Carl Dickson

If you don’t want your proposal to look and sound like every other proposal the customer will have to read, then you need to get good at reading your proposal like the customer, and being honest about what you see… See also: Differentiation Read your proposal and look for the differentiators. Ask if other companies will claim the same things, whether or not they are true, whether or not your claim is stronger. If they can say the same things, you’ll all sound the same. Differentiators are the secret to writing a proposal that stands out from the pack. Focus on getting them right. Make your whole process revolve around your differentiators. Try standing for something that is better than normal. Read your slogans. On second thought, don’t even bother. Just throw them out. Along with the slogans, throw out everything that sounds like advertising. Those claims belong in brochures going to strangers and not in proposals. They won’t convince the customer that you are their best alternative. But they might convince the customer that you sound like every bad ad they’ve ever seen. Read your statements about the subject matter. If you’re using academic or universal pronouncements that apply to everyone equally as an introduction to what you have to say, then rewrite them so they only apply to you or so they become part of what you will do or deliver. For example, I often see proposal writers start by saying things like… [insert something that is factually true] is [critically important|vital|a big fat concern|etc.] to achieve [the success of the project|a goal that everyone bidding will share or claim, probably because it says so in the RFP]. For example, “In these troubling times, it is critical that everything possible be done to maximize efficiency in order to continue to meet the performance specifications. [Company name]’s approach will…” The first sentence does not differentiate you because it is true no matter who wins. Efficiency is always important and the sentence doesn’t say that you’ll do anything about it or that your competitors won’t. And it doesn’t prove your understanding or set the stage in any meaningful way. Introductions like this can often be simply deleted, but sometimes they can also be turned into a statement about what [Company name] will do or deliver. And if you really want to stand out from the pack it will describe the differentiated approach [Company name] offers. Read your proposal and ask why it is more credible than those of your competitors. Then ask whether your proposal explains that and then proves it? If not, you’re no more credible than you competitors, no matter how much you want to believe in yourself. Being more credible than your competitors is important for standing out from the pack, because it makes you more trustworthy than the pack. You don’t become more credible by claiming it. You become more credible by proving it and by having approaches that deliver it. Focus on credibility and your approaches to risk and quality may write themselves in a way that is more authentic. Read your proposal and ask whether you’ve treated the customer and the opportunity as if they are unique and worthy of special attention. Have you offered something that is a perfect match, or have you just done what you were told? Like everyone else. If your offering is as unique and special as the customer and the opportunity are, you will stand out from the pack. But you can’t claim uniqueness. You shouldn’t even use the word “unique.” Instead, just propose an offering that is a perfect match for what is unique and special about the customer. Read your proposal and ask whether the approaches you describe are merely competent and routine. If so, they will sound just like everyone else who is competent. Widely accepted best practices can easily become boring when you have to read through dozens of them. The standard of care does not make you stand out from the pack. If your approaches aren’t exciting, you’re just not trying hard enough. You can improve on the standard of care by going beyond procedures and focusing on your interactions, communications, transparency, delivery, metrics and performance measures, decision making, logistics, or any of the other factors that impact the efficacy of your practices. Try writing your approaches as if failure is not an option and you need to prove that they will hold up under any contingency. Read your proposal and ask whether you sound beneficial or whether you sound like you will have a profound impact. Every one of your competitors will sound beneficial. Addressing benefits in your proposals tends to degrade into a lack of specifics. For example, people start claiming their experience will deliver benefits without itemizing what those benefits will actually be. Will accepting your proposal have an impact on the customer? Or will it just keep the trains running on time, just like everyone else will promise? Try showing how you matter by having an impact. Read your proposal and ask if you are avoiding talking about certain things. Are you saying things to yourself and cynically mumbling under your breath when you read it? If so, then your self-censorship is probably making you sound like everyone else. You may be hiding some awareness that could be turned into advantages if you address them properly. If you want to stand out from the pack and sound different, try sharing some truth that you don’t normally reveal. By far, the best way to stand out from the pack is to start before you read your proposal. Start before the proposal is even written and determine how you are going to stand out and differentiate. Then plan the content around proving how you’ll deliver your stand-out offering as promised. Fixing these issues on the back end of your proposal is like trying to repair the foundation of a house after it is built and doing it against a tight deadline. That’s not a reliable way to create something exceptional that someone else would want to purchase.

Don't look at filling your pipeline as one big monumental task. Divide and conquer. Do this based on defining categories for your leads and setting targets. People often look for “a” source of leads, when they should be looking for all of the potential sources of leads. But what percent of your leads should come from each? This varies a great deal, company by company. What you don’t want to do is chase them all with the results being random, because then your company will grow like a weed. Decide what a healthy mix of leads for your company will be and set targets accordingly in each of the categories. This will ensure your long term growth is balanced and strong. It will also help keep you from getting overwhelmed because each problem you have to solve, like how many leads can you get from relationship marketing, becomes a smaller more solvable problem. It will also help provide focus, resource allocation, and time management. Finally, it brings some structure to how you track your progress toward filling your pipeline. Here are some sources to consider: Recompetes of your competitors. These will most often be found in databases. But nearly every government opportunity you decide not to bid or lose will come back around. Private sector opportunities are not as likely to be recompeted periodically, so this may not be a viable market segment if you are not a government contractor. If you are, you can know of recompetes years in advance. These are often the easiest to get ahead of the RFP and practice relationship marketing on. Organic growth. Can your current contracts expand in scope or volume? It may require a contract modification, but if the customer agrees that there is a need and a budget, a contract modification is easier than a new procurement. Always be thinking about what else you could do for the customer and try to have the kind of discussions where they can discover that you have capabilities that are broader than what you are currently doing for them. Relationship marketing generated leads. For some portion of your leads, you should drop the databases and discover those leads by talking to and getting to know your customers. How do you know which customers will provide leads? Start with a database that can show you who buys what you sell. Then get to know them by becoming an asset to them instead of a narcissistic vendor. The more what you offer resembles a commodity, the less interested the customer will be in having a relationship with their vendor. However, the more what you offer resembles unique solutions to problems or complex services, the more that the customer will want to know enough about its vendor so it can decide whether to trust them. In between is a bell curve and your offering will likely lean to one side or the other. How much it leans determines how many of your leads should be generated through relationship marketing. Relationship marketing will pay off even on bids where the customer doesn’t tell you about the leads by giving you the kind of insight that provides an information advantage for your proposals. Marketing. Marketing is about reaching out to potential customers to bring them into your sales funnel. It comes in both inbound (waiting for them to contact you, such as through your website) and outbound (email, associations, tradeshows, etc.) variations. Marketing is crucial for companies that sell commodities. It is often ignored by companies that look for a relatively small number of large contracts for complex solutions. Small businesses tend to ignore marketing because it looks like a high risk expense. However, if you're planning for the long term and you don’t start marketing in the short term, you’ll never get there. Contract vehicle considerations. Customers have different ways of buying. This is especially true for government customers, who may purchase through specific contracts, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts, catalogs, ordering agreements, sole source contracts, micropurchases, and simplified acquisition. You want to be able to sell through the contract vehicles that your customer prefers to use. If they like a certain ID/IQ, you need to be on it. If they like the GSA schedule, you need to be on that. If you are an 8(a), you want to find agencies that do a lot of sole source procurement. And if what you sell can be packaged under the threshold for simplified acquisition (currently $250,000 but it can vary so look it up), then ask because you might be able to make things easier for your customers. And if what you sell can be packaged under $10,000 it might be as easy as a credit card transaction through micropurchases. Having more contract vehicles means having more options, but don’t expect the vehicle to bring your customers to you. Expect to bring the vehicle that the customer prefers to them. Prime vs sub considerations. When contracts cover more than any one company can provide, they form teams that share the work and provide a stronger solution than any of them could provide individually. In some areas this is so routine that all business involves teaming. In others, it’s the opposite. While there are companies that prosper with all their business coming from subcontracting, they tend to be manufacturers of unique devices that aren’t easy for other companies to make, and services that are truly unique. This means that everyone else needs to be a prime. You can still do some subcontracting, and the mix will vary. It will largely depend on how well you trust your primes, and that will largely depend on how much they need you. Small, minority, and disadvantaged contracting requirements play into this. So set your targets strategically according to how much you want to play each role and begin networking with companies so that you can better find the prime or sub that you want instead of getting stuck with whatever you can find. RFIs and Sources Sought. Requests for Information (RFIs) and sources sought notices are often announced ahead of a solicitation, usually around 30 days. If the customer plans to announce a draft RFP, sometimes longer. Occasionally much longer. If you start your pursuit at a public announcement it is not the same as getting ahead of the RFP. They are nearing the end of their acquisition process and are not at the beginning. Your chances of influencing it are small. But you can try. The first thing you should do is determine why they made the announcement. In some cases it will be an inconsequential routine. In others it will be strictly to determine whether two or more small businesses will respond by saying they can do the work to determine whether to make it a set-aside. In other cases it will be to head off any protests. And in a few rare and precious cases, it will be because they aren’t sure how to write the RFP and want to get some industry advice. The reason they are making the announcement will determine how or if you respond. Responding will almost never give you an advantage during the evaluation of proposals. But it does give you a chance to introduce your company and show that you can be an asset to them.

Recently I talked to a government employee who was transitioning to the private sector. He asked me if I could recommend any particular contractor because they all sound the same. I thought of all the articles I’ve written about good and bad proposal writing habits and the things I see over and over again when I review proposals for companies and realized it’s true. If the problems I see are in most companies' proposals, then to the customer, those companies must all sound the same. Thinking about it more, there are reasons why your proposals all sound the same. Some may not apply to you. But I’m betting that some will. Maybe most. Hopefully not all. But possibly. And I doubt there’s a company out there that will not have at least one apply to them. Warning: This may not be easy to hear. Sometimes I can be too honest. But every harsh reality I’ve pointed to is an opportunity to beat your competitors who stay where they are. And if you can’t do anything about them, then at least have a good laugh at yourself and your industry. Here's why your proposals sound just like everyone else’s proposals: See also: Great Proposals Your proposals are about your company. When the customer says “Describe your company’s…” or “Contractor shall describe its approach to…” you do just that instead of focusing on why the customer asked for that or what the customer hopes to get out of it. If you want to differentiate, make your proposal about the customer. Then whatever you say about your company has to matter to the customer. Describing who you are while sounding beneficial is easy. Showing how you matter to someone else is not so easy. You make the same writing mistakes as everyone else. You are pleased to submit, fully committed, understand, brag, and claim all the same way. You even use the same clichés. It’s easy and it passes your proposal reviews because it sounds like all the other proposals. You've developed some bad proposal writing habits. If you want to sound different, try sharing some truth. You all talk about quality and risk in the same way. You provide the lowest risk and the highest quality without any proof just like everyone else. If that was true you wouldn’t have had any problems on any of your past projects, and yet… Maybe this one should have been titled that you tell the same lies as everyone else. Try doing something about the risks or improving quality and then proving that you’ll follow through after award. Try focusing on credibility and your approaches to risk and quality may write themselves in a way that is a bit more authentic. You lack insight and are talking around it just like everyone else. So the RFP came out and you decided to bid it because “you can do the work” and your proposal is responsive to everything in the RFP while trying to sound beneficial. But there’s nothing in there that anyone would look at and say “Wow! I’ve never thought of doing it that way before. That’s going to make a huge difference.” The truth is you just don't have any insightful information to work with and are trying to word around it like you do. Try treating the customer and the opportunity as something that is unique and special. Then offer something that is a perfect match. You won’t take the risk of saying the wrong thing so you end up saying nothing just like everyone else. Being exceptional requires being different. But if you do something different you might get dinged in a review, or worse. If the proposal loses you might get fired. So you do something normal and completely expected. Try making the entire proposal process revolve around differentiators. Try standing for something better than normal. Your approaches are good enough. You have achieved RFP compliance. This is important. You may have even eked out a little better than merely compliant here or there. That’s good enough to submit and maybe you’ll win on price. Try raising the bar. There is no good enough. Losing is always blamed on price. It’s politically acceptable to lose on price. Every proposal that makes the competitive range and loses will be blamed on price. The truth is you scoped it wrong, your overhead is too fat, or your value is too low. Try being honest about why you lost so that you’ll leave your comfort zone in order to change. You implement the same best practices. The acceptable ways of doing things are not competitive. Everyone does acceptable. You’ve got to be better. Try taking what’s acceptable and then modifying it to be a better match for this particular customer, their preferences, and their circumstances. Your management plans are all boring. Most management plans are competent and routine. If your management plan isn’t exciting, you’re just not trying hard enough. Try writing your management plan as if success or failure of the entire project depends on it. You aim to be a little better than your competitors. You’ve done what the RFP told you to. You’ve done it well. This means that you may have done what you were told to do better than your competitors. And if so, you might win. But you're probably going to lose. How far below 50% is your win rate? And aiming to be just a little better is not much of a long term competitive strategy. You are all writing to the same RFP and trying to be better. Try doing what the RFP requires in ways that are different from what others will bid and matter in ways that are compelling. When it comes to service proposals, your capabilities are defined by who you can hire. You didn’t get into the service business by assessing the market or trying to disrupt the market. You got there by responding to RFPs that were low hanging fruit and then hiring staff to do the work. Whatever the customer said they wanted in their RFP, you morphed into. You are all hiring from the same labor pool and you all claim staff counts that are true but will have no impact on the next customer because they are all already billable. When someone asks about your capabilities you often start talking about your experience, as if the two are the same. Try focusing on your differentiators other than experience. Those are what can define a company that isn’t defined simply by who it hires. Then turn those differentiators into sustainable ways of operating that are different and use them to produce differentiated capabilities. Add it all up and you all sound the same. And not very credible. And there’s no connection between what you’ve said in your proposal and how the project goes. So your customers don’t believe half of what vendors say in their proposals anyway. And the next one they read sounds like more of the same. Is it yours?

Everything you want your customer to conclude about your proposal should be in your Executive Summary. Not the details. But what the details mean, what they add up to, and why that makes you the customer's best alternative. Your Executive Summary should introduce every key point you’re trying to make. It's not actually a summary at all. If you don’t know what to say in your Executive Summary, it’s because you don’t know what the point of your proposal should be, and this is a major problem to solve before you start writing anything. You won’t discover what the point of your proposal is by writing about it. You want your proposal writing to prove the points you make. The points won't make themselves. You need to know the points you want to make before you start writing. In fact, you should probably hold a major review to make sure you intend to make the right points before investing in writing to support them. This is a solid argument in favor of writing your Executive Summary before you write the rest of your proposal. What’s in most Executive Summaries When you read your Executive Summary the way the customer will read it, you may not like what you see. Here is what most companies offer their customers: See also: Executive Summary Bragging. Clichés. Unsubstantiated claims. The word "unique." Beneficial sounding platitudes that everyone will claim and are ultimately meaningless. Statements of commitment instead of how you will deliver results. A great deal of focus on being exactly what the customer asked for instead of being something better. A great deal of focus on your being experienced and qualified, as if everyone who is a contender to win won’t be. And just to top it all off, some background about the customer that they already know, as if being able to copy and paste from their website proves how well you understand them. Or worse, a claim that you understand them without anything to make it credible. And a pinch of stating the obvious about what will be “critical to the success of the project” or what is "vitally important" presented in such a way that it applies to everyone bidding. Oh, and let’s not forget the big revelation about how pleased you are to take the customer’s money submit your proposal. If these things are in your Executive Summary, then this is what you have offered. In some Executive Summaries I have reviewed for companies, you have to read through almost a page of this stuff before you see anything offered at all. And then it's not differentiated. Is this what you think the customer wanted? You may think your offering consists of the details that appear in your technical approach. However, the Executive Summary is essentially a statement of what you are offering. The way you articulate it in the Executive Summary is what you are offering. The rest just provides details that prove you can deliver what you’ve promised. Is this really who you are? The Executive Summary is also who you are. Your mission statement, branding, and/or corporate identity statement are not who you are. You are what you claim to be in your proposal. And the Executive Summary is your proposal. If your Executive Summary is pointless then you are pointless. If your Executive Summary doesn’t say things that matter to the customer, then your offering does not matter and you do not matter. It does not matter how much you want to matter. And if your Executive Summary is all about you instead of being all about the customer, then who you are is narcissistic. You don't have to tell the customer who you are or what's great about you. You have to show the customer that they will get great results by selecting you. The proposal is who you are until you win. Only if you win the proposal, do you get the chance to become what you deliver. Prove that you matter If you really do matter, then your Executive Summary should explain why. Only it shouldn’t be about you and why you matter. Your Executive Summary should be about what matters to the customer and how by accepting your proposal they will be better off than by choosing any other alternative. This is what your offering should be, and what your Executive Summary must show. Your Executive Summary is not a summary of your proposal. It is the reason why the customer should accept your proposal. And you can’t write your proposal without knowing what that is. So start by figuring out why you are the customer’s best alternative and write an Executive Summary that demonstrates it. Then your Executive Summary truly is your proposal.

How much experience do you have? How relevant is it? How about staffing? Do your staff have the right qualifications and skills? Do you have enough staff? Behind these questions are two win strategies you should know by name: depth and breadth. They are not mutually exclusive, but sometimes one is more relevant to a customer than the other. Depth communicates sufficiency of quantity See also: Themes If the customer is looking for one type of experience and I have 10 project examples, I may have the depth of experience they are looking for. If I have more staff than the minimum needed, I have sufficient depth to be able to replace staff due to turnover. Depth can be applied to things other than just experience and staffing. It can also apply to resources, technology, parts, and more. Depth can prevent disruption, provide back-ups, increase speed, mitigate risks, improve capacity, and enable you to meet surge requirements. Depth implies resilience. Breadth communicates coverage If the customer is looking for a range of experience and I have a project example for each, I may have the breadth of experience they are looking for. If I can cover all of the positions with the qualifications or skills required, I have sufficient breadth to cover the requirements. Breadth can apply to more than just experience and staffing. It can also apply to locations, technology, resources, skills, procedures, and more. Breadth can meet all the requirements, reach all the locations, cover the hours of operation, and ensure readiness in every area. Breadth implies coverage and range. Presenting depth and breadth A table or matrix is commonly used to show depth and breadth. For example, a staffing matrix might have columns for the qualifications required, and rows for the labor categories. If you are showing breadth, you want to cover every single cell to show that you have staff with every qualification in every labor category. If you are showing depth, you might show the number of staff in each cell, or better yet, the number you have above what is required. Or even both. With a combination of colors/shading and numbers you can show both depth and breadth at the same time. Other examples where depth and breadth can be presented in a table or matrix: Experience in each statement of work area Staff in each statement of work area Staff with degrees, years of experience, certifications, etc. Locations with numbers of staff Years in each location Required parts coverage Ability to cover the level of effort (hours) Ability to cover the positions (people) Coverage of the range of technology needed Coverage of the skills required for the project Current hires, contingency hires, and recruiting required to fill positions Staff available by the prime contractor, subcontractors, and other sources Size, scope, and complexity of experience Equipment required Depth is usually quantified. But breadth doesn’t have to be. When you have both depth and breadth, then you can communicate that you cover all of the requirements with sufficient back-ups to mitigate risks and ensure delivery. I like to use depth and breadth by name because they are easy for the customer to understand. And presenting them in a table or matrix makes them easy to evaluate.

When I tell people that they should exceed RFP compliance if they want to win, they often reply “But if we do that we’ll be too expensive.” This comes from an assumption that time is money and that anything you do takes time. When I point out that you can go beyond the RFP without it actually costing anything, they often reply with “But how do we do that?” Well, here’s how… Proposal writing examples See also: Examples 1) Focus on “why” in addition to compliance. Show that you are the better alternative for the customer to select because you have better judgment. Having better judgment does not cost anything. Not having good judgment is what will cost you. The reason we do [RFP requirement] by [differentiated approach] is that it [mitigates risk | improves quality | achieves a benefit]. 2) Make something common uncommon. Everyone is going to propose a quality assurance plan, probably because the customer requires it. But even if they don't, you probably will do things according to quality principles because it prevents risk to your company. If you're going to do things anyway, you might as way get credit for doing them! But how can you avoid having an approach that is minimal and the same as everyone else's approach? What makes your approach special? Everyone is going to have an approach to staffing the project. Everyone is going to be compliant (at least the only competitors to be concerned about will be fully compliant). Everyone can do the work. Everyone has experience. Most of these are routine. So in everything you do, what can you do so that it is not routine? Show that in addition to what you do and the reason why, there is also something added. This simple change in presentation makes the ordinary something more, something special. Our approach to [quality | something else] goes beyond the [double checking | something else] so that it also serves as a [project management | design | something else] tool. This not only achieves [goal] but also adds value by [additional benefit]. 3) Focus on how you will deliver instead of what you will deliver. This works best when the RFP forces everyone to bid the same thing. Everyone who makes the competitive range will be compliant. If you are going to differentiate, you have to do it without adding to the cost. So don’t change what you will deliver, just deliver it in a better way. Something as simple as checklists or documented standard operating procedures that are kept as records so they can be verified can take you from someone who promises, to someone who has verifiable, accountable delivery. By [differentiated approach] we ensure [better | faster | more reliable] [delivery | implementation | execution]. 4) Use compliance to solve a problem that others leave unspoken. Everyone will be compliant. But you can show more value delivered by talking about the problems your approach to fulfilling the requirements will solve. This is also much more compelling than telling the customer you’ll do what they asked you to do. While it may be true that everyone who is compliant will do the same thing, by mentioning the issues you demonstrate more understanding, preparedness, risk management, and value than those who don't mention the issues you do. By meeting the required deadline for [requirement] we ensure we have enough time later for [second requirement]. This [mitigates the risk | something else] of [problem] and ensures we can [benefit]. 5) Ghost the competition. Explain why if someone else doesn’t do things the way you do they’ll be unacceptable. This involves explaining what you do that's different, the problems it solves, and the possibility of those problems occurring if another vendor doesn't do things the way you do. We do [differentiated approach] because it [avoids a problem | mitigates a risk | ensures compliance | adds value]. A contractor that doesn’t do this will expose the customer to unacceptable risk of noncompliance and [other problems]. 6) Offer something intangible. Intangible benefits are difficult to quantify and usually less compelling. But as a last resort, they can sometimes earn you a few points in evaluation. While intangible benefits can be real, the challenge is that they are not quantifiable, tangible, or easy to prove. Because we have experience with [reference], we can better anticipate problems like [examples]. 7) Make something intangible tangible. Do you provide better quality? Are you faster? More reliable? More experienced? More capable? More responsive? More flexible? If you simply claim these attributes, they will likely be ignored. What can you do to make them tangible? Can you quantify them? Can you draw a picture? Can you provide an example? Can you make the impact clear? Making intangible differences tangible can be challenging. Which is why most of your competitors will not do it and why if you do it you can outscore them. Quality is often promised, but especially when delivering services it can be very subjective. If you make it less subjective, you can appear much more thorough and provide a tangible difference that the evaluators can score as a strength in your proposal. The reason our services are of better quality is that we define it. See Exhibit X for a sample of the quality criteria we use. We use one checklist for each task assignment to ensure that we can define success. We use the second checklist after completion to verify that we delivered as promised. By simply checking the boxes, we accumulate performance metrics that identify trends, uncover problems, and support making decisions such as resource allocation. The result is tangibly better quality of service. 8 ) Quantify things they don’t. Take the key tradeoff decisions from your basis of estimate (BOE) and explain why they are the right choices. Or explain why your capacities beyond what the RFP requires mitigate risks or provide other benefits. This can involve citing things you already have that the customer didn't ask for, but in the right circumstances could prove to be a benefit. In addition to the X staff required for this project, we have an additional X staff who enable us to respond quickly in the event of turnover or a change in the requirements. 9) Address the stakeholders. You may be delivering the exact same thing, but by citing benefits to the customer's users, partners, executives, and other stakeholders you can show greater understanding and value. Often delivering benefits to the customer's stakeholders also benefits the customer. We will leverage [compliance with requirement] to ensure that [needs] of [customer]’s stakeholders are not only met but that they also [receive benefits]. 10) Don’t just comply, accomplish the goal. Make the benefits of everything you do achieve the goals the customer has for conducting the procurement. They may be ordering paper clips with certain specifications, but their goal might be having well organized recordkeeping. While everyone will be compliant, you will be accomplishing something that matters to them. We will achieve [goal] by [approach to compliance with RFP requirements] so that [bigger picture]. 11) Offer a better future. Think of it as a long-term relationship. What are the possibilities down the road? What does this project set up for the future? What kind of foundation will you lay? Making this your goal is another way to show understanding and added value while simply meeting the requirements of this project. In addition to [required capability] we bring capabilities in [related but not required]. As [project] matures, these additional capabilities will become more relevant and could position [customer] to better meet its future goals. 12) Be easier to work with. If you’ve got several vendors who can all supply what you want at a reasonable price, who would you pick? Would it be one that’s uninspiring but compliant, or one that seems super helpful? A lot depends on what you’re procuring. Is it a bit uncertain? Outside your area of expertise? Complicated? Sometimes being easy to work with matters a lot to the customer even though it’s not part of the specifications. In several important ways, our approach adapts to [customer]’s preferences. Since they require similar level of effort, we will consult with [customer] to determine which of the following approach options you prefer. 13) Exceed the specifications. If you can complete the transition in half the time, then do that and explain how the customer will benefit. If some of the performance specifications are easy to meet, offer to accept a tougher standard that you know you can still meet. Because others won’t. Don't be afraid to commit to doing things better when you can. While the requirement is that monthly reports be delivered on time 90% of the time, we commit to delivering these reports on time 98% of the time. The difference is that we will be late five times less than our competitors who merely comply with the RFP. 14) Be more compliant than compliant. Offer compliance that goes beyond the RFP. When customers care about compliance, it is usually because they have things they have to comply with. In addition to complying with the RFP requirements, we will ensure that the work is performed according to [relevant laws, regulations, and directives]. Do you want to submit an ordinary proposal or a great proposal? Taking approaches like these enables you to go from submitting an ordinary proposal to submitting a proposal that is better. And you can do this with any RFP, no matter how specific or limiting the requirements. You can do these things without adding any cost to what you are offering. And if you are in a best value competition, you can take each of these things further by investing time or resources into turning them into differentiators and then quantifying the difference in value to the customer.

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Often preparing the pricing is that last thing people do when working on a proposal. This is especially true with proposals for services where people have to figure out what their offering is going to be before they can price it. However, a good argument can be made that proposal pricing should be done first. In between those two sits the basis of estimate (BOE). See also: Technical Approach A BOE is a combination of the data and formulas you’ll use to calculate an estimate, such as the price for doing something. A BOE does not require a lot of writing to prepare. But it does require that you think things through well enough to calculate them. Or at least to identify what the variables are. You may be able to get things started just by understanding what the variables are and how to turn them into the formulas that will produce the estimate you need. Then you can collect the data later. When companies do their pricing last, they sometimes fall into the trap of figuring out what to offer by writing about it. This is extremely risky and can send a proposal into a death spiral. You should design your offering before you write about it. This is much easier said than done because there is no single way to design an offering. Does this mean to create a diagram or blueprint? That’s not normally appropriate for a service proposal. But what is appropriate for a service proposal is to calculate how many people, in what roles, at what level of effort, with what tools, materials, and resources will be required to accomplish the project goals. If you do this first, even at a high level, you will have to think through what you approaches are. You will have to quantify them. And before you write anything you can determine whether they fit the budget. You may find creating the BOE to be… challenging. But you have to do it sooner or later or you can’t price your proposal. And if you do it first, then proposal writing becomes describing an approach you’ve already figured out, instead of a tangled mess of figuring it out while rewriting it with every little change until you run out of time. If you want a better proposal experience and a higher win rate, you should do everything possible to begin creating the BOE sooner. Here are some things you can do to streamline creating the BOE. Create templates that do the math for people Create lists of possible variables to consider. List sources of data or possible formulas to use for quantifying the variables. Don’t try to produce final pricing. You might not need to prepare any pricing at this stage. Sometimes just figuring out the variables is enough. Consult with the people who do the pricing for your company and find out what inputs they usually need. They might even be able to provide formulas. They might appreciate getting the inputs required up front. Guide people to answer questions like these: Do you know what you need to know in order to make the required estimates? Do you have the details you need to perform the calculations necessary? How do you quantify what you have to do to meet the RFP requirements/specifications? How many people at what level of effort do we need? What are the variables that determine that? Location, shifts, productivity? What tools, resources, or other things will be directly required to fulfill the contract? Do you need a Bill of Materials (BOM)? Are there supply chain concerns? Will you have teammates? How will the effort be divided among them? How do they impact what will be needed? What things will be needed that are indirect, outside the project, or not billable under the contract like invoicing or HR support? Is our approach feasible? Extra credit if you determine whether you can deliver at the price-to-win. Does the BOE account for what you need to do to add value, differentiate, and win the proposal? You can make preparing the BOE part of the planning people need to do before they start proposal writing. Consider holding a review of the BOE before writing can start. The discussions that fall out of doing that will benefit the proposal immensely.

To help you implement our recommendations in 6 things you need in your proposal reference library, here are some subtopics to address in each area. If you are avoiding narrative, you can keep this information in a spreadsheet, with a tab for each category. For graphics, quick notes, etc., PowerPoint can also be a convenient format since it’s easy to move through. I’ve also seen Evernote, Google Keep, and Microsoft OneNote used to store this information. Keep in mind that some information will be pursuit specific and some will apply to all of your pursuits. Pursuit specific may not be worth saving in a central repository, but when you apply your reference material to a new pursuit you should specifically provide a place for people to contribute pursuit specific variations for use in the new proposal. Also, for business lines or markets, you can create categories or columns. Topics to consider for your proposal reference library: Proof points See also: Reuse Performance/accomplishments Specifications/comparisons Features/benefits Quantities/capacities Capabilities Qualifications Durations Results Turnover Cost reductions/efficiencies Sections/topics: Technical, management, quality, risk, staffing, transition KPIs, metrics, and performance measurements Sample reports, documentation samples A single version of the truth Dates Durations Numbers Locations Names/labels Events/history Certifications Tests/audits Steps Procedures/processes/approaches/methodologies Sections/topics: Technical, management, quality, risk, staffing, transition Options Results Reasons Graphics Concepts of operations (CONOPs) Standard approaches leading to results Standard comparisons/metaphors/messages Standard positioning Pictures as proof Differentiators Frequent evaluation criteria Approaches Competitive positioning Capability/qualifications Ghosts Strengths Sections/topics: Technical, management, quality, risk, staffing, transition Approaches mapped to different circumstances Customer circumstances Evaluation criteria Incumbent/not incumbent Local/not local US/OCONUS Single site/geographically dispersed Technology/platform Subject matter Commodity/bespoke Business line Competitive circumstances Risk Environment Capacity/scale Jurisdiction Customer concerns Timing/schedule Accuracy/precision Predictability/consistency Specified/Indefinite quantities, deadlines, etc.

What should a proposal library contain? If you think it should contain proposal text ready to use so you don’t have to write as much in your future proposals, you’re setting yourself up to lose your proposals. There are better ways to speed up your proposals. But there are some reference materials that are handy to have. And people need inspiration. These things can help improve your proposals instead of weaken them. See also: Why proposal reuse is really much more expensive than fresh proposal writing Are templates the best way to prepare proposals? Proposal Sample Makeover: Before & After What is the best way to accelerate proposals? Sample Proposal Introductions Template alternative: proposal cookbooks What matters to the customer depends on what they are buying Creating a win strategy re-use library Matrix of key customer concerns and how they relate to your proposal Why proposal win themes are so hard to write (and what to do about it) What matters to the customer about your offering? 20 questions and an example that shows why every proposal is different The problem with proposal re-use repositories The best example of bad proposal writing I've ever seen Proof points. You obviously think that you are the customer’s best alternative. But how will you prove it? All those benefits you’re promising, how will you prove the customer will actually get them? Your credibility lies in how compelling your proof points are. When you claim that you will complete the transition without disruption, how will you prove it? When you claim you can staff the project without risk, how will you prove it? Each proposal likely has dozens of claims. How will you prove each and every one? While the narrative of your proposal will change greatly with every proposal due to changes in what the customer cares about, it is a good idea to remember your proof points and be able to refer back to them. A single version of the truth. How many staff does your company have? How many locations? When was it founded? What is the proper way to describe a certification you have? Or word around the fact that you don’t actually have it? It’s a good idea to have a reference where you can look up definitions, names, facts, dates, events, numbers, etc. Otherwise, they may get reported differently by different authors. Steps. While you will want to tailor the language you use to describe a standard process in order to match the goals, reasoning, benefits, participants, terminology, and more to the current RFP, the actual steps may remain the same. Or not. For example, the recruiting process is not actually the same for every project. Nor is the transition plan. But while you can’t just copy the processes, you can recycle the steps. You don’t need or even want the entire writeup for a process, but it can be handy to see a list of steps so you can decide what to add, delete, or change and then prepare a narrative based on what the new customer cares about and the language they use in the new RFP. Graphics. For process-oriented proposals, sometimes a good approach is to create a graphic based on your standard process and begin proposal writing by doing a gap analysis against the current bid to determine how it should be changed. These graphics can be simple wireframes or even hand-drawn graphics because they are not intended to be the finished product. The marked-up graphic is very valuable for planning the writing. It tells you how this project will be different from the last one. And if you build your graphics around your messaging, starting by marking up your standard graphics will also inform the writers about what points they should be making. Here is a ton of inspiration for your graphics. Differentiators. What makes your company, staff, and approaches special? If you believe them to be unique, what makes them so? Why should the customer conclude that you are their best alternative based on these attributes? Some of your differentiators will be specific to a pursuit. But some of these relate to your company, resources, and other things that may apply to more than just one bid. Once you’ve got your differentiators figured out, it’s a good idea to turn them into a reference resource that not only informs people but also inspires and helps them figure out the pursuit specific differentiators. You get extra credit when you map your differentiators to your proof points. Approaches mapped to circumstances. If you look across many proposals, you’ll find that certain approaches lend themselves to certain circumstances. For example, certain approaches make sense when you are the incumbent. Other approaches make sense when you are not the incumbent. Some approaches work best for a customer that is obsessed with quality, other approaches are for customers obsessed about risk. Or performance. Or schedule. Or cost. Etc. Think of all the approaches you have, both technical and management. Then think of the variations and options. Then organize them according to which circumstances they apply to. The goal really isn’t to recycle the approaches, but to provide inspiration for people in those circumstances to help them think of better approaches so you can win more of what you bid. Don’t try to capture a lot of narrative text. That form of proposal reuse can be more expensive than starting fresh each time. Instead focus on reusing data, remembering ideas, listing options, and providing inspiration. Narrative text is not only a pain to maintain, but will also lead to people emphasizing the wrong things for the new customer, or worse not emphasize anything. When you map the proof points, graphics, steps, approaches, and differentiators to the circumstances of your current bid, you get a ton of powerful inspiration. That’s why on PropLIBRARY you see over 500 recipes that provide the ingredients instead of finished proposal sections intended for reuse. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers we've taken these 6 areas and identified 58 subtopics to help you figure out what proposal reference materials you should have on hand.

Ghosting the competition is an advanced proposal skill. It involves explaining why the customer should not select your competitors. Here are some examples of the wording you can use to do that covering many proposal sections. Click here for an explanation of techniques for ghosting the competition. Use care when ghosting the competition and note how important it is to offer a differentiated solution that shows why the customer should select you before pointing out that it is also a reason why the customer should not select a competitor. Experience See also: Examples One of the things we’ve learned about doing [fill in the blank] for [fill in the blank] is the importance of [fill in the blank]. If a contractor does not [account for|anticipate] doing this, [consequences]. At [fill in the blank] we developed techniques for overcoming the challenge of [fill in the blank]. This enables us to prevent [fill in the blank]. These techniques include [fill in the blanks]. If a contractor has not developed techniques for [fill in the blank] you will be at risk for [consequence] during the [project activity]. We require all of our Project Managers to make contributions to our [lessons learned database]. The result adds value to our experience and makes it tangible. We do not claim years of experience while delivering inexperienced project staff. The project staff working on your project will have access to this valuable store of problems to anticipate, risks to mitigate, and ways to address issues that occur. Staff We have exceeded the number of key personnel required by the RFP by adding [positions]. We have named the staff who will fill these positions and are committed to delivering them. This means that on the project start date, we will deliver more than our competitors and less recruiting risk. It also gives you better insight into what you will be getting than other contractors offer to you. We have identified staff and provided resumes for all of the positions required for this contract. If we win, we will either hire and use the incumbent staff or use the proposed staff, depending on your preferences. This means that we actually offer less chance of positions not being filled (for example due to turnover) than the incumbent, more choice of qualified required staff qualifications and capability, and significantly better value. We have reduced the recruiting required and substantially mitigated the risk of not being ready at the project start date, by naming half of the staff required to perform this contract. A contractor that does not do this has double the risk that we offer. Approach We considered [approach option] but ultimately rejected it because of [reason]. Instead we have chosen [another option] that delivers [result] with less risk of [trade-off]. A contractor who bids [approach option] will be delivering a higher risk of [trade-off] that could in turn [consequence]. By using [tool] we completely remove the risk of manual errors, while simultaneously lowering costs. This is significant, because otherwise lowering costs using manual approaches requires either using fewer staff with higher workloads, or using less experienced staff, with either approach increasing the risk of manual errors. We designed our approach to solve the problem of [problem] by [techniques]. If this is not addressed, then [consequence] is likely to occur. While it is slightly more expensive to do this, it is far less expensive than fixing things when [problem] occurs. A contractor that does not do this will not only be ultimately more expensive, but they will also cause disruption to [customer]. Transition Our transition accounts for everything required, while completing in half the allowed time. Faster start-up adds value and significantly reduces the risks of not completing the transition on schedule. A transition plan that requires all of the allowable time exposes [customer] to risk if any transition activities, such as recruiting, take longer than expected. Our transition plan addresses updating project procedures to incorporate [new RFP requirements]. Even the incumbent can’t be ready on “Day One” because they too will need to make changes based on the new RFP. A contractor that does not account for these changes is basing operational readiness on flawed assumptions that could disrupt the project start. By using a transition team separate from the operational project management team, we ensure that RFP requirements will be met during the transition period. A contractor that does not do this will be relying on staff to develop infrastructure while also fulfilling operational requirements. This is an unreasonable expectation that our approach resolves. Quality We have reviewed the performance standards required in the RFP and in several key areas have improved on them. We are voluntarily accepting more difficult performance measures. This matters, because a [%] difference in performance results in a [%] difference in [availability|errors|other impacts]. A contractor that merely meets the requirements will result in [consequence]. Our approach to quality management not only fulfills the RFP requirements, but will also surface relevant metrics that will support making data-driven decisions. [Customer] staff will have full access to this data in order to better pursue your mission. Our quality surveillance approach collects data and documents findings. The result is full transparency regarding what was checked, when it was checked, what was found, and what was done about it. This extra effort reduces the burden on the customer to oversee our work, provides historical data regarding trends, can be used in predictive analysis, and helps ensure that lessons learned get applied. A contractor that merely claims to have a quality surveillance approach without doing this will have nothing to show for it if it is actually performed. Resources We have itemized in detail the reach-back resources available to this project. Companies make a lot of claims about resources, while at the same time making as few promises as possible. This is especially true regarding personnel and reach-back resources. Large companies with huge staffing counts can be just as resource poor as a small business because nearly all of those staff are billable and fully committed. The resources we have identified are available and will be deployed when needed. Like all companies, we delegate authority to different levels of management. What we do differently is that we escalate authority regarding resource allocation based on how long an issue has been unresolved. As the escalation table below shows, we also escalate issues all the way up to the CEO. We do this automatically. Companies that don’t describe how they escalate issues can hide them and delay in the hopes that a resolution will somehow occur. Our resources have been tailored to your environment and needs. This is important because [describe problem with generic or off-the-shelf resources]. When resources aren’t tailored, they can result in [consequences]. If a contractor has not described how their resources have been tailored, then you are at risk for these issues. Pricing Our pricing accounts for the following [issues]. Pricing that does not account for those issues will [not be compliant|have higher actual cost|be unreasonable|not be technically acceptable] because [reasons, give them the math]. In preparing our pricing we determined that there are several pricing strategies that could lower the numbers while introducing unacceptable risks. In preparing our pricing we calculated that below [number] it would not be possible to [hire the incumbent staff|perform|fulfill the requirements] because it would require [pricing x% below market|overhead below x%|other reasons]. Our pricing is above this threshold, but not excessively so. Pricing below this threshold exposes [customer] to unreasonable risk of [default|delay|other reasons]. Low price technically acceptable (LPTA) Our approach delivers [results] by [differentiated details] in order to ensure [goal] in spite of the risk of [describe risk]. When this happens, the impact results in performance that is not technically acceptable. A contractor that has not accounted for this and included it in their pricing is not being realistic or technically acceptable. Our solution includes [feature]. Without [feature] [describe negative outcome]. While the RFP does not specifically reference [feature], it is necessary in order to achieve the required goal. A proposal that does not mention [feature] and account for it in the price will not fulfill the requirements and therefore is not technically acceptable.

Ghosting the competition is an advanced proposal skill. It involves explaining why the customer should not select your competitors. It is best when: Ghosting comes after proving why they should select your proposal. You shouldn’t play on the dark side until you’ve established your inherent goodness. And even then, use it with care. Ghosting should also be handled indirectly, so that instead of being a direct attack it is more of a consideration that just happens to paint them in a bad light. You don’t name names unless you are certain in your fact-checking and provide the proof. Even then I’d avoid it. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a proposal there. In the right circumstances, ghosting the competition has strategic value and can impact the evaluation of your proposal. Plus it’s fun to be a tiny bit snarky. Think of ghosting the competition as subtly educating the proposal evaluators by dropping hints. If ghosting informs them of important things they need to know before they make a selection, then it delivers value to the customer and is not simply casting aspersions. But use it with care since being snarky can backfire. Techniques for ghosting the competition throughout your proposals This article is about techniques. PropLIBRARY Subscribers can also click here for 23 examples of wording that you can use when ghosting the competition. Here are some ways to employ ghosting in various sections of your proposals: See also: Winning Experience. Why do customers care about experience? It often comes down to the customer not wanting things to go wrong. If you have experience, you should play up your ability to prevent that. And if you want to ghost against customers that don’t have experience, point out all the things that could go wrong without the experience that you have. Since no one will bid without being able to claim they have experience, you should expect them all to have it. With ghosting you can undermine the relevance and applicability of their experience. The key to this will be the examples you provide. Claims about the benefits of having experience without examples of how it provides advantages are not compelling. The same applies to claims of other experience not being relevant. Staff. If you have the staff, then name names. Prove it. And ghost the competition by pointing out the recruiting risks. If you don’t have the staff, then you can still ghost the competition by providing a better approach to screening, qualifying, and onboarding staff. Don't forget to include everything that the staff will need to be successful, so that you can end up with better staff. Ask yourself, "What does the customer care about regarding staffing?" Is it speed of project startup, performance of the staff, coverage, or the risk of disruption to something ongoing? Provide more of what the customer cares about, while ghosting against those who don’t or who merely say they’ll meet the requirements. Approach. Why did you decide to do things the way you did? What could go wrong if you didn’t? That’s what you need to explain in order to ghost your competition. Show that your approaches will succeed and explain why. Use those explanations to show why others who don’t follow your approach or don’t cite the issues you do may fail. Then let them compare the approaches. Simply providing the details, examples, or proof points gives your proposal strengths when others fail to mention them. Especially when you add what might happen if the customer selected a proposal that didn’t mention those things. Pricing. What must be reflected in the pricing for it to be reasonable? What must be accounted for? What bad things might result if a competitor’s pricing doesn’t account for or mention the things you did? What might surprise the buyer? Transition. Incumbents often get lazy and cite transition superiority without proving it. You can steal contracts from incumbents by showing that there are considerations that if not accounted for can cause disruptions even by the incumbent. When you are thorough and account for every little detail, you not only mitigate the risk for the customer of selecting you, you can introduce risk if they do not select you. When projects can fail right at the beginning, transition plans matter. Quality. If quality matters to the customer, then don’t treat it as a mere requirement. Show that you will achieve what matters about quality and ghost your competitors as merely following procedures and not achieving the right goals. Resources. Companies make a lot of claims about resources, while at the same time making as few promises as possible. This is an opportunity to explain why all those resources that a competitor claims to have will never impact or be made accessible to the project. It is also an opportunity to offer resources that will and explain the positive impact they will have. Special note regarding low price technically acceptable (LPTA) bids If the customer will select the lowest price bid that meets their specifications and you are concerned you might not have the lowest price, all you can do is make sure that your proposal is the only one that is technically acceptable. Your proposal becomes about two things: Proving that you meet the specifications Proving that anyone who doesn’t do things the way you do will not be acceptable Ghosting the competition may be your only chance of winning if your price is not the lowest. Don't be a hypocrite One of the things you will notice if you try ghosting is how important differentiation becomes. It's hard to point fingers at someone else if you are not any different. You should always give them a reason to select you that also implies a reason not to select someone else. Before you can do that you must be able to articulate why they should select you in a way that others will not also claim.

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Every one of the sample proposal write-ups below is selling the same widget. With minor edits, that widget could be a product, a service, or any other offering. The widget is not the point. Good news and bad news See also: Examples First the bad news: Even though they offer the exact same thing, your proposals should end up so different from each other that it doesn't even make sense to recycle the content. Now for the good news: Creating highly tailored proposals increases your competitiveness so much it is highly profitable. Note how different each example is. The number of words that are the same in each writeup is practically nil. This is an excellent demonstration of the dangers of proposal reuse and starting from pre-written proposal content. Each customer has different concerns, and even if you’re selling the exact same widget, the proposal must be very different if you want to be competitive. If you start from the same sample proposal every time, you will not achieve this level of customization and your win probability will drop. You may save a little time, but the cost of the reduced win rate will be orders of magnitude more than what it would have cost to prepare better proposals. Another way to look at this is that proposals should be treated as a profit center. If you invest in better proposals that increase your competitiveness, you will make more profit than if you don’t. These examples also show why you can’t be everything to everybody, and why you will be far more competitive if you have even just a little insight into what concerns your customer. You can’t address all nine of these at the same time, and even if you could, the ones that matter to the customer would get lost in the noise. Besides, every customer articulates their concerns differently. Even if you had these 9 and 99 more like them ready to go, you’d need to reword them for every new proposal. If you don’t write your proposals to a specific customer, you are really just sending expensive brochures. Examples of proposal writing Proposal to a customer concerned about quality: The reason our widgets are more effective is the way we design quality in from the beginning. We not only apply quality criteria to sampling and testing our widgets after they are made, but our design methodology uses those same quality criteria to create a manufacturing process that eliminates the source of most defects. The result is greater reliability, lower total cost of ownership, and customers who can focus on their mission and spend less time on widget maintenance. Proposal to a customer focused on experience: Our widgets are better [cite differentiators] because they benefit from all our experience with installing them at [identify customers like this one]. This experience enables us to anticipate the inherent project risks [identify them for better credibility]. Our [lessons learned methodology] enables us to deliver more value to our customers [better if defined]. Our approach transforms experience into action, which will have much more impact than empty claims of years of experience. This is important because an implementation without the vital lessons learned that our staff bring would be at risk of [negative outcomes]. Proposal to a customer concerned about risk: We have identified and mitigated the risks associated with delivering the widgets to you by [insert differentiated approach]. We will also give you direct access to our widget tracking system so that you can see issues as they arise, monitor our timeliness in resolving them, know when we’ve escalated issues, and see how we’ve resolved them in real-time. Nothing will be hidden from you and you will be able to provide feedback and be as involved in the decision making as you choose to be. We will manage things just as if you are watching, even when you aren’t, because we will never know whether you are or are not. Because of this, you may not have to put as much effort into monitoring us in order to get the widgets you were promised, when you were promised them. Proposal to a customer focused on the staff: We will provide all the staff named in our proposal, all of whom are dedicated widget specialists. We do not expose you to the risk of us having to recruit the key staff needed to do the job. We know that it’s the people on the ground who will make this project successful, and not promises from the home office. We also have not included resumes that look good but are for staff you will never see, and our level of effort tables prove it. A contractor who does not provide level of effort commitments will be tempted to withhold their more experienced but expensive staff during performance. As a result, widget quality and performance will suffer. Our staff are not only fully qualified widget specialists, but they are also supported so they can be effective. Our people perform better because of the knowledge resources and best practice forums that we provide. Proposal to a customer with trust issues regarding vendors: While our past performance shows that we deliver as promised, it’s our approaches and transparent management that ensure you will get the widgets just they way we’ve promised them moving forward. These [provide differentiated examples] ensure that no step in the widget workflow can be overlooked or skipped and that every widget is fully functioning at or above specifications before they are delivered to you. Proposal to a customer who is happy with their current vendor: Our approach uses new [technology, approaches, etc.] to produce a better widget that will enable you to [insert example of better goal fulfillment]. Our approaches are proven to be low risk because we have already implemented them for other, similar clients. We have the people, processes, and tools to begin immediately with an approach that will enable you to pick up from the current state without any disruption and then raise the bar. The result will be a smooth transition that not only continues a reliable supply of widgets, but also [achieves benefits like lower costs, improved performance, time savings, etc.]. Proposal to a customer concerned with compliance: [customer name] will be better able to [insert goal of procuring widgets] because our approach is based not only on fulfilling the specifications in the RFP, but on helping you to achieve your goals. [Exhibit/table] shows that our widget meets or exceeds every specification. In addition, because our widget also complies with [insert other relevant standards, rules, laws, etc.] you will be able to confidently rely on our widgets. Widgets that do not meet these additional standards will not only represent a compliance risk, but they will also ultimately cost more than our widgets due to lower performance and reliability. Proposal to a customer concerned about widget performance: The increase in performance that results from using our widgets will [Lower cost? Improve results? Save time? Other benefit?]. We achieve better performance by [differentiated process] that [delivers benefits]. When widgets aren’t produced this way [describe how disaster may ensue]. Proposal to President Trump: It’s a great widget. We only sell the very best widgets. Anyone who says they are not the greatest is Fake News. People love our widgets. Recycling and automated assembly are dangerous and will cost you more than doing it right How well do you think a recycled widget write-up from a previous proposal would stack up in competition? Anything you copy and paste from a past proposal will have been written for the wrong context and show that you are out of touch with the new customer's concerns. What would the win probability of any one of these be if given to any of the other customers? It is better to focus on competitiveness than on reuse and assembly. More proposals produced faster but less competitively will not lead to growth. Instead of focusing on proposal assembly, focus on differentiation that better addresses customer concerns. I hope my competitors all recycle their narratives and automate their proposal assembly. Because I won’t.

Carl Dickson, Founder of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY sat down for an interview with Ashley Kayes and Baskar Sundaram of the Scribble Talk Podcast. He shared some insights into the nature of proposals as well as some details about himself that have never been published before. 90

Here is some guidance that can help you when you sit down to write the proposal. While we've broken it down so that someone could follow it sentence by sentence, the goal is really just to enable people to write better proposals by giving them something to check their paragraphs against. If you are stuck regarding how to approach proposal writing, this can help. See also: Great Proposals A structured approach to writing introduction paragraphs When you sit down to write, before you start summarizing ask yourself, “What makes my offering different, and how is that better?” Then drop the summary and focus on making your introduction about how your differentiation will produce better results for the customer. Compose your paragraph like this: The point you want to make set up as something the customer will get This should be followed by points about your differentiators, set up as things that will make what the customer gets better An optional competitive ghost, saying what bad things might result if things aren’t done this way and intentionally targeting competitors who don’t meet your standards If possible, organize what follows your introduction around your differentiators. If what follows must follow an RFP-mandated outline, then map your differentiators to that outline and differentiate how you comply with the RFP requirements. Keep in mind that what the customer gets should address all of their concerns, from how to complete their evaluation, will they actually get what you’ve promised, and how will it impact their future, to the unwritten requirements that didn’t make it into the RFP. Also keep in mind that strengths, while good to have, are not differentiators. Writing responses to RFP requirements When you sit down to write, before addressing the RFP requirements ask yourself, “What point do I need to make here?” Then ask yourself, “What does the customer need to see here to perform their evaluation?” Also ask yourself, “What might the customer be concerned about?” Then address the RFP requirements in a way that is easy to evaluate and achieves compliance, while making your points and addressing the customer’s concerns. Try this model for paragraph construction: An insightful point you want to make about why your approach matters and what it will achieve. This should be followed by sentences that show insight into achieving the goal of the requirements, using the RFP’s key words, and addressing the customer’s potential concerns in a way that turns them into advantages of your approach. Each of these sentences should have two parts: What you will do or deliver Why you will do it that way Make sure that you follow the RFP instructions and optimize what you say to achieve the highest score against the evaluation criteria while responding to the requirements. Note that why you do things is sometimes more important than what you will do. Use lots of tables, text boxes, and graphics Wherever possible create tables, use text boxes, and incorporate graphics. Use them to reduce the writing while improving communications. Try to move all details into table, lists into text boxes, and procedures, relationships, and metaphors into graphics. This will enable you to focus the text on telling your story about how your differentiators will produce better outcomes.

Warning: proposal damage may occur Let’s start by addressing things you should avoid: Claims. Especially unsubstantiated claims. But claims in general. They rarely pass the “So what?” test. They rarely increase your evaluation score. Claims belong in advertisements. Proofs belong in proposals. Proposals get read differently than advertisements. Things that work in advertisements can backfire when used in proposals. Descriptions. Descriptions add very little value for the evaluators. Evaluators respond to insight. Insight is usually related to why you do things instead of what you do. Insight is found in why your qualifications matter or how you turn them into advantages in performance. Insight is how you pass the “So What?” test. Patronization. Don’t tell them how to make their decision. Do give them reasons in your favor. Be subtle. Being merely beneficial. Don’t just sprinkle your proposal with generically beneficial results of your merely compliant offering. It’s good to deliver benefits to the customer. But they have to be superior benefits in order to impact the customer’s decision. These are bad habits that will undermine your ability to get it right. So what should you write about in your proposals? See also: Winning You know that the proposal evaluators: Will be checking to see if you fulfill the RFP requirements Will be looking for strengths and weaknesses in how you fulfill those requirements Must complete evaluation forms and justify their decision May need to justify a best value award at a higher price Have other alternatives than accepting your proposal So talk about what matters to someone making a decision about what to do or which to select. Help them make that decision. Don’t tell them how to perform their evaluation, but do give them the information they need to do it. If you merely state a claim and then describe your RFP compliance, you will not be competitive against someone who takes proposal writing seriously. Plus, your proposal will be boring and a chore to read. The most important ingredient in proposal writing What makes your offering special? What makes it not only better, but the best? What makes you matter so much you become the customer’s best alternative? All of that starts by being different. What are your differentiators? You can always find differentiators. If they are not what you offer, they might be how you deliver it or why you made the trade-off decisions that you made. Your entire proposal should be about proving why your differentiators make you the customer’s best alternative. You accomplish this by showing how your differentiators relate to the decision that they have to make. It starts by making points: At the section level, make the point about how your differentiators will lead to better outcomes. At the paragraph level, make the point about how your differentiators will result in better requirements fulfillment. Make the text and graphics proofs of your differentiators. The result will be a proposal that has insightful advantages that aren’t available elsewhere and that delivers better results, making your proposal the customer’s best alternative. Planning your proposal content around what it will take to win You can turn this into a sentence-by-sentence plan. But that might be more planning than you can accomplish, even though companies often spend days' worth of time on the back end doing sentence-by-sentence rewriting that could have been avoided by planning it that way on the front end. But there is a middle ground for planning your proposal content. Start by identifying your differentiators and the points you want to make. Then have your proposal writers take it from there. You can review what they produce by checking it against the points and assessing whether they are sufficiently substantiated, achieve RFP compliance, and are optimized to achieve the highest evaluation score. To make it easier for proposal writers to accomplish this, we’ve created a blueprint for proposal writing. It’s only available to our paid subscribers, but we’ve given away hints at how to construct one. In our blueprint we break it down so that someone could follow it sentence by sentence. But the goal is really just to enable people to write better proposals by giving them something to check their paragraphs against.

If you are obsessed with speeding up your proposal writing, the first thing you might want to think about are the things that slow it down. They may not be what you think… To slow down proposal writing: See also: Faster Start proposal writing before you have your basis of estimate (BOE) figured out. One way to look at your proposal is simply as proof of your basis of estimate. It’s kinda hard to prove your BOE if you don’t have one. Without the BOE already figured out, people will tend to write about capabilities and qualifications in a broad beneficial sounding way that does very little to help the customer reach their decision regarding what the best alternative is. Trying to work out your BOE while doing the writing is a surefire way to slow down the writing, and having to rewrite every time you modify the BOE will make it take even longer. Start writing before you have the points you want to make figured out. Every paragraph in your proposal should prove a point. Then you substantiate that point with details that demonstrate RFP compliance while maximizing your score against the evaluation criteria. If you have your basis of estimate and the points you want to make already figured out, the paragraphs practically write themselves. Without a set of points to make, proposal writers will make some up on their own. For better or worse. Actually, the worst worse if is when they don’t. A lot of proposals end up being simply descriptive. A descriptive proposal is literally pointless. Rewriting to try to insert some points is a surefire way to make proposal writing take longer, since you will likely need to edit every sentence in a paragraph that you try to insert a new point into. Start writing without a compliance matrix. If the writer has a compliance matrix, they know what RFP requirements they have to comply with. They know what words to use. They know what evaluation criteria will decide whether they win or lose in that section. A surefire way to slow down proposal writing is to give the writers a copy of the RFP and then expect them to figure it out, achieve compliance, optimize against the evaluation criteria, and do it on the first attempt. Recycling past proposals can actually make the writing take longer, as well as hurt your win rate. Your past proposals were all written to prove the wrong points. What concerned the previous evaluators was different from the concerns of the new set of evaluators. So either you leave them as beneficial sounding pointless narratives, or you edit every single sentence. Then there is the wording of the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, and statement of work to consider. They usually change from RFP to RFP. Parsing apart a narrative to base it on the wording of the new RFP will take far longer than you realize. But perhaps a more likely outcome is that people won’t do that. They’ll “tailor” the “reuse” material by adding some stuff from the new RFP without getting rid of the material from the RFP that was written to address the wrong customer concerns. Given a BOE, a compliance matrix, and a list of points to make I can write sentences faster than I can edit a recycled narrative. So a surefire way to slow down your proposals and reduce your proposal evaluation score is to start from recycled proposal content. Don't give your proposal writers any structure. How should proposal writers introduce sections and paragraphs? What should those introductions accomplish? How should they be supported? What should they emphasize? All it takes is a little high-level direction. Not knowing these things, having to figure them out, then having to rewrite them when you get them wrong are surefire ways to slow down proposal writing. Start proposal writing without a set of quality criteria. If your review process is to invite some people to read the draft and give their opinions, it’s a surefire way to make the proposal writing take longer. If the writers don’t know what the target is, they are not likely to hit it. You may effectively double the writing time if you conduct your reviews like this. You may even simply run out of time and submit the proposal you have, instead of the proposal you wanted to have. Instead, proposal writers and proposal reviewers should both work from the same set of criteria that define what proposal quality is and what they should accomplish to pass the review. Start the proposal without already having the staff you need to write it. Or assign writers who will be wearing too many hats. Time spent looking for resources or using inattentive resources is a surefire way to make the writing take longer. This is because they won’t be writing to the plan. Either they will use the lost time as an excuse not to do the planning needed to write quickly and deliberately, or they won’t pay attention to the plan and take shortcuts., Skip the graphics. Graphics seem hard. But the problem is not illustration. The problem is the thinking that goes into understanding what you are trying to communicate before illustration can happen. It's so much easier to write until you stumble across what you want to say or simply run out of time. A lot of companies spend a huge amount of time writing procedures and descriptions, and explaining relationships that could be easily presented in graphics. Graphics are an investment that reduces writing, focuses what writing you must do on your differentiators, and gets people out of being merely descriptive. So skipping the graphics is a surefire way to slow down proposal writing and add to the amount of rewriting you'll have to do. If you go back and reread this, the secrets for accelerating proposal writing are there. In fact, the entire proposal process is implied. But the secrets for accelerating proposal writing do not involve recycling past proposals, making putting pen to paper your top priority after RFP release, figuring things out while you write about them, or having ad hoc subjective proposal reviews. It’s kind of funny how the things most companies do to accelerate their proposals actually make them take longer. But I like it that way. It creates an opportunity for competitive advantage for the companies that understand it.

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Proposal themes are defined in many different and not very helpful ways. Try googling it. How does someone new to proposals write a “concept” that gets “woven throughout the proposal” to “call attention to the benefits” you offer? Definitions like that can't be acted upon. Because themes are defined in such a nebulous way, they often end up being overly-broad claims of greatness that do nothing to persuade the customer. When I review proposals I often see unsubstantiated slogans that sound like what people have read in brochures. Writing proposals that sound like brochures is a big part of what makes customers distrust vendors. I also see proposal theme statements that have devolved into simply trying to sound beneficial. This often happens when the writer doesn’t have any insight into what the customer cares about and doesn't really have anything meaningful to say, but still wants to sound positive and somehow win. Why should the customer select you? See also: Themes When the customer is reading your proposal, they are looking for reasons why they should accept your proposal over all their other alternatives, which may even include doing nothing. Unsubstantiated claims, pronouncements about things like how critical quality will be to this project, or beneficial sounding attributes without any significant impact do not give the customer anything to help them reach a decision. Proposals are not won by trying to hypnotize the customer with subliminal messages. Proposals are won by proving that what you propose is the customer's best alternative. The most effective way to achieve this is by pointing out things that are truly different in your proposal and explaining why those differences matter. A key way customers select between proposals is to consider the differences between them. If your proposal points out those differentiators while explaining why they matter and how they make your proposal the customer’s best alternative, you make the customer's decision much easier. Differentiators are much easier to understand than themes. But sometimes people struggle to identify differentiators that really set them apart. A lot of the attempts at differentiators I see when I review proposals make the same claims that everyone else will make! You can expect every competitor to claim that: We have the best experience We have the best staff We are extremely well qualified We meet or exceed all RFP requirements We are the lowest risk We deliver the highest levels of quality Most of them are unsubstantiated claims and examples of bad proposal writing. But putting that aside, they are not really differentiators. Everyone bidding who has a shot at winning will be experienced, capable of staffing the project with impressive resumes, be well qualified, and will claim low risk and high quality. It does not matter how much you believe your claims to be true for you and better than everyone else’s claims. The customer will see them all as the same. Making claims similar to these puts you in the middle of the pack instead of making you a standout. A differentiator has to make you different. Ideally, a differentiator should make you unique (please don't claim that overused word), but you can sometimes settle for rare and valuable. If the customer reads about what you are offering and sees it as rare and valuable to them, that is a very good thing. Strengths are not necessarily differentiators, but they are still good to have While they are not differentiators, your experience, staffing, qualifications, risk management, and quality assurance are still good attributes to have. They are strengths and position you as a competent vendor. Competent is good. But it is not enough to be the best. It is theoretically possible to win without any differentiators if you have more strengths than your competitors. But proposing to be a little bit better than your competitors is not a way to achieve consistently high win rates. You want to be clearly superior, and that requires differentiators on top of your strengths. You can improve your proposal writing by skipping the themes and instead focusing on differentiators and strengths. If you’re astute, you’ll realize that your proposal writers probably can’t make up differentiators and strengths on their own. They’ll need technical and subject matter input. They’ll need experts to tell them what matters about what you’re offering. But proposal writers can help you articulate what matters as differentiators and strengths for the proposal. Then you can debate whether the differentiators are truly different and whether they are what the customer needs to reach a decision in your favor. This is a most important debate to have. Winning may depend on it. Make two lists: one for differentiators and one for strengths. Then ask yourself whether they add up to beating all possible competitors. Do this before you start proposal writing, and your proposal becomes a proof of your differentiators and strengths. That is exactly what the customer needs to make their decision.

A management approach is a document that explains to the customer what you will do to ensure that they get what you’ve promised. It is not simply a set of operational plans. A lot of people find writing the management approach for a proposal to be boring and uninspiring. They even routinely recycle their boring management approaches, as if the customer doesn’t care. I love to compete against them because the management approach is often a great opportunity to win proposals. Management approaches are inherently about trust. How does the customer know they will get all the technical proposal goodies you’ve promised them? What is the customer concerned about? Why should they believe that you can deliver? What good is your promised offering, no matter how great you claim it to be, if the customer can’t trust you to deliver? Writing the management approach isn't just answering the mail, it's proving that your company is reliable. More so even than the technical approach, it's where you prove your company's greatness instead of merely claiming it. "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) Most companies put far more effort into deciding what to offer than they put into how they will make sure that it gets delivered as promised. If there is any challenge at all to the project, then delivery is uncertain. And if there is no challenge to it, why does the customer need you at all? Why should the customer believe that you will do a better job meeting the challenges than their other alternatives? If your management approach is recycled boilerplate, you’re bidding at a competitive disadvantage. A routine management approach vs a winning management approach See also: Technical Approach Project management plans are often operational tools, without much flourish or insight to them. But the management approach for a proposal needs to be insightful and accomplish a lot more: A routine management approach for a proposal is an undifferentiated description of how you will run the project. It shows that you are capable of delivering. A winning management approach differentiates, earns trust, and adds value. It shows that you are not only capable of delivering, but that you will also overcome the anticipated and even unanticipated challenges. It proves that you will deliver more value and do it more reliably than any alternative. A routine, recycled management approach is not competitive against a management approach written to win. A simple approach for writing a winning management approach While in the technical approach the central question is typically how do you do things, in the management approach the central question is how do you make sure the project accomplishes its goals. How do you make sure things happen as promised? At every step in the value chain, there are opportunity to confirm, validate, anticipate, reallocate, communicate, record, track, monitor, and deliver. If you are making improvements for the customer, you are bringing positive change. But it's change nonetheless, and that creates opportunities to demonstrate you understand change management. Here are 200 additional topics to consider for your management approaches. All these things can earn trust by proving to the customer that you will deliver as promised. For each step, activity, event, or service, consider what happens: Before. What can you do to confirm expectations, anticipate problems, and prepare? What are your goals? During. What options do you have? How will you select among them? How will you detect problems? What will you do about them? How will you track progress? After. How will you validate that things were done correctly? How will you confirm you fulfilled your goals? This in essence is quality assurance, and quality is often a topic required to be addressed in your management plan. But for the management plan as a whole, think of quality more broadly. Think of it as reliability and trust. How do you prove that you are reliable under all circumstances and completely trustworthy? Your org chart is not simply a hierarchy. Your reports are not simply reports. An invoice is not simply an invoice. Everything single thing is done for a reason that benefits the customer and its completion adds value. The reasons why you do things can be more important than what you do. They show you have insight and judgment worthy of being trusted. Before, during, and after wrap everything you do in reasons for doing them that add value. Let other people treat their management approaches as routine. Channel your own distrust of salespeople and vendors into something more productive Have you ever had a bad vendor experience? What did you do about it in the future? What does the customer fear about selecting a vendor? Have they had problems in the past? Are they concerned about the project’s risks? What would you want a vendor to do to prove that they are worth your trust? What procedures should they follow? That’s what your management approach should be. Even if the technical requirements are routine, you can differentiate by providing better delivery. How do you ensure that better delivery actually takes place? That’s what your management approach should be. Turn your concerns about project risks into a demonstration to the customer that you are ready to face them When you prepare your technical approach, you’ll solve many problems and have to hedge against many unknowns. Every single one of them is a chance to show the customer that you can handle the project. Think of the things you don’t know as opportunities and not as disadvantages. Show the customer that you have accounted for and mitigated those issues. The winner will be the vendor that the customer is confident will be able to handle the problems that inevitably come up. You can inspire that kind of confidence by showing that your management approach: Has methods for anticipating problems early and preventing them from occurring at all Rapidly detects when problems do occur and quickly addresses them Will prevent small problems from growing into larger problems Already has an approach for dealing with problems that do become large so that you won’t be making it up as you go along Has a means to determine when things have been done correctly and ways to correct anything that isn’t correct Provides communication at every level and in every direction to the extent desired by the customer, which can range from full transparency to just informing them when they need to know Addresses when resource allocation is not optimal and can reallocate resources as needed over the life of the project These features can’t be simply claimed. They must be demonstrated. Features like these should be the results of what you will do. Blanket statements of what you’ll achieve without the details for how you will achieve them do not inspire confidence. Imagine three proposals… One has a routine management approach that is good enough to get the job done. The second promises much better results, but is short on the details for how this will be achieved. The third cites some of the things you’ve anticipated, explains what you’ll keep an eye open for when performing oversight, provides examples of things you’ll consider, describes what you’ll do in various contingencies, and includes some options you have ready if things go wrong. Which proposal would you pick?

Fight! Fight! Fight! Not really. But sometimes you do have to decide which to focus on first. Or how much to budget for each. Keep in mind that companies often define things differently. They often blur the lines between roles. If you have a slash in your title (i.e. BD/capture, capture/proposal) then you are neither. You stop prospecting the moment you start doing capture. You stop doing capture the moment you get in the weeds of document production. What matters depends on several things See also: Roles There is a difference between selling commodities where meeting the specifications matters more than who provides what is being procured, and selling complex services or solutions where the provider matters very much. The more the procurement focuses on specifications and price, the less important the relationship with the vendor is. The more the procurement focuses on approaches, risk, and quality, the more who the vendor is matters. These are essentially trust issues, but trust matters differently depending on what is being procured. The more trust matters, the more important capture management becomes. If you bid a high volume of proposals, then business development becomes more important to feed the funnel. All those leads have to come from somewhere. If you bid a low volume of high value proposals, then relationship marketing that produces an information advantage is critical. But strategy matters and a great proposal is needed to close the sale. If compliance with the RFP requirements is critical or if your proposal will be evaluated formally, then proposal management becomes critical. How many people get involved in your proposals? It’s always more than you think. But as the number of contributors to the proposal increases, the need for proposal management also increases. What is the depth and breadth of your offerings? If what you offer is highly technical or covers multiple specialties, you can’t expect one person to do it all. However, if you only have a single offering, then it is possible for someone to learn everything they need to know to prepare your proposals without help. All this means that what is important for another company, even one in your industry, may not be the right approach for your company. If you are a business development, capture, or proposal manager, here are some things to consider that impact just how much your role matters to your company. If all you're doing is… Business development. If all you do is mine databases for RFPs or take orders, you're not adding as much value as someone who finds opportunities before they are published. You may be processing information instead of developing customer relationships and generating leads. Also, if your company bids everything, you're not doing lead qualification. Bidding unqualified leads is nothing to brag about. Capture management. If you start at RFP release, ask yourself what makes you different from being a proposal manager. How much do you contribute to developing the information advantage, proposal strategies, differentiators, winning offering, and price to win? Proposal management. If all you're doing is putting someone else's information on paper, you're not adding as much value as someone who helps people understand the customers' expectations and how to win in writing. Which roles can you do without? If business development didn't exist, who would establish relationships with new customers? Who would fill the pipeline with leads? If capture management didn't exist, who would herd the cats to deliver the information, strategies, and differentiated offering needed to win the proposal? If proposal management didn't exist, who would fill all the voids and take on the workload to get the proposal submitted on time no matter what? Who contributes the most to winning? If business development doesn't establish customer relationships, how will you gain an information advantage? If capture management doesn't figure out what it will take to win and prepare proposal inputs based on it, then who will? If proposal management doesn't deliver a proposal without defects that is based on how the customer will evaluate the document and make their decision, who will? What does it all add up to? See also: Pursuit and Capture Program Tell me the answers to the questions above and I'll tell you which is more important at your company. Not all companies are ready for dedicated capture management. At some companies, they need a proposal manager just to manage the workload, and can fill the gaps in strategy and solutioning well enough. At other companies, they might have business development and proposal management staff, but their win rate will suffer without capture management. Which role is the most important? The one that makes the greatest contribution to win rate. If business development has no involvement once the proposal starts, they don't contribute to the sale closing. They don't deliver the win. But if they develop an information advantage and help drive it into the proposal, they are vital. If capture management doesn't turn the information advantage into winning proposal strategies and a winning offering at the right price, your chances of winning go down. But if they do, their contribution is vital. If proposal management doesn't produce a compliant proposal that presents the offering according to the win strategies, you're just producing expensive paper. But if they help the company get their strategies on paper while achieving RFP compliance, their contribution is vital. So what do they do and not do at your company? Which is easiest to outsource? Which is the easiest to use consultants for instead of full-time hires? If you outsource business development, you outsource your company’s future. Maybe you can jump start things that way. But developing the ability to identify qualified leads is a core corporate competency. If you outsource capture management, you are outsourcing offering design and strategy development. Those are also core competencies. But you might be able to outsource someone who can lead your staff through the process of offering design and strategy development. If you outsource proposal management, you are outsourcing your ability to pull it all together and get it on paper. If you intend to do a lot of proposals, this becomes a core competency. But you might be able to outsource capacity instead of capability. Outsource to learn. Outsource coordination. But don't outsource a capability you need your company to develop. When you not only have the capability, but also have a mature process to bring people into, then it becomes easier to outsource. If you use a consultant to do business development, you better have a strong lead qualification process to assess the leads they generate. And unless you're going to pay them to do capture and the proposal, you better have those capabilities as well. If you use a consultant to do capture management, you better have strongly qualified leads for the investment to pay off. You'll also need strong proposal management so that they dedicate their attention to capture management and not document production. If you use a consultant for proposal management, you better understand what it will take to win and have the information, offering design, and price to win as input. All of them benefit from process Business development benefits from strategic direction, lead qualification, and intelligence gathering guidance. Just leaving it up to people to figure it out on their own will reduce their success. Capture management depends on collaboration, with information flowing in every direction. If they have to make it up as they go along or deal with uncooperative contributors, it will reduce their success. Proposal management depends on input. But if they don't have a process for specifically requesting the input needed to go from merely compliant to a winning proposal, they are less likely to achieve it. What you need is driven by what it takes to win. You need prospecting and qualified leads that get dedicated attention before the proposal starts so that you can end up with a winning proposal. You need all three functions. But that doesn’t necessarily you need people with all three titles. That will depend on your circumstances. But if you don’t have staff in all three roles, you’ll need to put a lot of thought into how to prevent win rate destroying gaps from developing. How do you get everyone to play nicely together? Growth is everyone's job. They are all part of the same goal. But they all hand off information and need to be able to rely on each other. This requires more than just a spirit of teamwork. It requires a process that sets expectations, defines what is needed, explains what to do, verifies that things get done, and adds value at every step. It is extremely difficult to develop this and be dedicated to winning business at the same time. "In between pursuits" means it never gets done. Outsourcing process tailoring and implementation can enable your staff to perform more effectively without disrupting their workflow. The MustWin Pursuit and Capture Program enables all of the stakeholders involved to improve how they work together through a combination of training and building the process items that enable them to perform better than they do on their own.

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Some large companies operate like a collection of small businesses and some small businesses never stop making it up as they go along. This produces companies that grow like weeds where everything is a constant struggle. How do you stop operating like you are small? See also: Small Business Let's start by asking, "What does it mean to be small?" The SBA publishes size standards based on revenue and head count, but they don't tell you anything about a company's maturity. A company's revenue and head count don't tell you what their win rate is or whether they are maximizing their return on investment. Being small means being unable to field the team of people you normally would need to go after contracts that employ teams of people. Being small means being able to go after work that is larger than yourself. But what being small really means is being ad hoc. Being small means making it up as you go along, because you still haven't figured out how not to. If you don’t want to be small, don’t be ad hoc. People are more effective when they have the support and information they need to be successful. This means they need coordination, collaboration, process, guidance, and inspiration. No longer being small requires more than just hiring additional staff. As you grow, you’ll gain more resources. But you’ll never have enough. Large companies never have enough resources either. What you need is to get the most out of the resources that you do have. As long as everyone is making it up as they go along, going along will take longer. You will face a constant struggle and waste tons of resources on herding cats. You are stuck in a trap. You can’t improve efficiency because you don’t have the resources. You don’t have enough resources because you are inefficient. Your overhead costs are too high because you are inefficient. You can’t hire more resources because your overhead costs are too high. Two things that can help you get out of the trap Every small business has to find a way out of this trap to become successful. Since your staff are already maxed out, invest in outside resources that will make your internal resources more effective. Instead of using outside resources to do the same thing that your internal resources do, use outside resources to build the structure you need for your internal staff to be more effective. Use outside resources to make your internal resources perform better in a lasting way. Pay for that investment through growth. Start with opportunity capture. Increasing your ability to win what you pursue can be extremely profitable. So once you have a pipeline and some leads, it’s time to make the changes needed to ensure you capture what you have in your pipeline. When you use outside resources to help your internal staff achieve a better win rate, those resources pay for themselves. And when you no longer need the outside resources, you will still have the structure to achieve the high win rate. If you are currently paying the bills winning 30% of what you pursue, imagine how much better things would be if you increased your win rate to 40%. How much is learning how to achieve that 10% improvement for all of your future years worth? Invest by making the changes required for it to happen. The growth that results will pay for more internal resources, and the new resources will be more effective because you’ll have a better structure to bring them into. When you stop being ad hoc is when your growth can really take off. Here's the approach we recommend to get out of the trap of being small See also: Pursuit and Capture Program Having the same staff pursuing your opportunities while also building the structure to improve how people pursue your opportunities is problematical. That’s the nice way of saying it usually fails. Either you are taking them away from the pursuit at a risk to your win rate, or you are expecting them to complete the development effort “in between” pursuits, which never happens. You’re also expecting them to be able to integrate stakeholder groups with competing interests. Getting it right deserves more attention and pays off in improved return on investment. The way we approach it is to break down the topics that the organization needs to work on and then create what is essentially a project plan. We have a template that we use for this. We also have the advantage of being able to draw from the huge amount of materials we have in PropLIBRARY. We combine: Online training Involvement of all stakeholders Creating process artifacts that the company will use for years Q&A and feedback Then we create a monthly schedule based on the topics. And use the above as weekly topics. This balances any disruption to the organization while making steady progress to continuously improve win rate and ROI. It also enables us to quickly put in place what amounts to a project plan that addresses: Schedule Roles Goals ROI impact Metrics and measurements This greatly mitigates risk and enables oversight to ensure that goals, including ROI targets, are met. One way we’ve used this approach is to introduce capture to a company and roll it out over some number of months. Or to fix intractable problems that companies who have capture managers often still face. Another way it can be used is to help companies that are graduating from the 8(a) program. Starting about 18 months ahead of graduation, we can transform the entire organization from a dependency on set-asides to being ready for full and open competition. What I like about this approach is that it is transformative without being disruptive, and that it enables companies to blend improving and learning with doing. This resolves many of the problems that companies struggle with, often for years. That struggle lowers your win rate and leaves money on the table. Fixing those problems pays for itself.

Capture management requires organizational development and not just a lucky hire. Sure it's possible to hire someone who can herd the cats and win a pursuit. Maybe win some more. There are some great capture managers out there. But there's a reason that turnover for capture managers is so high. And why on average most companies' win rates are so low. Winning consistently requires organizational development and not just relying on luck. When the luck runs out, most companies blame their capture managers and hire a new one. And then another. And another. Looking to get lucky hiring the "right person" instead of changing the organization. The fate of your company is determined by when you realize that your future growth requires more than just lucky hiring. It is determined by how well you develop your organization. And how well that organization can implement capture management as a function instead of a role someone plays. It's impossible to find someone with all of the knowledge and skills required for capture management, and it's impossible for them to be successful in the long term in a company that hasn't done anything more than just hire someone to do the job. To do the job of capture management you have to have more skill, knowledge, and experience than any one person can have: See also: Capture Management The technical discipline(s) relevant to what you are trying to capture. You will lead the offering design effort. You have to know when the engineers are non-compliant or preparing an offering that won’t win. Project management. It does no good to capture a project you can’t perform. And to capture it, you’ll need to offer approaches that are better than all alternatives. Your plans will have to be credible. Sales. Everything you do has to win in a competitive environment. You must know what matters to the customer and what it will take for them to consider your offering to be their best alternative. Oh, and you won’t just be selling to the customer. You’ll also have to sell inside your own company, just to get the resources, attention, and approvals you’ll need. Competitive assessment. When trying to be the best alternative, it helps to know what the other alternatives are and what it will take to beat them. Estimating and budgeting. You’ll not only be estimating for the resources you’ll need to capture opportunities, you’ll be estimating for the project you’re proposing. You’ll have a budget to live within. Hopefully you’ll have some input into that budget. Pricing. Price always matters. You not only have to know how to price, you have to know innovative pricing strategies and how to determine what the price to win will be. Contracts and acquisition policy. If you are capturing government procurements, you’ll need to know their procedures and policies so you can position within them and potentially influence them. You’ll need to understand not only what contract clauses mean, but how they are typically applied, and strategies related to them. Proposals. It’s not enough to know proposal procedures. You have to know how to drive your win strategies into the document and end up with a proposal that is better than any of your competitors. And do it on schedule. Risk assessment. What are the risks in bidding? What are the risks in performing? Which risks are greater than others? And what should you do about them all? It's worse than you think. It's impossible. Good luck finding someone fluent in all of those. Worse, you really need experience in each of them. You need to know what works and what doesn't. You need to know how to combine them into winning strategies. Even worse, you need to be at the top of the competitive range in each of them. What you accomplish in each of these areas must be the best. There is no good enough in capture management. Even worse still, it has to come packaged in a personality that matches your corporate culture, gets things done, and interacts with your customers well. Skills are not enough. On top of that and even worse still, capture management has to sell inside the company just to get it to do what it needs to do to win. Selling customers is easy. Overcoming corporate inertia is hard. So it's impossible to find someone with all of the skills needed to do a job that your company will make impossible even if you somehow do. And if a capture manager loses after a long pursuit that probably should not have passed lead qualification at the beginning, your company will probably fire them. So they have that to look forward to. Capture, Sales/Business Development, and Project Management are not the same thing Sometimes companies try to cheat. I mean "compromise." They either have their sales/business development lead do double duty as a "capture manager" or they ask their current project manager to do the job. Your sales lead can't be dedicated to winning one pursuit and prospecting at the same time. If you give them the job of capture, they will no longer be doing the job of sales. Plus, they'll have serious gaps. If you give the job to one of your project managers, you'll have serious gaps that will weaken your competitiveness. What should you do if your capture manager has skill gaps? You capture manager is going to have skill gaps. There is no “if.” How well you fill them determines your success. If you hire looking for a superman, you’re setting yourself up for failure. A professional is better than a hero. If you leave it up to individuals to figure out when to ask for help, they are likely to favor their strengths and hide their weaknesses. It’s human nature. And it will make you less competitive. What you really should do is institutionalize the capture management function so that support, collaboration, and handoffs are routine, expected, and smooth. This is the secret sauce. The success of your capture management function determines your ability to grow. And growth is the only source of opportunities for people in your organization. So it’s kind of important. How do you fill the gaps? Assume there will be gaps and build in collaboration and quality validation. Account for all the topics that need to be addressed and identify experts inside your organization to involve. Make sure all your internal resources treat supporting capture with the same priority as their future pay raises, because growth depends on capture. Then treat everything as risks. Gaps are just another kind of risk, as are: See also: Pursuit and Capture Program Not knowing what to do Having unanswered questions Needing contributions from others Dependencies of all types Competitive positioning Customer requirement fulfillment Contractual compliance Win probability Etc. Identify, mitigate, track, assess, and report on all risks. A capture manager who doesn’t seek out help is a bad capture manager. An organization that doesn’t support their capture managers is one that isn’t prioritizing growth. But it’s not really the capture manager that needs help. It’s the organization. The organization needs help supporting its capture function. The organization shouldn’t even think of it as “help” because that implies it’s an exception when it’s really part of the expected routine. Capture management requires continuous risk mitigation until the sale closes. So instead of treating it as help, treat it as risk mitigation. A potential problem or deficiency could become an issue that results in a lost opportunity and lower growth. Risks are ever present and new ones are constantly arising. How do you create an organization that functions like there are no gaps? Think about everything that the capture function touches at a highly involved, strategic level: Sales/business development Proposals Contracts Pricing Operations Human Resources Finance Executive offices Others? Functioning like an organization that has no gaps related to pursuit capture means making changes to the entire organization to get them all involved and coordinated. Mostly small changes. But everyone needs to embrace them. Implementing a capture function means not simply hiring someone to do the job, but going through the entire organization and defining the interfaces, the flow of information in and out, approvals, thresholds, communications, expectations, etc. Creating an organization that functions like it has no gaps means making these exchanges continuously smooth. Making it up as people go along won’t cut it. Instead of waiting for gaps to emerge, the organization should anticipate the expertise required, supply it, and confirm that the results meet the need for quality and risk mitigation. In our Pursuit and Capture Program, we deal with the issues one at a time and tailor our materials to match your environment. Each month we take on a new department or challenge. Each month we create tangible deliverables that institutionalize the interactions. Your fate will catch up to you The difference between being a small startup and a mature growing firm is more than just the people you hire. At some point you must go from making it up as you go along and trying to win by working harder to putting in place the culture and processes that make people more effective. If you don't you will never reach your company's full potential. If you ignore having a low win rate, you doom your company to a future of declining profit margins, as you make up for your lack of competitiveness. Implementing a dedicated capture function is a key moment in a company's evolution. Maybe you're not ready for it. It requires change. It requires investment. But if you never get around to it, your growth will not be healthy and your future will be very high risk. The good news is that you don't have to take a great leap and get it all right in one step. Maturing takes time. The challenges are predictable. And you can solve them as you grow. But if you just hire people, they'll be too busy fighting fires to transform your company. Transforming the company isn't normally part of the job description for a capture manager, and they are usually not empowered to do so. Our Pursuit and Capture Program maps out the challenges and provides a way to address the needs of all the stakeholders in an orderly way that gets everyone on the same page regarding how everyone should work together to achieve growth and bring opportunity to everyone at your company. We'll work together with your staff in a way that won't get in the way of them doing their jobs while as a team we methodically transform your company to achieve its full potential.