Carl Dickson

As companies grow, they go from figuring out how to close their sales as they go along to putting it in writing, to putting in writing in a more reliable way. They reach a point where their proposals are getting more and more complicated, the volume is increasing, and the value of the proposals is not only larger but more critical to the company. However, because they remain entrepreneurial they don't feel ready to slow down and focus on structure. Consider the following company as an example: See also: Process Implementation They do some government business, but are mostly B2B. Their market is becoming more heavily regulated and customers are passing on their compliance issues in their RFPs. They don’t do a good job of creating proposals that reflect their win strategies. A lot of their proposals consist mainly of recycled marketing materials. They hired someone to do their proposals and put them under the VP of Sales. It didn’t improve the quality. They don’t want or need a complicated process like the “government contractors” have. My first reaction is that they have three problems going on at the same time: They need a process that will set expectations, manage the flow of information into the proposal, and help participants assess proposal quality as they go along. They need training in what a quality proposal is, and what is involved in producing one. They need to change their culture. They need to evolve how they view sales to reflect the changes in their market and develop their organization from one where customer relationships are about taking orders to one that is more solutions oriented. But where should they start? The best, obviously, would be to do all three. But what if they can only do one? They could hire someone to come in and do training. But while that will improve overall awareness, it won’t give them a process that is right for them and ready to implement. A better approach is coaching, but while that will increase the expertise available, they’ll still need to develop their process. By embedding training in the process they can start there. The right process will also embed expectation management and help participants understand what information is needed to win a proposal. This will begin the process of changing how the organization views sales. You don’t create a proposal function and implement a new process that impacts other departments in a single step. It’s better to start simple and increase the sophistication over time. But where do you start? What is the least amount of process you can get away with? To understand this, you have to change how you think about process. It’s not about steps. You don’t start with fewer steps and add more over time. Instead, it’s about starting out with the right principles and improving your ability to fulfill them over time. The basic requirements for a winning process What is the bare minimum that you need from a proposal process? Here is a list that can get you started: Start the proposal with the information required to win it. Define quality as a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. Be able to articulate what it will take to win. Turn what it will take to win into instructions for writers and criteria for reviewers. Start with a compliance matrix to plan your content and evolve into ever more detailed Proposal Content Planning. Review what was written to ensure that it reflects the compliance matrix/Content Plan as well as what it will take to win. The ramifications of each of these items will guide future improvement efforts. To simplify the process even further, simply remove items from the list. Take a look and see which items can be deleted. If you can find any. To implement the process, start by doing things according to the list. In order to set expectations, you’ll need to document the process. Forget formal process language or telling people every little detail. Start with what goals to achieve and questions to answer. Give them checklists, examples, and suggestions for inspiration. Each time you successfully prepare a proposal using this approach, raise the bar. Improve your approach. If you run into problems or challenges, then focus on applying the principles to solving them. If you want to cheat, you can just use our process library. Then skip most of it. Just pick out the items that you are ready for. If you read up on the MustWin Process, you’ll know how sophisticated it can get. But you don’t have to start there. You can use it to define and clarify your goals and accelerate the implementation. And then when you are ready to raise the bar, you can add more. If you need help implementing it, we can even come out and do the training or provide you with coaching. But you can also use it without paying for any help. Think of it as a huge toolbox that will make it much easier to improve the quality of your proposals.

Sometimes you have to bid when you don’t have a previous relationship with the customer. So how do you write from their perspective, when you don’t even know what that is? While you may not know them directly, you may know people like them. You can ask yourself questions like: What matters to people in their environment and circumstances? What would they find useful, helpful, or beneficial? What are their characteristics? Your goal is to build a profile that will help you visualize what you think the customer is like when you don’t really know them that well. Make sure that you separate the people from the organization: What matters to people like them? How does a person like that tend to make decisions? What matters to organizations like theirs? How does an organization like that tend to make decisions? This approach gives you someone to visualize so that you can write from their perspective. It is better to write about results and benefits that are relevant to people like the customer, than to not write about results and benefits at all. If you really don’t know the customer, their organization, their industry, their type or anything about them, then all you can do is use yourself as an example. Write about the results and benefits that would matter to you if you were them. Even though we vary a great deal as individuals, we all share a human nature. Just don’t write it about yourself, make it about what the customer will get and how they will benefit from it. There are some writing techniques you can use when you don’t really know the customer. These tend to water your proposal down and make it weaker. But using them is better than not making your proposal about the customer. You can hedge your bets by using words like “usually” and “most” when you want to say that something matters to a lot of people, but don’t want to say that it matters (to all people) just in case the person reading isn’t one of them. You can also use examples of things that matter, such as how you take customer concerns into consideration, without saying that those concerns matter to the customer (even if you suspect that they do). Another approach you can take is to make your submission the first step in a conversation. Even when there is a written RFP and everything is set in stone, once the contract is awarded there will be plenty of discussion. By making the proposal conversational, you can show your expertise by addressing important considerations, while maintaining flexibility with regards to the options, trade-offs, or approaches favored by the customer (as soon as you find out what they are). While you may not know the individual or company's details or specific concerns, you can still write about organizations like theirs. By focusing on issues that matter to most people and subtly hedging your language, you can prepare a proposal from the perspective of a typical customer and still be superior to one that simply describes the company submitting the proposal.

In publishing our email, we have distributed a couple million emails. This has given us some insight into the nature of “spam.” You may think that spam is something specific to email, but the truth is that a lot of people write their proposals as if they were writing spam. One of the things that we have learned is that the reader gets to decide what is spam and what is not. In publishing our newsletter, we have achieved an extremely low rate of spam rejections. We know this because our email service provider keeps benchmarks. But if someone gets our newsletter and decides it's spam, then it’s spam. We don't get to correct them. We don't get to remind them that they signed themselves up for it. The reader gets to decide. Most people define spam as unsolicited commercial email. But some spam isn’t commercial. And readers often reject email they have requested as spam. Why is that? Because what really drives people to consider an email spam is when: It's not what they expected It's not relevant to them It's not what they want Some people have a lower threshold than others, but usually it’s one or more of these that turn the relationship from something they wanted to something they reject. When you write a proposal, you want to be the opposite of spam. To achieve this, you need to provide: Exactly what the customer expects (or better) Something directly relevant and useful Something they really want When you write your proposal based on who you are, what you do, and why you are better, you risk getting the same reaction that people have when they receive spam. This will happen when they don’t want you, they want what you can do for them. If you don’t focus on the results and how they benefit, then all those impressive details about you aren’t relevant to them. They were expecting a solution and not a description of how great you are. That is not what they expected and now instead of a partner they see you as trying to sell something to them and they sense a bait and switch. Your proposal is spam. To avoid that you have to anticipate what the reader expects and values. And you have to make everything you say about yourself relevant to them. The best way to achieve that is to avoid being descriptive. The reason why it is relevant is more important to the customer than whatever fact you are describing. This is especially true with your qualifications. They don’t want your qualifications, they want what will result from those qualifications. So the next time you are trying to figure out what you want to say in your proposal, remember that it’s not about you — the customer gets to decide what’s spam.

Definition: Proposal triage is a best practice for when you have too many proposals, get a late start, or have proposals that are broken. Proposal triage is based on prioritizing effort based on the urgency of your needs. It often involves exceptions and doing things in streamlined, accelerated ways that would not be ideal under less adverse circumstances. It may involve focusing on submission instead of winning, or it may involve preserving a lesser chance of winning over a very real risk of not being able to submit at all. Proposal triage requires making quick decisions that are good enough and seeking the best compromise for best fulfilling your priorities under adversity, instead of the normal best practice and normal priorities. It starts with a rapid, intense, and brutally honest assessment: See also: Dealing with adversity Are you sure you should bid? If not, can you get out of it or are you stuck with it? How many and what kind of writers do you need vs. what do you have available? What do you have to do to get more? What, if anything, has already been done to prepare for the proposal? How much time do you have between now and when it’s due? What do you have to do in that time, and what can you skip? What does the schedule look like? What can you get people working on right now? Who should you assign to what? What is the least amount of planning you can get away with? What guidance, coaching, or training do you need immediately so people can be effective? What kind of review process should you put in place? What problems can you anticipate and mitigate early? As if these questions aren’t hard enough, once you get past them you have to grapple with what will go in the proposal. What content do you need? How should you plan and organize that content? Which parts are well known, and which parts need to be figured out? How do you discover and integrate what is known about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and company submitting the proposal, along with the RFP and subject matter expert input based on the schedule and specific characteristics of this bid? How much time and attention can you give to figuring out what it will take to win before writing starts? How are you going to deal with the reviews and inevitable changes that come from an unprepared, poorly planned, rushed effort? Deep in the back of your mind, you also have to ask yourself whether your goal is to just get something submitted or actually win the darn thing. Answer honestly because it will impact the risks you face and the decisions you make. Saying that you are going to submit the proposal while attempting to make it as winnable as possible is a meaningless rationalization. It could mean: You just want to submit but have to tell your stakeholders that you're trying to win it. You believe in winning no matter what. But this one might be out of your hands and you have competing priorities. Winning is not possible but you have to submit something. For reasons. Winning might be possible if you had the input and resources required, which you don't. Winning might be possible if you hadn't started so late. Maybe you'll win on price if your proposal doesn't get thrown out. Let's just see how things go. In order to pull as much success as possible out of adverse circumstances, try sizing up what you must produce and deliver against: What information you have to work with How much time you have until the deadline What resources you have to work with Then allocate the time and resources to a series of steps that converts the information into what you must produce in way that minimizes risk of loss while also maximizing your chances of winning where you can. It is in this last step that you succeed or fail. You should approach proposal triage with your procedures and tools ready for immediate use (and not in your head, ready to be written, or anything else a step or two away from immediate use) just like a hospital emergency room has theirs. In our toolbox, we have the MustWin Process, fully documented and ready to go. At a moment’s notice, we can use the checklists, forms, etc., without necessarily implementing the whole process. In proposal triage, you have to take shortcuts. Here is some of what we use from our MustWin toolbox: We take the four lists of questions, goals, and action items from the Readiness Review methodology and treat it like a checklist for rapid assessment of what information we have to work with. We use Content Planning to provide a way to integrate everything into a plan for writing that scales according to the available schedule. Content Planning incorporates the outline and compliance matrix, but can add a lot more depending on the time available. We can collapse the eight iterations into a single pass and quickly drop RFP requirements, instructions, questions still to be worked out, boilerplate, and anything else we can copy and paste into the Content Plan. We use Proposal Quality Validation to provide a semblance of quality assurance to the chaos of proposal triage. We use it to track what we should be validating, and then to decide what we think really needs it. It helps us balance between skipping reviews and slowing down to take a detailed look at something. A set of prepared templates for proposal logistics. Proposal logistics covers assignments, resource allocation, scheduling, and production. You may know how to prepare a schedule, but you shouldn’t have to slow down to format the document that wraps around the schedule. If you don’t have these items ready for immediate implementation, then on the spot and under pressure you have to: Know what questions to ask to find out what information you have to work with and spend time in discussion assessing it. Find a balance between planning and writing by the seat of your pants. Hold a review or two and figure out what that means when you get there. That’s not only a high-risk approach to proposal triage, it also means you will be slowed down by figuring it out as you go along. It’s easy to say that proposal triage should not be necessary and that any opportunity that needs triage should not be bid. But that’s not reality. And if you know it’s going to be required sooner or later, you should be prepared when that day comes. If you are practicing proposal triage on all of your proposals, then you do not have an emergency room. What you have is dysfunction in something that should be a core competency for your company. In the medical world they’d call that malpractice.

Once you understand what proposal themes are and how they contribute to winning, then comes the hard part: articulating your message in the form of theme statements. When we review people’s proposals we see a lot of theme statements that are either: See also: Themes Grandiose statements that sound like bragging and are completely unsubstantiated. Like being the best-in-class industry leader ever. Claims of qualifications or experience as if they matter, without saying why they matter. Bland, boring statements that the customer should pick the company submitting the proposal without explaining why. So much blah, blah, blah. Each of these is a result of trying to describe yourself in favorable terms or how you want to be seen. They don’t provide any value to the customer or help them make their decision. They do nothing to help your proposal win and can actually work against you. They come are a result of trying to "sound good" without actually understanding how to articulate your message in a way that matters to the customer. The best way to approach writing theme statements is to give the customer information that will enable them to justify a decision in your favor to others in their organization. Write the award justification for them. Writing theme statements Theme statements should focus on reasons. Instead of stating that you are better than your competitors, it is far better to provide the reasons why you are better. Instead of saying that your offering is great, explain how it is great. When you are the customer, you don’t care if the salesperson thinks their product is great. Of course they do. They better. But that is not even a consideration for you. You ignore that noise and make your decision based on reasons. You make your decision based on what makes it great, why it is better, or what its impact will be. You factor in things that concern you like quality, risk, and timing. Your theme statements should deliver the information that you anticipate the customer will consider and give them what they need to make a decision in your favor. Good vs. Best The best theme statements tell the customer what they are going to get. They don’t offer commitment, understanding, enthusiasm, flattery, promises, universal statements that apply equally to your competitors, or even claims of attributes like quality or lower risk. They don’t tell the customer what they require or patronize them by telling them who they are. Good themes offer results. They make the customer want you by telling them what they will get if they select you. If you leave out what they are going to get, then there is nothing there for them to want. But the best themes offer something more than results. They offer proof. Proof points are the best themes. When a proposal is being scored on strengths and weaknesses and the evaluator needs to justify their score, proof points are exactly what they need. Claims of being "proven" are ignored. But actual proof gets attention. The next time you are trying to formulate the message you want to deliver to the customer, focus on what the customer wants from you, instead of what you want to tell them. Theme statements should say things that matter — to the customer. Unsubstantiated claims do not matter to the customer. In fact, they get in the customer’s way when they are looking for what matters about your proposal. Identify what matters to the customer and then prove what you have to say about fulfilling it. In a short, pithy statement. That's a theme. And it sets up the rest of your proposal to substantiate the conclusion you want them to reach. Passing the test A good test for whether you are successful is whether you can delete the theme statements from the proposal. If you can delete the theme statements without removing something vital from the proposal, then your theme statements do not matter. If your theme statements do not matter, then you have provided no reason to accept your proposal. That is the strongest argument I can think of for why you should write your theme statements first, before the text of your proposal. If the text of your proposal is the only thing that articulates the reasons why the customer should select you, this means that the people who wrote the proposal didn’t know what those reasons where. It means they wrote the text of the proposal while also trying to figure out the reasons why the customer should select you, instead of writing the text of the proposal to prove why the customer should select you. The difference matters and will impact your win rate.

First you need to qualify it. Qualifying a lead means making sure that it’s worth pursuing. See also: Information Advantage Is it real? Is it big enough? Is it the right type? Is it worth pursuing? Can you win it? But the truth is that you should be qualifying the lead continuously. You should be constantly proving that the lead is worth pursuing. Once you qualify the lead, you need to prepare to win it. This is a combination of things you need to do and things you need to find out. You do this by seeking the answers to more questions. When most companies get a lead, they ask themselves what they can find out about it. They go fishing. Sometimes they discover good information and are quite pleased with themselves. But usually, when the RFP is released and they start asking the real questions that they need to answer to guide the proposal writing to the win, they find that they are unprepared. This is because they have not used the time before RFP release to the maximum advantage and because the information they stumbled across did not add up to what they need to know to win. The only way to overcome this is to bring some structure to how you approach the pre-RFP pursuit. Start by breaking down the time before RFP release into parts, so that you can allocate action items and information gathering activities and then hold reviews to track their progress. Tracking the progress of leads means you need check-in milestones and some way to measure progress. Monthly business development meetings tend to become routine and ineffective. The way we approach this in our process is to break the time before RFP release down proportionately into four reviews. We take the questions that articulate what we need to know in order to write the winning proposal and allocate them across those four reviews. When we get to a review date, we grade whether the answers we’ve gathered are sufficient for us to be ready to win at RFP release. We call our approach to the pre-RFP pursuit phase Readiness Reviews. They enable you to measure whether you are becoming more or less ready to win before the RFP is even out. Even if you have passed a prior review, if you find that it's no longer worth the investment to continue it may be best to drop the pursuit. When you assume all leads should be pursued and are incentivized to show a full pipeline, companies have a difficult time dropping the pursuits, even when they haven't succeeded at developing an information advantage for them. But when you see the Readiness Review scores, it’s a bit more objective. If you track the metrics, it becomes concrete. Grading your progress at set reviews enables you to collect metrics that can help you determine exactly what drives win probability. If you divide the questions and action items into categories like customer awareness, opportunity awareness, competitive awareness, and self-awareness, you can measure how your score at each phase in each area correlates with your win rate. Over time, this can help you decide how to prioritize your efforts. Holding onto every lead means your win rates will go down and those you do win will have lower margins. But to develop an information advantage and be able to know which leads are on track you need to implement a structure like we’ve described. In a more competitive environment, those that do will gain market share. Those that don’t will starve and fade away.

A key part of winning in writing is having the ability to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. Not everybody can write from someone else’s perspective. It turns out that seeing things from other perspectives can also help with other parts of the process. Here are five different ways of looking at your pursuits and how they impact your ability to win: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline The forward perspective. Looking forward is about anticipating and preparing for what to do next. It is about starting from where you are and saying "what do we need to do?" Looking forward is the easiest perspective for most people, what they focus on, and some never look at it any other way. It works great, until you run out of time or get to the end and find out that you don’t have what you need. Most people start their proposals feeling unprepared. Do you think there might be a connection? But looking forward also means laying the right foundations. It means creating a strategic plan that tells your staff how to position the company. It means collecting intelligence so that you’ll be able to articulate what it will take to win. It means having the right processes and methodologies for pre-RFP pursuit and post-RFP proposal development. Looking forward should not mean making it up as you go along. The backward perspective. Looking backward means starting by thinking about what it will take to win your proposal. Each item you think about will lead to more things that you need in order to get there. Each step you take will take you further back in time. Looking backward tells you what you need to do at each step to arrive at the winning proposal. It is a good perspective for showing people why they need to take action early in the process instead of waiting until the end. The information perspective. Winning proposals is all about finding and assessing information so that you can articulate what the customer needs to hear in order to win. Most people just take what they know and try to present it well. Winners base their presentations on better information. The entire process can be looked at as a flow of information that gets assessed, converted, and ultimately becomes the proposal. Instead of thinking about gathering intelligence, obtaining a competitive advantage, or writing a winning proposal, consider looking at it from the perspective of where you have an information advantage. Then translate your information advantage into winning strategies and themes for your proposal. The progress perspective. How do you know if you are on track to be ready to win when the RFP is released? The only way to track your progress to ensure that you accomplish everything you need to before time runs out is to start already knowing what steps you need to follow, questions you need to answer, and goals you need to achieve. Then you can measure their completion. Another perspective is to look at your pursuit not in terms of time, but in terms of progress. How much have you completed out of what you should have? To visualize this, you need a process that is measurable. The scientific perspective. If you have a process that is measurable, you can track metrics. If you correlate those metrics with your win rate, you can determine which things have the most impact on your win rate. If you’re going by conventional wisdom, you’re probably wrong. One of the best things that result from this perspective is better bid/no bid decisions. The hardest part about bid decisions isn’t deciding which leads to pursue, it’s deciding which pursuits to pull the plug on because the pursuit has fallen too far behind. Metrics and a scientific outlook take the emotion out of that decision.

Is your company’s ability to develop business based on people or processes? Many companies assume that all they need to do is hire the right salesperson and then wait for the money to start pouring in. They think that if they hold monthly meetings for their sales staff to tell them what they’ve been up to, they have a process. They might even prepare an agenda for the meeting, use a standard PowerPoint template, and require reports to be submitted. But that is not a process. That is just trusting people to do the right thing with a little collaboration thrown in. If that was sufficient, there would be no need for any processes or quality methodologies. But how do you turn relationship marketing into a process, let alone a process that can be quantified? Most people assume that you can’t. But they give up too easily. Business development is really about developing an information advantage. The information you see can be itemized and the information you obtain can be measured. Progress can be quantified. More importantly, results can be validated and correlated with the desired outcome. Companies that do this have a process for business development. The reason they have a process is that it enables good, solid, trustworthy people to perform at their full potential. When you do this in business development it produces a competitive advantage. Companies that have a good process for business development have a competitive advantage over companies that hire good people and leave them to do their thing. So how do you create a process for your business development efforts? Start by: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline Itemizing the information you need in order to scope, price, and win a proposal Bringing structure to the period between lead identification and RFP release that monitors whether you have obtained this information Quantifying how much information you have obtained and its quality through a review process After measuring your progress, comparing how the results correlate with your win rate for past pursuits The key elements in a business development process are: The itemized list of information you seek The structure you create for the pre-RFP pursuit The review process and grading system Turning review results into metrics The success of the effort will be determined by how well you convert the information you gather into an awareness of what it will take to win that can guide the development of the proposal. In our case we created a process that we call Readiness Reviews. They take the questions, goals, and action items needed to discover what it will take to win and allocate them to a series of reviews. The result enables you to measure your progress towards developing an information advantage so that you are ready to win at RFP release. A full off-the-shelf set of documentation for implementing it comes with PropLIBRARY. You can use it, or you can follow the same approach to build your own. Here’s a hint: Start with what it takes to prepare a winning proposal and work backwards. For each item you identify, ask yourself what you need in order to get it. Allocate the results to a series of reviews and create a grading system. If you do an exceptional job of it, what you create will inspire your sales staff and help them remember everything to ask the customer or that they need to do. It will carry the results forward so that they are assessed and transformed into what you need to win the proposal. Instead of making extra work and imposing structure, it can help your staff be more successful.

One of the most common questions we get is, "What should my proposal look like?" So when a company we’ve teamed with many times in the past started talking about producing some templates to help people format their proposals, we told them we have a few thousand friends who might be interested. As a result of that conversation, we now have a bunch of proposal formats available. Only these aren’t just any proposal formats. These are designed by the 24 Hour Company. If you don’t know them, they practically invented proposal graphics. When companies going after billion-dollar proposals want the best possible graphics and visuals to deliver their message, this is the company they turn to. I know them personally and know the quality of their work. The reason this matters isn’t just that their templates are better looking (which they are), but that they are also better constructed. They are in the right formats for MS-Word, they correctly use style sheets, and they have both single and double column layouts. They come with an instruction sheet that explains it all. And because of who developed them, you can have confidence that they were done right. The templates can also be used with the MustWin Process that we recommend. One of the best ways to streamline your proposal planning is to do it in the format of the document you are trying to produce. Our Content Planning methodology starts with an empty shell of a document that has all of the formatting in place. You can use these templates to instantly complete this step and go straight to planning and writing your document. This would be a good time for me to stop raving about them and get out of the way so you can go look at them. Before I do I want to tell you how we’ve organized them. They are mostly in packages. Pick a type of template (financial, medical, technology, business, etc.) and a package contains a variety of templates in different colors all ready to use. If you do a lot of proposals across different areas, or you just can’t decide which is best for you, we have a discounted package that enables you to just get them all. If a package is more than you need, we even have a basic single template that you can purchase that is less expensive than a full package. Take your choice, there should be something in there for you. Okay, now you can click here to see them all.

The best way to determine how many people you need to write the proposal and what skills they should have is to thoroughly plan the content before you start writing. Only when you know exactly what it is that you plan to write can you accurately determine how many people you need to write it. Unfortunately, you usually need to estimate the number of writers far in advance of having a Proposal Content Plan. The budget for a proposal is often submitted before the RFP is even out. That is why a lot of people do their bid and proposal budgets based on a percentage of anticipated revenue (typically 1-3%). It’s easier to say what the company is prepared to invest in the proposal than it is to say what the proposal will actually require. See also: Proposal management From this number you can take out the core staff (typically a Capture Manager and a Proposal Manager but sometimes others) and any production staff required at the back end. Next add in reviewers and ancillary support (contracts, pricing, etc.). Take out any resource and travel costs. Whatever’s left is what you’ve got to cover the writing. The last step is to figure out how many people that will cover. It helps to be able to anticipate whether the proposal will be under 50 pages, 500 pages, or 5,000 or more pages. It also helps to have some idea what subject matters you will have to cover, so that you can identify subject matter experts (SMEs) and decide whether to have the SMEs write the proposal or work with a proposal specialist to get the proposal in writing. Trying to estimate the amount of writing and how long it should take is where people get into trouble. I have heard many people cite benchmarks like it will take a day’s worth of effort for every page in a proposal. But it’s really elastic. The time per page for a 50-page proposal due in 30 days will be very different for a 500-page proposal due in 30 days, even if they are otherwise for exactly the same bid. Other factors, like the speed and experience of the writers, whether the proposal is on a familiar topic, whether the customer is well known, whether staff are dedicated or distracted, etc. also impact it. You should keep in mind that on a 30-day schedule, the time available for writing may only be 15 days, with 10 of them before the major review. On a 10-day schedule, the time available for writing may only be 5 days, with 3 days to get to a first draft. Incidentally, you should clarify whether you are counting calendar days or business days. What really determines the number of people you need is whether one person can write a section in the time scheduled. This in turn depends on whether that person is dedicated or distracted. Small page counts vary less in the number of writers required than large page counts do. A 50-page proposal due in 10 days will most likely require 2-4 people, not counting review or ancillary staff. It will most likely have two main sections of 10-15 pages, and a couple of smaller sections. So it will probably need 3 writers producing about 5 draft pages per day. But a 500-page proposal would have a wider range due to having more variables. When you have a detailed Proposal Content Plan, it is easier to estimate with precision, because you have accounted for everything that needs to be written in advance. But a Proposal Content Plan will not be ready until several days after RFP release. In fact, you may need your writers before the Proposal Content Plan is complete, because you might want them to contribute to the plan. So it is difficult to estimate how many writers you will need before you know the schedule or have the RFP. But what I can say is that it only takes one proposal specialist to screw in a light bulb — unless you want to have someone review the quality and someone to price it. It may also vary depending on how much time is given. And to make it more realistic, it will also depend on how many light bulbs you need to screw in, which you will not know until you are finished. All I can really say is that the budget for this task will be one-half of what it actually costs. If you’re lucky. Hope you’re lucky with your proposals!

Here is a nice long list of topics to discuss and things to discover when you are talking with your customers. While they are presented as questions, you should not necessarily ask them directly. Rather you should weave them into your conversation and relationship. Obviously you won’t be able to touch on all of them in a single meeting. But they can help you create a contact plan, inspire you to dig deeper, and give you targets for follow-ups. All of them have the potential to produce intelligence that can help you win the pursuit. The Customer’s Priorities and Preferences See also: Relationship marketing 1. What are the customer’s priorities? 2. How do their own goals relate to their organization’s goals? 3. What are their preferences? 4. What trade-offs do they anticipate? 5. Are they risk tolerant or risk averse? 6. What alternatives does the customer have? 7. What is the most meaningful in terms of value to the customer? 8. Does the customer prefer a single award or multiple awards? The Customer’s Environment 9. What is their culture like? 10. What sources of pressure do they face? 11. What else do they have competing for their time and attention? 12. What problems do they anticipate? 13. What changes do they anticipate? 14. If they could do anything differently, what would it be? 15. What kinds of deadlines do they face? 16. Do they usually stick to their deadlines? 17. What kinds of hassles do they have to deal with? 18. What kind of challenges do they face? 19. What do they look forward to? 20. What do they dread? 21. What are they sensitive about? 22. What steps do they go through to get something new? 23. Do they have any insight into who/what/where/how/when/why? 24. Do they like their boss? 25. Are they centralized or decentralized? 26. What would they like to change? 27. What would they like to stay the same? 28. What platforms, formats, or standards are relevant? 29. What social networks does the customer participate in? 30. What trade shows or events does the customer attend? 31. Are there any ethical considerations you should be aware of? The Competitive Environment 32. What companies have they worked with? 33. What are their positive/negative experiences with their vendors? 34. Are they satisfied with the current performance on the contract? 35. What do they think about teaming between contractors? 36. Do they like working with small businesses or large businesses? Decision Making 37. How do they make decisions? 38. How do they evaluate RFPs? 39. Do they buy on price or value? 40. How will price be evaluated? 41. What does the customer consider to be the minimum that is technically acceptable? 42. How does their approval process work? 43. Are they consensus driven? 44. Who participates in making the selection/decision? 45. Who influences the selection/decision without actually participating? 46. Do they prefer off-the-shelf or customized solutions? Executing the Process 47. Is their procurement process documented? 48. Do they have training materials you can download or view? 49. Do they have any other information you can take? 50. Do they have to issue an RFP? 51. How many different ways do they have to buy things? 52. How do they select an acquisition strategy? 53. What options do they have for making a purchase or getting a contract signed? 54. Do they already have a budget? 55. Is their budget funded? 56. Do they participate in RFP writing or evaluation? 57. What step are they on/what is the next step? 58. Do they have all the information they need? 59. Is there any information you can provide to facilitate the process? 60. How do they like to buy things? 61. Are there any potential conflicts of interest to be managed? 62. Would a demonstration be relevant? 63. Is a site visit an option? 64. Will the customer issue a Request for Information, Market Survey, or Draft Request for Proposals? 65. How well do the programs, procurement, and executive levels work together? 66. Do you have contacts to cover the programs, and procurement, and executive levels? Expectations 67. What result is the customer looking for? 68. Do their expectations match what it will actually take? 69. How long until they expect to be ready to make a purchase? 70. How long after the purchase do they expect to take delivery? 71. How do they prefer delivery to take place? 72. How will they measure or define a successful outcome? 73. What do they expect regarding how the project will operate or be managed? 74. Does the customer expect to directly manage any staff involved? 75. Is the customer looking for a partner, or someone to take direction? 76. What action items are next for the customer? 77. What action items are next for you? 78. Are there any important dates to consider? 79. What deliverables will the customer expect? 80. When should you follow up? 81. Who else should you talk to? 82. Is there anyone else within your own company that you should introduce to the customer? Readiness Reviews give you a structure into which you can insert questions like these to ensure that you are making progress toward being ready to win your pursuits. The Readiness Review methodology is part of the MustWin Process that we developed. It is fully documented in the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase, along with many other items that provide inspiration, guidance, and acceleration for your business development efforts.

When most people think about what their competitive advantages might be, they tend to focus on themselves. They ask questions like “What do we do better?” and “How can we exceed the requirements?” But they are missing that they do not matter. The customer who will be making the decision matters far more than you do. A much better way to find your competitive advantage is to focus on what they prefer. For more information about how it impacts the pre-RFP pursuit phase, see also: 5 steps to gain an information advantage and turn it into a competitive advantage The truth about customer intimacy How do you win before the RFP is even released? You just found a lead. Now what? People are not enough for business development 21 tips for new executives with business development responsibilities Gaining a competitive advantage by understanding your customer's acquisition process Pre-RFP Pursuit: Discovering what it will take to win Turning an information advantage into a competitive advantage 11 ways to get ahead of the RFP Changing the dialog surrounding bid decisions For more information about how it impacts winning, see also: 7 objective signs that your company is not the winning organization it could be Attention Executives: If you only do one thing to win more business, it should be this 5 ways to become serious about winning business 8 things that impact your win rate the most 5 ways a small business can beat its much larger competitors For more information about how it impacts the proposal, see also: 9 things to know about your customer to write a winning proposal 4 things you need to do to win proposals consistently 4 things that are critical for winning large proposals How a proposal beginner can beat the proposal professionals 8 simple indicators that you’re going down the wrong path before you lose your proposal 9 places you should invest to increase your proposal win rate 3 more ways to use this clever approach to win your proposals that you probably haven’t thought of A competitive advantage is something that will make it more likely the customer will pick you over their other alternatives. The best competitive advantage is to discover your customer’s preferences. When the customer follows a formal evaluation process, an information advantage regarding what it will take to get the highest score can be decisive. When the customer will award to the lowest price technically acceptable offer, an information advantage regarding what they mean by "technically acceptable" gives you a definite edge. When there are trade-offs involved in fulfillment, an information advantage regarding which of the trade-offs the customer prefers give you a competitive advantage. Instead of looking inward for a competitive advantage, you should gain insight about the customer that amounts to an information advantage. When people turn inward to look for a competitive advantage, it’s often a sign that they are trying to identify their competitive advantages too late in the game. When it's too late to get to know the customer, all you can do is look inward for competitive advantages. That is one reason why many people favor not bidding when the company has no customer insight. In order to develop an information advantage, you should ask: What do we know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that others might not? What can we find out about the customer’s preferences, especially regarding trade-offs? How do we turn what we know into a better evaluation score? Your information advantage should be turned into a positioning advantage by presenting your company and offering in the context of what you have learned. Your information advantage may result in you developing a better offering, or it may result in a proposal that scores better with the exact same offering. An information advantage can help you make better trade-offs in developing your offering so that you come in at a lower price. Or it could help you target the right features to better meet the customer’s needs. Or it could give your offering strength where your competitors' offerings are weak. When the RFP requires everybody to propose the exact same thing, an information advantage can enable you to show your offering in better alignment with the customer’s goals. Often the same feature can be presented as having different benefits. Which benefits matter most to the customer? The exact same feature may be perceived as having better or worse value based on which benefit you present. An information advantage enables you to maximize the value to this particular customer. When it’s not clear whether the evaluation will focus on price or value, an information advantage can make all the difference. Should you emphasize value? How will the customer consider value? Or is the lowest price more important to them? What would make a low priced offering unacceptable to the customer? Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: The MustWin Process Architecture: How does it all fit together? Assessing the impact of the input layer on your process How information flows through the process to become what you need to win Business development, capture, and pre RFP pursuit Measuring readiness to win and your information advantage MustWin Readiness Reviews Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #1) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #2) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #3) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #4) Questions to ask to build an information advantage (Readiness Review #4b) Proposal Startup Information Checklist (ebook with 135 questions in 9 categories) Your bid process should be structured around developing your information advantage. It is far better to start early, when you can take active measures to gain customer insight. But even when you start late, the process should drive you to make the best use of the information and knowledge that you have. Some companies make better use of what they know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment in their proposals than other companies do. We call these companies "winners." Some companies bid blind and send as many customers as possible the same proposal, reusing their proposal text as much as possible to keep costs low and bid at a high volume. We call these companies "losers." They celebrate when they win (on price), without realizing this can doom them to a future of declining margins. Your business development, sales, capture, and proposal activities and hand-offs can all be thought of as information hand-offs and steps toward adding to what you know and converting it into what you need to say and do in order to win. Your proposal process should not be a document assembly or production process. It should be an information advantage development and exploitation process. This is exactly what we have built into the MustWin Process that is available to subscribers on PropLIBRARY. The data you obtain, the reports you produce, the format you write things down in, how you assess what you’ve discovered, and what you do about it should all be done in ways that make it easy for your data to build and change into an information advantage. If your bid process is just about reports and reviews, it may not be doing everything it can to carry information forward and turn it into an information advantage.

Who do you need on your proposal team? The place to start is with what activities need to be covered and what skills are needed. The easiest way to account for all the activities and corresponding skill requirements is to categorize them by the roles that people play in proposal development. Proposal development roles See also: Proposal Management We prefer to define roles functionally. It doesn’t matter how many people you have doing the work, as long as you have every function covered. On a small proposal you might have one or two people doing everything. On a large proposal you might have someone dedicated to each function. Some functions might need multiple people. The roles we start with are: Business development manager: You need someone to find the lead, qualify it, and develop customer relationships. Without these you are likely to find yourself doing proposals without having an information advantage over your competitors. Capture manager: You want your business developers spending their time looking for as many leads as possible. If you want someone focused on winning this particular lead you need to assign a capture manager. Otherwise lead generation will grind to a halt every time a lead becomes a proposal. You need a capture manager to figure out how to win. Proposal manager: You don't need a proposal manager to do the proposal. You do need someone to define and lead the process of developing the document needed to close the sale, and to coordinate all the people who will be involved in the proposal. That will end up being far more people that you may realize. Proposal managers make all the people contributing to the proposal successful. If the proposal "manager" is one of the people writing the proposal, they aren't managing. You need a proposal manager to turn what it will take to win into a winning document. Proposal writers and contributors: You need proposal writers because writing and management are two different things. But sometimes the people involved in proposal writing don't actually do any writing. Subject matter experts and others can contribute to the proposal without necessarily writing sections. Depending on the nature of your offering, you may need highly technical people involved. Or estimators. Or experts who can address one specific requirement. The nature of what you offer, the RFP requirements, and the capabilities of the staff you have available will determine whether contributors prepared finished copy or not. Production coordinator and staff: Someone has to format it, print it, and stuff it in binders. If there are enough people involved, coordination becomes a full-time level of effort. Even if it’s just an electronic submission there is still significant production involved. Pricing and contracts: Someone has to prepare the pricing and business volumes. Someone has to read and understand the terms and conditions specified in the RFP. For a small business this might be one person. For a large business, this might be two or more departments with specialists like estimators, contracts, legal, supply chain and subcontract managers, human resources, facilities, etc. Reviewers: Not only do you need someone to double check everything, you need enough people to read both the proposal and RFP, understand the issues, and go beyond simply rendering their opinions about the proposal to validate the decisions, trade-offs, and presentation of your proposal. That takes time, experience, and knowledge. You may need technical experts in addition to the ones who wrote the Technical Approach to validate the approaches being proposed. People do not learn how to define proposal quality criteria or validate them in college. So you must find the people who are capable of doing this, and if you want objective opinions, you need to find people with this expertise who are not already working on the proposal. Organizing proposal staff If you have 2-3 people on the proposal team, organization is not that big a deal. If you count all the SMEs/writers, ancillary help, and review participants and realize that you have dozens of people touching the document, you need to bring some structure to the organization. Proposal writers are typically organized around their sections, and in large proposals a number of sections might be grouped into a volume. If you’ve got enough writers, you might want one person in charge of each section or volume. This person is typically called a Volume Lead. Once the proposal gets started, the Proposal Manager defines and leads the proposal process. The Capture Manager defines the offering and makes decisions regarding what to propose. The Capture Manager usually isn’t a writer and doesn’t usually manage the writing. The Capture Manager’s role is to figure out what to offer and how to win (leading and representing the technical staff). The Proposal Manager is in charge of getting it in writing. If you have one or more teams of reviewers, you should appoint a review leader to manage the participants and oversee the fulfillment of the review process. Even if the review team is small, it works best if the Proposal Manager defines the process and someone else takes over the job of making the reviews happen. If you don’t have a review process, then the Review Team Leader will have to make one up. This creates all kinds of problems and conflicts. A review process is a lot more than a box and a date that says “review happens here.” Your production staff will format and finalize the proposal for submission, whether electronic files or hard copies are required. This may require one person. Maybe a few. It depends on how complicated the proposal is. If you're lucky, it will include at least one proposal graphics specialist. Luckily submitting hard copies is becoming more and more rare, because they take more effort to produce. The level of effort for proposal production also depends on how complicated your layouts and graphics are. If you need multiple people to support production, you’ll probably want a single point of contact in charge of them and setting standards. All the others What about contracts? Supply chain specialists? What about pricing? What about other stakeholders? More people touch the proposal than you probably realize. I've seen people from facilities being involved. The core team may be small. Maybe you think it's one person. But there are many others who play small roles that are often vital and need to be accounted for. What does it all add up to? The number of bodies will vary. But people may cover multiple roles so long as they aren't overstretched. And that's the real challenge. Calculating the number of people you need to write a winning proposal has many factors and considerations. The level of effort for every proposal should be different. If it's not different, then you are not tailoring based on the customer, offering, and competitive environment, and your win rate is suffering as a result. Winning pays for all the effort many, many times over. Putting effort into winning has a better ROI than trying to reduce the effort it takes to submit. Instead of trying to calculate the fewest number of people, look at the roles, what should be accomplished by each, how well they were covered, and what the impact was on your win rate. Don't settle for we only have so many people to work with. Get data driven. You might find that by overstretching, you're losing far more than you are saving.

How we got started... Carl Dickson started CapturePlanning.com in 2001 as a membership-driven site to help people learn how to find business opportunities and win more contracts. He had some great content and wanted to sell it. But he wanted to take advantage of the web and not just put it out there as books. He went with a membership model so that he could offer an entire library and not have to sell every title separately. The site has grown every year since then. It went from a side gig to Carl's consulting work, to his primary gig leaving little time for consulting, and then to a mature publishing company. By 2008 CapturePlanning.com had published over a dozen tutorials and more than 200 articles. We lost track of the number of articles somewhere above 500. Along the way our site had attracted over 25 million visits and over 10,000 paying customers as of the end of 2015. The origin of the MustWin Process In 2008, Carl was doing regular speaking engagements and was doing one on the problems with Red Teams when he realized that those problems would never be solved. It was an awkward moment. He went on to publish a couple of whitepapers that spelled out the reasons why the way people were trying to do things would never work. He expected to encounter resistance from people defending the status quo, but instead Carl found a groundswell of le were tired of a review process that sometimes seemed like it wasn't even worth the bother. Naturally they challenged him to come up with a replacement. So CapturePlanning.com published the MustWin Process in 2009 and offered a new approach that showed what to do in order to be ready to win at RFP release, turn that into a plan for preparing the content of the proposal, and then validate that the content reflects what it will take to win. Instead of being based on phases or how things were typically done, it was based on what it takes to win. It seemed like such a simple things to build the process around the needs of the stakeholders. And yet... Launching PropLIBRARY By 2011, the membership side of CapturePlanning.com had outgrown it's original website. So CapturePlanning.com created a new resource for its members called PropLIBRARY. PropLIBRARY took all the content that CapturePlanning.com had published over the previous 10 years and turned it into a dynamic tool. Now the MustWin Process goes beyond it's book origins and provides just-in-time inspiration, guidance, and online training. In 2016 we launched a new and much improved version of PropLIBRARY. The user interface changed but the content remained. It just became more accessible. The CapturePlanning.com Network We currently reach over 100,000 professionals every week through our network of websites, the LinkedIn groups we moderate, mobile apps we've developed, and our email newsletter. This audience, vets our content, gives us feedback, and inspires us through discussion. And does business with us. Thank you for all of that.

Within a company, 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 to each other. It’s strange because they should have so much in common. If business development and proposal success require relationship marketing, then you would expect both to want to work together to grow the customer relationship. Business development can help the operational business units to grow their staff, resources, and scope of work. But the other factors in their environment usually far outweigh these considerations. Whenever they work together it usually means that the staff from the operational business units have been given work on top of their normal project workload. From the very beginning, business development is positioned as a distraction or burden. The business unit staff are sometimes uncooperative and disinterested, and business development can see them as an obstacle. And the operational business units see business development as uninformed and incompetent, making them a risk at best, a threat at worst. And the reward when the operational business units cooperate with business development is often to participate in a proposal — piled on top of their normal workload. Once the proposal starts, the conflicts can’t be ignored. They are set in writing for all to see. But the process of getting it in writing is stressful and painful, making it more emotionally difficult to deal with the conflicts. And often because the conflicts aren’t anticipated and resolved before the writing starts, resolving the conflict means rewriting, adding insult to injury on top of the now even more expanded workload. Business development is about reaching beyond your comfort zone. Operational business units seek stability and risk mitigation. Business development always wants more. But the business units must manage their workload so that they don’t get put into a position where there is more to do than they have people to accomplish it. See also: Roles Business development also forces the operational business units to confront their failures. Poor performance lowers the chances of winning. Overcoming poor performance must be part of the bid strategies. Nobody in an operational business unit wants to admit that poor performance occurred under their watch. You can use word games to call it something else (issues, incidents, whatever), but you can’t change the fact that it puts people on the spot. The biggest issues usually revolve around what to include in the offering and how to price it. Every bid has a price to win and a price to perform. The natural incentives are for business development to bid low and for the operational business units to bid high enough to cover every contingency that could impact performance. The right price depends on which risk and how much of it the company wants to take on. For this reason, neither business development nor the operational business units should control the final price. When a company holds a contract for a long time, rewarding their best operational staff can become a problem during a recompete. The competitors will bid staff who are qualified, but cost less because they haven’t received as many raises. They are like your staff was at the beginning of the contract. An environment like this magnifies the conflict between the operational business unit staff and business development. An institutionalized process of arbitration and transparent decision making can help mitigate the conflict. In most organizations this means someone sitting above both of them on the org chart with profit and loss responsibility making key decisions. But it should be based more on process than on authority. Risk decisions should be made explicitly, based on criteria you can articulate, the strategic plan for the company, and the circumstances of the bid. When you do this, you make the bid discussions about how decisions get made and not about what decisions got made or who made them. In addition to less confrontation among participants, you get better decision making as a result. Often companies try to fix the conflicts through incentives. Since BD is usually incentivized to win and operational business units are incentivized based on customer satisfaction, the incentives often get in the way of good relations between the two. Mixing the incentives, for example giving the business units some incentives based on wins, can help, but will still produce side effects. Incentives always have side effects. Intrinsic rewards often work better than financial ones. What fuels the conflict is basically insecurity. If you can’t give people direct control over their own destiny, then what does help is clear lines of authority and transparent decision making. Seek out what it will take to perform and what it will take to win, without ignoring either. Then make a decision based on which risks are in the company’s interests and explain it that way. Make sure that the staff stuck with the decision are managed based on how they handle the risk and not just on customer satisfaction.

When you get lucky and your customer reveals something they’re thinking about doing or buying in the future, your next step should not be to pitch them on selecting you as the vendor. Instead, what you should focus on next is: Gaining an information advantage Influencing the specification Building the relationship so that more revelations may follow Besides, any deal is weeks or months away. Maybe even years. And more importantly, the customer isn't ready to think about selecting a vendor. They're still trying to figure out what to get and how. At this stage, you'll get far more out of helping them then you will out of selling yourself. If something is big and complex, the customer can’t just go out and buy it. They’ve got research to do and an internal procurement process to follow. While the time is not right to sell them, the time is right to help them navigate their procurement process. You have probably heard about how important it is to start your pursuits before the RFP is released and to influence the specifications. Now is the time. First, you need to study up on your customer’s procurement process and buying habits. If they have a procurement manual for their own staff that is online or available, download and study it. Their procurement manual will describe the steps they have to go through. More importantly, it will describe the approval process and who will be involved. Studying their procurement process will tell you what they need to do next so that you can help them. It will also help you anticipate where the project could get sidetracked so that you can act to prevent it. The customer’s acquisition process will involve things like deciding what contract vehicle to use, budgeting, writing the RFP, performing market surveys of potential vendors, establishing the evaluation process and criteria, etc. Often a procurement specialist will get involved to guide the actual buyer through the process. You can help them by supplying the information they need to complete the process. Just simply understanding the steps will enable you to better track the lead and anticipate when the RFP will be released. At each step you should consider what you can do to help your customer, and how you can position for competitive advantage: See also: Influencing the RFP What contract vehicles can you offer that will streamline the paperwork for your customer? If the customer needs to conduct a market survey to establish things like the competitive range and the number of potential bidders, who can you recommend be included? What advice can you give them regarding the budget? An amateur will simply seek to make it as large as possible. An expert will show the customer what things will drive the price up or down and let the customer maximize their budget while influencing the requirements. If the customer’s process calls for issuing a “Sources Sought” notice to determine whether any small businesses are capable of being the prime contractor, what can you do to influence the specifications in either direction? What can you tell the customer about what’s important in selecting a vendor that might be useful when the customer has to prepare the evaluation criteria? What specification do you want or not want included in the scope of work? Can you help the customer by providing information in a white paper that they could use to help write the RFP? It’s all about being there at the right time with the right information. If you try to influence the contract vehicle after the customer has determined their acquisition strategy, you’ll encounter resistance. If you try to change the specification after the RFP has been written, you’ll encounter resistance. But if you show up with the information they need to complete the next step in their procurement process, you are being helpful. Being helpful grows the relationship and generates goodwill. But doing things to gain influence at the wrong time achieves just the opposite. How well you know the customer's acquisition process can make all the difference. Here is an article describing 24 Ways to Influence an RFP. It's taken from the get into position to win before the RFP is even released.

Most people overlook the best ways to speed up their proposals. They focus on having a faster start-up, having a re-use library, or automating document assembly. Or they look for AI to write their proposal for them, ignoring how that will never be competitive. But they overlook two critical approaches. What causes proposal slack time? See also: Faster Most of the slack time in a proposal happens when you are ready to take the next step, but can’t because you don’t have the information you need. So you spend some time trying to get the answers. Or worse, you spend more time trying to work around the issue because you can’t get the answers you need. The first problem is that it shouldn’t have taken you so long to ask the questions. The second problem is that you don’t have the answers you need. Speeding up proposal development If you want to speed things up... Start the proposal knowing what questions you’ll need answers to. The RFP doesn't supply them all. The RFP doesn't tell you all the customer's preferences, or everything that matters to them. It doesn't tell you how to position against the competition or how to make the many, many trade-off decisions you face. When questions pop up during writing, everything slows down. Even worse, you often have to backtrack when the answers force you to change what you've written. Be able to find at least some of the answers. You'll never get answers to all of the questions you have when writing a proposal. But the ones you do answer will not only speed up proposal writing, they will drive your win strategies as well. Waiting until the proposal starts to think about the questions you should have asked or delivering answers after the writing has started will slow proposal writing down and weaken the proposal. This is why it's good to build your entire pursuit process around getting answers to your questions. Getting answers starts with asking questions early. When proposal writers start already having the answers they need, it is much easier to build the proposal based on them. What questions should you ask? To create a list of questions to start the proposal with, ask yourself what you need to know about: The customer The offering The competitive environment How your proposal will be evaluated The trade-offs you will encounter The conflicts you will need to resolve The points you want to make What the customer will need you to say to conclude that you are their best alternative You may very well find that most of the questions related to these topics are applicable to all of your proposals. When you start a proposal, you should review the list of questions. You can accelerate the development of your win strategies and themes by assessing which you have answers for and which you don’t. Then when you start the actual writing, you know where the issues are. You may even have workarounds in mind from the start. An even better approach is to begin asking those questions the moment the lead is identified. This changes the pre-RFP pursuit phase from an exercise in fishing to see what you can catch into hunting for exactly what you need. It makes the pre-RFP pursuit about seeking specific answers so that when you start the proposal, you already have answers to many of your key questions. Bad signs If you are starting your proposals with an outline before you’ve asked the right questions, it’s a bad sign. What's going to happen when you get the answers? What's your win probability going to be if you don't? If you are trying to create a re-use library so that you can quickly reuse text before you’ve asked the right questions, it’s a bad sign. How do you know you've got the right content? Isn't there a conflict between building the proposal around what you already have written and what the customer wants and needs to hear to make a decision in your favor? If you are trying to speed up document production because you need more time to work on the text, if it's because unanswered questions are slowing down the writing, it’s a bad sign. It means you're trying to rush to finish after giving up on getting the answers that you needed to write the winning proposal. What to do instead If you want to speed up the proposal, start by knowing what questions to ask, and get at least some of the answers before you start the proposal. The rest is easy. If you think of the entire proposal process as a flow of information, assessment, and transformation ending with a decision support tool, that process is easier to build as a sequence or collection of questions than it is to build as a flow chart. During the pre-RFP phase of pursuit, we use Readiness Reviews to turn lead qualification and capture planning into sets of questions, with the goal to gather more and better information that produces an information advantage. At the start of the proposal, we use Proposal Input Forms, which are also based on questions, to aggregate intelligence about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Before proposal writing starts, we use Proposal Content Planning to identify instructions and questions for proposal writers to address in a way that accounts for everything that should be written and how it should be presented. When you start Proposal Content Planning with the answers to questions from Proposal Input Forms and Readiness Reviews, this is straightforward and goes quickly. When you gather the right information and assess and transform it into what proposal writers need to know, then proposal writing is not only greatly accelerated, but so are proposal reviews. Instead of going through endless iterations trying to change the proposal into something that can win, you start from an understanding of what it will take to win, build a structure for the document based on that, and write to produce something based on what it will take to win in the very first draft. Doing a losing proposal quickly is easy. This is how you quickly do a proposal that will win.

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From some of the BD databases I've seen, they go for around 10-20% of what you could hire a person for. But that's a single user. If you get a multiuser subscription, it could be a lot closer to the cost of hiring someone. With enough users, you'll exceed it. So what should you do, focus on hiring business development staff or purchase a database? A person and a database will always be better than either a person or a database alone, so it's no fun discussing which of those is better. But if you have one BD manager, a few executives, and a few key project managers, then you really could be looking at a choice between getting a BD database or hiring another BD specialist. That's worth discussing. Here are some key points to consider: Do you want primary source research (straight from the customer) and relationship marketing or do you lack the relationships and want an easy way to add leads to your tracking system? Do you want your BD staff at their desks or in front of customers? Will the database increase their productivity, or will it become a crutch that your staff will use to get their updates from the database instead of their contacts? If you don’t have the database, isn’t that like having a handyman without any tools? What advantage do you have over the competition when you’re all using the same databases? So is a database worth the cost? The answer is an equation. An ROI equation. The problem is we don't have all the variables (and maybe never will): Start with: The annual profit from the amount of new leads that you would not have found on your own that turn into wins Add: The annual profit from the amount of submissions won because of intel that you would not have found on your own Subtract: The negative impact of raising your overhead costs through an expensive purchase during a period of customer price sensitivity Note: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline The size/number of your bids and profit margins have a lot to do with the outcome. If you are in a competitive market with low margins, it will take a much higher number of leads to return a positive ROI. If you only bid into existing customer relationships, the database will have limited impact (it won't help you with your recompetes or natural project growth). However, if you are trying to establish new customer relationships, the data will have more value as a way to figure out which doors to knock on. Your ultimate ROI will be determined by how effectively you use the database, which has more to do with your BD process than the database. A more useful way of looking at it might be to first put in place BD staff who enable you to bid with an information advantage. Once that is in place, then you can ask yourself if you can significantly increase their productivity by giving them new leads to chase, or more advanced notice of leads. I know a company that was implementing the Readiness Review process we recommend for pre-RFP pursuit. They were in a small niche and sought to identify all the relevant contracts so they could target the recompetes, some 5 years in advance. It made sense for them to subscribe to a database that identified all the contracts that have been issued so that their BD Manager could focus on establishing relationships instead of finding the contracts. But I have also seen companies that purchased databases, where the BD staff spent their time copying leads out of the database and into their tracking system. They added little or no information advantage to win the proposals. But they had a lot of stuff to bid! If you are trying to figure out which database tool is right for you, here is a link to an article we wrote a few years back that is just as valuable today: 42 things to look for in a search tool.

Where do you spend the most time on a proposal? Most people think it’s writing. But if you watch people as they work on a proposal, you’ll find they spend more time on something else. If you look at a typical proposal schedule, you may see 50% or more of the time dedicated to writing. But most of that time isn’t spent on actual writing. It’s spent on figuring out what to write, with a healthy dose of distraction and procrastination thrown in. Distractions are really competing priorities. They are best addressed before people are assigned to a proposal. A big problem that's also completely solvable Outside of distractions, the biggest thing preventing people from quickly getting proposal writing done is not being prepared. When people are not sure what is expected of them, don’t know how to organize their thoughts, are not sure what to include, and are not sure how to express themselves they put off writing until they have better clarity. Most of the time spent “writing” is really a search for clarity. Clarity comes from having the information you need to write. It comes from not only knowing what to write about, but also knowing how it should be presented. And when people don't have this information, they start talking to try to find it. Or they procrastinate and hide. When they can't get good information, they talk in circles. On most proposals, more time is spent talking in circles than writing. To solve this problem, you need the right input. Proposal Content Planning not only organizes the writing, it gathers all the information stakeholders have, including pre-RFP pursuit intelligence and provides a way to ensure that the information becomes what the writers needs to take action based on it. This turns the company's customer, opportunity, and competitive awareness into instructions for proposal writers, allocated to specific proposal sections, instead of a bunch of talk that doesn't provide clarity about what to put on paper. Having a computer do the wrong thing for you will not help Your best opportunity to accelerate the proposal process does not come from automation. Editing past proposals takes far more time than people realize and results in a proposal that is written for the wrong context. Acceleration that hurts your win rate does more harm than good. The desire to see a sample before you start is really just part of the search for clarity. When you add in that you will likely put more time into creating and maintaining a proposal content re-use library than you will gain during proposal writing, it has a bad return on investment (ROI). Your best opportunity to accelerate proposals Your best opportunity to accelerate the proposal process is to accelerate the search for clarity before writing can start. Instead of leaving it to the authors to individually seek the clarity they need to write, before you start writing you should implement a planning process that defines what to include and how to express it. It should both inspire and guide the authors regarding what to write. It should enable them to begin writing immediately, without additional soul searching. If your company does a lot of proposals, then ensuring clarity before writing starts becomes: Your best opportunity to accelerate the proposal process is to accelerate the search for clarity before writing can start. A corporate core competency you should develop Your best chance to lower proposal costs, which in turn impacts your competitiveness The best way to stretch your staff to cover more proposals A great way to introduce inexperienced staff to proposal writing Your best chance to get your proposal right on the first draft Your only reliable way to consistently submit proposals based on what it take to win How you win more of what you bid So will your company put the least amount of effort into this while wishing it would go away, focus on it only until it gets distracted, leave it to staff to figure out themselves, or make it a corporate priority and keep at it until it's solved? Avoid the worst approach, because it will destroy your proposal See also: Reuse The worst way to approach a proposal is to seek clarity by writing until you find it. This results in an infinite number of draft cycles where the actual proposal is defined by whichever draft you are on when you run out of time. Searching for clarity by writing about it produces draft after draft, and never delivers the clarity. Avoiding this is the single most significant thing you can do to improve your chances of winning. If a company has this problem, then it will find its best ROI in eliminating it. You can put effort into other aspects of proposal development, but nothing will give you as big a return as implementing an approach that prevents seeking clarity through writing. This generally means implementing a process for planning the content of your proposals before you start writing.Time, motion, and ROI On your next proposal, pretend you have a stopwatch (or better yet actually use one!), and add up the time allocated to writing and the time spent formatting the document. Then look at how much of the time allocated to writing was actually spent writing and how much was really spent figuring out what to write about and how to express it. If you could bring a percentage of reduction to any of those phases, which would free up the most time? Of those phases, which has the biggest impact on your win rate? How does that impact what you should do during your next proposal? How does that impact where your proposal department should invest their time and resources for future proposals? How does the time spent actually writing when you have a content plan compare to when you don't? How much less time did you spend talking in circles after implementing Proposal Content Planning?

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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 win strategies instead. When you do enough proposals, you start to see patterns emerging. In similar circumstances, you position yourself in similar ways. For example, when you are not the incumbent, you emphasize innovation. When you are the incumbent, you address innovation but counter with risk mitigation. Good customer intelligence could take you in a different direction, but when all else is equal, you tend to use the same tools. A simple formula What we’ve found, in exploring how to combine our Content Planning Methodology with our Proposal Recipe approach to creating re-use libraries, is that you can recycle your win strategies. All you have to do is capture: See also: Differentiation On this topic, In this set of circumstances (customer, opportunity, and competitive environments), Here is how we positioned ourselves. Implementation What you get is similar to the Proposal Recipe format we recommend. You end up with a set of files, each one including: A topic A series of headings and text describing each set of circumstances An approach to positioning under each heading You can take this simple foundation further by also addressing: Resources that your company has (staffing counts, locations, equipment, tools, processes, data, etc.) Anticipated customer concerns, risks, and mitigations What matters (about the circumstances or offering) Differentiators Value propositions Your organization's preferences and why Relevant market research Relevant project/experience examples Testimonials Competitive issues Known trade-offs Relevant existing graphics Examples of potentially relevant graphics Points of contact and coordination Topics might include capabilities, experience, management approaches, processes, procedures, phases, or anything similar that fits the nature of what you offer. Circumstances could be when you are the incumbent, not the incumbent, things are new, things are established, high risk, low risk, efficiency is vital, quality is vital, when all the customer cares about is price, you are competing with certain companies or types of companies, or anything similar. Your positioning should reflect what you want the customer to conclude about you. This might relate to your ability to meet their goals, comply with their requirements, accomplish great things, deliver at or above their expectations, be worthy of a top evaluation score, or anything similar. Keep in mind that positioning happens in relation to other things, like the competition, RFP, things you know about the customer, etc. You should also include proof points, supporting data, metrics, etc., with your positioning statements. Just simply having a library of proof points can be immensely helpful during proposal writing. But proof points mapped to topics and circumstances with the positioning language to use is golden. Then add your strengths and weaknesses If you mine your strengths for differentiators and prepare defensive positions for any weaknesses, you can help future proposal writers do a much better job of identifying the winning strategies. Anyone who is competent can write a proposal based on following the instructions. But coming up with the winning strategies is a challenge. This is where you can provide some inspiration. Even if the evaluation criteria don't mention the words "strengths" or "weaknesses," you can often score well by addressing your strengths and defending against weaknesses. If you replace positioning with strengths and weaknesses in the formula above, it becomes: on this topic, in these circumstances, here are our strengths and weaknesses to defend against. Be honest about your weaknesses. If you really want to win, you'll find ways to turn your biggest weaknesses into your biggest strengths. For example, if you don't already have all of the staff you should to be competitive, focus on having the strongest recruiting approach and emphasize that everyone faces the possibility of turnover at any time and that you are the most reliable long term. If your competitors lose a key person, they'll be hobbled. The goal is to accelerate proposal writing by accelerating thinking. If people have to discover the right win strategies from scratch, it will take them longer to figure out what to write before they can even start writing. You don't need to recycle your approaches and solutions Recycling approaches and solutions is the kind of content recycling that does more harm than good. Having a win strategy library, however, inspires people to tailor approaches and solutions and go beyond simply meeting the RFP requirements. A reuse library based on recycling approaches and solutions degrades into approaches and solutions that are not optimized to score well and are not competitive. A win strategy reuse library helps people go beyond mere RFP compliance. Don't try to predetermine every word If you keep things short (at the bullet level), then you can easily copy from your win strategy library into future Content Plans in the form of instructions. These new instructions will explain how to position the other details already in the Content Plan. This will combine what to write with how to write it and produce a far better proposal far more quickly. And because this approach addresses strategy and positioning, it directly relates to your ability to win. Over time you not only accelerate the development of your win strategies, but you also strengthen them. When this will really help is when you are using junior staff to help prepare the proposals. In my experience this is, give or take, roughly all proposals. Being able to look up what strategies work best in which circumstances will help your proposal staff think strategically. Recycling proposal text only leads to staff getting the proposal done quickly by changing as little as possible. A win strategy re-use library gets staff thinking strategically, which can transform all of the text in the proposal. But it still accelerates things, because most of the time spent on a proposal is spent trying to figure out what context to put things in. And most of the time wasted on a proposal is a result of someone coming in after it’s written and asking pesky questions about strategy that should have been asked at the beginning. A win strategy re-use library can also help you get to the point where you are reviewing your strategies before you write the narrative. It can help you get to the point where you review what you are going to say in the proposal before you write it. That way you only have to write it once.

On a day to day basis people have to make decisions about resources like: See also: Assessing and filling your business opportunity pipeline 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? The answer isn’t some generic metric. The answer can be found in your business development pipeline. Your pipeline isn’t just how many leads you are tracking. It should also include how many leads you are targeting. With a little analysis you can figure out when those leads will arrive, whether you are on track to meet or exceed your target metrics, and what the impact will be. You should analyze your business development pipeline metrics based on two key targets: the minimum number of bids and the total revenue. You don’t want all of your target revenue to come from one bid. But you also don’t want it to come from too many low value bids. The right size bid depends on your company and what it offers. Once you know the target for your review and the number of bids, you can do a simple average to find out how much each bid should be worth. Then ask yourself if the number makes sense. If it’s too big or too small to be realistic for your company, adjust the number of bids, the target revenue, or both. When you settle on the average you can compare it to your previous bids to determine the number of people required per bid. Include everyone who is dedicated to the bid, such as the business development manager, capture manager, proposal manager, other proposal specialists, etc. If somebody works more than one at a time, then include them as a fraction. Now ask yourself what is the average length of your bids — 14 days? 30 days? Convert the number of bids projected for next year into the number of bids at a time (one approach is to divide it by 365 and multiply by the average number of days per bid). Now multiply by the number of people per bid. Round up. If you get a number far larger than the number of people you currently have, then either you set your growth targets higher than your resources can stretch, or you need to plan on hiring more staff in order to grow. This analysis can also help you decide when to use your own staff and when to outsource. Most of the calculations are based on averages. But the real world isn’t so neat and tidy. Instead of coming in at fixed intervals, your bids are going to come in a bunch at a time with dry spots in between. If you staff to the average, you will have surges that you can’t accommodate and dry spells with nothing to do. The dry spells will be where they develop their process and tools. The surges could be where you outsource. If your bids have high peaks and valleys, you may wish to do more outsourcing, so that you don’t have to cover the cost of the valleys. You should run several scenarios and really think this through. Assuming your staff will somehow stretch to cover the surges is really just planning to sacrifice quality to keep up. But in BD it doesn’t make sense to lower your win rate to accommodate more bids. So can you afford the number of staff your business development pipeline says you need to capture the leads you plan to target? To answer this, you may need your finance department involved, because you need to know about your company's profit margin and overhead to answer the question. Each dollar your company makes gets allocated by your accounting system to cover the costs of your business. Theoretically, each dollar coming in has a certain amount in it to cover BD costs. You need to assess whether if you hit the targets in your pipeline, you’ll be able to afford the staff your analysis says you’ll need to get there. If the numbers don’t add up, you’ll have to start over and reassess all your business development pipeline targets. If they do add up, then you need to address when to hire the staff. You want them on board and up to speed before they are needed. But you also need to cover their costs. If you measure your actual performance against the targets in the pipeline, you can do this. You can calculate what number of bids times what win rate is required to cover the costs of the next person you want to hire. Your pipeline should tell you how many leads you need to achieve that number of bids. When you do this kind of analysis, you should notice how important your win rate is. A slight change in win rate has a big impact on revenue. It also greatly reduces the number of leads required to achieve it. Pay careful attention to your actual win rate vs. your target win rate, because all of the other numbers will change when there is a difference. When you first start using your BD pipeline as a strategic tool like this, you will be making up a lot of the target values, because you don’t have the historical data to draw upon. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You can’t calculate your pipeline because you can’t calculate your targets, and you can’t calculate your targets because you don’t have any pipeline data. You have to short circuit this by making assumptions. However, you need to revisit those assumptions frequently. You may get to the point where you can set your targets once a year, but when you are first getting started you may need to reassess them every month, depending on your bid volume. In any event, your pipeline has the potential to be a business management tool that is far more significant than just being a lead tracking tool. It can help you make better decisions at all levels. That makes it worth understanding and developing.