Carl Dickson

Congratulations. You are a skilled technical professional. You have enough experience to know what works well and what doesn’t. But is that enough to be the best? Do you truly aspire to be the best anymore? Can you even define what the "best" is? Just what exactly does being the "best" really mean? More knowledge? More capability? More experience? Better insight? Faster? More capacity? The most certified? What about more relevance? What about better results? What does better results mean? See also: Technical Approach While proposal writing has sales as its goal, the act of proposal writing is more about the discovery of what matters than selling. Proposal writing requires understanding what "best" means. Proposal writing requires learning what it will take to be the best alternative. Or simply to be the best. It’s not about incremental improvement. It’s about understanding what it will take to be the best and then figuring out what to do to become it. Winning consistently requires being good at this. Proposals require you to measure where you are against what will make you the best alternative for the customer. Proposal writing teaches you that you can’t reach a plateau and stay there. Incumbency is not enough to win. Proposals are written to either beat the incumbent or beat any who would challenge the incumbent. Instead of incremental change to get a little better every day, working on proposals will teach you to embrace change and to change faster than anyone else to redefine and become the best every day. Growth is the source of all opportunity in a company. But it’s not about the money. It’s about positioning for the future so that you can be far more than you are. This is true at the company level, it is true at the project level, and it is true at the personal level. To work on proposals is to contribute to the effort to bring growth to the company, your stakeholders, and yourself. Working on proposals also teaches you to collaborate with all stakeholders, both inside your company and outside your company, to create something that is the best no matter how you look at or define it. Proposal writing teaches you to be relevant, have meaning, and to matter. Proposals are about understanding the requirements. All of them. Including the ones that aren’t written. Proposal writing requires you to understand the context as well as the specifications. Learning to write proposals will teach you that the meaning of the specifications is to be found in the context, and what you do will be far more effective when it addresses the whole context. Proposal writing will show you how to find the value in what you do. It’s easy to fall into the daily grind of just doing what you have to do. It’s good to realize that there’s hidden value in what you may not have realized. Learning to articulate that value helps you deliver more of it. Because every day in that daily grind, you are making decisions that add value. When you express it, you bring meaning to your work. Proposals are about authenticity. The worst proposals I’ve written were last minute affairs where instead of the folks who understand the work to be done, I had to be the one to discover the value and create a vision for what the future could be, while doing this with a team that was not creative enough to see themselves in that future and who just barely tolerated it. Proposals should be something you get to do and not something you have to do. The best proposals I’ve worked on were with teams who even though they hadn’t thought of expressing their value that way (or at all), got excited by it and realized their efforts could amount to something meaningful, compelling, and worth being proud of. A proposal like that ends not only with a great submission, but also with people who are changed and ready to take on the future. It ends with people who know what "best" is and are ready to become it. And that’s something that can help them take their technical skills to a whole new level.

A Capture Manager is a dedicated person assigned to winning a business pursuit, and provides the leadership, coordination, resource allocation, strategy, and management needed to prepare the winning bid. A Business Development Manager is responsible for opening new territories and markets and generating a whole portfolio of leads. They feed the open end of the pipeline with leads and qualify them. Capture Managers are most often used for large complex pursuits with long sales cycles, where closing the sale will take the business development manager’s attention away from pursuing the other leads. Capture Managers take the qualified leads and close the deal with a winning bid. A Capture Manager is supposed to give dedicated attention to just one bid. They sometimes work on multiple bids, but rarely are they active at the same time. It's not about capacity, it's about dedication. You can't be dedicated to winning if you are not dedicated. A Capture Manager plays a key role in between business development and proposal writing that can greatly improve your chances of winning the pursuit. Without a Capture Manager, what usually happens is that companies stop lead generation to work on proposals that are led by staff with large skill gaps who are inexperienced and knowledgeable about what it will take to win. You can't just give someone the title "Capture Manager" and make it so Being a Capture Manager is the hardest job in the entire company. It requires qualifications and experience that cover a wider range than most people have. Consider all the things they need to know to maximize win probability: See also: Capture Management A Capture Manager has to know what to offer, how the offering should be designed, and how to make cost/value tradeoffs. A Capture Manager has to not only have the technical skills to know how to do the work, a Capture Manager also has to know how to sell. A Capture Manager has to not only know how to sell to the customer, but has to be able to sell the opportunity within the company. A big part of a Capture Manager’s job is negotiating and persuading people to support the pursuit. A Capture Manager has to know pricing and contracts well enough to negotiate terms and win. They have to be aware of the price to win. A Capture Manager has to know enough about proposals to anticipate the information required to write the winning proposal and be able to find it. A Capture Manager also has to have enough authority to make decisions and work through other people without being constantly second guessed. A Capture Manager has to be able to take risks, know which risks are worth taking, and how to mitigate them when you can. On top of all that, a Capture Manager has a high chance of getting fired if the bid loses. Capture Managers are hard to find but worth the effort it takes How many people exist that can cover all of those skills and consistently win? Assigning a Capture Manager who can’t check all those boxes lowers your chances of winning. It replaces strategic intention directed at winning with gambling based on hope as a strategy. Companies that automatically assign the future project manager as the Capture Manager will usually be assigning someone with large skill gaps. If it’s a recompete, the project manager may also have bias regarding the current state that prevents them from being sufficiently innovative. The incredible difficulty in finding a top-notch Capture Manager is one reason companies often turn to consultants. But this isn’t a perfect solution either. A Capture Manager needs to know your company’s history, resources, culture, and capabilities. That can’t be learned quickly in meetings. A Capture Manager also needs to know your customer’s preferences. Some companies bid without even knowing their customer’s preferences. You generally won’t get that knowledge by hiring a consultant, even one with some experience at the customer’s organization. But you might get it if the Capture Manager can spend enough time getting to know the customer. Unfortunately, consultants usually aren’t given the months required to develop that level of insight. And yet more than half of what goes into winning proposals comes from before the proposal even starts. Capture management is about return on investment and not lowering your bid costs Most companies go for what is cheap and convenient, and then convince themselves it’s an effective choice. Don’t be that kind of company. Be the kind that understands win rate math and how achieving a high win rate is about return on investment. Your company should manage its pursuits to get the highest return instead of managing them to get the maximum number of bids with the lowest investment. Winning is worth it. Losing is what's expensive. So bid to win and don't try to convince yourself that bidding to lose without doing what it will take to win somehow saves money. Just doing the best you can and hoping is not a good strategy for maximizing your win rate or your return on investment. The skill of negotiation is vital Being a Capture Manager requires strong negotiation skills. Everything that you need a company to decide or put effort into in order to win the pursuit will require negotiation. Every person you engage in helping bring home the win will require negotiation. Oh, and then there are negotiations with the customer. The customer is easy. All you need to do to negotiate with the customer is to discover their preferences and give them what they need in a way that’s better than their alternatives. It’s your own company that will be hard. Who is going to discover the customer’s preferences? How much effort will be required to do things and where will the resources come from? Who has the authority to decide every little thing? How do you get the price low enough to win? What is a price that is low enough to win? How do you get it all into your proposal, articulated effectively, and submitted on time? Oh, and if you think the customer is as easy as it says above, think twice. Negotiation is fundamental to capture. You can skip Capture Management if winning isn't important All opportunity in your company comes from growth. And most must-win, high-value opportunities require capture. It’s a hard job. And everybody depends on it succeeding. It’s worth a dedicated, quality approach. Don’t skimp on the qualifications of your Capture Manager. Make the person you need available. But don’t just assume that getting the right person is all it takes. Hiring the right people is not enough. Surround your Capture Manager with all the organization, process, and resource advantages you can to maximize your win rate. Put the least amount into it that you need to win every time.

The things you need to communicate, your priorities, and the best sequence for presenting them should change from proposal to proposal, based on what it will take to win. If you always write your Executive Summary in the same sequence with the same topics in the same order, you should reexamine your priorities. Start with two simple questions: What does the customer want to see? What do you need to say? What you want to say should match what the customer wants to see. Usually. Sometimes the customer doesn’t know what they need to know. But if the customer has gone to the effort to write down what they want to see in an RFP, you should take note. Just avoid the temptation to rationalize that what you want the customer to believe is something they need to hear. [Note: You have the author’s permission to make that last sentence into a poster, maybe with text over some tranquil Zen scenery, and post it on the wall where your proposal writers work. You could start each day with mindful meditations pondering the implications.] The following topics are usually part of what needs to be addressed in an Executive Summary for a proposal. But what priority to give them or sequence to address them in can vary. Topics commonly addressed in an Executive Summary What should you write about in your Executive Summary? What do you need to accomplish? See also: Executive Summary Provide required information. If the RFP says the Executive Summary or introduction should provide certain information, make sure it is there and easy to find. Address requirements ahead of preferences or interests. This should be your top priority because if they don’t see it first, they may not read any further. Introduce your offering. What is the customer going to get as a result of accepting your proposal? What do they need to know about it to conclude that your offering is their best alternative? But what priority should you place on introducing your offering?? If the proposal is for a commodity specified by the RFP, then they know what they are getting. But maybe how you will deliver it matters. Or maybe your ability to deliver it on time and at the quoted price matters. Or maybe your company and its track record in delivery matters more… Introduce your company. Why should they care about you? What do they need to know about you in order to trust you and do business with you? Your company matters a lot to you, but the specifications of the offering and how they’ll benefit from it often matter more to the customer than a lot of noise about the provider. But then again, if the RFP forces everyone to bid the exact same thing, the reliability of the provider can become a higher priority in the selection. Provide details. Once the customer sees what they will get by accepting your proposal and can see that you are a credible provider, then they may need some details. Since this is an Executive Summary, what are the minimum details they need to reach the desired conclusion? Introduce your teammates. If you are bidding as a team, does information about your teammates matter to the customer? Sometimes it does, and sometimes all they care about is information about the prime contractor. Whether you feature information about your teammates depends on whether it matters enough to the customer to help you win. Justify getting the highest score. An Executive Summary is often the only part of a proposal read by stakeholders other than the evaluation team. The Executive Summary should make it clear why you deserve the winning score. It may or may not help the evaluation team, but it can help everyone else at the customer who will be impacted by the selection. In some evaluations, the authority who will sign off on the decision of the evaluation team may not actively participate in scoring and may not even read the proposals. The Executive Summary can help the team justify its scoring and gain that critical sign-off. This can make the evaluation criteria and how you match up a priority to address in your Executive Summary. But is it a priority above all the others? That depends on the nature what is being procured and how the customer makes its decisions.

Sometimes people think they are making more of a contribution by writing theme statements than they really are… Sometimes it goes a bit like this: We wrote some themes. They make us sound really good. What else do you want from us? It's not our fault they don't match what's in the RFP. You want a theme for everything in the outline? But that's so... artificial. And the outline, like the RFP, is redundant, has gaps, and isn't built around our "story." The reason our themes are so brilliant is that they tell our story . You're the proposal specialist. You can take our brilliant input and fit it into the outline. What? What we said doesn't match up to what the customer asked for in the RFP? You can reword them. What? Our themes don't cover all of the evaluation criteria? Didn't we just say you can reword them? Just adapt our brilliant story to their outline. Don't lecture us about scoring. You're the proposal specialist. You make it score well. We did our job and gave you some great input. Responding to the RFP is your job. A theme that doesn’t matter to the customer gets in the way of the things you’ve said that do matter to the customer. This is not only a recipe for a losing proposal, it's a sign of an organizational culture that is not built on winning proposals. In spite of what it says on the poster in the lobby, winning proposals is the real mission for a contractor. But it’s also a problem with themes themselves. Having themes is not necessarily better than not having themes if your themes are bad. Consider: See also: Themes They are easy to prepare as a list, in isolation from the RFP. And yet, the RFP defines the path to winning. It's very easy to have all of your themes reflect only one aspect of what the customer needs to see in your proposal. For example, themes often revolve around experience and staff. Those may be important, but they are not the only thing the evaluators will consider. If your themes only reflect part of what it will take to win you are vulnerable. Because a theme is a statement, it's really easy to have themes end up being unsubstantiated claims. When themes are prepared in isolation, you can't assume that a theme statement will get substantiated in the proposal. It may not be possible to substantiate a poorly written theme statement. Bad proposal writing does not get better because you label it a “theme.” A theme about your commitment is as bad as making your proposal about commitment instead of accomplishment. Themes often end up being a collection of things that sound good but do not add up to anything. Like a top evaluation score. People like to talk about themselves and often do it in ways that don’t matter to the customer. Poorly informed writers can't write great proposals. And poorly informed writers can't write great themes either. Bad themes are worse than no themes at all. Actually it’s worse than that. Neutral or irrelevant themes are worse than no themes at all. Even a good theme is not good enough to be great. A theme that doesn’t matter to the customer gets in the way of the things you’ve said that do matter to the customer. The problem with themes is that nothing stops you from having bad themes. Except you.

You need more than an RFP or the customer’s specifications to write a winning proposal. Just think about your last proposal, and all the questions you had when you started writing. Most people focus on tangible things, like whether you’ve done certain things or have certain things. But it’s easy to account for tangible things. What you really need to start preparing a winning proposal is to know things. Think about all those things you had to work around because you didn’t know what the customer meant, what they preferred, or which choice you should make. That’s what you really need to know. Start with the things about the customer you need to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective. That information makes the difference between simply responding to an RFP and showing insight. If your proposals are all about you instead of being about the customer, it’s probably because that’s all you know. The winner will be the one who knows the customer. But “knowing the customer” is not enough. You have to know the customer well enough to answer the questions that will come up during proposal writing. Who cares if you’ve met with or talked to the customer if you can’t answer the questions you need to win? See also: Reuse Being able to list what you anticipate needing is the only way to improve your chances of getting it. The most important thing a proposal specialist can do to increase the chances of winning the proposal is to help people bring you the information you are going to need. If you give them a list, they know what to look for. If you wait until the proposal starts to give them that list, they won’t have time to gather the information. You want to be able to say that when they want you to help them with a proposal, this is what they should bring you. To prepare your list, start with the things about the customer you need to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective. To do that, you need to understand what matters to them. Here’s a list from one of our previous articles that explains what matters to your customers. Here’s another that shows how your bid strategies depend on what matters to your customer. You also need information about them. Here’s a list from another one of our articles describing the information you need before you start your proposal. Within PropLIBRARY, we have lists of questions, goals, and action items for people to use during the pre-RFP phase to ensure they are ready to win at RFP release. Those items can be combined into a single list to act as a gateway into the proposal process. In fact, that’s what we’re working on right now. We’re combining them to give you an off-the-shelf list for subscribers to download at the moment of need. One of the reasons this list is so important is that it can improve your company’s bid/no bid decisions. Instead of telling people that you don’t want to bid low probability leads when the company is not prepared to win them, it puts you in the position of being able to say that you are all fired up and ready to bid every opportunity where the company can answer the questions on your list. A few public failures at attempting to answer those questions and people will start showing up at RFP release better prepared to answer the questions. This will in turn enable you to write better proposals. Just keep in mind that if you prepare a good list, it will be impossible for anyone to fulfill every item on it. You can never discover everything you would like to know about a customer. But having the list enables you to try, and find out more of what you need as a result. When you have some of what you need to know about the customer, even if you have a few holes, it can be enough to develop better win strategies and work around the things you couldn’t find out. Simply preparing the list, even if no one else ever sees it (let alone complies with it), will make you a better proposal writer. It will show you the links between the customer and what needs to go in the proposal. It will help you see how to transform statements about your company into statements about how the customer will benefit from working with your company. It will help you see how to win in writing.

Back in the day, the techniques below were what you had to work with. You had to be super gifted and super diligent to succeed at relationship marketing. Relationships took years to develop. If you didn’t have someone with the right skills and experience on the payroll, you relied on public announcements and databases for prospecting. It was easy to fall into low win probability habits like blind bidding. However, the old ways are no longer competitive. Mark Amtower is an example of someone who lives in both worlds. He had a rolodex, back when that was a thing. And his rolodex was almost certainly bigger than yours. Today Mark is a top expert in the newest ways to market to the Federal Government. His training on how to make the leap from old-school selling to social selling comes from someone who has practiced both. Mark’s a good friend of mine and contributed to this article. How we used to practice relationship marketing Networking and relationships are still at the heart of gaining customer intimacy. Get a contract. Relationship marketing can seem so difficult to get started that many companies assume they have to get a contract first in order to build relationships. They look at relationship marketing as something that helps them grow the account and get more contracts with the customer. The problem with this is that it starts with blind bidding to get a contract. Even if you rationalize that it’s not blind bidding because the organization is a strategic target, the fact is you haven’t qualified your leads by talking to anyone. There are more problems with this approach. Your company ends up being defined by the contracts it is lucky enough to win through blind bidding. Guess which ones those are likely to be? Commodities where the customer doesn’t care who the provider is and contracts that you win by being the lowest price. This is a trap that can kill your future margins. Databases. Databases are great for identifying what contracts exist that you might pursue. However, they don’t tell you what it will take to win those contracts. They also don’t tell you about new contracts coming up in the future, unless they have been publicly announced. Rolodex. Another mistake companies often make is to hire a salesperson for their rolodex. This rarely brings sales to a professional services firm. It seems like a good idea because the salesperson knows so many people and has actual relationships, just like you're supposed to. But their contacts are just evidence that they know how to make contact and form relationships. Don’t hire them for who they already know. Hire them for their ability to get to know the organizations that you want to do business with. And then give them plenty of time to build those relationships. Requesting a meeting. Also known as begging. So you land a meeting. Then what? Are you going to tell the customer about yourself? Or are you doing to do something that demonstrates you can be an asset? The only way to achieve that is to do your homework before the meeting. Trade shows. Whether you go as an attendee or as an exhibitor, you might run into potential customers. You might be able to follow up with them. You might score a meeting. Something might come of it. And if every one of those possibilities comes true, you might be able to develop a relationship. But have you noticed, there aren’t as many trade shows as there once were? They are expensive and problematic. And they are no longer the only way to discover and network with new people. See below… White papers and collateral. Putting paper in your customer’s hands used to be the only way to deliver information and educate them about things like technology. You had to know whose hands, be able to reach that person, produce the paper, deliver it, and hope they read it. Hundreds of hours could go into preparing and delivering a white paper. These days every step of that is quicker. But simply producing white papers has been overtaken by content marketing. See below… Today it’s possible to be both more data driven and more personal. Not only are there new sources of information, but there are also new techniques. It is easier than ever to practice relationship marketing. New ways to practice relationship marketing Hiring a salesperson to go fishing for dollars is no longer a path to success. Big data – contracts. The IT techniques developed for understanding “big data” can also be used to develop insight in the pursuit of contracts. How many contracts does a customer award in what areas to which companies? What percentage of time does the incumbent win in that organization? How frequently do they modify their contracts? When do they release their RFPs? How often do they release on time? More raw data is available than ever before, but few companies invest in the analytics to turn data into an information advantage. Big data – people. Who are the decision makers at the customer? What are their backgrounds? What are they working on? What are their interests? Who do they connect to? How do you connect to them? What interests do you have in common? Resources like LinkedIn enable you not only to reach out to people, both as individuals and as an organization, but also to interact with them. You can find people and develop relationships with them. You can go from being unknown to being known. However, social selling is very different from old school selling. If you don’t adapt to social selling, all the data now available about people won’t help you. In the past, you were lucky “to know someone” at the customer. But what about when there are dozens of people involved in a procurement and the decision of who to award it to? It is now possible to map the customer’s organization, and gather information on and even connect to most if not all of the people who might get involved. It is easier than ever to get ahead of RFPs, because you don’t have to guess which individual might be working on it. You can get to know most or all of the people involved in your line of work. Online networking. It is now possible to build a relationship over years without ever actually meeting someone face-to-face. Online networking is similar in many ways to traditional networking. But it also has some more advanced aspects. You can interact with potential customers in discussion forums, respond to the things they post, and learn far more about their backgrounds and interests. How to reach out to potential customers, what to say, and how to interact with them are some of the subjects covered in Mark’s training. Content marketing. You can now publish more information, in more different media, and in more places than ever before. Each new platform brings new ways to put content in front of your customers. Most companies never go much further then enabling their customers to browse their wares. For firms that sell services or have complex sales, this is a missed opportunity to educate your customers. What matters about what you sell? What should an RFP include to ensure the customer gets what they need? What options should they be aware of? What problems can they solve? What outcomes can they hope to achieve? Showing insight is one of the best ways to show the customer that you're worth interacting with. How valuable is it to you to have customers seek you out for your insight? Or at least accept a connection request because they’ve seen that you post information that is of value to them? Content marketing is an important part of conducting relationship marketing online. When you combine these, you get a completely different approach to marketing. It’s no longer about hiring a salesperson to go fishing for dollars. Now you can analyze data to discover who buys the most of what you sell, and who the stakeholders are for those procurements. You can break in simply by publishing some insight on the relevant topics and keyword searching for relevant staff at the customer to connect to. Once in, you can branch out and connect with the rest of the organization. Along the way, you’re not selling in the traditional sense. You’re sharing relevant information with people who need it. But you are also gaining insight. The kind of insight that can be turned into an information advantage. And starting your proposals with an information advantage leads to an increase in your win rate.

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It’s easy to get overwhelmed when thinking about all the things you could do to try to improve your win rate. Where should you start? What makes this complicated is that the answer is different for every single company. Your strengths, weaknesses, and issues are different from others. The nature of your offering and who your customers are is different. What you should focus on to increase your win rate will be different from everyone else. But there are some issues that most companies struggle with. In fact, they often get so distracted by fighting fires that they fail to address these issues. 8 things that affect your win rate the most See also: Improving win rates Having the lowest price. Is price the only thing the customer cares about? Yes, for some customers. No, for others. It may seem like price is the most important thing when everyone blames it for all your losses, but that’s usually a lie. The closer what you offer is to a commodity, the more price matters. Think about how you buy things. Sometimes you compare prices and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you can be upsold and sometimes not. Sometimes you pay for quality or convenience. And sometimes not. One of the most important parts of sales is to figure out what's important to each customer. What it will take to win must be discovered. And how the customer perceives and acts on value will be a key part of it. The problem of working with other people. If you want to win a proposal that is bigger than one person, you have to figure out how to get everyone on the same page in order to do a proposal together. It can be like herding cats, but working with other people is the most important difference between doing small proposals and doing large proposals. How you interpret the RFP. What is the customer really looking for? Why did they say it that way in the RFP? How do you interpret what they’ve said in the RFP? Your ability to understand the customer and the RFP are worth investing in. They give insight into how the customer’s evaluation process works, which is important for increasing your win rate. When you see that the evaluation criteria are based on “strengths,” what does that mean? How do they make trade-off decisions? What does “best value” mean? Different customers can define them differently. It’s important for you to know so you can write your proposal accordingly. Whether proposal quality is explicitly defined. Differing opinions over what makes a “good” proposal means that your win rates are suffering because people are not writing and reviewing to achieve the same goals. Although it’s related, this is different from how you define your review process. Instead of struggling to get people to go along with changes to your review process, start by getting everyone to use the same definition of proposal quality. Knowing how proposal quality is defined and what your proposal quality criteria are is necessary for writers to be able to deliver a quality proposal. Any other way is just guessing. Whether you do first things first. Proposal writing requires a flow of information. Fail to anticipate and deliver what is needed to answer your proposal writers' questions and they'll have to water down what they write instead of being specific. This may require gaining customer intimacy and building an information advantage long before the RFP is released. Fail to address bid strategies early enough and your writers will have to make them up, usually without adequate customer awareness. Fail to address bid strategies early enough to test them in front of your customer and you risk emphasizing the wrong things. Procrastination kills your win rate. The corollary to this is that most proposals are won or lost before the proposal starts. The way you deal with this is to realize that if you fail to do first things early enough, they have a snowball effect that hurts your win rate. Forgetting to include important things. I have seen more proposals lose based on noncompliance because someone forgot to include a form or sign something than I have from noncompliance in the narrative. It’s the little things. Fiddle with the narrative past the deadline and rush final production at your own risk. The odds of introducing a mistake are higher than the odds that your last-minute changes will make a difference. Staffing the proposal inadequately. Are you trying to keep costs low by using cheap staff? Or simply using the staff who happen to be available and convincing yourself that they are good enough? How many staff do you need? Even if you’re willing to invest in proposal success, identifying capable proposal staff is challenging. While some experience is necessary, the quality of proposal writing people produce has very little to do with experience. You need special techniques to assess proposal specialists. If you have good staff, are you maximizing their ability to win and investing in their training and growth, or are you trying to win more by working them beyond their capacity to maintain a high win rate? Treating proposals as an expense instead of an investment. Treating proposals like an expense means putting as little into them as possible. This is what leads people to seek out proposal reuse strategies that do more harm than good. Reuse can lower costs today but also reduce your win rate in a way that sacrifices far more future revenue. The proposal function should be managed like an investment, with the return on investment measured. When you do this, you will spend more on the things that produce a better return. And less on things that have no impact or lower it. And you’ll be incentivized to find out which things are which. Your win rate will go up as a result. In addition to the items above, here are some of the things that separate the companies that normally win from the companies that normally lose.

When your proposal is going to be formally evaluated, the customer staff participating in the evaluation will read your Executive Summary differently. They may not even read it all. They may just use it to start deciding how to score your proposal. Obviously, they can’t score your entire proposal in detail from the Executive Summary. But what will they see? See also: Executive Summary Will they conclude that your proposal is going to be easy to score? Will it be a bunch of happy-sounding words that have no real relevance to what they need to do to score your proposal? Or will they see their own evaluation criteria and how you position against them? Will they see that you have relevant differentiators and superior strengths that match up to their scoring forms? Will they see a table or headings that match the factors and sub-factors that make up their evaluation criteria? Will they see the same words they are looking for? Will they see the terminology of the evaluation criteria? Or will they have to translate from your overly clever terminology to what they need to assess? Will they conclude that your proposal is going to be easy to score, since it follows their scoring criteria? Or they might conclude that you didn’t concern yourself with their needs, and all that implies. Don’t worry, if it’s broken it can be fixed. How do you show why you should get the highest score? Don’t just claim it. Prove it. But don’t patronize. Inform. I would never take the risk of telling the evaluator how to do their job or what score to give. But I definitely like to explain what the strengths of my proposal are using the terminology of the evaluation criteria. Exactly how I do this depends on the evaluation criteria, the type of contract, and the complexity of what is being procured. If the evaluation criteria consist of just a few vaguely defined considerations, you can’t get too specific. You might not need a table to break out individual factors and sub-factors. But if the evaluation criteria list many factors then I consider a table discussing each and every one. The evaluation criteria communicate what is important to the customer, and that is worth talking about. If the evaluation criteria refer the things that are: Objective, I may provide a checklist, measles chart, or other visual demonstration of meeting the criteria. Subjective, I give an explanation of how the differentiators for my offering make it their best alternative. “Strengths,” I give a list of the most important ones, again focusing on my differentiators. It can be helpful to think of the things you present as your proof points. Your claims of greatness aren’t going to make it into the customer’s justification for your score. But if your proof points are compelling, they will. In addition, I sometimes go so far as to point out important considerations, including things that if they are not addressed indicate weaknesses. This is how I communicate what should get a high score and what should get a low score. I stick to being informative, show insight the customer may not have considered, and position what I say as helping to ensure the customer gets what they want. While the Executive Summary might be the only place where it makes sense to address all of the evaluation criteria, the idea of speaking directly to each factor and sub-factor, using the terminology of the evaluation criteria, and focusing on proof points instead of claims should flow down to each individual proposal section. What you write in your Executive Summary can define a structure that flows down into every section of your proposal. This is why it is a good idea to write the Executive Summary before trying to write the rest of your proposal. You can learn a lot about proposal writing by getting good at writing the Executive Summary.

Most proposals go bad in the introduction. Right from the start they are not written well. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you fix this, you can improve your proposal writing throughout the entire proposal. You don’t need to spend years studying every aspect of proposal writing. If you just learn how to write a great proposal introduction, you can write a great proposal. From learning how to write the proposal introduction, I learned to: Frame the entire proposal as fulfilling what the customer wants. In a single paragraph, you need to make your offering the customer’s best alternative. That doesn’t leave much room for describing your company, claiming understanding, reciting history, or talking around the issue. It means you must summarize your entire offering, what makes it superior, and how it best delivers what the customer wants. I learned to focus on this, make it the only thing you talk about, and put everything into this context. Deliver customer awareness to the start of the proposal. You can’t write about what makes you the customer’s best alternative if you don’t understand how the customer makes their decisions and what matters to them. I learned to make understanding these things my highest priority before I start writing. I learned that when I start a proposal with other people, I have to attain consensus on these things before we can write to achieve our bid strategies. I learned to build my proposal process around the things that need to happen and what writers need to know in order to write an effective introduction. Jump right into things from the very first sentence. I learned that the conclusion I want the reader to reach needs to come first and not last. I learned that many ways people talk around things in the first sentence have nothing to do with the point you want to make. I learned to drop all that noise and make my point. Skip slogans and bragging about unsubstantiated claims. Claims to greatness don’t make your point. They also hurt your credibility. So I learned to simply drop them. Instead of claiming greatness I simply prove that my proposal is the customer’s best alternative. Others can brag, talk about themselves, or sound like a commercial. I prefer to win the proposal. Differentiate. It does no good to make your points if everyone else can make the same points. Winning by being the same only a little better is not much of a strategy. I learned that it is always possible to differentiate. I learned to think through what makes my proposal completely different and perfectly well suited to being the customer’s best alternative. Then I write the proposal to present and support those points. Talk about understanding in the right way. I learned that reciting the customer’s description of themselves does not make any points and is a waste of space. What the customer needs to see is that you will deliver the results they are looking for in a way that will succeed in their environment. If you can do that, you clearly understand them. So when I need to prove I understand the customer, I do it by differentiating in a way that makes what I’m offering tailored to the customer. Then I explain why I tailored it that way and what the customer will get out of it. I prove understanding instead of claiming it. Write only about what matters. I learned that a long introduction paragraph defeats the purpose. So I also had to learn that I only have room to talk about what matters to the customer. This in turn made me a much better proposal writer. I stopped writing to make sure I said everything anyone wanted to hear, and now only talk about what matters and why. If you say things that don't matter, then your proposal doesn't matter. I learned to aim for insight instead of encyclopedic coverage. Write only from the customer’s perspective. I learned that the introduction isn’t about my company or what I want to say. It’s about what the customer needs to hear and writing from the customer’s perspective. It’s about how they evaluate the proposal and make their decisions. It’s about helping them through that process. I learned that talking about yourself and being self-descriptive is bad proposal writing. I learned to write by thinking about how the customer will read what I write. Combine all the different goals and ingredients into a single statement. You need to write about what makes your offering better. But you also need to explain what that offering is. And how it fulfills the customer’s goals. And what their future will be like with you in it. And write it all in the language of the RFP, especially the evaluation criteria. I learned not to write until I have all the ingredients lined up and how to connect them. Say it in fewer words. Summarizing the entire proposal into a paragraph is a challenge. I not only learned to be direct and focus on what matters, I learned to say things nice and succinctly. It’s a paragraph, not a page. Think many times. Write once. Thinking by editing doesn’t work. You don’t start with a thought and then edit it until it becomes the thought you want. You have to think about what you want to communicate and what the best way to express it is many times. Once everything is in alignment, then write it. Editing can improve your wording and presentation, but you’ve got to think things through first. Writing to discover what you should have been thinking will not get you there. Finally, I learned that every sentence is an introduction paragraph. Every. Single. One. Every paragraph needs to make a point. Every paragraph needs to differentiate. Every paragraph needs to be written from the customer’s perspective. Every one of these 11 points applies to every paragraph of the proposal. Every paragraph of a proposal is the introduction of a thought. And every paragraph needs to be thought through and presented with just as much care as the introduction. If you know how to write the proposal introduction, you know how to write the winning proposal.

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Don't let the name fool you. An Executive Summary has a specific purpose in a proposal. But it has nothing to do with the name. If you don’t have time to read the whole proposal, what do you want to know? Is it: See also: Executive Summary A little about each section of the proposal? A recitation of your own mission and goals from someone who claims to "understand" them? Information about the company submitting the proposal? Why this proposal is your best alternative for getting the most of what you want? An Executive Summary has little or no "summary" in it. An Executive Summary is a decision making tool. A proposal answers "who, what, where, how, and when." An Executive Summary is not a summary of your answers to these. An Executive Summary answers "why." Why should they bother to read your proposal? Why is your proposal the best alternative? Why will they get more of what they want by selecting your proposal? Why should they reach a decision in your favor? An Executive Summary is not used like a mini-proposal or abstract of what’s going to be in the proposal prior to reading it. If the evaluator needs to read a separate document in order to understand your proposal before they read it, you’ve done something wrong. You've added more reading to the reading they don't want to do. Write your proposal clearly so that no extra written explanation is needed. Delete the excess verbiage, or better yet make the words matter. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that adding more words and calling them a "summary" will make it easier for the customer to get through your proposal. An Executive Summary is not a summary at all. It is a rationale. It should contain what the reader needs to know to reach a decision, whether that reflects a “summary” of what’s in the proposal or not. If you want to make things easier for the customer, don't give them a summary. Give them something that makes it easier for them to decide that what you are proposing is their best alternative. Your proposal provides all the details to substantiate your recommendations. If you write a great Executive Summary, they may not feel compelled to read all the details because they agree with your rationale. If the proposal will be formally point-scored during evaluation this remains true, although they may be required to go through the entire proposal to score it. But they will be doing that with an explanation of why your proposal is worthy of the highest score. And by "why" I mean the rationale, so the decision maker and other stakeholders will understand why the proposal got the score it did. The emphasis should always be on the needs of the evaluator as the decision maker, and not on how you think the evaluators should score your proposal. Should your Executive Summary show “understanding?” This depends on the subject matter and complexity of the proposal. How does your understanding impact whether customer gets what they want? Is your understanding necessary to get the highest score? The best way to show understanding is usually through results. If you are offering what the customer wants in a way that is better than any other alternative, you clearly understand their needs. You may not even need to use the word "understanding" to prove that you have it. No matter how much you claim to understand them, if you don’t provide the results they want you clearly do not understand their needs. If the evaluators have to read paragraphs of text copied from their website with claims of "we understand" added, but without any value added or insight, that can backfire and end up showing you really don’t understand them at all. Should your Executive Summary introduce your company and describe your qualifications? How much do you matter to the customer? If you are selling a commodity, then you might not matter as much as you think you do. If you do matter, then explain why. Only give them the details that matter. If your qualifications make you the customer’s best alternative, your Executive Summary should explain why. Which will impact their decision more, the fact that you have certain qualifications, or how they translate into better results for the customer? The answer to this depends on how that particular customer reaches their decisions. The same applies to the qualifications of any teaming partners you might have. Why they are on your team may matter more than a description of their qualifications. What you should do instead of summarizing Instead of writing a big fat proposal and then abstracting it into what is actually a little bit more to read, try making your Executive Summary an explanation of why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative. Your goal should be to enable them to make a decision in your favor with confidence. That makes it more like an assessment than a summary. Instead of summarizing, try adding things up. What do your responses to all of the customer’s requirements add up to? What do they mean? Why do they matter? This is what the customer is most concerned about. The decision maker wants to know what it all adds up to. If what you offer sounds like it could be their best alternative, they’ll read the rest of your proposal to find out if the details add up to what you claim. But they’ll read it in context and with interest.

Sometimes it helps more to know what not to do than it helps to hear more about “best practices” and all the things you should be doing. You can use this like a checklist to see where you might have gone wrong and improve your Executive Summary writing: See also: Executive Summary Start your Executive Summary by introducing yourself. From the customer’s perspective, you are not as important as what they are going to get if they accept your proposal. Summarizing your qualifications. Whether or not you are qualified is usually just a pass/fail consideration. However, why your qualifications matter and what the customer will get out of them is worth explaining because it shows insight and value. Making unsubstantiated claims. An Executive Summary really isn’t a summary. And it definitely shouldn’t be a summary of your amazing claims, summarized by leaving any substantiation behind. In spite of your claims to the contrary, you are not special. Unsubstantiated claims do not “position” you as anything except lacking credibility, which in turn positions you as untrustworthy. Making the Executive Summary your story instead of theirs. The customer does not care about your story. They care a little more about how it impacts them. But what they really care about is their story, and how it changes with you in it. Don’t tell your story. Tell theirs. Ignoring the evaluation criteria. If your proposal is going to go through a formal or point-scored evaluation, then your Executive Summary will be viewed in the context of whether it shows why you deserve the highest score. Everything you write must be considered in the context of the evaluation criteria in order to maximize your score. No matter how great one of your attributes is, if it can’t be scored, it literally doesn’t count. Summarizing your proposal. An Executive Summary really isn’t a summary. The customer doesn’t want to read a little bit from every part of your proposal. They want to know why you are their best alternative. Not having any graphics. Less reading is still reading. The best Executive Summary is a single graphic that makes it clear how everything related to what you propose comes together to deliver the outcome the customer desires and why your approach is their best alternative. They are hard to create, but worth the effort. The customer would rather see it than read about it. No value added/purposeless/not mattering. If your Executive Summary does not say what matters to the customer, then your proposal does not matter. Your Executive Summary needs to make it clear what the point of it all is. If it doesn’t, your proposal is pointless. When they want details, they’ll read your proposal. Your Executive Summary should explain what all those details mean and what they add up to. What you want to say instead of what they need to hear. Don’t include everything you want to say in the Executive Summary. Only include what the customer needs to hear in order to decide that you are their best alternative. When you get there, stop writing. If you are not sure what they want to hear, that is the problem you need to solve, and you need to do it before you start writing. Make sure every single thing you say passes the "So what?" test. Long enough to become work to read. If your Executive Summary covers so much ground and contains so much detail that the customer has to work to read it, you’ve defeated the purpose. Failing to make firm statements. If your Executive Summary is full of promises, intent, and commitment, without unambiguous statements about what the customer is going to get by selecting you, then it will actually offer less value than a competitor's proposal who drops all those promises and simply says what they will do or deliver. Failing to prove that you’re the customer's best alternative. Are you the customer’s best choice? Did you prove it? The customer has alternatives… Consider your Executive Summary to be an explanation of why your proposal is the customer's best alternative, with the rest of your proposal being the details required to prove it. Failing to support their decision. The customer has a decision to make. Does your Executive Summary help them to make it? Have you answered their questions? Have you shown them how to move forward? Have you addressed the challenges? Failing to earn their trust/not being credible. Trust must be earned. Credibility results from proving your claims. Have you claimed trustworthiness or proven it? Whatever you do, don’t edit out your credibility or simply claim to be a “trusted provider.” An Executive Summary should be short, but it must be trustworthy. Customers buy from people they know and trust. But your unsubstantiated claims could be working against your bid strategies based on trust. Failing to show what's in it for them. It’s not about you. It’s about them. And more specifically, it’s about what they are going to get. If your Executive Summary is about your understanding, doing what they asked for in the RFP, or your qualifications, there may not be enough in it for them to accept your proposal. Failing to integrate with the rest of the document. Does your Executive Summary exist in a vacuum separate from the rest of your proposal? Or does it bring meaning to your proposal and point the way to where they can get answers? Focusing on what instead of why. An Executive Summary really isn’t a summary. It is not a summary of your offering, your RFP compliance, your features, your qualifications, or anything else. It’s the reason why all those things matter. It’s the reason why your offering is their best alternative. Telling instead of showing. Don’t describe. Don’t tell. Instead, trying showing. Showing with a graphic is best. But you can write to show what matters and why. Presenting details instead of what they add up to. Your proposal contains the details. Your Executive Summary should explain what they add up to for the customer instead of providing a redundant but small set of details for them to read before reading the larger and more complete set of details. Not differentiating. You can't be best if you are not different. An Executive Summary that sounds like all the others does more harm than good. You can always differentiate. If your Executive Summary doesn't explain why your differentiators make you the customer's best alternative and set a new standard for what the highest evaluation score should be, you need to start over.

What’s the point of it all? What does the customer want to hear from you? What do they need to complete their paperwork? What makes you their best alternative? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking as you prepare to write an Executive Summary for a proposal. To answer them, you need these four things: See also: Executive Summary A winning solution or offering design. You can’t articulate why the customer should care about what you are offering, if you yourself don’t know what you are offering. You need to know what you are offering in order to describe how the customer will benefit from having it. One of the main goals of the Executive Summary is to show why your offering is the customer’s best alternative. You can do a great job of explaining why you are the customer’s best alternative using nothing but the RFP. Differentiators. What makes you and your offering better than any other alternative? Even when the RFP forces every bidder to offer the exact same thing, you still can differentiate. In fact, it becomes more important than ever. You can’t be great without also being different. When the customer compares proposals, they often focus on those differences. To articulate a winning message in your Executive Summary, you should start with the differentiators that make you better. The evaluation criteria. If your proposal will be scored through a formal evaluation process, your Executive Summary should match their scoring criteria. Your Executive Summary should show why your proposal deserves the top score, with the rest of your proposal providing the substantiation. All of the features of your offering, all of your differentiators, and every part of your proposal message should align with the evaluation criteria in the RFP. What matters. What matters about your offering? What matters about your differentiators? What matters about every single thing you say in your proposal? What matters to the customer? If you’ve said something in your Executive Summary that doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. Delete it. If you are saying something that matters, make sure it explains why. When your judgment matters to the customer, the reasons why you do things can matter more than what you actually do. Focusing on what matters helps ensure that everything you put in your proposal can pass the “So what?” test. Focusing on what matters in your Executive Summary is a great way to demonstrate understanding. Think twice. Write once. There is a school of thought that says you should write your Executive Summary before you write your proposal. That way, you can flow down the messages and ensure your proposal substantiates what you said in the Executive Summary. The problem is that you can’t write the Executive Summary first if you don’t know these four things. When people write their Executive Summary last, they get time to figure out how to articulate them. But then again, you probably shouldn’t write any sentence in your proposal without knowing these four things. How can you know what points to make and how to make them if you don’t know these four things? If you are writing without knowing what points to make, you are either writing a pointless proposal or a proposal that makes random points that aren’t likely to add up to the highest score on a competitive bid. What this means is that you should be designing your offering separately and before you start your proposal. It is a prerequisite and not something produced during or late in the proposal process. You need to understand your differentiators before you start writing, and not try to figure them out while writing the proposal. Think twice, write once.

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Sometimes people put a lot of time and energy into making sure their proposal tells their story. They craft their story with great care. They become attached to it. They often use up valuable page space leaving less to address the RFP requirements. Your story should not be an extra book the customer has to read before they get the pleasure of evaluating your proposal And as much as your story can make you feel good about yourself, the customer probably doesn’t care about it. Because it’s about you. Who wants to read a book about how a vendor came to be so great? See also: Customer perspective The story the customer wants to read is the one about how great their future is going to be. And it’s a short story. It’s a tweet about the summary of the abstract of the short story. Who wants a lot of reading? TL;DR… The person reading the proposal only wants to read enough to reach their decision. Proposals are scored and not read. A story about something the evaluator doesn’t care about gets in the way of scoring. It makes the evaluator’s job take longer. Proposal writing should not be about you. Proposals should be written from the customer's perspective. A short story about what the customer will get by accepting your proposal and what things will be like in the future as a result can be scored. Even better, this aligns their immediate need to score the proposal with their future aspirations. Your story about the customer’s future is told in your introduction sentence. It’s what they will get. It’s told as the conclusion of subsequent topic sentences to either explain why you are offering what you propose or to provide support for the promise that they will actually get it. It links every approach and the fulfillment of every requirement with the likelihood that they’ll realize the future you offer. Your story about the customer’s future should be about what they will get, what matters about it, and why it’s special. It’s about what it will be like to receive it and live with it. It’s about a better future. Stories have conflict and every procurement involves tradeoffs. Your story about the customer’s future gives you a common explanation for why your approach to the tradeoffs resolves the conflicts in the best way possible. But the story is not a book. It’s told in the introduction sentences that make the key points. It’s told in the conclusions of sentences about requirements fulfillment. It’s told when you combine what the customer will get with why you chose that approach or with your proof for why they should believe you that you can deliver what you've promised. It’s part of every sentence throughout the proposal. But it’s not an extra book the customer has to read before they get the pleasure of evaluating your proposal. If you're ready for advanced proposal writing, you can try these 11 ways to approach telling a story in your proposal that are accessible to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. The story about the customer’s future will be far more engaging and far more persuasive than a story about how you became a great vendor that believes the customer should pick them.

This is an article for people who are not writers and don’t know what words to use when they write a proposal. They may know how to do the work and what to offer, but they often go blank when it comes to how to say that in words on paper. Ok, here it goes… Don’t describe. Just explain. What does that mean? When you describe, you tell the customer the details about your approach, offering, or qualifications. But when you explain your approach, offering, or qualification, it shifts you into explaining why. It improves your proposal writing by helping you to communicate things like: Why it matters Why it's the best alternative What’s special about it How the customer will benefit from it What makes your approach different and better Explain what you have to write about. Don't describe things. An easy way to explain things in a proposal See also: Making proposals simple Every sentence should have two parts: Your response to an RFP requirement and your explanation. Often the customer is more interested in the explanation than the details. Even when they are interested in the details, they are even more interested in why you chose those details. Even when the RFP asks you to describe something, such as your approach, what the customer is really interested in is the explanation for why it matters. If you write everything to include a response and an explanation, you will impress people with the quality of your proposal writing. Even if it's not exactly what they had in mind, they'll have enough to turn what you wrote into exactly what they want. There are hundreds of articles on PropLIBRARY with tips and best practices for creating great proposals. But if you’re struggling, then trying to think of all the things you could write about, the many ways to position what you’ve said, and more ways to write like an expert is just going to distract you from what you really need to do. Which is to stop describing and explain instead. Making proposal writing even easier To make proposal writing even easier, here are some things you can ignore: Style. Just say what needs to be said in any style and the customer will hear you. Don’t worry about trying to sound like what you think a proposal should sound like. Most of them aren’t well written, and this will likely steer you in the wrong direction. Just be authentic in the style you are comfortable with. If you are too wordy, too formal, or too informal, so be it. If someone complains, let them edit it. The only opinion that matters is the customer, so the most important thing is to deliver an explanation the customer can understand. Construction. Don't let thinking about how many sentences should go in a paragraph and how paragraphs should be structured get in the way of providing the information the customer needs. Avoid the really big paragraphs. That is all. How to introduce things. Don’t write proposal introductions the way you were taught in school. Just jump into the heart of the matter and explain what they are going to get or what you are going to do for them. Focus on why they can believe you at least as much as what you are telling them. Proposal writing can be challenging Here are some challenges you will face trying to get your explanation written: Writing against an outline that you don’t control and can’t change. You’re going to want to rearrange the topics so they make sense. Only you can’t. If you do that, it may no longer make sense to the customer. The customer will most likely be looking for what the RFP asked for in the exact places it asked for them and the sequence they requested them. It may not seem ideal, but you should follow their lead. Getting the right level of detail. Most proposals have page limits. More than anything else, that will determine the right level of detail. What you don’t want to do is ignore the page limit and write something lengthy for someone else to summarize. That’s actually more work than it takes to write it within the page limit. If the page limit is too short for you to explain things in detail, focus on what matters instead of the details. RFP compliance. Some proposals, such as government proposals, must be completely compliant with all RFP requirements or the proposal will not be eligible for an award. It may not even get read. So what you are proposing must be fully compliant with what’s in the RFP even though it’s hard to write against requirements that are out of sequence, disjointed, outdated, or otherwise problematical. Not only that, but you have to use their terminology to ensure they realize it’s compliant. If you really want to learn how to write an RFP compliant proposal, you should learn how to create a compliance matrix. Getting the highest score. Proposals are evaluated and not read. The winner may not be the best reading proposal or even the best solution. The winner will get the best score. This means responding to the language of the evaluation criteria in the RFP. If you don’t do this, then your superior offering may lose to a substandard one that scores better. Writing using other people’s words. Achieving RFP compliance and optimizing your score against the evaluation criteria means using the words in the RFP instead of the words you are more comfortable with. It’s a challenge, especially when you’re struggling to express things in your own words. If you have to, make two passes at it: once to get the ideas lined up, and then translate it into their terminology. How to respond to an RFP with the right words is the topic of one of the online training courses available to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. When you are ready for more… When you can write explanations instead of descriptions and overcome all those challenges, then you’re ready to start thinking about writing from the customer’s perspective. Because ultimately, they are the only judge of what great proposal writing is. The best proposal writing anticipates what the customer needs to see in order to accept the proposal. When you reach this level, proposal writing becomes easy and the challenge becomes gaining customer insight.

An Executive Summary for a proposal is not really a summary at all. If you are the customer receiving a proposal, do you really want to read a redundant summary before reading the proposal? Or do you want to find out what you’re going to get if you accept the proposal? An Executive Summary is a tool to help the reader make their decision and the evaluator to score the proposal. Extra and unnecessary reading that gets in the way and tends to annoy customers. Writing an Executive Summary that is redundant but smaller is not helpful. Your Executive Summary should be written from the customer's perspective. To learn how to write your Executive Summary from the customer’s perspective you should learn how to read your proposal like the customer will. To write a proposal Executive Summary from the customer’s perspective, ask yourself: What is the first thing that a customer wants to see or find out from your proposal? What comes after that? And after that? And so on… What questions do they need answers to? The Executive Summary for a proposal should be written to provide quick answers to these questions so they don’t have to read your entire proposal to get them. One way that an Executive Summary is used is to tell the decision maker what they need to know about your proposal so that they don’t actually have to read the proposal. They may have staff read the fine print and evaluate the details, and then read just the Executive Summaries to confirm the recommendation made by their staff. Or they may read the Executive Summary to set context before reading the proposal to see if it supports your claims. Proposals are often scored and not read. An Executive Summary enables them to use your proposal as a reference to see the explanation for the things that interest them the most, without having to read the entire proposal cover to cover like a book. Your proposal may also need to cover a lot of detail that is routine, necessary, and not worth discussing or even thinking much about beyond whether it is present. Material like that does not need to be summarized. It just needs to be easy to find when they go looking for it. Summarizing it in the Executive Summary gets in the way of the reader discovering what matters about your proposal. From the customer’s perspective, the Executive Summary should answer these four questions. What am I going to get if I accept your proposal? See also: Executive Summary The first thing on the customer’s mind is often: What are you offering? Why should I care about it? Does it excite me? Is it worth reading further? They may need to see this before they bother to read your proposal. The very first sentence in your proposal should not be some valueless introduction letting the customer know that this is a proposal, but should instead be a statement about what they are going to get that differentiates your proposal. Why is your proposal my best alternative? Why should the customer accept your offer? They have alternatives. The customer always has alternatives to accepting your proposal. What makes a proposal their best alternative depends heavily on how they will make their decision. The Executive Summary should provide the information they need to reach a decision in your favor. If your proposal will be scored and not read, this means providing information that shows why you should receive the top score. Can I trust you to deliver as promised? If the customer likes what you’re offering, then the next thing they want to know is whether they can believe in your ability to deliver as promised. That’s when they ask questions like: Who are you? Do I know you? Are you qualified? And by “qualified,” they mean have you met the minimal requirements and completed any necessary paperwork for you to be able to do business with them. But what they really want to know is “Can I trust you?” And no, they won’t take your word for it, so they start wondering: Have you ever done it before? Do you have a successful and relevant history that I can check up on? Are your proposed approaches credible? Is the staff who will do the work capable and reliable? Do you have the resources required? Are your estimates credible? Your Executive Summary should establish your credibility for being able to deliver as promised. What do I have to do to get it? If the customer likes your offering and finds you credible, then they want to know what they have to do to get it: Can they afford it? Is it still the best alternative when cost is considered? What steps do they have to go through, including both yours and theirs? If they have a formal procurement process, then their ability to get what you are offering may depend on your ability to navigate their procurement process. Answering this may include providing the information they need to conduct their proposal evaluation. It is a good idea to understand their procurement process so that you can provide the information they need before they have to ask for it. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes If you get answers to these questions in the first few pages, then you already know what conclusion to reach. Sure, someone has to read the proposal and make sure everything that has to be in there is actually there and evaluate all the details compared to all the other bidders. If you don’t get these answers, you remain indecisive and unmotivated. If your Executive Summary is about what you want to say, instead of what the customer needs to hear, that’s where you will leave them.

You are not special, because your proposal is about giving the customer what they asked for. Just like everyone else. You might be a little better, maybe, but that’s not special. That’s just being the same only a little bit more. You may have claimed to be special and probably believe it, but who cares about that noise? You are not special, because you haven’t proposed giving the customer anything that’s special. You haven’t proposed anything they have to select you in order to get. What does it take to be special? Some real understanding is always a good start… Just not the kind that is simply claimed, that involves scraping from the customer’s website, or that is based solely on experience (as if merely being present results in any depth of understanding). Real understanding is shown by applying what you know to create an offering that is special. If you can’t do that, any understanding you think you have has no value to the customer. But you can still be special, even if you don’t know the customer well enough to show real understanding. Special means something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Special means rare. Special means something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Special means surprisingly effective or beneficial. If everyone does it or has it, it’s not special. You can pretty much count on everyone meeting the requirements of the RFP. Being RFP compliant is not special. It needs to be said, but it’s nothing to brag about. If you want to be special, try showing insight about things that matter or that could impact RFP compliance. Innovative ways of being RFP compliant that produce surprising benefits can be special. Doing things in an exceptional way that results in surprisingly better results, less risk, lower cost, or other benefits can be special. But they have to be extraordinary and not just a little better. They have to be things the customer will only get from you. Even when the RFP requires all vendors to do or deliver the exact same thing, you can still be special. If you can’t be special in what you do, be special in how you do it, or why you do it. Sometimes companies that are truly special are not recognized for it, simply because they failed to explain why their offering is special. Claims are not enough. Everyone claims to be special. The best way to be special See also: Technical approach The best way to be special is not for you to be special, but for the customer to get something from you that is special. Will they get better results, insight, fewer problems, better confidence, less effort, more reliability, etc.? Just keep in mind that, whatever it is, it has to be something they are not likely to get anywhere else for your offering to be special. In the Technical Approach, being special is usually achieved by being innovative. In the Management Plan being special is usually achieved by doing things more reliably. But the easiest way to achieve being special is to make sure that every single thing you say addresses why it matters. You can be special without being especially innovative by focusing less on what you do, and instead make how you do it more meaningful. Proposals about things that matter to the customer are always special. But only when they agree about what matters. Give the customer something special, and they have to select you in order to get it. Now you just have to hope that the way you are special is something they want. If it’s not, they’ll pick someone else who they think really is special. And if they can’t find anyone they think is special, they’ll just go with the lowest cost provider, or maybe someone just a little better.

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There is one thing that if mastered will enable you to win every proposal, no matter what. The good news is that it is a simple thing. The bad news is that the implications are deep and achieving it can be challenging. The one thing you need to do is to get the customer to want you to win more than any competing priority. Keep in mind that it’s just a proposal. Your customer is not going to go to jail or lose their job just so you can win. They have other priorities that matter more to them than whether you win. They also have alternatives that might better match their priorities. There is no such thing as magic words that win proposals. You can’t hypnotize them into going against their other priorities. Understanding the implications This means that winning proposals is about positioning what you offer to be more supportive of the customer’s priorities than any other alternative. Understanding this is the secret to winning. The implications of it tell you what you should do in order to win. Your chances of winning drop dramatically if you don’t understand the customer’s priorities. For starters, your chances of winning drop dramatically if you don’t understand the customer’s priorities. And you must understand the reality of their priorities, and not just their aspirations about them. Will they place a literal interpretation of their procurement process ahead of how you’d like them to consider your offering? Will they talk value but act on price? Is their priority to follow the RFP or is the RFP just a step along the way to a higher priority? When you sit down to write a proposal, everything is about positioning. Every single sentence makes a point, even if you don’t think about it. So what should the point of every single sentence be? Should it be “pick us?” “We’re the best?” “We’ll deliver the best value?” “We comply with everything in the RFP?” “Our strengths match your evaluation criteria?” You can’t answer what points to make unless you understand the customer’s priorities. What is the point? See also: Making proposals simple When you don’t know what points to make, you have three choices: 1. Guess and take a chance at being wrong 2. Water down your points so they can’t be wrong 3. Try to be everything to everybody None of those will win you every proposal. In fact, watering down your points and being everything to everybody is a great way to lose proposals. What most companies do to try to be the customer’s best alternative is to pile on the positive attributes. In reality, they usually pile on positive sounding claims that don’t pass the “So what?” test in the hope that something will stick. Their goal is to have more “positives” (whatever that is) than their competitors. If you list all the reasons why you think the customer should accept your proposal, you’ll find that some of them matter more than others. What you think matters doesn’t. It’s what the customer thinks that matters. So how would they weight them? Which ones are strengths, which ones will get ignored, and which will detract? You can guess. You can pile on, and hope some signal makes it through all that noise. Or you can write a proposal that reflects the customer’s priorities. When you get to the proposal, it’s probably too late to discover the customer’s priorities. But it’s not too late to think about them. Which do you think has the best chances of winning? Guessing about their priorities and writing a proposal based on that in order to show the customer why they should want your offering Piling on beneficial sounding fluff to somehow add up to the customer wanting your offering. Or not. It's not about you Great proposal writing is not about you. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Learn to write your proposals from the customer's perspective. Is a proposal similar to your priorities, or at least one that shows attention to them, with a few awkward spots the best? Or is looking through a list of sales slogans and finding a few gems the best? Do you read it all or do you skim? And if you skim, won’t the parts that grab your attention be the ones that reflect your priorities? And what about your boss and other stakeholders? Does it reflect their priorities? The real problem with a strategy of piling on beneficial sounding fluff (even if you don’t think your fluff is fluff) is that it is quite literally pointless. From one section/paragraph/sentence to the next, the point is opportunistic (that’s a nicer word than “random”). Basing your proposal on random, opportunistic points hurts your credibility and can make the customer question whether they can trust you, since it appears your priority is being self-promoting and you’re willing to say anything to win. When you base your proposal on making points that reflect the customer’s priorities, you create a more meaningful proposal in the eyes of the customer. Your points matter. They add up to more than a list of beneficial sounding fluff because they have meaning. Not only that, but you appear considerate. It shows you considered the customer in more than just a casual way, which makes you appear more trustworthy than vendors who didn’t. Can you discover them? Can you guess them? Can you be honest about them? Being honest about the customer’s priorities is perhaps the most challenging. How can you be honest about them, when the customer is often not honest to themselves about their priorities? When people think about and discuss their priorities, they often reflect their aspirations, and you can base your bid strategies on your customer's aspirations. But when people act, they do so based on their real priorities. Understand these and you will know what must be done to win every proposal.

This is a what a few days in the life of a proposal team can be like if instead of working with just an RFP and Microsoft Word, they use a performance support system. In her book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, Gloria Gery defined performance support systems as: An integrated electronic environment that is available to and easily accessible by each employee and is structured to provide immediate, individualized on-line access to the full range of information, software, guidance, advice and assistance, data, images, tools, and assessment and monitoring systems to permit job performance with minimal support and intervention by others. This makes a performance support system something very different from a workflow or automation tool. That’s okay, because unless you sell a commodity, proposal automation can do more harm than good. But a performance support system can enable your staff to produce better proposals. At least that’s been our experience in using the MustWin Performance Support Tool. We created it to bring together all of the content and training we’ve created at PropLIBRARY and make it part of the act of creating proposals. We’ve used it as an example below to provide the details necessary to visualize what preparing a proposal using a performance support system can be like. Walking through a typical proposal effort The Proposal Manager gets the go-ahead to start the proposal. Just like she usually does, she reads the RFP and begins creating a compliance matrix so that she can build a compliant outline for the proposal. When she’s done, she goes to the MustWin Performance Support Tool and clicks on the “Add Proposal” button and names the proposal. Then she starts entering the outline. It takes about 15 minutes to enter all the headings. When she’s done she can click on any outline item and have a place to plan the content of the proposal and enter instructions for the writers. Within the Mustwin Performance Support Tool, people can be “planners,” “writers,” or “reviewers.” So, the Proposal Manager needs to decide who will be involved in planning the content of the proposal. Will it be just her? Will she involve a few key people? Or will she give everybody access? Different companies have different needs at this stage. While she’s at it, she can also give the writers and reviewers their access. Now the Proposal Manager sends them email explaining what she wants the proposal content planners to do and when she needs them to complete it by. She likes to give people about 20% of the available schedule for content planning, so that she has a couple of days to review the plan and still have plenty of time to complete the writing. Making planning before you write a reality When the content planners click on the proposal in the MustWin Performance Support Tool, they see the outline and can select the items they are supposed to contribute to. If the Proposal Manager sets it up that way, that may be all they can see. When the content planners enter a proposal section, they’ll see seven topic headings covering key subject areas related to proposal planning. For example, “Win strategies: For identifying the points you need to prove, your differentiators, things to emphasize, and ways to maximize your evaluation score.” Within each of the topics they can enter instructions that cover not only what to write, but how it should be written, things that should be included, etc. There are six types of instructions that they can pick from. One type is called “Quality Criteria” and can be used to define the criteria that both the writers and reviewers will use to assess the quality of the proposal. There are filters that can be used to turn viewing of various types of instructions on or off, so that writers might focus on instructions, or when they are nearly finished only show the quality criteria so they can self-assess their work. Each person participating in content planning will go through their sections and add the various types of instructions across the seven topics in each section. This helps make sure that everything that should be addressed is included. When they enter the instructions, they can start fresh and say whatever needs to be said. Or they can click on an icon and look at the PropLIBRARY Recipe Library. There they’ll find hundreds of ideas for possible instructions. They can add them with a click of a button. Or they can customize the recipes based on the particular circumstances of this proposal. It only takes a few seconds to enter an instruction. Wrapping the plan with everything else needed for successful performance Proposal writers can see how much easier it will be to write... and they will feel less afraid of the reviews because the reviewers will be using the same instructions and quality criteria... Over the last decade we’ve published hundreds of articles related to guiding people toward writing better proposals. All of this material, including all of our online training courses, are available inside the MustWin Performance Support Tool. When you are in planning mode, you see guidance related to proposal content planning. When you are in writing mode, you see guidance related to carrying out proposal assignments and winning in writing. When you are in review mode, you see guidance related to proposal quality validation and how to be a better reviewer. If you are new to proposals, you can take a course targeted to what you need to do right then and there. One of the key goals of the system is to prevent people from getting stuck. When people get stuck and the deadline clock is ticking, some will procrastinate, some will work around the problem and leave a hole, and others might fake something to fill the hole. Do enough proposals and you’ll see it all. It’s much better to prevent people from getting stuck than to have to dig your way out of the hole. See also: MWPST (deprecated) Over the next few days, the content plan starts to fill up with instructions. Soon it gets to the point where people can take a step back and really see what will be going into each section and how it will be presented. If there are holes or issues, they can bring someone in to address them with an instruction for the writer before they get stuck. The writers can see how much easier it will be to write with all that guidance, and they will feel less afraid of the proposal review process because the reviewers will be using the same instructions and quality criteria to assess the proposal. When the instructions are complete, the Proposal Manager asks the reviewers to take a look at the plan. The review of the content plan can be even more important than the review of the draft. Once the content plan has been approved, it’s time to invite the writers in to get started. The writers take over They don’t have to struggle to come up with what they should write about. Now, as much as I enjoy designing a winning proposal by crafting the instructions, this is where things really get fun. The writers go to the proposal page in the MustWin Performance Support Tool. If they can, they load it in a browser on a second monitor. Then they open Microsoft Word. If you have one ready to go, they load the format template with your headers, footers, and heading styles. They stare at the blank page, but only for just a second. Then they look at the instructions that have been entered in the MustWin Performance Support Tool. They don’t have to struggle to come up with what they should write about, if the instructions are well crafted. They don’t have to wonder about what points they are supposed to make. They see what they are supposed to write about and how they are supposed to present it. The results of doing this are so much better than handing them the RFP and a section assignment. It can turn proposal writing into a process of elimination instead of a risky black hole. The proposal writers don’t even have to fear the reviewers, since the quality criteria enable them to self-assess by applying the same standards the reviewers will be applying. But this is reality, and things aren’t always perfect. What if an instruction is difficult to interpret or implement? If a writer doesn’t understand an instruction or even objects to it, they can click on the instruction and post a comment. They can get clarification, discuss an issue, and figure out how to move forward as a team. Even if they are all working remotely, no one is alone. While they are working, the writers can signal their progress by clicking a traffic light icon next to each instruction. They all start off red, and when they are complete they should be green. The data show up on the proposal outline as an average, showing you the overall progress toward completion. It’s self-reported, but it’s a far more detailed, reliable, and data-driven way of measuring progress than you’ve ever had before. Proposal quality validation that goes beyond opinion-based reviews Proposal reviews are not a fishing expedition. The proposal manager has more choices for managing the review process. Should she require “pens down” during the reviews? The MustWin Performance Support Tool makes it easier than ever to have “rolling” reviews that don’t bring the writing to a screeching halt. But if you think it’s best to call a halt while the reviewers perform their assessment, you can. Reviews using the MustWin Performance Support Tool are not a fishing expedition. They target whether the instructions were followed and the quality criteria fulfilled. This makes the quality of the instructions more important, but it also makes the review of the narrative much easier. The reviewers get the same traffic light icons that the writers get for measuring progress. On one screen/window they have the proposal in Microsoft Word. On the other, they have the MustWin Performance Support Tool. The reviewers use the traffic light icons to declare whether the instructions were followed and the quality criteria fulfilled. Click. Click. Click. When published, the review results show up on the proposal table of contents. Section by section you can see where the reviewers scored the sections red/yellow/green. If the reviewers see something they want to comment on or explain, they can enter comments under the instruction or quality criteria. And don’t forget, you can still have a classic paper-based review with document mark-up and a debrief meeting. The MustWin Performance Support Tool just gives you new options for new approaches. For example, you can segment your reviews and have as many as you’d like. For example, you could have one or two experts review the instructions in the “RFP compliance” or “Offering Design” topic, but have others review the instructions in the “Win Strategies” topic. You can stage those reviews for when they make the most sense and conduct them without bringing the writing to a halt. You could even have them all going simultaneously. Then later, when you are ready, you can still have a traditional document review if you want. Or not. You decide based on what works best for the nature of your offering, the circumstances of this bid, and your corporate culture. Oh, and if your reviewers need training or guidance, it’s right there. They can take a course or read one of the articles we’ve published on making your reviews more effective. The Proposal Manager can take advantage of our library as well. The entire Proposal Quality Validation methodology that we recommend is available to them to help make their decisions and plan the reviews. What comes after the writing and reviews are complete? With the last click to green you can confidently take the proposal into final production. Experienced proposal professionals and most honest reviewers will tell you that many review comments are difficult to take action on, sometimes contradict each other, or have other problems. Writers are often not sure what to do to resolve some comments. Some comments get ignored. Some comments should get ignored. Within the MustWin Performance Support Tool, writers can ask questions after a review. They can discuss a comment. They can ask for suggestions or examples. And get them. No one needs to be left hanging when time is of the essence. You can also choose to have follow-up reviews to see if you can move any yellows to green. And they can be as quick as opening the file, looking at the yellow items in the MustWin Performance Support Tool, and re-reading just that part. With the last click to green you can confidently take the proposal into final production.

Take a moment and ask yourself why you're interested in reducing the amount of proposal writing. It could be because you're out of time. Or have strict page limits. Or have other priorities and want to reduce the effort required by a proposal. This is where I'd normally jump in with an ROI calculation that shows that the impact on your win rate of doing a proposal well makes it mathematically worth it. However, today I'm going to skip that and take an unjudgmental look at what it takes to reduce the amount of proposal writing. See also: Making Proposals Simple How to do proposals The Wrong Way™ is a topic I love to write about. Because, let's be honest, sometimes the "best practices" won’t help you. They generally aren't applicable to adverse circumstances. And sometimes just simply getting something submitted is such a great challenge that going the extra distance to improve your chances of winning is not an option. That’s when you may have to do a proposal The Wrong Way™. Doing a proposal The Wrong Way™ can ruin your chances of winning. You have been warned. But it can also help you survive the experience. Can you make a shorter proposal without hurting your chances of winning? The length of what you write for your proposal only matters if it’s related to what it will take to win. Adding detail may or may not impact what it will take to win. The trick to winning a short proposal is to understand what it will take to win so that you can say only that and do it in the fewest words possible. Most people add detail when they aren't sure what the customer is looking for and just want to cover the bases. The points below are not about how to achieve the best presentation or maximize your chances of winning. That's what the rest of PropLIBRARY is for. These are for when your top priority is to do less proposal writing. As anyone who has had to cut a proposal down to reach an RFP-mandated page limit can tell you, it can take a stupidly huge amount of time to shorten a proposal that's too long. If you want to save time and resources, the trick is to shorten it on the first draft. And since you’re probably working with proposal contributors who are not professional writers, you need simple, easy techniques like these to help them achieve that. The following tips are useful, risky, and problematic, but also effective in the right circumstances: Don’t talk about anything the customer doesn’t care about. Don’t say what you want to say. Only say what the customer needs to hear to make their decision. I could stop right there because it's really all you need to know about proposal writing in general, but you’d probably find that annoying. Separate features, benefits, qualifications, and what you are offering. Normally proposals contain a lot of narrative. And in that narrative, we try to do a bunch of things all at once. We add or expand our sentences to introduce, inform, include, claim, prove, differentiate, explain, position, qualify, score, comply, and more all in the same narrative. Stop doing that because it expands the amount of writing. Separate the points you are trying to make from the details of your offering. Use theme statements under headings, call out boxes, subheadings, tables, or anything else. Create zones where the parts go so that you don't have to connect them all with transition words or make them "flow." It will help you be less wordy, while still making the points. Go for punchy over smooth. Only do one thing in each sentence. Quit trying to write the perfect sentence. Quit trying to combine things like features and benefits in the same sentence. You still need to address the benefits. But when you weave them in and throughout, you make the proposal wordier than it needs to be. You can even create proposal writing formulas for your paragraphs with each sentence having a single purpose. Quit talking around it and just say it. Simply state the facts, details, proof points, qualifications, and benefits. You don’t have to ease your way into them. Don't introduce. Don’t be indirect. Think of your entire proposal as a checklist instead of a document. Instead of engaging with your narrative like it's literature, enable the customer to process their decision like a checklist that's presented as paragraphs. Don’t try to tell a story. Every proposal tells a story, even if you don’t try to. So tell a story about how easy you are to work with by making your proposal checklist simple. Just don’t explain the story. Let it be told by the clarity and simplicity of what you submit. Let your story be revealed without telling it. As much as possible, group things. When you group them, you can remove a lot of connecting words. You can make one point that addresses all of them. For example, in Quality Control Plan, you might say “Here are all the ways we improve quality by increasing transparency:” and then give them a super tight, concise list. Or you might say “Things we do to address the RFP requirement:” and then just give them a list. Write in lists. Bullets may or may not save space, but writing in lists definitely does. Write a long semicolon-separated paragraph with nothing but details if you have to. Just don’t explain every item in your list. Don’t summarize. Summaries are redundant. Skip them. Telling them what you are going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you told them makes for long proposals, just like this sentence. If your proposal needs a summary, then it's not well organized or you wrote too much. If your proposal needs a summary, the customer probably doesn't want to read your proposal (even if it has a summary). Don’t write warm-ups. Don’t introduce by setting a context, stating some universal principle, describing some background, providing history, or otherwise saying anything other than what you offer or why it matters. Don’t write conclusions. Building to the finish in a proposal is a mistake. Make your point up front and then support it. Don’t feel like you need to put something at the end. If you made your point, then the evaluator got what they needed. They want you to stop. Seriously. They don't need you to close out with something more. They just want to be done and don’t need to read through a recitation or a conclusion that doesn’t add anything new and just gives them more to read before they are done. Just stop. Do you hear me? Once the point has been made, that’s all they need. Giving them more to read might just be counter-productive. Don’t feel like you're leaving them hanging. Don't put them through a long goodbye. Just stop already. Make points, then stop. Spend a moment thinking before typing. What point do you need to get across? Make the point. Prove it. Then stop writing. Graphics. Graphics may or may not take less effort and space. In the right circumstances, they can radically simplify. If a process has more than half a dozen steps, you can probably illustrate it in less space than you can describe in writing. Just don’t explain the graphic in your text. Simply say “Our process is shown in the exhibit.” Don't create graphics that require explaining in the text. Ever. Tables. Tables work best when you can take a bunch of items in your outline and collapse them into a table instead of using headings. Tables are also great for making sweeping pronouncements and applying them to lists of things like RFP requirements. Another great thing about tables is that you can often structure them so you don't even have to use complete sentences. Often just a few words for each item will do. Try planning your proposal around tables and see how much less writing you actually have to do. Delete all the promises. I have reduced the length of some of the proposals I’ve reviewed by pages, simply by deleting all those statements about the company's commitment, values, dedication, or other expression of intent that don't actually say what the company is going to do. Don't promise things. Just do them. While you’re at it, simply delete any sentence that starts with “We understand” because all it's probably going to show is that you know how to copy and paste. Real understanding would show that you know how to deliver the results they are looking for and wouldn’t need to use the word “understand” at all to communicate that you deeply understand. Oh, and delete all those unsubstantiated claims too. Better yet, don’t write them in the first place. Make fewer claims. Focus on proof points. Remember, the goal is not to write a long proposal and then edit it down to a concise proposal. The goal is to write it that way from the first draft. Think twice, write once. Then go home.

It sounds so obvious that few companies bother to define it. But if you want to maximize your win rate, it’s worth giving some attention to how you define proposal success. You can't intentionally seek proposal success or consistently achieve it if you're just guessing at what it is. Let's start by looking at some common ways that people try to define proposal success. See also: Proposal quality validation Anything that wins! During the proposal phase you haven't won or lost, so it doesn't help you any to use that to define success for the proposal you are working on now. On time submission. Your goal should not be to simply submit the proposal. A late submission might be a loss, but an on-time submission does not mean you will win. Even if all your proposals are submitted on time, you could still lose them all. A defect free proposal. Being free of defects doesn't mean your proposal is better than all of the other ones submitted. RFP compliance. Being RFP compliant may keep you from losing before your proposal even gets read. But it doesn't make you more competitive than the other companies that are also RFP compliant. Proposal success is also not determined by the amount of effort put into it, how bad you want to win, how much you like it, whether it "sounds good," the most experienced person’s opinion, what the sales lead thinks, or even what makes The Powers That Be in your own company happy. So just what the heck in the world is it? Defining proposal success If you submit a proposal that to the best of your knowledge reflects all the attributes of a winning proposal, you have done everything you can to achieve success. You just better make sure that the best of your knowledge reflects the way the customer thinks, evaluates, and decides. The way we like to say it is that what defines proposal success is whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win. Success comes when you: Conduct a reliable discover phase that determines what it will take to win. Create a feedback loop that factors past customers' award decisions into future determinations of what it will take to win. Measure your win rate and the impact of the things you do to change it. If you leave "what it will take to win" undefined, or leave it up to opinion, you are just gambling. If you set your sales process up so that it is driven by opinion, you will not be competitive against companies that put more thought into it than that. If your bid/no bid process, pursuit strategy, offering design, proposal writing, and proposal reviews are all driven by opinion, your win rate will suffer. You may have great staff, but they will lose to the staff at another company who consistently put their energies into determining what it will take to win from the customer’s perspective, instead of basing their proposal on their opinions. If you pursue proposal quality by holding reviews that are basically subjective opinion-fests, you should take note. You could do so much better. Ensuring proposal success To accomplish what it will take to win, you need to identify the attributes that make up what it will take to win, articulate them as quality criteria, and then assess the quality of your proposal by comparing it to those attributes. To do this, your quality criteria need to be reliable. If they don't accurately reflect what it will take to win, they can actually become counter-productive. Your pursuit should start by researching what it will take to win. Sales should not just be about having “a relationship” with the customer and finding out whatever you can about the pursuit. Sales should use relationship marketing and intelligence gathering to discover what it will take to win. All the deliverables and progress reviews for the sales process should build toward being able to articulate this in the ways needed to win the proposal. They provide the input you need to create valid proposal quality criteria. Then you need a review process that ensures your quality criteria are reliable by making sure that: Everyone is on the same page and that how you have defined what it will take to win reflects the best knowledge available throughout your entire organization. The quality criteria themselves are reviewed and approved for use based on what it will take to win. This should include verifying that how you define what it will take to win is based on how the customer will reach their decision, instead of how you think they should reach it. When you do this, you define proposal success in a way that everyone can use to ensure their role contributes to achieving it. That is something that just basing your proposals on best efforts and opinions won’t do for you. How defining proposal success this way produces a better win rate With this definition of proposal success, the people working on the proposal know what they need to accomplish. Before the proposal starts they need to discover what it will take to win. After it starts, what it will take to win should be turned into quality criteria so that the proposal writers can create a proposal based on what it will take to win. And to provide quality assurance, the proposal reviews should use the same quality criteria to determine whether the writers achieved what it will take to win.

I realized today when I was working on the specifications to support pre-RFP opportunity pursuit and capture, that nearly all of the functionality could be achieved right now using the current version of the MustWin Performance Support Tool. Sure, it would lack some of the automagic streamlining we're planning, but the core of what you need to use it during the pre-RFP phase is already there. I love it when things work out like that. It confirms that we're on the right track with how we've designed the architecture. Because the plan is to stick as close to the same database structure as possible and to use the same instruction-based information model, you can do much of what we’re working on right now. You’ll just have to do some things manually and it will require more clicks than it will when we officially add the pre-RFP support. Before we get into features, functionalities, and steps, let’s start with some requirements analysis. What do we need in order to smooth the transition from sales and business development into proposal writing? We need: Containers for the information gathered To provide guidance regarding what information to gather A mechanism for tracking progress and ensuring the right information has been collected To address the bid/no bid decision Within the paper-based MustWin Process, we recommend Readiness Reviews. So we definitely want the new features to support that, as well as be flexible enough to support the myriad gate reviews and pursuit processes already in use at companies. The first step is to add a “proposal.” Maybe we’ll rename that to a “pursuit.” But functionally it doesn’t matter. The next step is to create your “outline.” An outline item is really just a container. The outline might contain an item for each Readiness Review or gate in your process. Plus any other topics or containers you want to have. In essence, what you're doing is setting up the structure of your capture plan, along with any pre-RFP reviews and bid/no bid meetings. Try numbering your outline as decimals less than one (0.x). That way, they won’t conflict with the future proposal outline and you’ll end up able to have your pre-RFP information right next to your proposal information when the RFP is released. Our plan is to automate creating the pre-RFP outline, and enable you to save and reuse your own. Here is a sample outline to try. When you enter an outline item, you’ll see the topics we use in Proposal Content Planning. Not all of them are relevant to pre-RFP pursuit, so we’ll be changing them. For now, some of them will come in handy and the rest you can ignore. Within the relevant topics, you’ll want to add instructions and questions for your sales or business development staff to seek answers to. You can use the current instruction adding functionality to do this. We’ll be creating a default list of off-the-shelf questions that will instantly import. And it will be customizable. But for now you can manually enter the questions from the Readiness Review methodology or from our Master Proposal Startup Information Checklist. If you structure your pre-RFP pursuit around answering questions, the way we like to do, then your sales and business development staff can answer the questions by using the discussion feature. Every instruction item added automatically comes with a discussion area. You can use this to plan, review, and clarify your answers as you work to develop an information advantage ahead of the RFP release. When the RFP is finally released and it’s time to start the proposal, you’ll need to convert the information you gathered into input for the Proposal Content Plan. This will involve creating an RFP compliance matrix in order to develop your proposal outline and adding it in the MWPST. Once the outline is ready, you’ll need to manually copy and paste from your pre-RFP outline items to the final proposal outline and articulate things as instructions and quality criteria for the proposal writers. The bulk of the coding we have to do for pre-RFP support will be to streamline this, because we should be able to greatly reduce the number of clicks that are currently involved. The result will be that all of the customer, opportunity, competitive, and other intelligence you gather, along with the work that you do to design your offering and develop your win strategies, will all be in a place where it will be relatively easy to convert it into Proposal Content Plan instructions and quality criteria. Doing this will ensure that your information advantage gets translated into a better proposal with a competitive advantage. Down the road (don’t ask me when, but I'm expecting it to be less than six months), it will become even easier. You’ll click a button to start a new pursuit, set some configuration options, and then go straight into tweaking the questions and instructions that will already be there for your sales/business development staff. It will be easy to enter and build the information you gather. And then at RFP release, you’ll easily map what you’ve got to the Proposal Outline, maybe with some drag and drop. Then, when you are doing your Proposal Content Planning, you’ll have all of your pre-RFP intelligence right there in each section where it’s relevant so that you can turn it into instructions and quality criteria. It will be easier than I’ve ever seen this done before. But you don’t have to wait. You can do it all right now. We didn’t realize that it would work out that way when we built the Proposal Content Planning tool, but we’re glad it did.