Carl Dickson

One way to approach proposal messaging is to make it about something. It helps to focus your thoughts. And it can give you something to stand for. Instead of simply positioning against the competition and everything else, you position to matter about something. This helps the customer perceive your value. When the competing proposals aren’t very different from each other, this kind of subtlety can determine who wins, because it shows better insight, understanding, and even value. The list below is also a good tool for learning to think about things from the customer’s perspective. You shouldn’t just focus on what you’d like to make your proposal about. You should make your proposal about what matters to the customer. 16 things to consider making your proposal about: You. It’s usually a mistake to make the proposal about yourself. But most companies do. It’s kind of like trying to get a date by talking only about yourself. Likewise, if you are the buyer, do you want “pick me!” to be a constant refrain? You can make the proposal about your being the customer’s best alternative, but this works best when you take it a step further and make it about what the customer will get by selecting you, instead of simply being about why to select you. The customer. All proposals are about the customer, whether you write them that way or not. Recognizing this explicitly and writing from their perspective is very powerful. Your offering. While you need to describe your offering, that’s not what your proposal should be about. Your proposal should usually be about why your offering is the best alternative for the customer. It’s always about the customer. Fulfilling the customer’s needs. Making your proposal about fulfilling your customer’s needs is one way to bring focus to making your proposal about the customer. Just be careful to make it about the customer getting their needs fulfilled and not about you as the one who will fulfill them. Don’t cross the line and make it about you by accident. And don’t make it about the fact that the customer has needs because that awareness of that fact doesn’t deliver any value. Instead make it about the fulfillment of those needs. A solution. While you’re offering a solution, what the customer is really interested in is why that solution is the customer’s best alternative. What the customer will get out of your solution and what makes it the best alternative may matter more than the solution itself. Giving the customer what they asked for. When the customer tells you exactly what they want and expects your proposal to be about that, it’s still about them. It’s about why your way of delivering exactly what they asked for will give them the best results or benefits. It’s about them getting what they asked for with the most value added. Even if price is the only value they are concerned with. And keep in mind that everyone else will be proposing at least what the customer asked for. Being about something doesn't have to cost any money and can make the difference. Getting results. It’s not the offering that customers usually want, it’s the results that offering delivers. Or more accurately, it’s about how much better off they’ll be because of those results. It’s always about the customer. The results of a procurement are often just a means to an end. When this is the case, the results that best facilitate achieving that end will have the most appeal. A recommendation. If you want the customer to take action, you can make a recommendation. You can recommend that the customer select you, but that’s the same as making the proposal about you. If the customer isn’t sure about what they want, or if they don’t realize the implications of what they’ve asked for, you can make recommendations that will achieve better results. If this deviates too far from their expectations and evaluation process, this can be risky. But if you deliver what they asked for, and can give them better options while staying within the structure of the RFP, you can offer a value that is highly differentiated. If the customer lacks expertise or has difficulty deciding what to do, you can make your proposal about your willingness and ability to make recommendations and enable the customer to make better informed decisions. Informing and teaching. Sometimes the customer just doesn’t know what they are doing. Maybe they’re just not good at writing RFPs. If you can avoid patronizing and offending them, you can deliver a proposal that is informative and teaches them what they need to know, and along the way you can show them that you are their best alternative. Even a well written RFP will require trade-offs, and your rationale in resolving them can matter. When you make your proposal about informing and teaching, you demonstrate the value of your expertise. Demonstrations trump declarations. Preventing a problem. When a key feature of an offering is that it prevents problems, you can make your proposal about that. The trick is to make it about the benefits of the resolution, and not about the problem itself, because your value is the resolution and not the problem. Focusing too much on the problem is just selling fear. Reducing risk. Reducing risk is similar to preventing problems, but with more uncertainty. With risk it’s not a feature in your offering that prevents a problem, but your techniques for identifying and mitigating risks that matters. You might not even know what the risks are at the beginning. For example, in systems development there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Your ability to prevent, monitor, and respond when they happen may matter to a risk averse customer. Making an improvement. Do you know a better way? Can you help the customer become better, more capable, faster, or more efficient? Just remember to make it about the customer and how much better their improved future will be instead of the improvement itself. And make sure you address any reluctance they may have in changing the status quo. Return on investment. Does the customer consider what you are proposing to be an expense or an investment? What they need from a vendor is different between the two. How does the customer perceive the procurement? You can prove it is worth it to spend as much as possible if your proposal nets a high return on investment, but if they view your proposal as an expense you need to reduce costs. If your proposal is about return on investment, make sure you prove your case. When a customer talks about obtaining the best value, it means they may be willing to invest in a better return but that their ability to do so may be limited. Answering the customer’s questions. If the customer is full of questions, your proposal can be about providing answers. But don’t just simply provide answers. Your proposal is really about generating sufficient confidence for the customer to move forward with what you propose. A destination. Where will the customer end up if they accept your proposal? How wonderful will it be? You can go beyond features and benefits and make your proposal about where they’ll end up as a result. Just make sure that’s where they want to end up. A differentiator. Customers look for the differences between proposals to determine which is better. If you are not actively identifying differentiators and featuring them in your proposal, you’re not trying to win. If you are, you can take it a step further and make your proposal about your differentiators. If you do so, make sure you make it about how the customer will be impacted by those differentiators and not the features that are different themselves. Features that differentiate get noticed, but it’s their impact that determines whether you win. Because many of these are related, you might be able to employ a couple at a time. But even though many will resonate with you, you can’t use them all at the same time and still have a proposal that is about something.

Proposals should stand for something. They are inherently aspirational. You aspire to win and beyond. The customer aspires to procure, reap the benefits, and beyond. Proposals matter when they fulfill aspirations. You want your proposal to matter. But are they your aspirations, your company’s, or your customer’s? Even within your own company, executives, sales, marketing, and proposal development staff all have different aspirations. Something similar is true for the customer’s aspirations. And which aspirations should impact your strategies? How do they impact what ink you put on paper? Discovering how you and your company’s aspirations impact your bid strategies: Are your aspirations tied to this particular pursuit, or are they broader? Should your strategies be aimed at developing the foundation for your broader aspirations? Are your aspirations personal or organizational? And if you answer “organizational,” who defines those organizational aspirations? How does this pursuit relate to them? Where is the line between your dreams and what can be achieved through this pursuit? How do those aspirations produce benefits for the customer of this pursuit? If you achieve your aspirations, why would that matter to the customer? Why should your aspirations make the customer more likely to accept your proposal? What should you change in your approach to the bid that would make this more likely? Discovering how your customer’s aspirations impact your bid strategies: Will the customer’s personal aspirations impact their decision making? Who defines the customer’s organizational aspirations and do the decision makers share them? Are the customer’s aspirations well focused, overly broad, or somewhere in between? Where is the line between what the customer dreams of and what can be achieved through this procurement? Does the customer have a consensus regarding their aspirations? How could this procurement impact the customer’s organizational aspirations? How do the customer’s mission, goals, and needs relate to their aspirations? Are there any conflicts between the solicitation requirements and the customer’s aspirations? Is your understanding of the customer’s aspirations up to date? What about fulfilling their aspirations could lead a customer to select one proposal over another? What can you do to further you and your customer’s aspirations in a way that makes your proposal the customer’s best alternative? Answering this in a way that impacts your bid strategies and what you say in your proposal can put you in a position of being the way for the customer to achieve their aspirations. What can you do or say in your proposal to become a vital part of the customer’s dreams? Or should you simply respond to the RFP like everyone else?

Q&A or point-by-point proposal formats are so easy. You don’t have to give much thought to the outline. But that’s not the reason to choose them. Easy is not always the best. What should drive your approach to creating the outline for your proposal is what the customer wants to see in your proposal and where they expect to find it. You do not want to lose just because the customer didn’t see things where they expected them and didn’t go looking for them. What information do they need to reach a decision? In what sequence? Remember, proposals are not read (like a book), they are evaluated. People don't want to read every word. They only want to read the parts they need to in order to make their decision. They need to be able to find these quickly. Don't get thrown out See also: Proposal Outlines The first goal for proposals is to not get thrown out. If the customer has given you instructions regarding the outline or proposal organization and you do not follow them, they may throw out your proposal without even reading it. If there is an RFP, you should start there. Your outline should make it easy to find what they will be looking for. Usually, this is best done by putting things in the sequence and terminology used in the RFP. Within the structure mandated by the RFP, you can add more headings of your own underneath theirs if needed. That might lead you to a Q&A or point-by-point low level outline. Or not. If the RFP itself specifies a Q&A or point-by-point response format, then you are lucky because it is clear what the customer expects and you’re not just doing it because it is easier. Should you choose a Q&A or Point-by-Point format? As long as they don't conflict with the RFP, there are many ways to organize the material you want to present. A Q&A format is best when the customer has given you questions to answer, or when you can anticipate the questions that the customer will have. A point-by-point response is best when that suits the nature of your offering. This can happen when there are specific locations, components, or details about your offering that fit with the customer’s needs or understanding. What about other alternatives? But not all offerings lend themselves to a Q&A or point-by-point response. A proposal to provide complex services or a solution might not have a finite set of objective components to structure your response around. They might be better suited to organizing based on: Results Processes Functions A work breakdown structure Risks Or something else that matters to the customer If telling a story is part of your proposal strategy, a Q&A or point-by-point response format can also make it more difficult. If the customer will have a formal evaluation process, like they do in government procurement, you might organize your response first around the RFP instructions, then the evaluation criteria, and then the offering in response to the requirements in the statement of work. Organizing around the way the customer makes decisions or will perform their evaluation is a powerful way to build your outline. How do you choose the best outline format for a proposal? The best outline format is one that the customer thinks is best, and not necessarily the one that you think makes the most sense. For the customer, proposals are a decision-making tool. Q&A outlines have the advantage of helping to make sure you answer all the questions that a customer might have. But not all subject matters are best organized around questions. You should choose the outline format that will: Not get you thrown out Meet the customer’s expectations Best support the customer’s evaluation or decision-making process Facilitate telling your story Help guide them to realize that your proposal is their best alternative Consider each of these carefully before committing to a Q&A or point-by-point outline format for your proposal.

Some people are faster than others. Estimating how long it will take someone to read something or perform an exercise can sometimes be very subjective. Here are some benchmarks we use to estimate course lengths to help refine and standardize our guesses: 1 article = 5 minutes 1 quiz question = 1 minute 2 presentation slides = 1 minute 1 video minute = 1 minute 1 page file = 5 minutes Here are a couple of examples: A one-hour course might consist of a single module with 5 articles, a 10-question quiz, a 10-slide presentation (or 5-minute video), and a 20-minute exercise. A 1.5-hour course might consist of two modules with 10 articles, a 15-question quiz, a 10-slide presentation (or 5-minute video), and a 20-minute exercise. A 2-hour course might consist of two modules with 8 articles, one 20-slide presentation, one 10-minute video, and a 1-hour exercise. Many other combinations are possible. Courses can be longer, there really is no limit. But for online consumption and development, it's better to break things up into smaller pieces. Sixteen one-hour courses are better than one 16-hour course.

We'll do the actual posting of your content online. You just need to show up with the right content, ready to post. But there will be overlaps where we need to work together. Here are some examples: You have files that might be better converted to articles You have PowerPoint that could be post as a presentation, video, or just a file You have recordings that are long and may need to be broken up into small pieces You need to create quizzes and exercises You need help estimating the length of the material you have and whether to add, delete, or change it to fit your target Contact us early. That way we can talk through what needs to be done, help you avoid problems, and figure out how to best work together to get your course posted.

If you have existing content, then your primary consideration will be identifying and filling any gaps. If you are creating a course from scratch, you will first needs to identify your needs. But even if you have existing content, you need to understand those needs to fill the gaps. Mapping instructional needs to course Start by identifying requirements such as: Capability to perform tasks Knowledge, awareness, or understanding Preparation required for contingencies Creating courses from scratch Map requirements to courses and identify course item topics to fulfill the requirements For each course item topic, identify the course item type based on subject matter (articles, presentations, videos, etc.). Consider whether subject is best learned by reading, stepping through the material, having it explained, performing exercises, etc. Consider quizzes for knowledge-based courses and exercises for skills-based courses Consider course length and reorganize courses as needed Create draft items Use the system to track progress and work towards a process of elimination Repurposing existing content While you should still consider the instructional goals above, repurposing content can be as easy as: Create a course item library Drag and drop into courses to create drafts Consider whether to post items as files, article, presentations, or videos Create draft items to fill any subject matter gaps Add quizzes and exercises Creating an outline You should plan your courses in an outline that looks like this: Course name(s) Module name(s) Item name(s) and type(s) Quiz or exercise in each module (optional but recommended) If you put your outline in a spreadsheet you can track other details like contributors, number of quiz questions, length targets, etc., it convert at least some of your course development into simple data entry.

oftan8jref?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640

To write a proposal from the customer’s perspective requires not only responding to the RFP, but also understanding how the customer will evaluate your response. How will they read it? Will they read it, or will they simply score it per their evaluation criteria? And if they do score it, what is their process? If the customer has a formal RFP evaluation process, like they do with government proposals, the RFP evaluation criteria can give you clues about their process. Are the evaluation criteria objective or subjective? Does the evaluation criteria specify point scoring? Or are they assessing strengths and weaknesses without a numerical score? These questions are where you start before you ask yourself the really important questions about how the customer will evaluate the RFP responses: What do they need to see to give a maximum score? What do they need to justify the score they give you? What will they put on their evaluation forms? Where will they find what they need in your proposal? A sample of commonly used RFP evaluation criteria See also: Proposal Software Too often people fill their proposals with the things about themselves that they think sound good, hoping the customer will take action on them. Only that’s not what the customer needs to complete their RFP evaluation or even what they really care about. Sometimes companies do a little better and fill their proposals with beneficial sounding claims. But not all benefits translate into things that can be scored. If the customer likes your offer and wants to make an award to you, what words do they need to justify their decision? That is what you need to put in your proposal. And the RFP will give you clues as to what those words are. You must carefully parse the language of the evaluation criteria. How are the criteria grouped? Will it be treated as one bid item, or a bunch of specific items? How will they be labelled? What will they be giving credit for? Then ask yourself how can you organize and word your proposal so you can get the maximum score. Everything that you know about the customer, the opportunity, the competitive environment, and your own company and offering must be aligned with their scoring methods for it to impact whether you win or lose. And outside of things necessary to achieve RFP compliance, if it doesn’t impact your score, it’s probably not worth saying. If you want to say something, say it in a way that will make it onto their scoring justification forms. If you put saying things your way ahead of saying things the way the customer needs them said to process their evaluation, you will likely end up with a brilliantly eloquent proposal that loses. Along the way, you will make many discoveries, which could include things like: Will the customer be able to compare apples to apples? Will they be more focused on strict RFP compliance or have they given themselves room to use their judgment? What does the customer think is important? Price always matters, but how much in this case? Are they concerned about risk? You may also be able to detect whether the RFP is wired for someone else, like the incumbent. But don’t fool yourself. All RFPs can look wired and they almost never really are. Don’t just treat this as an exercise in presentation. There are strategic implications as well. What do you need to emphasize in order to win? What does your offering need to do or be? What strategies do you need to employ in your proposal to outscore your competitors? For formal evaluations, great proposal writing is not about finding the magic words that will hypnotize the evaluator. Instead, great proposal writing is about translating what you are offering into what the customer needs for their evaluation process in a way that maximizes your score. Everything about the pre-RFP phase of pursuit and everything that goes into your proposal needs to be done with achieving this goal in mind.

monthly_2017_02/589c9d3a16fe8_Compliancematrixtemplate_xlsx.4dada9633dad5a7d8399bb4dfb0cf97d

monthly_2017_02/5894cf52339fd_Exercise-Createacompliancematrix_docx.26487d4c4927c8b8fe03300937893a12

The best way to write a great proposal is to get inside the mind of the evaluator and make it easy for them to reach the desired conclusions. It helps to be able to read the proposal like an evaluator. This can be challenging when you don’t know who the evaluators are. But you can still anticipate what an evaluator has to go through and how they’ll approach looking at your proposal. You might also consider the culture of the customer’s organization and the nature of what they are procuring. The answers to the questions below can vary bid by bid based on these factors. The following questions are intended as a way to consider the customer every time you are writing a proposal, and not as a one-time exercise. See also: Winning Is the evaluator the end user of what is being proposed? How does that impact what they’ll look for in the proposals? What guidance has been given to the evaluator regarding their assessment? Are they free to consider whatever they want or reach their own conclusions? What training have they had? What procurement policies or procedures might apply? How does that impact how they’ll read the proposals? If the evaluator is not technical, when they read a proposal do they want an explanation of the technology or an explanation of why it is the best way to get the results they are looking for? What matters about the technology to the evaluator? What should matter about the technology to them? Is the evaluator primarily concerned with the qualifications of the vendors, or how their qualifications impact their ability to deliver as promised? Will qualifications be evaluated on a pass/fail basis? How will they assess who has more or better qualifications? Will they even try? How does this impact the way you should write about your qualifications? How does the evaluator assess experience? Do they quantify it and look for the vendor who has the most? Or do they look for vendors who explain how they apply their experience to achieving better results? How do they consider relevance? Does project size or complexity matter? Do they check your references? How does this impact the way you should write about your experience? Does the evaluator want you to describe yourself, or do they want to know how those details will provide them with better results? How does this impact how you should present details about yourself? Put how you want them to think about you aside for a moment. Do vendors really matter to them? If so, what will they think matters about the vendors submitting proposals? What do the evaluators need to know about you to reach a decision in your favor? If the evaluator is not the decision maker, what do they have to do to justify their evaluation? What do they need to find in the proposals to accomplish this? What tasks does the evaluator have to perform in order to complete their evaluation? Will they have forms to fill out? Rationales to write? Comparisons to make? Checklists to complete? Scores to assign and calculate? Will the way your proposal is presented make this easier or harder? What is motivating the evaluator to take action and what does that imply? What do they care about? What gives them inspiration? How will what they see in your proposal impact their motivation and the actions they take? What must the evaluator believe to accept your recommendations? Does the proposal have to change their existing beliefs or reinforce them? What does the evaluator fear? How will this impact their assessment? What can you present to avoid having their fears negatively impact how they assess your proposal? Can their fears help you win? What are the evaluator’s aspirations and goals? How does what you are offering fulfill their goals? Can you show them how making a decision in your favor will help them achieve their goals? What if the evaluator can't find something they are looking for? Have you anticipated what they'll need to locate in your proposal to perform their evaluation? Is everything easy to find? Is the evaluator in a hurry? Does the level of detail and the way your proposal is presented support the evaluator’s pace? Will they appreciate how easy evaluating your proposal is, or will it be a time-sink and drudgery that slows them down? How many proposals does the evaluator have to consider? How much attention will they give each one? Will they be motivated to disqualify as many proposals as possible to lighten their load? Does your proposal focus their limited attention on the right things? Must the evaluator reach a decision at all? What alternatives do they have? What should you say to prevent them from selecting one of those alternatives? Does the evaluator trust you? Does what they see reinforce trust or detract from it? Do they see claims or do they see proof? When the evaluator considers price, do they also consider a company’s ability to deliver at that price? Where do they draw the line between wanting the lowest price possible and the risk of nonperformance? How does that impact your pricing and what you say about it in your proposal? When the evaluator considers price, do they also consider value? Are they willing to pay more to get something more? What do they need to justify a decision to pay more to get a better value? Must it be quantified? The evaluator is concerned about risk, because they are always concerned about risk. How do they assess risk? Are they risk tolerant when it comes to innovation? Or are they risk averse? Which risks are they the most (or least) concerned about? What do they consider sufficient risk mitigation to be? How does this translate into how they perceive strengths and weaknesses, and how they justify their decisions? How does the evaluator define strengths and weaknesses? Is it a strength to meet an RFP requirement, or does it have to be something more? Will risk mitigation count as a strength? What about quality improvements? If you have qualifications that exceed the requirements, will they consider that a strength? If the evaluation is conducted based on an assessment of strengths and weaknesses this becomes critical customer awareness to have. Does the evaluator see your proposal as more work or as an opportunity? Is it the means to get something they want or is it just part of their job? Are they thoughtfully considering or just processing your proposal? What can you do in your proposal presentation to change that? If you were the one to evaluate this procurement and you were doing it formally according to the RFP, how would you set up your evaluation forms? How would the forms relate to the instructions and evaluation criteria? Is your proposal optimized to evaluate well when those forms are completed? Will the evaluator start the proposal review with the RFP and look for how the requirements are addressed in the proposal? Or will they start from the proposal and then try to match it up to the RFP? This can change how you present your proposal. If you were the evaluator, and you gave the vendors instructions in the RFP and vendors didn’t follow them, how might you react? How would you assess whether vendors followed the instructions? Would you still be able to perform your evaluation? How hard would you try to evaluate the proposals that didn't follow the instructions? If you are evaluating proposals based on the RFP, but the headings and terminology of the proposals are all different, would that confuse you? How hard do you try to find things that don't match, even if they mean the same thing? If you are keyword searching based on the RFP can you find what you are looking for? If you are the evaluator, how hard will it be to compare the proposals you’ve received from different vendors? Do you compare them to each other, or to the RFP? How should all this impact the way you write and present your proposal? How does it impact the outline, headings, layout, text, and graphics? How does it relate to your strategies for winning? How does it impact the way you articulate things in writing? If your proposal is full of what you want to say, then no matter what great things you have to say about yourself, you may be at a competitive disadvantage to a proposal prepared in a way that matches how the evaluators think. When you sit down to write a great proposal, you must take the information you have to share and present it from the customer’s perspective. Answering the questions above can help you discover your customer’s perspective and present things in the way they need to see them in order to accept your proposal. If you were the evaluator and picking an important vendor, wouldn't you look for someone who thinks the same way you do?

[]

Some organizations seek change and some resist it. Both need to plan and manage change whenever possible. Sometimes change management is addressed explicitly, and sometimes change management techniques are incorporated as part of a project rollout. Contractors who carefully plan and of changes can appear to offor greater value, develop more trust, demonstrate insight, and prove that they are a considerate partner. Change management considerations What is the nature of the change? Why change? Why change now? Is the change a familiar change or an extreme change? Is the impact of the change expected to be minor or major? Can the changes be rolled out in a steady, predictable manner? How much repetition will be necessary for employees to get acclimated to the change? How can you ensure there is a clear understanding of the reasons the change is being implemented? What are the key aspects that you will focus on to ease the transition? How can you involve stakeholders in creating the change so as to help them respond more favorably? How do the changes relate to the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission and goals? Who will be impacted the most by the changes? How can you parcel out complex ideas in such a way that stakeholders can understand and absorb them? How can you diversify the way you package new ideas to encourage stakeholders to pay close attention? How can a sense of stability and a vision be instilled as the change is enacted? How can you incorporate cultural diagnostics to identify conflicts and define factors that can recognize sources of resistance? What are the training needs that are driven by the change? When and how do you plan to implement training procedures during the rollout of the changes? How can you create accountability for stakeholders? What short-term targets can be set to aid in the transition? How can you prioritize change initiatives to avoid change fatigue? Are the resources allocated for implementing the changes sufficient for completion? What risks do you anticipate related to the changes and how do you intend to mitigate them? Will there be any overlap between the current state and the changed state? Is it possible to roll back the changes once implemented? How will you monitor status and progress during the rollout of changes? How will status and progress be communicated to stakeholders? How much notice or preparation time will be given to stakeholders prior to changes? How will resource requirements change before, during, and after the changes? How long will it take to realize the anticipated benefits of the change?

If you don’t sell a commodity, starting unprepared to win at RFP release is an organizational failure. You’ve missed your chance to develop an information advantage and are about to spend time and money on a proposal that you (by definition) aren't prepared to win. It is an organizational failure because it has failed at resourcing, planning, prioritization, and ROI calculation. Now that I’ve said that, let’s talk about starting at RFP release and winning anyway. Because it happens. If you want to achieve a high win rate, you won’t let it happen. Moving from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate increases your revenue by 50% with the same number of leads. You won't increase your win rate by bidding more unprepared bids. But for many reasons, sometimes you find yourself bidding even though you're unprepared. Sometimes it even makes sense to do so. Maybe. Just maybe. See also: Dealing with Adversity Winning at RFP release can be like playing a game. How do you get the top score? Can you do a better job of executing a high scoring proposal than other companies who are starting with an information advantage and better prepared? The answer is probably not. But maybe. Just maybe... Achieving the maximum score without any real customer insight involves optimizing the proposal around the evaluation criteria and process. It’s about organizing your proposal and using the right words to score well. It’s easy to fall into the "say anything to win" trap, because words are all you’ve got to work with when you lack insight. It helps to understand the specific customer’s evaluation process. If the customer is scoring you based on “strengths,” you really need to know what they consider a “strength.” Is it a feature or qualification that fulfills an RFP requirement? Or is it something that goes beyond the requirements? Is it just something that appeals to them? Does it have to be a differentiator? Different customers define the term differently. But if you’re starting at RFP release, you probably don’t know. You have to guess. You may also have to resort to word games when designing your offering. Designing your offering by writing about it is bad engineering and can be a terrible mistake. When designing your offering, you are going to have to consider trade-offs. If you don’t know what the customer’s preferences are, you’re just going to have to guess. Or you may have to weasel-word it. You might have to make the wording a little fuzzy to avoid committing so you can offer the customer both sides of a trade-off while appearing to be flexible and willing to partner with them. It's bad ethics and can set your company up to ruin its past performance, but if the customer likes your positioning more than they dislike your lack of insight and detail it might work. Not consistently or reliably. Not as a standard practice. But maybe. Maybe just this once... Taking a chance at winning vs. taking a chance at submitting In proposals, it is better to take risks and be decisive than it is to try to be everything to everybody. Your win rate will come down to how good your guesses are. A proposal that is everything to everybody will score below a proposal that is exceptional and insightful every time. It is better to risk losing by being exceptional and wrong than it is to be merely satisfactory and acceptable. Satisfactory proposals only win when they are the only one submitted or their price is lower. As a standard practice, it is a recipe for declining profit margins. It is better to risk losing by being exceptional. The odds of winning may even be higher because you offer something special. If you guess what they want well you can appear insightful. And if you guess wrong, well the odds were against you winning anyway. And while it's rare, sometimes a better prepared competitor will produce a substandard proposal, even though they had the insight to create an extraordinary one. They have to get their insight on paper. If they don't you have a chance to appear more insightful, whether you really are or not. If you find yourself starting at RFP release, seek differentiators that correspond to the evaluation criteria and an offering design that differentiates by taking risks to be categorically better than simply meeting the RFP requirements. You can't beat a better prepared competitor by trying to be a little better than the unprepared company you really are. Take risks to offer substance instead of weasel-wording. Take a stand and offer something great without worrying whether they'll like it or not. Guessing at how to be great has better odds of winning than reliably being ordinary. Be the stranger that people want to meet If you are starting at RFP release, the customer probably doesn’t know or trust you. If you are meek, compliant, and ordinary you can only win on price. But if your proposal inspires the customer with aspirations that turn out to match theirs, while also being compliant, qualified, competent, and substantiated, they might just pick you over someone else they already know who submitted an ordinary proposal. Make sure your exception doesn't become a routine A word-game playing weasel guessing at who they should become is not the company you want to be. But it could be what you have to do to win today. Who will you be tomorrow?

monthly_2017_05/59137997b9354_Exercise-Createacompliancematrix_docx.263fead9e57f72ca62b298b0af664e6f

Normally I think that even looking at a past proposal is asking for trouble. You don’t need that kind of pain. You made mistakes you don’t even know about. A lot of them. In fact, based on what we see when we review proposals for companies, there were a lot of problems in them. Even the proposals that won. Why open those wounds? Two words: win rate. A small increase in win rate is worth a large investment. Do the math. But what should you do to improve your win rate? Looking at your proposals to see what’s actually getting to the customer and assessing what that says about the organization that created it is a good place to start. It’s objective. The customer does not see your intent. Only what you submit. So here are 11 examples of the kinds of things we learn when we look at previous proposals for companies: Do your writers focus on the RFP or their own ideas? Do they show insight that goes beyond the RFP? Do your proposals effectively present your differentiators? Are they writing around the fact that they didn’t have the input they needed? Do they have bad writing habits? Does the organization show they were writing according to a plan or were they making it up as they went along? Is writing from the customer’s perspective institutionalized? Is writing to optimize the evaluation score institutionalized? Were reviews effective? Did the team run out of time? Is visual communication an afterthought? And for each item above, here is where you can invest to improve your win rate: See also: Proposal quality validation Focus on RFP compliance first, but don’t stop there. Insight beyond the RFP is an important quality indicator, since it indicates whether your proposals demonstrate an information advantage. If you want your proposals to show insight, you have to supply that insight to your writers. In order to be the best, you must be different in all the right ways. Differentiators matter. They must be a priority. Yet they are often an afterthought. Instead, identifying and articulating them should be the focus of the entire pursuit. You can’t write from the customer’s perspective if you don’t know what that is. Fluff and unsubstantiated claims do more harm than good. You must gather the right data, assess it effectively, and deliver it to the proposal writers at the right and in the right format for it to impact the proposal. Does your organization tend to write in passive voice? Does it tend to make unsubstantiated claims? Does it avoid the issues? Does it speak with the right level of formality or informality? Should any bad habits be fixed by training proposal participants or through back-end editing? Are your reviewers trained to catch bad habits when they reappear? Implement an effective proposal content planning methodology. It helps to integrate it with developing the quality criteria for validating the quality of your proposals. If your proposals describe your company and your offering, you’ve got a problem. Your proposals are probably written from your perspective instead of the customer’s. This is a major training issue. It even has the potential to impact your corporate culture, because once people start considering the customer’s perspective during proposal writing, it tends to spread. And that’s a good thing. If the customer follows a formal evaluation process, then your proposal is more likely to be scored than read. That means writing your proposal to maximize its score can be more important than maximizing it to read well. This requires training proposal contributors to organize and write your proposals according to a different set of priorities. It also requires understanding your customer’s evaluation process in detail. If problems are slipping past your reviewers, you’ve got process and/or training problems. Ineffective reviews can also introduce problems, and sometimes that’s the explanation for problems you see in the proposal. An ineffective review process can be worse than not having a review at all. If you don’t have a written definition of proposal and criteria for use in performing the reviews, there’s a good chance your review process needs improvement. Changing the review process often means retraining the highly experience senior staff who often participate in the reviews. If your proposal team ran out of time on a bid it can be understandable. If they run out of time on a significant portion of your bids, your win rate is likely suffering and it’s probably worth improving your process and/or resource allocation in order to improve. Is the message built around the graphics, or were the graphics tacked on at the end? Graphics can be tremendously effective, but only if they are effectively built into the proposal. PropLIBRARY Subscribers can access our methodologies for Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation. They are two of the core methodologies for the MustWin Process that is documented within PropLIBRARY. If you are interested in having an experienced person outside your company review your proposals, here is how to contact us.

We're turning PropLIBRARY into a platform for corporate-wide continuous win rate improvement. We're starting by adding three days' worth of online training to our single user subscriptions and creating a new Advanced Subscription that will have a week's worth of online training. Guess what we're doing for our Corporate Subscriptions... Currently a Corporate Subscription provides access for up to 100 people. All of them will also get the same week of online training we're providing for our Advanced Subscription customers. Here's a list of topics that training includes. One of our goals is to provide a cost-effective way to train everyone in your organization. But we're doing it in a way that is customizable Do you have business-line considerations that should be part of a bid/no bid determination? Special charge code procedures? Specific people to notify when RFPs are received? They can all be incorporated into the training so that your staff learn everything they need to know the way they need to know it. But because it's online training, when things change you can easily update the training. If you conduct a lessons learned review and discover that something slipped through a review, you can update your reviewer training to improve things in the future. This transforms PropLIBRARY into a platform for organizational change --- true continuous improvement of your win rate. And because we have an efficient content management system as a baseline to work from, we can create customized online training and roll it out to everyone who needs it at a cost that's an order of magnitude less than it has traditionally cost. Let's talk prices and return on investment A PropLIBRARY Corporate Subscription currently costs $3,000/yr. That price is going up to $5,000/yr when we release our Advance Subscription training. If you purchase a Corporate Subscription before then, you save $2,000/yr. Customization costs can vary, but we think customization for 80% of companies will cost below $15,000. The net is that a week's worth of customized business development and proposal training for 100 people can cost only $180 a person. What will the impact be on your win rate of that level of training continuously updated and provided to all your staff? We're creating the platform you need to revolutionize the way your organization wins business. We're creating something that will give you a precious competitive advantage against other bidders. Ordering is easy and electronic You can place a Corporate Subscription in your cart and checkout using PayPal and a company credit cart. But you don't have to do it that way. We have other options. And you probably want to discuss it first and see a demonstration. We want to show it to you. We're excited about how it's turning out. Click here to grab a timeslot and we'll set up an online meeting. Just do it before we finish releasing everything and raise the prices.

im969s17bj?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640

Getting everyone on the same pageWhen people working on proposals are pulled in multiple directions and all have different goals and different approaches to achieving them, you’re not going to maximize your win rate. Getting everyone on the same page involves more than defining roles and responsibilities, steps in the process, and having good assignment management. It requires having expectation management throughout the process. It requires that all these things be integrated into the process so that they are inherent in the way things work. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: Defining roles functionally Roles and responsibilities Developing an information advantage See also: Introduction You must be extremely good to compete on price and maintain a decent profit margin. You can’t maximize your win rate by bidding with only the same RFP everyone else has to guide you. To maximize your win rate, you must bid every pursuit with an information advantage, and you must institutionalize how you develop an information advantage if you want to be able to do it consistently. But it takes more than simply fishing for customer, opportunity, and competitive insight. You must seek the information that the proposal writers will need to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective. The reason you need to bring structure to the pre-RFP pursuit is to enable the people gathering intel to anticipate the needs of the proposal writers and bring the insight required to write from the customer’s perspective to the proposal. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: How information flows through the process to become what you need to win Introduction to Readiness Reviews Discovering and building your proposal around what it will take to winWhile it’s hard to believe, most bids are submitted by companies that never explicitly asked themselves what it will take to win. If you bring it up, they will never admit not knowing. But you’ll catch them making up an answer on the spot. You can’t build a proposal around what it will take to win unless you can articulate it. While there are similarities, every bid is different because every customer has different preferences and different ways of making decisions. You can’t articulate what it will take to win if you haven’t discovered it. But if you have, you’re not done. You must turn your insight into what it will take to win into criteria that can be used to assess proposal quality. You must use what it will take to win to guide proposal development and measure its quality during reviews. When you do this, you shift your efforts from trying really hard to pull out a win at the tail end of the process to making sure a win is within reach before you even start. The result is that you can confidently ensure that everything you do during proposal development is based on what it will take to win. Anything else is just gambling. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: What it will take to win Assessing what it will take to win Creating your "what it will take to win" list 90 things that someone needs to do to win and who is usually responsible Defining proposal quality and enabling writers to achieve itWhile it’s hard to believe, most companies do not have a definition, written or otherwise, of proposal quality. Without it, they default to “I know it when I see it,” which instead of achieving quality proposals, achieves the opposite. This is not only because it is an arbitrary measure, and quality should not be arbitrary, it’s also because it's a strictly a back-end measure. You don’t find out whether you have a quality proposal until after it’s produced. You can’t validate proposal quality or design quality in from the beginning in this environment. The only way to design quality in is to define proposal quality and ensure the writers are working with the same criteria that the reviewers will use at the back end. When you implement a review process that does this, you’ll find that the review to validate the quality criteria becomes more important than the review of the draft. Not only with this one switch will radically change how you do proposals, but it will change your pre-proposal process and corporate culture as well. It will change them for the better and take your win rate to a much higher level. It’s the difference between winning by chance and winning consistently and deliberately. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: Defining proposal quality Introduction to Proposal Quality Validation 60 proposal quality considerations for 6 key topics The MustWin Process enables you to achieve all four of these goalsThe MustWin Process was designed to achieve each of these goals, while guiding you through all of the activities required to win your pursuits. It makes it easier to get everyone on the same page with the same expectations, while creating an unbroken flow of information that discovers what it will take to win and builds the proposal around it. The MustWin Process defines proposal quality so that proposal writers can design it into the proposal as well as enabling reviewers to validate proposal quality. The result is that the MustWin Process maximizes your win rate, manages expectations, and improves efficiency while reducing risk.

So here's our plan for world conquest. First we developed software that lets us repurpose our huge content library as online courses, complete with videos, quizzes, exercises, transcripts, and more. Next we're going to develop about a week's work of training. The basic stuff needed to implement our recommendations will be included with a regular PropLIBRARY Subscription. Additional courses that explain how to customize our approaches, adapt them, or use them for organizational development will be part of an Advanced PropLIBRARY Subscription. Now we just have to produce dozens of hours of training. Luckily 80-90% of the material is already done. But that last 10-20% is time consuming, since it involves tasks like video production. A peek inside our production lab Instead of just doing this development in isolation until we're ready to release them all in one big swoop, we're going to give you a peek at our production lab. The list below contains the titles we have planned and their status. It's all subject to change, because when we're developing a course, if we think of a better way to present the material, we're going to take the time to rework our content instead of working to the calendar. Titles may be changed, merged, or dropped. We also might take things out of sequence if it speeds up production. So you can think of these as targets, but not promises. Most of the titles below are an hour in length. A few will be more like one and a half hours. A couple will intentionally be a half-hour or less. The Advanced titles may get skipped until the end. Product Plans But taken as a whole, there's a ton of training coming. It's lot of value that we've chosen to add to our subscriptions instead of making it a separate product. Regular PropLIBRARY Subscriptions will be $495. Advanced PropLIBRARY Subscriptions will be $695. If you are a PropLIBRARY Subscriber the day we launch the Advanced Subscription, you'll get automatically upgraded from Regular to Advanced, saving $200. As each course is completed, we'll go ahead and release it and our current subscribers will get immediate access. In some cases, we might release drafts instead of waiting until the final piece is produced. Let's chat about it If you'd like to chat about what we're up to, create training to be hosted on our platform, or discuss how this is all just the first step to turning PropLIBRARY into an amazing corporate win rate improvement tool, you can get on our calendar here. January Introduction to the MustWin Process. A quick orientation. We're working on this one right now. How the MustWin Process works. A more detailed roadmap. This one is next. Proposal startup and logistics. While first in sequence, this topic may get produced last in this group. Kickoff meeting options (Advanced) Creating a compliance matrix. This is where we'll start since it's more important and useful to more people and we want a complete set of guidance for planning the content of your proposal to be our first major release. Advanced compliance matrices (Advanced) Creating a proposal outline Introduction to Proposal Content Planning Implementation options (Advanced) Guiding writers (Advanced) What should go into your Content Plans? Boilerplate and re-use (Advanced) Bid strategies and proposal themes February Functional Roles and Responsibilities Resource allocation and staffing (Advanced) Introduction to the proposal writing process How to write for proposals What to do when you get a proposal assignment Proposal writing from the customer's perspective March Introduction to Proposal Quality Validation Defining Proposal Quality Implementing Proposal Quality Validation (Advanced) Performing Proposal Quality Validation Proposal sight reading Proposal completion Post submission April Pre-RFP pursuit Pre-RFP process design (Advanced) Performing Readiness Reviews Customizing Readiness Reviews (Advanced) Discovering what it will take to win Offering design Bid/No bid decisions

Thanks for another year of double-digit growth. We had over half a million visitors in 2016 and served over a million page views, with a 25% growth in new users. Visitors from social media about doubled. Thank you for all the social media reposts and referrals that made that growth happen. And another thanks for the many fascinating discussions it made possible and the inspiration it provoked. In case you missed any of them, here are the 10 most popular items we published last year: Proposal recipes for inspiration Figuring out what to say in your proposals 8 things great proposal writers do differently Proposal management and organizational development How to win in writing Introduction to The MustWin Process Attention Executives: How do you know if someone is ready to be a proposal manager? This bidding strategy can destroy your company before you realize it Why we don’t recommend color team proposal reviews 44 things you might want from your Proposal Manager In 2017 we will be rolling out new online courses and content faster than ever!

Designing quality into a proposal means building a process in which defects aren't created. Designing quality in doesn't just mean making sure you get it right the first time, it means eliminating the possibility of defects. It is a very different approach from creating a draft and then inspecting it. Most existing proposal processes are based on creating a draft, then inspecting it, then re-doing it as needed. Instead of a proposal designed to win, this model results in fixes applied to fixes that only end when the deadline is reached. Creating a proposal process that designs quality in means following a different process and having very different expectations. Before we can jump into how to do it, we have to address what a proposal defect is If we define proposal quality as reflecting what it will take to win, a defect is something that runs counter to what it will take to win. The magnitude of the defect is directly proportionate to how it impacts what it will take to win. Thus, while you might consider a single typo to be a defect it is, in all likelihood, an inconsequential one. However, failing to comply with the RFP requirements, ignoring the evaluation criteria, or scoping the offering wrong and blowing the price are defects that can ensure a loss. The trick is to be able to define what it will take to win. For proposals, designing quality in means building a process that ensures we deliver proposals that reflect what it will take to win. You should note that this does not ensure a win. That is not up to us, it is up to the customer, and it occurs in an unpredictable future. What you can do as a company is define what you think it will take to win, and confidently deliver that. See also: Production Designing quality into a proposal starts with how you design your offering Building a proposal around what it will take to win and doing that without defects means you need to know what you want to offer before you start writing. Offering design is an engineering process, and while it will require specifications to be documented, designing your offering should not be done by writing about it. But you may select any engineering design methodology that fits the nature of what you offer. The goal of offering design is to ensure that what you intend to offer fulfills what it will take to win before you create a narrative draft of the proposal based on it. You should validate your offering design through whatever testing, reviews, approvals, or stakeholder participation is necessary. As an example, an offering design that is too expensive to win, non-compliant, or doesn’t reflect the evaluation criteria would fail this validation and should never make it into the proposal. Zero time should be spent writing about it. Before you can validate your offering design, you need to be able to articulate what it will take to win in the form of proposal quality criteria. To perform the validation, you need to establish that each criterion related to what it will take to win has been fulfilled. The good news is that much of this can be checklist simple. Thinking things through instead of writing and re-writing While the offering is being designed, you should also be designing the proposal, with a separate plan for the proposal content that identifies what you need to say and how you need to say it. This plan should address the structure of the proposal and how you should present the details of your offering. It should explain to proposal writers how to position things against the evaluation criteria, competitive environment, and what you know about the customer. It should explain what points need to be made and how to incorporate your bid strategies and differentiators. The Proposal Content Plan should also be approved before turning it into a narrative. Designing quality into the proposal means having thought through the offering and its presentation before you create a narrative draft. This is the only way to create a draft that is without defects, and fully incorporates what it will take to win. Indecision works against your ability to design quality in During proposal creation you will face many decisions that need to be made. To design quality in, decisions need to be validated or approved as they are made. Designing quality in requires a series of validations and approvals with the key stakeholders and decision makers instead of waiting for milestones like drafts. Creating a draft for someone to inspect means you’ve fallen back on the old model and are not designing quality in from the beginning. The problem with the old model is that when the review and validation of decision waits for a draft, changing the decision requires an entire draft production cycle. This is not only time consuming against a deadline, but it tends to result in the next draft being a kludge instead of something created with the final decision in mind. Designing quality in means making sure you have made the right decision, and then writing it into the proposal. Poor corporate decision making is the real reason companies stick with the old model of inspection and repair. They can’t decide an issue, so they delay until a draft is produced. A better approach is to improve your organization's ability to make decisions so that quality can be designed in. If you don’t do this, you are unlikely to be competitive against an organization that does. Don't fall back on old habits When you design your offering separately from writing about it, design your proposal content before you create narrative, and validate decisions as you go along, you have the right foundation for designing quality into your proposals. If you catch yourself correcting the message in writing, then you failed to think it through before writing started and have fallen back on the old model of writing and correcting. The new model is not based on correction at all. It is based on collaboration. Proposal writing, decisions, and validation are all one collaborative process. Reviewers are part of this collaboration and not occasional drive by correction police. Don’t fear running out of time Regarding time management, note that designing quality in takes less time than preparation, inspection, and rework. The types and amount of information that need to be gathered to win a proposal are the same with either model. The time it takes to make decisions is the same with either model. The amount of review time is the same. However, the amount of work product created and wasted effort is less when you design quality in. In addition, there is less risk and likelihood of production costs spiraling out of control. The most important consideration is the impact on your probability of winning. Which would you rather submit, a proposal that was designed to win, or a proposal that consists of fixes applied to fixes until the clock ran out? Designing quality in through continuous validation enables much better time management than having one or more back-end reviews. Better time management leads to a better proposal, higher win rate, and being more competitive than companies that follow the old model of write and fix.