, or other such fluff. To win when the customer has never talked to you before you need pure substance. Ignore anything they’ve said in the RFP. All you know comes from the RFP. You need to show that you’ve paid attention and then added value. Simply submit a compliant proposal. The only reason the customer has to select you if you are merely compliant is the price. Unless you are doing everything it takes to have the lowest price, you need to give them some other reasons to select you, other than just your willingness to do what they asked for. Simply hoping to be a little better, a little better qualified, and somewhat more experienced than the others while claiming to be superior has very low odds of success. So either give them the lowest price or give them something demonstrably better. That something will be the reason they select you, so it has to be capable of unseating the incumbent and all your other competitors. Final thoughts There are reasons why the customer might not select a company it already knows. But you have to anticipate them and take a position in your proposal that helps the customer make that move. You can even make assumptions about why the customer might not select the incumbent and risk being wrong. Unlike the incumbent, you’ve got nothing to lose. And going from no chance of winning to the slimmest chance of winning is an improvement. But going from no chance of winning to the slimmest chance of winning habitually can actually destroy your company’s potential by replacing strategic growth with random wins. This approach will consume the resources you need for more strategic approaches. Whatever you choose to do, do it well. And if you bid opportunistically, don’t do it with ordinary proposals thrown together without much thought and minimal effort beyond simply responding to what they asked for in the RFP.

Some companies prepare their proposals like they are trying to ensure people are miserable. Some of them even take it as a point of pride that everyone hates working on proposals. If you make proposals easier, there will be less glory at the finish line. So maybe we’ve got it all wrong and need to avoid all that process-stuff. Instead let’s embrace making sure that everyone has a bad proposal experience. Here’s how: See also: Proposal Management Hand them an outline and tell them to start writing. This makes it almost a certainty that they will spend all of their time up until the deadline writing and rewriting while people grow increasingly unhappy and the pressure builds, until they finally submit the proposal that no one is really happy with. If it gets really bad, that’s when the blame games will start. So just let people start writing the proposal with just a blank sheet of paper, a heading, and a copy of the RFP. Don’t do this, even when they are begging to get started on the writing. One of the reasons we recommend Proposal Content Planning is that it scales so that you can manage the time available, but still add significant value even if you can only spare a minimal amount of time for planning before writing. Just a few instructions per section can make a difference! Don’t tell your proposal writers what the reviewers expect to see until the review. Reviews should be routine exercises that find zero defects but make some helpful suggestions about presentation. If this is not the case, you’ve done something wrong in how you set up the review, and not just in how you wrote the proposal. The proposal writers should know exactly what the reviewers will be looking for. And it shouldn’t be in vague terms like “a compliant solution with a compelling presentation.” How do writers objectively self-assess what’s compelling? Both the writers and reviewers should be working from the same set of quality criteria that works like a rubric. If kids in school can have rubrics, why not people working on proposals? The reason we recommend Proposal Quality Validation is because it provides them. Leave ambiguity regarding who is responsible for doing what and making which decisions. One of the biggest things that a proposal team can’t decide for itself is who is responsible for what. Who decides when to change the approach? Who decides which strategies are acceptable? Who decides how to word the theme statements? There are dozens of issues like these. The Proposal Manager is rarely the highest ranking person working on the proposal. As long as people remain cooperative, it’s all good. But when there are conflicts, it can be very destructive if people don’t have a way to get quick resolution. Power struggles, territories, and the ensuing passive/aggressiveness will ensure that everyone has a bad experience. Figure out what to propose by writing about it. What are your approaches? What should you offer? Writing narratives about them is the worst way to decide. It means you don’t validate your solution until you have a draft. And it means the only way to consider alternatives is to write draft after draft. Until you run out of time in a proposal death spiral. Proposal writing in search of an acceptable solution usually ends with a terrible deadline crunch, a proposal with a low probability of winning, and a group of people who hate working on proposals. This is why we recommend separating figuring out what to write from writing about it. Start writing before you can explain how you will win the proposal. If you can’t articulate how you are going to win, then you don’t know how you are going to win. You’re hoping you’ll figure that out through the act of writing. And that ensures endless rewriting cycles that almost never pay off. Don’t try to think by writing. You need this as input at the start of proposal writing so you know how to position things, can make your win strategies the point of every paragraph, and can write a narrative that substantiates the reasons why you should win. Figure out what to write by starting from a previous proposal. This is a different proposal sin. When instead of preparing a Proposal Content Plan and what you want to offer you try to take a shortcut by recycling a previous proposal, what you really get is a proposal written using terminology that doesn’t match the new RFP, points of emphasis that don’t match the new evaluation criteria, and a context that reflects the wrong customer concerns. People fall into this trap because they don’t realize that similar is not the same, and turning a similar narrative into what you need takes longer than writing something designed to match in the first place. You can take inspiration from boilerplate, but you shouldn’t use it as the starting point for writing. That is why we prefer using Proposal Recipes over reusing proposal text. Change the outline after the writing starts. One of the most disruptive things you can do to a proposal is change the outline after writing has started. You might not be able to properly fix the narrative because it was based on the previous organization and have to start over. Except that rarely happens and instead people end up submitting a patchwork proposal. This is why we recommend validating the outline before writing starts. Ignore the proposal until the end and then change everything to save it. Why do so many bad proposal experiences seem to involve a know-it-all who can’t be bothered to participate in the proposal effort until the last minute, when they declare it’s all wrong and needs them to save it? Give me a proposal professional over a last minute hero any day. Make supporting proposals obligatory instead of part of growth. Growth is the source of all opportunity in a company. Growth is both personal and corporate. Growth is the reason why people should want to work on proposals. People get to work on proposals. They shouldn’t have to work on proposals. Unless you're trying to create an environment based on compulsive drudgery. Move the goalposts. When you ask people to do something one way, you should forgive them if they think they’re done once they achieve that. If you ask them to do it again, but differently, you’ll probably feel some resistance start to kick in. Do that another time or two and you’ll probably see willing partners turn into people who are annoyed. Ignore their needs. They know what you need. You’ve assigned it to them. But what do they need? What do they need to remove their distractions and resolve their challenges? What do they need to be comfortable? What do they need to not feel overwhelmed? What do they need to understand it all? What do they need to have a great proposal experience?

Our tangible training programs are all based on exercises that create the tools you’ll need to be successful. Instead of just talking about process, we’ll create the checklists you can use to improve your process. Instead of focusing on steps and procedures, we’ll focus on goals and accomplishments. We’ll help you understand how to approach each topic, how to define success, and how to measure your progress toward achieving it. These are private sessions. Only staff from your company will participate. We will be able to discuss your specific circumstances, goals, and environment. We will tailor the course presentation and materials to be specific to your needs. This training is delivered remotely and is based on three 1.5-hour sessions. The exercises and course materials are based on our existing content library, but we will customize them as part of the course. The result will be checklists that are specific to your business, but enhanced through our content and training. Course sessions are scheduled at mutually convenient dates and times. The following four training topics are the most popular and all involve your participants creating and doing things of lasting value for your company. Course 1: Creating lead qualification and pursuit checklists This course provides business developers and capture managers with checklist-based guidance regarding what information to seek in order to maximize win probability. This is vital to improve beyond simply accepting what information you can find. It is an easy way to introduce some structure to the pre-RFP pursuit, without being burdensome. The checklists will help business developers and capture managers be more successful. They will also help executive sponsors to assess leads and the progress being made toward being ready to win at RFP release. Topics for Session 1: Introduction of course Topics: Checklists for lead qualification and determining what to offer Introduction of exercises [Participants complete exercises as a group and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 2: Review of completed exercises Checklists for developing customer awareness, measuring customer intimacy, and competitive assessment and teaming Introduction of new exercises [Participants complete exercises as a group and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 3: Review of completed exercises Feedback for finalization of checklists and implementation of process improvements At the end of the course you'll have tailored checklists as a tool that business developers and capture managers can use to make sure they aren't overlooking anything. You'll also have a tool executives can use to review and assess progress. As a result, your company will start more of its pursuits with an information advantage and improve its win rate. Course 2: Creating Proposal Input Forms This course will enable you to start your proposals with the information proposal writers need to be successful. Your team will learn how to quickly assess what proposal contributors know that could impact the way you write your proposal. This is vital to enable proposal writers to be capable of writing a great proposal. It will produce the forms your team needs to collect that input, enable more rapid proposal startups, improve your ability to plan before your write, and increase your win probability. Topics for Session 1: Introduction of the course Topics: How to create and use proposal input forms to gather input about your competitive environment, the incumbent contract, teaming, customer awareness and insights, and understanding the customer’s procurement process Introduction of exercises [Participants complete exercises as a group and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 2: Review of completed exercises Topics: How to create and use proposal input forms to gather input about the opportunity, what you will be proposing, positioning, and win strategies Introduction of new exercises [Participants complete exercises as a group and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 3: Review of completed exercises Feedback for finalization of forms and implementation of process improvements Course 3: Creating goal-driven proposal quality criteria checklists This course will produce a set of checklists that measure success during proposal development. The checklists will be based on the quality criteria that will define whether key goals have been achieved. They can be used to help proposal contributors to accomplish their goals or by proposal reviewers to determine whether the goals have been accomplished. They can even be used to define a goal-driven proposal process for companies that do not have one. Topics for Session 1: Introduction of course Topics: Quality criteria for proposal input, data calls, handoffs, outline, and compliance matrices Introduction of exercises [Participants complete exercises as a group and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 2: Review of completed exercises Topics: Quality criteria for proposal content planning and improving proposal writing Introduction of new exercises [Participants complete exercises as a group and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 3: Review of completed exercises Feedback for finalization of forms and implementation of process improvements Course 4: Proposal writing skills enhancement Send us up to 25 pages from one or more of your previous proposals. We’ll use them to select and tailor a set of exercises designed to prevent the problems we find from coming back in future proposals. Your team will practice identifying and fixing the problems. This can also be used as a train-the-trainer course, to provide a tool to key staff who can then use the technique to train others at your company. Topics for Session 1: Collaborative course planning session: Discuss findings from our review, the lesson plan for addressing the issues, and select the exercises we’ll use from the dozens we have to choose from [We tailor the selected exercises] Topics for Session 2: Introduction of course Discussion of the issues found in your company's proposals and how the exercises address them [Participants complete exercises as individuals and submit them 24 hours before next session] Topics for Session 3: Compare and contrast the exercises completed by participants so they can see things that worked well and things that didn’t Discuss the lessons learned related to completing the exercises, and how to better approach future proposals How to schedule your training Let's have a conversation to discuss your needs and how to move forward. Decide which of the courses you are interested in. You can take a single course or multiple courses. The courses are intended for a group at a single company. You can have as many participants as you want. You decide how to best balance whether having a small group or a large group will best meet your needs. If the group is large, we will cherry-pick which completed exercise answers we discuss. The three sessions can be scheduled over 3 weeks or 2 weeks. If we schedule all three in a single week, you risk people not being able to complete the exercises in between the sessions. The cost for the training described above is $2500 per course. After our discussion and dates are selected, we'll send you an invoice so you can pay online. If you need something specific, we can design a training program specific to your needs and give you a quote. We want our training to have the maximum impact possible. While each of the courses above involves a certain amount of customization, we regularly design complete tailored training programs for our customers. We can usually schedule your training within the next few weeks. For individuals who want to take these courses, we collapse the 3 sessions down to 2. You get all the attention and do all exercises. The cost is $1500 and comes with a $495 subscription to PropLIBRARY or credit for renewals. 

Sometimes it seems like the proposal schedule is a work of fiction or a plan that has failed before it has even begun. Sometimes you know the moment you give a proposal assignment that it will not be met. Sometimes you and the person getting the assignment both know it is going to be ignored and no one is going to enforce the deadline. When this happens routinely, it can make being a proposal manager discouraging and feel pointless. The trap you should avoid falling into is to assume that if only the deadlines were better enforced, it would all be better. There is more going on than mere deadline compliance. Many of the reasons that people miss their deadlines can be mitigated. It may not be hopeless. Here are some of the reasons why people miss their proposal writing assignment deadlines: See also: Proposal Management They don't have the information they need There is a disconnect between their expectations and yours Their current work wasn’t completed or delegated before they got the assignment They have competing priorities They need an uninterrupted block of time They need someone else's input They can't make the decisions required They're not sure what you want from them They're not interested in the proposal They have no incentive to focus on it They think it's a waste of effort They don't know how They are too important The RFP confuses them The assignment is too complicated and they are overwhelmed by it They don't understand the reader they should be writing for There are trade-offs, options, and considerations, and they don't know what to do about them They keep finding ways to make it better They can’t separate how they think things should be done from what the RFP asks for They don't know where to start No one has accounted for all of the ingredients that will go into their section They're trying to architect the solution while writing about it Many people need to have input and they don't know how to approach incorporating it They have a day job and the proposal isn’t it They don’t know the subject they’ve been asked to write about They’ve been given too much time to write it, got distracted, and ended up procrastinating Their assignment simply specified a proposal section and that’s not very inspiring They’re too busy looking for something previously written to write what’s needed now They don’t understand how much work needs to be done after they complete their assignment They see the deadline as a progress check and not a completion milestone They know there are holes they will be unable to fill, so what does a completion milestone even mean? They see their assignment as a best effort goal Nobody set any expectations for them regarding their involvement in the proposal prior to getting the assignment There is simply more that needs to be done to complete the assignments, than people assigned to do it Most of these are solvable problems for the proposal manager. But they aren’t solved by demanding that people meet their deadlines. They are solved by delivering the right information or guidance at the right time. And the failure to deliver that information is a proposal management process failure. Some of them are cultural and depend on how the organization has set expectations. But they point to possibilities that can help get assignments completed on time. Try asking yourself what can you do to: Prepare yourself and the writers before giving assignments Help people make sense of the RFP Help people balance their priorities Ensure the information and inputs people will need are there when they need them Surface and track impediments and issues slowing down the writing Eliminate distractions for contributors Accelerate the act of writing Accelerate figuring out what to offer Separate designing the offering from writing about it Give writers the information and guidance they need in addition to their assignments Ensure that all stakeholders have the same expectations Enable proposal authors to get it right on the first draft Prevent surprises during draft reviews Change the culture Explain the importance of growth and the impact on ROI Make their job easier Demonstrate the ROI of adequate resourcing Create an objective measure of success for what they are writing Why haven’t proposal managers already done these things? They probably have done some of them. But many of them are continuous efforts and not the kind of thing you only have to do once. It turns out that their reasons for not having done them are the same as the list of reasons above for why proposal writers miss their deadlines. So maybe a little empathy is called for. Instead of focusing your proposal management process on deadline pressure, try focusing it on the flow of information and guidance. Try focusing it on anticipating issues and helping each other. Deadline enforcement will be a constant struggle that you can’t win. Deadlines can always be met by sacrificing quality. Meeting deadlines requires a process and not an assignment. That process should be built around helping each other to win the proposal.

Going straight from sales to a proposal is problematical in a way that can lower your revenue. When a salesperson spends time working on a proposal, they are not finding and qualifying more leads. This can cause peaks and valleys in your growth. When the salesperson does not spend time working on the proposal, who is going to apply the customer, opportunity, and competitive insights discovered to winning the proposal? Without those insights, your win probability will suffer. Having a proposal manager will improve your ability to produce the document for submission and will increase your win probability. But without quality input, the proposal function can’t produce quality output. Capture management takes over from sales after a lead has been qualified. Sales finds and qualifies the leads. Capture management provides dedicated attention to pursuing the leads and brings the required inputs to the proposal in order to win. Capture management interacts with the entire company See also: Capture Management The capture management function is a lot more than just a sales facilitator. It is the sales closer. Capture management figures out what it will take to win and then integrates everything in the company in order to accomplish that. It takes companies from where everyone tries really hard to win but it isn't really part of their job to where the company has a dedicated focus on winning. Capture management works with technical staff to define the solution or offering. It works with pricing and technical staff to determine the price to win. It works with everyone who interacts with the customer to gain insight. It works with contracts to achieve compliance and on the representations, certifications, terms and conditions. It works with HR, Facilities, Finance, and potentially both accounts receivable and payable. Capture management works with everyone who can to contribute to the win. Capture management can be a change agent As a company, you have to decide what “works with” really means. And you have to decide how important is winning and all that “growth oriented culture” stuff and the financial impact of your win rate really is to you. Should the capture management function shape the solution/offering? Or merely ask someone technical to define the solution? Does the capture management function ask for cooperation, or does the capture management function define how the company should adapt to the customer? Does the capture manager have to ask nicely, beg, and cajole all of the people they have to work with in order to attempt to win? Or does the company serve its potential customers, and the capture manager represents them? Are you really a customer focused organization? Or do your silos determine how customer focused you are willing to be? These are high-level, executive philosophical questions. Do you want the silos to direct the company, or do you want the function that integrates everyone around growth strategies to direct the company? There’s room for collaboration, but these questions are worth consideration. They determine what experience and expertise you need in your capture managers, as well as what role they will play and what authority they should have. If you are just introducing capture management, answering these questions may require change. Introducing capture management gives you an opportunity to reconsider what you want your company to become, as opposed to simply adding to what you’ve already got. Introducing capture management is an opportunity to raise the bar on performance Introducing capture management is also an opportunity to add a little structure to how you do things. Introducing capture management means setting expectations that run in both directions with every part of the company. It means defining the inputs and outputs of each handoff and contribution. You don’t have to go all in on burdensome process detail. You can begin by simply discussing expectations, inputs, and outputs, and taking some notes. Introducing capture management makes your entire company perform better by raising the bar for everyone it touches. Which is everyone. Facilitating growth Introducing capture management will increase your win rate. Adding some structure will enable people, in all parts of the company, to perform at a level higher than they currently and informally do. Having that structure means that you have something to bring new people into and a way to support them already in place. It beats making it up as you go along every time. This means it's profitable to introduce capture management. It returns more than it costs. It orients the entire company toward growth. The ROI gift that keeps on giving By winning more of what you are already pursuing, capture management not only pays for itself and then some, it enables you to hire the people you need to do things right. This will also improve your win rate. Each improvement in your win rate will increase your ROI. It can lead to a virtuous cycle of ROI improvement. Unless It is possible to introduce capture management and fail. If you simply hire a “capture manager” and expect them to figure it all out, or if you start training capture managers without considering how you will change your company to maximize their impact, you’ll recreate the same problems you have now. Only you’ll have more people to retrain in the future. You should only implement capture management if you're ready to dedicate and focus attention on winning. If you're just going to dual-hat a project manager without training, don't expect to transform your company into a winning growth-machine. Capture management is not the sort of thing you can do half-way. Trying to do so may not even provide half of the potential return that implementing capture management can bring. Embrace the change When you realize that the way you are going from sales to proposals isn’t going to cut it anymore, it’s time to pause and reflect. What do you want your company to be like when it grows up and how do you want the various parts of your company to work together to accomplish that? It’s all fine and good to make it up as you go along when you’re small. But when do you stop doing that? When you are ready to transform your company, introducing capture management is a great place to start. The day you find yourself thinking about hiring a capture manager is the day to reconsider it all When you decide to go ahead and hire a capture manager, you should take advantage of the opportunity it represents. Use introducing capture management as a change agent. Use introducing capture management to stop defining roles by the person sitting the chair and start systematically defining roles by what needs to happen in order to win. Use introducing capture management to become a growth-oriented culture that involves everyone in the company in the opportunities that growth can bring. Use introducing capture management to stop making it all up as you go along, and actually have defined expectations, inputs, and outputs. Use introducing capture management not just to get some help by adding another person to the roster. Use introducing capture management to grow.

What happens when you start writing as soon as you have an outline… See also: Content Planning Box An outline is where you start. But it’s a long, long way from the finish line. If you start proposal writing from an outline you will be giving your proposal writers zero guidance beyond a heading. And maybe an RFP. If they read it. You are expecting the writers to figure it all out. Even the best proposal writers need input and to think things through before they start writing. No one does their best work by just jumping into proposal writing. Starting from an outline may satisfy those begging to start writing, but it does so by lowering your win probability. It also will likely increase the amount of effort to finish the proposal, because the lack of thinking things through will add to the number of rewriting cycles. Annotated outlines are better, but still not enough to maximize your win probability An annotated outline is better than just an outline for proposal writing. It contains additional guidance. The quality of an annotated outline depends a lot on how much structure you have for creating it. If the annotations are whatever you think of in the moment, then the quality will not be the best you are capable of, no matter how much skill or experience you have. If you follow a checklist for the kinds of annotations you have and if your checklist is thorough, you will provide better guidance to your proposal writers. Unfortunately, annotated outlines are rarely used this diligently. And it is even more rare that an annotated outline is used as a set of specifications to guide later proposal reviews. Content Plans enable you to gather everything you need to figure out how to win in writing before you start writing A proposal content plan takes an annotated outline even further and gives it some structure to maximize your win probability. It turns your annotated outline into a methodology by accounting for: What topics must be addressed and in what sequence How guidance and annotations should be presented What format should be used What roles and responsibilities people will have in creating the content plan and how they should collaborate on it How contributors will know when they’ve done a good job How reviewers will assess the content plan How the methodology will adapt to different circumstances (5-day schedule? 60-day schedule?) A proposal content plan enables you to ensure what’s going into the proposal reflects what it will take to win before the proposal is actually written. It gives you a tool to connect your customer awareness, competitive assessment, subject matter expertise, ideas, and dreams with the proposal before it gets written. We turned Proposal Content Planning into a methodology and built the MustWin Process around it. When we created MustWin Now, our online proposal tool, we found that automating content planning is the best way to figure out how to win in writing. A proposal content plan is a tangible way to ensure that everything you know about what it will take to win makes it into the document. It enables you to drive the proposal to the win instead of waiting to see where the proposal ends up. An annotated outline is a push in the right direction. And an outline is merely an aspiration.

It is so much easier to talk about your experience than to plan approaches or develop differentiators. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the value of your experience answers all requirements. Your experience has no value and does not matter. Unless you articulate that value and bring meaning to it. The following example is loosely based on proposal content that was actually submitted to the customer, with some changes to hide the identity of the company that submitted it. The company was not one of our customers (but probably should be). Original RFP Requirement: Describe your capabilities to deliver staffing services. Original proposal response: ABC Corp. brings three decades of experience in delivering over 14 million hours of staffing services to local, state, and federal government agencies. We currently hold $750 million in active contracts nationwide. ABC Corp. works with over 247 public sector agencies to fulfill their staffing needs. ABC Corp. holds government contracts with 13 Federal Executive agencies in 42 states. Notes: ABC Corp. brings three decades of experience in delivering over 14 million hours of staffing services to local, state, and federal government agencies. How does having 14 million hours of experience make you more capable of staffing than other companies who also have a lot of experience? 14 million hours of the wrong staffing experience or poorly performed staffing experience doesn’t deliver any value. What value have you offered? We currently hold $750 million in active contracts nationwide. How does you having active contracts add value to the customer? What is it that you can do for them? Does experience with other branches even matter? If it does, why haven’t you said it? ABC Corp. works with over 247 public sector agencies to meet their staffing needs. Just because you’ve helped other agencies meet their staffing needs doesn’t mean you’re the best one to help this particular customer. What can you say to prove that you’re the best option? What can you offer them? ABC Corp. holds government contracts with 13 Federal Executive agencies in 42 states. In three of the four sentences in this paragraph, you have cited doing a lot of work for others without saying why it matters. If you look past the impressive numbers, you never got around to addressing your actual capabilities to deliver staffing! After a little editing. Well, maybe a lot of editing. ABC Corp. has effective staffing processes developed over three decades in this field giving us deep knowledge of the best ways to operate, as well as the knowledge of what improvements can be made to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The lessons learned we bring from our work with over 250 public sector agencies and 15 federal executive agencies enable us to anticipate, prevent, and resolve problems quickly. Our proven practices will save you time and money. Our experience delivering over 14 million hours of staffing will provide you with better staff who are more effective. We kept all of the facts. But we made each one be about something. We brought meaning to their experience. What each should be about should change for each bid. For example, if you wanted to focus more on staffing capabilities, you might write it like this: ABC Corp. has effective staffing processes developed over three decades in this field, giving us the capability to handle any staffing problems that might arise. Our work with over 247 public sector agencies and 13 Federal executive agencies gives us the reach to staff positions in any field, at any level, across the nation. We add to this a technology and applicant tracking infrastructure that has been continuously proven and refined. Our experience delivering over 14 million hours of staffing to Federal agencies demonstrates our ability to achieve full contract compliance, including addressing all position requirements.

  If winning proposals is a mission critical function for your company, then you can’t treat the proposal management process as a support or document production function. The goal of the proposal management process is to guide the people working on a proposal and enable them to be successful by accounting for the information, planning, and quality assurance needed. But this doesn’t really capture the importance of it. The proposal management process requires going beyond document production to ensure that it delivers mission critical growth to the company. The proposal management process must be designed around what it will take to win, and not be limited in scope to achieving RFP compliance, assembling the document, or supporting proposal contributors. Those things are all part of proposal management, but the function shouldn’t be limited to those things if you want it to drive winning new revenue. The proposal process is a tool of the proposal manager. It is not simply the steps for completing the production of the document. It should be the steps required to integrate the entire company into the process of winning. To achieve this: See also: Proposal management The proposal management process requires understanding what information you need to win, and discover and deliver it to the start of the proposal part of the proposal process. This may involve better integration with sales, business development, and capture management functions. But it starts with articulating what information is required so that delivering it can be assigned. We recommend Readiness Reviews and Proposal Input Forms. The proposal management process requires ensuring you also have a process for figuring out what to offer. Without this every change to the offering is likely to require significant rewrites. Reviewing the offering by first writing a narrative about it and then deciding whether it’s competitive is putting the cart before the horse. Figuring out what to offer may require getting the operations side of the company and the subject matter experts who perform the work to develop and implement a methodology for doing that. It may involve coordination with pricing and contracts. It may require implementing an offering review with executive participation so that the proposal can start with a reliable offering that the company believes is the most desirable. The proposal management process requires figuring out what to write and how to present it before you start writing. If you don’t, your writers will not only produce lower quality, but the process will require more edit cycles. Instead of a deliberate process of figuring what to write and how to present it, it will devolve into endless cycles of “is it good enough yet?” that only end when you submit what you have instead of what you should have created. The proposal management process requires providing a great deal of structure regarding the content of the proposal. It must go beyond tasking sections and accepting whatever is provided. Winning requires mapping the evaluation criteria, customer concerns, RFP instructions, offering elements, and presentation format. Proposal writers need a structure that shows how these things fit together in order to get it right. Winning depends on it. That structure could be an annotated outline, tables, graphics, placeholders, etc. But whatever you choose must enable you to drive the information you have and your goals for what should be written into the document. We recommend using Proposal Content Planning. The proposal management process requires decisions. So identify and assign them. Make doing this part of the process and not just an ad hoc request. Make reporting on the decisions part of the process. Indecision can kill a perfectly good proposal and decision makers are often above the proposal manager’s pay grade. Identifying the decisions you need and the timeline you need them made on into the process is better than calling out decision makers in the moment. The proposal management process requires quality to be defined and validated. One or two subjective reviews will not deliver quality at the level a mission critical business function should provide. We recommend Proposal Quality Validation instead of subjective milestone based reviews to validate that the quality of what is produced fulfills the definition of proposal quality, meets all quality criteria, and that the proposal produced reflects what it will take to win. The proposal management process requires understanding ROI. If you want it to be treated like a mission critical function, you must be able to prove your ROI. If you want support for your decisions, you must be able to demonstrate the ROI of them. ROI is a language and you must learn to speak it. It may also require data, analytics, and integration with finance. Build data gathering and reporting into the process itself so that it actually happens. Keep your steps for achieving RFP compliance and for document assembly, because they are part of it too. They are just not the entirety of the proposal management process. Don’t let all that text fool you. Put them all together and see what they add up to: Understanding what information you need and delivering it to the start of the proposal Figuring out what to offer separate from writing about it Figuring out what to write before you starting writing Bringing structure to proposal writing Accounting for and expediting decisions Defining quality and validating it Tracking and delivering a positive ROI Feel free to drop any of these that you think the proposal management process doesn’t need. If your proposal management process starts at RFP release and only addresses the tasks related to achieving RFP compliance and producing the document, you might want to rethink that. If you are responsible for profit and loss and see the proposal function as specialized administrative support, you might want to rethink that, too. If you can’t figure out how to do it all, then begin by adding them as requirements in your process and focus on articulating the goals. Let people figure out how to accomplish the goals. Let people challenge the goals. But any goals that remain are worth figuring out. And then only put as much effort into it as you think you should for mission critical future revenue.

Describing your own company is a mistake, even when the RFP uses the word “describe.” The customer doesn’t care about your company, they care about what they are going to get and whether you can deliver as promised. They ask for the description because they want to assess that ability. The following example is loosely based on proposal content that was actually submitted to the customer, with some changes to hide the identity of the company that submitted it. The company was not one of our customers (but probably should be). Original proposal paragraph: See also: Examples We live in a post-digital age, a time of constantly changing technology transforming the way we live, work, and relate to one another. Technology has become an everyday part of our lives, invisibly powering the world all around us. In this 24/7/365 economy, clients are impacted differently and have different needs. The way that people work is changing, and this influences their performance requirements. Our world is constantly changing. How we live, relate to each other, and work are all transforming due to technology. Technology has become something that we can’t live without. We have to be prepared for those changes and the different needs of our clients. Notes: After each sentence, ask yourself: How does this sentence add any value to what you offer your customer? Does it tell them anything they don’t already know? Does it help them figure out what to do about it? Does it even pass the “So what?” test? The text above implies a solution is needed, without ever offering that solution. You’re supposed to assume they have one, even though it’s unstated. Even if it comes later, you’ve wasted the reader’s time by slowing down the part where you actually do something for them. This approach to writing does more harm than good by opening things up to a competitor that starts off by offering a solution to these problems without wasting page space by stating the obvious. After each paragraph, ask yourself: What does it add up to? If you received this from a vendor would you be inclined to accept their proposal or have you tuned out? After a little editing. Well, maybe a complete rewrite: ABC Corp. tracks the changes in technology and accounts for the differences they will bring so that we can adjust our processes accordingly and remain ahead of the game. Our approach involves updating our software before issues begin to occur, which will bring you reliability and speed. There will be less time spent fixing technical issues due to outdated software, so time can be allocated in more useful ways. Our staff are continuously training and updating their skills. We position you to not only deal with constantly changing technology, but to be able to take advantage of it. For our clients, changes in technology bring opportunities instead of disruption. For a real-world proposal, I probably would simply have deleted those two paragraphs. But where’s the fun in that? The key to this example is not the wording of the rewrite, which does transform the original into something that adds value. The key is not to introduce your proposal by talking in overgeneralizations about obvious problems and issues. Instead of talking around the issues, offer solutions to them. Proposals are not research or school papers. Do not start by stating the problem. Start by offering a solution in a way that makes it clear you not only understand the problem, you also understand what to do about it. That is what customers want to see in a proposal. And they’re not going to hunt to find it.

You know things about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. But what do you know and what do you do about it? Must people just ponder it hoping lightning strikes. But here is a more organized way to leverage what you know into winning your proposals. It starts by making lists. It’s really nice when the customer does that for you. For example, if they give you a list of goals, a list of evaluation criteria, and a list of requirements. But not everything comes packaged in neat little lists. Sometimes you have to parse them out yourself. Here are some good list topics to start with. In each topic, simply list the facts. See also: Themes Customer concerns Goals Requirements Evaluation criteria Risks Price to win Your advantages Strengths Differentiators Qualifications Experience Resources Approaches Win strategies Proof points Competitive environment Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats Outcomes Results Benefits Value How do they all relate to each other? Next you match up the items in your various lists. There are several ways to do this, but a good all-around tool is a spreadsheet. Can you lay out your lists so that the ones that are related are on the same rows? Can you read a row and see everything that is related to each other? What you usually find is they don’t match up very well. Each topic can have overlaps and gaps. But this can be turned into a good thing. The gaps and overlaps become the inspiration for your proposal win strategies. When your lists don’t match up well, you are gaining valuable insights about how to win: How many times are they actually evaluating experience? I’ve seen it show in the technical approach, staffing plan, and the past performance volumes. That favors a company with lots of experience. You might find that most of the goals are related to only a few of the evaluation criteria. Do more than one of the evaluation criteria overlap? Is it in effect double counting? Or does it indicate an interest area with more than one application or set of issues? Are there any requirements that are not evaluated? How do you and your competitor's strengths and weaknesses match up with the requirements, evaluation criteria, and each other? How do your differentiators match up with everything else? Do they indicate a differentiated advantage that you want to focus on? Are there issues like risk or quality that, while not evaluated, can be mapped to their goals or requirements that are evaluated? When you think about what the gaps and overlaps mean, you can discover strategies that wouldn’t otherwise occur to you. How do you exploit your strengths or cope with the issues? Use your insights to bring meaning to your proposals In addition to the strategic implications, your insights can be a valuable tool for addressing your response to the customer’s requirements in context. You can go beyond simply saying that “you’ll do” whatever they are asking for and say what you’ll accomplish. It gives you a cheat sheet for winning. For any given proposal paragraph you can look up what might be related and pick the goal, issue, evaluation criteria, outcome, etc., that is the most relevant to the topic you are writing about. Instead of simply making a description or a claim you can make a connection or alignment with something that matters. You can turn the simple things you will do into things that have a much bigger meaning. Do this consistently and you will gain a competitive advantage.

Apple is famous for having a designer lead their product development efforts instead of having an engineer lead them. Apple designers obsess over what will please their customers. In many ways that exactly describes what great proposal writers do. So who designs the offering for a company that offers complex services like engineering? Should it be a subject matter expert? Someone who understands the work? Or should it be a designer, someone who understands what will please the customer? Could it be that most contractors have it backwards? See also: Technical Approach Could having your subject matter experts determine what to propose based on the RFP ensure that you never reach greatness? Could starting by figuring out what will please the customer lead to better solutions? Could measuring your solution against what will please the customer instead of the specifications alone result in better engineering? Should you design your offering instead of engineering it? Personally, I prefer integrated project teams. I don’t care for a hierarchy based on whose ego gets to claim they are leading the effort. But more often than not, I have found that when I support proposal efforts, I tend to shape what is going to be proposed. I don’t just merely try to make an approach sound good. I try to make it better so that it will be more competitive. When I work with companies on a series of their proposals, more often than not I end up introducing change to the company. I represent the voice of the customer, and instead of directing the solution, I seek to inspire it. Determining the solution requires subject matter expertise I don’t have. I rely on the subject matter experts for that. But I do help make the solution the subject matter experts produce better. I can do this because I look at it from the customer’s perspective and am a little cynical when it comes to the claims of vendors. I help turn the solution into something that is more credible and reliable. This in turn makes it better than other alternatives and more competitive. It results in a proposed offering that is more pleasing to the customer. Let's try an example... As an example, in order for a company to get a top score related to quality, I would look for ways that the team could raise the bar on their quality approach. And I’m not talking about writing the required quality control plan. I’m not a quality engineer or formal quality methodology expert. But I’ve written enough proposals on the topic to suggest ways to improve accountability and transparency. Or ways to better design quality in from the beginning or validate it on the back end. Or to measure and report performance and support data-driven decisions. As a proposal expert, I show proposal teams how to choose their approach based on what the customer has indicated is important to them in the evaluation criteria. I help them approach quality in a way that has an impact, that the customer cares about, and that makes our proposal their best alternative. By working improvements into their proposals over time, I can also show them how to be a quality driven company. We can change how the company comes to view quality and embed that into their culture. I’ve always been amazed at how much change a proposal specialist can drive into their company through influencing how they identify themselves in their proposals. Proposal writers can change a company’s identity. If you are a corporate executive trying to figure out how to herd the cats to do better, then forget about writing a new mission statement. Instead consider using the proposal process to continuously define your company’s identity in a way that pleases your clients, and that affects what people actually do on the job. The obligatory Steve Jobs citation... Steve Jobs changed the world and changed how products are built. He started by changing Apple. He put designers in charge of product development. Instead of products that were merely handy, useful, or practical, Apple designed products to please their customers. In the 90s, Apple had a market share of less than 14%. Today, Apple is a dominant industry change leader. The approach Steve Jobs took doesn’t have to be limited to computers or even product manufacturers. Service contractors can take the same approach. Only instead of designing and building, a service contractor proposes their offering. Contractors decide what they will propose doing for their customers when they write their proposals. Proposals are where contractors design their offerings. If you want to be a great contractor, you shouldn't simply do what you’re told. Bring a vision and capabilities that please the customer in ways they didn’t even realize were possible, delivered in ways that are feasible. You don’t settle for the status quo. People throw money at high-priced Apple products because they are not the status quo. And if Apple ever settles for the status quo they’ll go into decline. You will never become great simply by responding to the requirements in the RFP. You will never get there simply by having the best specifications. Apple routinely defeats companies who compete on the specifications alone. Is Apple the best company in the world? Nope. They’ve got issues of their own, even (especially?) under Steve Jobs. That’s not the point of this article. The point is that you can use the proposal function to change your approach to how you determine what to offer, and do it in a way that changes your entire corporate identity. You can be better than you are. Much better. What to do about it People tend to be afraid of change. They get caught up in how it will impact them personally. They often seek to control territories and create stovepipes in an attempt to prevent change. It helps to focus on the goals and what you are trying to accomplish. All it takes to accomplish improving your offering design is to: Start your proposals with an assessment of what would please the customer Make this part of your overall assessment of what it will take to win Determine how to position what you intend to propose against your competition and how the customer will make their decision Do a gap analysis between the items above and what it will take to be RFP compliant Identify approaches that fill the gap to make what you are going to propose stronger from the customer’s perspective Bring this to the start of proposal writing Note that I did not turn this into a contest of who leads the offering design effort. It's not an ego contest or a territorial dispute. Instead it should be about what you want to accomplish, how to accomplish it well, and how you will validate that you succeeded in accomplishing it. Who can accomplish it is a secondary consideration. A significant one, but one that must fulfill the goal. It may very well be that the scope is too broad for any one person. This is why I like integrated teams. They bring more skills and experience to the effort. If you want to make your company great, institutionalize this approach so that it becomes part of everything you do, and don’t just do it at the start of a proposal. Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business Click here to start a conversation by email Or use the widget below to get on my calendar for a telephone conversation so we can discuss whether we're a match.

Describing your own company is a mistake, even when the RFP uses the word “describe.” The customer doesn’t care about your company, they care about what they are going to get and whether you can deliver as promised. They ask for the description because they want to assess that ability. The following example is loosely based on proposal content that was actually submitted to the customer, with some changes to hide the identity of the company that submitted it. The company was not one of our customers (but probably should be). Original RFP requirement: See also: Examples Describe your capabilities to deliver training. Original proposal paragraph: ABC Corp. has worked hard to establish a best-in-class training program. ABC Corp. was awarded a [Name] Award from [Name] Magazine. This award is given to organizations that deliver the most successful training in the world. Our award was based on training frequency, length, budget, and innovative delivery. Our receipt of this award is a direct result of our employee training, excellent customer service, and standards. Notes: Every single sentence in that paragraph is about the company submitting the proposal. They are proud of their accomplishments and believe they make them better than their competitors. But when you pull it apart, you find that it has major problems. Here it is sentence-by-sentence: ABC Corp. has worked hard to establish a best-in-class training program. This is about the company. Does it pass the “So what?” test for the customer? Does your effort matter more than the results you will deliver to the customer? Will this be the first thing the customer wants to hear about your response to what they want to get from their training program? ABC Corp. was awarded a [Name] Award from [Name] Magazine. This is a simple fact about the company. Does it pass the “So what?” test for the customer? This award is given to organizations that deliver the most successful training in the world. If you are trying to say that this supports your ability to deliver the best training, you should say that. But would that be credible? What constitutes “successful” training to the customer you are proposing to? If the award reflects that, it would be more significant to the customer. Our award was based on training frequency, length, budget, and innovative delivery. “Our award” indicates that you are talking about yourself. This should be a statement about how the award confirms your ability to meet criteria that are relevant to the customer you are proposing to. Our receipt of this award is a direct result of our employee training, excellent customer service, and standards. “Our receipt of..” followed by “result of our...” further indicates you are talking about yourself instead of how this will impact the customer. Who cares about you? What does this award do for the customer you are proposing to? After a little editing. Well, maybe a lot… The training delivered by ABC Corp. will enable [Customer]’s employees to achieve top performance. The benefits that ABC Corp.’s training program can bring to you are credible, having received multiple awards including one from [Name] Magazine. This independent assessment demonstrates that our training frequency, length, budget, and innovative delivery reliably produce the kind of world-class training results that you would like to have. It also demonstrates that our training development resources, methodologies, and standards will be effective for achieving [Customer]’s training goals. When the customer has to read through countless companies talking about how they’re at the top in their industry and how great their reputation is, those claims lose their value. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. If you are the buyer, would you rather listen to someone go on and on about how great they think they are, or hear about what exactly it is they can do for you and why you should believe it? Every time you make a statement that is about yourself, you should stop yourself and explain how it will impact the customer and why they should believe you will deliver as promised.

People perform better when they have the right support. Teams of people perform better when their collaboration is coordinated. The proposal process is only part of what is required to optimize the performance of proposal contributors. Proposal management begins with the implementation of a formal process. But that is just the beginning. It is only part of managing what it will take to win. It takes more than defining some steps and telling the proposal team what to do to and on what schedule. Even though I had spent two decades defining and implementing the MustWin Process, when I built the first version of our MustWin Now proposal software I learned something profound. As I watched people use the software, the process disappeared. They were following the process, but they didn’t realize it. It wasn’t even their intent. They were just doing what it made sense to do. I learned some key lessons from observing how things worked when the process was no longer about using paper to create paper: See also: Proposal Software The best process is an invisible process. The more users have to be aware that there is a process, the more friction there is between them and simply doing things. The user interface for your proposal matters more than the process. Note that by “user interface” I mean it in far more than just a technological sense. Even if you do not use any software to support your proposals, you have a user interface. For a given process, you can have many different user interfaces. But some will be much more effective than others. It is entirely possible that if people won’t follow your process, the problem is your user interface and not your process. When you stop thinking in terms of steps and process, and begin thinking in terms of how users interface with proposal development, you begin to see ways to improve performance that go beyond what is typically thought of as “process.” Why people hate working on proposals It’s not just because of the extra workload: Collaboration is not reliable, let alone smooth. People can’t get a simple question answered, so it seems pointless to raise the elephant in the room as an issue. The process breaks, shows gaps, or is clearly not applicable within minutes of use. We say we’re adapting it to every new proposal, but in reality we’re making it up as we go along within a loose framework. Our contributors see this and silently question our credibility. No one is on the same page. People are routinely tasked with things that they are not capable of doing. Some of them have given up before they’ve even started. People spend a lot of the time they put into proposals not knowing what to do or even how to figure it out. Rework, which we all know should be unnecessary, happens so frequently it becomes expected. Letting people who hate proposals start immediately writing to get the proposal out of the way ends up leading to extra rework cycles which simultaneously fail to get the proposal out of the way and lower your win rate, making people hate proposals even more. Reviews are allowed to be subjective, which leads to even more unanticipated rework, all because of opinions that should have been expressed as proposal quality criteria at the beginning of the proposal. People who expect to get blamed for rework, or worse losing the proposal, spend as much effort on CYA as they do the proposal. Capture requires risk, which in turn requires tolerance. Teamwork requires trust. Any proposal training that people have received may be better than nothing. But it hasn’t solved any of these problems. It doesn’t even address most of them. It’s part of the reason proposals suck. Because people hate working on proposals, they want to hand off and run away, leaving the proposal starved for input and timely contributions. This, of course, makes the experience for everyone left working on the proposal that much worse. Last minute heroes who never helped planned the proposal but for some reason are allowed to change it all at the last minute. Enough said. Etc. Advanced proposal management is about going beyond the process. This is necessary because not all of the challenges can be solved with process alone. Advanced proposal management is about identifying and implementing the changes that are necessary in order to create proposals that reflect what it will take to win. Advanced proposal management leaves the proposal process behind in order to focus on the much broader proposal experience. In many ways, advanced proposal management is about solving the problems above by addressing everything the proposal process doesn’t: What should the user experience for proposal contributors be to maximize the chances of success? What should working on proposals be like? What, in addition to the process, is necessary for team members to be capable of succeeding? What do contributors and stakeholders need to know? People perform better when they know how. What guidance and inspiration can you provide so they perform even better? What makes people stuck, slows them down, or causes them to water down their contribution? Most people don’t start off intending to take the path of least resistance. They take it when they run into challenges. And if they can’t get help, they may take the path of least resistance in order to submit something. So what can you do to keep them on the path towards winning? Why should they care? It helps with motivation to understand how the outcome of the proposal affects people personally. Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. What should contributors and stakeholders expect? Not knowing is the worst. Plus, that’s how bad surprises happen. Don’t let that happen to the people you depend on. How do people get help? If it’s easier to water things down or take the path of least resistance rather than ask for help, you’ve got a problem. But most importantly, what can their efforts accomplish? People understandably hate working on tasks that do not accomplish anything. Like a proposal that is doomed to failure. Or to be obligated to do something with benefits that are only theoretical. Every person in a company depends on its growth. Make it personal. And make it possible to accomplish. Instead of steps, the new version of MustWin Now is being built around an engine for managing people’s needs. Assignments are one form of need. Reviews and feedback are another, as are getting answers to questions. Instead of phases with matching tools, you just have needs and tools are only one way of getting them met. When you combine that with things that make interactions and performance easier, like tracking, prioritization, checklists, and discussion, you get a platform for interaction with tools that support the user’s ability to accomplish goals. At least that’s what we’re going for. We’ve still got a ways to go before release. We'll be launching an advance program for PropLIBRARY Subscribers who want to get to know it ahead of time. But hopefully I’ve shared enough here for those of you who haven't subscribed to use in improving your proposal experience, even if it’s fully manual. Think beyond the process. Instead of thinking of streamlining in terms of assembly line automation, streamline the way people interact. Make sure that no one is left on their own, without support. Make that support easier to get than it is to work around or water down. Save people time by reducing all that talking in circles that happens at meetings, and turn it into creating something that facilitates forward progress. Keep in mind that the team working on a proposal has the ability to completely change the experience. There are many things you have no control over. But the people working together control the experience you will all have working on the proposal together. The best proposal experiences happen when the team puts a little effort into each other as well as the proposal. And that in turn produces the best proposals. Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business Click here to start a conversation by email Or click below to get on my calendar to talk by phone sp;

Some people write like they are proposal narcissists. Their proposals are all about how great they are. They claim this. They claim that. They describe themselves in such grandiose terms. When they explain their approaches they say “We will…” after “We will…” after “We will…” as opposed to focusing on what the customer will get. But your customer doesn’t believe that noise. So why are you even writing it? You wouldn’t represent yourself in person with someone you just met. But when we don’t know what to write, we fall back on what we know. It’s easy to write about yourself. And because you’ve been exposed to millions of commercials, you think that’s how you’re supposed to sell. But that’s all wrong for selling in writing See also: Customer Perspective Selling in writing is about helping the customer make a decision, and not trying to hypnotize them with your amazing branding magic. They will parse what you write into what they need to decide. If they have written evaluation criteria, they will compare what you’ve put in writing with how it stacks up. An easy model that a lot of proposal evaluations follow is to compare strengths and weaknesses. All of those unsubstantiated claims to greatness that you feel present your company as the one who should win are not going to be considered strengths. And that makes them just noise. Proposal writers often get confused about what the customer will consider a “strength” to be. So they just write, hoping that their greatness will somehow resonate with the customer and they’ll pick the strengths out of the text. The reality is the customer is rolling their eyes at the pretentiousness of it and skipping large pieces of it when their eyes glaze over. The remedy Here is a simple technique for writing strengths that the customer will find compelling: Pretend to be a cynical customer who believes all vendors are liars who are out to get you. Then identify the points you can use to prove them wrong and win them over. Each of those points is a potential strength that the customer will pay attention to. It’s a great way to focus your proposal on what matters. This is not the same as providing proof points for your approaches. Proof points are a very good thing. But this technique is a bit more aggressive. It requires you to challenge yourself. And to do a really good job of it, you’ll have to change what you’re offering to be more accountable. If you show up with an offering that can be implemented transparently, with measurable progress and outcomes, and a history of measurable performance to support your ability to deliver as promised, you are ready to write a proposal that is full of strengths. But if you are showing up unprepared (which happens), then try to think about what will make a cynical customer believe you will do all the right things and deliver as promised. Modify your approach so that they can see with their own eyes that what you’re saying is reliable. The more narcissistic your proposal is, the harder this will be to do. So simply drop all that noise. Make no claims. As in zero. Instead provide a proposal that is 100% self-validating. Each validation is a potential strength. Don’t just do things or have an approach. Instead have a way of knowing if things were done correctly, have a way for workers to self-assess whether they were done correctly, have specific oversight or external validation to ensure the self-assessment was correct, and then provide transparency so that the customer can see this in operation at any moment rather than having to take it on faith. Turn this into performance metrics that you can track over time, both to prove to this customer that you did it and to prove to future customers that you do it reliably. In each proposal section, at each step or feature, the customer will see not only compliance but also assurance. It is the assurance that will become most of your strengths. But because the assurance is there, many of your features that would otherwise get ignored may now become cited as strengths. The reason is simple. Compared to what other vendors offer to do, your proposal is credible. Claims are not strengths, no matter how grand. Credibility equals strength. Try being a little cynical and you’ll see what I mean.

A lot of RFPs assess proposals in terms of strengths and weaknesses. But they usually don’t tell you what a strength is. While you will find some customers that will define a strength as meeting the requirements, that is not a safe assumption. Some customers believe a strength is something that goes beyond merely meeting the requirements. Weaknesses are easy to define. It’s when the customer can’t find something they think you should have talked about. Note: that’s not quite the same thing as you didn’t talk about it. It may mean that there’s an aspect to it they think is important that you missed, or they just didn’t see where you addressed it. They may expect to find it, even if they didn’t mention it in the RFP, even if it was right there and they didn’t see it, and even if what you said means the same thing, but they didn’t see the words they were looking for. You can lose if their expectations were not met or even if they were wrong. One reason that actually talking to your customers before you bid increases your win rate is that it helps prevent this from happening by cluing you into what really matters to the customer, regardless of what it says in the RFP. See also: RFPs When you are being evaluated based on strengths and weaknesses, you should change how you write in order to get the best score. You should not rely on writing the same way you normally do and expect that somehow your strengths will be apparent to the evaluator. Strengths can be the features of your offering, but they will be the features that deliver a benefit the customer finds sufficiently compelling to make note of. Different customers, even different evaluators within a given customer, will have differences in what they find to be compelling. This is why the best strengths are differentiators. They are compelling features that none of your competitors can claim. Evaluators commonly look for what’s different between proposals in order to determine which is better. Small differences in qualifications are unlikely to stand out and be noteworthy. Differences that matter might be noteworthy. So make sure you explain why what you’re saying matters. Make it past the “So what?” test. And make why it matters relate to what they really want to know. Here are some examples of the questions evaluators typically ask themselves: Will you do what is required? Can they trust that you’ll do it completely? Can they trust that you’ll do it accurately? Will you do it quick enough and meet the required schedule? Why should they believe you’ll do it within budget? How do they know that things won’t get overlooked? What will you be like to work with when something goes wrong? What if something changes? What about the known unknowns? And the unknown unknowns? Will you put them at risk? Will your performance suffer because of the risks? Will you be attentive and responsive? Have you done it before? How will your experience lead to better outcomes? What about your proposal makes you their best alternative? Will your people be good to work with? Will your people be good at their jobs? How do you know that when you and the client’s backs are turned, people will still do a good job? Keep in mind that you can’t simply claim these things. You can't simply claim that you will do what is required at the best quality with the lowest risk from Day One. In a proposal, you must prove your claims to be credible. Of course you think your people will be good at their jobs. You think they’ll be great. You are also a salesperson, so nobody believes you. What can you say that is tangible and provable that demonstrates they’ll do a good job under the most challenging of circumstances? That's what matters to the customer, and not claims that sound like bad salesmanship in a document where must try to prove your worth in order to win. What you claim is not a strength. Read that last sentence again, because most proposals are full of declarative sentences that are nothing but claims. But if you combine your differentiators and claims with proof points, you create compelling strengths. An easy formula for writing about your strengths A strength is not a feature, declaration, or claim. A strength is in why it matters or helps the customer answer questions like those above. Here is an easy way to approach writing about strengths to maximize your score: What you say about meeting the requirements, plus something else. "Something else" could be why it matters, how the customer will benefit, how it adds value, why it's the best trade off, how it differentiates your proposal, what makes it their best alternative, or some other rationale. But there has to be something that takes it from being a statement to being a strength. What you add beyond what you'll do to fulfill the requirements is your chance to make it a strength: It’s not just that you’ll do the work. It’s that your approach also prevents failure from occurring that matters. It’s not just that your approach eliminates points of failure, it’s that your approach also reduces the burden on the customer to monitor your performance that matters. It’s not just that you’ll staff the project on time. It’s that because you have named names you can do it more reliably than your competitors, and that matters to the customer. It’s not just that you’ll deliver. You’ll also verify delivery was made to ensure that it occurs every single time, and that matters if it's important to the customer. It’s not just that you have experience. But your experience enables you to show up with plans and checklists already drafted that you just need to confirm. And that matters if getting started right away is important to the customer. In addition to having the tools to do the job, you have already tested, integrated, or configured those tools and the staff you’ll provide already know how to use them. The result will be a faster, more reliable startup that leads to the following improved outcomes… that matter to the customer. Do this in every sentence. Or at least most of them. Or just do it as many times as is necessary to have more strengths than your competition. Implications for offering design If you ask your subject matter experts to write something that is RFP compliant, that may be all you get. But if you teach them to write every sentence in two parts, you can teach them how to create a better offering. If you just ask them to create a great offering or to explain why it matters, you might just get a blank stare. If you teach them that every requirement response, every point made, every feature, and every step in your approach must come in two parts, then they will design the offering to deliver the value, differentiators, and proof needed. And that will lead them to produce a better offering than they would have by just trying to fulfill the specifications. Every time. Considerations for how to best present your strengths The evaluators will prepare a list of your strengths. So why not make it easy for them? Provide a list of your strengths in your proposal, possibly in a text box. Text boxes draw the eye to your strengths. However, if you abbreviate your demonstration of those strengths in order to fit them into the box, your strengths can easily degrade into simple claims. Calling your claims “strengths” will not only be a self-delusion, it will do more to hurt your credibility than prove your strengths. If your proposal is short, then you can provide a single list. But usually it’s better to highlight the strengths where you are talking about the topic. This way they can read it, do their assessment, and if they agree they can copy and paste from your list onto their evaluation forms.

It would be really great to know if you're going to win a pursuit, or even just have a decent chance at it, before you put all that effort into it. We are driven to really want to quantify our chances of winning a pursuit. We want to make it a science. Really badly. There are several reasons why people need to estimate the probability of win (pwin). It helps to: See also: Winning Determine whether a lead is worth pursuing at all Figure out how much to budget on the pursuit Assign the right staff Have a better idea about the likeliness of future revenue The problem is that even though we don’t like to admit it, nobody can predict the future. Most pwin estimates are rubbish. It’s bad enough that: Your quantified estimates are not based on anything quantified You don’t refine your pwin estimate based on real world outcomes The estimates you have aren’t statistically significant anyway The real reason your pwin is a complete work of fiction But the real reason your pwin estimate is inaccurate wrong is that it is disconnected from the proposal. There is no tangible connection between the factors you use to estimate pwin and what you do or say in your proposal. In other words, there is no connection between what you claim is your probability of winning and what you do to win. This alone makes your pwin a complete work of fiction. Snarkiness mode: On Setting: High If you wanted to attempt to create pwin factors that actually define your probability of winning, you would need a verifiable mechanism for driving them into the proposal, and a means to track doing that over time so you can refine your estimates based on reality. Instead, a lot of companies produce a list of themes and hand it off to the proposal. Advanced companies will produce a capture plan, but unfortunately more often than not it will sit around unread. Well, maybe read once and never referred back to during the proposal. If you do better than that, congratulations, but your pwin estimate is still rubbish. Prove me wrong. Why pwin estimation can lead to lower win rates A list of themes is a weak attempt to impact the proposal. A list of themes or advantages is problematical because it presumes that proposal writers will keep it in mind and incorporate every place they should. This is not a safe assumption. That list is usually not mapped to the proposal outline, completely unrelated to the evaluation criteria, mostly all about you instead of being about the customer, leaves huge gaps where the proposal team will just make stuff up, and has overlaps where the team will simply ignore the weaker entries. The result during the proposal is falling back to basing everything on the same RFP that all your competitors have, as if there wasn’t any pre-RFP pursuit and paying zero attention to what you thought drove your pwin. If you don’t have a tangible means to drive the advantages used to calculate a positive pwin, your proposal will fail to live up to your projected pwin value. Your projected pwin value becomes a work of fiction used to secure a bid decision, and not an accurate reflection of your chances or of your advantages. There are as many ways to calculate pwin as there are companies. Anyone claiming to have an “algorithm” to calculate pwin usually just has weighting factors that sound good to them. But calling it an algorithm helps to imply that it has a sophistication that somehow imbues it with predictive gravitas. Pwin can be calculated in many different ways. Different factors are considered and everyone’s secret sauce is how they subjectively quantify them. What they all have in common is the disconnect between the estimate and what goes in the proposal. Does your pwin estimation pass the "So what?" test? Try applying the “So what?” test to your pwin calculations. Here are four areas that are often part of pwin calculations: Customer intimacy. Have you talked to the customer? How many times? At least once? Pwin calculations often try to quantify customer contacts. But if we’re being honest, so what? So what that you talked to the customer? Does it matter if it doesn’t change what you offer or say in your proposal? Experience. You have relevant experience, maybe even more than your competitors. But so what? How will that change what the customer gets in your proposal? Every proposal evaluates past performance. Maybe you have an edge in that section. But does this RFP even include any evaluation criteria based on experience in the technical and management volumes? Some do and some don’t. If it does, is it weighted enough to impact whether you win or lose? Offering advantages. Hopefully you believe with quite firm conviction that your offering is better. But so what? What needs to go into the proposal to prove that those advantages should earn the highest score? Price to win. You believe you can deliver at the price required to win. Is that something you calculated or are wishing for? Is price the most important evaluation criterion? How will your pricing strategy change your offering and how you position it to get you the highest score where it matters? If considerations like these are going to change what you say in your proposal, then how? How will you ensure that the right parts of the proposal position things in the best way so that your advantages achieve the highest possible score? If you go straight from the RFP into proposal writing, then your win rate will be much lower than your pwin estimates. In fact, just for fun, compare your average pwin values to your actual win rate. I apologize in advance for cluing you into that dose of reality. What people are saying to convince The Powers That Be to bid things is numerically and provably different than the action outcome. See also: Drinking your own bathwater. As a side note, if you still insist on calculating pwin as a percentage, consider only accepting pwin rates within, say 20%, of your win rate. Anything higher is likely improperly calculated and anything lower isn’t worth bidding. How your pwin estimation can positively impact your proposal win rate In order to drive your pwin considerations into your proposal, you need something in between creating the proposal outline and the start of proposal writing. This is where you can combine your advantages with the RFP evaluation criteria and allocate them to the document. This is how you explain to your proposal writers the points they should prove. This is how you ensure that you prove your advantages to the customer. This is how you increase your win probability much higher than throwing out a list and hoping it finds its way into the document. Increasing your probability of winning is a good thing. Assigning a percentage or value to pwin is an exercise in self-delusion. To increase your probability of winning, identify the factors that contribute to it. Measure them when you can, and guess when you can’t. Just be honest about your subjectivity. If you can, refine it based on reality on a regular basis. But if those factors don’t drive change into the proposal, then they have no impact on whether the sale closes and nothing to do with your actual pwin.

If you can articulate a repeatable proposal process and successfully implement it in the real world, congratulations! You are a proposal manager. Your education, however, is just beginning. Proposal development is not really about the process. Or said another way, the proposal process is just one tool for accomplishing the goal of winning in writing using a team of people working against a deadline to respond to customer requirements better than your competitors. The process is only part of what needs to happen. And it isn’t even the most important part: See also: Proposal Management Even if you have a proposal process, the management of risk, quality, and issues are more important to success than the process itself. The proposal process mitigates some issues, but does not resolve all of them. It isn’t even designed to address many of the issues that come up in every proposal. The proposal process does not determine your success. But your ability to mitigate the risks, deliver quality, and manage the issues does determine your success. These are deep topics. Risk should be looked at inclusively and address solution, pricing, contracts, and performance, as well as proposal schedule, compliance, and completion risk. Having a proposal review, or several proposal reviews, only scratches the surface of what quality assurance really means. And issues can involve assignments, predictable problems, unpredictable problems, proposal problems, staffing problems, customer problems, technical problems, and everything and more in between. The proposal process is just one of the tools you have for addressing everything relevant to the proposal, and it is not the only one you need. The development of strategy to give the tactics of the proposal process direction is also more important than the process itself. A well designed and implemented process often delivers an ordinary proposal with no hope of winning. Tactics and strategy are both required for success. Strategic development takes place at the corporate, department, and proposal levels. And only some of the strategic planning you need to do relates to the proposals themselves… Then there is the perspective that comes from looking beyond one proposal and considering what it will take organizationally to win them all. How does the proposal process integrate with the enterprise that it supports? How does the proposal process integrate with the sales, capture, and technical operations? How should resources be allocated across proposals? How should the organization’s culture impact its ability to grow and how should it evolve? What should be done to maximize the return on investment of the proposal function? And how should that be calculated? Advanced proposal management is about going beyond the process to integrate everything that impacts winning. It requires tools and a framework that go beyond the proposal process. Step away from the steps Proposals are not about assembly. They are about adding and communicating value. Assembly can be done by the steps. But adding and communicating the value of something created against a unique set of specifications in changing circumstances can’t be accomplished by strictly following steps. Not to mention that proposals are created by teams of people with varying backgrounds that don’t report to the proposal manager, against a tight unforgiving deadline, with a difficult to interpret set of specifications in which the only successful outcome possible is doing this better than any other company bidding. Coming in number two just makes you the first loser. Managing the people, deadline, and specifications better than any other bidder means having a perspective that goes beyond the steps. So don’t start by thinking about what steps everything should follow. Instead, get real clear on what your goals are. This is more challenging that you might think. It is easy to confuse goals and tasks. Your goals should be what you need to accomplish in order to successfully lay the foundation for what comes next. The tasks for accomplishing those things are secondary and somewhat more flexible. How this plays out in the real world As an example, the step of creating an outline is secondary to the goal of organizing the proposal to meet the customer’s expectations. There are many ways to create an outline. Most processes will spell it out well enough. But I really don’t care about the steps. I care a lot more about whether the outline puts things where the customer expects to find them. I care so much that: I want to do things before we start creating the outline to make sure I understand the customer’s expectations. These may not require additional steps, but do involve working with people on the issue who are involved before the RFP is even released. If I have to interpret or guess at what the customer wants, I want to mitigate the risks. In fact, I want an approach to document, assign, and address the risks. I want to build in quality assurance to make sure we’ve achieved that goal before moving on to writing based on that outline. That’s more than just a review. I want a definition for what a quality outline is so we can achieve it. And I want a rubric, self-assessment, a review, and a way to resolve outline issues. I want to track issues related to the outline so they can be dealt with in a timely manner and definitely not be ignored or forgotten. I want that tracking to be visible to everyone involved and support issue escalation for problems that aren’t resolved in a timely manner. This is more than just basic project management There is a difference between proposal management and the proposal process. Proposal management involves the techniques required to implement the proposal process. But what about the techniques required to go beyond the proposal process and address everything related to what it will take to win? Diving into that is what is required for advanced proposal management. Proposal managers can steal learn a lot from the world of project management. However, proposal development has specific requirements that require significant tailoring of generic project management approaches. Proposals are a highly specialized use case and performance measurement occurs after the completion of the project. You need to predict and build a proposal around what it will take to win, when the award decision comes weeks or months after the proposal is complete. But more importantly you need an integrated, enterprise-wide approach, because proposal contributions and stakeholders cross organizational boundaries. For some proposal managers, many of these things are outside their job descriptions. Some will be outside their own conception of the job. Those who have them might push them off to the capture manager role. Some will be too consumed by the day-to-day need to ship proposals to step back and consider the goals and context of what they do. But if you stay in your comfort zone, you’ll remain an ordinary proposal manager. If you want to be advanced, you have to leave ordinary behind.

When given aa opportunity to network with their peers, talk to experts, and forge relationships with potential customers why do some many people simply go on LinkedIn to post ads? And why do so many of them write their proposals the same way? We are so pleased to submit the following proposal because you might pay us a lot of money. We are a unique state-of-the-art industry leader. Our people, hired at the lowest possible price from the same labor pool as everyone else, are what makes us so special. Our slogan differentiates us. You should select us because we have other customers. We will fully comply with whatever you pay us to do. Aside from my snarky additions, most proposals are full of tropes like these. They sound more like ads than someone who is trying to prove they would be great to work with. See also: Great proposals If you pay attention to what people post on LinkedIn, you can learn some important lessons. Ignore the ads that people post. On second thought, don’t ignore them. Count how many people interact with them. Go to a group on LinkedIn where people have posted ad after ad and you’ll see almost no interactions. Nobody is even reading the ads. In those groups, everyone shows up, posts their ad, ignores everyone else and then leaves and congratulates themselves for being such excellent marketers. By the way, I lead the largest group on LinkedIn related to proposals. Every day I delete far more submissions that I let post, mainly because so many of them are ads. Pay the most attention to the posts that people interact with. Very rarely are they statements. Statements are not the best way to get a conversation going. They don’t encourage engagement. But stories do. Questions do. Things that people can empathize with do. Posts that are simply informative may or may not result in engagement. Study the informative posts to see which ones people engage with. And when it comes to engagement, comments and shares count way more than low effort “likes.” Now apply this to your proposals. Do you want your customers to give your proposal the least attention possible, or engage with you about your proposal? How should you write in order to achieve that goal? For starters, you should go first. Engage with your customers, even if you have to do it in writing. Don’t tell them. Don’t describe — even when they ask you to. Instead, talk about how you might work together. When you talk about what you will do, bring it back to them and invite them to participate. When you inform them, do it in a way that shows you considered what matters to them or will be useful to them. Invite them to benefit from what you’ve said so that you can continue to interact with each other to make it happen. Treat all of the stakeholders with empathy. Show that you understand their circumstances and how this project will impact them. Explain what you considered and provide opportunities in the future for them to share their thoughts. Be someone they want to engage with instead of being merely part of their paperwork. Basically, all you need to do is have a conversation in writing. While they can’t respond when it would normally be their turn to talk, you can anticipate what they might say and continue writing to keep them engaged in the conversation. Don’t just tell a story about how great you are, tell a story that they are a part of. This is not the normal mindset people bring to proposal writing. That’s why there is so much bad proposal writing out there, and part of why most companies have low win rates. Ordinary proposal writing is bad proposal writing. We have all been conditioned by seeing millions of ads and TV commercials to think that what people say in commercials is how to get customers. Here's an example of advertising copywriting and why it doesn't work for proposals. What works in commercials is also bad proposal writing because the proposal evaluator is not passive and has a different set of expectations. Study what you see people posting on LinkedIn and what people engage with. Then decide who you want to be in writing.

Everyone contributes to proposals. When it's required of them. If they can make themselves available. But no one seems to own the outcome… Who owns the win? Even the proposal manager is often just producing what other people came up with and passing it along. So whose job is it to win? Everybody wants to win. At least that's what they say. But who has it as their top priority? You’d be surprised at how many companies have no one who has winning proposals as their primary responsibility and top priority. You can’t come in at the last minute and claim that winning is your highest priority. Last minute heroics is not the best way to win. Is it sales' job to win the proposal? See also: Roles The goal of finding all the leads possible is in conflict with getting sucked into a proposal. Yet winning requires developing an information advantage and getting it into the proposal. If you’re going to close the sale, you need sales' participation. Part of your sales force’s incentives should be based on winning. But the pursuit is just one of the ones in their portfolio. If they are incentivized exclusively on finding or qualifying leads, they may not have any interest in the proposal. In some companies they want their salespeople to spend all their time finding and qualifying leads and not on proposals. However, your win rate will suffer if you don't get the customer insights your sales people have into the proposal. Is it the proposal manager’s job to win? Proposal Managers increase the chances of winning based on the input they are given. But how can the proposal manager be responsible for winning when they don’t choose the pricing, determine what to offer, or interact with the customer? The proposal function should be at least partially responsible for increasing the average win rate, but they can’t have the job of winning a particular pursuit unless they have the authority to lead the pursuit. You can't be the one responsible for winning if you just produce what other people give you. Is it a team effort? To paraphrase what Google thinks is an old Polish proverb, a team is an animal with six or more legs and no brain. If no one has winning the proposal as their top priority, then even though everyone will talk about the importance of winning, no one will make it happen as if they owned it. A well-led team may be necessary for winning. But a well-led team requires a leader with the right priorities. What good does it do to have a team of people if no one has winning as their top priority and the authority to make it happen? Decisions, decisions… Who decides? Everything from your strategies to how people should resolve their priority conflicts to what words to use needs to be decided and will impact your win probability. That’s really why you need winning the proposal to be someone’s top priority. You need someone making decisions or pushing for the right decisions to be made based on what it will take to win. Everyone making their own decisions based on their own priorities will not reliably result in what it will take to win. Is winning the capture manager's job? If you have a capture manager, winning should be their job. But has the company made winning the proposal the capture manager’s top priority? Is it even the top priority of the company? Has the company given the capture manager authority over what to offer and how to price it? Has the capture manager received enough training to know how to define the offering, price it, and determine strategies based on what it will take to win? If you don’t have a capture manager, maybe you need one. But whether or not you do have a capture manager, you need someone whose job it is to win the proposal. A capture manager should be the person who decides what to offer, what the pricing strategies should be, and how to present the offering. They also identify the resources needed to win. A capture manager doesn’t have to do it all. They lead a team of specialists and contributors. But their highest priority is to win the pursuit. The capture manager receives a handoff from sales once the lead is qualified. They should participate in deciding whether the lead is worth pursuing, since you won’t get the best results by making someone responsible for capturing a pursuit they don’t think is valid. The capture manager takes the lead, figures out what it will take to win it, and makes that happen. They don’t settle for good enough or balance the pursuit against the rest of their workload. They are in it to win. If you have people you call capture managers who are distracted by other priorities, you are not trying hard enough to win. Making proposals important will not produce the highest win rate Telling people that winning is important may inspire them to work harder. Maybe. Everything is "important." But the winning proposal will not be the one that worked harder. It will be the one that did whatever it took to win. Making proposals important will lead to winning some of your proposals. This is a really nice way of saying it will only produce a low win rate. Doubling your win rate will double your revenue. How much is that worth? Is it important? Or is it vital? Being important is not the same as being the top priority. You may not be able to make every proposal everyone’s top priority. But every proposal should be someone’s top priority. Losing a single proposal that you should have won will cost you more than putting someone in charge of winning each and every proposal you choose to pursue and support them with the effort required. Put the minimum effort into it that it will take to win. But remember that one bit less and all the effort is wasted. Winning is profitable. Almost winning is a huge loss.

See also: Winning Each time you start writing without a plan for what you are going to write, I’m going to start with the points my writers are going to prove. Every time you try to figure out what to offer by writing about it, puts me several drafts ahead of you. Every time you start your proposal without input puts you another draft behind me. Every day one of your people misses a deadline is a day added to my schedule. Each time you start without customer insights puts my score ahead of yours. The more you cut your staff working on proposals, the more the drop in your win rate will boost mine and the increase in my revenue will enable me to hire more and better staff. While you hunt for RFPs to bid, I’ll nurture potential customer relationships. The less you understand your customer’s preferences, the more likely I am to win. The fewer the leads that you decide to not bid, the higher my win rate will be over yours, and the more focused my qualifications and efforts will become, making it harder for you to win. When you fail to improve your win rate, I’ll be improving mine. When you let your people figure it out on their own, I’ll help them make decisions and support them with guidance, better processes, resources, and institutional knowledge. Each time you hesitate over whether to bid or what to do, it will add an equivalent amount of time to my schedule. The more you treat proposals as a necessary evil, the more I’ll treat them as critical to my growth. The more you lower pursuit costs, the more I’ll focus on my pursuit return on investment. While you obsess over finding more leads and lose the majority of them, I’ll obsess over winning more of what I bid. While you lie to yourself about having an effective proposal process, I’ll actually implement one. While you brag about getting a customer meeting and claim it as progress, I’ll develop an information advantage and measure my progress against it. While you’ll aim for RFP compliance and maybe a little better, I’ll aim for the highest score and base my decision on what it will take to achieve it. When you claim to be experienced, I’ll demonstrate why my experience matters. When you claim to be the industry leader, I’ll prove I’m the customer’s best alternative. Every cost proposal you prepare without understanding the price to win, gives me a pricing advantage. Every time you talk about yourself, I’ll talk about what the customer needs to hear to reach their decision and how much better off they’ll be. Every day I do things to improve my win rate. While you stay in your comfort zone full of its compromises, I will practice disruptive marketing. I am willing to change. I embrace change. You are being left behind.

The secret to business success is not to find as many leads and submit as many proposals as possible. You will not become prosperous by producing lots of cheap, low win rate proposals. While you may catch a fish by randomly casting your line over and over, you will not feed a village that way. The solution is not to cast as many lines as you can. You need to become smarter about fishing and invest in your gear. Maybe buy a net and a boat. You need to put some effort into it. Fishing at random is a pleasant, lazy way to while away the time and just maybe, occasionally eat. But if you want to feed your village every day and grow the population, fishing at random will lead to starvation and failure. See also: ROI For a business, trying to do a lot of quick, easy proposals is a great way to spend yourself into a hole while looking like you’re working so hard! But the truth is you’re trying to put as little effort into it as possible. The difference between success and failure isn’t the number of proposals you do. It’s your win rate. Think of your win rate as how many fish you catch each trip fishing. That's what determines how many people in your village get to eat. It's not how many lines you cast. You can become smarter about how to improve your win rate. And it won’t take more effort than preparing a bunch of proposals that are destined to lose while hoping that some might win. A high win rate provides the growth needed for a company and all those in it to prosper. The idea that you’ll make more money if your proposal function costs less ignores the fact that the effectiveness of your proposal function determines how much money you’ll make. The proposal function is an investment that brings a return. You should only invest as much into it as will bring you the maximum return. But sometimes investing more is the path to achieving the best return. When your win rate is rising, proposals become very profitable. And investing more in profitable things maximizes your return. In fact, by increasing your win rate, proposals have the potential to be the most profitable activity in your company. Calculate how much a 10% improvement in your win rate will return without any more leads than you already have. If your win rate is low, either you have the wrong resources preparing your proposal, you’ve got the wrong approach to preparing your proposals, your offerings are not competitive, or you’ve under invested in the function. Your proposal function is inefficient or ineffective or both. Your future prosperity depends on fixing that. A small increase in your win rate will easily pay many times over what you might invest to achieve it. A small decrease in proposal cost that lowers your win rate can easily lower your revenue more than any theoretical “savings.” Treat the proposal function like an investment. Measure its performance like an investment. And don’t even think about proposal efficiency without thinking through its impact on proposal effectiveness. You can and should measure the return on your proposal investment. You can use your win rate as an indicator of whether your ROI is increasing or decreasing. People also focus on proposal efficiency because there are competing resource priorities. They might see their normal jobs as the priority instead of working on proposals. However, this ignores how proposals contribute to the ROI of the company and the growth that is the source of all opportunity within it. Every single piece of content on PropLIBRARY is related to improving your win rate. Every piece of content can help you maximize your ROI. Maximizing your win rate starts long before the RFP is released. A subscription to PropLIBRARY shows you what needs to happen during the pre-RFP pursuit to maximize your chances. And then it shows you how to turn that into the input needed to win the proposal. Along the way it shows you what to do to ensure your offering has a high win probability. But most importantly, it shows you how to systematize doing it all --- how to consistently bid with a high win probability so that your win rate continuously rises and your village can prosper.