Carl Dickson

Proposal reviews are notoriously difficult to optimize. Part of the problem is that no matter how mature your process, it’s difficult to keep your proposal reviewers in sync with it. The nature of the problem See also: Proposal Quality Validation I’ve found that at a lot of companies, it can be difficult just getting your reviewers to show up prepared. When reviewers show up without having read the RFP, the results of their review will be more subjective and less relevant to increasing win probability. Reviewers tend to be executives and senior staff. Their schedules can be difficult to work into a proposal schedule. Even if they are available, the amount of time they are available may be limited. Depending on the size and complexity of the proposal, the effectiveness of the review can be undermined by reviewers who simply don’t have enough time to diligently read the entire portion of the proposal assigned to them. It doesn’t help when they arrive thinking that a proposal review is the same as reading the document and telling people how to make it better. This may be part of a proposal review assignment, but there are other parts that may be even more important. Or you may have specific aspects of the proposal that you need validated. Timing matters It can also be a problem when at different phases in the proposal process you need reviewers to focus on different things. During early drafts you need to confirm the proposal is heading in the right direction. However, as you get closer to the finish line, you need people to stop trying to rethink the proposal and instead focus on identifying defects. It is rarely a good idea to delay shipping a product because after manufacturing you decide it could be better if it had different features. When you absolutely must ship by a deadline, trying to retrofit changes after manufacturing introduces more risk of failure to ship a working product than the potential reward of increasing customer satisfaction. This is just as true for an intangible product like a proposal as it is for a tangible product. Quality is best designed in from the beginning. Reviewers who don’t understand this can be difficult cats to herd indeed. Why guiding proposal reviewers is like herding cats The combination of these is especially difficult. If reviewers show up unprepared and not available in sync with the proposal, especially during early-stage reviews, those reviews can pass without incident. Then if the reviewers engage more thoroughly in the late-stage reviews, they produce change against the deadline instead of change when you had time and resources readily available. Another challenge are reviewers who want to see everything in final form. Consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Editorial considerations come near the completion of the effort, after the completion of a full draft. Reviews that confirm the proposal is heading in the right direction are needed long before this. Late-stage corrections are far more difficult to make than early-stage validation of decisions, strategies, and direction. Waiting until the finish line to make changes like these is a great way to ensure you submit a hot mess instead of a refined proposal. Last minute reviewers acting as heroes trying to save proposals are more trouble than they are worth. They increase proposal risk instead of decreasing it. I’d rather have professionals instead of heroes working on a proposal any day. Unfortunately, executive and senior staff reviewing proposals tend to believe that they are intrinsically professional. Balancing the size of the assignment and the number of reviewers If later reviews are catching things that should have been caught in earlier reviews, it’s a sign that: They didn’t validate everything they were asked to validate, they weren’t given instructions regarding what to validate, or they didn’t follow the instructions They ran out of time or the assignments were too large At some point, you have asked for so many things to be validated that it can’t be done in the time you have allocated for the review. And speaking of that, how much time are you allocating? Is it measured in hours or days? Are your reviewers available for that? If you are making a tradeoff between the length of the review and the availability of reviewers, you don’t have enough review resources to do the job. You need smaller assignments and more reviewers. You also need your reviewers to follow directions regarding where to focus their attention to maximize the time they are available. How level of effort and accountability makes reviewers difficult cats to herd This is where herding the cats becomes challenging when you are trying to focus reviews and improve the effectiveness of reviews. Proposal writers have to pass their reviews and will take some guidance because of it. Reviewers don’t take guidance nearly as easily. They aren’t assessed on their performance and lack accountability feedback. What you can do to improve reviewer effectiveness Give them more than just an RFP for guidance. Don’t assume they know what the proposal needs. Tell them. Turn it into a tool like a checklist. Have different reviewers focus on different areas (compliance, strategy, presentation, graphics, etc.). Hint: You don’t have to schedule all of the topics at the same time. You can have a strategy review early, an early review of compliance for the outline and production plan, a later review of compliance for fulfillment, an early review of solutioning to identify gaps, a later review of solutioning for competitiveness, very late-stage reviews for editorial considerations, etc. Lots of smaller but tightly focused reviews are more effective than big review-it-all-at-once reviews. Tell the reviewers where they should focus their attention and what you want them to validate. Checklists and score cards can help. Hint: The purpose of the score card isn’t quantifying quality, it’s a way to get them to follow the checklist and direct their attention. How many things do you need the reviewers to validate? If they can’t hold the list in their head while reading, they are going to miss things. Hint: You can cover everything with short lists unless you split them across multiple reviewers. Schedule your reviews for how long it will actually take them to validate what you’ve asked for. If you are too accommodating to your reviewers, you encourage them to take shortcuts. If you compromise on the schedule, you are a party to compromising the effectiveness of the review and reducing the quality of the proposal instead of improving it. Hold reviewer training. If you want to be political, don’t call it that. But do get the reviewers into a meeting before the review to manage expectations. Explain what you need from them. Make the session mandatory and review participation contingent on attending. Staffing, staffing, staffing. Don’t allow people to claim a seat at the review who aren’t available to do what is needed or can’t focus on the proposal’s validation needs at the time of the review (early-stage vs late-stage). Make sure you staff your reviews to cover the skills needed to validate everything that needs validation. Recruit enough people so make the size of the review assignments manageable. Accountability. Accountability does not always have to be based on authority. Think about feedback cycles. How will your proposal reviewers be aware of whether they are doing a good job? How do you enable them to be aware of this during the review? Reading and commenting isn’t very tangible. What tangible actions must reviewers take during the review? Ultimately, if nobody can hold the reviewers accountable for their performance, then they must do it themselves. If it truly is important to win the proposal, then the company needs to act like it and invest the time required to validate that the proposal is what the company needs it to be. Showing up and just reading and commenting is not enough. Staffing your proposal reviews with whoever is available is not enough. Proposals have specific validation needs that change over the lifespan of the proposal, and the effectiveness of later reviews depends on the thoroughness of earlier reviews. Reviewers are senior staff. The way they show up and the behaviors they model have as much impact on the success of your company’s proposals as their review comments do.

That’s not a typo. I said how to tell if your win rate is too high. I obsess over improving win rates. I do everything possible to increase them. And yes, it is possible for them to get too high. The highest sustained win rate I’ve seen a contractor have was 87%. It was a company that had a huge software advantage in a tiny niche with repeat customers. And they stayed in it. They had discipline. They did not bid things at a disadvantage. Their win rate was too high. It limited their growth. They weren’t prepared for a future where other companies could match their software. Or when their limited set of customers changed. But they were comfortable, even though they weren’t maximizing their potential. For a while. When your win rate is too high, it can mean: See also: Improving win rates You are staying within your comfort zone and missing out on potential growth opportunities. You may not be maximizing your potential revenue because you are not exploring new areas. You have all of your eggs in one basket. What if it gets dropped? You think you have cracked the code on a successful strategy, but really you’re just forming a habit. You are vulnerable to new technologies and approaches. You may have been the original innovator, but if you drop your guard, in time you can become the one who is obsolete. The tech world if full of cutting-edge companies that became obsolete. You have too many possible points of failure and the risk increases over time, making it just a matter of time. How do you know if your win rate is too high? This is challenging because it depends on a lot of variables, and they are often compounded. If your win rate is high, you should ask yourself if it is high because you: Have too few customers? Have stopped seeking new customers? Are not innovating, developing new capabilities, seeking new differentiators, or exploring new technologies? Are not experimenting with bidding outside your comfort zone? Many of the things that can result in having a win rate that is too high require finding the right balance. The problem is that the right balance is different for each company. Do you have the right balance between: High win probability bidding vs. exploratory bidding? Current customers vs. new customers? Staying comfortable today vs. preparing for an uncertain future? Meeting your revenue needs today vs. growing? Growing cautiously vs. growing quickly? Bidding where you are strong vs. developing new capabilities? When your win rate is high but you have concerns about the future, it’s time to invest. You might invest in: Gaining new customers Opening new markets or territories Developing new competencies or technologies More extensive strategic planning Pursuing new and less familiar opportunities will lower your win rate. But as you gain familiarity, your win rate should come up. You might also invest in improving: Your processes. Strategic planning, prospecting, lead qualification, capture, and proposal processes can all always be improved. The best way to reduce the cost of breaking into a new market is to be deliberate, methodical, and efficient about it. Improving your awareness and insight. Which new customers, markets, or technologies should you consider? If you have to guess, it’s because you don’t have sufficient awareness or insight. The information you track and what you do with it. It’s a good idea to be able to segment your win rate by current customers and new customers. There are many other ways to segment your win rate to improve your assessment of the potential ROI of a decision. If you don’t anticipate what you will need, it will be difficult and time consuming to find, structure, and analyze the data needed to make informed decisions. Some things you don’t want to do Intentionally lowering your win rate, should be done with great care. You don’t want something that you do knowing it will reduce your short-term ROI to become a permanent drag on your ROI. To avoid this you should NOT: Bid when you have no customer awareness. Exploratory bidding and breaking into new customers require research and preparation. Bidding blind isn’t exploring, it’s gambling. Fail to have written lead qualification criteria and regularly reexamine them. You can make them more or less strict. You can modulate your win rate up or down by using them. But you must have written lead qualification criteria to do this. Fail to have regular strategic planning. Your strategic planning efforts should address growing your current business and where you want to invest to find and develop new business. Strategic planning is where you align your tolerance for risk with your opportunities for growth. This balance needs to be thought through and regularly reexamined. Stop trying to increase your win rate. If your win rate declines because you are trying to break into a new territory, line of business, or customer, that’s to be expected. It should be monitored and deliberate. However, if your win rate is too high and you bring it down by no longer trying to improve it, that’s not good at all. That’s how you turn a good win rate into a bad one that stays bad. It's all about ROI Whether you keep your high win rate or allow a reduction to it by investing in less familiar business, it’s all about ROI. Pursuing work at a lower win rate, can have a positive impact on your ROI. It may not be as profitable as your current work, but it can still be profitable. It can generate additional growth. And growth is the source of all opportunity within a company.   I have seen consultants claim higher win rates, but those are always cherry-picked numbers. I consider them to be misleading. Watch this… I have a customer I’ve had for 25 years. With that customer I have a 100% win rate. What I didn’t tell you is that they only have one contract, and they’ve won four recompetes in a row because they are innovative and have created a technology advantage. I mostly make sure they don’t lose. They are the real winners.

Proposals are where you often conceptualize new approaches before you put them into operational use. This is true for customer-facing projects, company-wide best practices, use of information technology, and more. Every proposal essentially is a research and development effort. Everything has to be figured out. This applies equally to the proposal itself and the work being proposed: You have to figure out what it will take to win and how to build a proposal around that. And since both the circumstances change as well as the wording of the RFP, you have to figure this out again for every new bid. What you are proposing to do or deliver also has to be figured out and estimated. You have to do this with a major incentive to have an approach that is superior to anything your competitors might offer. In particular, you have to figure out: See also: Proposal process improvement What it will take to win What the customer cares about What to offer What your approaches will be What tools will be used What resources will be required How to prove it all How to present it all How to overcome all the problems that will come up along the way When the best practices aren’t good enough Keep in mind that best practices might be the gold standard, but they aren’t enough to be competitive when everyone proposes the best practices. Every proposal should be an effort to raise the bar on the best practices. This means every proposal should be an effort to figure out new and better ways of serving the customer. Achieving this consistently and competitively means not only doing research and development, but making research and development the focus of your efforts. It means organizing your efforts and developing your process around research and development instead of repeatable steps. This is a key difference between companies that set out to submit proposals and companies that set out to win proposals. If the mission of your proposal group is to produce proposals, your win rate will not be as good as it would be if maximizing win rate was its mission. Efficient production lowers costs. Discovery of how to maximize your win rate through research and development can increase your revenue orders of magnitude beyond any possible cost savings. Proposals are at the center of the entire company Proposal management coordinates the efforts of the operations, contracts, pricing, and HR departments. It’s difficult to find a department in the company that isn’t touched by proposals. If you get all of your revenue from proposals, then everyone in the company is a stakeholder. The reason this matters is because the proposal department is the department that is constantly trying to raise the bar and reinvent so it can stay one step ahead of the competitors. The proposal department is not just a research and development department, it is the research and development function for the entire company. Winning proposals drives improvement in all the other departments and functions. This is a good thing. If you’re going to have a research and development department in your company, it makes sense that it be tied to: Revenue generation Understanding and pleasing your customers Lowering your costs The proposal function is right in the middle of each of these. Instead of treating proposals like a stovepipe, consider intentionally flowing the research and development that the proposal function coordinates into the other parts of the company. How do you convert your proposal function into a research and development function? For your proposal function to become an R&D function: Pursuit strategy needs to start from an awareness that you have to beat the best practices every time you bid. The proposal group must become inventors, problem solvers, and change advocates. People can’t be afraid of losing. R&D does not have a guaranteed or predictable outcome. You must beat yourself and not just your competitors. Every time. This means tracking your own performance, typically your win rate, and improving it obsessively. It requires an executive mandate. You can’t have the proposal department driving change and improvement into all the other departments in the company without executive sponsorship. People naturally resist change. Creating a culture that embraces continuous change and improvement will not happen without executive participation and enthusiasm. Without it, what tends to happen is that during proposals, proposal advocates push for differentiation by exceeding the best practices while operations seeks to keep things the same because they are responsible for performance and prefer to stay in their comfort zone. The truth is there is no need for this to be a conflict, but sometimes people, personalities, and expectations clash without mediation. But do you want a research and development function? You only need to treat your proposal department like a research and development function if you want to remain competitive, keep the customers you have, and grow your company. If you don’t treat your proposal function like a research and development function: Your competitors will beat you with more innovative proposals You will lose revenue as a result Your customers will start looking elsewhere for improvements Some companies treat their proposals as a necessary evil or an expense to be minimized. Companies like these are easy to beat. Research and development within a company requires investment. The good news is that winning proposal produces a measurable return on that investment. And increasing your win rate can easily be the best investment your company ever makes. So don’t just treat your proposal group as a research and development function, measure its success and the direction of its research by tracking your win rate very carefully.

These are the articles that you liked the most in 2024. Collectively they were viewed 244,083 times. Thank you for all that love and attention. I find it interesting how wide the areas of interest were this year. They are difficult to categorize. One major theme does seem to emerge: Greatness. All of them relate to preparing great proposals. But they also address it from many different angles. This makes sense to me, since proposals are complex and nuanced creations. It makes sense that there is no one secret to making them great. Instead, it requires being great in everything we do. In gratitude for helping me reach this insight, my first article of next year will be related to how proposals drive greatness throughout the entire company. Until then, enjoy the articles below. And thank you for a wonderful 2024. How are business development, capture management, and proposal management different? Instead of roles and hand-offs, what you really need is an integrated effort. Eleven examples of proposal win themes including the good, the bad, and the exceptional. Plus seven things you can do to write exceptional proposal themes. What does it mean to be a proposal rockstar? How do you break on through to the other side? Why my AI written proposal is going to beat your AI written proposal. You'll be surprised what determines the outcome. The difference between technical writing and proposal writing. Very few writers can do both technical writing and proposal writing well. Putting lipstick on a proposal pig. Can a proposal manager save a proposal that the company has not prepared for? An introduction to Proposal Content Planning. Proposal planning takes more than a proposal outline to get to great proposal writing. What is a Capture Manager and how do they impact win probability? Complex must-win bids require dedicated attention to win. What is the most important skill for cultivating great proposal writing? It's not wordsmithing, editing, subject matter expertise, or any particular style... plus four ways to tell when your proposals lack it. A methodology for figuring out what to write in your proposal. What should you say?

Bids for commodities simply require quotes. Bids for complex services and solutions require proposals. Every proposal is developed under different circumstances. To maximize your win rate you must become superior at figuring out how to turn those circumstances into a competitive advantage every time. Companies that try to create an assembly line for their proposals end up creating a machine that loses in volume. Don’t define your proposal process by making it based on rules. Rules will break. Don’t define it based on steps. Steps can’t adapt. In practice, every proposal rule has an exception. So does every step. There are so many exceptions, it’s the real reason people struggle to document their proposal process. Even if you could write down all the rules, how do you document the fact that in practice you are forced to ignore or replace them most of the time? Why a proposal process based on rules creates bad proposals See also: Steps Rules set boundaries. Rules that tell people what they absolutely must not do can be vital for safety, and in the case of proposals preventing loss. They tell you where not to go and what not to do. Using rules to define the things people are required to do is where the problems are. Rules that tell people what they must do are primarily the result of leaders who don’t trust their own staff. These kinds of rules replace judgment with mandates and send the message that people are the sources of the problems that come up, and they are incapable of solving those problems on their own. A proposal process defined in terms of rules and steps will not maximize your chances of winning. Rules and steps will not enable you to adapt to circumstances better than your competitors. Your proposal process should be defined in terms of what will enable you to adapt better and not to maximize compliance with one-size-fits-all approaches. The best proposal processes help people accomplish the process goals instead of mandating that people do certain things. Rules can achieve acceptable proposals and reliable submissions. Proposals that are merely acceptable are not competitive. Have you ever noticed that best practices are not rules and will soon no longer be best practices when they are turned into rules? If you want people to exceed the status quo, which is how you win proposals that are competitive, you need people thinking beyond the rules. What should you use instead of rules and steps? Proposals are about problem solving. They don’t follow the same steps every time, but they do have repeatable goals. Goals define the things you need to do to avoid common problems and figure things out. Goal-driven proposal processes are far better than proposal processes based on steps. How do you accomplish your goals without rules? In proposals, goals are accomplished by people collaborating. How do you collaborate without rules? You do it with expectations. What is the difference between rules and expectations? Expectations flow in both directions. They are not mandates defined by a hierarchy of authority that imposes them. Expectations are negotiations. But it is vital that they be made clear. Your process should explicitly state what is expected of people regarding achieving the goals. But it must also invite them to share their expectations in order to anticipate expectation conflicts so they may be resolved before they happen. You can set expectations without rules. In fact, it’s better to do that. Rules and steps are not negotiable or adaptable and therefore break down during expectation conflicts. When was the last time you had a frank and open discussion about your expectations, that: Learned what everyone else’s expectations are? Removed any conflicts in a way that everyone agrees creates a new set of expectations in common? If it's been a while, then now you know why your proposal process is not working as well as you think it should. You've got expectation conflicts. Implementing rules to impose your own expectations sucks the innovation and adaptation right out of proposal development. It also lowers your win rate. This is partly due to passive resistance or cheating as a result of expectation failure, partly due to under resourcing due to priority conflicts, and partly due to turning people’s innovative talents to gaming the system instead of winning. People will perform only up to or down to the rules set. Instead of developing integrity, rules suppress integrity. Rules require people to ignore their own judgment and comply. Expectations, however, require integrity to be fulfilled. If you aren’t working in a culture of integrity, rules aren’t going to help you create one. And if the people working together on a proposal don’t show up with integrity, you’re not going to be able to maximize your win rate until you fix that.

When it comes to proposals, there is a lot more to honesty than just knowing where the line is that turns stretching the truth into lying. In fact, you’ll encounter far more issues related to honesty everywhere else! See also: Assignments Honesty in assessing win probability. How many times have you heard people tell the lie, “We should bid this because we can do the work and we could win?” How many reports incentivize showing a high win probability? How often is a pWin percentage given with a straight face when both the giver and the receiver know that the percentage is pure fiction? Even if it’s unintentional, it’s still a lie. How many pWin “algorithms” provide that percentage so that no one is personally to blame for telling the lie, and no one questions the accuracy of the algorithm or compares it to their bid history? They are all just guesses. Personally, I prefer an honest guess over an obfuscated, incentivized lie. Honesty in assessing level of effort. Assessing the amount of time required to write something for a proposal is similar to assessing win probability. Writers are incentivized to pad their estimates, while managers are incentivized to lowball the estimates, usually to conserve budgets. The difference between estimates for writing and win probability, is that writing will scale to the time given. Give someone a day and you’ll get a day’s worth of writing. Give them three days, and assuming they don’t have competing priorities and don’t procrastinate, they’ll put more effort into it. Managing this is more of an art than a science. One page can take all day. Or it can take 20 minutes. It depends on what you are writing and how well you know the subject matter. Honesty in managing expectations. I will be honest about what I expect from you during the proposal. Will you be honest with me? I expect there will be differences in expectations, especially those due to priority conflicts. We can work together to untangle them. What I want to avoid is being told what you think I want to hear, leaving me with a false expectation. We both need to be completely honest if we are going to avoid false expectations. Honesty with accepting assignments. The scope of an assignment and the schedule for completing it are both negotiations. I can negotiate with someone who’s being honest with me. But an assignment accepted by someone who is not being honest is not only worthless, it’s a risk to proposal success. Honesty in issue reporting. Often proposals are nothing but problem solving. Successful problem solving depends on people being honest about the nature of the problem and the options for resolving it. Issues are best surfaced early, while there is time to address them. Hiding issues is a form of dishonesty, even if it is well intentioned. However, if you miss your deadline without letting anyone know you were running late, you weren’t being honest about your status and you negatively impacted the proposal by running out the deadline clock. Issues tend to come up in areas where estimates are really guesses about things that can’t be quantified, like how long it will take to write something. The more honesty there is in surfacing, discussing, and resolving issues, the better things will turn out. Honesty with your customers. How much of what companies say about cost, price, schedule, availability, capability, and recommendations are known to be not true when spoken? Isn’t that the same as a lie? Customers also lie. They ask for things, tell you things, and say they will do things they know aren’t true. All of these things can affect your proposals. The more honest you are in this dynamic, the more credible and reliable you will be. Risk-conscious customers appreciate credibility and reliability. Honesty with teammates and subcontractors. Is the subcontractor scheming to take over as the prime contractor at the next recompete? Is the prime contractor scheming to keep more of the best work for themselves? Why is it that subcontractors tend to be late with their proposal assignments and then they don’t deliver in full? Is this honesty? What does it say about the future relationship? Honesty when reporting capability. This is an issue at both the company and individual levels. Companies tell customers they have capabilities they don’t really have, maybe because they think they can just hire the staff that will give them those capabilities. Or maybe because they think they can rise to the occasion, somehow. All this can make knowing what to write about a company’s capabilities a lesson in how far you are willing to stretch your honesty. Individuals sometimes claim expertise they do not have and sometimes deny expertise they do have in order to avoid assignments. Sometimes people claim knowledge or expertise until they see what is actually required. These failures result in time being wasted against the deadline. Here’s how these things impact your proposals Saying you can deliver something in two days that you know will take longer disrupts the review process and reduces the time for recovery. Not surfacing problems you are aware of, or even just suspect, makes them worse. Ignoring other people’s expectations when you know you won’t meet them runs out the deadline clock. So does having expectations of people that you know they can’t meet. So does turning in an ordinary proposal section that doesn’t reflect what it will take to win, but you hope will slide past the reviewers. Honesty is not just about whether a statement is true or false. In proposal development, honesty is mostly about reliability and coordination. If you are less reliable or your efforts are less coordinated because you were less honest, you are working against winning the proposal. The entire company, its management, and its culture can contribute to this. You won’t improve honesty by focusing on one event at a time, or by evangelizing on the importance of honesty. It will improve when people respect it and lose their fear of it. Creating a culture of honesty doesn’t mean enforcing honesty. It means nurturing it and rewarding it so that people aren’t incentivized to stretch the truth.

There are two reasons why your company struggles with conflicting priorities during proposals: Everything is a tradeoff and the tradeoffs impact people differently. Decision makers struggle with the same tradeoffs and so have not brought clarity to everyone else. Here’s how this causes a reduction in your win rate. People with experience and knowledge are always in demand within a company, especially when it comes to finding people to contribute to proposals. There are many things competing for their attention. People like this can easily become a bottleneck, making proposal outcomes dependent on their availability. When you do get a sliver of their availability, it may be enough to call an assignment done, but not enough to win. To address this, you need more people with similar experience and knowledge. To afford more people, you need growth. If you measure the success of your proposal efforts by their ROI, you will find that it’s almost always worth cultivating resources that can contribute to proposals and eliminate win rate stealing bottlenecks. Just compare the cost to the return of an increase, even a small one, in your win rate. Growth vs Operations See also: Proposal Process Improvement What the balance should be between growth vs operations is a strategic decision. But it is a decision that should be made and communicated. Getting by without addressing it and hoping to get more out of people by stretching them is actually a recipe for ensuring that you don’t get enough of them, and that makes it a recipe for lower win rates. The cost of lowering your win rate by overloading people is far higher than any potential cost of deciding how to balance growth vs operations and communicating it clearly. All opportunity comes from growth. But nearly all revenue comes from operations. If you focus too much on operations, it comes at the expense of future revenue. But sometimes you have to pay the bills you have today before you can think about growth. This is a balancing act, with no right or wrong answer, and it’s okay to wobble back and forth according to your finances. However, keep in mind that getting help requires growth and growth pays for the investment. Build discussing priorities and a commitment to investing in growth into your corporate culture so that it becomes a part of daily life for everyone in the organization. How do accounting fictions and realities impact your win rate? It doesn’t cost anything to give people on salary more work to do. Or does it? Organizing your company around the expectation that all proposal work will be done after operations staff complete their “day job” turns all proposal work into rush jobs by fatigued people. What impact will making this a standard operating procedure have on your win rate? It doesn’t cost anything to give proposal staff on salary more proposals to do in the same amount of time. Or does it? Here’s what you give up: Quality. People under time pressure process things instead of considering them. They skim instead of reading. They favor "good enough" to get to the next step over accomplishing goals. Win strategies. People under time pressure accept ordinary, acceptable proposal writing instead of great proposal writing. Oversight, guidance, and help for proposal contributors. Under time pressure, instead of coaching proposal contributors to get from good to great, they may just get left to figure things out on their own. The proposals will still get “done.” They will be submitted. They will sound good and be acceptable. They might even be good, but they will consistently lose to competitors who write great proposals. Losing proposals reduces your ROI. By adding too many low probability proposals just because there’s “a chance” you might win them, it’s easy to actually reduce the win probability of the proposals that have an excellent chance of winning. Decide carefully instead of automatically based on the flawed premise that all “opportunities” are worth pursuing. Make your decisions based on what will improve your ROI the most. Some companies track their proposal costs and some don’t. Companies that don’t track these costs are more willing to do whatever it takes to win. And sometimes this encourages being wasteful. Some companies have budgets for proposals that encourage people to manage their resources better, but they can also incentivize people to avoid investing in preparation. What often gets lost in these calculations is the impact on win rate and the impact win rate has on ROI. These are the calculations that should guide executive decision making. Getting more proposals done cheaply does not equate to winning more proposals and growing revenue. In fact, putting more effort into winning more of the proposals you bid can easily pays for the extra attention. Teach everyone to understand win rate math and to account for proposals as investments instead of costs. Cost savings Cost “savings” that reduces win rate can easily cost the company more in lost revenue than any possible “savings.” Meanwhile, things that improve win rate help cover a lot of costs. But there is also cash flow to consider. Future revenue does not pay today’s bills. Unless you’re well financed and confident in that future. Choose today’s priority carefully because your future depends on it. On the ground truths When proposal staff have to struggle to get resources to commit to supporting proposals, it is usually because executive leadership has failed to set expectations and priorities. As the above shows, hard choices may be needed. When those choices are made, staff know what the company’s priorities are and shouldn’t have to fight over them. They may have to struggle to deal with the outcome, but they don’t have to struggle with each other. This is key and important for developing your corporate culture. You want people to work together on the struggles and not work against each other because of them. Making priority communication part of your culture If every meeting should end with reviewing the action items, then every meeting should also include a discussion of priorities and how to manage them. Talking out priority conflicts at the beginning has a positive impact on team building and corporate culture. Instead of letting priority conflicts become a wedge that drives people apart, you can turn priority conflicts into just another problem that people work together to resolve. Build a culture based on struggling together instead of struggling against each other.

The things you do to win proposals come naturally when you have an effective corporate culture. But if you're encountering win rate stealing friction while doing proposals, it's a sign that your corporate culture is broken. Fixing your corporate culture can help you win proposals. But most companies don't understand what a corporate culture is, let alone how to cultivate an effective one. The good news is that if your leadership focuses on what it takes to win proposals, it can create the foundation for an effective corporate culture. Winning once is easy, especially if you’re lucky. Winning consistently takes hard work. There is no single thing that results in winning consistently. Winning consistently requires the integration of all that goes into it. It is the culmination of what you do and not the individual actions. Culture is the same. A winning corporate culture requires not just that you take certain actions, but that you integrate them into something that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Some of the elements of a winning culture include: See also: Organizational Development Purpose. How are you going to get everyone to buy into the purpose of the effort if you can’t even get them to define the purpose of the entire organization the same way? This requires more than a mission statement. It requires all company leaders to be on the same page, make their decisions based on it, and show up committed to it. Most contractors have the wrong mission statement anyway. That will have to change if you want to get everyone on the same page. Collaboration. Is there a common approach to how people work together, face challenges together, organize their efforts, make decisions together, disagree, help each other, and grow together? If not, how can you expect people to get along when things get stressful? Proposals have a tight deadline with many people involved, trying to create something that beats all competitors. They will always be stressful. Having common ways to collaborate when facing challenges helps tremendously. Process. How can you have effective process implementation if people don’t define and value process the same way? When there is a common understanding of why we have processes, how we go about implementing them, and what matters about them, it means that people will arrive at the proposal process already having expectations for how to interact with that process. Strategy. Strategy also requires that people have the same understanding and value for it, if it is going to be successful. You are less likely to be competitive when people come into a proposal thinking strategy is someone else’s job or without strategic considerations for how they complete their proposal assignments. The same is true when a proposal hero shows up and tries to personally own the strategies. Branding. Most people don’t even know what branding is. Few branding experts define it the same way. Is branding a set of rules or is it an identity? Is it who you are or an aspiration of who you want to be? Or is it just an appearance trying to manifest as something real? How your company approaches branding tells the truth about what your company really values, no matter what your slogan says. Does your branding reflect what it will take to win, or is it an after-the-fact pleasantry? Finance. How do you balance cost control and performance? How do you balance profit and expense? How do you approach maximizing ROI? Finance affects everything. And nothing is real without it being fully integrated and compatible with what you are trying to do. But wait, there’s more... Culture manifests through the things we do. But the things we do result from how we conceptualize ourselves and what we do. And the individuals within an organization rarely do this the same. That’s okay. Maybe even beneficial. Unless they are incompatible. Corporate culture can help get people into alignment. Some additional elements of a winning culture include things like: Curiosity. People who have insufficient curiosity tend to stay in their box. If people can’t think outside of their box, they are unlikely to make a cultural shift. Some cultures actually put people in boxes. But people in boxes don’t win proposals. Willingness to change. People who are set in their ways are also likely to resist a cultural change. When every RFP requires adaptation, and every proposal requires differentiation and win strategies that can beat the competition who are also improving, you need to be constantly evolving. Prioritization. All companies have resource challenges. Culture must be strong to win over territories and personal preferences in the competition for resources. But culture is one of the few things with the potential to unify people and change their priorities. Dedication. If you demonstrate inconsistency, that is what your culture will become. If your culture lacks dedication, your processes will be considerations and not processes. Issues, Risk, and Fear. Proposals require a lot of problem solving. And they are chaotic. They need issues to be reported quickly. Without fear. They need an environment where risks aren’t ignored, they are managed without fear, because risks are never eliminated. Risks are never zero. And because of this, proposals require taking risks. Without fear. But also, not randomly. A culture that manages risks and surfaces issues early is more likely to avoid a train wreck at the end of their proposals. Honesty. Saying you can deliver something in two days that you know will take longer is a form of dishonesty. Hiding problems is another form of dishonesty. So is ignoring other people’s expectations when you know you won’t meet them. Or having expectations of them that you know can’t be met. Or turning in an ordinary proposal section that doesn’t reflect what it will take to win, but you hope will slide past the reviewers. Creating a culture of honesty doesn’t mean enforcing honesty. It means nurturing it and rewarding it so that people aren’t incentivized to stretch the truth. Friction. Friction results where there are things in the environment that impede people’s ability to collaborate. Sometimes people are things that impede collaboration. Look for the root cause of proposal friction and then lubricate it. Processes and tools can lubricate some types of friction. Culture is what lubricates friction caused by people. Advanced proposal management requires addressing all of these. But this can be like swimming upstream in a company that doesn’t have an effective culture. Does your culture reflect what it needs to be to consistently win and grow? Keep in mind that culture, like parenting, is best taught through modelling. People will do what they see the executives doing, while what they say will only be absorbed so much. If you don’t model your culture as well as describe it, it is less likely to grow. Commit to demonstrating your culture, especially when it's difficult. What you model during proposal development can become a model for the rest of the company. This only works if the company’s leadership believes that culture is a priority, and that the model you build working on proposals is something that should spread throughout the company. You can build a foundation for corporate culture from the bottom up. But it can’t grow and become fully integrated unless the company’s leadership gives it the same level of attention and commitment. Modelling effective culture does not cost anything except attention and effort. The thing that can unify us all is growth. And growth requires winning. And winning consistently requires a culture based on it. You can start cultivating a winning culture in the proposal department by creating a department-level culture based on growth, winning, and ROI. You can model it for the rest of the company. But you will always be working with people from other departments with other cultures until your company’s leadership decides it wants the entire company to have a culture of growth and winning.

Proposal writers and proposal managers do not do their best work in isolation. They need: See also: Dealing with Adversity The company to be qualified and capable of complying with all of the RFP requirements. A rapid decision whether to bid that doesn’t waste time with the deadline clock ticking. An information advantage related to the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Winning strategies that provide differentiators related to what to bid, how to price it, and how to position it. Direction and details regarding what to offer. Teaming arrangements to be in place. All of this delivered on day one of the proposal. Can a proposal manager can save a proposal when the company has none of these things and is making it all up as they go along? This is such an annoying question because lightning strikes. It is true that proposal managers have saved proposals without having the information normally needed to win. This doesn't make it a best practice, or even a profitable one. It’s also the wrong question. The right question is whether on average the win rate for bids like these pays for the cost of pursuit. Even if they do, doing this habitually will lower the company’s return on investment. This is because trying to save a proposal like this is putting lipstick on a pig. A proposal based on nothing more than the RFP is like competing with one hand behind your back. Your win probability will be dismal because you are competing against companies who are better prepared. An awesome proposal manager will be able to create a proposal that is merely acceptable. They might even be able to eke out a proposal that is pretty good. But what they can’t do is overcome decent competitors who are better prepared. Is this why your win rate is so low? Taking a merely acceptable proposal and trying to dress it up, so it can pretend it has substance that it doesn’t, is putting lipstick on a pig. No one will be fooled. What it's really asking is for the proposal manager to be the capture manager, start after RFP release, manage the solutioning, develop the pursuit strategies, staff it, price it to win, and do it all while managing the proposal. How can that be a path to increasing your win rate? You’re asking the wrong person to win it for you When you’re in an uncompetitive position, having the lowest price is the most reliable path to winning. A good pricing manager is far more likely to save you when the company has not properly prepared. But it may very well come at the cost of your past performance when you can't perform at that price, resulting in the loss of future revenue from being unable to win with bad past performance. And it will inevitably come with a loss in profit margin from having lowered your prices. This is the penalty you pay for being unprepared. What can a proposal manager do to save it? The best a proposal manager can do is to be a proposal professional instead of a hero. They can’t magic your proposal into showing insight and customer awareness if you have not delivered any to them. What a professional proposal manager can do is: Ensure you don't get thrown out, so you have a chance to win on price. Play the numbers game by using language that relates to the evaluation criteria, in the hope that the customer will see relevance instead of substance. Put lipstick on the pig for the customer who really only cares about price. Hope that this will be the time that the extremely low win probability will win. A 1% win probability will result in a win once every hundred proposals, on average. It also means that one winning proposal will have to cover the cost of 100 submissions. Not only is it an extremely expensive way to bid, but the odds are that the winner was a result of having the lowest price. Combining low margins with high costs is not taught in business school for a reason. What can your company do to save it? When you are facing a low win probability, especially when you have to unseat an incumbent, the company should take risks. You are probably going to lose anyway. It’s time to bid a compelling strategy that the customer might not agree with, but then again they might. When you don’t know because you lack customer awareness, the odds of guessing right with a risky strategy are better than winning with a substandard proposal because your competitors did an even worse job than you did. If you don't have the guts to cancel a bad capture pursuit, then take risks. If you're going to lose anyway, get bold and offer something truly differentiated that targets the customer's goals and aspirations. And if you don't know what their goals and aspirations are, then guess. Instead of writing to not get thrown out and relying on hope as a strategy, base your entire proposal on a guess about the customer's goals and aspirations. Guess at what an amazing proposal based on what you think the customer needs to hear would be instead of watering the proposal down to avoid getting thrown out. This needs to be a corporate decision, because it switches the top priority for the Proposal Manager away from achieving RFP compliance. It is far better to not have to guess. Companies that don't have to guess win consistently. They have high win rates and a higher return on their proposal investment. They also don’t chase low margins with high costs by putting lipstick on a pig. They have the guts to no bid. What would your company's revenue be if your win rate doubled? Wouldn't that pay for a good capture effort? Or you could keep putting lipstick on the pig.

Great proposal writers often have to write about things they don’t know anything about. How do they do it? See also: Proposal writing tips and techniques Instead of thinking about what they can say, they: Start by figuring out what needs to be said Break down what the customer has asked about Consider what the customer needs to hear for each one Address how they prove their claims Finish with what would show the most value These are just some of what they need to figure out, and not the sequence for presentation. For each bullet above, it’s not unusual to start off having no idea what the answers are. Instead of wordsmithing around what they don’t know, great proposal writers formulate how to set up the responses. An easy way to think of this is that they drop in a bunch of placeholders for the things they don’t know so they can structure the response and fill in the placeholders later. This shows how proposal writing more closely resembles thesis writing than creative writing. Once you have introduced the thesis with the point you want to make and you know what the conclusion needs to be, then you can start filling in your placeholders. Doing research to fill in the placeholders is where proposal writers spend most of their time. Setting up the structure brings focus to the research and helps accelerate it. You can think of this approach like creating formulas for your proposal. You create the framework and then find values for the parts you don’t know. Sometimes filling in your placeholders means you go talk to someone who understands the customer, that issue, or that subject matter. When you already know what you are trying to prove, it’s easier to interview people to get the information you need to complete the writing. The more specific the questions, the more likely you are to get good information to work with. This enables you to write a proposal, even when you have no idea what you are writing about. Instead of asking a subject matter expert, “How do we do this?” consider asking, “How does our approach solve [this problem]?” You already know what the solution needs to add up to because it’s in the RFP. You can ask follow-up questions like: What’s important about doing it that way? How do we prevent things from going wrong? How does it accomplish [insert goal from the RFP here]? Have we ever done that successfully in the past? Great proposal writers need to be able to lead the reader to the right conclusions so the customer reaches a decision in your favor and gives you the highest evaluation score. They can formulate a sentence based on supplying those reasons using placeholders for the details, and then do research to get those details. The challenge comes when nobody available knows those details. Great proposal writers then change the formula to match what people do know. It’s only as a last resort that they write around the things they don't know. It is much better to say something that matters or shows insight into what the customer has asked about, than it is to go shallow and avoid the details. To get to this level, it helps to start thinking about communication like Legos. How do you snap parts together in order to create what you are trying to communicate? The parts you might have to work with may include things like: Any instructions, evaluation criteria, and requirements provided in the RFP Experience your company has (relevant work the company has done) Sequences or processes (whether you have a full list, know parts, or just know that there is a sequence that you need to figure out) Things that must be included (usually you can identify some of the things that will be part of the response, and use them to research the rest) Results (whether you know what they should be or not) Positioning (usually you know the context that it needs to be put in. For example, should it be quick, powerful, or efficient? Pick the right one and translate everything about it to match that context) Conclusions (either you know what it should add up or you have to figure out what that is) You can introduce your conclusion and position the details. Both may be determined by the details you have to work with. Your goal is usually to prove that the results will be delivered, an evaluation factor is well met, or the fulfillment of one of your win strategies. For anything you don’t know, you can put it in as a placeholder that identifies what you need and what you need it to accomplish. Then you try to find the answers and when you are done you actually sound like you know what you were talking about. Having spent decades working on proposals, I can have short conversations on almost any topic related to the things people do. I may not know any of the details, but I can ask probing questions that make it look like I understand. Proposal writing isn’t about creating fluff to hide the fact that you don’t know what you are talking about. Proposal writing is about figuring out and presenting insights that matter and impact the customer’s decision process. Knowing how to do this is really all proposal writers need to know in order to be great.

It means people want to be a part of the proposals you lead. It means you inspire the reader so much with your proposal that they dance, sing, and feel the music. If you want to be a proposal rockstar, you need to make your proposal mean something that matters. It means you've opened them up to the raw beauty of what you are creating and they can feel its importance. See also: Great Proposals It means you love what you create, and who cares whether anyone else does. Those who matter will get it. If you’re afraid of offending the customer, you can’t change their world. If you want to be a proposal rockstar, the only opinion that matters belongs to the customer. Being a rockstar means you've got a rebellious streak. After all, isn't that where differentiators come from? Isn’t that necessary to defeat the competition? And isn't that what you need if you're going to throw out the ineffective legacy processes (or lack thereof) that everyone else follows because they think they're supposed to? Rockstars have something to rebel against. If you want to be a proposal rockstar, you must be a change agent. It means no one understands what you do or how you do it, but they love the results. When you win, corporate will let you do anything you want. When you lose, they want to tell you what to create and how to create it. Only corporate doesn't produce rockstars. It produces boy bands. However, boy bands make bank too. Rockstars live on the edge between winning and losing. That’s where they shine. Like a crazy diamond. Rockstars make hard work look fun. And most burn out early. But then there’s Keith Richards. Being a proposal rockstar means you skip right past the surface level and create something that's primal, passionate, and compelling because of it. Proposal rockstars focus on differentiators because they aren’t willing to settle and just fit in. It might mean you've got some wickedly bad habits, and they could be a necessary part of how you create such great proposals. Proposal rockstars know when to break the rules. Rockstars can change the world. Rockstars create proposals that have impact, touch so many stakeholders, and change the direction of our institutions. Shhh… don’t tell corporate. All genres have Rockstars. Rockstars have their own sound. A rockstar who's trying to sound like what a rockstar is supposed to sound like is a contradiction. More. Cowbell! It's hard to be a rockstar playing cover tunes. Unless you make them your own. Proposal rockstars don’t do boilerplate. Rockstars have moves. And moves within moves. When circumstances move the proposal in one direction, a proposal rockstar knows how to get it to move where it needs to go. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Pablo Picasso was a rockstar. Sometimes it's not the words, it's the guitar solo that sells it. A proposal rockstar plays graphics like an instrument. When Rockstars feel blue, they write great songs. When Rockstars feel happy, they write great songs. Rockstars feel. And when they are doing their thing, everyone else can feel it too. You can know the words. You can know the music. And not be a rockstar. You can know the RFP and know the process, but still not be a proposal rockstar. Being a rockstar means your proposals have soul. A proposal rockstar goes against the grain and doesn't care about creating a proposal that sounds like a proposal should. They don’t just recycle past hits. They don't just differentiate. They change the rules by ignoring the rules. They don't just practice disruptive marketing, they are proposal punk. A proposal rockstar takes risks. They win. They also lose, but their losses don't define them. They fuel them. They don't just try to assemble a proposal, they create something that matters all the way down, and those who read it can feel what makes it matter. It's not just words. Not just marketing. They aren't just pushing paper to please their corporate paymaster. Their proposal is a manifesto. They don't just follow a process. They create. The process is just laying down the rhythm track for everyone who wants to be a part of it and dance and sing along. Being a rockstar isn’t always a good thing. Being a proposal rockstar isn’t always a good thing. Rockstars get in fights and trash the room when they get angry. They tend to be terrible leaders. Some are terrible people. A lot of what they do, a lot of their greatness, happens by accident. But like other tortured artists, what they create actually has changed the world. Capturing just a little of that energy can lead to amazing proposals.

Imagine two AI written proposals. Which one wins? Now think about how the customer will use AI. I’m betting that an AI will score the proposals and a human will make the final decision. This matters a lot because it determines who will win and who will lose. The company that will win the bid will be the company that best trains its AI. All future AIs will have been trained on the entire world wide web and probably every book ever printed. All of the publicly available portion of PropLIBRARY. All of every other website. Now imagine it competing against another AI that has done the same thing. Imagine them both consuming the RFP and then… both writing a proposal that will be pretty darn close in terms of how they score. Imagine #1 and #2 being as close as Olympic Swimmers. However, that’s not how it’s going to go down, because my AI is going to stomp all over your AI. How? How future proposals will be won See also: AI The input I’m going to give my AI is going to include input that’s not on the web. The input I’m going to give my AI is going to include insights from the people my company has talked to. Face to face. My AI is going to know what concerns them, what matters about the technology/solution/services I’m bidding. My AI is going to know what concerns the customer that isn't in the published RFP or on a web page. I am going to build an information advantage using an OG proposal pursuit and capture process from a time before AIs existed. Not only is my proposal going to address these things while your AI will not, but when the human decision maker reads the proposals that their AI thinks are #1 and #2, my proposal is going to sound like I understand them far better and am way more insightful. Because I am. The human making the final decision will select my proposal over yours because I will be speaking far more specifically to the things they care about. The customer's AI will also likely select mine over yours as well, because the reasons I give for why I do things will show details that other AI written proposals will not. The more the customer's decision maker selects proposals like mine over proposals written exclusively by AIs, the more the customer's AI will be trained to select proposals based on my approach every time. The result will be that my AI written proposals will beat your AI written proposals every time. This will be partly because you used AIs to replace the people who would provide the insight. But it is also partly true because I will have institutionalized an old-school process that develops an information advantage by talking to non-AI replaced customer humans. AI does not eliminate the need for an old-school process that starts before the RFP is released. AI makes having an effective manual process more vital than ever. You may not need as many writers. But you will definitely need all the insights you can feed your AI proposal writers. Because without those non-web-based insights, you cannot win. Anything. Time is running out The time you have remaining to change your future is the time until AIs become available that can actually parse an RFP and write proposal content without hallucinating or leaking your corporate secrets. When that happens, companies everywhere will start using AIs to write their proposals. The companies who play around with AI written proposal content today will not have an advantage in the future. They don't have an advantage today. Today's AIs aren't changing your score. They're letting you develop bad habits and dependencies. Those who ignore implementing an effective process will find themselves quite good at using AI to produce proposals faster and easier than ever, but completely unable to win.

Establishing proposal accountability sounds like something you should do. However, good luck with that. Try not to throw out the baby with the bath water. For accountability, you need direct responsibility. That’s hard to find in proposal work. Proposal development is closer to research and development than it is to project management. The proposal process is a process to figure out the process instead of a set of procedures. And when the proposal is bigger than one person, nearly every task is a collaborative effort. Just bringing up the word accountability in this environment is enough to have unintended consequences that lower your win rate. See also: Assignments But here’s the real reason to be extremely careful in how you manage proposal accountability: An environment where blame and shame results from work on proposals will kill your win rate. Winning proposals requires differentiation. Differentiation requires risks. No one takes risks in a blame and shame environment. Worse, everyone tries to be perfectly acceptable. They seek to be completely ordinary. And ordinary proposals lose to simply good proposals, let alone great proposals. Even if you don’t practice the blame and shame variety of accountability, the mere presence of it is enough to turn people ordinary. When you combine that with the difficulty in establishing accountability in proposal work, you get an environment where focusing on accountability can do more to reduce clarity than improve it. Here are 9 reasons why creating accountability for work on a proposal is so challenging that it usually does more harm than good: Proposal development is collaborative work. You can’t disaggregate the contributions of individual people when writing a proposal. You know some did more than others and some did better, but you can’t quantify it. How do you measure the amount or quality of proposal writing? How do you measure the amount or quality of the input provided by each contributor? Comparing individual contributors ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. Instead of ranking them, try paying attention to who people want on their proposal team and who they don’t. Proposal reviews are never sufficiently objective to create a quantified outcome. Even when proposals are scored during reviews, the outcome does not correlate to win or loss in a quantifiable way. Trying to pin proposal accountability to review outcomes ends up being a recipe for disaster, as it turns the proposal into an exercise that’s about gaming the review process. If the goal is to measure your performance against winning or losing, you can’t until the customer decides. You do not get to decide whether a proposal is good enough to win. Only the customer can do that. And while you might feel good or bad about your chances at submission, you can’t reliably quantify your win probability before award. While people claim to have “algorithms,” the best you can do is to create an accountability system based on doing the things you hope will lead to winning. Then the outcome is determined by how well you understand what it will take to win, which is right where you want it. RFP compliance is not the absolute people would like it to be. The simple fact that there can be 150 pages in a SOW with a page limit of 30 pages (or less) to respond to them all proves that some of the requirements will simply not get addressed in the proposal. Achieving RFP compliance depends on taking risks and the individual customer evaluator’s level of subjective interest. This makes holding people accountable for achieving RFP compliance impossible, unless you want to keep them in fear over something that’s out of their control. Proposal development is not a single workflow. You can’t set reliable, precise metrics for each task. You don’t even have the same tasks on every proposal. Differences in RFPs force enough change that you can’t compare apples to apples. Forcing things to be the same to make them accountable will hurt your win rate by reducing the tailoring needed to optimize your win rate. Proposal efficiency is properly measured by ROI and not task performance. Holding people accountable for proposal metrics other than ROI brings enough negative incentives that it’s just not worth it. It’s much better to obsessively focus on ROI, but you have to assess it as the entire pursuit and capture function, and not as individually accountable efforts. Correlation is not causality. You can determine which things correlate with your win rate. But a proposal loss with a clear cause is very rare, even with (also rare) detailed customer debriefs. Be very, very careful when using data to establish accountability because you almost certainly do not have statistical significance in your findings. Without statistical significance, you can be misled when drawing conclusions from the data. The proposal team does not control the volume of proposals being bid. They do not control the amount of resources available, or more often, the lack thereof. During high volume bidding, they often make trade-off decisions based on what will have the least negative impact in order to get everything submitted instead of maximizing win probability by applying sufficient resources. And they usually don’t have the authority to cancel lower probability proposal efforts to increase the win probability of the others in some unquantified way. You decided that you want them to take this approach when you overloaded them with bids, because you thought that would be the best way to maximize revenue growth. Trying to hold them accountable for what you did will not achieve the results you are looking for. The proposal team usually also does not control the pricing, which is a huge component of win probability. The proposal team can do everything supremely well and still lose because the pricing was wrong. And the pricing can be wrong because the work was overestimated, corporate overhead is too high, the staff bid was too expensive, etc. If accountability is the only tool you have for performance improvement, you might want to avoid proposals. As a baby step, you might focus on improving clarity of expectations ahead of accountability. If win rate is your top priority, you should focus on the things that improve collaboration before focusing on accountability. But do give a lot of consideration to the ROI of the pursuit and capture function, even if you don’t have statistical significance in your data. I’ll be over here nurturing my team to take risks, write great proposals, and compete against you while you’re focusing on accountability.

If you are treating your pink team review as a progress review to see how the proposal writing is going, then you are doing them wrong. And you are setting yourself up for a bad experience at the red team review. You are missing a vital opportunity and will suffer a lower win probability than a company that has a better definition for what a pink team review should be. See also: Proposal Quality Validation A pink team review should be a blueprint review prior to the construction of the proposal. The blueprint for a proposal is called a content plan. If your first review of a building construction was to see if it’s 75% complete or not and on track to be 100% complete at the next review you’ve got some problems. Is the design of the building correct? Is it being built to fulfill the right goals? Will it be better than any other comparable building? Will it stand or will it fall? Do you build it 75% before you try to check these things? A pink team review is a test to see if you know what the proposal should be before you waste time on creating it with the deadline clock ticking. A pink team review should not be a draft review at all, let alone a draft that isn’t expected to be complete, but is expected to be far enough along to see how the proposal is shaping up. Whatever that means. Instead, a pink team review should enable you to validate that: You know what should be written and how to present it The proposal, when written with this guidance, will fulfill the customer’s expectations What you intend to offer is what the company wants to offer and can be delivered below the price to win, before you commit to that offering The proposal reflects what it will take to win Going straight to a partial (or even a full) draft won’t enable you to validate any of these things. A pink team review should be of your proposal content plan, before a draft is even written. When you review a draft at pink team, people review your win strategies to determine if they sound good. This is a poor criterion to use for assessing proposal quality. Lots of self-praise and beneficial things can sound good, but unfortunately, do more harm than good in a proposal. It also sets the proposal up for red team failure. This is because: You still have no defined criteria for proposal quality or the means to measure it without a proposal content plan to define them or compare the draft proposal to. The foundation that everything is built on remains unsound. The proposal writers, who lacked guidance during the first draft effort, have now been sent in a different, but equally subjective, ambiguous, and unverified direction. They are being asked to repair and complete a building built on a shaky foundation. That might be achievable, but not with a high win probability. The draft delivered to the red team is simply based on better guesses rather than a validated plan. Is it better to write poorly and try to fix your proposal through infinite revisions until the deadline clock runs out, or is it better to take a little time, figure out what the proposal should be, and validate that is what the company wants the proposal to be before you write it? Expecting proposal writers to trip over the right proposal copy through revisions is high-cost and high-risk. For proposals, this translates into an expensive proposal effort with a low win probability. When you make your pink team reviews a draft review to check in on the proposal and make any changes in direction needed, you institutionalize a low win probability. This is not what a professional proposal organization should do.

I'm working on a new offering and have decided to take a different approach than I have in the past. Instead of waiting until everything is final and announcing it for sale, I'm reaching out to potential customers for discussion so that they can share their thoughts before things are set in stone. I have tons of course materials and over a hundred slide decks, exercises, and quizzes on dozens of topics relevant to BD, capture, and proposals. I’m thinking about creating a subscription add-on for PropLIBRARY that will share the training materials I have with other consultants and coaches to accelerate, enhance, and incorporate into their own training. Status I have all the content for this offering. I just need to reformat it. I'm thinking about going as plain as possible to make it easier for you to incorporate into your own slides and branding. I'll launch a solid foundation in a couple of weeks and add to it forever. What I need to work on are the product details. And rather than do this in isolation, I'd rather do some outreach and get some feedback regarding what works best for you. Examples Here is a small fraction of the course material topics that will be available. You can use these to quickly launch a course. Or add to a course you have in mind. Some could be broken down into several courses. Each will be posted as a pptx file that you can reformat and incorporate into your own presentation. Bringing structure to the Pre-RFP release phase of opportunity pursuit Formulas and techniques for improving your proposal writing Goal-Driven proposal process training How to format your Executive Summary Introducing capture management Introducing the MustWin Process Introduction to proposal recipes How to get everyone on the same page regarding the proposal process Objective signs you are not maximizing your ability win proposals Using the process to increase ROI and win probability Introduction to Proposal Content Planning Start by defining proposal quality Proposal sight reading Proposal Quality Validation How to word your RFP responses Market research and accommodating different needs I'm planning to make this an add-on to the PropLIBRARY Subscription. But I anticipate a few variations to meet different sets of needs. For example, some people fly solo. They are either freelance consultants, entrepreneurs, or the only inhouse proposal specialist at a company. Their need for training materials is to enable them to personally deliver training to others. Then there are people who work in a proposal department, large or small, in a company with enough staff that they need just-in-time training or perhaps a semi-regular training program. When a company has over a thousand employees, that's a lot of training to deliver. Finally, there are the agencies that place consultants. Many of them do training. Maybe not as much as they would like. Access to the library I have to offer could be a major source of revenue and a great accelerator. So the offering should accommodate different needs with different licenses for how the materials can be used and distributed. Summary of the licensing models under consideration Solo trainer. Applies to single employees, consultants, coaches, or trainers. Only you will be licensed to access, display, distribute, and use the PropLIBRARY training materials for the purpose of conducting training to specific, named individuals. You may use the materials to teach courses and include them in your training materials. You may not publish the materials in any public medium such as on a website or in a book, without written permission. If you charge for the training, you decide how much and keep all of it. Corporate trainers. Applies to companies with a significant head count potentially involved in proposals and with multiple staff who would deliver the training. A specified number of concurrent trainers will be licensed to access and use the PropLIBRARY training materials. They may use them to teach courses and include them in training materials for an unlimited number of students who are all employed by the same company. They are not licensed to teach students at multiple companies. They also may not publish the materials in any public medium such as on a website or in a book, without written permission. Agency trainers. Applies to companies that provide proposal services to many corporate customers. A specific number of concurrent trainers will be licensed to access and use the PropLIBRARY training materials. They may use them to teach courses and include them in training materials for an unlimited number of students who are in companies that have engaged the parent corporation for training services. They may not publish the materials in any public medium such as on a website or in a book, without written permission. In all of the above cases: Attribution to PropLIBRARY will be required on each slide or page where they are used. This will take the form of text saying “Portions Copyright 2024 by CapturePlanning.com, LLC and used with permission. See https://proplibrary.com for more information.” This text in a caption, footer, or type at the bottom of a slide is sufficient. A “white labelling” option will be provided for an extra charge that will permit you to use the PropLIBRARY training materials without attribution. The license to access, use, display, and distribute the PropLIBRARY training materials where used in whole, part, or with modifications ends when the subscription ends. If your subscription expires you will be required to remove our materials from your training materials and no longer display, distribute, or use them. An optional permanent license will be offered for an additional charge that will enable you to use the materials in perpetuity, even after your subscription ends. Thoughts on pricing Final pricing has not been decided. Perhaps you can help with the market research by sharing your thoughts. Strategy. I look at this from multiple perspectives. The first is whether I consider the price to be a good value for enabling solo consultants to launch a training offering. The second is whether it saves enough time compared to creating all your own content to make it a no-brainer. I consider the break-even point related to a single course and the profitability after doing multiple courses. Basically I want to position consultants to make (a lot of) money through training. For companies, I want to position you to launch an internal training program that saves far more than the license cost. Single trainer. I haven’t determined the pricing for the Single Training subscription add-on. It will require a PropLIBRARY Subscription and be an extra charge on top of that. Until the future product launch, I am planning to make the materials available to PropLIBRARY Subscribers who I find are good candidates to help me market test the concept without the add-on charge. Many of you already have your subscription, but if you're on the monthly payment plan you will need to convert your subscription to annual. If you do not have a PropLIBRARY annual subscription, they cost $595 per user for the first year and only $195 to renew in the following years. Here is the subscription product page. Corporate trainers. I am considering setting a fixed price for up to a specific number of trainers (5, 10, 50?) to keep things as simple as possible: purchase your license and you don’t have to worry about how many trainers or students. If you are in this category, reach out to me below since it requires manual processing at this point. Agency trainers. This will also be a fixed price, but higher than the Corporate trainer license, which is restricted to employees of a single company. I expect it to come in below the cost of the time to create the equivalent yourself, enable you to differentiate and promote your brand, and be able to have training materials from a source that is not only respected but is also quite thoroughly vetted. If you are in this category, reach out to me below since it requires manual processing at this point. White labelling. This will be a fixed price based on the type of license. Permanent licensing. This will be a fixed price based on the type of base license and renewals for a certain number of years. Maybe 5. Affiliate possibilities One piece of feedback I've received already (Thanks Eileen!) is that some folks might want to be able to earn a referral fee for referring customers to become PropLIBRARY subscribers. That is something fairly easy to to implement on our end, so we will definitely do that for those who want it. We can even provide some marketing support related to best practices for making the referrals. Promotional possibilities Something else we'll be doing is mentioning people using our materials in their training in our newsletter and other channels. This can help promote the training you'll be offering. How to make contact and participate in shaping the offering If you are a consultant or trainer and this is something you might be interested in, I’d like to talk to you before I finalize the details. This is your chance to influence the direction I take. Click the button below to schedule a phone call or a Zoom and we can have a conversation about it.

If you begin by asking “Should you use AI on proposals?” you are at risk of using AI to create losing proposals. It’s the wrong question to start with. The issues with using AI on proposals are not whether to use it, or even whether AI or human writers are better. The main issue with using AI is not just how to use it, but how to use it competitively. It gets to the heart of what it takes to win proposals. If you think about it, the number of losing proposals prepared by AI will be about the same as the number of losing proposals currently prepared by humans. The number of awards being made and therefore the number of winning proposals will remain about the same, even if AI lets you submit more proposals. In fact, AIs could produce a great deal more losing proposals if lots of companies decide it costs very little to throw an AI at it and submit a proposal. Using AI to submit more proposals to more customers may not result in any more wins that you are getting now. As a side note, I find it interesting that humans submitting more ordinary proposals to more customers also rarely increases the number of wins. Losing in volume does not increase revenue. The key is the difference between proposals that are ordinary and proposals that are great. The right question to ask See also: AI The most important thing about AI and proposals is whether you will win more proposals using AI than you will without using AI. If you want to win proposals, you need to ask “How should I use AI to win competitive proposals?” And it’s not simply about whether you can be more competitive by today’s standards, it’s about how to win against other AI-written proposals. If you give two AIs a statement of work from an RFP and tell them to write a compliant response, they (probably) will. One will get a higher evaluation score and win. If, after you get a response to the SOW, you ask one of the AIs to optimize the wording of the response based on the evaluation criteria, that AI will have a substantial advantage over the first and be far more likely to win. If you take two responses like this and then you ask one of the AIs to incorporate some insights you have about the customer’s needs and preferences, it will lead to a proposal that has a clear advantage over all of them. The key takeaway here is that going into a proposal having insights about the customer's needs and preferences enables you to better train your AI to beat all the other AIs. But there’s a problem There’s just one big, fat, ugly problem with this. Where do those customer insights come from? The answer is: offline. That’s right, the secret to beating all the AIs comes from what you do offline. It comes from your customer relationships. It comes from your ability to gather intelligence that no one else has. It comes from assessing the intelligence you gather and turning it into win strategies. A simple scenario shows why Let’s say the RFP lists the customer’s goals in the background section. This is fairly common. An AI might skip them since they aren’t really requirements. If you’re smart you’ll tell your AI to provide a compliance response that achieves their goals. Unfortunately, you have a competitor who frequently talks to the customer. Your competitor knows that the customer has some constraints. Those constraints could be financial, political, or simply the preferences of management. So your competitor tells their AI to provide a compliant response that achieves the customer's goals while also addressing their constraints. Their AI beats your AI. They win, you lose. It’s all about how you train your AI Winning proposals in an AI world isn’t all that different than winning them before AIs. You have to: Discover what it will take to win and do that offline Turn that into a plan for writing your proposal content Explain the plan to your proposal writers Verify that your proposal writers followed the plan You can simply replace “proposal writers” with “AI.” Nothing has really changed. Should you use AI to write your proposals? That’s an easy “yes.” But it’s also the wrong question to ask. If you want to win, you’ll ask “How can I train my AI better than anyone else will train theirs?” This will quickly be followed by "Where will I get the customer insights I need to win?" And this last question applies whether you use AI or not. It is also the secret to how you can beat companies using AI if you are not.

The things that bother me the most when working on proposals are mostly avoidable. And yet they often occur. Even being the proposal manager and being aware of them may not be enough to be able to always prevent them. That makes them doubly annoying. While I love working on proposals, these are the kinds of things that lead to bad experiences: See also: Dealing with adversity Unresolved competing priorities. There will always be competing priorities. That’s not the problem. The problem is when there is so much money at stake and The Powers That Be are aware of the conflicting priorities and do nothing to resolve them. It’s hard to put so much effort into a proposal that has its probability of winning crippled. We can’t risk offending the customer we don’t know. Every compelling offer is polarizing. The odds of winning favor being bold and polarizing with an offer that matters, over watering down your message so that it can’t offend anyone. It holds you back from being able to write a great proposal and limits you to just cranking out a proposal that is merely acceptable. pWin. This one is both love and hate. It’s vital but false at the same time. The moment you try to pin a percentage on your pWin, you’re lying to yourself. It's amazing, and not in a good way, how many proposals that shouldn't have been bid started off with a high pWin assessment. I have a 99% win rate. All win rates are cherry picked. You must determine what is included or excluded just to calculate a win rate. But the incentive is to make those decisions in your favor. Be skeptical of someone who cites their win rate without telling you about the bids they left out of the calculation, because the odds of it being deceptive are high. This is true within a company, between companies, and when cited by individuals. When people think that by submitting their assignment by the deadline, they have done what needed to be done. Winning proposals is not about filling out the pages. It’s about winning. Every part of a proposal requires planning, executing, reviewing, and recovering. If you’re in it, be in it to win. It's a lot harder to do proposals with people who just want to do the minimum and run away. Making the RFP the beginning and end of it. The RFP is just the beginning. A lot more goes into winning than just the RFP. If you think your work on a proposal ends when you’ve addressed what’s in the RFP, you’re not trying hard enough to win. This shows up at the beginning, when you discover that the proposal is starting with sufficient customer insight and people are working exclusively from the RFP, and it happens in the middle when people want to take the easy route and not do any research beyond the RFP. It’s better to write something quickly so that you have something to work with. This is the start of the proposal death spiral, where you write iteration after iteration in search of something that can win until you run out of time and submit what you have without finding what you were searching for. Winning consistently requires that you think through what it will take to win first and then write it. I can’t tell you what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it. This is the worst sin in proposals. Telling people to burn the time available trying to guess at what the proposal should be instead of thinking it through, validating it, and then proceeding to execute it. Imagine flying in an airplane built that way. A proposal process is based on having steps that people should follow. This flies in the face of reality. In most fields, every RFP in the door presents exceptions and deviations to your steps. Having a process that is mostly accurate is a contradiction in terms. The proposal process should be based on goals and not steps. This shows up when companies say they have a process, but really don't. Proposal automation saves money and time. Think about what the return is on a small increase in your win rate. Usually it’s a rough order of magnitude more than the effort it takes to increase your win rate. The same is true in reverse. Proposal automation gets in the way of the things you need to do to increase your win rate. This creates a reduction in ROI instead of an increase. It is better to create your proposals like your business depends on them than it is to minimize them. I love working on proposals and the reasons for it are more compelling than the things I occasionally hate about it. But stressful and recurring problems like these definitely detract from the experience. Take another look at the list above and ask yourself how many of these are people problems. And how many of those are mismatches in expectations. And how many are part of human nature and not going away anytime soon. I also see that I have written articles related to almost all of them. That’s an indicator that I’ve given it some thought in the past and will continue to do so until the problems go away for good. I just hope I don’t have to wait for human nature to change for that to happen. 😉

For most folks, a job is a job. It can’t be like that with proposals. You’ll burn out in just a few years. I’ve been doing them for more than 30. These are the things that help me find meaning in proposals and that have kept me going during the worst, most high stress proposals I’ve had to suffer through: See also: Great Proposals Creating opportunity. When you win proposals, you win jobs. Sometimes you even get to define those jobs. Sometimes you get to define what people will do and how, and you might even get to define how people will interact. You get to set people up for growth and promotion. If you are lucky, you might be able to set someone up with their dream job. With a career in proposals, you will potentially create opportunities for (tens of) thousands of people. When I’m working extra hard against a deadline, I try to keep this in mind. It helps make it feel worthwhile. Growth is the source of all opportunity and you get to be in the middle of nurturing it. Helping people to realize the significance of what they do. When I interview people about what they do or how to do a job, they often do not realize how significant it is. They might routinely be impacting the health, safety, income, or wellness of millions of people. But to them, their job is just their daily grind. Sometimes when I draw it out of them and they see what they do described in a way that makes the benefits clear, it’s a big eye opener for them. Working at all levels of the chain of command. On my very first job in proposals, I was regularly working with everyone from the CEO down. That has been true at every proposal job I’ve ever had, even for gigs I’ve taken with billion-dollar companies. What matters about this isn’t the glory, it’s the insight and perspective you gain. Being able to cut through the bureaucracy. If something is needed to complete a high value proposal and you’re up against the deadline, it’s a lot easier to get cooperation. And it’s a lot easier to go over people’s heads if you don’t get it. Procedures can be expedited when the need is important enough. Proposals can be that important. Clear, unambiguous goals. What do I need to do? Win. That’s not easy and there are a lot of challenges between here and there, but the goal is clear. Success matters. Your daily routine working in proposals has huge ups and downs. It’s not the same every day. For most jobs, if you are a little better or a little worse, it won’t matter. You can be better or worse again tomorrow and it probably won’t matter either. This is not true for proposals. You’ll spend your career trying to get better so you can win more instead of punching a clock. After some time, getting better at winning proposals will take you to places beyond the proposal. You’ll never stop learning and growing. Solving unsolvable problems against a deadline. You must submit a winnable proposal by the deadline. Every time. No matter what problems come up. In many ways, proposal management is nothing but problem solving. When you have a big, fat, ugly problem and the deadline clock is ticking, you can find great satisfaction in finding a solution. And if you can’t find a solution, you will find a workaround. Because that’s just who we are. The adrenaline rush. I once heard a theory that proposal specialists are simply adrenaline junkies. I believe it more now than when I first heard it. I find when I’m high on a proposal, it’s because the adrenaline is pumping. How many office jobs are like that? Collaborating with people who have strategic vision. Give me solid win strategies that demonstrate customer insight and I can create a great proposal. Give me someone with strategic vision and insight, and we can have great conversations on what would make the greatest imaginable proposal and go from there into how to change the world. And then make it happen for real. They end. Whether it’s a good proposal or a bad proposal, it has a due date. No matter how many times they extend it, there will be a due date that’s final. All proposals end. On a bad day, that’s the best thing about them. But it can be enough to keep you going. The next one will be another chance to make it better. So long as you have confidence that you can make future proposals better, you have hope. And hope is a good thing to have. The next article I write will be 10 things I hate about working on proposals…

Proposal work requires people to use judgment and not just blindly follow procedures. Wherever possible, it is better to define the proposal process as a series of questions instead of a series of steps. The beauty of using questions is that: You can easily tailor them for your corporate culture and issues. A list of questions is also easy to change over time. This makes them a great way to ease process in and to continuously raise the bar by periodically changing the questions. They convert into cheat sheets and checklists very easily. People react differently when you ask them to follow a process vs giving them a checklist to make things easier for them. But the wording of the questions matters. How you ask the questions has a major impact on how well things get done. There are an infinite number of ways to phrase the same question. Sometimes you can be direct. Sometimes you need to be very indirect. It depends on your audience and the proposal environment you are working in. The people trying to answer the questions will react differently depending on how you word them and this will produce different results. This is a good thing. It’s far easier to fix than a flow chart that no one is following. Here are some examples of ways that you can use questions to frame your process: See also: Proposal Process Improvement Redefine roles. Instead of telling people what their roles are and then expecting them to just comply, try asking them who should be responsible for something or what role they play in it. Select very carefully. For example, instead of telling them to write something and provide finished copy by the deadline, consider asking them who is responsible for completing the writing by the deadline. Even if they answer someone else, it provides an opening for discussion about the topic instead of passive aggressive silence on it. You can also ask questions without addressing “who” that result in their acceptance. For example you could ask them if they have the proposal quality criteria and understand how to fulfill them. If you are having trouble getting sales or operations to participate in the proposal, you could ask “Does the proposal content plan reflect our full awareness of the customer?” or “Does our proposed approach have sufficient detail to provide a foundation for an acceptable project plan that you might be responsible for executing?” Change assumptions. Ask what else is possible or should be considered. Ask if there are any alternatives or better ways to do things. Ask people to achieve a goal instead of following a procedure. Include the assumption in the question and then ask for something else. Use comparison and contrast. Ask “What if…” Change how people do things. You can ask questions that stretch people out of their comfort zones and into other areas that are needed. Ask about whether they’ve considered doing certain things or various options. Ask if they’ve completed something needed. Ask questions about the customer, opportunity, or offering for them to answer. Ask them to assess something and turn it into something else. Ask them to draw a picture of it. You can also be indirect and ask whether they have what they need to complete something, where the answer provides acceptance without directly asking them to complete it. Getting people to show up prepared. What do you need before you can start? Do you have enough time to get ready? Did you bring…? Have you read the RFP? Apply lessons learned. Instead of telling people about lessons learned from the past, just simply change your list of questions to reflect them. You can anticipate and prevent questions, add detail, add new questions, remove or replace old questions, or even embed the lesson learned in a question. Meet expectations. You can use questions to surface expectations, inform people of expectations, prepare them to fulfill expectations, track or report on progress, confirm fulfillment, discover issues related to expectations, and more. Plan before they write. What needs to be written? How should it be written? How should it be presented? What should be included or considered? What do they need to know before they can start? The entire Proposal Content Planning process can be articulated as a series of questions. Apply proposal quality criteria. Proposal quality criteria are best presented as questions. Describing your quality standards as statements tends to make them more subjective and easier to ignore. Describing them as questions requires consideration (of whether they meet the standard) in order to answer the question. And it’s harder to move on without having an answer. Change behavior. What do you want people to do more of, less of, or do differently? Then ask them a question that either prompts the desired action or confirms its completion. Indirect questions work best for changing behavior. For 43 more examples, see the companion article written for PropLIBRARY subscribers.

See the companion article that describes how to build a goal-driven proposal process around questions like these. To redefine roles To encourage business development to play a larger role in writing the proposal, or to contribute more customer insight into the proposal: Does the Executive Summary reflect what we discovered from talking to the customer? What should we say in the proposal based on our customer interactions? How can we translate our customer insights into differentiators for use in the proposal? To encourage technical staff to improve their ability to write persuasively: What technical trade-offs are involved in doing this work? How is our approach to resolving them better than anyone else’s? What should the customer know about it? To change assumptions To encourage people to move away from an assumption that “Proposals always have a train wreck at the end,” during a proposal review ask: Is your section complete so the proposal can meet the deadline, or will it contribute to a train wreck at the end of the proposal? Has your review done everything possible to prevent a train wreck at the end of the proposal? To change how people do things When staff have a habit of not doing something they should, remind them: Did you address what differentiates our approach in what you wrote? Did you resolve all comments and issues related to your section? When staff are submitting incomplete responses, ask questions like: Did you complete your section without leaving any holes? What impediments do you have to completing your section(s)? Did you get the help you needed to complete your section? If your proposal section is not complete, who is going to complete it and when? To get people to show up prepared In general: Have you read the RFP and the capture plan? Have you cleared your schedule to work on the proposal? Do you have any issues you need to raise at the beginning? When reviewers are showing up unprepared at the start of a proposal review: What have you done to prepare for this review? Have you cleared your schedule to focus on the review? When your reviewers are executives with competing priorities but outside your control: Can you clear your schedule sufficiently to thoroughly review the proposal? If you can't thoroughly perform the proposal review, who can? To apply lessons learned When the last proposal involved staff with competing priorities completing their assignments late, consider questions like: What is your plan for dealing with expected competing priorities? Who else might have relevant knowledge and be able to help with completing your section? To meet expectationsWhen people aren't fulfilling expectations during the proposal, you should do everything possible to ensure that the expectations are clear. Questions like these can help: Have you discussed your expectations related to your proposal assignment? Do you have any exceptions or require any clarifications about the expectations for your proposal assignment? Are there any issues related to completing your proposal assignment? To plan before they write When Proposal Content Planning is formalized, then it is an assignment of its own. But you can subtly remind people of its importance with questions like: Are your Proposal Content Plan contributions sufficient to prevent revisions later? Do your Proposal Content Plan contributions add up to the proposal the company would like to submit? Do your Proposal Content Plan contributions describe a proposal that is competitive enough to win? When Proposal Content Planning is informal or new to a company, you can coach people through it by asking questions like: What do you plan to make your section about? What points do you plan to prove? What differentiators will you highlight? What options are you considering? What steps, details, or components do you plan to include? What do you need to say beyond RFP compliance to win? To apply proposal quality criteria To remind writers about the proposal quality criteria: Before writing, have you reviewed the proposal quality criteria? After drafting your section, have your reviewed the proposal quality criteria before submitting it and calling it complete? To remind reviewers about the proposal quality criteria: Before reviewing the proposal, have you read the proposal quality criteria? Have you used the proposal quality criteria to ensure that nothing has been overlooked and that you achieve the goals of the review? To change behavior During proposal, people sometimes do, say, act, or behave in ways that are counterproductive. If this is showing up habitually in a lot of proposals, you can use the questions you ask to try to minimize the behavior by asking questions like: Are you bringing issues up at the proposal meetings quickly enough to prevent them from becoming major problems? Have you reviewed and discussed your expectations related to the proposal? Have you made sure that other people’s expectations related to the proposal are accurate? Are you fulfilling other people’s expectations during the proposal? Implementing this approach In writing this, it occurred to me how many of these are conversational. Some are questions I would have asked in person. You can build those into your process. If you create before/during/after events for achieving each goal in your proposal process, you can pre-write emails with reminders and subsets of questions delivered at the moment of need. You can use them for conversational questions, or even to trigger real conversations. Smaller lists of highly relevant, just in time questions will get much better attention than large comprehensive lists delivered at the beginning of the proposal.

Here is a low-risk way to try our services and training. You can use it to take a class, get our feedback on one of your proposals, and more. If you are thinking about reaching out to us about something more strategic like a continuously win rate improvement program, ongoing support, fractional VP services to provide affordable but top leadership, you can use this simple approach to test the waters. You can pick any item below, either service or training, for a fixed price. This keeps it nice, simple, and low risk. If you pick just one, the price is $2500 and it comes with a free 1-year subscription to PropLIBRARY. If you already have a PropLIBRARY subscription, you get $500 off. It may be hard to just pick one. If that's the case, we can create a package and quote you a price. We can also help you understand the options and figure out which is best for your needs. What kind of challenges are you facing? Where do you need the most help? What are you trying to improve? The list below provides plenty of opportunities to raise your win rate and do it in ways with a positive ROI that more than covers the cost. Sometimes by orders of magnitude. Scroll through the list below and pick a few to talk about. Then click the button and schedule a conversation. We’ll share the details and you can tell us about your company and your goals. Services Pre-RFP Proposal Preparation Getting the proposal input you need Proposal compliance matrix and outline building Proposal content planning Reducing proposal friction Proposal Review Proposal Process Assessment Pre-RFP and bid/no bid process assessment Maximizing ROI Assessment Training Courses Proposal writing from the customer’s perspective Successfully collecting the proposal input you need to win Implementing a goal-driven proposal process Creating communication templates to streamline proposal management Alternative proposal reuse strategies Good proposal writing vs great proposal writing Writing proposals to use the words in the RFP Fixing bad proposal habits Refreshing your proposal writing techniques Defining and communicating proposal expectations Defining quality and quality criteria 10 different ways to conduct proposal reviews Implementing Proposal Quality Validation instead of antiquated draft reviews Proposal review leadership and logistics Building a proposal compliance matrix and outline Proposal content planning Everything I needed to know about proposal writing, I learned from writing the introduction paragraph

You are going to need something to apply the expectation formula to, so start by gathering the following information to make it easy: Proposal Stakeholders. First, identify all of the proposal stakeholders, either by name or role. Proposal expectations flow between stakeholders in every direction, so you need to consider all of their different perspectives. Goals. Next, identify the goals you have for your proposal process. Action Items. Finally, identify what people will need to do in order to achieve the goals of the process. If you do not have a goal-driven proposal process and are still trying to get people to follow your steps, this is a good time to reconsider. But if you have to, you can use your steps instead of goals and action items. Organizing the expectations into a matrix See also: Assignments The first column should be for Stakeholders. Then create additional columns for each goal and each action item within them. Use the Stakeholders column to label each row with the people who will be involved in or impacted by the proposal process. In each cell, identify the expectations for your Stakeholders. This is where the formula will help. The simple formula for clarifying proposal expectations When I teach proposal writing, I commonly ask people to memorize the following as if it is a mantra: Who, what, where, how, when, and why I have written before about how this simple formula can be used to exceed RFP compliance. Now we’re going to use it to clarify proposal expectations. Here are some examples of how to use it to surface expectations: Who. Who is expected to do what? What. What are they expected to provide or do? Where. Where do things need to be done? Where can you get what you need? Where should they be put when complete? How. How should things be done? Are there procedures to follow or methodologies to employ? When. When should they start? When should they complete? When should they check in or meet? Why. Why do you expect that? Why them? Why that way? The people you are depending on will do a better job of fulfilling your expectations if they understand why they are being asked. You should do this twice: What the proposal effort expects from people contributing What people can expect from the proposal effort It’s also a good idea to ask: What can people expect from the customer? What can the customer expect from the proposal? However, these apply to the proposal as a whole and you’ll run into challenges trying to apply them to every action item. Nonetheless, since an important goal is to create a proposal that reflects the customer’s perspective, you might consider creating expectations for proposal contributors to discover and apply the customer’s perspective in achieving the goals of your process. Implementation The big challenge implementing this approach is granularity. If the number of expectations you create is overwhelming, it totally defeats the purpose. Consider dropping expectations that are obvious, patronizing, not a high priority, or address issues that are exceedingly rare. Do you really need an expectation set that people should be on time? You might. But you probably don’t. The result will change your life (as well as those of your stakeholders) Instead of going from kickoff to outline to assignments, imagine going from goals to expectations to assignments. Which do you think will get better results from proposal contributors? How will people perform when you’ve had an open discussion about what you expect from them, and what they can expect from you? Just make sure that you discuss expectations and don’t unilaterally declare them. Your expectations are meaningless if people don’t buy in to them. But if you get their buy-in and they feel confident that you can be trusted to fulfill their expectations in turn, then imagine the proposal you can create together and how it can go. Imagine facing the inevitable challenges with people who know how to be clear about expectations and how to resolve expectation conflicts.

Doing a proposal is easy. Doing a proposal with other people is hard. What makes it hard is that everyone has different expectations. Expectation conflict is the biggest source of proposal friction. What is proposal friction? See also: Improving Win Rates Proposal friction is energy lost in the form of heat generated when people do not move through your proposal process smoothly. When people don’t do what they are supposed to, have to work without the information they need, are assigned tasks they can’t complete, have to work around issues because they can't get them resolved, won’t cooperate, receive review feedback that's arbitrary or unexpected, or have priority conflicts, people are experiencing proposal friction. Proposal friction produces distractions, delays, hard feelings, conflict, and confusion that disrupts the smooth, efficient, and flawless execution of the proposal process. Proposal friction results in work taking more energy than it should. Proposal quality is directly dependent on the motivation of the people contributing. Proposal friction reduces quality and lowers your win probability. It is also a big part of what makes people hate working on proposals. Nearly all of the friction encountered by people working on proposals comes from mismatches in expectations. If you want a better process that leads to a better proposal experience and a higher win rate, you should focus on discovering, articulating, and refining expectations instead of on steps or deadline enforcement. If you don’t achieve agreement on expectations when you issue an assignment, the resulting friction will cause the assignment to not achieve the results you’re hoping for. Reducing proposal friction Reducing proposal friction requires expectations to be thoroughly communicated and agreed on. Consider spelling out the expectations in writing for every stakeholder at every step. Make sure you give them a chance to object to your expectations and to share their expectations. The goal is clarity that reduces friction and not imposition. Keep at it until everyone has explicitly agreed to accept the expectations. It helps to have a structured approach for communicating expectations. The way you document the expectations and how you communicate with people throughout the proposal directly impacts the amount of proposal friction that the proposal will encounter. Goals, expectations, and communications can be integrated and turned into communication templates so that you are constantly working to keep everything clear. Proposal friction can’t be eliminated by the unilateral declaration of expectations. Telling people what you expect of them is less effective than discussing it, because expectations run in both directions. A boss can actually create more friction by declaring expectations, if they diverge too much from the expectations that their stakeholders have. Only if the judicious use of authority brings clarity that the stakeholders buy into, will it reduce friction. People accept different types and amount of authority in different cultures. Things change During execution people run into problems and external matters come up that can impact the proposal effort. This can create proposal friction as it can create a conflict between an accepted expectation and reality. This is a big reason why people can be commitment shy and not want to buy into expectations. The closer you get to your deadline, the higher the risk of these unexpected issues can be. It helps to create an environment that surfaces issues quickly. Make issues easy to report and encourage and support people who have problems instead of projecting disappointment to them. Then clearly communicate how the expectations have changed to everyone impacted. Apply lubrication Proposal friction adds up and can make a proposal grind to a halt. Even if it doesn’t, it wears away at quality. Think of everything you do as adding either friction or lubricant to other people’s efforts. Apply lubrication and make the proposal run smoother by reducing or eliminating all points of friction. What you may find is that your efforts to reduce friction also increase productivity and effectiveness such that instead of proposal friction killing your win rate, your efforts to lubricate the points of friction result in producing better proposals by happier people who then achieve a much higher win rate.

A thesis is tremendously helpful for proposal writing because it gives you something to prove. A thesis is the central claim in a paper. When you try to write a thesis for a proposal, you’ll probably struggle and that’s a good thing. If you want to win, you should be putting some effort into figuring out what to write before you just throw words at the customer. The difference between a proposal thesis and a theme is that themes more easily degrade. Theme statements intended to link your proposal to benefits and differentiators tend to become watered down beneficial sounding claims without proof. They become ideas and attributes instead of statements that matter. They become unsubstantiated claims. However, we’re all taught in school to prove a thesis. A thesis provides better guidance for achieving writing that make proposals compelling. Why don’t a lot of proposals have a thesis? See also: Themes Because it’s hard to pick just one. The point of most proposals is really just Pick me! Pick me!” and that’s not very persuasive. If your thesis is “We have the most experience” or “We have the best qualifications” what you are really saying is “Pick me! Pick me! I’m the best!” because the customer doesn’t get anything from the fact that you have experience or qualifications. It’s hard to know what the customer really wants and to address it better than any other alternative without doing a lot of research. You have to put effort into writing a good thesis, and do it before you write anything else. So instead, companies pile on all the reasons they think they are great. These claims tend to be shallow and unsubstantiated. And when they aren’t, they are rarely differentiated or say anything that is significantly different from the pile of claims made by their competitors. The result of doing this is a proposal that is not competitive and easy to beat. It results in proposals written about your company instead of proposals that are about the customer. What should a proposal thesis be? The central claim for a proposal should be: How does what you are offering address the customer’s needs in a way that is better than every other alternative? The best thesis will be about things that matter to the customer, like what they are going to get. From the customer’s perspective, this is more important than a description of your company and how great it is. The greatness of your company becomes relevant when you write to prove that what you are offering is better than every other alternative. A simple formula for your proposal thesis Fill in the blanks: [Company name] offers [what you will do or deliver] that will [fulfill a key requirement or goal] by [differentiated approach]. This is a simple example to help you visualize the concept. There are many other ways to formulate a thesis for a proposal. Your thesis should go before you introduce yourself. It should be the very first thing the customer reads. It’s that important. You only matter to the customer as a vehicle for getting their needs and goals fulfilled. Make yourself part of the proof that they’ll get what the proposal promises instead of the point and focus of your proposal. How does a proposal thesis like this drive better proposal writing? A thesis must be proven. Claims of greatness from a vendor fail against proof. Every. Time. A good thesis will force you to prove that you are the best alternative for the customer. It forces you to make the proposal about the customer. Give every proposal section a thesis of its own In the RFP, the customer may have asked you to describe something or tell them how you’ll do something. But what you should write is a proof of what you are describing. The customer may have used the word “describe” but what they really want is relevance to their needs and goals. The customer has asked you to describe it because they want to assess if your ability to deliver is credible. What they really want is proof. A thesis for your proposal sets you up to deliver it. A thesis forces you to plan your content You can’t just spew words and end up with a proof that is better than all alternatives. You certainly can’t have section level thesis statements that add up to proving your top level thesis without some planning. Simply adding the thesis for each section to your outline before you start writing makes a huge difference in what you will get out of your proposal writers. If you take it a step deeper and itemize some of what they’ll need to say in order to prove each thesis, you’ll be able to quickly and easily produce a full content plan for your proposal. A thesis delivers focus Proposals should not be exercises in creative writing. They should be structured like a proof. Instead of teaching and elaborating this to proposal writers who just want to complete their contributions and go back to their normal jobs, try giving them a proposal thesis to prove. And then watch as they slip into better proposal writing without even thinking about it. Watch as the proposal gains focus. Watch as what gets written matters more than when proposals are written without a thesis. Then watch what that does to your win rate.