Carl Dickson

Are you trying to win all of your future proposals, or just the one on your desk? Are you thinking short-term or long-term? Are you trying to do a proposal and get back to your other work, or are you trying to develop an organization? Some of the things that drive how many people are needed to win a proposal are fairly obvious: The amount that needs to be written The schedule The size of the production effort But some of them are less obvious, and these tend to be the ones that impact your ability to win the most: The range of subject matters that need to be covered. This is not just a technical concern. Do you have someone involved who knows how to create a detailed transition plan for this type of project? What about the staffing plan, quality control plan, etc.? Who knows your company’s projects well enough to select, edit, and update your past performance project descriptions? How many people do you need contributions from in order to address all the required topics? The difficulty of designing the offering. Can one person decide what to offer and describe it for the proposal? Or do you need a cross-functional team? Layers of involvement. How many people must be involved in reviews, approvals, and decision making? Do you need section or volume leaders? The availability of information. If you know the customer’s preferences and your bid strategies proposal writing is straightforward. If you don’t, you’ll have to add research, deliberations, meetings, etc. to decide what to say in the absence of the information you need. The maturity of your proposal process. Are you making it all up as you go along? Is your process well-defined and efficient? What will it take to administer the process or invent it on the spot? Then there are organizational strategies and productivity concerns Should subject matter experts deliver finished writing, or should they be paired with writers who are specialists? Should you hire junior staff and train them, or hire experts? Should you use consultants? There is no answer to these questions that is right for everybody. But you will usually find a mixture of proposal specialists and non-specialists involved. And it shows the importance of productivity. The number of people varies with their productivity, and how productive someone is going to be at proposal writing is extremely difficult to predict. How many hats can one person wear? There are a number of roles that the business opportunity pursuit process is typically broken down into. In large companies, each role may be staffed by a single person. In small startups, each person typically has to wear multiple hats. Defining roles is important, even when one person fulfills multiple roles, because it prepares the organization for growth. It begins the process of defining tasks by roles instead of by people. Small businesses often make the mistake of building their process around the people they have instead of how the process should work. Proposal staffing is an ROI decision See also: Roles The money a company spends on proposals should not be treated like it’s an expense. It is an investment. The amount you spend depends on how much you can invest, and what return you are seeking on your investment. The way you staff the proposal function should be based on how much you can invest in it, and you should do it in a way that maximizes the return on your investment. You’ll make better decisions if you track your ROI. If you are seeing a high rate of return, you might decide to increase your investment until the return levels off. Everything you do in proposal development should be correlated with your win rate in order to achieve a continuously improving ROI. As an example, understaffing the proposal function does not save you any money if it reduces your win rate. There are ways to do proposals with fewer people, but they often come at the expense of a lower win rate. A small difference in win rate can cover the cost of a lot of proposal effort. Learn to do the math. On the other hand, if adding staff isn’t increasing your win rate, the additional staff are hurting your ROI and you need to give attention to something other than the amount of resources if you want to increase it. Learn to track performance of the proposal function against win rate in order to know how to maximize your ROI. Your goal should be to continuously increase your win rate, since this has a direct correlation with the ROI of your proposal function. You should be able to assess how everything correlates with your win rate. Sometimes winning isn't just about staffing a proposal. Sometimes winning requires organizational change. Which has the greater impact? Process changes New staff Proposal tools and software Training Availability of information Review scores Status of offering design Teaming When you start the proposal Etc. If you are reading this, I challenge you to quantify how these things correlate with your win rate. If you can’t, you’re only guessing at what to do next to boost your win rate. Budgets are a necessary evil Regardless of your win rate, it’s important that the cost of the proposal function not increase in proportion to your company’s revenue. This is because the proposal function is usually overhead, and if the company has to increase the percentage of overhead used during pricing, it can become uncompetitive. This is where budgets come into play. One of the things a budget does for a company is that it tells people how much overhead they can spend before it negatively impacts their competitiveness. The good news is that you can increase the total amount spent on overhead (and by the proposal function, although it competes with other priorities) by increasing the amount of revenue. And the proposal function can increase the amount of revenue by increasing the win rate. If you know what correlates with your company's win rate, then you are in a much better position to make informed decisions regarding how to budget the proposal function. Instead of zero-based staffing, try ROI-based staffing Trying to calculate the number of people needed to produce the number of pages to submit is at best a scientific guessing game. And it is rarely that scientific. The amount of time spent to craft a small page-limited proposal can be the same as what it takes to produce a much larger proposal. It depends on the RFP. But fitting a large RFP into a small page limit makes the time per page go way up. Then there’s the complexity of the RFP instructions and evaluation criteria, the complexity of the subject matter, the amount of time until the deadline, the amount of pre-RFP preparation, your familiarity with the customer and offering, and more that will impact the time per page. Averages aren’t. There’s too much variance. Instead of trying to calculate the workload, try basing the budget on the desired ROI. What are you willing to invest to get the win? How many pursuits do you have to spread that investment across, and at what win rate? Your business development pipeline can provide valuable clues regarding how many resources you need. If you don’t know your win rate, you’ll have to guess. But you can refine your guess over your next few proposals. When you consider what you can spend while keeping a competitive overhead rate, depending on your market, you might end up with a budget of 1-2% of projected revenue for the pre-RFP pursuit, and another 1-2% for the proposal. You can convert these numbers into how many people you can afford to have work on the proposal. This defines what you can afford to invest and not necessarily what the proposal should cost. It could be more than what the proposal could be created for, if done on the cheap (but that might not achieve the best ROI). It could be less that what the proposal should cost based on the workload. But it reflects what you can afford to invest. If you can’t afford to invest what it will take to win and thrive off a positive ROI, you might be in the wrong business, undercapitalized, or doing the wrong things to reach a positive ROI. When a proposal is with a familiar customer or offering, it will take less time and cost less to produce. When the RFP is simple and well written, the proposal will take less time and cost less to produce. Other things that can impact proposal cost include the availability of internal staff, use of consultants, competitive environment, time until the deadline, and more. But you can calculate an overall average to invest and divide it among your pursuits. You should manage the proposal function to maximize ROI, instead of trying to guess what the lowest head count is you can get away with and still make submissions.

At most companies, the proposal management role is not well defined. What you are managing is not well defined. The processes you are supposed to implement are neither written nor well defined. Who you are managing is not well defined. The resources at your disposal are not well defined, and they're usually minimal. Your responsibilities are all-encompassing. In larger companies, there are multiple roles (business development, capture, subject matter experts, writers, proposal specialists, etc.) that contribute to the proposals that you ostensibly manage. But sometimes that just means more cats to herd. In small companies, you have the opposite problem. Writing a proposal sounds like a single thing, so it’s often given to a single person. That person is usually not a proposal specialist and is often a stuckee low on the org chart, with none of the authority and all of the responsibility. See also: Proposal Management That’s okay. It creates an opportunity, since proposals are competitive. You can beat companies who don’t take proposal development seriously and try to slack their way through them. But you might have to transform your entire company to do it, since most companies are organized around functional operations and not around growth. It often falls to the proposal manager to see the needs, define what needs to be done, and become the change agent. Proposal managers are often the tail that wags the dog. Proposal managers, no matter how humbly placed on the org chart, often have a disproportionate influence over the company's future, including everything from how work will get done and how it will be managed, to what the company values. This, by the way, should not be the case. But when you leave things undefined and require a proposal manager to fill the voids, they often do such a great job they fill voids you didn't realize you had. Most of the issues below will appear unsolvable if you just try to resolve them with improved procedures. They require change at the organizational level. This is often above the pay grade of a proposal manager. And no matter how motivated proposal managers can be to fill the voids, they can get stuck by a lack of collaboration. This, by the way, is not a recipe for winning. But if you build the right types of communication into your process, you can make it clearer to The Powers That Be what needs to be done to increase your win rate. Create reports that show the performance of the handoffs that occur in your process, the flow of information, and how they impact the return on investment. Make your process speak for itself regarding what should be done to maximize win rate and return on investment. If you don't have the authority, try being an advocate. And if you can't be an advocate, try being a decision support resource. Enable data driven executive decisions by providing the data. Some of the issues that proposal managers face are not exclusive to proposal management. However, these issues can almost be inherent in the proposal management role, even though they shouldn’t be. You’re closing someone else’s sale. Someone else found and chased the lead. And yet, it doesn’t close until the proposal is accepted. If they aren’t part of closing the sale, is it really their sale? Are they responsible for putting lines in the water, or reeling them in? Who owns the customer relationship? Who is responsible for representing the voice of the customer during proposal development? Regardless of how you allocate your sales resources, design your process to effectively close and not just produce leads. If you are on the receiving end of someone else’s lead, you should be able to articulate what you need from them to close the sale, while they are still pursuing it and able to get the information you need. You should be able to show the correlation between whether you start with what you need and your win rate. Does the proposal manager receive a handoff from sales or does the proposal manager provide assistance to close the sale? What kind of proposal manager does your company want to have? You have all the responsibility, with none of the authority. No one on your team actually reports to you. You don’t even control the proposal budget. Proposal managers are often called on to manage their own bosses and even their bosses’ bosses. Is it any surprise that people often repeatedly fail in their proposal assignments without ever being held accountable? It’s hard to manage expectations when you are not in charge of the expectations. Or their fulfillment. Building expectation management into your process helps change it from a chain of command issue and instead make it a natural part of the collaboration. Who sets the expectations? Who is responsible for fulfilling them? Where do the resources required for fulfillment come from? What happens when expectations are successfully fulfilled? What happens when they are not? If your company doesn't address these issues head on, then maybe the proposal manager will be able to fill the gap. And maybe not. You don’t get to decide who’s on your team. A proposal manager typically gets what they get as far as resources go, and is expected to take it from there. And win. If you want more resources, you need to be able to prove the ROI. Expect proposal contributors to show up without having any training, their experience to be from at least five years ago, and you may not know if they’re any good until it’s too late to do anything about it. This is one reason why building training into your process and making it part of performance instead of something separate can help so much. Proposal management success depends on being able to adapt to the resources you have to work with. But this can mean that the company ends up with compromised proposals instead of the maximum potential ROI. Proposal managers need to be able to teach The Powers That Be how to quantify proposal ROI in order to get appropriate resources. You are responsible for the information you’re not given. You are supposed to win. Unfortunately, not being given sufficient insight into the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment is never accepted as an excuse for losing. If you are expected to win, design your process to clearly identify what information you need to write a winning proposal, and put it in the hands of people who interface with the customer early enough to be able to get it. The more a proposal manager does to ensure they get the information they need to craft a winning proposal, the better their career will go. Structure your proposal around the information needed instead of draft cycles. Quantify what having an information advantage means, what its impact is on win rate, and what the impact of that is on the company's ROI. Your process will break. Every time. One reason people usually have more of a way of doing things than an actual proposal process is that the customer will do things that break your process. They will ask for unique things out of sequence, leave out critical information, be inconsistent, be self-contradictory, or simply change their mind. If you have to reinvent your process every time you bid, why bother to write it down? Most proposal managers do not have the ability to design a process that is sufficiently adaptable, and if they do, they won’t be given enough time to write it down. They end up with techniques that they call a "process." You can build an actual, survivable process around your information needs instead of steps. You can predict what information each participant needs to play their role, regardless of whatever wackiness the customer throws into the RFP. You can also cheat by starting with the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY if you become a subscriber. You’re supposed to be able to write, present, manage staff, implement processes, design offerings, read the customer’s mind, provide quality assurance, and understand the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), DCAA compliant pricing, graphics, and publishing. And yes, you’re not only expected to supervise, you’re supposed to participate personally in doing all those things, and do them well enough to beat any potential competitor. It’s usually a mistake to give your proposal manager writing assignments, but it happens all the time. Overloading the proposal manager usually results from simply not sufficiently defining the role. When a proposal manager is writing, they are not managing. What do you think the impact of that is on proposal quality? Making an accurate, on time, within budget, and defect-free submission is not good enough. Sometimes the only thing companies care about is, did it win? Is your company assessing its proposal managers by things that are within their control? Do you want your company to focus on preparing by doing the things that enable proposals to consistently win and measure the win rate that results, or do you want people going after bids individually with great sound and fury but little silent preparation? Who will win more often, the tortoise or the hare? Your company's ROI depends on taking the right approach. You have no control over other people changing their minds. You’re outranked. It’s hard to give people a voice in the process and an opportunity to make or participate in decisions when The Powers That Be randomly change their minds later. It’s one thing when the customer does that to you. It’s another when it’s people in your own organization. Companies often invest a great deal into having standard processes leading to reliable outcomes in every part of the company, except proposals, which they treat as unfathomable unique creations that require figuring everything out and struggling until a hero comes in to "save" everybody at the end. Companies like that have low win rates and can't achieve their maximum potential ROI. If you want consistent professionalism leading to a high proposal win rate, you must oversee the proposal management function professionally and not arbitrarily. Everyone thinks they are more qualified than you, but no one wants to do your job. Or follow your instructions. Look at how most writing roles are staffed like people assume that anyone can write, so they use junior, inexperienced, less senior staff to do most of the proposal writing. Proposal managers are often seen as the pusher of paper that no one else wants to push. That makes them an asset, but not much of one. And certainly not a highly qualified one. Proposal managers are not indispensable just because no one else can push paper as well as they do. They become indispensable when they can show people how to win. If you are going to be responsible for the proposal process, then become the organizational developer who implements it, the trainer who shows people how, the indispensable helper who makes their lives better than they would be without you, and the only way your company can achieve its maximum ROI. Everyone resents that they have to work on your project. No one wants to work on proposals. If you’re not a proposal specialist, it’s a distraction from your real job and an extra set of deadlines. The more a proposal manager can do to link participating in the proposal with people's aspirations for making a difference on the project, the company, the customer, their career, and more, the better. Growth happens through proposals. The world changes through proposals. An operations manager can get by without being inspirational. For proposal management, inspirational leadership is a core competency. PropLIBRARY helps companies become winning organizations through a combination of process guidance and training materials that are ready for immediate implementation. PropLIBRARY has off-the-shelf procedures for addressing the issues above, along with hours of online training to boost the skills of all your staff and get everyone on the same page. It is a tool for implementing organizational change and doing so less expensively than any other option. You can start with a single user subscription and upgrade to a corporate subscription.

Uncertainty works against creating a winning culture because it breeds trust issues. But the solution is counter-intuitive. To fix the trust issues related to uncertainty, you should build a proposal process that does not trust anyone ever. You need to eliminate the need for trust. When your process functions without trust, then trust will flourish. I told you it's counter-intuitive. It's not that your people aren't trustworthy. Or that they are fallible. But they have multiple competing priorities, and probably have limited experience and training. Even experts have difficulty making accurate estimates and predicting the future. And we're all working with less information than we'd like to have. So to maximize your win rate, build your proposal systems and processes so they expect people to fail. Build systems that make failure difficult. A system that resists failure is a system that does not trust easily. The result can be an environment in which people failures are rare. And that ends up being a great way to increase trust. Here are 15 ways you shouldn't trust people working on proposals: See also: Proposal management Don't trust people to figure out what to write on their own. Implement an approach to planning what should be written that provides enough detail that you don’t have to trust anyone to figure it out on their own in isolation. Implement an approach to validating your plans before you start writing so you don’t have to trust people to get the plan right on the first attempt. Then you can trust that they know what is expected and you can validate what they deliver against it. Don’t trust that a decision to bid will be made promptly. Deciding whether to bid and incur the costs of a proposal can be difficult when you don’t have a clear understanding of your chances of winning. Unfortunately, this is most of the time. Time can be lost just finding an available slot on everyone’s calendar to discuss it. The problem is you’ve waited too long to decide, and it’s a symptom that all you have to go on is the RFP. There shouldn’t be a single bid decision. The decision to pursue should be made early and revisited frequently along the way during the pre-RFP pursuit. People should be poised to start immediately upon RFP release. The bid decision after the RFP is released should simply be about whether the RFP contained any surprises. When you do this, you can trust that people know what to expect at RFP release and aren’t losing time waiting for a decision because it’s already been made. It’s easier to stand down quickly than it is to start up late. Don't trust people to design the right offering and then write about it. What is the best thing to offer? Is it the most expensive? Best performing? Least expensive? Don’t trust people to write about it until you have systematically considered it. Only start writing when you have consensus regarding what the offering design should be. Then you can trust that you won’t have late stage “do overs” from people waiting until the proposal is fully written to change the offering. Don’t trust your project manager’s opinion about customer satisfaction. While it’s true that project managers may not want to report that their customer isn’t particularly impressed by your company, they also may not know. How many vendors have you had that, while you didn’t complain, you didn’t really like either? In addition, how many people does your project manager interact with? On many projects, it’s a fairly small number. They may not see the whole picture. You need multiple opinions from multiple sources to understand what your customer thinks. When you create procedures, prepare for your recompetes, and involve other people to collect this information, not only will you develop a better understanding of the customer, but you can trust that your project managers will have more opportunities to set expectations with the customer and improve performance, leading to better past performance assessments and higher win rates. Don’t trust your sales people to provide the information needed to win the proposal. Though they’ll never admit it, they probably don’t know what that is. The questions you need answers to won’t come up naturally in conversation. Tell your sales people what information you need. Itemize it. Help them build their sales process around it. They’ll never be able to get all of it. But you can trust that they’ll begin trying and put you in a better position for being able to write a great proposal. Don't trust that you’ll get resources based on what you need. Budgets are about what the company thinks it can afford, not what the people doing the work think they need. Instead of basing your budget requests on need, try basing them on Return on Investment (ROI). Things that impact your win rate, whether they raise it or lower it, directly impact the company’s ROI. If you care about budgets, then track your ROI and what correlates with your win rate. Learn to do the math that shows what a change in win rate means to the company’s finances. For example, learn to show the impact of staffing on your win rates, and by how much that change in win rate exceeds the cost of adding the staff. No other argument will be nearly as compelling. Focus less on your needs and more on delivering ROI and you can trust that people will want you to have the resources needed to achieve those ROIs. Don’t trust your customer. Assume they prefer someone else. Assume they will change or cancel the bid. Assume the RFP was written by a competitor. Assume they will misinterpret everything you say. Assume they will be looking for excuses to throw your proposal out. Assume they will contradict themselves. Assume the people you have talked to will not participate in the evaluation, and that the evaluators will have a different agenda. Gain all the insight you possibly can, but it will never be enough to trust that you really know them and what they’re up to. Build your pursuit process to dig deeper than the intel you think you have and contact others at your customer’s organization. Don’t trust your proposal assignments. If you get a proposal assignment without a set of quality criteria that have been validated and will be used during proposal reviews, or without a validated offering design, then there is a high risk that you’ll have a lot of rework coming after the proposal reviews. Participate in discussions about proposal quality, ask for written quality criteria, and separate offering design from writing and you’ll be able to trust that the reviewers are looking for how to improve the message and not changing the offering or strategies late in the game. Don't trust people to pass the review. What’s the point of getting to the review and then finding out it’s wrong? Running out the clock is the most popular way to sandbag the review. Instead of trusting them with all that time, try giving proposal writers the review criteria up front, and measure progress by how many of the criteria have been met. Then you can trust that they’ll know what they need to do to pass their proposal reviews. Don’t trust people to show up prepared. They will not have read the RFP. The proposal is not their only assignment. When they make time for the proposal you can’t trust that they’ll also make time to prepare for the proposal. You should embed preparing into the assignment. You should schedule preparation completion deadlines and make them accountable. And since RFPs are sometimes open to interpretation, there is some value, even though it may seem time-consuming, to reading the RFP as a group and talking through the issues. You do not increase the burden by making sure people do something they have to do anyway, like reading the RFP. All you are doing is preventing them from skipping it while telling themselves they are just cutting corners a little to manage their schedule overload. Make it so they can’t show up unprepared and you’ll be able to trust that they know what is required. Don't trust proposal reviewers to know what to review. If it is left up to them individually, you’ll get random and conflicting feedback that may even run counter to what it will take to win. Effective proposal reviews need review team leadership, training, procedures, and quality criteria. If a review is worth having, it’s worth doing right. Don’t leave it up to them to figure it out and simply “have reviews.” Make reviews about what you need to validate and not just showing up, and you’ll be able to trust that the reviewers will give you the feedback you need. Don't trust anyone to know what proposal quality is. If they can't articulate what proposal quality is, they don't know what proposal quality is. If it's not measurable, they don't know. In practice, this means that if you don’t have written proposal quality criteria that have been validated and agreed to, then no one knows what proposal quality is and it comes down to whims, authority, and last-minute revisions. Get everyone on the same page regarding what proposal quality means and you’ll be able to trust that they are all trying to achieve the same thing. Don't trust your executives to enforce your proposal process. They are often the ones most likely to ignore it. The only counter to this is to create a process that people want to follow and build into it the guidance that they need to be able to follow it. Make your process revolve around setting expectations. This turns your process into a tool that the executives can use to know what to expect and to inform people about their own expectations. This gives them a reason to be involved in the process and to ensure that everyone achieves what is expected. Do all this and you can trust that people will follow the process. Don’t trust your price proposal to support your technical approach, and vice-versa. Don’t let the people responsible for the proposal's pricing work in isolation. Do those bid strategies you’ve written about lowering prices and risk impact your numbers? Do your numbers support your approaches? What about those claims about what it will take to do the work? Does your pricing volume say the same things about price realism? If you document your Proposal Content Plans and offering design prior to writing, then you can identify the points of coordination without having to read the full narrative. This makes it possible for you to trust that your strategies, approaches, and prices are presented properly in both volumes. Don’t trust your production staff. Don’t let them do their own quality assurance. I’ve seen proposals with hundreds of pages get tossed because someone left a one-page form out of a proposal by mistake. Don’t wait until final production to start thinking about how you’ll know if any mistakes have been made. Don't make your production staff take all the risks. Work through it all at the beginning so they’ll know someone is standing by them at the end. Then you can both trust each other. When your systems don’t require trust, it's easier for your people to trust each other. When your process doesn't require trust, your people will perform as a stronger team. When your systems permit failure, people don’t trust each other and this works its way into your organization's culture. If you want better teamwork, stop trusting your people to do whatever they think is right in that moment and put in place the checks and tracking systems that enable them to work in a coordinated manner. Teamwork is what you need to win proposals that are bigger than one person. But I still think it’s fascinating how building systems that don’t trust people is what is needed to develop trust in an organization. PropLIBRARY helps companies becoming winning organizations through a combination of process guidance and training materials that are ready for immediate implementation. PropLIBRARY has off-the-shelf procedures for addressing the issues above, along with hours of online training to boost the skills of all your staff and get everyone on the same page. It is a tool for implementing organizational change and doing so less expensively than any other option. You can start with a single user subscription and upgrade to a corporate subscription. Get access to our free forum for discussing organizational development. This forum is not just about how to win proposals, but is a place for discussing and sharing practical insight into organizational change that leads to increasing win rates. Initially, we're focusing on the needs of U.S. Government contractors. If you are a U.S. Government contractor, you can request access to our new organizational development forum by clicking the button below. Include your name, email address, and a little about your firm. Request access to the Organizational Development Forum

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One of my favorite techniques for writing proposals is the “who, what, where, how, when, and why” approach. It helps you answer all the customer’s questions, including the ones they forgot to ask. It helps you exceed the RFP’s requirements, often without adding any cost. It’s easy to memorize and repeat like a mantra. But it can be used for more than just improving your writing. It turns out to be a powerful proposal management technique as well. Expectation management See also: Proposal management One of the biggest challenges in proposal management is managing expectations, both yours and others. In fact, managing expectations is the secret to winning proposals that are bigger than yourself. Proposal Managers task out assignments, but their expectations are often unmet when the assignments come in late or with low quality. But the person receiving the assignment had expectations as well. Maybe they didn’t think it was realistic to be given an assignment of that size while also working full-time on their billable project. They both had expectations, and both probably needed adjusting. Too often that doesn’t happen. Expectations need to be communicated and managed. When they aren’t, problems occur that could have been avoided. On a typical proposal, conflicts in expectations probably occur over a hundred times. I kid you not. Try counting them. This makes expectation management an important aspect of proposal management. And brings us back to “who, what, where, how, when, and why.” Every assignment given, every assignment received, and every progress check-in, should ask these questions. Make "who, what, where, how, when, and why" your new mantra... Who is involved or impacted? What are they expected to accomplish? Where should should work on it, where can they get help, and where should they submit it? How should they do it, by what procedure, using what inputs, and according to what standards? When should they check in and when should they complete their efforts? Why is the assignment important and why should they do it the way you’ve described? But wait, there’s the person receiving the assignment’s point of view to consider: Who might be a better candidate? Who do I need to help? What do I need to accomplish the assignment? What conflicts do I have? What don’t I understand? Where do I have to be? How do I learn what I need to know? When can I work on it? When can I complete it? Why can’t I follow the process, meet the schedule, or fulfill the expectations? If you don’t encourage the person receiving an assignment to voice these questions, you won’t know about the issues until it’s too late. People often do not voluntarily admit that they are going to fail before they get started. Both sets of expectations need to be communicated and any issues resolved if the expectation of creating a winning proposal is to be met. Writing a winning proposal requires an unbroken flow of information When people complete their proposal assignments on time, it’s a huge accomplishment. But that alone is not enough to win. The best competitive advantage for winning proposals is an information advantage. Whoever has the most information about the customer and can make use of it in their proposal has a huge advantage. It’s hard enough to get an information advantage, but transforming it into the right black ink on paper is even harder. It must be assessed, articulated, and delivered through a series of handoffs to the right people. It requires an unbroken flow of information. Having a meeting with the lead salesperson to talk about “what you know about the customer” is not the same thing as an unbroken flow of information leading to an information advantage in your proposals. To win consistently, you’ll need to identify what information you need, where it will come from, how it will be assessed, who will articulate it, and how handoffs will be accomplished. Most companies think they do a better job of this than their proposal development performance actually indicates. You can improve your ability to discover, assess, and articulate your information by using the “who, what, where, how, when, and why” approach. Who has information relevant to win strategies and offering design? Who needs information to support the pursuit? What information should be sought? What format would make that information useful? What information can each participant in the pursuit use? Where can relevant information be gathered? How should the information be assessed? How should it be articulated? When is it needed? Why does the information we have matter? You can use “who, what, where, how, when, and why” to do a better job of flowing information. And doing this means you can do a better job of building an information advantage that leads to a winning proposal. Filling your process void Do you have a process, or just a way of doing things? Do people follow the process you think you have? Winning consistently depends on having a well-developed process. But winning the RFP on your desk depends on doing the most with what you have. At every handoff, meeting, or step, ask yourself “who, what, where, how, when, and why.” It’s almost as good as actually having a process. Before the proposal starts, think about the flow of information and ask yourself “who, what, where, how, when, and why.” When you start the proposal and begin issuing assignments use “who, what, where, how, when, and why” to set expectations. When you receive an assignment use “who, what, where, how, when, and why” to ensure that you are communicating your expectations. When you sit down to write, use “who, what, where, how, when, and why” to do a better job and write more comprehensive responses. Combine them all and you get a higher win rate, without doing anything cumbersome or complicated. Make it your new mantra. PropLIBRARY helps companies becoming winning organizations through a combination of process guidance and training materials that are ready for immediate implementation. PropLIBRARY has off-the-shelf procedures for addressing the issues above, along with hours of online training to boost the skills of all your staff and get everyone on the same page. It is a tool for implementing organizational change and doing so less expensively than any other option. You can start with a single user subscription and upgrade to a corporate subscription.

Most corporate cultures are a mixed bag. No real attention is given to it. As a result, it is defined as much by the personalities of key staff as it is by intent. If you are in charge, the odds are that your corporate culture is not what you think it is. The reality is different from your aspirations. And yet your corporate culture is as important to your company’s ability to grow as the steps in your business and proposal development processes. Is the reality of your corporate culture different from your aspirations for it? So what do you do about it? How do you go about changing a culture? It’s not just about speeches. It’s not just about how people treat each other. It’s about changing behaviors. But behaviors don’t change just because someone says they should. It helps to model behaviors. People tend to emulate their leaders. It also helps to synchronize how people do things with the results you want to achieve. Here are eight examples of things you can do to change the culture in your organization to one that encourages behaviors that support winning: See also: Organizational Development Require all levels to focus on ROI. The economics of resource allocation and priority setting should be based on ROI and not cost control. That should become part of the culture, encouraging people to track ROI and make decisions accordingly. Focusing on ROI shifts the debate from what is the least expensive way to win contracts to what is the most effective way to win contracts. This is where I like to start with companies, since understanding their pipeline and how to calculate the ROI of BD and proposal efforts drives so many other decisions. Focusing on ROI helps companies pay more attention to their win rate. Require achieving top performance measures. For Federal contractors, having a top past performance score is critical for being competitive. Instead of making "the highest levels of customer satisfaction" a "value," I recommend making it a mandate. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the top score, the company's expectation should be that projects will score a 5. Scoring below a 5 shows a disconnect between the customer and the company, and should require corrective action. This makes project managers advocate for the customer and helps focus them on understanding the customer’s expectations. Make evidence based decisions. Bid/no bid decisions should be evidence based, with the burden of proof on why leads are worth bidding based on ROI. Having the evidence means tracking metrics and measurements. Arguments should be over what the data means and how to get more of it, instead of about opinions. A company focused on evidence of performance and quantifying ROI will make better decisions. Validate quality. Quality should be validated and not simply claimed. If your company values "the highest levels of quality" no one will pay it any attention. But if it values the validation of quality, then action is required. And validating quality will start by defining it. Making this part of your culture means that everything people do should be checked to make sure it got done in the correct way. It means every assignment should be defined and have a means to verify that it was properly completed. When this is part of your culture, it becomes simply the way people work. And it is a much better way of working than trying to satisfy whims. Cherish customer insight. The best competitive advantage is an information advantage. Gaining an information advantage requires customer insight. If growth is your top priority, then every single customer interaction by every single person who has customer contact should be part of a coordinated effort to gain customer insight. This should not simply be a standard operation procedure, it should be part of your culture. Gaining customer insight should be part of what you do, at all levels and in all departments. This is a key step toward ensuring that all of your proposals reflect customer insight. It takes more than a salesperson or a capture manager. Throw the whole organization behind it to become a winning organization. Value perspective. Your entire proposal should be written from the customer's perspective and not your own. You need to train the organization to see things through your customer's eyes. When you achieve that, your staff will also be able to see things through each other's eyes, and better understand how to work together. When winning is determined by someone else, perspective becomes a key ingredient. Perspective avoids the stovepipe mentality, departmental walls, and excessive bureaucracy. Perspective facilitates teamwork and collaboration. Perspective across the organization is needed for being a winning organization. Advocate creative destruction. You can claim to value "innovation" all day long, but how do you actually make innovation happen within a company? When you advocate creative destruction, you encourage looking for ways to obsolete the status quo. It informs staff looking for what offerings to develop or solutions to propose. It directly contradicts people who have a fear of doing something new that might cannibalize an existing business line. It sets the stage for disruptive marketing. It's about competing by changing the rules, instead of following the pack and trying to work your way to the front. Institutionalize clarity of expectations. Failure to manage expectations leads to friction. Sometimes lots of friction. Win rate killing friction. Assignments that shouldn't have been accepted go unfulfilled. People meet deadlines with substandard work. People are asked to complete assignments without being told how or by what definition of quality until they hand in their completed assignment and find out it's wrong. Achieving clarity of expectations works in both directions. Not only must assignments be clear, but availability, capability, and progress must be made clear. Expectations should be discussed, reviewed, verified, and confirmed by all parties. When expectations flow in both directions we get collaboration instead of rework and substandard submissions. The difference between tasking and culture Mandating reports to track performance is not the same thing as building a culture based on evidence based decisions. When you mandate reports, people will do what is required. When you have an evidence based culture, people will think differently. Complaining about quality is different from having a culture that prevents quality issues by validating everything out of habit. Making understanding the customer the salesperson’s job puts all your eggs in one basket and doesn’t ensure that insight makes it into the document that closes the sale. Why Because you want people to do these things without being told to. Because your corporate culture is as important to increasing your win rate as steps in your process. Because win rate is critical for growth. And growth is the source of all opportunity.

Winning as an organization isn't just about business development. Or proposals. Or capture. It takes a village to develop business. When an organization decides it's time to get good at winning new contracts, it often focuses on developing its proposal process. This is a good thing. But it is also not enough. It is merely a starting point. Winning as an organization requires more than just a process. There are staff issues, leadership issues, culture, management practices, strategies, collaboration, resource allocation, and more that are just as important to your win rate as your proposal process. Becoming a winning organization is critically important for achieving growth. And without growth, the opportunities a company can offer the staff that work for it are limited. Growth should be your top priority for developing a winning culture. But becoming a winning organization requires change, and people are not good at change. And the change should go to the very heart of your company's mission, because it's probably holding you back. Becoming a winning organization is critically important for achieving growth. Organizational development can start by increasing the effectiveness of your proposal group. But it shouldn't end there. A winning organization will consistently beat collections of contributors thrown together to produce proposals, even if they call themselves a "team." If you simply delegate winning to ad hoc proposal teams, you will not maximize your chances of winning. Here is how to tell when winning requires organizational change. Because the culture in an organization is often different than what people aspire for it to be, it also helps to assess your organization using some objective signs that your company is not the winning organization it could be. See also: Organizational development When you realize that corporate culture is as important to growth as the steps in your process are to improving your win rate, then you have to figure out what specifically to do to create a winning culture. Most companies don't give it nearly enough attention, and as a result, it's defined more by personalities than by intent. Developing organizational approaches that enable you to produce better proposals than what a collection of individuals is capable of is how you can consistently beat your competitors. And that starts by developing a winning culture. Organizational development is vital for increasing your win rate If you want to win consistently you'll need to develop the right culture, skills, and habits throughout the organization in order for people to play their parts. It also means avoiding the bad ones. Some people, maybe some in your organization, have preconceptions that can destroy your company's win rate. This is important, since winning benefits everybody in the organization. Jobs are created and opportunities for growth are provided that the organization wouldn't be able to provide otherwise. Winning business pursuits and proposals should not be something that people have to do, but something that they get to do. Besides, the people working proposals sometimes have as much ability to change their company as the CEO. Organizational development requires paying attention to staff development It starts with hiring the right staff. We've developed an assessment tool to help you hire great proposal writers. But for every proposal specialist working on a bid, you probably have several people who aren't specialists, and you still need to get the most out of them because their contributions are vital for winning. Because proposal writing is related to marketing and sales, sometimes it can be difficult to get technical staff and subject matter experts to fully participate. If you are a proposal specialist, then here are six subjects to learn about that can help you write better proposals. Congratulations, you're an executive! When you have profit and loss responsibility (P&L), growth becomes vital. Here are 21 tips for new executives with business development responsibilities that they didn't teach you before you got the job. If that's too much for you, just focus on doing this one thing to win more business. If you want to get the most out of your resources, here are nine things your proposal team can't decide without your help and a couple of character traits you might want to cultivate if you care about winning. And before you pick your next proposal manager, here's how to know if someone's ready for the job.

It’s not just what people do. It’s more than process. When people do things together, sometimes they can’t change how they do things on their own. When they do things as an organization, they must change as an organization. This applies to business and proposal development. Sometimes making a process change isn't going to be enough to start winning consistently. Sometimes becoming a winning organization requires organizational change. Achieving change at an organizational level requires more than just authority. It also requires a new vision for the future and the leadership ability to get people to make the changes necessary to realize it. When people do things as an organization, they must change as an organization But there's another problem. It requires leadership that knows what to do about the problem. Just becoming a leader does not automatically convey instant knowledge of how to solve all problems. Most people promoted to leadership positions have come from organizations that weren’t that effective at business and proposal development. Their entire careers have been spent learning bad habits. And most people under the executive level don’t have a full perspective when it comes to organizational development. When an issue requires changes to occur at multiple levels, such as at the worker, management, and executive levels, it can't be solved by any one level on its own. Grassroots solutions won't be enough. Some people will recognize the need to change, and be frustrated by their inability to herd the cats into a resolution. It needs an organizational response. This is more than a top-down mandate. Leadership requires more than a mandate. Instead of levels, some issues involve crossing departmental boundaries. Sometimes these can be worked out by the departments in question, and sometimes differences in interests and priorities mean that it needs to be worked out organizationally. These are some of the reasons you’ve been stuck. Luckily, there are some things that indicate you have an organizational issue and not simply a business development or proposal issue. Ask yourself these questions See also: Organizational development Does the organization know what its bid/no bid criteria are? When it’s purely subjective at the executive level, people bring opportunities to the top and wait for a decision. When bid/no bid criteria are well defined and known by participants, they function as an organization to live up to the standard. If you’re wondering why you always feel unprepared at RFP release or never have a real information advantage, start here. It may help to think in terms of setting expectations rather than bid/no bid criteria. What do you expect your staff to bring to the table at the start of a proposal? What staff need to be involved before the bid starts? Do your salespeople know what information is needed to write a winning proposal? Do they know what information is needed to design the winning offering? If you haven’t communicated anything about bid/no bid criteria, that is what you’ll get. Are you writing and re-writing until the deadline? This is not a simple failure of assignment or schedule management. It could be that rather than thinking through the offering and bid strategies, people just start writing. It could be that people think a proposal assignment is just a writing assignment. The solution isn’t deadline enforcement, it’s to avoid setting things up so that every new idea or approach spawns a rewriting iteration and that the only way to assess whether something is a good idea is to try writing a narrative about it. Your organization needs to figure out how to think things through before jumping into writing. You need your organization to recognize that this destroys quality instead of improving it, and to do the preparation required to avoid it. Are you designing your offering by writing about it? There is no engineering methodology that I’m aware of that recommends you design things by writing narratives about them. Just because a proposal is a written deliverable, doesn’t mean that you should skip designing your offering and just start writing about it. Once your offering is in writing, any change spawns rewrite cycles that typically don’t end until you run out of time and submit what you’ve got instead of what will win. Validating that you know what a winning offering consists of before you commit it to writing will require the participation of your operations group and coordination between them and your business development, both probably before the RFP is even released so they are prepared to write a winning proposal when the RFP is released. This makes it an organizational issue and not just a proposal process issue. Do people know what your differentiators are? If you ask people at most service companies what their differentiators are, they’ll answer with descriptions of the contracts they have. Contract experience is a very weak form of differentiator. Everybody bidding thinks they have competitive experience. And most do. So other than experience, what makes your company special? And don’t make it all fluff. What makes your company special enough that a customer will consider it a reason to select you over someone else? If you leave that to the proposal team to figure out on their own, you’ll get watered down differentiators that don’t add up to much across your pursuits. Does your company’s strategic plan define its high-level differentiators and positioning? Does this sit on a shelf or flow down all the way to your proposals? To be a winning organization, you must start by being different in ways that matter. Do you treat business development and proposals as expenses or as investments? Expenses are to be minimized. ROI is to be maximized. Are you killing your win rate by treating proposals as an expense? Do you measure your business development and proposal ROI? Do participants know what your business development and proposal ROI is or what it needs to become? Are your people managing their business development and proposal efforts to minimize expenses or to maximize ROI? Do people show up for reviews without any written quality criteria or without having read the RFP? Does the review team have a leader? Have they met prior to the start of the review? Have they studied the RFP even more thoroughly than the proposal team? If they haven’t, it means their only role is to provide a minimum-effort subjective judgment. This is not how a winning organization approaches its reviews. It’s not a simple matter of scheduling the reviews. Training and leadership are required, as well as the participation of people at all levels of management. This makes how you review your proposals an organizational issue. Are people making up the process up as they go along? Is the process written down in such a way that anyone can follow it and not just the process owner? Does the process documentation sit on a shelf, or do people refer to it during execution because they find it helpful? Most organizations that say they have a business development or proposal process really don’t, and suffer as result. They have a process concept and maybe some milestones, but they are making up the details as they go along. This is not just a process failure, this is a failure to devote organizational resources and implement the change organizationally. It takes an organization to win. Is figuring out your bid strategies something that starts during the proposal process? Did you really approve that bid without knowing what bid strategies would drive the proposal? What makes you think those bid strategies will make it into the proposal if that’s how it starts? If your proposal team works in isolation, they will reinvent your company for every bid and will base their positioning almost exclusively on the RFP. This is not competitive. Harmonizing your bid strategies for long term success requires the executive level to work with business development to bring the right strategies to the start of the proposal, so that proposal writers know what points to substantiate. In other words, this is another organizational issue. Does your proposal quality methodology come down to having one review? It is not possible to validate all the things that should define proposal quality in a single review. A single review is not a quality methodology, it’s a failure masquerading as better than nothing. And simply adding more reviews without defining proposal quality and the scope of each review won’t cut it either. Changing to a process that validates all of the criteria that define proposal quality will require organizational change, but you can’t become a winning organization without being able to define and validate proposal quality. Outside of a quick statement at the kickoff meeting, does the first executive participation happen at the draft review? If this is the case, it means they’re showing up after the problems crossing organizational boundaries have already occurred. It means they’re too late to observe the interactions. It means they’re not participating in the organizational issues.

If you are a contractor, I’m willing to bet that not only is your mission statement ignored, it’s probably just plain wrong. Take a look at these mission/vision statements from three of the largest U.S. Government contractors: Lockheed Martin: We solve complex challenges, advance scientific discovery and deliver innovative solutions to help our customers keep people safe. (source) Boeing: Connect, Protect, Explore and Inspire the World through Aerospace Innovation (source) Raytheon: One global team creating trusted, innovative solutions to make the world a safer place. (source) These companies have succeeded in spite of their mission statements and not because of them. Collectively they have more than 330,000 employees. Do you think that any of their employees refer to these mission statements in doing their jobs? Do you think that even 1% know what their company’s mission statement is? Your real mission… See also: Organizational Development If you are a contractor, then your mission is really to win new contracts. The only way a contractor creates opportunity is by growing. Growth is the only sustainable way a contractor can reward its staff. It’s the best way to ensure the company is performing successfully for its customers. It's the best way to expand its capabilities. Making growth your stated mission also makes the success of your mission measurable. It’s not just happy-words void of any actual meaning. Not only is it authentic, it’s what you are actually in business to do, and it reflects what you expect of your staff. When your mission is to win more contracts, it makes it clear how each part of your company can contribute. It provides direction, because everybody plays a role in winning new business. Most people don’t think of their job in those terms. But if you make it your company’s mission, it helps them to see it that way. Making your mission “to be universally regarded as the foremost practitioners of outstanding customer satisfaction,” or whatever, isn’t going to help an operational unit struggling with resource allocation issues and deadlines achieve customer satisfaction. But operational units can contribute to winning new contracts by obtaining outstanding past performance evaluations and gaining customer insight, and resources should be allocated accordingly. When your mission statement is about “customer satisfaction,” the “highest levels of quality,” or similar hyperbole, it doesn’t give the various groups that make up your company any direction, tell them how to work together, or tell them how to handle the inevitable trade-offs that arise. But when you are clear and honest that your mission is growth, it tells human resources, accounting, operations, facilities, purchasing, accounts receivable, operations, and every group or department in your company what they need to focus on so they can work together to achieve their common mission. Making your mission to win new contracts does not mean you should just make things look good long enough to get a new contract and then do the minimum you can get away with to maximize profit. That is not how you win contract extensions, logical follow-ons, repeat business, or referrals. It also kills your past performance record. When you make it your mission to win new contracts, it means that if any part of your company fails in performance or does not achieve the highest customer satisfaction levels, it’s jeopardizing the mission. In most companies, the staff responsible for contract fulfillment get caught between pressure to maximize profitability and satisfying the customer. In most companies, their “mission” is in direct conflict with their real goal of being profitable. This is one reason why people in the company ignore their mission statement. In some companies, the mission statement is written to impress their customers. The mission statements above could be examples. However, being ambiguous, saying nothing, or trying to be all things to all people does not impress anyone. If you want your mission statement to summarize what your company does, then what you need instead is an elevator speech. An elevator speech that provides a short description of what you do is very different from the goals that you exist in order to achieve. Developing into a winning organization If you need a mission statement you can post on your website and tell your customers, then try something like this: Our mission is to win new contracts. Every day we develop the capabilities, resources, and qualifications required to achieve that mission. If we fail to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction, if we get poor performance reports, or if our customers don’t sing our praises, we jeopardize our ability to fulfill that mission and we fail as a company. To become a winning organization, start by bringing everything that people do into alignment with winning. This starts when everyone realizes that growth is their common purpose. And you can reinforce that by making it the stated mission of your organization.

Joining a company should be about opportunity. Personal, professional, and fiscal. But where does that opportunity come from? Most jobs become a status quo. You have a role, you fulfill it. If you excel, there is the potential for promotion. But if you work on a contract for a service company, promotions and pay increases are impacted by the terms of the contract. Usually your company can't simply pay you more and charge the customer more to cover it. Usually they can't create a new position to give you a promotion, unless the customer approves it. But the worst part is that even if they do, it might make the company less competitive. See also: Organizational Development Each raise someone gets on a contract raises the price when the company has to re-bid the contract. If that happens enough times, a competitor can bid staff that are just as qualified as you were when you first started working on the contract. And because your company is now more expensive, competitors can potentially win with a lower price, taking your job with it. It’s a difficult circumstance to be caught in. Luckily, there is one thing that can break this cycle. It is surprising to me how many contract employees aren't aware of it. Everyone should understand it. It should be baked right into your corporate culture, since it is a great unifier. It brings everyone together with a common goal. It should be your company's top priority. Growth Growth is a great unifier. Growth increases the salary pool. Growth creates new positions that staff can be promoted into. Growth increases the overhead pool to bring in more resources and pay for PropLIBRARY Subscriptions. 😉 Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor and the people who work for them. Some growth can come from expanding your existing contracts. But most companies will be lucky if this accounts for 10% of their growth. The rest comes from winning new contracts. Winning new contracts isn't something people should leave to those who "work in business development." Everyone has a vested interest in the opportunities that growth brings. Growth unifies all departments and breaks down silos. Growth unifies all levels of staff. This does not mean that everyone should become a salesperson. It means that everyone has a vested interested in contributing to the growth of the company. For a contract services company, growth isn't something that only benefits The Powers That Be. The growth of your company is the only source of your personal growth. A winning culture should make people aware of how this common purpose brings everyone all together. If growth is your top priority, then it should be the focus of your corporate culture. It's not just something to be done. Creating opportunity should be why everyone is there, every day. Instead of “adding value,” “being committed to quality,” or “focusing on customer satisfaction,” everybody in the organization should start their day thinking about how to create opportunities and grow. The opposite of growth The opposite of growth is truly scary. It is not just the loss of contracts. It is the loss of opportunity. Even if revenue is merely flat, it means a reduction in opportunities. When revenue is flat and costs increase, you not only lose profit, you lose competitiveness because your overhead rates go up. Losing competitiveness leads to a reduction in growth. Which leads to less competitiveness. And so the vicous circle that consumes opportunity begins. Contract losses will happen. The only way to make up for them is to win enough new ones to cover the loss. A growth orientation will save you when contract losses happen. Growth doesn’t happen by wishing for it It’s not enough to know about the importance of growth. You have to do something about it. You have to discover what it will take to win. And this means you have to: Cultivate an information advantage Achieve the highest customer satisfaction and past performance evaluations Differentiate Take strategic planning seriously Contribute to proposals Define proposal quality before you start writing Continuously improve your win rate Continuously look for ways to create opportunity Some of these relate to technical performance. Some of them relate to winning contracts. Some of them relate to both. The nice thing about focusing on growth by creating opportunity is that it benefits the customer, it benefits the staff, and it benefits the company. It brings them all into a harmony based on a better future. It makes your culture more aspirational than fiscal, while growing fiscally at the same time. This is how you achieve a winning culture.

Just because your proposals are produced by a group of people doesn’t mean that you have an organizational approach to winning business. Just because you call them a team doesn’t mean that they aren’t really just a collection of individuals sharing the work. An organizational approach to winning is different from spreading the work to more individuals and keeping track of the pieces. An organizational approach is more than the sum of its parts because the work that each participant does reinforces the work of all the others, instead of just adding to the pile of paper produced. An organizational approach is far more competitive, because it makes the individual contributions better than they would be on their own. This is what makes changing your approach a competitive advantage. See also: Organizational Development If you start your proposals without an information advantage, it’s a sign that you’re responding to RFPs without the right customer interaction. It could also be sign that those in your organization who interact with the customer are not an integrated part of the process for winning. It means that an unbroken flow of information that leads to winning never has a chance to form. You’re not even trying or making excuses instead of creating a quantifiable information advantage. If you start your proposals without knowing what your differentiators are, or if you wait until the proposal to start articulating them, it’s a sign that your organization is making things up as it goes along. The odds are your differentiators are weak and only there at all because someone said you must have some. Developing compelling differentiators is a strategic process and not something done in the moment against a deadline. Compelling differentiators require the organization to define itself in a way that’s fully aware of the strategic implications and customer preferences. Compelling differentiators require an organizational approach, because no individual has all the insight required. Having meetings to talk about differentiators is not much of an organized approach to identifying, articulating, and substantiating them. You may give your proposal writers instructions regarding what to write. But do you also address how to write it? If you don’t, it’s a sign that you’re leaving it to the writers on their own to figure out what context to put things in, instead of working as an organization to design the proposal and position it to win. If you start your proposals without a written definition of proposal quality, then every individual will determine for themselves what it means. If you don’t define proposal quality as an organization, then you do not have a common goal. The goal becomes making every individual sufficiently happy to get along and hoping that’s good enough to win. You should also ask yourself if your processes require the participation of certain individuals. If your process doesn’t process with someone else in the role, then it’s not a process. It might even be a good way of doing things. But it’s a personal way of doing things. It's also a trap. It’s an individual approach and not an organizational approach. Do you design your offering separately from the proposal, or do you try to do it as part of the proposal writing effort? If you try to figure out what to offer by writing about it and re-writing until you get it right, you’ll run out of time and submit what you have instead of something designed to win. If you are designing your offering by writing about it, it’s a sign of starting unprepared and probably late. Doing this on more than one pursuit is a sign that your organization doesn’t prepare and starts late. This requires an organizational solution. If you only have one major proposal review, you’ve probably overloaded your reviewers' capacity. How much can you lump into a single review before you are no longer assuring quality: RFP compliance, evaluation score, customer awareness, competitive positioning, win strategies, offering design, proofreading, style, layout, graphics, pricing, and more? If you only have one real proposal review, it’s a sign that your reviews are really not about achieving quality (which you probably haven’t defined) and merely about satisfying The Powers That Be (which is not the same thing as assuring quality). If you only have one review, it’s easy to leave what should be accomplished unstated. The goal becomes “a review.” If you only have one review, you probably have zero accountability (with no definition of proposal quality and no criteria to assess it), while convincing yourself otherwise because of the involvement of senior staff. Fixing this requires an organizational approach that both defines quality and changes how proposal reviews are performed in order to validate it. Winning as an organization requires integration. It requires tearing down silos, the way business development, proposals, and operations are often constructed. Or the way reviewers and sometimes executives hold themselves separate from the proposal process. Business development, capture management, and proposal management should all be integrated so that information not only flows from one to the next, but it grows and transforms into what is needed to win. In a winning organization, what one person does should add to what came before, such that the first contribution helps guide the next, so that each contribution is greater than what an individual could accomplish. To win as an organization, people must manage expectations together instead of simply receiving assignments. If you are organized to win, your writers and reviewers work from the same criteria that define quality. Achieving this means being sufficiently organized to be able to articulate your quality criteria before the writing starts. Winning as an organization means figuring this all out, because if you just make it up as you go along, everyone will do it as individuals. If you want to create a winning organization, at some point you must stop doing everything ad hoc. The challenge is that everyone has to stop and make the switch at the same time. You can’t have islands of individuals in conflict and be organized to win at the same time. You can’t take on one issue at a time and arrive at an integrated approach. This challenge is so difficult that most companies avoid taking it on. Ever. But this means that if you do take this challenge on, you can achieve a level of competitiveness that they will never be able to match. But do the math. A small improvement in your win rate will make all the hard work to accomplish this so worthwhile.

If you lose your proposal, it’s because the customer chose another alternative. Maybe they chose another proposal, or some other alternative. The best way to win a proposal is to prove that you are the customer's best alternative. And being their best alternative requires anticipating the others and positioning against each one. Winning a proposal is about helping the customer make a decision, not just about your proposal, but about which of the alternatives they should move forward with. What are their other alternatives? Do nothing. This is their easiest alternative. At least in the short term. And maybe the problem will go away or be overtaken by events. If the proposal is not solicited or if you are the only one submitting a proposal, this could be your biggest competitor. What do you need to do to motivate them to take action? And what action do you want them to take? What will happen if they do nothing? What will compel them to do what you are recommending? Delay. If the customer is not decisive, then they may just wait. Take their time and think about it. Get advice. Run it up the chain of command. Let it be overtaken by events. This can be the passive form of doing nothing. It too benefits from motivation and direction. Why do they need to take this action now? What makes it a priority? Do it on their own. They could choose to insource instead of outsource. If they prefer to insource, then a proposal to outsource is swimming against the current. But a proposal to support the development of their internal capabilities might been seen as a beneficial bridge. What might make them prefer to outsource? How do the benefits outweigh the costs? Do it over. If they haven’t thought things through, or have written an excessively bad RFP, they have the option of just cancelling the procurement and starting over. Being the one who helps them think it through before the RFP is released is a good position to be in. This can prevent the customer from having to do it over. But if they do decide to start again, maybe you can help... Go small or make it larger. Sometimes the customer realizes that they should change the scope of the problem. Maybe they should combine procurements. Or separate this one into smaller ones. This is usually a budget issue, but sometimes it can also be a strategic issue based on economies of scale. If they can’t afford what you propose, maybe they can start with something smaller. And maybe you can offer them ways to scale it up once proven. Pick something better. How does the customer define “better?” Are they ready to commit to investing for the future and focused on value instead of cost? Are they being strategic? Or do they want something in particular? If they choose to move forward, then they will want the best of their alternatives. It really helps to understand how they define “best.” Sometimes you can help guide the customer to what to consider and help them understand why your alternative is the best. This is the core of offering design and proposal presentation. Pick something cheaper. In the customer’s eyes, what constitutes “good enough” for now? If they get that and aren’t motivated to procure something better, they might just pick the cheapest proposal that is good enough. Negotiate. If you’re close, maybe they can get you to make the necessary adjustments. Maybe they just want to be sure they’re getting the best deal. Choose all the options. Why do they have to pick just one? Why should they limit themselves to one vendor? Choose someone else. The customer can like your proposal and still like someone else's proposal better. What happens if they like what you propose, but already have a preferred vendor? What if the uniqueness of your company and offering simply aren't? What if your buyer likes your proposal but The Powers That Be don't like it, don't want to pay for it, or have something else in mind? These all apply, even in an RFP based procurement. It’s just that in an RFP based procurement, some may only apply before the RFP is released and with government RFPs there are rules that must be followed. But the point is not to explain why a customer did something after the fact. The goal is to anticipate what a customer is most likely to do so you can position your proposal to win. What alternatives can you anticipate? What can you do to mitigate the risks and possibly eliminate some of the alternatives? Writing your proposal as if you are their only alternative leaves you exposed to the fact that you are not.

Disclaimer In describing our plans, we're not making promises. All dates, features, prices, details, and everything else on this page are subject to change. This is just how we'd like things to play out at this moment. If we get a better idea later, we might follow it instead. But if you don't hold us to any commitments here, we'll gladly share some of what we're working on. Attention potential corporate subscribers... If you do the kind of proposals that require a team of people to work together and still more people to review the quality, we should talk. Take a look below and then use this button to reach out to us and let's start a conversation. If you wait, it could end up costing you a few thousand dollars more... Click here to reach out and start a conversation What's in development now A series of online courses for proposal writing. The first has been released. The second should be complete in the next week. A couple more are planned before we shift to a different topic. We're building a major new tool that will help you figure out what to address in your proposals, implement proposal quality criteria, and conduct better proposal reviews. It greatly lowers the level of effort to implement our recommendations, without disrupting your current workflows. It integrates everything on PropLIBRARY (knowledge, tools, process, online training). We had a major breakthrough that's made it all possible. I'd love to discuss it more, but we're in the early stages where things can change quite a bit. Our recipe library is being converted from text to a database format. This is anticipation of our new tool. However, we've put together a quick interface so that you can tap into the recipe data. It's not amazing like what's in development, but it lets you get at the data without waiting. The recipe data is pretty amazing. Only PropLIBRARY Subscribers can access it. If you are a PropLIBRARY Subscriber you can try it out here, otherwise you'll just get an error. Click on the text to expand the outline. Click on the icons to put a recipe on the clipboard for use in your documents. Look for hundreds more recipes to be added over the next few months. Roadmap for the future In Q3 we expect to have completed online training that addresses the full MustWin Process from a participant's point of view. After that we'll start working on advanced level courses for proposal specialists. These will target implementation and management issues, along with optional considerations. For example, we have already released online training that addresses how to perform Proposal Content Planning. But should you implement it with a centralized or decentralized model? How do you scale it from quick turnaround task orders up to lengthy strategic proposal? Etc. We are working towards two levels of subscription. The current subscription level will target proposal contributors. A new advanced-level subscription will target proposal specialists. When we make the change, all current subscribers will get upgraded to the advanced level free of charge, so keep your subscriptions current. We want to include about 24 hours of free online training in our regular subscription and 40 hours in our advanced subscription. We're already at 18 hours. The value of our subscriptions keeps going up, up, up. For less than the cost of a single traditional proposal course, we're going to offer a week's worth of training, on top of all our other subscription benefits. That's kind of crazy and people are telling me it's too much and that might actually cause people to under value the benefits. I'm inclined to stick to the plan and do it anyway. Corporate Subscription prices are going up, as soon as I can create the new product description page. This involves more than just simple text, and I've got our developers overloaded already. So it's waiting in line... We have a baseline capability to customize our entire library for Corporate Subscribers. I want to make this easier to use and create a self-serve model. Corporate Subscribers will be able to create their own customized training on our platform. Possibilities that are floating out there but not scheduled Fixed price training customizing and internal certification programs for Corporate Subscribers. We know how long it takes to modify or create content. We can turn that into fixed price customization offerings. New content contributors. This will likely happen in our online training offerings. Some will be offered an individual courses priced separately, others will be bundled in with our subscriptions. Talks are under way. We're playing around with some new navigation features to make things easier and possibly a replacement for the red menu to the left. We might create a simple menu and an advanced menu. We've got some really cool ways to filter content, but have decided how to build them into the user interface yet.

Proposal Content Planning is a methodology that is part of the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process. The full methodology is part of what comes with a PropLIBRARY Subscription. Here is an introduction to Proposal Content Planning. When you are just getting started with preparing Content Plans for your proposals, you can put anything in them that’s helpful. You don’t need to get hung up on the wording. Anything you put in them will be better than nothing. As your experience and skills improve, however, you begin to see how the way you articulate instructions directly impacts how they are followed. If you pay more attention to how you word the things you put in your Content Plans you can take them to a higher level. The best way to articulate what you put in your Proposal Content Plans is to phrase them as quality criteria. Prompt the writer with the questions that will be used to assess whether the goals were achieved. This has two advantages: See also: Content planning best practices It guides the reviewers, with the Content Plan doing double duty as a checklist for validating the draft proposal. It enables writers to see how their efforts will be evaluated. It's like a rubric for a school assignment, and shows writers exactly what they need to do to “get a top grade.” Here are several ways to introduce something in a Content Plan that turn it into a quality criterion: Does it… Does the approach reflect the evaluation criteria? Have you… Have you shown understanding through results instead of simply claiming it? Are the… Are the steps in our process compliant with the statement of work? Compare this approach to simply giving instructions: Does the approach reflect the evaluation criteria? vs: Explain the approach in the context of the evaluation criteria. Have you shown understanding through results instead of simply claiming it? vs: Show understanding through results instead of simply claiming it. Are the steps in our process compliant with the statement of work? vs: Identify RFP compliant steps for our process. While a case could be made that the instructions are more direct, the reason we prefer articulating them as quality criteria is that we’re shifting people from following instructions to achieving goals. We’re shifting them from doing what they’re told to thinking about what proposal quality is. Using questions also helps prompt the writer to think more about it than a statement does. Phrasing your Content Plan ingredients as quality criteria also has the advantage of combining steps in the proposal process. If you fill your Proposal Content Plan with instructions, then before you can conduct Proposal Quality Validation, you must convert your instructions into quality criteria. By articulating the ingredients in your Content Plan as quality criteria, you save a step. But there’s a problem There’s always a problem. In this case, the problem is being rushed and unprepared. You can’t articulate quality criteria for an approach you don’t have. Unfortunately, we often enter the proposal process while we’ll still designing our offering and figuring out our approaches. Before you can write assessment criteria, you might have to write instructions to resolve the issue. In other words, you might have to say, “Figure out our approach.” Usually you can mitigate this by saying something like “Describe our approach AND optimize it against the wording of the evaluation criteria.” This combines the instruction with a quality criterion to assess it. Wait, there’s more… What if you are using the Content Plan to pass on tips, data, or a suggestion that is not going to be required or assessed? When you use a Content Plan statement that starts with the word “Consider” you prompt the reviewers that it isn't required. But the reviewers can also ask about it to assess whether it was given appropriate consideration. This is one way of using the Content Plan to drive constructive discussion. It’s a bit of a challenge How many of your quality criteria can you nail in the Content Plan? Every one that comes after provides zero guidance to the writers until after the fact. Content Planning gives you a visible, and even measurable, way to ensure that you aren’t waiting until the draft review to start thinking about what a quality proposal would be. So how many of the things you add to your next Content Plan can you articulate as quality criteria? It’s a bit of a challenge… Even more advanced... With the right metrics and measurements you can change proposal writing from an art into a science. Here are 9 proposal metrics you didn't think possible that are enabled by Proposal Content Planning.

See also: Content planning best practices Track the number of Content Planning items per page and you’ll have a quick way to gauge the amount of detail that went into the planning. Correlate it with your win rate to find out how much effort going into detail is worth. Count the number of Content Plan items that had to word around things that were unknown during proposal planning. You can even categorize the types of unknown (customer awareness, offering design, teaming, etc.). This will tell you whether your proposals are starting prepared or if you’re making things up as you go along. Correlate it with page count and number of staff or hours contributing to the pursuit and you can see the impact of being short-staffed. Correlate it with your win rate and you can determine whether you are losing more than you are saving by being short staffed. Count the number of items articulated as quality criteria vs. instructions in your Proposal Content Plans and turn it into a ratio. Correlate this ratio with your win rate and you’ll see which has the most impact and how much the effort is worth. You could also do this with other things you might include in your Content Plans, like tips, suggestions, data, boilerplate, etc. Assess whether centralized or decentralized Content Planning is best. This could also take the form of a ratio, to determine whether more centralized or less centralized correlates with the highest win rate in your environment. Track the length of time spent Content Planning prior to writing, and when you correlate it with your win rate, you’ll see the true value of planning before writing. Correlate the number of Content Planning iterations/topics completed with your win rate, and you can identify which have the most value. Count how many Proposal Quality Validation criteria originated in the Content Plan vs. those that did not. This will tell you whether your writers are starting with adequate guidance regarding proposal quality. Track the number of instructions related to visual communication vs text. This can also be converted to a ratio. And correlated with your win rate, which will tell you the value of the graphics. Track the average time to create a graphic and you can compare the value of the change in win rate to the cost of graphic production, and use this to make better informed decisions regarding whether to hire graphics specialists or use consultants.

The right words to use in a proposal are the ones that the customer needs to hear to reach a decision in your favor. This can be hard to figure out. Luckily, when the customer releases an RFP, they give you those words. Before you put pen to paper, proposal writing requires you to interpret and understand the RFP. This skill has more to do with your ability to win a proposal than your writing skills. Where to find the words you need to use See also: RFPs When a customer writes an RFP, they identify the things they want vendors to address and the things that their evaluators will assess. When you read an RFP, you can see when they are indicating these things by the words the customer uses. For example, they may identify sections of the RFP as providing instructions, evaluation criteria, and a statement of work identifying what they require. Within those RFP sections, they often use words like "shall," "will," and "must" to indicate their requirements. In fact, a lawyer specializing in procurement will tell you that terms like “shall,” “will,” and “must” have precise meanings and that certain words should be used for things that the customer believes are mandatory and certain words for things that are optional, facts, etc. But while this might be how RFPs should be written, proposal writers must deal with how proposals are written. Often the person writing the RFP doesn’t understand the subtle nuances. This can make interpreting the RFP more challenging. Words like “shall,” “will,” and “must” usually indicate things the evaluator will be looking for and assessing. They may indicate things like customer requirements, instructions, terms and conditions, or facts, depending on how precise the customer is with their terminology. This is where interpretation becomes important. What you can rely on when they use those words, and others like them, is that they are indicating or identifying things that matter. The customer may be doing this to bring things to your attention, to the attention of their own evaluators, or both. It may be necessary to acknowledge them to be considered compliant with the RFP. The evaluator may be tasked with accounting for whether you responded to them in your proposal. The words that follow "shall," "will," "must," and other similar words are telling you what words to use in your proposal. You want the evaluator to be able to easily find the indicated words. They are what the customer will be looking for. You should also look for lists, bullets, numbered items, and things put in tables. When the customer itemizes things, they make it easier to account for them. You should make those lists easy to find and just as easy to account for in your proposal. Using the same bullets, numbers, table formats, etc., that the customer used can help. You should make your proposal checklist-simple to evaluate. Whether it's true in reality or not, it can help you write your proposal by picturing the evaluator looking at your proposal and checking off on a list as they find each keyword indicated in the RFP. Sometimes lists are simply words separated by commas. If the customer is looking for three things separated by commas, you need to decide how important those three things are. If they are the essence of what the customer is looking for, then you might want respond to those requirements with a bullet for each, with a run-in heading that uses those words. Or a table with those words as headings. You might even want a graphic that shows the relationship between those three requirements (are they a sequence, parallel activities, equally important (or not), goals/results, things that have prerequisites, etc.). When the customer looks at the section they should easily see those key words, see that you've responded to them with what they need to evaluate, and also see that you've shown some insight about them that goes beyond the RFP. Once you figure out what words they have indicated are important and that the evaluators might look for, you should write your proposal based on those words. Pay particular attention to the words used in any evaluation criteria provided. If there will be a formal scoring or decision process, it will be based on the words in the evaluation criteria. Those words may very well determine whether you win or lose. You should use their words when you write to fulfill the RFP requirements, but in order to win you should also do write in a way that adds up to a superior score against the words of the evaluation criteria. Turning their words into your proposal The job of a proposal writer is not to simply present the offering in a way that "sounds good." It’s to present the offering in a way that maximizes your chances of winning. Part of doing this requires using the language of the RFP when you write about your offering. When you are looking for what words to use, use theirs. What you don’t want to do is repeat the RFP exactly. This makes it harder for the evaluator to determine whether you understand what you are saying and can be trusted. Instead, take your offering design, bid strategies, and the points you wish to make, and articulate what differentiates them using the words from the RFP. Think of the words of the RFP as providing a structure. Your words describing your offering need to fit within that structure. You should review your proposal by making sure that all keywords indicated or identified in the RFP can be found in your response. You should read the proposal and evaluate it the same way the customer will. If you have trouble finding any of the key words in the RFP, even if you eventually do find them, it’s a safe bet the evaluator will also have difficulty finding them. And they may not even try that hard. Companies have lost proposals because the customer couldn't find things that actually were addressed in the proposal — they were just hard to find or didn't use the same terminology as the RFP. A few words about page limitations If the RFP contains several times the number of pages they limit the length of your proposal to, it may be physically impossible to include all of the keywords in the RFP and stay under the page limitation. The words you should use are the ones the evaluator will be most likely to look for. This means you must look past what they have indicated are keywords to consider what words they need to perform the evaluation. This requires correctly interpreting the RFP. Understanding which words the evaluator needs to see This also requires understanding the customer's evaluation process, right down to the forms they use. Sometimes helping the customer reach their decision comes down to helping them complete their forms, and sometimes that comes down to matching the words in your proposal to the words on their forms. This is not being trivial or nit-picky. In a page-limited proposal, doing this can be vital, since any words that do not impact your evaluation are extraneous, even if they are in the RFP. Every word you put in your proposal should be measured not by how important you think it is, but by how much it will impact the evaluation made by the customer. Before putting pen to paper, pause for a moment to consider what the evaluator needs to see in order to perform their task. Proposals do not get read. They get evaluated. Evaluators don't read proposals. They score them. The customer may not read your proposal at all. They may search for evaluation criteria keywords and then score what they find, bouncing all around your carefully articulated narrative without any concern for "how it flows." Knowing how your customer performs their evaluations is critical for achieving a high win rate. What the customer needs from you Customers who go to the trouble of publishing an RFP typically need to assess certain things about each proposal and bidder: Have they met the qualification requirements that were in the RFP? Did they follow the instructions I gave them? Does what they propose match what I said I needed? Did they accept all the terms and conditions that will be part of the contract? Which proposal best fulfills our requirements at a price we can afford? They often ask these questions before they ask which offering they like more. If they have written evaluation criteria, they may not even consider which proposal they "like." They will consider how the bidders compare on the basis of the evaluation criteria. How the evaluation criteria are worded, and how your proposal stacks up against them, will determine whether you win. When well-liked incumbent contractors lose, it is because their proposal did not get the highest score against the evaluation criteria. Being "liked" did not help their score because they wrote what they thought sounded good instead of what the customer needed to award them the proposal. At each step, ask whether you have used all of the words from the RFP that matter. If the page limitation means you can’t possibly address every RFP keyword, then think about the information the evaluators need and their evaluation or scoring process, and give them the words they need to make a decision in your favor. No matter how attached you are to a particular way of articulating things, you should make sure you are using the words the customer needs to hear in order for you to win.

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All proposals represent change for the organization considering them. This is true even if you are the incumbent and aren’t really proposing any significant changes in approach. There will still be incremental changes to account for. All proposals can add value through change management practices. This is true whether the changes are explicit, with the customer expecting change, or if the customer either hasn’t considered or isn’t concerned with change. They may not think the project needs change management. And yet, addressing some of these can show you have a better approach for managing the project. The following items can be used either to explicitly address the topic of “change management” or to improve your management approach without even using the word “change.” See also: Technical approach How can you engage people to address their concerns about the changes? How do the benefits compare to people's concerns about the changes? How do the changes relate to missions, goals, and requirements? How do the changes align with strategies and plans? Who are the stakeholders who will be involved, contribute, participate, or be impacted? What are the size, scope, and complexity of the changes? What is the gap between the current state and the change state? What alternatives are being considered? What effort will be required by various stakeholders? How will various stakeholders be impacted? What timeframes are significant? Will change implementation be expert-led, participative, or collaborative? How will change progress be tracked and communicated? What can you do to provide recognition of impacts and contributions? What motivations might impact people's reactions? What can be done to help prepare people for the changes? What should people anticipate? Can modeling or simulation help with change planning, communication, or risk mitigation? How can you engage people who are influencers? Is there a difference between internal and external impacts and issues? How are people concerned with compliance, risk, cost, or uncertainty related to the changes? What can be done to mitigate issues? Will existing policies, procedures, working practices, culture, budgets, job designs, effort, satisfaction, or prospects be impacted by the changes? Do you have a communication plan that will make the change agents visible and accessible? What can you do to ensure communications are timely and consistent? Who will be responsible for listening and learning during the change process? How will you collect stakeholder input? Will you communicate and interact with people both one-on-one and in groups? Who will you target for communications? How can the "who, what, where, how, when, and why?" model help you improve your communications? What media and channels will you use for communications? How will you match media and channel preferences to communication receivers? What can you do to reinforce communications? Is a training plan part of your approach? What logistics issues should you anticipate or prepare for? How will you handle both active and passive resistance to the changes? How will feedback be obtained and handled throughout the process? What will you do to monitor changes both during and after implementation?

Sometimes the friction between sales and fulfillment results in the company being afraid that someone might say something in the proposal that the company can’t deliver in order to make the sale. I see this often at engineering companies, where the customer’s concerns can deviate from the engineering realities. A proposal is supposed to be written from the customer’s perspective and address their concerns. But what about the engineering realities? The truth is that there is no conflict. But there is a lack of understanding. And the result can be decisions that do more harm than good. Proposal writing is not about saying whatever needs to be said to win. Proposal writing is about putting things in context. It is a lot like translation. Proposal writing is about putting your solution in terms that the customer will understand and that show the alignment between your features and their concerns. In many ways it is merely an extension of engineering, since it begins with understanding the requirements and measures its success by how well it addresses them, just like engineering does. One key difference is that for proposal writing, the evaluation criteria and procurement process are part of the requirements assessment. I could probably make the case that this is not different from including supply chain considerations or alternatives assessments in an engineering methodology, but I’m not trying to convince anyone that proposal writing is the same as engineering. What I am trying to do is show that there are enough similarities to make an integrated process-driven approach better than fighting over who should control the writing. When companies have their engineers write their proposals but don’t train them to understand what drives the evaluation process, they get poorly engineered proposals that do not meet the requirements of the end user. In other words, they lose. Engineers can be great proposal contributors. In fact, great proposals require strong technical contributions. But proposal quality is based on the procurement process and not simply on the offering design. It requires both to be addressed. You can teach your engineers to understand proposal development, or you can teach them to work with people who do. Either way, you need a process that defines and validates proposal quality. If engineering does not address fitness for purpose, it is not good engineering. And you can’t have a great proposal without having a well-designed offering. When companies try to handle everything from offering design, approach validation, RFP compliance, and bid strategy effectiveness to proofreading in a single review, it can be worse than not having a review at all. A better approach is to have multiple reviews to validate specific criteria like whether the approach as written reflects an approved offering design. When companies try to do engineering in writing, they are just asking for trouble. The design of your offering and the design of your proposal are two separate things. Is there any engineering methodology that recommends designing things by writing narratives about them? Don’t let your engineers do this and call it proposal writing. Don’t let your proposal writers do this. First design your offering to fulfill the relevant requirements. Then write about how your offering fulfills those requirements and is the customer's best alternative. The implementation of engineering benefits from also having a quality methodology. The implementation of a proposal process benefits from having a quality methodology. The success of your integration of your engineering and proposal practices can be proven by your quality methodologies. Any concerns or debates about how to interpret the requirements that drive both engineering and proposals, as well as whether the work product produced reflects them, should be addressed by defining quality criteria and applying them to the proposal. The debate you should be having is not who should write the proposal. It’s not about control. The debate you should be having is about what a quality proposal is, what concerns need to be addressed in producing a proposal, and how to validate the proposal that is produced. The debate you should be having is about what defines proposal quality and what your proposal quality criteria should be. If you can’t engineer the right proposal quality criteria, you shouldn’t be trying to produce a proposal.

Most of the proposals companies ask us to review have one or more of these issues. This means that most proposal writers have one or more of these bad habits. Simply fix these bad habits and you will make a dramatic improvement in your proposal writing. Once you’ve broken the habit, you can flip each one around and find a best practice hiding inside. See also: Themes Don’t state a universal truth by way of introduction. Avoid the temptation of starting off by saying something that is obviously and universally true, like “quality is vital for the success of this contract.” This is equally true of your competitors, and says nothing to make you a better alternative. If the statement is true, then start off by saying what you’ll do about it. That matters far more to the customer than what you were going to say. Take credit for owning the solution. Frame the issue with insight instead of something that does not differentiate your proposal one bit. Add value. Don’t state your commitment or intentions. Don’t be committed to customer satisfaction, quality, risk mitigation, etc. Deliver them. If it’s important, then don’t promise it, do it. Show commitment instead of intent. Which do you find more compelling, a vendor’s intentions or their credible and verifiable approach to delivering what you want? Likewise, don’t promise, believe, look forward to, hope, or otherwise say what you’d like to happen instead of saying what you are going to do. And don’t make your proposal about your mission or values, since those are essentially intentions. Prove your intentions through the results your actions will deliver, instead of making unverifiable empty promises, even if your intentions are good. Don’t tell the customer about themselves. Don’t tell the customer what their mission, needs, or requirements are. Don't write your proposal like a lab report in school. Instead, show insight into how to achieve these things. The customer looks to a proposal to find out how what is offered will help them achieve their mission and fulfill their needs. They do not look to a proposal to discover their mission, or to see if you can repeat it. Simply describing their requirements does not add value or help them make their decision. It does not show understanding. Understanding is best shown by results. If you deliver the right results, the customer will know that you understand. But seeing that you copied and pasted something from their website doesn’t give them any confidence in your understanding. Don’t make your proposal about you. It’s easy to get tricked when the RFP says to describe your company and offering. But what the customer really needs is to know why your offering is the best alternative and what makes it credible. Most of the details they request are so they can evaluate your credibility. They aren’t really interested in you. They are interested in what you can do for them. Make your proposal about the customer and what they will get as a result of accepting your proposal. The easiest way to do this is to never describe yourself. Describe what matters to the customer about your qualifications and approaches. Prove that they can trust you to deliver. But don’t make your proposal about you. Make it about the customer. And while you are at it, don’t waste their time saying things like you are pleased to submit your proposal. That’s obvious, adds no value, imposes extra reading on the evaluator, and does not reflect the customer’s perspective. If you want to reflect the customer’s perspective, start off by saying what they are going to get if they accept your proposal. Don’t build to the finish. What you learned in school can lead to bad proposal writing. What the customer needs to see in a proposal is what you offer. Then they read the details to see if they can trust you to deliver it. When writing proposals, the conclusion should come first. If it comes last, it is just a wrap up and not an offer. They may not see it at all. Building to the finish does not reflect the customer’s perspective, what they want to see, or how they approach reading a proposal. Don’t make unsubstantiated claims, especially grandiose ones. If you call yourself unique, you better prove it. Otherwise you hurt your credibility. Don’t claim to be state-of-the-art or innovative. Prove that you are through the results your approaches deliver. When you are selecting a vendor by reading proposals, you are less likely to select the one that sounds like a television commercial than one that shows insight. A good way to avoid making unsubstantiated claims is to avoid describing your company at all. Instead, talk about what you will do or deliver. Details about your company only matters as proof that you can deliver. If what you do or deliver is exceptional, and the way you do or deliver it is credible and differentiated, you will be the customer’s best alternative, even if you don’t make grandiose claims about yourself. The reverse is not true. Don’t use slogans. When used in the narrative portion of a proposal, slogans and tag lines are all unsubstantiated claims unless you are somehow using one in a proof point or summary. In a proposal, slogans don’t even support your branding because they make you look like someone who is willing to put selling ahead of talking about how you’ll fulfill the customer’s needs. In a proposal, slogans and tag lines don’t characterize what you are presenting. They just get in the way, create extra reading, and can make the customer skeptical of your trustworthiness. What makes proposals different from other marketing materials is that you are not positioning unspecified services against unspecified customers with unspecified needs and unspecified actions where a high-level statement adds structure. In a proposal, you are speaking to a specific customer to address their needs and help them make a decision. Slogans don’t help with decision making. The customer gets no value from slogans used in a proposal. Instead, just be your slogan. Let your proposal prove it. But make your proposal about the customer and not what you think you need to say.