Carl Dickson

It’s hard to get an early start on a proposal, and not just because you don’t know when the RFP will be released. You often get advance notice of RFP releases. When the pursuit is a recompete, you can anticipate the release years in advance. If it's the result of a sources sought notice, request for information (RFI), customer forecast, or other announcement, you may get a notice a month or so in advance. So what do you do? With the time you have available, how can you maximize your win probability? How to get started when you have ample advance notice Companies often research pursuits like they are fishing. They see what they can find out. Sometimes they get some bites, but often all they get are nibbles and catch nothing. This tends to result in intel full of generalities and broad concepts that may have little, and sometimes no, impact on what gets written in the proposal. The entire sales process should be about closing the sale. In effect, this means the entire sales process is about proposal writing. Only instead of the act of proposal writing, it’s about preparing to be able to write the winning proposal. Your business development staff may not participate in proposal writing. But they play a critical role in informing proposal writing, and that has a major impact on the win or loss. Great proposal writing doesn’t fabricate the message and the proof points out of nothing. It requires information about what messages matter to the customer and the details to substantiate those messages. What defines “What it will take to win?” for a given pursuit? It shouldn’t be things your proposal writer just made up based on what they saw in the same RFP all of your competitors have. Proposal writers merely help articulate your messages based on the information you provide. Closing your leads with a winning proposal requires your lead generation and pursuit staff to deliver an information advantage to your proposal writers. But what information is that? And where can you get it? Winning a pursuit starts with research. And that research starts by asking the right questions. Those questions should form the basis of your pre-proposal pursuit process. When we created the MustWin Process, we created Readiness Reviews to assess your progress toward answering those questions, to ensure that you develop an information advantage sufficient for winning. When we moved that process online and created MustWin Now, we made it even easier to collect the answers and turn them into something that can drop right into the proposal. How to get started when you have a little advance notice See also: Proposal Startup Sometimes you are lucky to get a month or two’s notice of an opportunity to bid. It’s probably too late to get deep intel about the customer or the opportunity. Maybe you can scope out the competition, but you probably won’t be able to do a very deep assessment, or even identify all of the players. You may need to jump right into finding potential teaming partners, with limited intel and opportunities. You have very little time for research and the customer is far less likely to share anything of substance with you that they don’t share with everyone bidding. You need to focus more on what matters about the information you have. What matters about it that could impact what you have to say: • In the technical proposal? • In the management proposal? • About your staff? • About your experience? • About your qualifications? Don’t drill all the way down to everything you should say. Don’t try to write the sections. You can’t finish the wording of the proposal until you have the wording of the RFP. But you can figure out things that matter about each of these sections and determine how you should position against what matters to the customer. This will be a huge accelerator when proposal writing starts and will provide the information the proposal writers need to turn a simple compliant response into a compliant response that will be better than your competitors. How to get started with no advance notice When you start the proposal at RFP, you have to work with the information you already have. But what is that? And how many people can contribute to it? This is another place where you need to ask the right questions. Most of them won’t get answered, because you don’t have time for research. But you still need to ask. However, those question are a bit different from when you are starting with advance notice. You need to ask questions that: Don’t require research. They should be questions about what you know instead of what you can find out. Are specific to the proposal. These are things like what past performance references should you use, what staff will be bid, who is on the team, etc. You also need to know what matters about the answers. Think in terms of the “So what?” test. If you have the name of the project manager you intend to bid, so what? What matters about having that person to the customer? One of the ways we enhanced the MustWin Process after we launched it was to add Proposal Input Forms. We created them by modifying our Readiness Review questions to meet the needs described above. How to turn what you know into a winning proposal What do you do with this information once you’ve gathered it? You shouldn’t assume that proposal writers will be able to read it, assess it, and remember to incorporate it everywhere it can have a positive impact while writing a response to all the RFP requirements. What you should do is design things so that the answers drop right into your proposal content plan. Instead of an assignment to write whatever should go under a heading, you should create a proposal content plan that guides proposal writers to use the information you’ve gathered. You can think of proposal writing as coming in two parts. The response and what matters about it. Your content plan should contain guidance like: Address the requirements in section... Make sure you emphasize… [this thing that matters to the customer] Explain how our approach to… will result in… [this thing that matters to the customer] Demonstrate how the way we… addresses… [this issue that matters to the customer] Even better, you can reverse them to guide your proposal writers to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective. Your proposal writers can come up with the words, if you give them the prompts in a form that they can use like a checklist to make sure they don’t overlook anything. That is what a proposal content plan does for you. And by answering the right questions to surface what matters, you’ll have more awareness of how to write sentences like these than you would have if you don’t itemize what you know. Or said another way, your win probability will go way up because you’ll be better using what you know in ways that make your proposals matter more to your customers. By moving the proposal process online, what we’ve done with MustWin Now enables you to not only easily answer the questions and collect the answers, but also to allocate those answers to the proposal outline. In fact, we’ve added a tool that enables you to turn your answers into proposal win strategies and themes, and then allocate those to the proposal outline and then automatically generate a proposal content plan. As soon as the cross-referencing is done, you have a content plan. And you can then click through to each section and add even more guidance. The result is that your proposal writers start creating the narrative proposal with everything they need to write a great proposal on the very first draft.

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When you subtract the companies that don’t bother writing down their strategic plans and the companies that write them down but leave them sitting on a shelf, what you have left are the companies that usually win. Having an effective strategic plan won’t guarantee that you win, but it does mean that you will be more focused, better thought through, and as a result the odds will skew in your favor. Over the long run, having the odds in your favor leads to consistent growth. It's not a question of whether you think strategically, but when you think strategically that makes the difference. If you only think about your strategic plan once a year, it is more likely to sit on shelf. It is also more likely to devolve into just being a budgeting exercise that sets the target numbers for the year. Everything else is given lip service or ignored until next year. Strategy becomes defined as a once a year activity, and never makes it into the corporate culture. If you only think about strategy at the beginning of your bids, you are more likely to lose your corporate identity. Doing this makes strategy about your bids instead of long term positioning. It also makes the strategy change from bid to bid. The company becomes about being whatever it will take to win the next bid. It also makes bidding more opportunistic because there is no filter or criteria to determine which bids to pursue, other than the whim of the moment. The companies that win through strategy make thinking strategically part of everyday life for their staff. And the best part is that it really doesn’t take any more work than creating a strategic plan once a year. It can become part of your culture and the way your company does things. It’s really the only way to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are two alternative approaches that we’ve used to help companies become more strategic: See also: Strategic planning Update monthly instead of annually. Instead of creating a whole new strategic plan once a year, try breaking it down into twelve topics. Then just do one topic a month. We’ve guided companies through implementing this approach. Each month the company is thinking about a different topic related to their strategic plan. They have a whole month to consider and document it, and it’s easier to work into their schedules than doing the whole plan at one time. The way we do this is to first finalize the twelve topics and what they need to include. Then each month, we facilitate a meeting at the beginning of the month to make sure everyone understands the issues and then create assignments. We hold a review in the middle of the month to ensure the strategies are the right strategies, and we set a deadline at the end of the month to complete the assignments. It only requires about two hours of our time each month, but the results transform a company into one that is constantly thinking strategically. The long term positive impact this has had on our customers far exceeds the impact when we win a proposal for them. It’s also a concept that companies can easily implement themselves. But there is value in having an outside facilitator and in having an outsider asking difficult questions and challenging you to improve your strategies. Update quarterly instead of annually. We have a few customers that like to hold quarterly off-site management meetings and have asked us to be involved. If we divide the strategic plan into four chapters, we can create homework assignments for people to complete in between the meetings. At the quarterly meetings we review the updates and discuss their implementation. It’s not as constantly in-your-face as doing it monthly, but it’s better than once a year and works well for collaborative companies that like to shut down for a day each quarter and think about the big picture. It helps to turn your strategic planning document into tools that people use to facilitate execution. If you define strategic targets, then supplement the explanation of why those are your targets with a checklist that turns them into bid criteria. If you want the company positioned in certain ways, give them sample themes to use in your proposals and marketing collateral. This will help bridge the gap between strategy and performance. It will also turn the strategic plan into an asset that makes it easier for people to do their jobs. This is ultimately the best way to ensure that it doesn’t sit on a shelf and actually gets implemented. When you conduct strategic planning on a more regular basis, have regular assignments, and turn the document into a tool, you subtly change the culture of the company. What, where, and how people pursue bids becomes more focused. The company develops an identity. People know how to position the company in various circumstances and do it more consistently. More people spend more time thinking about strategic issues. The result is that instead of making it up as you go along to win the next bid, the company gets into the right position with a more focused message that is better supported. That is how you become a company that wins through strategy.

Companies misdiagnose their problems all the time. They often see a problem, they try to fix it, and end up struggling because they don't realize they are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause. Sometimes the real cause goes all the way back to their approach, or lack thereof, to strategic planning. It's easy to get caught up in the daily routine of doing what seems to make sense in the moment, following along with what you think should be done and what you see other people doing. The problem with this is that why you do things is more important than what you do. If your attention just goes from problem to problem, you may never get to the strategic issues that are causing all the problems. And if you don't even recognize the flawed strategies at the root of your problems, then when your fate comes to be you may have no reason why it turned out that way. To avoid these horrible fates, it's not enough to create a strategic plan once a year that sits on a shelf. It has to be an effective plan that people use like a tool. See also: Strategic Planning Examples of how ineffective strategic planning can doom you to a horrible fate When companies don't do effective strategic planning, they: Become the kind of company that bids anything. One of the things a strategic plan should do for you is provide the criteria that define what the company wants to bid. If you are bidding anything, it’s because there is nothing telling you not to. Or more accurately, nothing telling you what criteria an opportunity must fulfill, in order to be worth pursuing. Without specific criteria that are used like a filter, companies often behave as if they are incentivized to bid everything they find. The reality is that they never reach their full potential because their experience, staffing, resources, and qualifications end up being a random collection that was chosen for them, instead of a strategically chosen collection that positions them for market dominance. End up with no differentiators. What strategic planning does is define the differentiators the company should develop in order to achieve its market goals, and provide new business targets that will enable it to develop and reinforce those differentiators. When everybody is free to define the company’s identity to be whatever they think will win each new proposal, the result is that every bid carries a different message and the company's growth is directionless. By being everything to everybody, they end up being nothing special. Can't come up with good themes for their proposals. Most proposal teams start from scratch trying to figure out their message, when they should be starting from a playbook called a strategic plan. They should be referring to the strategic plan for descriptions of how the company should be positioned in various circumstances and then applying that to their proposals. Another outcome when companies don't do this is that their messaging depends on who wrote the proposal. Don’t create any barriers to entry for competitors. When you have a wide variety of customers and business lines, you end up with no real depth and no barriers to entry that would prevent other companies from competing with you. By strategically developing and reinforcing your differentiators, you increase the level of difficulty for other companies to steal your customers and prevent your growth. Run out of money chasing low quality leads. If you don’t strategically apply a filter to what you bid, then it’s easy to wake up and realize you have no budget left to pursue more leads, because you wasted it all chasing low-hanging fruit that turned out to be the most competitive kind. Now you have no wins, and no budget to go after better leads. You end up having to go after new leads in panic while pinching pennies instead of being in an advantageous position to beat your competitors. Graduate their size standards without having a reason for companies to continue to team with them. Companies often realize that they need to be strategic when they are about to exceed their small business size standard. Once they cross that line, they need to have strong reasons for companies to team with them. But those reasons (customer relationships, technical capabilities, infrastructure, etc.) take time to develop and by then it’s usually too late. Get stuck with the work more strategic companies avoid. Strategic companies have higher win rates. Opportunistic companies usually lose when they compete with them. What this really means is that the bids the opportunistic companies usually win are the ones that the strategic companies didn’t want. This usually translates into high risk and low margins. Opportunistic companies have more risk, lower win rates, and are less profitable than strategic companies as a result. Become limited to competing on price. If you don’t have a competitive advantage or a strong value proposition, all you can do is compete on price. If you are Walmart, you can grow a business through high volume and low margins. If you are competing against Walmart, then good luck. However, your overhead is too high. You aren’t Walmart. Suffer from overhead rates that creep higher and higher. One of the things strategic planning does for you over time is create economies of scale that help to keep your overhead down. When you are spread out with lots of different customers, lots of different business lines, and no economies of scale, your overhead will creep up over time making it more and more difficult to compete on price. Miss positive trends and end up stuck in negative ones. A key part of strategic planning is choosing where to go next. Opportunistic bidding is about ending up some place that looks comfortable (but never is). Opportunistic bidding results in jumping on trends that are fading. A trend that is fading is a declining market. When you go from one to the next, it makes it even harder to break away from opportunistic bidding and become strategic. Let their contracts define them, instead of defining themselves to attract more contracts. Whatever contracts you win define the composition of your company's staff, its capabilities, and its references. Without a strategic plan, a few years down the road you'll have a random collection of projects. Who knows what company you will be? And while you may think you're building qualifications for future bids, the reality is you're building a weak foundation that won't support what you want to build and are more likely to end up with a pile of rubble than a palace. Occasionally get lucky, convince themselves that they’re smarter than they are, and never are able to repeat it. Sometimes an opportunistic company shows up when a customer is ready for a change and gets lucky. This makes it easy to convince themselves that what they are doing is working and that their insight is so good they don’t need formal strategic planning. They win just enough business to get by to convince themselves of how smart they are and to reinforce their bad habits. But they don’t prosper and they don’t have the strength to weather bad business cycles. When budgets are rising they can get by. When budgets are being reduced, they are the first to wither. Realizing a better fate requires more than a quick fix The biggest problem with the horrible fates that await companies that don't do effective strategic planning is that the only cure is to stop how you are bidding now and bid strategically. This can be very disruptive and it's hard to get your staff who have been trained into bad habits to go along with it. It can even result in a drop in business for a year or two while you make the investments needed to be a strategic company in the future. When companies start to realize that they've grown like weeds and it's holding them back, they often try to implement better bid decisions. The problem is that better bid decisions aren't something you can just do. They are one of the the end products of strategic planning. You can't just wake up and start doing better. You have to rethink everything. Remember, it's not the things you do that matter, it's why you do them. Unfortunately, by that point the problem won't be your ability to think strategically. The problem will be that all of your internal processes, the way your staff goes about doing their jobs, and even your corporate culture will all work against trying to do things strategically. Failure to have the courage to face this pain only means that your fate will get worse. It's far better never to let yourself even get into that position.

Strategic plans are vital. But they can’t be the kind of strategic plans that sit on a shelf. Instead, your strategic plan should help your staff by telling them what they need to know to successfully identify leads, pursue them, and grow your business. Your strategic plan should be a tool that explains: See also: Strategic planning What kind of capabilities and offerings to develop Who their target customers are Where to target marketing and build relationships When, where, and how teaming relationships should be part of the mix What areas they should research to select targets for prospecting What numbers they need to hit What strategic outcomes they should strive for How to embrace trends and changes When a lead is considered identified, what is required to qualify leads, and what the criteria are for bidding them How bid/no bid decisions should be made What their pursuit budgets are and how they should be allocated What differentiates your company and how it should be positioned How should overhead be managed, internal budgets allocated, and where should the company invest in itself How methods, approaches, tools, and procedures have strategic impact and how they should flow down What needs to be done to track progress and verify implementation of the strategic plan Most strategic plans are written annually, and often updated quarterly. If people are not using and referring to the strategic plan throughout the year, it’s a sign that the plan is not perceived as vital for them to do their jobs. It means the next one you create should be done differently so that it provides answers that people need and adds value to what they do. If you have to force people to follow the strategic plan, it’s also a sign that something’s wrong. Either there are incentives (financial or otherwise) in the environment that are pulling them in another direction, or else they have conflicting goals. People should want to follow the strategic plan because it makes them all part of the same team, because they share the same compelling vision, and because it’s in their interests. If people are doing things differently from what it says in the strategic plan, one of them is wrong. Either the strategic plan needs to be updated to reflect reality, or the decision process needs to be updated to incorporate referring to the strategic plan. The strategic plan should make it easier to get the right kind of business to build the foundation your business needs for the future. It’s not just about driving executive level mandates down to the workers. It’s about giving the workers something that will help them fulfill the executive vision. To be perceived as an asset, it needs to be useful. If you achieve that your strategic plan won’t just sit on a shelf. Like a map or trusted guide book, people will use and refer to it constantly.

In 2013 we split our newsletter into two tracks and in most issues published two articles, one on business development and one on proposals. As a result, we hit our goal of publishing more than 100 new items and greatly expanded the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase with more checklists and detail. To celebrate the end of the year, while we plan more goodies for next year, here's a list of our Top 20 articles on business development. Hopefully they will help you have a more prosperous new year! Note: It's not in any particular order, so make sure you read all the way down so you don't miss something good. How your pipeline can help you reliably predict the future of your business Will your business grow, shrink, or stay the same next year? Are you chasing enough leads? Should you focus on finding more leads or on winning the ones you have? How many people will you need to chase your leads and prepare proposals? Will your win rate go up or down? How many leads can you “no bid” and still hit your numbers? The right way to fill your BD pipeline If you think that filling your pipeline should start by identifying leads, you’re wrong. There are things you need to do long before you start looking for RFPs or mining databases to identify leads. BD pipeline metrics tell you what resources you need With the right approach, your BD pipeline can be far more than just a lead tracking tool. It can answer questions like: How many people do I need for BD? How many do I need in my proposal department? Should I insource or outsource? How many project managers and other operations staff will I need? Can I afford to hire the staff I need? Should you purchase a database for business development? Which is better: hiring someone for lead identification or purchasing a BD database? How do you calculate your return on investment? How do you pick the right one? Is it worth the cost? Why don't business development and technical staff get along? The staff that do business development and the operational business units that serve your customers often don't get along. It's not surprising, given that they've been set up to fail and organized to be in direct opposition. 11 Ways to get ahead of the RFP and gain customer insight Getting ahead of the RFP is critical for relationship marketing and obtaining an information advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP is either really difficult or really easy but takes a long time. Most people give up on even trying. That creates an opportunity for the rest of us, who can develop a competitive advantage with a little creativity and some perseverance. A better way to find your competitive advantage When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves and ask the wrong questions. Here's an article we wrote about how changing your perspective can help you find better competitive advantages. 82 Topics to discuss with your customers This list will inspire you and help you collect better customer intelligence. It will also help you create a contact plan, gain an information advantage, and give you things to follow up on. It will give you plenty of ideas for things to discuss with your customers. People are not enough for business development Is your company’s ability to develop business based on people or processes? Over the years we've seen many companies act like all they need to do is hire the right salesperson and then wait for the money to start pouring in. We've also seen a lot of companies that say they have a process, but really what they have are smart people who make it up as they go along. It's worth exploring the difference between people and process, because you need both. 5 Perspectives that connect business development and proposals with winning Being able to see things from different perspectives can help you see what to do in order to win. Here are five different ways of looking at your pursuits and how they impact your ability to win. You just found a lead. Now what? When most companies get a lead, they ask themselves what they can find out about it. Sometimes they discover good information and are quite pleased with themselves. But usually, when the RFP is released and they start trying to put things in writing, they start asking the real questions and often find that they are unprepared. 6 Approaches to Bid/No Bid Decisions and 10 Things They Must Get Right Very few companies make effective bid/no bid decisions. It's something that's really hard to get right. Here are six different ways that companies approach bid/no bid decisions, followed by 10 things that a good bid/no bid process should do. 9 Ways to tell if your bid process needs improvement If we had to pick one thing to change that would have the most impact on an organization’s ability to win, it would be how they approach bid/no bid decisions. If you think of them as just being about deciding whether to bid, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity. Here's an article from our library that provides you with 9 ways to tell if your bid/no bid process needs improvement. Creating a bid strategy re-use library When most people think of a proposal re-use library, they think of pre-written proposal sections. We've invented a new kind that can have a far greater impact on your win rates. Instead of trying to capture all of your proposal text and recycle it, which turns out to have a negative impact on your win rate, try focusing on your bid strategies instead. 4 Ways to Determine What it Will Take to Win The reason we collect intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment is to determine what it will take to win. But what intel should you target, and how should you assess it? Here is an article we wrote to expand the portion of our process that helps people figure out what it will take to win. It presents four key areas to target and approaches to take in assessing them. How do you win before the RFP is even released? People always say how important it is to get into position to win before the RFP is released. What they don't talk a lot about is how to achieve that. How do you create an information advantage? What kind of intelligence should you collect, and what should you do with it? How can you influence the RFP? What do you need to do to be ready to win when the RFP is released? In this article we share some of the things we do. Bad business development habits of B2B and B2G companies Even though the bad business development habits of B2B and B2G companies are different, in many cases the cure is the same. Here is an article we wrote describing four bad habits for each of them, the common cause, and most importantly how to cure a company that has them. 10 Winning Habits Your Company Needs to Develop The habits that companies need to develop are different from th personal habits. Companies focus on things like policies and procedures, but not on habits. As a result, the habits they develop are usually the bad kind — the ones you fall into when you don't intentionally develop good habits. So we thought we’d take a look at what the good habits should be for developing business, and ended up writing this article.

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In 2013 we hit our goal of publishing more than 100 new items. We greatly expanded the 7 Tips for Doing Proposals with Fewer People These tips are not about doing the same things a little better or more efficiently. They are not about which steps you should follow or which steps you can leave out. These tips are about changing the fundamentals to maximize your chances of winning with the resources that you have. Creating a bid strategy re-use library When most people think of a proposal re-use library, they think of pre-written proposal sections. We've invented a new approach to proposal re-use that can have a far greater impact on your win rates. Instead of trying to capture all of your proposal text and recycle it, which turns out to have a negative impact on your win rate, try focusing on your bid strategies instead. 7 Ways to make proposal writing faster and easier What you need to speed up proposal writing probably isn't what you think. Here are seven things that people need to do to successfully complete proposal assignments and what they need to make them happen. 8 Challenges you must overcome to write every proposal To write a proposal, you must overcome these eight challenges. You can’t avoid them. You can’t skip any of them. You just have to face them. To help out, we’ve provided some advice for overcoming each. A better way to find your competitive advantage When most people try to describe what their competitive advantages are in a proposal, they tend to focus on themselves and ask the wrong questions. Here's an article we wrote about how changing your perspective can help you find better competitive advantages. Bid strategies depend on understanding what matters to the customer Once you identify what things matter to your customer, you can choose what to focus on in your proposal. What you choose to focus on becomes your bid strategies. Here's a link to a list we put together of some of the things that matter to your customers and how you can use them to create bid strategies and competitive advantages. How a proposal beginner can beat the proposal professionals You don't have to be a proposal specialist to win. In fact, a beginner can easily beat a professional if they know the most important ingredient. Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with proposal writing. 13 Examples of how knowing how to do proposals The Wrong Way can improve their quality Sometimes you have to cut corners and do proposals The Wrong Way. But cut corners at the wrong time and you'll lose. Find out how to recognize when someone is doing a proposal The Wrong Way so you can call them on it and put things right. When you get an RFP, do you do these 12 things in order to win? When your company first gets an RFP, do you do the things that lead to winning or things that lead to losing? You can use this article from our library to assess your company. Don't write your Executive Summary backwards The way I was first taught how to write an Executive Summary turned out to be backwards. Here's an article I wrote explaining what I mean. 12 Ways to Turn Proposal Weaknesses Into Strengths This is an article about doing proposals The Wrong Way. That is what you have to do when you are required to submit a proposal your company is not prepared for and you don’t have the information you need to win it. Maybe your company shouldn't be bidding it at all, but that decision isn't up to you. You have no time to fix your proposal weaknesses. All you can do is embrace your weaknesses and turn them into strengths. Formulating win strategies in just 3 steps A remarkably simple formula we have in our library can not only help you figure out what your win strategies should be for a particular bid, but can also show you where your proposals are lacking. 9 Things to Know About Your Customer to Write a Winning Proposal Proposal writing should not be about you, your company, or even your offering. It’s not about describing yourself or telling the customer anything. Instead, it’s about the customer, their decision, and what they need to hear to make it. Here's an article from our library that shows what you need to know to write a proposal from the customer's perspective. How to Write a Better Technical Approach What technical subject matter experts lack in writing and fine art skills, they often make up for with enthusiasm for their subject. And technical detail. Their contribution is vital, but sometimes difficult to work with. Here's something from our library we wrote to help technical staff do a better job of creating useable proposal content. How to tell if a proposal is well written When two proposals offer the roughly the same thing, the quality of the proposal writing can determine whether you win. Here's an article from our library we wrote with 12 signs of bad proposal writing, and 8 ways to get it right. Why planning the content of your proposal is more important than reviewing it Reviews are not the most important thing you can do if you want to improve proposal quality and your probability of winning. I've come to believe that planning your content is more important than reviewing your proposals. Find out why. The secret to solving 14 proposal problems at the same time Writing this article was an eye-opening moment for us. It's changed our priorities for what we focus on when developing proposals. It revolves around something we knew was important but we didn't realize just how central it is to proposal success. We were surprised by how the answers to key questions kept pointing back to the same thing... Don't start writing your proposal before you do these 9 critical things If you start writing your proposal as soon as the RFP is released and keep re-writing it in search of what it should be, you'll run out of time and submit what you've got instead of the quality proposal you were looking for. Here's something from our library that identifies 9 things that you must do before you start writing if you want to submit a proposal based on what it will take to win. The problem with proposal re-use repositories A lot of people would rather recycle their past proposals than create a new one every time. There's just one big, fat, ugly problem with this. And what makes it worse is that it applies to almost every kind of proposal... Thank you for making 2013 so wonderful!

What value does the customer get from reading your proposal? Oh sure, they’re going to get what you are proposing, but if you’re responding to an RFP they pretty much already know what that is. And besides, if the RFP told you what to bid, then they definitely know what it is. Reading your proposal is a chore. The customer doesn’t even assign their best people to it. It’s a chore because it’s a mechanical task of making a selection based on matching criteria and following procedures. The evaluator gets nothing out of it. In fact, they might be a little bit afraid of it, since they don’t want to make mistakes or cause a protest. And you make it worse. You make it worse because you offer nothing of value to the reader. Do you really think they care about your company? They just have to pick one. Your self-description is not enough to make them care about you. All they want to do is to find the items from their evaluation criteria scoring sheet in the document so they can submit their paperwork and get back to their life. But first they have to read while company after company drones on about themselves. Why do you think the customer issued the RFP? It’s not just because they want to buy something. They have a problem they are trying to solve, and they want more than one vendor to weigh in on what approach they should take. They have to figure out how to solve their problems and fulfill their goals. If instead of describing yourself, you write about how what you are proposing will make things better for them you might just pique their interest. But that’s still not delivering immediate value to the reader. Most people read for entertainment or to learn. While companies occasionally say some entertaining things in their proposals, it is usually unintentional. In fact, most companies go to great lengths to strip out anything that might be provocative or controversial in a desire to appear “professional” and to avoid the slightest chance of offending the customer. Humor is the first to go. Your proposal is the opposite of entertaining. But what about learning? Does the customer learn anything reading your proposal besides how great you are? Do they gain any insight into their issues or ways to overcome them? Just don’t get all descriptive and start teaching them or coming across like a boring textbook. When you have a problem you are looking for people to share their insights and not to be lectured at. So have you shared any insight along the lines of: See also: Customer perspective How what you propose will impact their future? Ways to solve their problems that they haven’t thought of? Why you proposed what you did? Why you chose the trade-offs that you did? How what you propose will fulfill their needs and goals? Demonstrating the truth of what you are proposing or proving anything? Showing them how to get past the trust issues that they face? Showing them that the risks they face can be mitigated? Showing them that there is a way to make what they want affordable? If you are smart and read between the lines, you’ll realize that every one of the opportunities where you can show insight that might make the evaluator actually care about what they are reading is really about them and not you. They don’t care about you. They want you to care about them. They are the customer, after all. If your proposal is about insightful observations, clever approaches to addressing the customer’s concerns, and what the customer will get out of it all, you become an asset and separate yourself from the pack of “Pick me! Pick me!” vendors. Given the same offering, at the same price, who would you want to work with? The customer still might not care about your proposal, but there is a slight chance that you can get them to care about you. You just have to start by caring about them.

When you write a proposal, it should be based on what it will take to win. The challenge with that is that what it will take to win may be different for every bid. You can probably anticipate some of the things that are typically part of what it will take to win, but with every bid there can be differences that matter. Understanding what it will take to win is mostly based on discovering what matters: See also: Information Advatnage What matters to the customer? Customers have needs. But they can’t simply go buy what they want. They have to follow their organization's procurement process. The buyer will have lots of action items along the way. They have to make decisions and get approvals. At each step, concerns like trust and risk factor into those decisions. And while price is always a concern, what matters about the price can change. All of these things matter to the customer. But some matter more than others. What are their needs? What are their priorities? What are their preferences? What do they have to do to get their needs fulfilled? What matters about the opportunity? If you are offering to fulfill a customer’s need, then the customer will consider your offer in the context of the things that matters about it, like the results they are looking for, what their preferences are, what resources are relevant, who the stakeholders are, what their role is, and what’s impacting the schedule. But the question for you is why do you matter in relationship to the things that matter about the opportunity to the customer. What matters about the competitive environment? What you are proposing will not be the only offering or alternative available to the customer. For the customer, this is a choice between alternatives. They will consider what matters about each alternative. Specifications, performance, experience, trust, risk, relationships, cost, and more can all matter. But how much they matter to any particular bid depends on the circumstances. Your ability to win the proposal depends on whether what you propose conveys why it matters more than all the other alternatives. You may feel confident that what you offer is better. But unless you make that matter to the customer, then it just doesn't matter. What matters about you? When buying a commodity, the vendor hardly matters. Customers will switch vendors for a lower price when the vendor doesn't matter. However, when buying a complex service or a solution to an important problem, what matters to the customer is more than just your claim of being able to provide it. What matters to them will be whether they can trust that you will deliver as promised. Most of the questions and information requested in an RFP is to evaluate this simple issue. What matters about you isn't your experience, your qualifications, your capabilities, or your resources. What matters is whether they can trust that you will deploy these things in a way that reliably delivers on what you have proposed. That's a long way of saying what matters about you is whether you prove your claims. What matters about the RFP? When the RFP comes out, it matters. It matters so much that some companies forget everything else that matters. But what is it about the RFP that matters, when it comes to what it will take to win? It’s more than just the requirements, instructions, and evaluation criteria. Gaps, ambiguities, and conflicts matter. The deadline matters. Contract types, terms, and the pricing model matter. Your ability to differentiate while responding to the RFP matters greatly. And what it will take to get the top score during evaluation matters more than anything else. What you do matters. What actions should you take? What processes should you follow? Did you prepare effectively? How will you execute your plans? What will your strategies be and how should you position yourself regarding the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment? The actions you take matter and impact whether you ultimately are able to achieve what it will take to win. If you consider the six areas above, you can identify the criteria that should drive every aspect of your pursuit. Another way of saying it is that every aspect of your process should be driven by what matters. The process you follow to pursue each bid should do more than just make nice with the customer and submit a proposal by the deadline. Your process should discover what matters, so that you can deliver a proposal that is built from the ground up around what it will take to win. "What matters?" is a question. It is a question that can only be answered if you have the right information. If you want your proposal to matter the most, then you need to start the proposal with an information advantage that enables you to provide the best answer to "What matters?" That is exactly what the MustWin Process provided in PropLIBRARY is designed to do. It is also why we built a pre-RFP pursuit and capture tool and a proposal input tool into MustWin Now, and designed them to drive what you learn about what matters right into the proposal.

In companies that sell services, there are far more people with customer contact than just the sales force. This is especially true for existing customers, where the project staff have far more contact with the customer than a sales person ever will. In these companies, all customer-facing staff play a role in “sales.” The trick is to enable them to contribute to sales without becoming sales people. Customer-facing staff can play a critical role by helping: See also: Organizational development The company understand the customer’s issues and preferences. How does the customer like to work? What kind of problems do they run into? Both projects and proposals involve addressing trade-offs. How does the customer approach trade-offs? What are their preferences? This is all critical information for winning proposals. Project staff are actually better positioned to collect it than sales staff. But they have to know what to listen for. To discover what the customer would like to do or achieve. Just like you, the customer has problems to solve and goals to achieve every day they go to work. Some of them are immediate or short term things, and some of them are long term. Sometimes they know what they want, and sometimes they have to figure it out. When you are working with them, if you listen, many of those problems will be things that your company can help them out with. Sometimes you can help them out with simple recommendations. Sometimes you might need to find answers within your company. And sometimes the answer might be services that your company can provide. To position the company as helpful, responsive, and someone they want to have available. This has multiple benefits. It improves past performance reviews, it increases your perceived value, and it makes them more willing to discuss their issues with you. It is the sort of thing that is best demonstrated through results over time, giving project staff a major advantage over sales staff in achieving it. Project staff don’t necessarily have to sell. Sometimes they can help simply by listening and making referrals. Connecting the customer with people in their company who know about the issues or who know how to take things from a concept to a contract. The most important thing is to recognize the significance of the moment. You don’t have to even know what to do about it, just bring it to the attention of someone who does. In addition to project staff, you have other staff who interact with the customer directly. They may be in accounts receivable, contracts, or HR. It doesn’t matter. Every one of them has the opportunity to discover customer preferences and issues. If you are not funneling what you learn from the contacts back into the proposal process, then it can’t help you win. The way to leverage the value that can result from everyone’s contact with the customer is to train people to recognize the significance of the moment and what to listen for. It doesn’t take a week or even a day's worth of training. Half an hour or an hour can be enough to help people tune into the significance of what they are hearing. But if you really want to leverage all of your customer contacts, you need to go beyond simply listening and start asking questions. You can also provide training in what questions to ask, but by the time people have the opportunity to ask them, they are likely to be forgotten. It may be better to provide cheat sheets, or lists of questions that people might ask the customer that can lead to them discussing their issues and preferences. The questions should also include follow-ups and questions about whether they’d like you to find someone else in the company who knows about the subject to talk to. Within PropLIBRARY, we have many sets of questions like this for different circumstances, all set up as simple forms and checklists. But more importantly, the pre-RFP intelligence gathering phase is designed so that many people can participate in getting answers to the questions you need to build an information advantage.

Not everyone can write. And people who write well in other areas may not write great proposal copy. The law of averages means that not even every proposal specialist is exceptional. So how do you win using people who are not great proposals writers? First, you should start thinking in terms of contributions instead of sections. Just as there are many ingredients that go into a winning proposal, there can be many contributors. And a contribution to the proposal doesn’t necessarily have to involve any writing at all. Some contributors may be technical subject matter experts (SMEs). Others might be proposal specialists or other kinds of specialists. There is an ongoing debate about whether it is better to train SMEs to write proposal copy, or to pair them up with a proposal specialist who interviews the SME and writes the copy. We think the right answer for any given company depends on the organization, the skills of their staff, and their availability. See also: Winning But regardless of the approach you take, there are some things you can do to get more useable content out of each contributor. The way we approach proposal writing is to start by figuring out what all the ingredients should be. We use a methodology we developed called Proposal Content Planning that is fully described within PropLIBRARY. It guides people to not only identify what they need to write about, but how they should write it. It enables you to collect and pass instructions to the author(s). This creates an opportunity to reach out in different ways to all potential contributors. You can ask people who have had customer contact to address things like customer preferences and what matters from their perspective. You can ask technical SMEs to address why the approach they recommend is the best alternative in addition to what that approach is. Someone might contribute a sentence, someone else a paragraph. From others you might want raw data, a chart, a graphic, or just a list of steps or bullets. A Proposal Content Plan can even function like an interview that is conducted on paper. Responses can be rough or finished copy, depending on the capability of the person contributing. You can even go back and forth for follow-ups or bring in another person to add to it or finish it. What makes it work is that each person knows what is expected of them. Asking someone, especially a non-specialist, to write a proposal section without defining your bid strategies, positioning, customer intelligence, and other details is just asking for trouble. That’s how companies get to their proposal review and have to start over. But even when you have defined them, you need something to bring them all together so that the writer can incorporate everything. A Proposal Content Plan contains the instructions that define your expectations. If all you expect of someone is to answer a question, provide the question. If you expect them to share insight about a topic or describe something, be specific about what you want to get back from them. When you insert instructions into a Proposal Content Plan, make sure you phrase it in a way the receiver will understand. If you are dealing with technical SMEs, instead of asking them to explain things from the customer’s perspective, you might want to ask them how the customer will be impacted, what the customer will get out of it, or why the customer should care about it. In addition to using something like Proposal Content Planning to enable you to deal with contributions instead of drafts, you should also separate designing the offering from writing about it. Designing the offering by writing about it is just asking for re-write after re-write while you search from the right offering only to run out of time before you find it. There is a reason why engineers do not build bridges by writing narrative prose about them. You should encourage your technical SMEs to plan and validate what they are going to offer to meet the customer’s specifications before you start describing it in writing. They can use diagrams, blueprints, data sheets, design processes, storyboards, checklists, forms, or whatever they prefer to identify the components of what you will offer. Only after you have validated that it’s the right solution --- that it’s cost competitive and compliant with the RFP requirements --- should you describe it in narrative writing. And when you do, it shouldn’t be a simple description, but rather an explanation that shows the customer what they will get out of it and why it’s the best alternative. The last step will be to transform what you have into something that incorporates your bid strategies, is optimized against the evaluation criteria, and is written from the customer’s perspective. This is what will take your proposal from being merely compliant to being exceptional. It is what you need to outscore your competition and win. Maybe your SMEs are up to that kind of writing, maybe not. Maybe your proposal staff will produce something exceptional, maybe they’ll be struggling to meet deadlines and only produce something compliant. But when you implement Proposal Content Planning, you can see what they were supposed to do. And you can assess whether what they produced is what it was supposed to be. Instead of expecting contributors to intuitively guess at what an exceptional proposal might be, you can actually instruct them to combine the components of the offering with the description of what the customer will get out of it into a narrative that is about the customer and shows why your offering is the best alternative when looked at from the customer’s perspective. Instead of expecting people to just somehow know (and all agree!) on what a good proposal is, you can identify the parts and how they should be assembled. And that is something your technical SMEs should be to able wrap their heads around more easily than writing something that “sells.”

These tips are not about doing the same things a little better or more efficiently. They are not about which steps you should follow or which steps you can leave out. These tips are about changing the fundamentals to maximize your chances of winning with the resources that you have. See also: Proposal management 1. Figuring out what to write takes longer when you do it by writing and re-writing. If you jump into writing your proposal and then review it, you’ll find you overlooked things. Or you’ll find that it’s based on what you wanted to say instead of what the customer needs to hear. You’ll try to fix it by making the smallest changes possible. And then review it again. And find more things to fix. You’ll keep doing this, never finding satisfaction, until you run out of time and submit what you have instead of what the proposal should have been. It ends up being faster to start by thinking through what the proposal should be before you start writing. People often say that because their team is so small, they don’t have time for a lot of planning. But the truth is that small teams need planning the most. They just don’t have the resources to make an attempt and then do it over to get it right. 2. Make discovery of what to write about easy. It takes longer to figure out what to write about than it does to write it. The best way to accelerate things is not to focus on the writing, it’s to focus on figuring it out quicker. Figuring out what should go into a proposal is a process. It can be made checklist simple, and there are ways to accelerate it. Most organizations focus on recycling the text, which is just a quicker variation of #1 above. Instead, you should accelerate figuring out what should go into your proposal, and what your bid strategies should be. Once you know them, you can turn writing into a simple process of elimination. Time for planning should be balanced against time spent re-writing. Spending half of the time available planning is not the same as losing half the time you have for writing.Spending half your time planning and half of it writing is better than spending half your time writing and half of it re-writing over and over until you run out of time and submit whatever you’ve got instead of what it will take to win. 3. Focus on enabling people to check their own work instead of reviewing and re-writing. Writers should be working from the same criteria the reviewers will use later. This will enable them to aim for the right target. But it also means that you can’t ignore how reviews are done and leave it up to the reviewers to make it up as they go along. This in turn means that establishing the criteria for reviews before the writing starts is more important than the reviews themselves. Especially when you are short staffed. If you are short staffed and the writers expect the review process to randomly create change (more work) that they can’t anticipate, they will undermine the review system. However, when you give them the same criteria that will be used in later reviews, you give them a tool that will help them write more quickly and with more confidence. 4. Separate figuring out what to offer from what to write about. Because your offering must comply with the RFP requirements, it is tempting to design your offering by writing to each requirement. This is a huge mistake. It means every design change spawns a re-write cycle. Designing by writing and re-writing will never be the most efficient approach. So first figure out what you are going to propose as your offering or approach. Do this separate from writing about it. Review your offering or approach for compliance with the specifications. Review your offering or approach for price competitiveness. Review your offering or approach to make sure all of your stakeholders agree. Then write about it. 5. Have the answers you need when the questions get asked. This sounds simple, but it requires the ability to predict the future. Since no one can reliably do that, you have to anticipate everything you possibly can. During the proposal you will make dozens of trade-off decisions. How will you know which trade-off is best? In every part of the proposal, you will want to emphasize the things that matter most to the customer. How will you know what they are? Ultimately you want your proposal to score the highest during the evaluation process. What is that process? Those who anticipate best and have answers to at least some of these questions will have a huge competitive advantage over those who do not. Those who don’t have the answers will have to do last minute research, try to work around what they don’t know, and endure extra re-writes as people try to cope with a lack of information. A streamlined flow of the right information can not only make it easier to get by with fewer people, but can also give a smaller team an advantage over a larger one. It can also enable beginners to beat more experienced professionals. 6. Wear multiple hats but don’t drop any balls. As humans, we like each person to have a role. But small teams can’t dedicate a person to each role on a proposal. Sometimes the business developer is the capture manager and the proposal manager. And sometimes the lead writer as well. Sometimes that makes sense, and sometimes it does not. The trick is to define the roles functionally. If you know the responsibilities for each role, then when one person has to wear multiple hats, they know everything they have to cover. If balls get dropped, it will be because you asked them to wear too many hats. But balls should never be dropped because someone overlooked something. 7. Be decisive. Indecision is a huge time waster. A major cause of indecision is a lack of information. See #5 above. When it’s time to make a decision, the decision should be made quickly. The fewer the resources you have to make up for time spent deliberating, the more important it becomes to decide quickly. Making decisions and then revisiting them is also a form of indecision. So when you decide something, make sure you stick to it. This also means you should ensure that your key players are not commitment shy.

To write a proposal, you must overcome eight challenges. You can’t avoid them. You can’t skip any of them. You just have to face them. To help out, we’ve included links to many other articles we’ve written that are relevant to the individual challenges: See also: Winning Complying with the RFP. First you have to read it and understand it. Then you have to cross-reference all the requirements across the various sections. Even if your assignment is for a single section, there may be requirements in other sections that are relevant, especially the evaluation criteria. Achieving RFP compliance is part using the customer’s terminology and keywords, part cross-referencing, and part understanding their evaluation process. Cross-referencing can be tricky and often requires interpretation. Figuring out what to write about. Writing is easy. Knowing what to write about is hard. If you want to win, it’s important to avoid the temptation of starting from another proposal. Once you know what should go into the proposal, writing it is pretty straightforward. What we do is follow a process that quickly guides people through considering everything that should go into a proposal and sets them up with a plan for writing it. Figuring out how to say what you want to say. Some people get stuck in the mechanics of putting the words together. They are sure how it’s supposed to sound. We usually pay little attention to style. But we pay a lot of attention to whether it is simply descriptive or whether it says something that matters from the customer’s point of view. The most important thing to accomplish in proposal writing is to make it reflect the customer’s point of view. What the customer sees on the paper should be what they need to get answers to their questions, complete their evaluation process, and be persuaded that you are the best alternative. You have goals to accomplish, terminology from the RFP to use, and have to put it in the reader’s perspective instead of your own. That can be difficult, especially for people new to proposal writing. But when we review proposals, we often see problems in proposals written by people with many years of experience as well. We publish lots of guidance on every aspect of proposal writing to help people find their voice. Figuring out what to offer. Whatever you do, don’t figure out what to offer by writing about it. This is a recipe for proposal disaster. Figuring out what to offer and figuring out what to write about should be done in parallel. Only after they have both been figured out and reviewed to ensure they aren’t likely to change should you start writing. Figuring out what to offer by writing about it does incredible damage to proposals. We have seen it cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars. Articulating your bid strategies. The truth is the bid strategies for the proposal should be figured out before the writers ever get their assignments. Bid strategies should be just one of the ingredients that go into what you need to write. If you get your assignment and it includes figuring out the bid strategies, you need to do that before you start writing or designing your offering. The proposal should prove the bid strategies. It’s difficult to write like that if you don’t know what they are. Meeting deadlines. Even when you know everything that should go into your proposal, getting it all down on paper before your deadline can make it a huge challenge. However, there is a difference between knowing the kinds of things that should go into a proposal and having a list ready to go for this particular proposal. The best way to accelerate proposal writing is to accelerate figuring out what to write and to have writers who understand how to write from the customer’s perspective. Figuring out what to write can be done as a part of a process that makes writing go faster, with much less risk than handing writers a copy of the RFP and telling them to have at it. Passing the review. Most companies review their proposals before they finish them. If you start focusing on winning your proposals when the writing starts, you are too late. You should focus on winning when you figure out what should go into your proposal, before the writing starts. You should focus on winning when you figure out your bid strategies and offering, before the writing starts. When you do, you’ll realize that in order to incorporate what it will take to win into your plans for the proposal, you’ll need answers to questions that should have been asked before the RFP even came out. The pre-RFP stage should be driven by what you will need to know to close the sale in the form of a proposal. That is when you really should have been focused on winning.

In business development, companies often have one person managing the customer relationship. All relationships are personal, so companies tend not to think about making them process driven. But this causes problems in business development because over the life of the pursuit, many people will get involved. Relationship marketing is not about having relationships. It’s about winning because of your relationships. For relationships to lead to business, they must be productive. The goal of the customer relationship is to supply what is needed to turn customer contacts into contract wins. This means it must produce the information that will be needed to win the proposal and accomplish certain goals. There are multiple stakeholders whose needs should be addressed. To actually accomplish what you need to be ready to win at RFP release you need to guide that relationship to ensure that it delivers what is needed to address everyone’s needs and to close the sale with a winning proposal. If you just leave it to people, then no matter how hard they work or how smart they are, the results will be hit or miss, uncoordinated, and ultimately unreliable. If one person owns the customer relationship, is the sales person, writes the proposal, and specifies what will be offered, there is no need for formal coordination. But once you have multiple people involved, you’ve grown beyond the point where business development is just about people. When you make it a people problem, what you see at most companies is: See also: Information advantage They get to RFP release feeling unprepared because they can’t answer some of the questions other stakeholders have in order to write a winning proposal They measure the strength of their customer relationship and progress towards being ready to win by how recently they’ve contacted the customer instead of what information they got out of those contacts Regular business development meetings are about status and not about discovering what it will take to win Those involved in business development disappear once the proposal starts Bid strategies and themes are not developed until the proposal starts or those that are developed before the proposal starts are abandoned The proposal team doesn’t know what matters to the customer and is not sure how to position what they are writing about When any of the dozens of trade-off decisions come up during the development of the offering or proposal writing, they don’t know which side of the trade-offs the customer prefers So what’s your score? How many of these occur at your company? How often do they occur when it’s your own recompete? If you think you have solid customer relationships but still have many of these issues, your relationships are not productive. The problem isn’t that people aren’t working hard enough to get the information, the problem is that a lack of structure is making results hit or miss and failing to deliver what stakeholders really need. In this environment, some have better luck than others. Some work harder and some work smarter. They can win by making the best use of what they know instead of having what they really need. This is enough for the business to continue operating, and maybe even to grow by a contract here or there. If it’s a big contract, they can convince themselves they know the recipe for success. A large percentage of the proposals you are competing against are made up by proposal teams without any real customer insight, often written by companies who are sure the strength of their customer relationship will win it for them. You can boost your win rate simply by being better than that. And the way you do that is to bring just enough structure to your pre-RFP business development efforts to ensure that you deliver the information that all stakeholders will need later to close the sale. This makes it more than just a people problem. You need to: Anticipate what information will be required to win Manage the relationship to obtain the right information and accomplish your other goals Coordinate with the other stakeholders about that information Communicate progress towards being ready to win as well as status Convert what you discover into a useable form If you leave business development to your people, you’ll get their best efforts, just like all your competitors. But if you take the path less followed and create a structured approach to discovering what it will take to win, and then convert what you discovere into a winning proposal to close the deal, your win rate will reflect it.

If your proposal lessons learned focus on steps in your process or pursuitpspecific things you should have done differently, you may be missing the big picture. Instead of asking “what can we realistically do to make things better next time” you should try asking “why did we end up where we did.” If you dig deep, you’ll probably find the cause happened long before the proposal even started. Whenever you have more than a few people working on a proposal, you have grown to the point where it takes more than just good people to get the job done. People are not enough. No matter how hard they try. Doing more by working harder breaks down at a certain size when you are trying to win. This is because you don’t need more effort or to do a better job of telling people what to do, better discipline, or for people to follow orders better. What you need are systematic approaches to things like collaboration, coordination, and quality assurance. You need people to: Know what to do Know how and when to do it Be able to work in synch with others Be able to tell when it’s been done right Checklists, systematic communication, just in time guidance, expectation management, and quality validation may be all that's needed for a bunch of individuals to work like a team. A team that is in synch and plays strategically will beat a collection of individuals, no matter how hard the individuals try. If you have a collection of people working on a proposal, you need to get them in synch and give them strategic direction so they can play like a team and beat the competition. See also: Proposal management Instead, what we see at most companies is: One person claims to have a process. It’s not fully documented. In reality it’s one person with a concept, making up the details as they go along. The result amounts to people being asked to do what they are told by the deadline. Process advocates wonder why everyone resists, or ignores, their instructions. Evangelists without any real authority must resort to pleading to gain buy-in. People go along with it only if it doesn’t conflict with their own priorities or vision. Management talks about the importance of the bid, without providing strategic direction. The proposal is staffed with people who happened to be available. It may not include anyone who actually knows the customer. Individuals write the sections they are assigned, with some trying really hard to deliver a good message. The collection of messages they produce is uncoordinated. There is no structure or criteria to determine what the right messages are, let alone get them in synch. There is no time to do anything about this before the proposal goes to an internal review. Few people worry about that because most have little or no message and merely address the minimum requirements, fulfilling their writing assignment with the minimum of effort. Management reviews the proposal late in the game and is surprised when it has no strategic direction or it differs from theirs. The do-over they require destroys what was left of any process being followed. So what’s your score? How many of these occur at your company? The problem isn’t that you aren’t telling people to do the right things or that people aren’t doing what they’re told. The problem is that you’ve outgrown your whole approach. In an environment like the one described about, some will have better luck than others. Some will work a little harder and some will work a little smarter. They can win by failing less than their competitors, and this is enough for the business to continue operating, and maybe even to grow by a contract here or there. If it’s a big contract, they can even convince themselves they know the recipe for success, and continue doing what they’ve always done. Because so many companies go down the path where the approach to proposals amounts to little more than assigning some people, a large percentage of the proposals you are competing against will be last minute do-overs, with little or no message that’s substantiated in the proposal. They are uncoordinated messes that only have a chance at winning because the customer has to pick someone and they might just accumulate enough points to win on price. The secret to having an above average win rate is to enable people to perform better than they would on their own. Think about what helps individuals perform better: Knowing what’s expected of them Knowing how to achieve it A little strategic direction Being able to work in systematic coordination with each other Quality standards and criteria that aren’t moving targets Answers to their questions If you leave it to your people, you’ll get their best efforts, just like all your competitors. But if you take the path less followed and create a systematic capability to win based on more than just people, your win rate will reflect it. PS: If you think you have all that because you’ve assigned smart people to it, you need to re-read the article.

You can't credibly claim thought leadership in a proposal. It’s too late. If the customer doesn't already think of you as a thought leader, what will they think about that unsubstantiated claim? At best it won't affect your evaluation score one bit. At worst it will hurt your credibility. Doesn't being a thought leader require providing leading thoughts? What does claiming leading thoughts and not providing any do for your image? Thought leadership is more about trust than knowledge and not at all about image. Simply claiming it can backfire. When you get to the proposal phase, instead of claiming thought leadership you must demonstrate thought leadership. The way you demonstrate it is through insight. And the only insight that matters in a proposal is that which impacts your evaluation score. How to demonstrate thought leadership in a proposal See also: Proposal Writing Insight means going beyond simply responding with something that addresses the requirements. Insight involves explaining what matters about the requirements and why your approach to fulfilling them has advantages that aren't obvious. It requires delivering on being innovative right there in the proposal instead of claiming to be innovative. When you can explain what matters about something instead of simply describing it, and point out things the reader didn't realize are important, that's insight. Your demonstrated awareness of things the reader didn't realize that will make them better off in ways no one else has thought of makes you an invaluable asset. This is why people want to work with real thought leaders. When you go beyond simply identifying a trend and explain what to do about it, that's showing insight. When you go beyond describing a problem and explain how to solve it, that's showing insight. When you explain why the best practices are insufficient and what to do in addition or instead, that's showing insight. Showing insight is about adding value by pointing out things that matter to the reader that the reader hadn't thought of. This is how a thought leader demonstrates value. This is what makes thought leadership important in proposals. The customer needs the vendor to help them realize the value being proposed because the company is the only one with the insight for how to achieve it. Thought leadership like this can make a company the customer's best alternative. In a field of competing proposals, where they all describe their approaches because that is what the RFP asked them to do, a thought leader will not simply describe, but will explain why their approaches matter. In a field of competing proposals, a demonstrated thought leader has an advantage and earns the customer's trust. Claiming thought leadership without showing insight is just being a salesperson trying to sell something. And the customer knows it. Becoming a thought leader without claiming to be one For a thought leader, “why” you do things is more important to the customer than “what” you do. “Why” shows that you have good judgment and deliver value. "Why" shows that you are trustworthy and reliable. "Why" demonstrates your value instead of merely claiming it. If all you do is describe “what” you do, then you have shown that you can follow directions and the customer will get what they ask for. But you haven’t shown any value beyond that. "What" you will do shows that you have a plan. But we all know how long a plan lasts. "What" might be good enough for a customer who's not worried about the risks or only wants you to do what you are told. But if the customer needs something they don't understand, is depending on the outcome, and is concerned about things going wrong, focusing on "why" is how you win. It doesn’t cost you anything more to explain “why.” By explaining “why,” you show the customer that you can deliver greater value than those who simply explain “what” they will do. By explaining "why," you can even beat competitors with more experience if they merely say "what" they will do. If all they do is cite the fact that they have experience without explaining "why" that experience matters, you have an opportunity to beat them. When everyone else writes about "what" they will do, if you write about "why" you do it that way, you become the thought leader. For vendors to become thought leaders, they must earn the customer’s trust through their insight. Some types of bids require more trust than others. When the customer is purchasing a commodity, it barely matters who supplies it. But when the customer needs a solution, they must be able to trust that you will be able to deliver, often with insufficient time, information, or unexpected complications. The higher the risk of the project, the more the customer must trust its vendors. Thought leadership and trust go hand in hand. When the customer requires a vendor with solid judgment and awareness of the issues, they tend to look more favorably on thought leaders. But they won’t select you because you self-identify as a thought leader. They will select you because in your proposal you demonstrated good judgment when you explained “why” you chose the approaches you did. They will select you because when something unexpected happens, they can trust you to figure out what to do about it on their behalf. When the customer is concerned about risk (and all customers are concerned about risk), and they have to pick between one vendor who describes what they will do for their price, and another vendor who describes why they chose their approach, what matters about it, and what the customer will get out of it for their price, which vendor do you think has the advantage? A thought leader may not even need to describe their approach in as much detail as their competitors to have the better approach. Extra detail that is not insightful doesn't demonstrate much. However, a demonstration of good judgment regarding an approach can eliminate the need for details that don't ultimately matter. Using thought leadership to win your proposals If you started the proposal at RFP release and have a weak customer relationship, but are trying to somehow win the pursuit in the proposal phase, then demonstrating thought leadership can be how you do it. The customer needs more than just claims to select you. They don't know you, but they must learn to trust your judgment in order to select you. They need more than procedures and qualifications to trust your judgment. Demonstrate your judgment by focusing on what matters and why the approaches you selected make you their best alternative. When the customer is following a formal evaluation process, scoring your proposals against written evaluation criteria, and filling out forms that justify their selection, a proposal that demonstrates thought leadership has the advantage. The reasons "why" you do things make completing the evaluator's justification an easy copy and paste. They score better than descriptions of what you do. The vendor said they will do what we asked them to do never shows up as an award justification. Being a thought leader during the proposal phase is very different from what people think of as how you become a thought leader during the pre-proposal marketing phase. This is because marketing is about how you get introduced to the customer whereas the proposal is the last thing you say to them before they make their selection. During marketing, if the customer is intrigued, they may talk to you to learn more. You don't have to prove it upfront. However, during the proposal, when you're trying to close the sale, the last thing you say shouldn’t be an unsubstantiated claim. Instead, the proposal should demonstrate what you'll be like to work with after award. The best way to become a thought leader is to do it without ever claiming to be one or using the words "thought leader." If you truly are a thought leader, the customer will use those words on their own in their award justification. If the reader doesn't conclude that your insight is superior when they read your proposal, this will never happen.

In business development, thought leadership is really about trust. That is why thought leadership is best demonstrated, and why simply claiming it can backfire. Thought leadership is about who you trust to guide you through the issues and find solutions. If you want to be a “thought leader,” you should: Show insight that helps your customers achieve their goals in ways they may not have thought of on their own Demonstrate customer service before the project even starts Do your homework so that what you say demonstrates that you are informed Not only identify the trends that could impact the customer, but help them figure out what to do about them In business development, thought leadership requires two-way communication. Thought leadership is not only about what you have to say, it’s also about how well you listen. You must listen so that what you say and recommend will be relevant to the customer. A thought leader who is not relevant is not a thought leader in the customer’s eyes. Relevance is also critical to being a thought leader. In business development, relevance is often a matter of timing. You should anticipate what the customer needs to know so that you provide the right guidance at the right moment. If you make recommendations before the customer is prepared to act on them, it will be premature. If you make recommendations after the customer has reached a decision, they will not want to revisit the topic. See also: Relationship marketing You can see how this works during the pre-RFP acquisition process. If you try to influence the RFP when the customer is trying to decide which the best contract vehicle will be, they won’t even know what to do with your recommendations. And no one will want to listen if you try to recommend a different contract vehicle when the customer has already determined their acquisition strategy and is getting ready to release the RFP. However, if you are there to help them figure out what contract vehicle will best meet their needs for what they are trying to procure, and if it requires an RFP you are there with recommendations for the specifications that they can copy and paste right into the RFP, you will be demonstrating: The kind of customer service they can look forward to Your ability to anticipate problems and solve them before they become issues That you listen, understand your customers’ needs, and do your homework That you add value If you want to show the kind of insight that will also make you a thought leader, your recommendations need to anticipate and solve problems that the customer would have struggled with on their own. If the customer doesn’t have the expertise to write the RFP or isn’t sure how to resolve the trade-offs that are inherent in specifying what they want to procure, this is a golden opportunity for you to help them figure it out. If the customer is facing change but is not sure what form it should take, this is a golden opportunity for you to help them figure it out. When you are consistently there, with the right advice at the right moment, then you are the contractor that the customer goes to for answers. You are the contractor that the customer trusts to talk about their issues because they know you’ll have something constructive to say that will help them achieve their goals in spite of the challenges. Whether you use the label “thought leader” or not, being a thought leader can put you in the best possible position to win your customer’s business.

Almost everything I learned about proposal writing early in my career turned out to be wrong. My success with proposal process and techniques started when I grew confident enough to abandon what I had been taught. But what has really advanced my career has been the subjects I learned about while writing proposals. If I had known about them at the start, my early proposals would have been much better. Here are six subjects that I learned about and how they impact the way I do proposals. As those of you who are already experts in them will see, I am not an expert. I know enough to write about them, not enough to get a job doing them. But that just goes to show that learning a little about these things can help you write better proposals. See also: Great proposals How help desks work. When delivering services, customers expect things to go wrong. They often want to know what you are going to do about it. That’s where being able to describe issue tracking, assignment, escalation, follow-up, reporting, and related matters is really useful. If you take a proposal that doesn’t require a help desk, and insert help desk techniques without ever using the term “help desk,” you can sound really sophisticated in your approach to customer service. ISO 9000. ISO 9000 was a quality methodology that I got some exposure to. Since then they’ve upgraded and changed the numbers. But that doesn’t matter. What matters are the basics. If you have a process, you need to be able to prove that you’ve followed the process. Sign-offs, forms, checklists, etc. can be used to demonstrate that you are delivering the way you said you would. Auditing is also necessary to verify that people have implemented a process. External auditing is even better. Quality must be defined so that you can validate an end product by measuring it against the definition/specifications. How will participants know if what they’ve done is free of defects? How does the organization know that what participants have done is free of defects? Progress must also be measured. You can take any process and if you define quality and add validation and proof of process execution, you can make it better. Six Sigma. Another quality methodology. You are better off building quality in at the beginning than by verifying it at the end. Everything is a matter of statistics and measurements. Hat tip to Peter Drucker who said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Elementary school rubrics. When I went to school we didn’t get rubrics. Grades were subjective. When my kids brought home rubrics I had no clue what they were. Rubrics tell a student exactly what they have to do on an assignment to get an “A,” a “B,” a “C,” etc. What a genius concept! I stole it and built it into our MustWin Process to solve the problem of proposal writers getting to a review and having the reviewers tell them it’s all wrong and to do it again. If you tell proposal writers what criteria their sections will be measured against, they can build the quality in from the beginning. But for it to work, you have to do it in enough detail to take most of the subjectivity out of it. If elementary school kids can have rubrics, proposal contributors can too. Capability Maturity Model. People don’t usually go from a total lack of process and quality systems to a full blown implementation in one step. Process improvement comes in stages. Get something in place that makes people’s lives easier, and then take them to the next level. Repeatability is something important to achieve. I mainly use what I learned here when implementing business development and proposal processes, but being able to describe the level of maturity in your operational processes can enable you to put some detail behind all those unsubstantiated claims about being “committed to the highest levels of quality.” Various engineering and lifecycle models. The systems development lifecycle (requirements, design, build, test, repeat or some variation) can be useful terminology whenever you have any kind of deliverables. Engineering methodologies are also useful. For example, they can enable you to describe in formal terms how you do an alternatives analysis. Being able to drop in a table that shows the possibilities along with the criteria you will use for assessing them and the grading system you will use for selection can make it look like you have a clear, objective, and verifiable approach to decision making. There are many, many methodologies that can probably help your proposal writing. As soon as I publish this article I’ll probably think of some I left out. I find it interesting that many of them work both to help you figure out what to write, and how to improve your proposal process.

You don’t have to be a proposal specialist to win. In fact, a non-specialist can easily beat a specialist. All you need to do is have a better understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences. That is more important than your proposal writing skills. Far more important. If you do a good job at gaining an information advantage regarding the customer’s needs and preferences, you can often win, even though you did a mediocre job of putting it in writing. But if you don’t have an information advantage, then you better do a great job on the proposal. And even then you’ll be at a disadvantage compared to someone whose offering will meet the customer’s needs better because they understand them better. The sweet spot is to have an information advantage and a great proposal. But that’s actually rare. Even for the specialists with lots of resources at their disposal. The specialists usually start off by complaining that they don’t have the information they need to work with. That’s why you have an opportunity to beat them. If you’re not a proposal specialist with a lot of experience, then you have to beat them by being more insightful about the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment. Play to your strengths. Your challenge is to gain an information advantage and then build a proposal around it. If you’re starting late, such as after the RFP has been released, the deck is already stacked against you. If you don't have a relationship with the customer before the RFP is released and can’t quickly develop an information advantage, you should consider not bidding. If you think you have a shot because the customer asked you to submit a proposal, then start asking questions. Lots of questions. If you can’t translate your customer relationship into an information advantage, then it’s a shallow relationship, and the opportunity may not be real either. If you think the customer likes you, the way to measure it is by how well you can turn it into an information advantage. If you think they like you, but they won’t share or discuss any insights about what they really need, then it doesn’t translate into any competitive advantage. In fact, anyone else who does have that insight has the competitive advantage over you. If you can gain the insight required to make it worth bidding, then it’s time to think about the proposal. If there is a written RFP with a formal evaluation process, it will drive the structure of the proposal. If there is no written RFP or if the evaluation is informal, then Don’t just start writing. In each section, you will have multiple goals, and you can’t anticipate them all until you’ve mapped them out. If you have a written RFP, you follow the outline suggested by the customer and tailor it for each evaluation according to their evaluation process. If the RFP is not organized according to a point by point or question and answer structure, you will probably need to cross-reference all of the RFP requirements to the sections of the proposal where they will be addressed. If there is no RFP then you should organize it according to how you anticipate the customer will make their decision. See also: Customer perspective Once you have the organization you need to think about all the things that should go into each section, like: Fulfillment of the requirements Win strategies and themes What matters to the customer What you are offering and why it’s their best alternative What the customer will get out of what you are offering Graphics, visual communication, and navigation aids When there is a written RFP with a formal evaluation, compliance with all of the customer’s requirements can be extremely important. Use their terminology and not your own. When the customer publishes written evaluation criteria, proposals are not read, they are scored. So carefully consider their evaluation criteria, and make sure that your response scores the maximum points. Everything you write should be put into the context of the customer and the competitive environment. Even if you do the same thing for every customer, you should position what you do differently. The things you do can have multiple results and benefits. For example, is the result of automation an improvement in speed, quality, or efficiency? Your proposal should reflect the customer’s preferences and how you want to position yourself against the competition. In addition, everything you write about should reflect the customer’s perspective and not your own. The easiest way to achieve this is to make every single sentence about what the customer is going to get out of whatever qualification, approach, or item you are writing about. You should avoid describing things, even when the RFP asks you to, and instead show the results of things. If you are starting most of your sentences with your company name, “we,” or “our,” you are probably writing about yourself instead of writing about what matters to the customer. If you are making bold, unsubstantiated claims like they do on television commercials, you probably aren’t writing from the customer’s perspective. Think about what the customer needs to hear in order to make their decision. That’s what you should focus on. When you write from the customer’s perspective and show insight about them and their requirements, what the customer reads will show how your offering is the best alternative for achieving the results they are looking for. Customers pay less attention to style than they do to picking the proposal that looks like it will give them what they want. That’s why your best chance for beating the competition is to start with an information advantage.

Most people are a mix of all three perspectives. This is especially true in organizations that don’t have someone assigned to each level. You will substantially improve your value if you can at least look at every issue from all three perspectives. People who like the comfort and security of staying within the box of their chosen level are not people needed to drive the organization to win. So what we’ve done is start with the Executive, Manager, and Worker’s perspectives, and then applied them to both business development and proposals. You can really see from the results, the different ways that people look at these functions and their roles in them. If you don’t have someone in your organization (regardless of their title) asking all of these questions, your organization’s ability to win business will be negatively impacted. That is because each organization has to strike the right balance. If a perspective is not present, then you can’t strike the right balance. Even when all three are present, it can be difficult to get them into the right balance. The Executive Perspective: What should we target? Where should I invest resources to get the best ROI? What should I expect? How can I influence events? What should the plan be? How do I measure progress? How do I know if the results are right? The Manager Perspective: How do I achieve my target? How should I coordinate my team? How do I execute the process or plan? How do I make sure everyone is doing what they should? The Worker Perspective: How do I complete my assignment? How am I required to coordinate with others? What process or plan should I follow? What am I supposed to do? Business Development See also: Roles The BD Executive Perspective: What customers and core competencies should we target? Is our pipeline healthy? Where should I allocate resources to improve our win rate? What is our contribution to the company’s strategic plan? How do we implement the company’s strategic plan? Are our bidding strategies profitable? What should we be doing to better position what we offer? How do I know if we are on track to be in position to win our pursuits? The BD Manager Perspective: How do I hit my numbers? Are the leads we’re finding valid and worth pursuing? Where should people prospect and how? What processes do I have to get people to follow? How should I flow down the strategic plan and corporate positioning to our pursuits? What plans and reports do I have to submit? How should I track process toward being in position to win and how do I verify everybody is doing what they should? The BD Worker Perspective: What numbers do I have to hit? How should I go about prospecting? What do I need to do to qualify each of my leads? What will it take to win each of my leads? What do I have to do to comply with our process? How do I know if I’m on track? What do I have to do to pass my reviews? Proposal Development The Proposal Executive Perspective: What bids should we anticipate? What do we need to do to be ready? What information do we need to flow into the proposal process? Where are we going to get it and how? How should proposals reflect the company’s strategic plan and positioning strategies? Does our process match our business needs? Where should we focus to improve our win rates? How should we allocate resources? How do we address issues that cross organizational boundaries? The Proposal Manager Perspective: What bids do I need to prepare winning proposals for? What resources do I have to work with? What information does the company possess that will impact the proposal? Who should I assign what? What can I do to maximize their effectiveness? What channels do I need to go through to coordinate with all of the stakeholders? What strategies and positioning will drive each bid? How do I apply our process to the particular bids I have to pursue? How do I balance process, resources, and my deadlines? What reviews should I plan for and how? How does it all get integrated into the final document? The Proposal Worker Perspective: What are my role, responsibilities, and assignments? How do I fulfill them? How am I required to coordinate with others? What process or plan should I follow? What am I supposed to do? What needs to go into it? When is it due? What is my role in the review process and how will I be impacted?

In our continuing series on how to do proposals The Wrong Way, we’ve seen the power that comes from doing the opposite of what the best practices say you should do. In the webinar we did last week on the topic, we showed 20 different techniques for doing proposals The Wrong Way. These techniques are for dealing with adverse circumstances where the best practices don’t apply. Use them inappropriately and they can cause you to lose. But if you have no choice and may otherwise be unable to submit anything, they can potentially save the day. Or at least let you submit something so that the loss isn’t entirely your fault. One of the benefits of learning how to do proposals The Wrong Way is that forever after, you will recognize when someone else is trying to pull those tricks on you. Most of the time, people do it subconsciously and not on purpose. But either way, you don’t want to see them in a proposal you are trying to win. So now we’re going to turn things around again and talk about what to look for when you are trying to win a proposal and some well meaning fool is taking a shortcut that can undermine your chances of winning. Learn to see what the writer is focusing on and question whether it is the right thing. Most of the techniques are forms of misdirection aimed at avoiding writing about what you don’t know. Are they: See also: Dealing with adversity Writing about intent and commitment instead of what they will actually do? Writing about experience instead of how they will fulfill the requirements? Writing about capabilities instead of results? Using the words “like, about, nearly, almost, more than, less than, etc.” to avoid commitment? Simply stating that they will comply with the requirements, without saying how? Positioning to hide their weakness, as in "being innovative and bringing fresh insights and new ideas" because in reality they don’t know the customer or their environment? Dropping in words and phrases they found using Google instead of showing real insight? Using things like “flexibility,” being a “partner,” or preparing for “all contingencies” as a way of being everything to everybody and hiding that they don’t know what the customer really wants? Redefining the requirement or limiting it with assumptions because they don’t know the real scope? Writing about things instead of actually identifying them? Using passive voice to hide that they don’t know how something actually happens? Planning to have a plan instead of actually saying what they will do? Focused completely on compliance instead of the customer’s goals? When you’ve used these techniques to cover your own lack of information or weakness, it becomes much easier to recognize them in someone else’s writing. That can help you get rid of them and replace them with something that will help you win. Turn the statements above around and you’ve got a good list of what you should write about in order to win.

This article is another in a series we've written on Doing Proposals The Wrong Way. They describe very powerful, but dangerous, techniques that turn the best practices on their heads. The most powerful proposal writing aligns what you are offering with the customer’s vision. The customer’s vision for themselves is about what they want to become. It tells you how they want to change. If you get their vision wrong, then you could very well be suggesting that they change in a way that is not what they want. This is not a recipe for winning. If you avoid the issue by not writing about how your offering relates to their vision of the future, then what you offer will not be compelling. It will not be a necessary part of that future. You will lose to a competitor who addresses that alignment. See also: Customer perspective So how do you write about the customer’s vision when you aren’t really sure what it is? You can get a glimpse from their website and by doing research, but unless you’re talking to them about it you’re probably not going to learn how they intend to change. It’s not the sort of thing people write down until they’ve turned it into a specific plan. Some customers may even have an internal consensus on their vision. The vision one person shares may be different from the vision the evaluator or decision maker has. If you think you’ll lose to someone who can write about how their offering supports the customer’s vision, but you don’t know enough about that vision to write about it yourself, then one option is to do your proposal The Wrong Way. If you don’t know the customer’s vision for themselves, then write about your vision for them. That’s right, ignore their vision and give them one of your own. If you paint a vision of their future that’s better than any alternatives they are considering, it will be extremely compelling and move your proposal to the top of the ones being considered. It’s hard to do this and be realistic. But it can be done. The reason it can work is that while sometimes the customer has recognized the need for change, they haven’t yet figured out how they should change. If you solve that problem for them, there’s a good chance they’ll select you to make it happen. Another reason it can work is Fear Of Missing Out. If your vision is that good and they can’t get it anywhere else, they’ll be missing out if they don’t select you. You can beat incumbents, larger companies, and better prepared competitors with this strategy. But it’s a long shot. There’s a good chance that your vision won’t take everything into account that the customer is aware of. If it conflicts in any significant way with their other considerations, instead of moving you to the top, it will move you straight to the bottom. It's a very high risk strategy. But then again, if you have stronger competitors who know the customer’s vision better than you do, you probably weren’t going to win anyway. This is not something you can do halfway, or water down. You either paint a bold, unique vision that’s only possible through your offering, or you describe how your offering best supports the customer’s vision. If you try to drop hints, allude to things without saying them directly, hedge your bet by offering them options or in any way make the vision appear optional, then it will be less compelling. Less compelling is no way to win, especially when someone else has the advantage. Customers sometimes pick vendors more for their vision than their offering. In a commodity market or in services where everyone is hiring from the same labor pool, your vision may be your only real differentiator other than price. An ordinary vision is not compelling. If you are going to ignore the customer’s vision and give them one of your own, it better be extraordinary.

This is an article about doing proposals The Wrong Way. That is what you have to do when you are required to submit a proposal your company is not prepared for and you don’t have the information you need to win it. With all the problems and weaknesses that you have to overcome, maybe your company shouldn’t be bidding it at all, but that decision isn’t up to you. The best practices are all about preparation and won’t help you in adverse circumstances like these. So you’ve got some challenges. Of course you do. It’s too late to fix your weaknesses, and you’ll just have to write around them. Ugh. That’s no way to win. It results in an evasive, unimpressive proposal. But sometimes that's all you can do. Sometimes, you just have to get something submitted and survive the experience. We feel your pain, and have been there ourselves, too many times. So here’s a list we put together with a dozen examples of how to take those weaknesses and turn them into strengths in your proposal: See also: Dealing with adversity If you lack relevant experience, explain how the experience you do have will give you unique insights. Instead of focusing on the quantity of experience, and who has more of it, focus on the relevance of your experience. Show that your experience matters to the new project. Turn your experience into a strength that has prepared you for success instead of a weakness. If you don’t have the required staffing at the time of submission, then talk about how that enables you to right size the project or seek new expertise. If you do this well, you can turn your competition's strengths into weaknesses by showing that their staffing is actually not what is needed. Insufficient knowledge becomes a strength when you double down on what you do know. Who, what, where, how, when, and why. Make your proposal about the ones you know and skip the rest. Even if you only know the same as everyone else, if you describe the importance of it better the customer will conclude that you know more. For this to become a strength, you must demonstrate that what you do know is critical for the success of the project. When you have options for how to respond and aren't sure which to choose, you can still position as an expert on how to choose. Simply focus on both the pros and cons and leave the trade-offs unresolved. Show that you understand the issues and can help the customer make more informed decisions. The more insightful you can be about the trade-offs, the better your chances of making not knowing which to choose a strength. Consider tossing in a little something about how this demonstrates your flexibility and ability to be a trusted advisor. If you don't know anything about the customer's needs beyond what they've told you, you can still position as an expert in relevant matters. This becomes a strength when you can show the impact of your knowledge. What do you know that can affect the results? The bigger the impact, the more important your knowledge becomes and the more likely the customer will see it as a strength. If you can't be an expert, be experienced. If you can't be experienced, be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be capable. If you can't be capable, be compliant. If you can't be compliant, be fun. At each level, be a company the customer would like to work with. That is your strength. If you lack information about the customer and opportunity, position as being innovative (and risk conscious at the same time!). If you don't know what's in the box, think outside of the box. Guessing wrong is better than not guessing at all. If you're not sure what your win strategies should be, steal your competitors' win strategies (or what you imagine they might be). Then be more of whatever they say they are. If they are strong, steal their strengths and present as even stronger. If you can't give the customer what they want (perhaps you don't know), then give them what they should want. Maybe they don’t know what they want and will like the way you describe it better. The relevance of your past performance is what you make of it. If you don’t have relevant past performance, that just means you haven’t thought hard enough about how the experience you do have is relevant. Just hope the customer goes along with your rationalization. If you can't make the size, scope, or complexity relevant, find other attributes (trends, goals, methodologies, terminology, lifecycle, deliverables, services, customer interactions, or anything else) and show that what you did is not only relevant, but that it gives you something special to bring to the new project and will enable you to achieve better outcomes than anyone else. If the customer does not know you, then make it all about reputation. Focus the customer on the fact that others know you and think well of you. Make the evaluation about your reputation so that they have to think about you. By thinking about you, they are getting to know you. While you are at it, make them doubt how well they really know the incumbent. If your weakness is time and you just don't have enough of it, focus on compliance. Roll as many RFP requirements into tables as possible. If you can't describe how you comply, then simply state the RFP requirements that you comply with. This can get you thrown out, but (especially when the proposal pages limit is much lower than the length of the Statement of Work and the evaluation criteria emphasizes price) sometimes you can get away with it. If all of that fails, then go all Sun Tzu and the Art of War on them. Instead of confronting on ground where you are weak, go somewhere else. Find ground where you have strength and make them come to you. If you have less technical capability, emphasize management, and vice versa. Billion-dollar contracts have been won this way. The trick is knowing when to do proposals The Wrong Way. If winning is your highest priority, you should do things the right way by preparing and following the best practices. If you do things The Wrong Way on a bid you think you have a shot at winning, it just might ensure that you lose instead. If you face a real risk that that you might miss your deadline or not have anything to submit, then doing things The Wrong Way may keep things from falling apart and at least preserve a chance of winning, no matter how small. It's always possible that the other companies were struggling even more than you are on their proposals.

Enough of all these best practices already. While we write a lot about them, it’s a lot more fun to write about how to cheat. What do you call it when the best practices no longer apply? Worst practices? That's not right. Best practices for adverse circumstances? That's too long. We call it cheating. But it's not the dishonest kind of cheating. It's the get out of your box and break the rules because that's the only way to survive kind of cheating. When you can't do proposals the right way, you have to do them the wrong way. You have to cheat. See also: Dealing with adversity Sure, if you want to win you need to do everything you can to achieve the best practices. But what about when you’re starting late on a bid where you don't know the customer, aren't sure what to bid, can't get the information you need to write a winning proposal, have to bid because someone in authority says you must, and it's all you can do just to survive the experience let alone win it? When people tell you that you should “no bid” an opportunity like that, it really doesn’t help you at all. It’s not like it’s your choice. When you're caught in a circumstance like this, the best practices aren't going to help. You have to know how to cheat. Remember, we're not talking about lying, breaking laws, failing to comply with regulations, or ignoring ethical standards. We’re talking about what you can do when the best practices simply don't apply. If the best practices say: Avoid passive voice. This is great advice, but it doesn't apply when you aren’t sure who is going to do what but the RFP asks for your approach. When that's the case, then embrace passive voice and use it on purpose. Let them know that things will happen. Let them know that software will get written, results will be achieved, and requirements will be met. It will sound very business-like while lacking the pesky details that you just don't have. Be direct and specific. You can't be specific about things you don't know. When you know you can't be specific or cite the facts, then it's time to talk about numbers without providing any, have a plan to have a plan instead of providing the plan, and avoid commitment. But when you do, make sure you also sound flexible and enthusiastic. Talk about the benefits of your approach. Which benefits? What matters to this customer on this procurement? If you don’t know what matters to the customer, then just try to sound beneficial. Sound like someone who will work hard to do good things. Whatever they may be. You should exceed compliance, because compliance is not enough. While this is true, how do you exceed compliance when the scope is vague, the RFP is ambiguous, and no one can explain the requirements? If you have no idea how to exceed compliance, then just cite examples from the past where you have exceeded compliance and talk about applying your experience exceeding compliance to this project. Show insight into the statement of work beyond what’s in the RFP. You know you should, but it's hard when you all you have to work with is the RFP and you don’t know anything about the customer or the project. That's when it's time to talk about the kinds of things you do instead of what you actually will do. This stuff is so much more fun to talk about than best practices. It's fun to write too, but only if you've given up on winning. Mandatory warning label. The worst possible outcome for a proposal specialist is not losing. People lose all the time and just blame it on the pricing. The worst possible outcome is failing to submit the proposal on time. Cheating can help you submit on time against an impossible deadline. Just never forget that cheating on a good proposal, one that is winnable, will probably ruin it. Cheating, by definition, means turning the best practices on their head. Cheating means turning your back on the best way to win, in order to get something submitted. If by some quirk of circumstances you cheat and win, that’s just luck. Or having the lowest price. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's anything more than that. You can’t cheat on every proposal and be competitive. At least not against companies that are employing the best practices. The odds favor them, every time. On the other hand, when all the best practices in the world won’t save you, all you can do is cheat. Just have fun with it and don’t be consumed by the dark side.