Carl Dickson

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.

It saves so much time to write a short proposal than writing a long one and editing it down. It also involves a lot less risk. However, it does require you to think about what you are going to write before you start. But you should be doing that anyway. Skip the introductions See also: Proposal Writing You don’t need a page to introduce your company. You don’t need half a page to introduce each section. Just say what matters — to the customer. Just because something matters to you does not mean it will matter to the customer. What matters about your company to the customer is what they’ll get by selecting you, and whether they can trust you to deliver as promised. If you can’t say what matters about your company to the customer in just a few focused sentences, then you just don’t matter that much. If what you have to say will matter to the customer, then take as much space as you need and delete something else that matters less. A heading called “Introduction” or “Executive Summary” doesn’t have to take up a lot of space, so it’s up to you whether you start off with one or just make the first paragraph of the first section the introduction. Let the customer’s expectations guide you. Just don’t assume because you have a heading that you have to put more than a few lines under it. As for the section introductions, you can skip them. The customer doesn’t need to read about what you are going to say before they read what you said. They don’t need it to be put into context because they know what they asked for. Just give it to them. That’s what the customer is telling you they want by setting the page limit so low. And skip writing an introduction sentence for each paragraph as well. You don’t need to get warmed up to say something that matters. Just say it. Don’t try to prove thoroughness through detail Demonstrate thoroughness by being insightful. Focus on what all those details mean. You can show that you’ve considered everything without detailing it all. Talk about what things add up to. Talk about the impact of things. Talk about what matters about things. Combine, collapse, integrate, and summarize the steps, procedures, and details. Only talk about the details if the customer asked for them or there is a specific reason why each of those details matter. And then consider focusing on the reason why they matter instead of the details themselves. A well written plan in a proposal is not the plan with the most detail. Instead it’s the plan that the customer finds to be the one that understands and anticipates the issues and is insightful. It’s the plan that matters the most. The customer of a tightly page limited proposal isn’t looking to select an architect by studying blueprints. They will make their selection by reading the rationale for the design. If the page limit is really tight it means they don’t even want details about the design, and just want the rationale. Demonstrate understanding by having the right approach and not by claiming it Unless the customer asks for it, avoid creating a separate section called “Understanding.” When you receive a proposal, you determine who understands by what they offer and how well they anticipate the issues related to delivering it. Their grasp of what matters proves their understanding. So prove you understand through how you present your offering and approaches. Whatever you do, don’t waste page space with material copied from the customer’s webspace that tells them about themselves. Think about what gives the customer the most value in performing their evaluation It’s not about you. It’s about the customer. And in particular it’s about the evaluator. What do they need from you? How can you help them? A helpful proposal shows them how to accomplish their goals by way of your offering and shows them how it matches their priorities per the evaluation criteria. It makes the decision easy. A helpful proposal will likely score higher than a proposal from a vendor that just talks about themselves in as much detail as they can pack into the page limit. Don’t write about the subject of your assigned proposal section. Write to help the reader discover why you are their best alternative and to easily complete their evaluation. A good way to get started Stop trying to think about all the things you should write about. Instead focus on the points you must make in order to win. Then include only the details needed to prove your points and establish compliance with the RFP. Compliance in a page limited proposal may not mean what you think it means. Stop trying to make your plans in the proposal actual project plans. Implementation plans are often detailed. But good proposal plans are not the same as implementation plans. Good proposal plans make points about preparation, capability, and readiness for implementation. They are not a recipe for every task required for implementation. Stop trying to make your approaches about steps and procedures. What points do you need to make about your approaches? How will you prove those points? That is what you should talk about. The evaluation criteria are a clue In an RFP, the evaluation criteria will tell you what factors the customer will consider in making their decision. These are the things that the customer thinks are the most important. What you think makes for a good plan, approach, or proposal section matters far less than what the evaluation criteria says matters about them. This is not only true because the evaluation criteria will be used to score and select the winner. It is true because when the customer considered what will matter when making their decision, this is what they selected. Take that as a clue. Address the evaluation criteria as if they matter and let what you think matters get cut in order to stay within the page limit. The shortest proposal Only say things that matter to the customer. When you run out of things that matter to the customer, stop. That’s how long your proposal should be. Do not keep writing in the hope that you might stumble across something that matters. If you’ve only said things that matter to the customer and you’re still over the page limit, you should revisit your assumptions. And prioritize. Prioritize what you give page space to based on what matters to the customer the most. When the page limit is tight, a meaningful proposal will beat a proposal that crams details margin-to-margin and removes spacing between paragraphs, lines, and even characters. What makes a page limited proposal any different? Even if there is no page limit, you still have to communicate effectively and get the highest score. So if you think about this, these techniques aren't just for writing a page limited proposal. They are relevant to writing any proposal.

Incumbents like to play it safe, especially when things have gone well. When the recompete comes up, they often focus on not making any mistakes and submitting a proposal that is fully compliant with the instructions. You shouldn't assume the recompete is wired for the incumbent contractor. But if you want to beat the incumbent, you must take risks. Just not any risks. You should target the things the customer cares about the most. Your proposal can be more credible than the incumbent’s proposal, even though the customer knows the incumbent and doesn’t know you. But you won’t achieve that unless you do it deliberately and with the highest levels of competence. You won’t beat the incumbent with unsubstantiated claims of greatness, relying on your experience, or making it up as you go along. You also need to target what the customer is concerned about, and that depends on the nature of what they are buying. If the customer is buying… See also: Winning A unique solution, then trust and risk are their primary concerns. To win you need to be more trustworthy and offer better risk mitigation than the company currently doing the work. This can be a challenge. But if the incumbent rests on their relationship, it will create an opportunity for you to propose an approach that is more transparent, accountable, foolproof, reliable, etc. You won’t convince the customer that you are trustworthy and low risk simply by claiming it, or stating that you’ve done it before. To convince the customer to leave their current contractor, you need to show a formal, documented process that anticipates all issues and will not fail, no matter what contingencies occur. Doing this can win when the incumbent merely proposes to continue doing what they do. A commodity, then meeting the specifications at the lowest price will be their primary concern. For commodity services, focus on what acceptably meeting the specifications means. To convince the customer to leave their current provider, you’ll need to demonstrate strength in areas where they failed to deliver. For commodity products, demonstrate that your supply chain can more reliably deliver under any circumstances. Products, then supply chain and price are their primary concerns. However, the more the product resembles a unique solution, the more their priority will shift from price to quality. Winning as commodity product seller means being able to deliver at a lower price. If you have a higher quality offering, it will help if you can quantify how the improvements in quality result in lower long-term costs. If the product is not a commodity or is difficult to deliver, then your approach to delivery and reliability become important concerns. If the incumbent has failed in these areas, you have an opportunity to win if you can prove that you are better. Services, then customer satisfaction is their primary concern. Understanding what drives that is critical. If the services resemble a commodity, then any vendor that can deliver will do. If the services resemble a unique solution, then their concern will shift from price to expertise, staffing, and approach quality. In between unique solutions and commodities, and products and services, customers are concerned about: Risk. The customer is always concerned about what might go wrong. If the incumbent doesn’t address it, or if they just claim they are “the low risk solution” because they’ve already been doing the work, it creates an opportunity for you to point out that even the incumbent has risks and to list what they are, followed by your detailed approach to mitigate each and every one of them. Performance measures. How do they know if what you’re doing is effective? The customer may be satisfied with the incumbent’s work even though they didn’t measure it. But the fact that they didn’t measure it, or measure it as well as you are proposing, raises questions about their ability to manage it when circumstances change. Performance measures enable you to demonstrate to the customer that your work is well done at every step, and make it clear if anything slips. Performance measurement can be a key part of demonstrating that you will do a better job of managing the project than the incumbent will. Value. Price always matters. But in the middle between commodity and unique or product and service, it is not the only thing that matters. When the customer balances their concern about price with other concerns, they do it by focusing on value. If the incumbent doesn’t address value or merely claims to offer the “best value” it opens the door for you to prove that you offer a better value. Differentiators. When customers compare proposals, they look for what differentiates them so they can decide whether the difference is an advantage. Being better starts by being different. The incumbent is known. It’s hard for them to be anything other than what they are. But you are not known and therefore can offer something better. But it has to be better enough to overcome their concerns about trust and risk. So don’t just claim to be better. Prove it. In nearly every recommendation above, it takes proof to beat the incumbent. Claims will not do. This makes each one of the circumstances described above a bid/no bid consideration. Either you can prove it or you’re just gambling that the incumbent failed in ways you don’t know about, and has lost the customer’s trust. Proof is in the details. Don’t just meet the RFP requirements, prove in detail why your proposal is not only compliant but thoroughly addresses the customer's concerns. Let the incumbent play it safe.

We want to free you up to focus on relationship marketing by doing the online searching and monitoring of opportunities. When we monitor websites like SAM and identify opportunities for upcoming recompetes you can focus lead generation through relationship marketing. We’ll even help with that by letting you know when to reach out to customers before the RFP for recompetes are written so you can reach out and establish a relationship, influence the RFP, and get into position to win. We’ll stay behind the scenes so you own your customer relationships. And the best part is you’ll only pay for the leads that are worth pursuing. You won’t pay us for the daily searching we do. If you don’t like the potential leads we discover, you won’t pay anything. Each time we send you something, you’ll decide whether to take it further. Then you pay, but only for the next step. At each step we prepare deliverables that make the available data more relevant and useful for your pursuit. The total cost for a completed, ready to bid lead is $1680. There is no charge for leads you don’t like. And if you decide to drop a lead in the middle, you only pay for the phases you entered. The result is a solid lead with your insights and positioning well articulated and ready for RFP release. Once the RFP is released, your company owns the bid and what comes next. You don’t have to use us to do the proposal. But we’re here to help if needed. Proposal support is not part of the search service. What happens when…. We find a potential lead? We’ll let you know so you can decide whether you want to pursue it and provide feedback. A lead gets updated? We’ll let you know so you can determine what if anything needs to be done. A sources sought, draft RFP, or similar announcement comes out? We’ll let you know so you can respond appropriately. You can respond to it on your own. Or you can engage us as consultants to help. An RFP gets released? We’ll let you know. Hopefully it’s one of the ones we were anticipating and you already have a plan in place. You can respond to it on your own. Or you can engage us as consultants to help. An award notice comes out? We’ll let you know if it is one of the leads we’re following. We miss something? We’re incentivized not to, but our searches are only as good as our filters. You can help us get them right and fine tune them over time. Customers do wacky, inconsistent things in what they post. When we discover something got missed, we’ll improve our filters for the future. We have an ID/IQ, BPA, or GSA Schedule contract vehicle we’d like to monitor? If you forward the emails to us or provide us with a login, we’ll include any lead source you’d like. What sources do you monitor? We use SAM. A lot. We also use some commercial databases of Federal opportunities and some that cover state and local opportunities. We’re constantly experimenting with the mix to determine which are the best match. What if we pursue the leads on our own without paying? We’re not worried about that for three reasons. The first is that it’s a better use of your time to have us doing the searching and monitoring. The second is that our structured approach will help you win. And finally, you’d be missing out on future leads worth far more than what you’d save. We are both heavily incentivized to help each other. How do we get started? First, reach out to us below. Let’s see if we’re a match for each other. If we are a match: Normally we charge a startup fee to cover the time for us to discuss what leads you are interested in, what leads you are not interested in, how you qualify your leads, and to set up your search filters and add you to our system. Once we start searching, we’ll need to refine the filters. For the first week or two, we’ll need a lot of feedback and leads that we’re not sure how relevant they are. We’ll immediately start with monitoring current announcements. But we’ll also start going through the last 5 years of recompete data. That may take some time, but we’ll start with the opportunities that might be up for recompete in the next 6 months or so, and work from there. If we don’t find anything, we’ll still send you an occasional email so that you know we’re looking.

The reasons why tables help reduce the page count are: RFPs usually allow for a smaller font size in tables The text that goes in a table can be succinct, use fewer words, and not to be complete sentences Table text can be repetitive, but tables also help you eliminate the repetitive parts Tables enable you to show relationships without explaining them Tables can show required data without having to talk about it. Just don't fill your tables with whitespace. The main challenge to using tables is designing the rows and columns to balance out without using valuable whitespace. If page count is your primary concern, you don’t want a heading in one column with a lot of whitespace, while another column has a bunch of text. Be careful about going overboard See also: Proposal Writing I have seen proposals that moved a large portion of the text into tables. But be careful. While I’ve never heard of it happening, sooner or later someone’s going to go too far and get thrown out for non-compliance. That said, I have tempted fate more than once because tables can be that effective for reducing your page count. Table techniques for achieving minimal compliance One approach is to have a column to identify a section and a column to detail requirements compliance. However, the section cell will likely have a lot less text than the requirements response, and mostly contain white space. Another approach is to make the section a column-spanning row with a cell underneath to describe what matters about the section and your approach to fulfilling the requirements and a cell that itemizes your compliance. This has the virtual of identifying the requirements in the RFP and saying something beyond what’s in the RFP in as tight a space as possible. You might also consider having a cell for each RFP requirement and a cell for (pick one) who, what, where, how, when, and why. Remember, in a table you don’t have to write in complete sentences. Sometimes this can shorten a paragraph into a few lines. As an example, if the RFP lists a set of steps you must follow, instead of responding with your implementation approach, you can put the steps in a table with a cell for the step/requirement and a cell for why that step matters, what it must achieve, or other language relevant to the evaluation criteria. If you convert your approach write-up to a single line per step you might reduce the length substantially while still saying that you’ll do each step as required. No approach to responding to too many requirements in too little space works in all situations. Think of these approaches as the middle ground in between simply stating your compliance and fully describing your approach to compliance. Use text judiciously The text in a page-limited proposal should focus on what matters to the customer. Details such as steps, requirements acknowledgement and fulfillment, resources, qualifications, etc. that don’t need to be talked about should be presented as data and lists in the most compact form possible. This form will often be formatted using tables. Use your text to explain why you are the customer’s best alternative, demonstrate insights, and explain what matters. Simple table formatting tips to take up less space Make sure you optimize the formatting of your tables. If the text in the table word wraps, you can adjust the column widths until the table takes as little space as possible. But first, go into table properties and adjust the padding above, below, left, and right inside each table cell. This will give a surprising amount of space and reduce word wrapping. Make sure the text is formatted without unneeded space above or below. Also, adjust your bullets so they have little or no indentation. Keeping the proposal on schedule If you don’t have time to waste, you need to plan your tables up front. You don’t have time to write a long proposal and then convert it into tables. This kind of conversion requires substantive editing and may not be something to give to people who are not subject matter experts. This means you really need to think through your table designs before you start writing and validate the design with your proposal reviewers before you get to a late-stage review when it will be too late to reformat and rewrite.

RFP compliance means demonstrating fulfilment of all the instructions and requirements contained in the RFP. RFP compliance is mandatory for some bids, such as Federal Government RFPs. The problem is that full RFP compliance often cannot be achieved. See also: Proposal Management Proposal managers are taught from birth that: Proposals must be 100% compliant or they will lose and it will be your fault. Do not parrot the RFP. It even says so in the RFP. Do not merely state compliance. That is not compliant enough. You must explain how you will be compliant and do it in your own words. All are wrong. But only sometimes. And that's what makes compliance so much more challenging than we have been taught. Unfortunately "you must be fully compliant with the RFP" is a mandate that contractors repeat as a mantra. It began in a time when people had to be convinced to write in compliance with the RFP. Today this only comes up rarely, making a compliance mantra unnecessary. Especially when the mantra is frequently wrong. RFP compliance is non-binary. It’s not pleasant to be responsible for full RFP compliance when it is not possible to achieve. RFP compliance is not an absolute. When the customer releases a hundred-page statement of work but limits you to a 20-page proposal that must address both the technical and management responses, full RFP compliance simply is not possible. So what is RFP compliance? Compliance with the RFP is simply meeting the customer’s expectations. But what are the customer's expectations? RFPs often (usually?) fail to communicate the customer's expectations unambiguously. Have you tried asking the customer what their expectations are? If you haven't or can't, all you can do is try to interpret the RFP and guess when you have to. The company that makes the most informed guesses has a significant competitive advantage. We want RFP compliance to be simple. "Are you fully compliant with the RFP" sounds like it should get a yes/no answer. " But wanting things to be simple does make them so. We want to avoid being to blame for non-compliance. But something subject to interpretation shouldn't be the subject of blame. RFP compliance requires a strategy and that requires judgment. Being absolute in your response to someone else's expectations when they are arbitrary in how they apply them is not good judgment. RFP compliance depends on what matters What matters about RFP compliance is totally and completely up to the customer. Only the customer gets to decide whether your proposal is any good. The customer picks and chooses which things said in the RFP they care about, and they get to ignore a lot that they don't care about. It's good to be the customer. Your job, in responding to the RFP, is to guess at what matters to the customer. This will require a combination of RFP interpretation, research, customer awareness, and good judgment instead of a mantra. Your bid strategies depend on what matters to the customer. Do you know what matters to the customer about what they are buying? And do you know what matters to the customer about RFP compliance? If the customer is buying a commodity, they will evaluate it completely differently than they would if they are buying complex services. Sometimes the specifications are the only thing that matters, and sometimes they are more concerned with what they are going to get and only give a minimal consideration to the RFP specifications. With commodities, sometimes the only thing that matters is price, and sometimes they want every specification met, and sometimes they can accept a little less if it lowers the price. Government proposal evaluators are themselves supposed to comply with everything they put in the RFP. But there is often room for interpretation and judgment. The proposal evaluator may not be the person who wrote the requirements. Their priorities may be different. Keep in mind that the customer is more than one person. What matters to the contracting officer is different than what matters to the end users. What matters to the executives can be different from both the contracting officer and the end users. The contracting officer is concerned with making sure the acquisition process requirements are fulfilled, while the end users are concerned with getting their needs fulfilled. The executives may have goals, budgetary concerns, and a strategic vision that are different from the contracting officer and the end users. For each of them some of the requirements matter more than others. Some of the requirements in the RFP exist because they are required by the procurement process. Some must be responded to, while others get incorporated into the contract and really don’t need to be talked about in the proposal. This is an example of the importance of being able to interpret the RFP the same way the customer does. Some of the requirements in the RFP tell you what the customer wants, more or less depending on the level of subjectivity. If the customer must inspect what you are offering to make sure they are getting what they asked for, they’ll need to validate that the RFP requirements are fulfilled in the proposal. If they don’t trust their vendors or if that fulfillment is complicated or subjective, they’ll need to see how you fulfill them and may care more about your approaches than your promises of delivery. If the requirements are routine, they’ll focus more on the results or what they are getting as evidence that the requirements were fulfilled. This is an example of the importance of having customer awareness and good judgement regarding which requirements to address and how. Some (most?) of the requirements in the RFP will be poorly worded. Are they ambiguous? Overly specific? Realistic? Feasible? Routine? Some critically affect the results. Some don't. Some imply that a written response is required. Some are simply stated and may or may not require written acknowledgement. This is another example of the importance of being able to interpret the RFP. Writing for multiple audiences The decision to accept a proposal is almost never done by one person in isolation. Proposal evaluations may include junior staff, senior staff, procurement specialists, subject matter experts, executives, stakeholders, and random people who got drafted into participating in the evaluation. The proposal should be written to address what matters to all of them. Luckily, some messages will work for multiple audiences. If the customer expects to receive a lot of RFPs they may divide the evaluation into two or more parts, with one focused on compliance and the other focused on more qualitative evaluation criteria. The compliance review is often designed to be a quick, low effort pass to eliminate as many proposals as possible before the more substantive review. Understanding how to pass the portion of the evaluation that focuses on compliance is critical for you to even have a chance at winning. Whether the customer evaluates this way formally or not, compliance is not enough to win. It just gets you to the review that counts. This review is where they consider what matters to them. If you don’t push past compliance and address what matters you will lose the review that counts. The trick is to address the aspects of RFP compliance that will get you past the initial review. This makes being able to interpret compliance the same way the customer interprets it important, but not the most important part of winning. What should you do to achieve compliance? Give the customer what they need to address their concerns as decision makers. Those concerns will depend on what they are buying. Your job is not simply to establish RFP compliance. It is to add value to the evaluation process. You can do this even in a low price, technically acceptable evaluation by making it easy for them to satisfy their concerns. If you don’t know what their concerns are, you shouldn’t be bidding. Even if you don’t know the customer, you should be able to look at their circumstances, the nature of what they are buying, and the competitive environment and anticipate at least some of their concerns. If you can define compliance the same way the evaluators do, you can try being fully RFP compliant in the ways that matter for what they are buying. Try to be fully compliant every way you can, but when the number of pages of RFP requirements exceeds the page limit for your response, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions and take some risks. Following the instructions vs complying with the statement of work (SOW) vs scoring against the evaluation criteria RFP compliance starts with following the instructions. If they are well written (good luck with that), this will be straightforward. But what about fulfilling the requirements of the SOW? While that also requires compliance, the SOW is often where judgment calls have to be made. Do you need to address every keyword mentioned in the SOW? Is that even possible? What does SOW compliance mean? And what do you need to say in the proposal to achieve it? Then there are the evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria are not really a compliance item. But if you don't get the top score, it's doesn't matter that you were fully compliant. If you think that "compliance comes first" you overlook that compliance is not the top priority. Winning is. Winning requires earning the top score based on the evaluation criteria. You can win if you are minimally compliant. You can't win if you get a minimal score. Do not allow an obsession with compliance to take too much time and resources away from optimizing your proposal to get the top score. Proposal management requires balancing the instructions, requirements, and evaluation criteria against the page limitation. This requires exceptional judgment. A mantra can't save you from the risks All proposals involve taking some risks. Take your risks strategically. If you try to not take any risks, you’ll still be taking risks — you’ll just be doing it unintentionally. Take the right risks on purpose. This means the most effective proposal process is one built around risk assessment and not CYA RFP compliance. Avoid the blame game A culture of blame and shame makes people fear for their jobs. It makes them avoid taking risks that are necessary. A culture that obsesses over RFP compliance to avoid blame will cause the company's win rate to suffer. Risks should be anticipated, considered carefully, and taken deliberately after validating the decision. Interpreting an RFP requires risk assessment. Compliance is about risk management and not reciting mantras. Obsessing over compliance means that for every loss you possibly prevent to make yourself feel safer, you've lost many more by not focusing on winning.

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Companies often ask their proposal specialists to wear many hats. They blur the lines between sales, business development, capture, and proposals. And when it comes to proposals, they don’t make any distinction between proposal management, proposal writing, or proposal production. Some companies, usually the smallest ones, have one person doing all of them. When that person is working on a proposal, prospecting for new leads stops. When someone is writing, they stop managing. And capture gets dropped completely because they go straight from database searching to bidding with no relationship marketing in between. This is a great way to stay small. But you’ve got to start somewhere. And all service contractors are understaffed, no matter how large. This is actually a good thing, because keeping overhead low is critical for ensuring cost competitiveness. And cost competitiveness helps achieve growth. And growth is the primary source of opportunity for the staff working at a service contractor. The first thing an overworked proposal specialist needs to do is to figure out what kind of proposal specialist you want to be. Are you the kind of proposal specialist that: See also: Faster Takes ownership of winning Supports others leading the effort to win Owns message development Produces what others give you Ensures absolute accuracy Obsesses over compliance Orchestrates the process Defines the process Makes it up as you go along Creates and maintains the resources that others use Builds what you need and uses it yourself Enforces deadlines that others have to meet Is at the mercy of others who determine when deadlines get met Coordinates proposal reviews Manages proposal reviews Participates in proposal reviews Etc. There is no single, right answer that applies to every person in every corporate culture. If you are overworked, you probably cover several of the bullets above. You still must decide what kind of proposal specialist you want to be, because that determines how you should invest your time. How to invest your time If you are responsible for winning or message development, then your time should go into creating tools that get you the information about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that you need to articulate the winning messages. If others are involved in sales or the customer relationship, you need to create tools to get input from them for the proposal. You need to guide them to bring you the right kind of input. You can’t expect them to realize what input you really need. If you have to go get the information yourself, then you need tools to make that quicker and easier. If you are producing what others bring you, you can help them get it to you on time and in better shape by providing checklists that facilitate their ability to do that. The more you help them understand what is required to play their role, the more likely it is to come to you quickly and without defects. Just don't give them an entire style manual they'll ignore. Keep it simple. Spending some time making their job easier will pay off for you by making your job easier. If you are responsible for accuracy and compliance, then consider creating tools that will help them define proposal quality and provide quality criteria that they can use to self-assess before the material even gets to you. You can only accelerate a review after the writing is complete by so much, and then you have to deal with fixing the defects on the back end. It is much better to be the guide on the front end than one blocking crossing the finishing line because their work wasn’t good enough. If you define the proposal and implement it, then you need more than a diagram and templates for your process artifacts. Spend some time creating goals for each activity in your proposal process, because people are more responsive to accomplishing goals than completing steps. Give them checklists that let them know when they’ve done a good job. The one thing that's absolutely vital But by far, the most important thing you can do is educate your stakeholders about return on investment (ROI). If your proposal function is profitable, then The Powers That Be will throw resources at it to maximize their return. It is well worth spending the time to: Understand how to calculate the return on investment of the proposal function Being able to demonstrate how revenue growth benefits the people you need to motivate Get, track, and analyze the data needed to assess ROI Enable data driven decisions based on ROI Use ROI to track performance Prepare reports and educational materials to teach it to others Telling The Powers That Be that every time you work on a proposal you stop looking for leads may sound compelling to you. But what sounds compelling to them is how much money they lose as a result. It is one thing to evangelize about improving the company’s win rate. It is another thing to quantify the money to be gained by investing in improving win rate. The Powers That Be are not born knowing these things. If you want them to share your understanding you have to guide them to it.

See also: Customer Perspective This one page of a brochure contains all of the following claims: Everybody loves us. You can depend on us. You can trust us. Family owned and operated. Since 1984. We pride ourselves on… Excellent customer service. We can help with everything… We’re the most recommended. Customers love us. It’s a mixed bag of unsubstantiated claims and claims that fail to pass the “So what?” test when taken on their own. It’s also pretty normal for a brochure where you don’t know who the reader is and you don’t have much space to explain yourself. For a brochure, it’s not bad. Maybe even good. I have no idea how good the product is because I’m not a customer. I have no idea how good the company is because I’ve never dealt with them. I’m assuming without evidence that they’re excellent, because I’m optimistic like that. If they are still in business or even exist. The company isn’t the point. The style of communication is the point. This brochure is just a convenient example to use for comparing brochures to proposals. For a brochure, these claims may be enough to spark your interest enough to make contact and find out for yourself. That’s the primary purpose of a brochure. However, once you get to the proposal stage, you should no longer be communicating like you do in a brochure. The primary purpose of a proposal is to convince the customer to take a specific action, such as signing a contract. If you want someone to read your proposal, talk about what they are going to get and how it will make them better off instead of talking about how great you are. If this copy was used in a proposal for water systems, it could lower the win probability of the proposal. Imagine a customer issuing an RFP for water systems. They’d have specifications. They’d skip right over those claims about people “loving us” “depending on us” and “trusting us”. Everybody makes similar claims and proposal reviewers just roll their eyes. The reviewers would look for whether the proposal followed the instructions and meets the specifications that define a quality product from the customer’s perspective. If dependability is an issue, the customer might include mean time before failure or related specifications. They might ask pointed questions about how the water systems are built, delivered, installed, and maintained. They might check with past customers as references. If all the customer sees in the proposal are claims like these without the facts to back them up or the details that answer their questions, they might just get annoyed or even offended. The references to being “family owned” since “1984” are meant to tell a story of longevity and accountability. But in a proposal, they’d fail to pass the “So what?” test. So what if you were founded in 1984? How does that impact your ability to fulfill the RFP requirements? If you don’t say how something impacts what the customer is getting, then it simply does not matter. Beneficial sounding statements that don’t actually matter in a proposal are considered to be “fluff” and can annoy the customer who has to read through the noise to get to the things that do matter. When a salesperson tells you they have “excellent customer service” and that their “customers love us” or that they are “the most recommended” do you pay it any attention at all? The worst is when a salesperson says “You can trust us” without any substantiation. In a proposal, that can backfire and hurt your credibility instead of establishing it. In a proposal, every unsubstantiated claim hurts your credibility just a little more because a proposal is supposed to prove your claims. Making claims that aren’t provable in a proposal makes you seem untrustworthy. So pay attention to this brochure. It may be good as a brochure, but don’t write your proposals to sound like a brochure. Write your proposals to prove you will deliver as promised, and earn trust through credibility instead of unsubstantiated claims.

The following items can be used as a quality criteria checklist to determine whether what you have written is a proposal or a brochure. A brochure gives people something to buy. A proposal gives them something to consider and helps them reach a decision about it. Good brochure copy makes for bad proposal writing. You can use this list to determine whether what you have written reads like a brochure or reads like a proposal: Does it read like it is primarily an offer to sell the customer something, or a plan for how to solve challenges, find solutions, and make improvements? Is it all about you? Or is it about what the customer will get and how much better off they’ll be because of it? Taken as a whole, is your proposal an explanation or a series of claims? After reading it, can you articulate what that explanation is? Does this explanation make your proposal the customer’s best alternative? Does your proposal say what you want to say, or what the customer needs to hear? Is it you presenting your best attributes in the hope they care, or is it a tool to help the customer reach a decision? Does it talk to a specific customer, or just whoever happens to be reading? Brochures are written without knowing who the customer will be. At best they target a market segment. Does your proposal say things that matter to the specific potential customer you are submitting it to, or does it just talk about things that universally matter? If an employee, business partner, or vendor gave it to you, would you accept your own proposal? Would you be skeptical of its claims? Would its level of detail inspire confidence? Or would you have more questions than answers? Would you feel offended at the lack of consideration? Would you criticize them for not doing their homework or just reject it outright? Can you write the justification for selecting your proposal, based on what you see in the proposal? Is it easy or do you have to hunt for it and cobble it together from various sections of the proposal? Does your proposal show insight or merely say that you will give them what they asked for? Is it really just a quotation based on your specifications, or does it show a competence that would add value? Have all of the claims been proven? Note: This is different from whether you believe your own claims. Brochures make lots of claims. Proposals skip the claims in order to prove that it represents the best alternative. When you complete reading the proposal, what have you learned? What conclusions would you draw? Are they all about the company submitting the proposal? Will the customer find your proposal useful, even if they decline to accept it? Does the proposal itself have a value? Or does it seek to get value from the customer, instead of the other way around? Is it credible to the reader? Note: This is different from whether you are capable or whether you believe in yourself. Every unsubstantiated claim, act of irrelevant bragging, ambiguity, universal truism, unanswered question, lack of justification, and failure to add value reduces your credibility in a proposal. Brochures can get away with that. Proposals can’t.

Nearly all of the examples of selling in writing that we see in life teach us the wrong ways to write for proposals. From the ads on TV and the junk mail we receive, to the ads in publications. Even the materials handed to us by other companies are written completely wrong for proposals. And yet, when people sit down to write a proposal, they can’t help but emulate what they’ve seen when others try to sell in writing. Even what we learn in school about writing is wrong for proposals. When you write a brochure or an ad, you are guessing who the reader will be. You have very little idea how they will make their decision or what information they need. You have to make your pitch blind. Most customers won’t bother to read your brochure so you really have to grab their attention and sell, sell, sell. It’s a numbers game. However, when the customer has asked for a proposal, you know more about them. If you have met the customer or have a relationship with them, you will know even more. You can write the proposal directly to them and they will read it differently than they will a brochure. This changes things: See also: Great Proposals PropLIBRARY Subscription information and premium content access What compels the customer to read your proposal is to find out what they might get if they accept it. This means that instead of some hook, promotional copy, or statement to qualify your company, the first thing they should see should be what they will get and what the benefits of having it will be. Next, the customer needs to find out what differentiates what you are proposing. Why is it their best alternative? Why should they take the action you are proposing over doing nothing? Why should they choose you over other vendors? Why should they choose you over doing things themselves? Or over doing something different with their limited resources? Then, if the customer likes what you are offering, they will read more because they also have to determine whether they can trust you to deliver as promised. This is a key difference. People will not trust a proposal that sounds like a brochure or advertisement. To earn their trust you need to credibly show that no matter what happens you will deliver as promised. No amount of commitment or claims will do. To be credible you have to prove that you not only have the capability, but that you have also accounted for every contingency to ensure success. The customer will also need to obtain approval to make the purchase, so they need information to justify the decision. Again, you need proof points and not the claims you see in brochures and ads. If they don’t find the language they need to justify your selection in your proposal, you may lose. Unsolicited proposals vs RFP based proposals An unsolicited proposal is when you send the customer a proposal without the customer asking you to do that. It may or may not get considered. Would you consider a random proposal sent from someone, especially someone you don’t know? Some unsolicited proposals are really just long-form brochures. The message in these proposals tends to be “Hey, I’m glad I stumbled across you. You should do business with us.” Other unsolicited proposals are trying to influence a decision. These are effectively the sender trying to convince the receiver to go along with what the sender wants. Their success is largely dependent on how well their interests overlap and how good a job the sender does of showing that the receiver's interests are best served by accepting the proposal. A solicited proposal usually takes the form of a Request for Proposals (RFP) that describes what the customer wants. When the customer has already decided that they are going to make a purchase, they only need proposals so they can select who the vendor is going to be. The customer isn’t looking to be convinced to purchase, they are performing an alternatives analysis. If the customer will conduct a formal proposal evaluation, they will need to complete forms and write justifications based on what they see in your proposal. They will seek to quantify the alternatives analysis. They may even skip reading your proposal and instead focus on scoring the alternatives. Your score against the evaluation criteria and your differentiators will have the biggest impact on their decision. A brochure will lose out to plainly written details that make the proposal evaluator’s alternatives analysis and ultimate decision easy. How can you tell if your proposal is really just a brochure? It’s hard to keep brochure messaging from seeping into proposals because when we see thousands of ads every day, that language sounds normal. Proposals that contain messaging like this often pass their reviews because no one sees anything wrong with them. They sound normal. To help PropLIBRARY Subscribers improve the effectiveness of their proposals, we created this 12 point checklist to determine if their proposal sounds too much like a brochure. This checklist provides quality criteria that get to the heart of what your proposal communicates so you can assess whether the messages in your proposal are being properly delivered. In addition, here is a link to a 30-point checklist for assessing customer reactions and whether you would accept your own proposal.

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The scope of work required to achieve a high proposal win rate is bigger than one person. If your company depends on winning proposals for its revenue, you may need a Proposal Department instead of a proposal person. When to expand is really an ROI decision. When it comes to proposals, you do more to maximize your ROI by winning more than by keeping expenses low. It's time to expand your proposal department when adding another person will enable you to win far more than that person will cost. What you don't want to do is fall into the trap of trying to figure out how few people you can get by on to fulfill your proposal volume. This leaves money on the table by failing to maximize your win rate. What you should pay attention to is how much revenue will result from even a small increase in your win rate. Improving your win rate, even without an increase in volume, can easily pay for the new staff needed to achieve it. But once you've decided you need to expand your proposal support, how should you go about it? A good place to start is to consider the differences in the roles that proposal professionals often play and determine which will make the most contribution to improving win rate in your circumstances: See also: Proposal Management The things that a Proposal Director does are different from what a Proposal Manager does. A Proposal Director might not, and probably should not, even manage individual proposals. A Proposal Director sets standards, defines processes, ensures staff are trained, and allocates resources across all of the company's proposals. They play a critical role in quality assurance for proposals. A Proposal Director also addresses problems that cross organizational boundaries, which is a common problem for proposals. A good way to look at it is that instead of managing proposals, a Proposal Director manages the win rate, ensuring that all proposals do what it takes to maximize their win rate and that the win rate continuously improves. A Proposal Director pays off by helping each proposal manager improve their win rate, and that collective revenue increase adds up to far more than the Proposal Director costs. A Proposal Manager implements the process for the development and submission of proposals. In an organization with a Proposal Director, they typically focus on the individual proposals they have been assigned. Proposal Managers herd the cats guide the proposal contributors through the process to complete their assignments. If the company has capture managers, a Proposal Manager works with the capture manager assigned to their proposal. A key requirement for a Proposal Manager is to understand how a compliance matrix helps you create a structure for the document that will meet the customer’s expectations. This is key for understanding the relationship between achieving RFP compliance and maximizing your evaluation score, and for providing a structure you can build your messaging around. When your Proposal Managers are focusing on submissions instead of wins, it's time to bring in additional Proposal Managers so that you have the resources to do what it takes to win instead of doing less to submit in volume. An organization with multiple Proposal Managers may also have a Production Manager who specializes in formatting and file management. The Production Manager is responsible for configuration management of the proposal information to prevent version conflicts, ensure backups, enable people to find the information they need, and improve efficiency. The Production Manager handles the initial setup of files so the proposal team can get to work, final production and formatting of files for delivery, and any baseline changes or file management at milestones in between. Increasing your production support can enable your Proposal Manager(s) to handle more volume and improve the production quality of your proposals. Production Managers typically cost less than Proposal Managers, but improving production quality also tends to have a limited impact on win rate. Production Management can also be treated like a stepping stone toward Proposal Management, and a way to train people to first become Proposal Coordinators and then through continued training become Proposal Managers. It's a promote from within and training them in how you want things to work approach instead of hiring people with experience obtained doing proposals the way other companies do them. The key is to train Proposal Managers to win instead of training them to produce. This approach works better when you have a Proposal Director guiding Proposal Managers to become winners. In most organizations, the role of Proposal Coordinator is poorly defined and ends up being a mini Proposal Manager, or someone who is cheaper, has less experience, has little or no authority and who assists the Proposal Manager. I prefer not to use the title "Proposal Coordinator" because it is too ambiguous and results in misuse of the role. I prefer to call them "Proposal Process Administrators" because what they should be doing is ensuring that process deliverables are completed, enhancing communications, facilitating expectation management, and helping to surface issues. The Proposal Director sets standards and the Proposal Manager sets expectations for achieving them. The Proposal Process Administrator documents the expectations, makes sure that everyone is aware of them, and discovers if there are any issues in fulfilling the expectations on time. This is the technical sounding way of saying that they track all the many, many moving parts that become a proposal so the Proposal Manager is managing expectations instead of tracking all the details. Proposal Writers are responsible for completing the narrative portion of the proposal. Most Proposal Writers are not specialists, and many proposals have at least one contributor who is doing proposal writing for the first time. A distinction can be made between Subject Matter Experts and Proposal Writers. Sometimes Subject Matter Experts are Proposal Writers and write proposal copy, and sometimes they just provide information to Proposal Writers. Either way, Proposal Writers are responsible for fulfilling expectations regarding their proposal assignments. They are also helpful for raising the bar on making your proposal writing reflect what it will take to win. The Proposal Manager runs the process, but shouldn't be taking writing assignments. A Proposal Manager who is writing the proposal is not managing the proposal. Adding a(nother) Proposal Writing to your team provides a writing resource that the Proposal Manager can count on to write based on what it will take to win, instead of writing based on their technical background. Proposal departments usually include specialists who form a supporting cast for the proposal. These may include graphics illustrators, editors, content managers, tool administrators, review team managers, production support staff, and others. Don't think of these staff as specialists who enable you to increase the volume of proposal submissions. Think of them as specialists who enable you to increase your win rate in the areas you are targeting for improvement. Proposal organization at small companies vs large companies Large companies have more people. But small businesses can be better organized. This directly impacts proposal development and win rates. Small businesses can have better win rates than large businesses. There's also the difference between small proposals and large proposals to consider. Small businesses often have one proposal specialist. Large businesses may have a whole department. But the curious thing is that what it will take to win your proposals is functionally the same whether you have a single person or a whole department to do it. Titles do not matter. What matters is whether you understand what it will take to win, have people with the skills to turn that understanding into proposals, and have the capacity to meet your bid volume. Proposals at small companies. When a small business has one person effectively “doing” the entire proposal, it should still think in functional terms. Each person you hire will have strengths in some but not all the functions required. How will you fill the gaps? If you start with a junior or mid-level proposal specialist, who will play the role of Proposal Director? If you hire a proposal writer, will they be capable of creating a compliance matrix? As you grow, how will you split the functions? Will you promote your first proposal specialist? Will they be capable of fulfilling the functional aspects of their new role? Will you hire someone new, give them a title, and just expect the work to get divided up? Or will you hire someone who can fill your functional gaps? As you grow, it is better to organize around covering the functionality required to win than it is to create positions based around the skills of the people you have or hire. First, identify your functional requirements and then map your people to them. Then fill the gaps. Along the way, you can also use consultants and training to address your gaps. Proposals at large companies. Large businesses need the ability to do more proposals at one time than a single person can support. They have multiple Proposal Managers. Their proposal volume also supports having specialists and a supporting cast (see above). As the number of Proposal Managers increases, they begin to need a Proposal Director. If they have a high volume, multiple locations, and major impact on the company's financial health, a large business might also add a Proposal Vice President. The difference between a Proposal Vice President and a Director is that the Proposal Vice President focuses on ROI. Proposal resourcing should be based on the ROI contribution of the Proposal Department to the company. When the Proposal Department plays a key role in the financial health of the company, ROI management needs the attention of someone who understands finance as well as proposals to interface with the company.

This proposal template applies to any industry. When combined with your subject matter expertise, it will enable you to quickly write a proposal in a way that matters to your customers. The easiest way to understand this approach to proposal writing is to think about using it to structure your paragraphs. Once you see how to do that, you can use the exact same template at the section level by breaking down each section into its components (topics, steps, features, locations, etc.). The introduction paragraph makes the point, followed by paragraphs for the details. Within each paragraph, you have a main point supported by the details. Tips for preparing proposal outlines: Proposal Outlines This template will make it quicker and easier to write your proposal sections once you have your proposal outline. A proposal outline is not a generic thing, like you might have been taught in school. It must be created from the customer's perspective to help them make their decision and meet their expectations. Outlines based on a written RFP may require creating a compliance matrix first in order to get the outline right. A compliance matrix helps you map the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, and requirements so that you can build an integrated outline that puts everything where the customer expects to find it. Follow the links in the highlight box for advice to help you prepare your proposal outlines.Proposal writing template There are two parts to this template. The first is the point you want to get across, and the second is how you will substantiate it. People often get these backwards. Here are 10 examples of what people do wrong when writing their proposals that this template can help you fix. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, here is a visual that shows how the parts of the template below fit together. Start by thinking about the point you want to make Choose the point you want to make. In proposal writing, the conclusion should come first and not last. It’s really what the customer cares about. So what conclusion do you want the customer to reach? The rest of the paragraph substantiates the point and only gets read if the customer agrees with the point you made, cares about it, and it describes what the customer wants. Here are some examples of what the point can be about: How you will comply with requirements Your differentiators What the customer will get What the result will be An advantage you’ll bring How the customer will be better off Why you are offering what you are offering Relevance to the evaluation criteria The point you'd like the customer to reach about what you are going to write If you make the right points in your proposal, the customer will be sufficiently interested to read the details that follow. Paragraph after paragraph, the points you make should add up to why the customer should accept your proposal. Follow your point with sentences that substantiate and prove your ability to deliver as promised. This will show the customer that the point you made is valid and prove you can deliver and are trustworthy. Here are some examples of the details you might need to prove your point: The details of your approach Procedures or steps you will follow Details about how you will comply with the requirements Schedule details Resources and allocation Coverage This is where you demonstrate your credibility so that the customer will accept the point you made. Feel free to use bullets, tables, or graphics instead of narrative text in your proposal paragraph. A simple technique for proposal writing See also: Reuse If you are struggling with what to say about those details, you can use this simple technique. Address: Who What Where How When Why Click here for more details on this deceptively simple sounding but powerful approach to proposal writing. Tips to help you write a winning proposal In addition to the details, consider sprinkling some of these into your proposal sentences. Examples Experience citations Testimonials Graphics Finally, make sure you use the language of the RFP and optimize the points you make to score highly against the evaluation criteria. Use this over and over to iteratively build your proposal. No template can give you the points you need to make about your subject matter in a way that will reflect your customer’s preferences. But you can use this template to take what you know about your customer and offering and quickly create a great proposal.

What is a pink team proposal review? We define a pink team proposal review as an assessment of whether what you plan to write will produce the proposal that your company wants to submit, before you write it. This ensures that people know the points they need to make in order to win, and sets the stage for reviews that lead to improvements instead of re-writes. A simpler version of this would be to determine whether you are ready to start writing the proposal. Unfortunately, at a lot of companies, instead of figuring out what the proposal should be and then writing it, they throw together some quick draft writing to see what they've got and instead of a quality validation review, the pink team review ends up being a subjective progress review of the draft that sets the stage for the whole proposal to be thrown out at red team because it didn't turn into what people think the proposal should be. If you define your pink team review as a review to make sure you are on track for having a successful red team review, your pink team review is likely to degrade into a draft review. This turns the pink team review into an exercise of trying to discover what you want in your proposal by tripping over it. This in turn contributes to a red team review that is a purely subjective attempt to decide whether you like the proposal that was written. A pink team review like this results in the expectation that you will do rewrite after rewrite until the proposal is due and submit whatever the proposal happens to be at that point. What should an effective pink team proposal review accomplish? An effective pink team review validates what you intend to write before you start writing it so that you can write it once and improve it from there. An effective pink team review is not of a draft proposal. It is of the plan for the proposal. A plan that leads to a first draft that already reflects what it will take to win, because you've verified that you know how to do that before you start. In reality, “pink team” is really a category of proposal reviews and not a single event. There are a number of things you need to assess to determine if what you are going to write is correct before you start writing it. Think about what you should accomplish before you start proposal writing: See also: Proposal Quality Validation You need to be able to articulate what it will take to win. You simply can’t write a proposal that reflects what it will take to win until you can articulate it. Writing to discover what to write is not a winning strategy. It’s a time-wasting effort-expanding strategy that will reduce your win probability. You need to know if the proposal outline will meet the customer’s expectations. You should also think through any structure (subheadings, tables, etc.) that you’ll use at the subsection level and whether it will help the customer perform their evaluation. If RFP compliance is an issue, then you should start with a compliance matrix that shows which RFP requirements should be addressed in each proposal section. Before you write, you should verify that you know what to talk about where in order to achieve compliance and to maximize your evaluation score. You should know what points you want to make in each proposal section, if not in each paragraph. This is important if you are going to make your proposal about substantiating the points needed to make your proposal the customer’s best alternative. Any win strategies or messaging developed before RFP release should be mapped to the post-RFP release proposal outline and reformulated based on the evaluation criteria. A list of themes is not sufficient to drive your messaging into the document. You need your messaging to correspond with the structure of your proposal and how the customer will evaluate it. You should have a written definition of proposal quality. This should establish a standard to be used by proposal reviewers. It should provide written proposal quality criteria not only for the proposal reviewers, but also for the proposal writers to use so they can determine if their efforts are delivering what is expected. How many of these do you think you can skip and still win consistently? How many of these can achieve if you skip having a plan before you write? You not only need to have these things before you start writing, you need to be able to rely on them being correct. This means you need to validate these things before you start creating a proposal based on them. If you don’t, you risk having to rewrite portions of the proposal because you changed your mind. You know, the kind of thing that frequently happens between an ineffective pink team and an ineffective red team. You can’t reliably assess all of these in a single review. Perhaps if you have 5 or 10 reviewers, with 1 or 2 assigned to each. A series of validation efforts is often far more effective than one big, disruptive, formal proposal review that can't possibly assess everything it should. A pink team "review" really needs to be a review of all 5 items above. Is it worth it to change? The bottom line is that everything you do on a proposal should be prioritized by how much of an impact it will have on your probability of winning. What does starting proposal writing with a plan that addresses all five items listed above contribute? Prioritize your effort according to that impact. If the alternative is to skip the plan and quickly pull together a draft, how does that compare? If the way you are conducting your pink team is just because that’s how it’s always been done or when you tried to herd the cats that’s where they ended up, and you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort to change, make your decisions based on what will impact your win rate. Improving a 20% win rate by 10% leads to a 50% improvement in revenue. How much effort is that worth? Make all the discussions related to “what to do about the pink (or other color) team” about win rate instead. If you are going to argue, then argue over what impacts win probability the most. You only need to change if the way you are doing things is producing (or is likely to produce) a low win rate. P.S.: Color team labels are traditional and cause more trouble than they are worth. They are meaningless. Ask 10 people what a “pink team” is and you’ll get (at least) 10 different answers. The name has no relationship to the goal or scope. It’s meaningless. Give your reviews purpose. And then give them a name with meaning and a single definition. Otherwise you will watch your review effectiveness degrade over time, just like we see with blue teams, red teams, green teams, and all the other colors.

Getting into position to win before the RFP comes out requires preparation. Preparation doesn't just happen. The things you do before the proposal even starts can have a huge impact on your win rate. It makes more sense to focus on them than to rely on last minute proposal heroics. Here are links to five sets of tips that lead to even more content that can help you put just enough structure into place to be successful: Discovering what it will take to win. We think of sales as driven by charisma. But when the sale closes with a written proposal, sales is really driven by intelligence gathering. Charisma can be a part of that, but knowing what you need to know and discovering it is what determines the success of your sales efforts. What is even more important than charisma? It’s knowing what questions to ask and being able to ask them in such a way that the customer will want to answer them. Here are a bunch of tips and examples for doing just that. Gaining an information advantage. For proposals, an information advantage is the best competitive advantage you can have. The extent of your information advantage is how you can measure the real strength of your customer relationships. You can’t build an information advantage without knowing what information to gather and then gathering it. But it’s what you do with your information advantage when you do have one that determines whether you win or lose. Here are more than a dozen links with hundreds of potential questions and guidance for getting answers. Influencing the RFP. How can you help the customer write an RFP that will get what they want? Have you even tried? Do you provide them with tips and recommendations? When you respond to a draft RFP, do you respond with self-serving questions or do you suggest requirements, instructions, and evaluation criteria that will help the customer, while also helping you to make sure the RFP contains more opportunities than problems for your company? Here are more links to ways to get ahead of the RFP and tips for influencing it. Bid/no bid decisions. How do you get past the fact that making effective bid/no bid decisions is vital, but at the same time sounds a lot like not bidding potential opportunities? Making effective bid/no bid decisions is more than vital. It has a huge impact on the fate of your company, whether your company grows strategically or like a weed, and how well positioned it will be for bigger and better opportunities in the future. But first you’ve got to herd the cats into a rational way to approach them. Here are over a half-dozen links with examples of bid/no bid decision criteria and tips for how to make your bid decisions more effective. Readiness reviews. How do you know if you are on track for being ready to win when the RFP is released? Simply holding monthly business development meetings can do more to harm your chances than help them. How do you introduce just enough structure without creating something burdensome? How do you tie asking the right questions to discover what it will take to win, gaining an information advantage, influencing the RFP, and making effective bid/no bid decisions all together? That’s what readiness reviews are for. Getting ahold of the process details is one of the benefits of becoming a PropLIBRARY Subscriber. But we freely share the concepts that drive implementing Readiness Reviews.

The goal of writing a proposal is to persuade the customer that you are their best alternative, so that they will accept your proposal. Being the best alternative means taking into consideration all of the factors that impact whether the customer selects your proposal. Even if your proposal is the only one under consideration, the customer may decide to do nothing. In fact, the customer deciding not to do anything can be your greatest competitor. See also: Winning Who decides what the customer’s best alternative is? So you think that your offering is the best. Of course you do. So does each of your competitors. But frankly neither your opinion nor any of their opinions matter. The only opinion that matters is the customer making the decision. You might think that your offering is superior in some pretty objective and compelling ways. You might even be correct in that assessment. However, those might not be the only factors involved in the customer's determination of what alternative is best for them in that moment. In addition, whether your proposal speaks to how the customer goes about making their decision can determine whether or not the customer perceives your offering as superior when compared to their other alternatives. So how do customers decide? Some choose what they want, and others follow detailed proposal submission instructions with written evaluation criteria that tell them what they are going to get. Some customers make a selection and other customers follow procedures and complete forms. Before you try to influence their decision, have you asked the most important question? Have you asked them what they think their best alternative will look like? You might also consider asking what concerns them, what they are hoping the outcome will be, and what their preferences are. If you don’t, all you can do is guess at the best way to influence their decision. What can you do to influence that decision? If the customer is following a formal process with detailed proposal submission instructions and written evaluation criteria, then you must achieve the top score in order for the customer to accept your proposal. You get the top score by presenting what the customer wants in a way that makes it easy to give it the top score. This means that you must accomplish two separate goals. Having an offering that the customer considers their best alternative and writing to achieve the top score. Doing both requires insight and execution in order for your proposal to truly become the customer’s best alternative. If you understand their process you can make educated guesses that drive your score up, but you will not maximize your win rate unless you are making your decisions with insight into the customer's hopes, concerns, and preferences. If the customer interprets their evaluation criteria as humans tend to do, or if the customer has no written evaluation criteria or decision making process, they will make their decisions as fallible humans do, with as many approaches to that as there are humans. If your customer is like this and you have not spoken to them, you can’t make an educated guess. You can still make a guess. But you are gambling and not being strategic. Your win rate will be much lower than someone with insight. The trick is to change how you think about becoming the customer’s best alternative Becoming the customer’s best alternative does not come from trying really hard to be the best. It comes from figuring out what the customer needs to see in order to reach a decision in your favor. Once you realize that, you also quickly discover that research into understanding your customers is as important as proposal writing, and proposal writing is as important as having the best offering. You must become the best at all three of those in order to consistently become the customer’s best alternative.

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