Carl Dickson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most people calculate proposal efficiency the wrong way. They calculate it based on how much effort they put into their proposals. This is based on the assumption that less effort always makes things more efficient. And it happens to be a wrong assumption. Efficiency is defined by maximizing productivity with the least amount of wasted effort. Measuring proposal efficiency See also: Improving Win Rates The productivity of proposal effort is best measured by the amount or percentage won. This means that the efficiency of proposal development is defined by the dollars won divided by the dollars expended to win them. Here’s the equation: Dollars won / dollars expended to win them Now, take the top number, the dollars won, and look at it as the dollars submitted multiplied by your win rate (Dollars submitted * win rate) / dollars expended to win the proposal If you don’t track the cost of your proposals, you can use the number of hours spent working on the proposal as a poxy, since nearly all of the cost of preparing a proposal is time. Which of these numbers will have the biggest impact on your efficiency? Spoiler alert: It’s the win rate. Let’s try an example: ($1,000,000 * .3) / 10,000 = $30 won for every dollar expended If you increase win rate to .4 you’ll get 40 dollars won for every dollar expended. You can achieve this without spending more on your proposals. You’d also get the same result by reducing cost to 7,500. But that requires a 25% reduction in cost. If you did every 4 person proposal with only 3 people, or if you did every 4 week proposal in 3 weeks, what would the impact be to proposal quality and your win rate? If you reduce cost but lower your win rate, you won’t get the same result. Here’s an example based on only a 10% reduction in win rate: ($1,000,000 * .27) / 7,500 = $36 won for every dollar expended That’s better than the first example, but it’s 15% less revenue than the example of ignoring proposal cost and increasing your win rate. It is usually better to increase win rate without spending more than you do than it is to risk lowering your win rate by reducing costs. It’s easier to increase win rate by working smarter than it is to maintain you win rate while working less. The volume of proposals submitted by a given number of staff is not a valid measure for proposal productivity or efficiency. Submitting more proposals at a lower win rate is not more productive. Definitions matter. But what about the real world? In the interest of simplicity, there are some things missing from this equation. For example, at a higher win rate, you need fewer leads to win the same amount of business. Pursuing fewer leads reduces costs. Pursuing fewer leads that lose increases profitability, as well as productivity. Pursuing fewer leads that lose increases efficiency dramatically. Another important consideration is that identifying, pursuing, and capturing leads can take a long time. Winning the leads you already have takes much less time. If you want quick revenue, instead of chasing opportunistic leads considering putting the effort into increasing your win rate for a faster payoff. Focusing on win rate means pursuing smarter instead of pursuing more. Your win rate also enables you to calculate the amount of wasted effort. Is it wasted effort to use elaborate proposal formatting that takes a lot of time to prepare? The way to determine that is to figure out how much that formatting impacts your win rate. Everything else is just opinion about presentation. If formatting impacts your win rate, then improving it will increase your proposal efficiency. If it doesn’t impact it, or if the impact is minimal, it will at best have a minimal impact on proposal efficiency, and you should be able to find many things that have a major impact to give priority to. If you want to increase efficiency by reducing wasted effort, don’t start by reusing proposal content. The reduction in win rate will wipe out any savings in effort. Instead, start by losing fewer proposals. Take the effort you’d put into create a reuse library and put it into increasing your win rate. This is another reason why it’s better to build your process around lead qualification and capture instead of maximizing lead discovery. If you define proposal efficiency as the time per proposal, you can end up winning less. But if you define proposal efficiency as the time spent achieving a certain amount of revenue, you will only become more efficient if you increase your win rate. We obsess on improving win rates. It's basically what every single article on PropLIBRARY is ultimately about. Our articles talk about the theory and foundation for preparing better proposals. Our premium subscriber-only content shows you what to do and makes it easier to achieve a better win rate.

What drives the efficiency of the proposal process is not what you think. It’s not how quickly you can crank out your proposals It’s not how much time you put into producing the document It’s not what causes a train wreck at the end of the proposal, or what can fix it It’s not how easily you can recycle your previous proposal content It’s not any of the things people complain about when working on proposals Losing efficiently is counter-productive. Putting effort into change in order to improve efficiency is counter-intuitive. But it has the biggest payoff, by far, because it will increase you win rate instead of lowering it. Doing proposals efficiently and effectively requires understanding what consumes the most effort See also: Faster Proposal formatting takes a tiny amount of time compared to everything else that needs to be done to complete a proposal. While you might be able to make formatting more efficient, the effort saved will be small, the cost saved will be hardly noticeable, and more importantly it will not likely increase your win rate or result in more revenue. The ROI could even be negative if you spend money to achieve the “savings.” Proposal writing takes significant time. And while it can be reduced, it’s best achieved through planning and not through win rate destroying content reuse. it’s also not the largest source of wasted time. The largest source of wasted time in proposal development is the time spent rewriting. And talking in circles. Rewriting happens when you create a draft, don’t like it, and keep rewriting it hoping to trip over the proposal you want before the deadline. It is the number one cause of proposals using up all the time available. And it is unnecessary. Talking in circles happens when you don’t have a plan and you keep talking around what should go into the proposal. It often occurs in tandem with rewriting, with each draft cycle bringing up the same exact topics and the same words triggering a new draft cycle. People focus on formatting and content reuse because it's easy to see how to make them more efficient. They often ignore the bigger problem of eliminating rewriting because they simply don't know how to do that. As a result, they often spend money to reduce the smallest slices of the pie instead of putting effort into cutting the big pieces by half. If you want to have a material impact on your proposal costs, make proposals easier, and do it while also increasing your win rate, eliminating rewriting is the challenge you need to overcome. And you won’t overcome it by trying to do less. If you reduce proposal effort in a way that lowers your win rate, you will be reducing your ROI instead of increasing it. How to make proposals more efficient To overcome this challenge you must try to do things once. In order to do things once: You need to start with an information advantage. If you don’t start the proposal with the right inputs so you can articulate what it will take to win, you will not discover it by writing and rewriting. Making it up as you go along leads to excess draft cycles that are doomed from the start. Making it up as you go along also reduces win rate by watering down your response as you settle for “good enough.” Starting with the right inputs may require some investment before the proposal starts. It certainly requires investing in thinking through the proposal before you make the big investment of writing it. You need an approach to planning your proposal content before writing it. This will have more impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of your efforts than anything else you do. This is because it is the best tool you’ve got to reduce draft cycles. It’s also your best tool for driving your win strategies onto paper, leading to increases in your win rate. You need the right approach to quality assurance. How do you define and measure proposal quality? If you don’t do either one, it will lead to excess draft cycles that may never end because there is no definition for what the end state should be. If writers don’t know what the reviewers will be looking for, it will lead to unnecessary draft cycles when they are surprised and sent in a new direction. Defining quality and having written quality criteria gives your writers a rubric that reduces draft cycles. Just having someone read a draft of your proposal and tell you if they think it’s any good is not enough to provide quality assurance. A subscription to PropLIBRARY gives you solutions for the challenges you face in proposal development. A subscription to PropLIBRARY addresses each of the recommendations in this article. It identifies the inputs you need to be prepared to plan your proposal. It shows you how to plan the content in way that makes writing quicker and easier. Most importantly, PropLIBRARY shows you how to maximize ROI by achieving a higher win rate. Getting your proposal right on the very first draft Doing things once means knowing you’re doing the right thing in each step before you start. Reviews become an exercise in confirming that you got it right instead of random subjective commenting. Getting your proposal right on the first draft means your writers must know what they must accomplish before they start. Getting your proposal right on the first draft does not mean that there won’t be edits to be made. It means that you will have the right offering presented with the right strategies and no topics unaccounted for. The best way to achieve proposal efficiency is not by emulating an assembly line. The best way to achieve proposal efficiency is to stop thinking through your proposal by writing and rewriting until you’ve figured it out. Think first. Then write.

We published 98 new content items last year. But it's not the quantity that counts, it's the quality. We published some of the most useful articles ever this year. We've split them into two groups, one for everyone and one just for subscribers. Just take a look and think about how they can help improve your win rate: 12 fundamental problems you have to solve to prepare great proposals The best example of bad proposal writing I've ever seen 14 examples of proposal writing that show how to exceed RFP compliance in ways that don’t cost a dime Why the Executive Summary is your real proposal 18 lies that companies tell in their proposals 9 examples of how your proposal should change even though the offering remains the same What does it really mean to be RFP compliant in a proposal? Proposal director vs proposal manager vs proposal coordinator vs proposal writer Proposal templates for any industry and subject matter 11 ways that your proposals sound the same as everyone else's proposal Top 10 premium content items published in 2020 The top picks from the premium content items we published for PropLIBRARY subscribers go beyond the theory and advice provided in the articles above and show how to put our recommendations to work. How to wire an RFP in your favor based on your staffing 23 examples of how to ghost the competition in your proposals 7 ways to fill your pipeline using a divide and conquer strategy A blueprint for proposal writing that explains how to approach writing proposal paragraphs Proposal paragraph template visual Inspiration for writing proposal themes How creating the Basis of Estimate first can improve proposal writing 58 proposal reference library topic recommendations 9 ways to help eliminate false hits when searching for leads Techniques for using tables to deal with tight proposal page limits We have big plans for 2021! They include the biggest upgrades to PropLIBRARY and MustWin Now we've ever conceived of. The changes will be dramatic and increase the ease of use and utility substantially. I can't wait until I can share what's in the works. Can you guess what it is? Enjoy the links above. If you've read this far, here's a parting gift. If you can guess the most popular article of all time on PropLIBRARY, you'll get a free subscription or a free renewal. One guess per person. Click the green button below to submit your guess.

Why do companies only have one proposal process? Planning the activity is not the same as planning the content of the proposal. The activities that go into the proposal process include things like: See also: Content Planning Box A kickoff meeting Building a compliance matrix Proposal writing Proposal reviews Final production Etc. You could claim that proposal content planning should be a step between the outline and the start of proposal writing, but while that is sometimes claimed, it is rarely achieved. It might have something to do with it being more than just a step. You could claim that your review process is how you assess your proposal content plan. But if there is no content plan to review, that’s a weak claim. Reviewing the document content or a draft is not the same as having a plan for what that content will be and assessing that plan before you write it. The review process is the heart of the proposal process. But it is merely the conclusion of creating a Proposal Content Plan. What makes having a Proposal Content Plan so important? Planning your proposal content is a combination of: Gathering your knowledge about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment Figuring out what to offer and how to differentiate and position it against all these topics Determining your strategies for winning Discovering what it will take to win Determining not just what to say, but how to present it Articulating it all as guidance for writers Determining how to meet the customer’s expectations Allocating it to the document and tailoring it to fit Etc. These are predominantly conceptual, non-sequential, non-tangible, but absolutely vital. They are way too important to assume that people will just do them, without guidance or validation. And it is a bit silly to assume that people can just start writing a proposal without doing them. You may have a proposal process, but you also need a process for planning the content of your proposals. Proposal priorities matter If you were going to skip one, it would be safer to skip the process than it would be to skip planning the content of your proposals. And if your proposal content plan doesn’t address all of the bullets above, you don’t have a content plan. You may have an outline. But an outline is not a plan for winning the proposal. A proposal process is not a plan for winning a proposal. It is a plan for completing a proposal. Winning is determined by the content. A Proposal Content Plan is what you do to prepare to win the proposal. Then what is proposal management? Proposal management is the techniques you use to implement the proposal process. It includes things like: Stakeholder engagement and expectation management Proposal scheduling Proposal assignment and progress tracking Coordination and communication Proposal risk mitigation and issue resolution Production across the proposal lifecycle Herding cats But if your proposal process does not address Proposal Content Planning, then your proposal management approach is about producing a document and not winning it. How do you maximize your proposal return on investment (ROI)? Planning the content of your proposals makes writing your proposals easier. What’s hard is figuring out how to plan the content and herding the cats to get there. However, a tiny increase in your proposal win rate makes that effort insanely profitable. So much so, that your company needs to justify NOT doing it, and not the other way around. Look at the lists above. What do you think the win rate will be if you don’t do even one of the bullets for proposal content planning? If your approach is to crank proposals out and hope that some of them win, you need a proposal process and maybe someone to lead the production effort. If your approach is to crank proposals out and do a good job of it, you need a proposal process and a proposal manager. However, good is usually not enough to be number one. Your win rate will suffer. If your approach to proposal development is to seek the maximum ROI, you’ll need a proposal process, an approach to Proposal Content Planning that incorporates what it will take to win into the document in a way that can be validated after the document is written, and a proposal manager or pursuit strategist who spends as much time obsessing over how to guide people to prepare the right content as gets spent obsessing over the production after it is written. How to solve the challenges holding down your win rate. PropLIBRARY premium content addresses the entire proposal process, shows you how to do successful proposal content planning, and can help you improve your proposal management techniques. A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks the premium content you need to implement our recommendations and increase your ROI.

A great way to fill your pipeline is through divide and conquer. It's easier to eat the pie one slice at a time. Don't think of the total number of leads you need to find to hit your numbers. Instead, think of how many leads you need in each slice. Then strategically consider how big each slice should be. Is one dominant? Should you avoid having all of your eggs in one basket? Which ones are required to maintain your revenue, and which are the targets for growth? Here are some ideas for how to divide your pipeline and make filling it easier: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline New customers. A new customer that you have not done business with before has the largest potential long-term value. And costs the most to gain. New customer leads should be part of your investment strategy. Targeted relationship marketing is the best way to find and develop new customers, but it requires time, patience, and investment. It can also generate the highest return on investment. But it will not be the only way you divide your pipeline. Existing customers. Once you “have your foot in the door” with a project for the customer, you can look for other ways to serve them. Consider both vertical (similar specialization or other buyers in the same agency) and horizontal (other types of work or other agencies with similar needs) strategies. If you have a happy customer, make sure they understand the full range of your capabilities. Organic growth. Don’t overlook whether your existing customer projects can be expanded. It might require modifying your contract and the customer may need additional funding. But this often takes far less effort than a new procurement to get those same services. Organic growth alone will usually not hit the big numbers you need, but it can be a nice boost. Recompetes. Recompetes are a wonderful hybrid. You can target them years in advance. They should never be surprises that catch you unprepared. You can selectively and efficiently conduct relationship marketing by targeting recompetes. But you are limited to business that’s already out there, known by your competitors, and an incumbent might (but maybe not) have the advantage. Recompetes are usually a big slice of the pipeline pie. Prime contracting. The price for controlling your own destiny is finding and winning your own customers. The prime contractor gets to claim the past performance, gets the most facetime with the customer, and gets to decide how workshare gets allocated. But a prime contractor has to invest more in its pursuits. A lot more. Subcontracting. Not being responsible for the proposal is great. But if the prime doesn’t absolutely need you, you may not get what you expect. Leverage is required for success. Unique product providers with something needed by an integrator or service provider sometimes choose this route and successfully avoid a lot of overhead. It’s a lot harder for a service provider to be irreplaceable. Some amount of subcontracting, especially when playing the small business teaming with large business game, can be part of the mix. Large companies seek small businesses to round out their subcontracting goals and get a piece of set-aside contracts. Small companies seek large companies to enhance their qualifications and resources, giving up part of the potential revenue to increase their probability of winning. But outside of construction and products it’s rare to see companies only do subcontracting. Public vs private sector. Sometimes public sector companies think they have something they can sell in the private sector. And sometimes private sector companies covet big juicy government contracts. But very few companies are good at both. Most attempts are disasters. The marketing, accounting, finance, sales cycle, organization, policies, procedures, regulations, and culture are very different. It’s a lot like having a split personality. Be skeptical of filling your pipeline by reaching across the public/private sector fence. If you want to go there, consider investing in a subsidiary that will be a company with the right attributes to do business on the other side of that fence, but that can share resources with the parent. Products vs services. If you sell products, services can be a natural add-on. If you sell services, they can sometimes be productized. Adding products or services can help you with organic growth. But sometimes it’s really more of a marketing and positioning strategy than a new strategic marketing where you can fill your pipeline. Ultimately, what and how your customers want to do things will determine whether you can do this successfully more so than the value proposition. But it's worth considering as a way to add another slice of pie. Contract vehicles. Adding contract vehicles won’t bring you business. They make it easier to close the sales you originate through relationship marketing and the risky game of solicitation announcement prospecting. Some contract vehicles lend themselves more to opportunistic bidding more than others. But opportunistic bidding as a strategy is a great way to destroy your company’s future potential. Assigning target numbers to new contract vehicles is usually a guessing game. Lots of other things can potentially impact your pipeline, but may not be strategies for filling your pipeline. For example, change of any kind such as technology, regulatory changes, reorganizations, and other transitions can create the need for procurements. But jumping on a trend is not the same thing as having a sustainable approach to filling your pipeline. But maybe your pipeline is not the problem. Maybe it’s your win rate. Double your win rate and you can hit your numbers with half as many leads. Improve your win rate by a more realistic 20% and you need to find 20% fewer opportunities to bid to achieve the same revenue. This is mathematically the same as finding a way to fill 20% of your pipeline. You shouldn’t be thinking about filling your pipeline without also thinking about your win rate. Investing in one without considering the other will not produce the best ROI. Regardless of which approaches work best for your company to fill its pipeline, make sure you are measuring your win rate, cost of sales, and ROI for each approach separately. Some approaches to filling your pipeline will have a better ROI than others. Your win rate in each slice of the pie is going to be different. And those difference matter strategically.

Everyone says they have a proposal process. But all of them have problems. In many ways, the proposal process is something that is in continual development. It’s not something you write down and are done with. But what should concern you is that most of the hundreds of proposal process implementations I have seen have critical flaws. I’m not talking about the mistakes you already know not to make in creating a proposal. I’m talking about mistakes in how you’ve constructed your proposal process. These are flaws that will cause them to plateau and be unable to reach a higher win rate. Not being able to improve your win rate limits the ROI the proposal function can offer to your company. The difference between a 30% win rate and a 40% win rate is a 25% compounded rate of growth --- without any more leads than what you currently have. If you don’t know what that means, run it by your finance department and ask them to show you how those numbers would impact your company. You don’t want mistakes in your process getting in the way of that kind of growth. You want to be leading the charge to make the changes that will deliver that kind of growth. Don’t: See also: Proposal Management Build your proposal process around your schedule. It seems like working from the calendar and the amount of time you have might be a good place to start, but it is misleading. Schedule drives how you implement your process. It should not drive how you design the process itself. The proposal process is based on what it will take to win. And that really doesn’t change whether you have less than a week or more than a month to prepare your proposal. Certainly, time and resources change. But what you need to accomplish remains the same. Define roles based on the people you have. What it will take to win remains the same whether you are on your own, working with two other people, or have a team with dozens of people or more. The things that need to be done remain the same. You just do them with more or less formality, skip more or less of them, and do them in more or less detail. Define your roles based on what it will take to win and then allocate that to the resources you have. It will become clear pretty quick whether you’ll be doing more or less. But that clarity is valuable feedback. Build your proposal around steps instead of goals. Steps often break in practice. But the goals should remain the same. The steps you take to accomplish your goals can be flexible. Goals inform the steps and give people more insight regarding what to do than a step like “Complete your proposal writing assignment(s).” The goal is not to write. The goal is to write something that fulfills your proposal quality criteria. Fail to define quality. If you don’t define proposal quality in writing, you leave it to people’s individual opinions and will get inconsistent outcomes and ineffective reviews. Fail to start by assessing your input. If you don’t assess the input you have to work with, you won’t ever get any input. Not only that, but instead of thinking about what you have and don’t have, people will just start making things up to fill the gaps. This tends to degrade into inconsistent, unplanned, uncoordinated proposals that have lots of unsubstantiated claims and are written with as little substance as possible. Build your proposal process around more than one draft. A proposal process based on draft cycles will degrade into a writing without creating a content plan or trying to discover what the proposal should be by writing and re-writing. Either way, it will not maximize your win rate. Make your proposal process up as you go along. If you identify phases, claim you have a process, and then make it up as you go along trying to be relatively consistent each time, you do not have a process. You have a way of doing things. If no one else can implement the process, then you have no process. Start from boilerplate. If you don’t know the win strategies, the points you are trying to make, and how you want to position things, you are even ready to consider boilerplate. If you start by loading up the proposal with recycled content, instead of thinking through what it will take to win, you might get a proposal that’s good enough to submit. Good enough to submit may be enough to look like you’re doing your job, but it is not competitive and is a great way to ruin your win rate. Fail to articulate what it will take to win before you start writing. You can’t prove it if you don’t know what it is. If you don’t start from being able to articulate your strategies, then you risk writing and re-writing and never finding them before you run out of time. Proposals that start this way tend to end up literally pointless. You don’t want a proposal that is a collection of beneficial sounding platitudes wrapped around statements that the company will do what it says in the RFP. You don’t just want a process that creates a proposal. You want a process that discovers what it will take to win and then creates a proposal based on it. Focus on abstract concepts like themes instead of tangible realities like differentiators. Themes are good. Usually. If they don’t degrade into beneficial sounding platitudes that do nothing to help you win. This is especially true when you are working with proposal contributors who don’t understand how to win. Differentiators are easier to understand and assess. Push for differentiators instead of settling for the same themes everyone else uses. Ignore scalability. Since what you need to do to win is the same for a large proposal and a small proposal, a short proposal and a long proposal, you need a process that scales. You don’t need a different process for each. Since what changes is the availability of resources and time, create a process that enables each activity to be done with different levels of resources and effort while working towards the same goals. Put the proposal manager in charge of reviews. You might need a refresher on the difference between quality control and quality assurance. A proposal manager can provide quality control. But a manager can’t provide quality assurance for their own projects. If you want quality assurance, a proposal manager shouldn’t be leading, training, conducting, or participating in the proposal reviews. Quality assurance requires a perspective outside the proposal effort, that can consider whether the goals for the proposal at that stage have been accomplished without considering the compromises it took to get there. Your company needs quality assurance in the proposal process because it needs to validate that the proposal is what the company wants it to be. Your long-term win rate depends on it. Give the proposal manager writing assignments. If a proposal manager is writing, that proposal manager is not managing. Can they do a little of both? Definitely. Do you really want only a little bit of your proposals to be managed? Make excuses for not following your own process. If on every proposal you do not follow the process as it is written, you have the wrong process. Or more accurately, you do not have a process. What you defined as the process has not been implemented. Instead you are making it up as you go along and making excuses at the expense of your win rate. When you catch yourself explaining why this proposal requires a different approach and you’re doing it on every proposal, you need to throw out your process and start over. It means your process is based on the wrong assumptions. Fail to build the foundation for tomorrow. You’ve got to start somewhere. No company, department, or proposal ever has the resources it needs. But if you build your process around what you’ve got to work with, it will hold you back. It won’t adapt as your organization grows. Don’t build your process around the people and resources you have. Build it around what it will take to win and allocate the effort to accomplish that to what you have to work with. That way, as things change, you can reallocate resources, add specialists, and drop them into an existing structure. It also provides valuable feedback regarding where adding resources can improve your win rate. Change your process each time you hire someone. If you’re changing your process with each new hire, that’s a sign that your process was built around the people you had instead of what it will take to win. It’s also a sign that every proposal process you’ve had was merely a personal way of doing things. Ignore performance measurement. Be data driven. Otherwise you’re either making assumptions or just guessing, while claiming things are based on your “experience.” Fail to speak in the language of ROI. Why do you need more resources? Why should more effort be put into delivering the input you need at the start of a proposal? Is your review process as effective as it could be? Is it worth planning before you write? Learn not only to quantity these things, but how to explain their contribution to maximizing return on investment (ROI). Companies invest in things that generate the largest return. The proposal function is potentially one of the largest contributors to ROI in your company. But you have to prove that. If you can’t speak the language of ROI, no one is going to listen. Trust people. A process that trusts people to do things correctly is a bad process. Just telling people what to do is not a process. A process should support people. It should wrap them in guidance, get them what they need to be successful, make it easier to achieve their goals by following the process than by going rogue, check their work, and make it impossible to fail. By the way, what to do to correct each and every one of these mistakes can be found on PropLIBRARY and in the MustWin Process. How many of these mistakes does your company make? I’ve seen behind the curtains at how proposals are done at a few hundred companies. Every one made at least one of them. Most made several. And yes, some companies make all of them. Every single one is a chance to improve your win rate and maximize your ROI. Choose the mistakes you will make. They may be necessary today, but they come with a price. If it impacts your win rate, that price could be orders of magnitude greater than what it would have taken to correct.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. This is mine. Proposals are more mechanical than art. They are more scientific. They are quantifiable. They are competitive. They are capitalistic. And they are art. There is a depth to doing proposals that most people don't understand and it holds them back. See also: Great Proposals But the art in proposals is not where most people expect to find it. The art is not in the construction, the presentation, or the style of the words. The art is in the solution. And not just in the solution that you offer to the customer. When you reconcile what you intend to offer with the evaluation criteria and gain insight into how to be the best among all who would make the attempt, and then somehow combine all that into a vision that is compelling, you turn the ordinary into a great work of art. The art in proposals reflects the beautiful nature of growth. For growth is the source of all opportunity, and without it everything withers. Growth is personal, but we are at our best as humans when we grow together. For companies that depend on winning business through proposals, proposals are so much more than a necessary step toward gaining new business. Proposals are an expression of how you develop as a team and as a company, how you bring value to your customers, and how we grow as individuals. Proposals are a dynamic form of art that brings forth the beauty of growth. The art in proposals is in the interpretation. How should the requirements be interpreted? What is our relationship to them? What could they add up to? What could we become? What insights are required? What do the words in the RFP mean? What do they imply in terms of expectations? How should the potential future be envisioned in order to create a proposal that makes the world better? Proposals are significant works of art. The art in proposals is in the meaning. Not the literal meaning of the words, but the meaning that the proposal brings to those who work on it, the meaning it brings to those who work on the project that results from it, the meaning it brings to the customer, and the meaning it brings to the customer's stakeholders. Invisible and behind the scenes, proposals bring immense meaning to the entire world. The beauty of the words is not in their grammar or even poetry. It is in their meaning. Proposals are a intentional act to discover what matters and turn that meaning into impact. And that is more art than art. And yet everyone hates doing proposals. There is art even in that. Proposal specialists are sometimes treated like an expensive, undesired artist. There is art in the struggle. To be a proposal artist does not mean to practice something intangible, imprecise, or without substance. To be a proposal artist means to bring meaning and growth to the world, through deliberate acts of interpretation and brilliant insight that no one else is willing or able to provide, that bring together people who need each other. Be a proposal artist and be proud of it. Of course it is also art produced under a deadline. So sometimes it might be art like a Bob Ross painting. But you can be proud of that, too.

Introduction You can't wire an RFP. But you can make recommendations that result in changes to an RFP that work in your favor. The customer is responsible for determining whether those recommendations meet their needs. Here are some recommendations you might consider making. Every one of the topics below has two perspectives that amount to the "haves" and "have nots." For simplicity and brevity, the items below are written from the perspective of the "haves." If on any particular bid you are one of the "have nots" simply reverse the recommendations. For service contracts, many of the RFP requirements focus on staffing. Here are some areas of staffing in which you might want to consider making RFP recommendations. Key personnel. The more positions you provide names for and are obligated to deliver, the harder it will be. If you have the staff to name, you have the advantage. A clever twist on this is the RFP that permits the bidder to decide how many people should be key combined with evaluation criteria that reward having sufficient key personnel to ensure a lack of disruption of services or ability to meet the project size, scope, and complexity or capacity requirements. Turnover. Most turnover reporting is a lie. Companies play on subjective distinctions like “voluntary” and “involuntary” turnover. However, reporting the total positions on the projects cited as past performance and the total number of people who have filled them or have billed to the project in any form over its life make it harder to lie. It also makes it harder to bid. But if you have exceptionally low turnover it can make your competitors look bad if your customer agrees that turnover is important to them and that this is a better way to report it. Staff years of experience. Whatever experience the staff you intend to propose have is what you want the requirement to be. You don’t want anyone with less to be able to bid. Any requirement for more is just restricting competition and raising costs. The same generally applies to degrees, certifications, and other qualification requirements. Use the exact same approach for corporate years of experience. Data reporting. The more data you have to supply about the staff you are proposing, the more challenging it is to write the proposal. Especially when you don’t have the staff. So years, numbers, skills, etc. broken by SOW requirement or other category can show a competitor’s lack of coverage. Identifying staff provided by subcontractors. If your competitors will be a small business prime dwarfed by a large company subcontractor, then having them identify the employer of the staff provided will show this to the customer. If the customer is concerned that the small business prime is not really going to be in charge, then they might be receptive to a requirement like this. Combine it with evaluation criteria that require the prime to explain how they will manage subcontractor staff, or an evaluation of whether the staffing presented reflects the roles of the companies supporting the bid. Training. If your staff have specialized training or your company has a training program, then a requirement for staff training is to your advantage. You can compound this with requirements to have training during onboarding or prior to start and for ongoing training. Combine it with an evaluation of the extensiveness of this training and of the curriculum coverage. It can be particularly troublesome for your competitors to write curriculum descriptions for training related to the customer’s legacy systems. Legacy systems. If you have experience with the legacy systems, make sure the RFP requires all the acronyms. And integration plans, architectures, technology transition plans, data flow analysis, etc. that would require a competitor to demonstrate that they know internal details about the legacy systems that they can’t possibly know. Depth and breadth of staffing. Does the project require the contractor to have backup staff, staffing pools, or lots of similar staff in order to provide skills coverage, meet peaks and valleys, etc.? Or does the project require a lot of staff in different areas? Or both. Each is a different challenge for your competitors and can be difficult to demonstrate. Staff transition. Recruiting, certification/accreditation, and onboarding within the transition period can be high-risk activities. Companies often rely on retaining incumbent staff. A requirement that a competitor demonstrate their ability to staff the project without using incumbent staff, especially if they have to name names, can be challenging. Another option would be to require a recruiting plan in the event that incumbent staff are not retained. Market assessments that show how the size of the labor market and pay rates are assessed for recruiting risk can also be quite challenging to create. Also, requiring the transition schedule to show the timing of staff onboarding related to transition activities with an evaluation criteria that take into consideration the risk of staff not being ready on time and how it would impact the transition is very difficult to address. Teaming agreements. A requirement to cite any workshare or staffing obligations can put the competition on the spot. Combine this with evaluation criteria that assess whether these obligations introduce risk of disruption or conflict with the proposed approaches. Double counting staffing during evaluation. Staffing can be addressed as a separate evaluation criterion. The qualifications or ability of staff to perform can also be evaluated as a technical subfactor. And the staffing transition, recruiting, onboarding, training, allocation, teaming, and more can all be evaluated as management subfactors. Resumes can be evaluated separately. Experience of staffing can be evaluated in multiple places. When staffing is effectively evaluated in multiple subfactors, it makes it difficult to score highly when you don’t have the staff, and it’s hard to make up a lower staffing score with a high score somewhere else. If you have the staff, these will give you some ideas for requirements to recommend to the customer. If you don’t have the staff, these will give you some ideas for requirements to recommend against or counter requirements to recommend to the customer. If you are the customer, set your priorities according to your needs and realize that all those reasonable sounding recommendations have an agenda behind them.

A lot of companies make the mistake of treating a customer request for information as an opportunity to start selling them and end up sending them a mini-proposal. This is not the best way to position your company when the customer issues a request for information or makes a sources sought announcement. 5 things you should NOT do in your RFI or sources sought response See also: Pre-RFP Pursuit Sell. It’s the wrong time. Selling at the wrong time makes you look pushy and out of touch. Don’t be that kind of salesperson. Brag. Don’t be the best, state-of-the-art, unique, recognized, or even special. If you asked someone for some information to help you do something and they started bragging and talking about themselves, what would you think of them? Give away the store. Don't give away your differentiators, or anything else you don’t want to become part of the published requirements. Don’t give your advantages to your competition. Save them for the proposal. Only discuss the things you’d like to see in the RFP. Describe your approaches or how you will fulfill their requirements. Focus on what the requirements should be. Don’t focus on proposing your solution to meeting them. Be happy to respond to a future RFP or send them a proposal. Of course you'll be happy to get a contract. Instead of saying that, be happy to solve the challenges and work with them to meet their objectives. 7 things you SHOULD do in your RFI or sources sought response Follow the instructions. They provide clues regarding what the customer is trying to do. Affirmatively state your intent to bid. They want to know who might respond if they release an RFP. Describe your capabilities and the results you have achieved. They want to know if you are relevant to their needs. Describe your qualifications. They want to know if you can credibly bid. Show that you have the resources, capacity, depth, and breadth. They want to know if you can meet their needs. Assess the potential challenges and risks. Offer some insight into things that could cause problems for the customer, and show that you can help them address those issues without giving away your secrets before the proposal. Help the customer improve the RFP. The only thing harder to write than a proposal is an RFP. Make sure you explain your recommendations. Examples of recommendations you can make about the RFP to help the customer while gaining a competitive advantage... PropLIBRARY Subscribers get our specific recommendations that can help you influence the RFP. Here's an example of the recommendations you can make to wire an RFP in your favor based on staffing. 10 questions you can build your RFI and sources sought responses around How can you introduce yourself as a company that will solve the customer’s problem, fulfill their needs, improve their ability to meet their objectives, or deliver the results they are looking for? What details has the customer requested? Are those details part of your story or a side note? Can you meet the requirements as currently stated? What can you suggest to change or improve the requirements? Is there any information you can provide, without giving away your secrets, that will help the customer move their solicitation forward or achieve more successful outcomes? Do you want to recommend that the solicitation be set aside for a particular type of business? Is there a contract vehicle you’d like to recommend they use? Are there any recommendations you can make regarding the solicitation that would give you a competitive advantage if the customer accepted them? Will you need a teaming partner or subcontractors to respond? Is there information about them or the project that you would like to see included in the future RFP? Remember that they released the sources sought notice as a step toward figuring out how to get what they need. They have a process they must follow. They released the sources sought notice because they need to complete that process. They don’t want your proposal. Yet. No matter how great your response to the sources sought notice is, you are not going to get the business. Yet. No matter how great an impression you make, it’s not going to matter much. The most you can hope for is to convince the customer to make some positive changes to the future RFP. If you have issues, like needing to use past performance as a subcontractor or from a private sector contract, now is the time to recommend that the customer make it acceptable in the RFP and not penalize it by giving it a neutral rating. Remember that you are positioning ahead of submitting a proposal in the future. Whether you are qualified and whether your offering is acceptable will be determined by their evaluation of your proposal. But it would be nice io have them recognize your company as one that was insightful and helpful to them getting to that point.

The proposal manager role at one company can be very different from the role of a proposal manager at another company. This is often because the organization leaves it ambiguous. Position descriptions are often contradictory or too long to be feasible. The result is that sometimes the role is frequently defined by force of will of the person in it, sometimes by necessity, and sometimes by the organization’s culture. The differences end up being significant. Here are 9 factors that drive those differences. They can produce very different proposal managers. And that is neither good or bad. The real question is what kind of proposal manager is a match for a given company and proposal effort? A company can use them to determine the kind of proposal manager it would like to have. And proposal specialists can use them to determine the kind of proposal manager they would like to be. See also: Proposal Management Ownership. Who owns the proposal? Is it the executive sponsor, capture manager, project manager, sales, or the proposal manager? Who is responsible for funding and staffing it? Or owns the result after submission? Who is responsible for that result? Style. What should the management style of the proposal manager be? Are they a facilitator who builds consensus and creates the proposal through collaboration, a middle manager with no real authority, an actual manager with the authority to enforce, a process guide helping people who are not proposal specialists do a better job, or a teacher introducing a team to the world of proposals? Involvement. The majority of what impacts win and loss often occurs before the proposal even starts. Will the proposal manager be involved before RFP release, or will they start after RFP release? How does that impact what the role really is, and what it can rationally be responsible for? Outcomes. What outcomes must the role achieve? Is it RFP compliance, making the competitive range or any downselection, winning, or improving the company's win rate over time? Keep in mind that if you want a proposal manager to be responsible for winning, you have to give them authority over strategies, budgets, resource allocation, pricing, and the offering. These things have a greater impact on win or loss than the proposal manager does! If you scale the responsibilities back to mere RFP compliance, then who will drive the win? And if the proposal manager is responsible for RFP compliance or making the competitive range, then what happens when the offering or something else is flawed? Be very careful in how you allocate responsibility for the outcome of proposals. It affects behavior and can lead to CYA behavior that’s counter-productive. Deliverables. What deliverables do you require from your proposal manager? Focus on the minimum, because some things are merely increments toward a deliverable and can be considered optional, while some are firm requirements for every proposal. A compliance matrix and/or outline? The proposal content plan? The schedule, assignments, and other process artifacts? Questions to submit to the customer? Quality assurance checklists or criteria? Feedback forms? A list of themes or win strategies? An offering design? Pricing? On time submission of the proposal? Others? Management activities. Scheduling, facilitating, or leading kickoff and other meetings? Progress measurement? Stakeholder involvement? Staffing? Supervision? Resource allocation? Others? Quality assurance. What is the role of proposal management in quality assurance? Do they schedule it, facilitate it, participate in it, or lead it? Or are they responsible for the outcome of reviews? Who is responsible for the quality of the review itself --- what if the review is overly subjective or otherwise ineffective? Who decides how many reviews to have or when to cancel them? Should the same person be responsible for quality control and quality assurance? These questions are rarely asked related to proposal, and yet they have a large impact on your win rate. Writing. Who is responsible for writing the content? If the proposal manager participates, then while they are writing, they are not managing. What is your priority? Infrastructure. Is the proposal manager responsible for developing all of the tools, reuse libraries, budgeting procedures and allocation, staff oversight, and production in addition to managing and everything else? What is rationally achievable? What are you willing to tolerate not getting done? Plus 6 tips: Proposal development is a team sport. There are far more people involved, and responsible, than you realize. Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it. And it may come with unintended consequences. Responsibility requires a certain amount of authority. If someone has no authority over something, what are they really responsible for? Customers do inconsistent, wacky things and proposals have to adapt. This can change the rules, and often does. Start from a strategic perspective and not from the staff you currently have. How do you want your organization to go about winning what it pursues? The difference between small and large proposals is the number of people involved. If you want to be prepared for going after large wins, prepare for working with a lot of people.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Nobody has found a way to make working remotely be like working colocated. I recommend that you don't even try. Treat it as an opportunity to reengineer the way you do things. You’re probably overdue anyway. This is a good time to think about what people need to complete their proposal goals. It’s not just about incorporating some new tools. Note, I did not say what people need to complete their assignments. Since you can’t just make a little change and get it right, you should start from the big picture. What information do people need? Where will they get it? How will that information be formatted and delivered? What communications need to happen along the way? Then figure out ways to make these things happen when people can’t gather in a room together, talk around the water cooler, or otherwise colocate. To be effective, you’ll need some tools, some conventions, new ways to collaborate, and some process changes. There are an overwhelming number of options and very few best practices, even though people have their preferences. It’s not about the tools, even though they play a role See also: Proposal Management I’m tool agnostic. I’ll use whatever a company a has available and make it win. I have my preferences, but I don’t force my preferences on other people. This article is no different. I’d prefer to focus on what needs to be done than get into a [deleted] contest over whether Slack, Teams, Zoom, Gotomeeting, Webex, Microsoft, or Google is the better toolset for the job. If there was one tool to rule them all I’d let you know. There isn’t. Instead, there are many ways to do the same things, and just as many tradeoffs. Let your own preferences, or your IT department’s preferences, guide you. The big challenge to keep in mind The biggest challenge is keeping people from feeling isolated and making sure information gets to where it needs to be. When working remotely it’s a lot easier to overlook things and have that impact people’s work (or lack thereof) in a way that hurts the proposal effort. You don’t want problems to fester or people sitting around under-utilized against a deadline. Instead of getting everyone in a room or creating a step-by-step process, try thinking about creating an environment where everyone is remote but no one is isolated. Instead of looking for tools to solve this problem, try getting involved. Old habits die hard For me, it’s a big problem that there are no whiteboards or good ways to share them remotely. I’ve been tempted to set up a whiteboard in my home office and put a webcam on it. For others, it’s a big problem that they can’t put the proposal up on the walls or manage by walking around. Throw out all of your physical collaboration tools, techniques, and habits and rethink them all. Think about how and why you collaborate the way you do, but instead of concluding that colocated is “better” or “easier” dig deeper. What information needs to get where? Is there another way to make that happen. Don’t try to do the same thing online. Do something different that achieves the same goals. Using whiteboards as an example, the real need is to put ad hoc information in front of people easily. You can share ad hoc notes and status information online. For example, you can have a shared Microsoft OneNote. It’s pretty slick when it’s integrated into SharePoint. But if you track everything in tables, a shared spreadsheet file might work better for you. Or if you don’t have or know how to use anything, a shared Microsoft Word or Google Docs file can get the job done. I like to use whiteboards to track the “Single Version of The Truth,” assignments, deadlines, file status, phone numbers, doodles, and whatever ad hoc mention comes up that I want to share and not forget. All of that can be done in OneNote, Keep, Evernote, etc. Or even just Excel or Word. It works best if you can keep them one click away and update them in real time. Encourage people to keep it open in a browser tab. If possible, use it to exchange questions and issues as they come up. Think of it like a physical bulletin board for the proposal and leave notes for people. Instead of lamenting that you can’t put the proposal up on the walls, focus on how to quickly assess your content strategy. Instead of relying on people being around a table to brainstorm or review, think about how to organize the discussion to facilitate it online. Or even whether it should be verbal discussion at all. Maybe some things should move to a group chat tool like Teams or Slack. Some people like holding daily “standup meetings.” You can do this as a teleconference. But consider doing it in Teams or Slack to accelerate reporting status and issues. You can still schedule it. If you want to make sure people aren’t feeling isolated, consider dropping the meeting and having everyone available for an hour each morning. And then give them all a quick 5-minute call to check in. If there’s anything you can’t cover in 5 minutes, you can schedule a follow-up. New techniques and conventions to try Setting expectations is always good and may be even more important for working remotely. For example, set an expectation that between certain hours, for example 10am-2pm, everyone should be available for ad hoc calls and video sessions so anybody with a question or something to pass on can get instant gratification. Take some of the mystery out of communicating remotely. Decide what communication channels your team will use: text, email, phone, video conferencing, etc. Or let people set their own preferences but state them on the team contact list. Have everybody put everybody in their cell phone contacts list so they can see who is calling. If you want to be accommodating, set a convention that dogs, kids, eating, deliveries, etc. during a video call are acceptable and then no one has to worry about it. How about a convention to simply ignore the background in a video call? Or location? Don’t ask, don’t tell? Technology does help, but just a little Technology is not going to make working remotely the same as being colocated. It’s not going to be better. Or worse. But it will be different. So you might as well embrace it. Go ahead and get creative with technology. Regardless of what platform you select, make sure you communicate which tools to use and where files, including ad hoc files, should be stored. If you are using collaborative editing, you may need to adjust some procedures. But I'd encourage it. Collaborative editing is not without its challenges, like how to ensure improper changes aren’t made when multiple people are editing over top of each other. You may need conventions for who decides which changes get made, or talking through changes before making them. But the time gained from being able to work in parallel instead of one at a time can be huge. It’s nice when you can control access to the files so you can lock people out of collaborative editing when you need to. The way a lot of companies conduct their proposal reviews involves stopping work to produce a draft, that people spend time reading only to report that it’s incomplete, and then finally writing can begin again. With collaborative editing, work can continue even during the review! This makes the review a bit of a moving target. But for some reviews that is the better side of the trade-off. And being able to conduct reviews with everyone on the phone while simultaneously agreeing to and making final changes can be both painful and wonderful at the same time. With the higher dependency on technology, consider making someone, maybe someone in production, the dedicated IT liaison, configurator, problem solver, facilitator, and explainer. You don’t want anyone with lower tech skills or difficulty feeling isolated. Security is better than the alternative Sometimes we can’t have the toys or use them the way we want because of security. And while I believe that for most companies, proposal security is quite a bit over-done, it’s better safe than sorry. These days you may have more to fear from malware than you do from competitors trying to steal your secrets. But either way, security is a concern. And if your proposals involve work for DoD or certain other 3-letter acronyms, you have to worry about nation-state threats. If this is you, you’ve got an IT department with security specialists who know more about this topic than you or I do, and who can advise you on securely using your technology. Don’t forget your teaming partners and consultants Sometimes you need to be able to work on proposals with people outside your own company. Allow for this in your tool selection and security procedures. Think it through on the front end, because it can really mess things up on the back end if you don’t. Hybrid solutions don’t help much Weekly or other occasional meetings will not help much. Holding a planning session or review debrief live and in person can be nicely interactive. But the benefit to the proposal may be minimal. Doing this doesn’t eliminate the need to be able to accomplish nearly all the work virtually. You still need to think remote working through. Focus on what people need access to in order to write a winning proposal Remember that the goals are the same whether working colocated or remotely... Everyone on the team should know or be able to look up the status of everything and deadlines without having to ask someone else. And do it quickly and easily. In person or remote. Everyone on the team needs easy access to guidance regarding how to do things. In person or remote. Everyone on the team needs to know the single version of the truth and conventions (tools, locations, filenames, deadline, etc.). In person or remote. And everyone needs to know everything without getting overwhelmed. Use the fewest number of tools, single points of contact, and single files with everything they need to know wherever possible. In person or remote. Working remotely feels like a lot more work because you can’t rely on established ways of doing things, most based on colocation, and have to figure out new ways to do things that you were used to. But let’s be honest, the old proposal habits weren’t that great. So whether you like working remotely or hate it, maybe this really is an opportunity to create better habits.

You will not achieve the maximum ROI by staffing business development, capture, and proposals based on using the minimum number of staff to crank out the maximum number of proposals. To maximize your ROI you need to staff according to the things that most impact your win rate. Increases in win rate return orders of magnitude more than the staffing required to achieve them. Here are seven things you should staff your proposals to achieve: See also: ROI RFP Compliance. Achieving compliance is critical. But it is not enough to win. However, it is a baseline for calculating staffing requirements. If any of your bids lose because of a lack of compliance, you can improve your ROI by adding staff to achieve full compliance. Developing an information advantage. An information advantage is the best competitive advantage. If you are struggling to identify themes, win strategies, and differentiators, it means you lack the information advantage you need. It also means you are not maximizing your win rate. Consider increasing the staff responsible for obtaining an information advantage to increase your ROI. Designing your offering separate from proposal writing. Designing your offering by writing about it can do extreme damage to your win rate. Consider investing in attention to offering design separate from the act of presenting your offering in writing. The investment may be more in discipline than in dollars, because you can eliminate countless proposal writing iterations by having a validated offering design when you start writing. Content planning that drives your information advantage and positioning into the document. If you are figuring out what you should propose and how to present by writing and rewriting it, you should consider investing in planning the content of your proposals before writing about them. It can make a huge difference in your win rate, by forcing you to discuss and be able to articulate your differentiators, how to maximize your score against the evaluation criteria, and what to offer. Content planning requires investing in focused attention. If your staff only have time to prepare an outline and then immediately jump into writing in order to get it out of the way for other priorities, it’s hurting your win rate and leaving money on the table that could easily pay for the time and attention. Content planning turns winning proposals from something that happens into something that happens on purpose. Optimization against the evaluation criteria. If your proposal discussions don’t revolve around this, they are focusing on the wrong things. Getting the highest score is the only way to win. This affects everything you do on a proposal. While increasing your win rate is how you maximize ROI, increasing your evaluation scores is how you achieve a higher win rate. This makes doing the preparation, planning, and thinking required to increase your scores something worth investing in. Visual communication. Graphics, tables, and certain layout elements contribute significantly to delivering your message. If you’ve invested in improving your ability to deliver your message, you can still take it to a higher level by improving your ability to deliver it visually. This isn’t limited to improving your ability to create illustrations. It also includes your ability to visualize your offering and win strategies, and using the process of conceptualizing your graphics to help you understand what it is you are proposing and how it relates to what it will take to win. Quality validation. If you are still performing proposal reviews without having a written definition of proposal quality and quality criteria to measure it by, then your reviews are not doing enough to improve your proposals and increase your win rate. As an exercise, try calculating the value of a 1% improvement in win rate. Then apply that to each of these seven areas. How much time, effort, and improvement would that bring? What would the return on investment be? Each of these seven areas does not have the same priority for every company. Use this list to determine which will have the greatest ROI for your company.

If you are treating winning business as an expense, you may be leaving money on the table. Here are some signs that you may have fallen into this trap and recommendations for what to do about it: See also: ROI Are you closing the leads you have? If you are not winning enough of what you pursue, either you are pursuing the wrong leads or you are not pursuing them effectively. If you’re not winning the majority of your pursuits, you are probably leaving money on the table. If you are winning enough to get by and have found a comfort zone it may be encouraging you to keep doing things the same way, and looking for more leads to grow instead of winning more of what you pursue. It’s human nature to avoid change. However, investing in the changes that will improve your win rate can easily return far more than it costs. And make you a lot more comfortable. Do the math. Do you have enough leads to hit your numbers? Companies always think they need more leads. But the better your win rate, the fewer leads you'll need to hit your numbers. Sometimes chasing too many leads lowers the win rate for all, and you should invest in better lead qualification. Sometimes the leads you have are the wrong leads and you should invest in better strategic planning. But if you have enough leads and they aren’t closing, you might need to invest more in capture or proposals. Would increasing your win rate pay for the staff you need to make the improvements? What would the return on a 10% increase in win rate be for your company? It’s often an order of magnitude or two more than what it would cost to hire staff to make the improvements. And all the rest of it goes into the corporate coffers. By not improving your win rate, you may be leaving that money on the table. Should you gamble on prospecting or gamble on capture? Why is it that companies find it easier to gamble on hiring another business developer than it is to gamble on doing the things that increase your win rate (like adequately staffing the proposal, process improvement, capture, etc.)? Depending on your circumstances, the same investment can have a much larger return when it increases your win rate. The place to start is by assessing how many leads you need to hit your numbers. When you do, note the very strong impact your win rate will have on the outcome. Then decide whether to focus on more leads or win rate. Are you trying to discover your bid strategies by writing about them? If you get an RFP and immediately start writing, you are probably making your proposals unnecessarily expensive and lowering your win rate at the same time. One problem is that you aren’t figuring out what your differentiators, approaches, and positioning is before you start writing so you can prove them. When you start the proposal and you don’t already know what your differentiators, approaches, and win strategies are, it's usually a sign that you aren’t doing capture well and are starting unprepared. The other problem is that writing and rewriting until you stumble across a good proposal is expensive. And you probably will run out of time and submit what you have instead of something more competitive. Are you producing proposals or capturing them? Are you writing, compiling, formatting, and preparing files for delivery? Or are you gathering intelligence, assessing it and converting it into win strategies, discovering what it will take to win and then building a proposal deliberately around it? Is your approach to crank out low win probability proposals and make it up in volume or is it to invest in a high win rate and measure your ROI? Are you staffing your proposals based on capacity instead of win rate? While you can increase efficiency by having fewer staff do more proposals, you will lower your ROI with this approach. And this is only true if you measure proposal efficiency the wrong way. Instead of having the fewest staff do the most proposals possible, you should be looking for the sweet spot that maximizes ROI. The sweet spot is where increasing the win rate is no longer profitable. And you will never get your win rate that high or cross that line unless you sell something where the gross profit is lower than the cost of writing the proposal that closes the sale. If this is the case, you should be avoiding doing business that requires proposals. Are you shifting effort from high cost staff to lower cost staff? It doesn’t make sense to have your most experienced and expensive staff doing things that could be accomplished by lower paid staff. Shifting formatting from subject matter experts to production staff makes complete sense. But what about writing? What about managing the process? What about your efforts that directly impact your win rate? If you go cheap in the wrong way you could be losing more money than you are saving by lowering your win rate. Business development, capture management, and proposals should all be separately and collectively considered based on ROI. You should manage them as if they are a profit center, since a small change in win rate can return more profit then almost anything else you can do as a company. When a company with a 20% proposal win rate increases it 10%, they increase their revenue by 50%! That’s what you are potentially leaving on the table. The challenge is to understand whether the problem is in lead generation, preparing to win in the capture phase, or creating the proposal document. The place to start is to begin disaggregating and prioritizing the things that impact your win rate. Be careful here because the rules of thumb about what impacts win rate are all from other companies in other circumstances and may not apply to you in the slightest. Don't assume you know what impacts your win rate the most. Become data driven. What it will take to win in your circumstances is a combination of the nature of your offering and your customer’s expectations. Business development, capture, and proposals all play different roles in translating those two things into winning business. Set your priorities by what impacts your win rate the most and invest according to what will provide the greatest ROI.

The keywords that some use when searching for opportunities produce a lot more false hits that the keywords that other companies use. The suggestions below can help you reduce the number of pages of irrelevant opportunities you have to wade through to get to the good ones. But even when you do have to manually read them to determine whether they are relevant, if you have clarity about what leads you don’t want, you can greatly accelerate things. You can establish a process based on reading until you see one of the negative indicators then skip it and move on. The more you try to leave the door open to anything that might possibly “be a bid” the more you risk missing valid leads because of all the false hits. Sometimes looking for more ways to rule out the things that are low probability bids can help you be more successful at finding the bid opportunities that are good. The suggestions below can help you think of ways to rule out low probability bids. The faster you can do this, the more valid pursuits you can scan. See also: Pre-RFP Readiness Reviews Customer targets. Do you accept leads at any potential customer, or do you have particular customers you target? If your keywords procure a lot of false hits, restricting the search to specific customers can eliminate a lot of noise. Prime vs. Sub. When do you go after work as the prime contractor, and when do you pursue being a subcontractor? What words might you look for that would indicate whether an opportunity would be a fit as a prime or as a sub? Does your company have targets for the amount of prime vs subcontracting? Can you intentionally search for prime/sub opportunities, or must you search for relevance and then decide whether to prime or sub? Are you missing opportunities as a sub by only searching in areas where you can bid as the prime contractor? Capabilities. When it comes to filtering, what you don’t do is as important as what you do. While you start by searching for keywords related to what you do, you can filter the results by eliminating the keywords for what you don’t do. For example, if you don’t touch hardware you can use hardware terminology to filter out opportunities that include it in the requirements. If your search platform supports NAICS/PSC/other codes, you can also use them to eliminate opportunities that use your keywords but are about procuring other things. Locations. Some companies don’t work in certain places. Some will work anywhere. Some will work in certain locations only if the project is large enough. For example, do you work outside the continental United States (OCONUS)? How big a project would be required to make it worth it? Sizes. It is very disappointing to find an opportunity that is exactly the right type of work only to find that it is so small it’s not worth pursuing. There are many ways to size a potential opportunity. Some of the most common include the number of hours, number of people (or FTEs), potential award value, and number of units (any kind). You can and should calculate the number needed to make an opportunity worth pursuing. Schedule and time issues. Is it a short term project that’s not worth it to you? Is the delivery schedule reasonable? Is the staffing temporary where you need permanent placements? Or vice versa? Do they require shifts you’re not interested in covering? Teaming. While you can filter by eliminating the keywords for what you don’t do, if you have potential subcontractors who can fill the gap it might be worth pursuing anyway. Financial requirements and contract clauses. Are there contractual terms and conditions that you can’t live with? Would you skip bidding if the customer will require liquidated damages? What about insurance or bonding? Or auditing requirements? Advance search parameters. Does your search platform support Boolean search operators (and, or, nor)? Can you designate strings with quote marks? Can you control the order of operation using parenthesis? The syntax used for these can be different on every platform. You might have to look them up. But they are very powerful for filtering. They can be used to filter out “procurement support services” from all instances of the term “procurement” or any opportunity that happens to have the words “procurement,” “support,” and “services” in it but is really an opportunity for landscaping contractors to bid. You might also be able to use date ranges, restrict searches to particular fields, and more depending on your search platform.

Lead qualification is the process of determining whether an “opportunity” is a valid lead. To be valid, it must be worth the cost of pursuing the lead. This should be calculated in steps with qualification criteria to be reviewed at each step to determine if the lead is still worth continued investment. These steps are often referred to as “gates” that must be passed to gain approval to pursue an opporunity. Most lead qualification criteria look for show-stoppers, or things that would make the company uninterested. These include strategic fit, capability or performance gaps, size (people or revenue), and other considerations like insurance and bonding requirements or unacceptable contract clauses. Lead qualification should not be about whether you “can do the work,” but instead should be about whether it’s worth the cost of investigating the “opportunity.” Spending time researching, networking, and talking to your customers gets expensive. That cost is well worth it. For high probability leads. For low probability leads it can be a net loss. See also: Pre-RFP Questions While at first glance it seems expensive, for unique solutions and complex services relationship marketing can lower the per-pursuit cost by increasing the productivity of your customer outreach efforts while simultaneously increasing your probability of winning. This is why for businesses where customer trust is critical before they will buy anything from you relationship marketing is critical. What's the difference between lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions? Regardless of how good you get at pursuing leads, you should not be bidding every lead that you qualify. You should be discovering that some of the leads that were worth looking into are not worth bidding. Lead qualification foreshadows the bid/no bid decision to come if the lead proves worthy of pursuit. If relationship marketing and researching leads to discover that what it will take to win is expensive, proposal writing is an order of magnitude more expensive. The purpose of lead qualification is not to ensure that pursuits pass their bid/no bid decisions before proposal preparation. The purpose of lead qualification is to remove low probability leads before you even get to a bid/no bid decision. All leads are not worthy of a bid/no bid review, and bid/no bid reviews should not give consideration to everything the company finds. Lead qualification when searching for opportunities online When searching online for opportunities, lead qualification is really about creating keyword filters that can distinguish between business opportunities worth considering and opportunities that should be ignored. The challenge is that many words that are relevant to your business that you must use do not on their own indicate whether a lead is worth pursuing. This results in a lot of false hits. Sometimes you can use negative keywords that indicate a lead should be skipped. And sometimes you have to read them all to understand the context. This is where having good lead qualification criteria helps. What is the minimum size opportunity you are looking for? Size can be measured in many ways. Consider award value, number of staff required, or number of units produced or delivered. Consider contract clauses that are unacceptable and things like insurance or bonding requirements. The faster you can rule out bids that your company will not want to pursue the better. Those that remain are not qualified leads. But they may be worth putting the effort into qualifying. Make sure you collect feedback, regarding both leads that are worth pursuing and leads that are not. Use the feedback to constantly refine your filters. If you really want to improve the future of the company, track your leads all the way to award, and then use correlation with winning and debrief information to further refine your filters. Good lead qualification criteria will increase your company’s win rate.

When you've been asked to help write themes and you're stuck, decide which of these types bests matches what you need and then formulate some themes based on that type. See also: Themes Strengths and advantages. This is particularly useful when the evaluation criteria are based on strengths and weaknesses. Pointing out your strengths and competitive advantages is good to do, but only if they pass the “So what?” test. Being merely compliant with the RFP is not a strength. Your strengths and advantages only matter if they impact your evaluation score. Proof statements. It can be difficult to prove something in a single statement. But it can be done if you can articulate a single reason why something is true. That reason can become a theme that establishes credibility. Proofs are much stronger than claims. How does one thing compare to another? How should you position what you have to say? How does your offering compare to the requirements? An approach to the evaluation criteria? Or your company to the competition, your solution to the future, your approach to the stakeholders, etc.? Comparisons can help the reader understand. They can also help the reader articulate and justify the score they give you. Claims. You should avoid getting into the habit of making claims in your theme statements. These can devolve into unsubstantiated claims that do more harm to your credibility than any help they might provide winning the proposal. If you must make a claim, then make sure it passes the “So what?” test and is credible. Better yet, make sure that the evaluator will find it helpful instead of treating it like noise. Differentiators. Advantages that are rare can help their customer make the vendor selection. They are worth pointing out. But it can be challenging to show that they are rare and special without making an unsubstantiated claim. Think of differentiators as the things that stand out and enable the customer to select one proposal over another. Use them as themes to help them stand out and then prove them in the narrative. Reasons to select your proposal. The whole purpose of the proposal is to explain why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative and motivate them to take action. Statements that highlight why you are the customer’s best alternative and why they should accept your proposal are the best kind of theme. But they can’t be unsubstantiated claims. A weak form of a reason to select your proposal is a simple benefits statement that highlights the good that will come to the customer by accepting your proposal. Good is better than neutral, but isn’t competitive against great. Themes like this can get watered down into statements that merely sound beneficial and have little or no impact on your score. Summary statements and conclusions. Summary statements should not be redundant with the text of the proposal. But saying what the text adds up to can be very effective. What conclusion do you want the reader to reach about your proposal? This can be a theme that your narrative supports. Insights. Revelations that point out things that are not obvious that help the evaluation score your proposal can be compelling. If you don’t have insights to offer, why are you bidding? Submitting a routine proposal is not a good way to be competitive. Ghosts. Ghosting is a way of informing the customer about your competitor’s weaknesses. Ghosting the competition is just plain fun. But what’s the point if it’s not going to increase your score? Don’t use ghosting just to try to hurt your competitors. Only use ghosting if it will help the customer realize why your proposal is better. Points. What points do you need to make in your proposal in order to win? Turning those points into themes can help drive your message to the customer as well as help the proposal writers substantiate them. Everything in your proposal should be making a point. Those points should add up to something. You could throw out this entire list and just focus on the points you need to make. Compliance. Compliance is not enough to win. Themes that focus on compliance do nothing to improve your competitiveness. The customer probably sees them as noise because compliance is found in the details and not in the claim. An affirmative statement of compliance can establish intent, but is that really the point that will win the proposal for you? You can make that statement in the narrative. Whenever you are tempted to write a theme about compliance, try thinking about the reasons why the customer should select you instead. Use combinations Anything in a proposal is better if it’s also a differentiator. Everything should add up to the reasons why the customer should select you. Use these categories as inspiration and not limitations. Experiment with different combinations of them. For each section or place in the proposal where you’d like to add a theme, start by thinking about what the purpose of that theme should be. These categories can help you match the theme to what you are trying to accomplish. Themes are not an end in themselves. They are a means of achieving a specific objective related to what it will take to win your proposal.