Carl Dickson

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

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

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

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

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

monthly_2021_06/224827274_ProposalProofPointCheatSheet_pdf.1bd2323f3ac2542b5baa3d2a8e82a5a6

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

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

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

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.

monthly_2021_05/510091503_ProposalContentPlanningCheatSheet_pdf.619c59aa483472c85f1633d72604ae28

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. And less experienced writers tend to write to what they know and feel comfortable with, instead of what the customer needs to hear to reach a decision in your favor. No one does their best work by just jumping into proposal writing. Providing 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 provides 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. In practice, annotated outlines function more like reminders than as a blueprint for how to write the winning proposal. 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 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 that 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. We placed it at the core of the process, instead of focusing on reviews and fixing things on the back end. 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 with nothing to substantiate it. Instead of thinking of proposal development as a writing process, think of it as a design process. Design your proposal before you write it. An outline is not a design. It's a list of ingredients instead of a recipe. An annotated outline adds some helpful notes, but is also not a design. If you want your proposal to reflect everything you know about what it will take to win, design it to win with a full content plan and don't just leave it up to the writers to figure everything out.

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.