Carl Dickson

Writing an RFP is harder than writing a proposal. And it’s even harder when you are not the expert in what you need to buy or are missing information. When customers and vendors work together, they can mitigate issues like these: See also: RFPs How to get the right vendors to bid. Who out there could add value or bring better solutions? How do they find them? Would they bid? Who will ultimately bid? If they put out an RFP, what are they going to get back? Should they get more vendors just to have “competition” or should they focus on getting to know select vendors (and allowing them to get to know the customer)? What should they do about all that? How to reconcile what they know about their technical needs with what they need to do to conduct the procurement. They know they’ve got needs, but they may or may not know how to get those needs fulfilled. But if they have to go through a procurement process, how do they translate what they need into something that will survive their procurement process? This is why it’s critical for vendors and customers to talk before the RFP is written. Customers should create opportunities for this, and vendors should seek them out. Whether what they’ve asked for is feasible. When the customer writes the RFP, sometimes they put everything they might want into it. But the combination might just not be feasible, and they may not even realize it. How much it should cost. As they put together the list of requirements, the customer may not realize what each should cost, let alone what it should all add up to. Depending on what is being procured, the rationale for the vendor’s pricing can be as important as the pricing itself. Inflexible RFP pricing formats can get in the way of bidding better solutions. And sometimes small requirements drive a disproportionate amount of the cost. If the customer doesn’t realize this, they can blame vendors for being too expensive without realizing they could have lowered the cost substantially by dropping a low priority requirement. This is another area where discussing the basis of the estimate and how to present pricing should occur in discussions between the customer and vendors before an RFP is issued. How to control costs over time. For many reasons, costs can change after RFP award. Controlling those cost changes is tricky. Sometimes vendors game the system. Sometimes requirements evolve as part of the project. And sometimes customers want things that weren’t in the RFP. No one knows how to best control costs over time and both customers and vendors are to blame. This implies that only a solid partnership between them can address it. Achieving a solid partnership between the customer and the vendor after award starts with an RFP that requires and rewards it. How to get the most for the customer’s budget without telling vendors what their budget is. The customer knows how much they can afford to spend. They’d like to get the most for that amount. However, they fear that if they tell the vendors what their budget is, all proposals will be scaled to consume the whole budget. But that’s the only way to get the most value for that amount of budget. Customers rarely know what to do about that. The better the customer understands how vendors will approach their basis of estimates, the better they can make this decision. The best approach may vary according to what is being procured, the customer’s desire for ROI, and the range of possibilities in what could be proposed. How to maximize ROI. Sometimes customers are flexible on the budget based on what they are going to get. They are willing to invest more to get more. But they have no idea how to achieve that, let alone how to assess vendor claims regarding it. What problems could come up during performance. If the customer isn’t the expert in what they are buying, they may not be able to anticipate the problems that a given vendor approach might run into. They can ask vendors to describe them, but can they trust the answers? What makes one vendor better than another. The customer may not know industry best practices or typical ways to cheat. They’re not in the vendor’s business. This translates into the customer not knowing what things to ask about or how to write evaluation criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you know your customer is going to release an RFP, you can educate them about these things. Tell them what to look out for. Better yet, word your recommendations in ways that can easily be used in an RFP. For example, if you know that some companies lowball their pricing in ways that cause the customer problems after award, give them the requirements language that will enable the customer to prevent the problem. What’s wrong with the RFP they just wrote. RFP writing is hard. It requires projecting unknowns into the future. There are all kinds of potential problems, and many of them are not obvious: technical problems, editorial problems, things that aren’t problems now but could be problems in the future, obsolescence, incompatibilities, inefficiencies, risk, leaving things out, disorganization, ambiguities, loopholes, requirements that get in the way of other things you want, etc. When you see problems in the RFP, you can’t assume the customer did it on purpose or is even aware of it. Pointing it out might help them. Giving them wording that could resolve it might help them out even more. But better than either of those is to help them get the RFP right before it’s released, because fixing it after release can be disruptive. How to determine whether vendors will deliver what they promise. RFPs invite vendors to make a lot of promises. They attempt to get vendors to substantiate their ability to deliver on those promises. But when the customer does not know how to do what you do, it’s hard for them to set procedures or ask questions that will verify that vendors will deliver what they promise. What might work better than what they asked for. The customer might not know the best way to get from where they are to where they want to be. They try to research it as best they can before they release an RFP. But once the RFP is out, vendors might not be able to propose an approach that is better if it contradicts the RFP requirements. This happens when the alternative didn’t occur to the customer. Customers concerned about this should actively seek alternative approaches before releasing the RFP. The challenge here is that vendors like to save their “secret sauce” for the proposal, don’t want everyone to be prompted to take their better approach, and may not discuss it before the RFP is released. The trick is for vendors to share enough so that their better approach isn’t ruled out by the RFP, while not turning their approach into a requirement for everyone. Vendors can help by crafting wording that opens the RFP to their approach without defining the approach or making it a requirement. How to compare one proposal to another. Some RFPs try to inappropriately force everything into an apples-to-apples comparison. RFPs like this are particularly susceptible to preventing vendors from proposing better alternatives or adding value. The more dialog between customers and vendors to enable them to determine what separates a good solution or vendor from another, the better. How different people in their own organization approach decision making. Some people want one thing. Some people want another. The chain of command can be unpredictable. What matters to the customer can depend on which people at the customer are participating in the decision, and how they go about making their decisions. The evaluation process defined in the RFP is just a tool. Different people may use that tool in different ways. And the person writing the RFP, the people who need something procured, and those involved in the outcome may not know how it all will play out. For better or worse. How to maximize competition. The customer wants the best deal. But what does that mean? The best tool they have is usually relying on competition. But in highly specialized areas, the number of companies who realistically can meet the requirements without disruption to the customer can be quite small. And introducing more companies is not always quick or practical. This leaves the customer caught between wanting to maximize competition and wanting to solidify its vendor relationships. They may not know how to get this balance right. How to balance the trade-offs. When you create a list of all the things you want and call them “requirements” it’s easy to overlook that each of them brings new trade-offs. We tend to obsess over the trade-offs that impact pricing, but there are many other trade-offs. Vendors want to make the trade-offs that the customer would prefer. But the customer often doesn’t signal their preferences. RFPs focus on objective criteria and requirements instead of subjective criteria like preferences. The best way to manage the work. The customer might understand the specifications, but not be clear on the implementation (and vice versa). They might not know how to validate quality or mitigate the risks. And sometimes asking vendors about quality and risk is frankly a waste of effort. They often do not understand how to measure performance or what benchmarks to use. Asking vendors to commit to meeting performance measures or benchmarks is practically begging for a half-hearted response. For astute vendors, this creates an opportunity and an easy way to differentiate. Talking to your customer about the issues before the RFP is released is the best way to mitigate these issues. Don’t expect the customer to tell you what they don’t know. But don’t let that stop you from discussing the issue and providing information that might fill a gap. Vendors who understand how difficult writing an RFP is should help their customers by providing information in ways that aren’t self-serving or aren’t specific to a single procurement. Complaining about the quality of RFPs after they are written is an admission that you weren’t helpful enough at the right time and just waited. Instead, consider changing your pursuit process to better anticipate your customer’s needs before the RFP is written. Customers who are trying to get past the things they don’t know and still get their needs met have to look for ways to get past their distrust of vendors so they can discuss issues like these. Many of these issues can be talked about in ways that aren’t specific to any one procurement, but can increase understanding and produce better procurement outcomes across all of them. When customers are seeking input ahead of RFP release, I don’t see enough questions that start off like “What would you do to...” or “If you were writing an RFP how would you…” Complaining about the proposals submitted by your vendors or differences after award is often just an admission that you didn’t do your homework or didn’t talk to vendors before you wrote the RFP. Instead, consider creating opportunities for vendors to add value before RFPs are written. Take advantage of them. They want you to. We’re all in this together. We want the same outcomes. Being adversarial to each other or opportunistic isn’t going create the best outcomes for either of us.

If your proposal messaging amounts to: See also: Examples We’re fully capable of doing the work because we have experience and bring qualified staff, so here’s our approach that fully complies with all RFP requirements… Then you're telling the customer you are merely acceptable and not competitive. Every other proposal that makes the competitive range will also be acceptable. And most will be better. Most will be competitive. Assume that every proposal submitted will meet the specifications. Some will and any that don’t are not your competition. The companies you need to beat will all have met the specifications. They will all have relevant experience. They will all be fully qualified. To get selected, you need to be better than all of the acceptable proposals. You need to be the best. And to be the best, you need to offer something more than mere capability, experience, and doing what the customer asks you to do. You need to meet the specifications in ways that are better. You need to deliver more value as a result of your experience and qualifications. Instead of writing your proposal like the example above, how about something like this: The reason our approach is better is because… Our experience proves this delivers better results. Here is an example… We don’t just simply hire the same qualified staff out of the same labor pool as everyone else. We support the staff we hire with better processes and tools that include… The combination produces better outcomes for our customers, like… Instead of featuring what is essentially what they asked for, just like everyone else, and instead of talking about the same things that everyone else will be offering, try featuring the extraordinary. Here are four ways to do that: Superior approaches. In addition to meeting the specifications, provide something else that matters. Better reliability? Faster? Improved results? Lower costs? Remember, everyone will propose the best practices. Best practices are, in reality, the minimum for doing things acceptably. To win, you must deliver something better. Experience that has an impact. Why does your experience matter? What does the customer get out of it? How does your experience translate into better results? What does your experience prove? Everyone will have experience. Make sure your experience has the most impact. Better results. If you provide services, you provide people. How can you credibly claim to deliver better people? This is even harder to claim when you haven’t even hired all the people you need. If your offering is more than just your people, then feature better results delivered in a better way. Proof instead of claims. Everyone makes the same claims. You may feel like your claims are better deserved, but one unsubstantiated claim is just as good as another. Besides, customers ignore them. All of them. You never hear them mentioned during debriefs or showing up on evaluation forms. What does get scored? Proof points. Every time you write a claim, replace it with a proof point. Doing this alone can greatly improve your win rate. It will transform your proposal from being ordinary to being full of substance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen companies who were confident in their ability to win write a pleasant sounding but hopelessly ordinary proposal. You are what the customer sees and not what you believe yourself to be. Learn to see your proposals the way your customer will see your proposals. Then learn to be extraordinary.

This surprised me, so I thought I’d share. I’ve published dozens of articles about how recycling proposal content can hurt your win rate more than any possible cost savings it provides. Then I stumbled on this quick and easy proof: Take 10% of txe litters in a documgnt and replqce them w&th gprbage or intertional typos. Then, tome how lonk it taker you to fnx all the tipos. The imterestIng thing is tkat the sintences with the typqs are 90% simalar to the ones wlthout the typoz. If yuur recvcled propisal contept is 90% simliar to what you nead for the nuw proposel it’s a faer comparsion to the levil of efort to taillor the boilerplate context. Osce you’ve cleened up this paragraf, than tyme yourself tipping it. See if “tailoring” the sumilar contempt is fast then writen when you need. The lessor to be leerned is…. See also: Reuse Similar is not the same. Not even 90% similar. A similar draft written for a similar RFP at a similar customer with similar needs in a similar competitive environment is not good enough. Because words. The words have to be identical to be useful. Anything in your content library is inherently written in the wrong context. It was written for the wrong customer preferences, with the wrong evaluation criteria, delivering the wrong benefits, for the wrong competitive environment. Even if it’s 90% right, optimizing it to win will take longer than creating something based on what it will take to win. You’ll spend far more time, effort, and cost creating your library and maintaining it (which is excruciating) than it is worth. It will constantly suck effort away from doing the things that do contribute to winning. But try the test and see for yourself. Why do people crave having a content library? People crave having existing proposal content they can use because they don’t know what to write. The solution to this problem is not to submit substandard proposals based on previous submissions. The solution is to build a process that discovers what it will take to win, inspires people with ideas, and then helps them understand how to quickly write a proposal based on them. Instead of giving them a content library to misuse, because you know some of the people who don’t want to be drafted into proposals or know what to write will not tailor sufficiently to maximize win probability, try giving them ideas for what to write about. Give them lists. Give them recipes. What are the steps in your recruiting process? Don’t write it out. Let them write it according to the type of recruiting needed for the future proposal based on the future evaluation criteria. But do give them the steps. The options. The considerations. The possibilities. Just give them a list of things that could go into their recruiting section. How will you achieve the customer’s objective? Teach them the who, what, where, how, when, and why technique. Maybe give them a list of possible objectives. Maybe give them the steps in your project management approach that identify customer objectives and measure performance in achieving it. But don’t prewrite it. Just give them a list of ideas. The previous customer may have high-level objectives. The next customer may want you to just do what you're told. The previous customer may have been risk averse. The next one might be seeking innovation. If you put your fulfillment of their objectives in the wrong context, it will hurt your win probability. But if your writers start from a list of possibilities, they can quickly determine what they need to write for the new customer. It helps if you’ve followed a process that is based on discovering what it will take to win, like the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. Show it to me Perhaps we should counter every time someone on a proposal says "but we've written it before" by questioning whether something has been written to match the wording of the RFP, the new customer’s preferences, changes in the instructions, the differences in the evaluation criteria, and the particulars of the competitive environment. Show me where we have that already written and I'll not object to reusing it.

There is a big temptation on proposals to get words on paper. The problem is that having too many words on paper too quickly becomes a problem when they are not the right words. The right words are very specific because a proposal doesn’t win by chance. Your proposal wins when the evaluators see what they need to give your proposal the top score. And that requires they see the reasons why your proposal is their best alternative. And that requires differentiation. And it requires RFP compliance. And that requires following the instructions and using the terminology of the RFP. And what one customer perceives as the most advantageous is different from what another customer will want to see. Add it all up and the words you need to win one proposal can be very different from the words you need to win the next proposal, even though the kind of services requested may be the same. So here are 11 key issues where you can see this in action. Most of them include alternatives that work better than starting from a draft proposal for addressing that topic. Before you start proposal writing, ask yourself: See also: Reuse What points do I need to make? Does your draft make the right points? Rewriting to change context like that can take more time than writing something that makes the right points. Be very, very careful about inheriting points of emphasis from past proposals because they could be all wrong for the new proposal. On any given topic, having a list of the points you might want to make, organized by their circumstances (Are you the incumbent? Is the customer seeking innovation or risk averse?) is often more useful than something previously written in a context that is not applicable to the new customer. What do I need to say to get the top evaluation score? If the old evaluation criteria emphasized experience, but the new evaluation criteria emphasize staffing or something else, you may have a similar problem. Every approach and every benefit needs to add up to the top score for this RFP. The start of every proposal should include strategies for obtaining the highest score and those strategies should be turned into quality criteria for proposal writers. What do I need to say to establish RFP compliance? When the words in the RFP are different, the words in the proposal need to change, even if you’re talking about the same topic. What you might think of as “the same work” will need to be described differently to be considered compliant. A change of sequence here, different terminology there, and a slight change in priority and you’ve got major rewriting to do to turn your draft into what it needs to be. What are our company’s strengths? The strengths you present should focus on what matters to the customer and getting the top evaluation score. The strengths in your draft might sound good in a generic kind of way, but are they the right strengths to feature in this proposal? How much will need to change as a result? Don’t just throw beneficial sounding strengths at the customer hoping something sticks. Hope is not a strategy for consistently winning. Like the points you need to make, having a nice long list of your corporate strengths with proof points can be very handy and improve your proposals. It’s much better than having to dig through pages of text to find them. How can we differentiate ourselves? Differentiation is critical for successful proposals. However, the way you differentiate should reflect the new customer’s preferences. If the previous draft was built around differentiators that mattered to the previous customer, they may not be effective for this proposal. Changing differentiators can change your entire proposal strategy and the context that everything is written in. Positioning strategies and differentiators depend greatly on circumstances. You can take a similar approach for creating a reference list as described in the bullet list about the points you need to make. Sometimes your differentiators are the point. How can we prove it? Claims are lame and don’t get scored as strengths. Proof points are what you need for the customer to pay attention. Data-driven proof points are gold in a proposal. But researching and establishing a proof can be challenging. Having a list of common proof points with the data supporting them as a reference can be much more useful than a narrative that you have to extensively edit and where the proof points might not be optimized for this bid. What is the best that we can offer? What was offered in your previous proposal should have been based on the RFP requirements, evaluation criteria, and competitive environment. All three of those may have changed. Is what you wrote last time what you need to win this proposal? Is it sufficiently strong and differentiated enough to achieve a higher score against these evaluation criteria than any of your competitors? Do you need to improve on it? Do you need to reengineer your solution? And how does that impact the writing? How should we position ourselves against the competition? For some companies, the competition is always the same group of companies. But if your company offers a wide variety of services, then your competitors may change from bid to bid. And if you are attacking an incumbent, that company will likely be different from the last time. When the competition is different, your competitive positioning should change. This impacts the language you use to describe the benefits of your approaches and the reasons why you do things. And this can be woven throughout your paragraphs making it difficult to change. What matters? What mattered about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment for the last proposal? What matters for this one? How much does the draft need to be changed to reflect what matters? What is the customer’s perspective and what do they expect? Different customers have different expectations. Some are formal, some are informal. Some are centralized, some are decentralized. Some are authoritarian and some are consensus driven. Some are innovative and some are risk averse. Some are specific and some are flexible. These differences affect what they expect from contractors when they evaluate the proposals submitted. The perspective your last customer had could be very different from the next. Is the draft written with the right perspective and does it fulfill the right expectations? What trade-offs were made? Every proposal involves countless trade-offs. But the trade-offs made for one set of customer preferences and circumstances could be very different. And it may not be obvious when reading the previous proposal what trade-offs were made or why they were made that way. It’s easy for proposal specialists to want to make everything a document. However, consider putting this information in PowerPoint, Excel, or something like Microsoft OneNote instead. For lists and ad hoc fragments, these can sometimes be easier to maintain and browse. The most challenging part of trying to tailor a draft is that it can be difficult to recognize which language was originally put in to ghost the competition, which was put it to optimize the score against the previous RFP, which was put in because it mattered to that particular customer, etc. If it sounds beneficial, your proposal writers might not refocus and tailor it, leaving you with a proposal optimized for the wrong customer and lowering your probability of winning. But the key question will be “How much does the draft need to change in order to become what is needed?” What I often see is that more words will change than will be left alone. And the effort it takes to change that many words through multiple change cycles ends up being more than the effort to write it correctly the first time. In fact, most proposals run out of time before they discover what it will take to win. To break the endless writing and rewriting cycles, you should start by defining what it will take to win and measure everything against it. Build your proposal around it. That’s the primary goal of the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. Whether you start from a draft, read a draft and use it for inspiration without recycling the text, or create focused lists of differentiators, proof points, etc., for inspiration, you should always be comparing the language to what it will take to win this pursuit.

I like to think of it as the “other people” problem. Proposals would be so much easier if you didn’t have to work with other people. If they would just do what you need them to do… At work we tend to think that working with other people is just a matter of management and leadership. But proposal specialists often (usually?) work with people that they have no direct supervision of. Proposals borrow people. And those people have other priorities. If the only techniques you have are management and enforcement, your proposals are going to be full of people problems. The only real people problem you have is yourself. You don’t need to make them change. If you change, then how they will respond will change on its own. Here are 8 areas where you can change the performance of an entire proposal team simply by changing yourself. See also: Successful process implementation Value delivery. All opportunity requires growth. Proposals are the primary source of growth for contractors. People need to get something out of their efforts. It doesn’t always have to be something for them personally. But make them aware that working on proposals creates jobs, promotions, and improvements for the customers and all of the customer’s stakeholders. Working on proposals often delivers more value to more people than people’s normal jobs. Make them aware of it. Allow them to be proud of what they are accomplishing. People shouldn’t have to work on proposals. People should get to work on proposals. Inspiration. Encourage people to think bigger. You don’t necessarily need a sense of aggression to conquer the competition. A better vision will do. A grand vision of what could be. Thinking out of the box and changing the rules. Going way beyond the routine. And then turning it into something completely feasible and even practical. Help people break out of their routine so they can create a proposal that is far better than what your competitors are capable of. Motivation. Sometimes people need a little extra motivation. Motivation can be tangible, but often intangible motivation works better. But be careful. Too much cheerleading can be worse than none. Lubrication. What are the sources of friction that impede people's ability to complete their proposal assignments? Sometimes it’s competing priorities. Sometimes it’s a lack of clarity regarding how to fulfill the assignment. Sometimes it’s emotional. Friction adds up and makes things grind to a halt. Apply lubrication and make the proposal run smoother by reducing or eliminating all points of friction. Expectations. People show up with expectations. You have expectations. Can they all be met? Maybe. Maybe not. But they do need to be clear. All kinds of problems lurk under the surface when they are not. The good news is that most of the expectations that most people have are at least somewhat flexible. By surfacing expectations you gain the ability to find workarounds that maximize fulfillment for all. If you articulate your expectations as mandates, you immediately reduce the room for compromise and innovative ways to maximize fulfillment. Encourage innovation. I like to tell people that I will gladly steal their good ideas for how to do things better. I want them to find a better way. I’d much rather be debating which way is better with people who only want the best than to be trying to force people to do things my way. Make it easier for people to be uncomfortable. Winning proposals means leaving your comfort zone behind in order to improve your win probability. Staying in your comfort zone is not competitive. This is true for you as well as your team. This does not mean to take stupid risks, but it does mean you have to rationally assess risks and commit to the ones you decide to take. And you have to do this as a team, because all will be impacted. Embrace it together. Revel in it. Reread the bullet about inspiration. Mitigate conflicts. There are going to be conflicts. Because other people have their own opinions and agendas. Approach each one not as an argument or debate, but as a chance for productive improvement. Mitigate your conflicts by anticipating them, preventing them where you can, and resolving them all. Start by defining the conflict. Then ask yourself if that’s true. You are part of the conflict. So own it by finding a path to resolution that makes the team and the proposal stronger than it would have been without the conflict. Enjoy the process because it is necessary and can be good. You do not have to transform yourself into a “people” person or learn how to be emotionally intelligent. I’m not. I’m simply someone who needs to get things done through other people against a deadline. Since I can’t just get rid of them all and do it myself, I have to make them productive. It’s good to understand management. It’s good to understand leadership. But it’s crucial to be able to make a team of strangers you just met of varying skills and personalities productive. When you do it all yourself, you can only win opportunities that are within your reach. When you work through other people, you can win opportunities of any size and complexity. And to do that, you have to solve the “other people” problem.

Here are some reasons why work on a proposal might slow down or even grind to a halt. You need to be on guard. You need to be on the lookout, always vigilant because the sooner you catch them, the better. Don't let them hide from you. And whatever you do, don't ignore the signs when they appear. See also: MWN PM Priority conflicts. People get pulled in multiple directions. Should they work on the proposal or do billable work first? Are people assigned to the proposal available to work on it? Sometimes priority conflicts might be possible to resolve if they are escalated. But for a variety of reasons, this might not happen. Days of proposal time can be lost to competing priorities. Days of proposal time lost are expensive. Multiply the reduction in win probability by the value of the pursuit to estimate how much not quickly resolving a priority conflict can cost your company. Lack of clarity. RFPs can be notoriously difficult to interpret. Maybe you can submit questions and get answers. But that takes time and you can’t wait. You can also lack clarity in other ways, such as what you should offer, what should go into the proposal, what reviewers expect, or the scope of an assignment. Sometimes a lack of clarity leads people to make bad assumptions. It can be as simple as someone assuming their job is to provide a solution that fulfills the requirements of the RFP instead of one that will win against your competition, simply because they thought all they needed to do to complete their assignment is respond to the RFP. Questions that people have. People working on proposals need to know all the possible variations on who, what, where, how, when, and why. For example, they might be unsure about how to make one of the hundreds of trade-off decisions that come up during proposal development. And if they don’t have a forum to ask their questions, they won’t get the answers they need and will either make assumptions, write around the issue, or just stop and wait. Failure to ask. Sometimes people don’t ask the questions they have. Sometimes they don’t report a problem. Issues are best surfaced early. But to achieve that you must overcome the failure to ask. Solution gaps. Sometimes the people involved won’t know how to fill gaps in approaches, capabilities, resumes, experience, etc. The more time that passes, the more likely you are to be unable to fill a gap. The worst gaps are the ones that look filled, but don’t actually fulfill the requirement. Discovering a solution gap may require changing proposed approaches, replacing staff, or even changing teaming partners. Sometimes an inability to fill the gap prevents further progress completely and everything grinds to a halt. Don’t wait until you have a draft of the proposal to search for, surface, and fill your solution gaps. Lack of subject matter expertise or input needed. When an RFP requires subject matter expertise that covers a range of topics, it’s not unusual for the person assigned to write a section to not be able to cover all the topics and to need help. Where is that subject expertise going to come from? If section completion requires this input, it may just wait until someone comes up with an answer. Lack of issue management. Sometimes people don’t know who to ask about a question or who to a report an issue to. Sometimes they tell someone, and it gets forgotten. Quickly surfacing issues, articulating them, prioritizing them, and tracking them to resolution is critical to prevent losing because an issue didn’t get the action it required. Lack of training or guidance. New proposal contributors do not automatically understand how to combine the RFP instructions, evaluation process and criteria, and technical and other requirements into their response in a way that will get the best score. They also won’t show up knowing the process or even how to manage their time. If they get stuck, they might not know what to do about it. Futility. It’s futile to ask for help when none is available, or for cooperation from someone who never gives it. Why put extra effort into winning a low-probability pursuit that shouldn’t even have been approved for bidding when it’s futile? When people feel things are futile, they stop reporting issues and focus on getting something on paper that looks good enough that no one notices. When people feel things are futile, they assume resolving an issue is someone else’s job. Futility is dangerous against a deadline. Heroism. Give me a proposal professional over a hero any day. Why try when you know someone who has ignored the proposal all along is going to come in at the last minute and change everything because they believe they are the only one who can save the proposal? Lack of approval. Indecision wastes too much proposal time. Are we going to bid? If that decision takes days, you’re already in trouble. The same is true of the proposal budget, assignments of people, review dates, etc. Every day lost to “waiting for approval” is a day that could make a huge difference at the end of the proposal. One of the key goals of proposal management is to avoid having people sitting around unproductive while the deadline clock ticks away. Sometimes they are waiting. Sometimes they are fruitlessly working around a problem instead of resolving it. It is better to surface problems early and focus on resolving them than it is to limp along. This is so important, that when we built MustWin Now, we decided to add tools to make it easier for people to collaborate without these issues getting in the way. We’ve made the Collaboration Toolbox always visible so that people can post a question or request faster than they could pick up a phone and text it. But we do it in a way that tracks issues to resolution. One of the things that results from this is that in MustWin Now you can manage your proposal as a process of elimination. But the real payoff is that when people get stuck, it’s easy to surface the issue immediately, ensure that it gets appropriate attention, and make sure it does not get overlooked.

“What am I supposed to do now?” That’s the question that people are often thinking when the content plan for the proposal is done and it’s time to start writing. They have a plan, but what are they supposed to do with it? How does the plan become a narrative? See also: Content Planning Box The closer your plan gets to the structure of the document, the easier it will be to follow. So starting from the outline is a good first step, but only a first step. To have a solid plan you need to show what each section in the outline should become so that they can see what they have to do. You want people to understand the expectations and not on their own separately make things up as they go along. Here are some tips for accomplishing this: Tell them how to introduce the topic and what points to substantiate. Tell them how to structure or approach the section to be written. Tell them what strategies they should use and what details they should provide. Make sure you tell them how to present things as well as what to write about. Along the way include what it should add up to, what it should emphasize, and how it should differentiate your offering. Help them pass the future proposal quality reviews on the very first draft Note that you do not have to know the details to guide someone else to supply those details. You can provide guidance in the form of requirements, or you can make recommendations. You can ask questions for them to answer. You do not have to know what to propose to make recommendations regarding what it should address, how it might be implemented, what matters about it, or that it should take into consideration the customer’s preferences. You don’t have to write their sections to help them understand what they are supposed to do about their proposal assignment. If all you do is give your proposal writers a copy of the RFP, don’t expect to get much back. Plus, expect it to be late since they’ll need to figure it all out and rewrite it again each time they learn something new. There’s also a good chance they’ll overlook things and misinterpret the RFP. Or overlook parts of it. How to make the transition using MustWin Now In MustWin Now, it’s quick and easy to provide guidance to proposal writers. Click, type, save, next. If you have time, you can include examples, attach files, and explain in as much detail as you want. You can go beyond a plan and give them a prototype. If you don’t have a lot of time, you can just jot a few notes down in each key section and move on. A little bit of guidance makes a huge difference. We like to use MustWin Now during the strategy meetings at the beginning of a proposal. Instead of walking out of the meeting with ideas but nothing tangible, we take notes in MustWin Now so that people leave the meeting with all their good ideas mapped to the document. They leave the meeting with a plan they can follow. We’ve also done something similar when interviewing subject matter experts. While we’re talking to them we capture the notes in MustWin Now. When we’re done talking, we’ve already got the information the person assigned to writing will need in the plan. Sometimes the writer is the one we just interviewed, and they can see how their knowledge, insights, and ideas can be transferred onto paper. Given a little structure, they often can take it from there and fill in the details. Proposal Content Planning is scalable. You can do it in 15 minutes. Or you can do it over 15 or more hours. You have to make the decision when to go from planning into writing, and that will depend on your circumstances, which vary from proposal to proposal. But even adding just a few points here or there can add tremendous value and have a major impact on what gets written. Keep in mind that when you make the switch from planning to writing, if you are using MustWin Now, your writers will have the content plan in one window and MS-Word in another. Will they know what to do next based on the words you put into your content plan? That is up to you to decide. But just imagine how much worse off they’ll be if you just hand them a copy of the RFP and they jump straight into MS-Word. Who can predict what you’ll get back doing things that way? Do your writers know what is expected of them? Have you defined proposal quality? Does your content plan's instructions explain what writers need to do to achieve it? Is it in writing? This matters, because everybody thinks they have defined proposal quality. It's just that everyone on the team defines it differently. Proposal content planning gives you the chance to get everyone on the same page. A successful transition from planning to writing means that the plan enables the writers to pass the proposal quality review on the first attempt. Writing depends on a reliable content plan. Even if it is a minimal plan prepared quickly, make sure your content plan is reliable before implementing it. Don’t give your proposal writers bad advice and start them writing against the wrong structure. The review of your content plan is even more important than the review of the draft proposal. Don't waste precious time by skipping the plan Give content planning whatever time you can afford. Add value and help your writers. Review the plan to make sure it is reliable. Then gain back the time you put into it when writers are able to work more quickly and produce better quality results. Having a plan for what to write and how to present it increases your win probability. Winning makes the time spent worthwhile.

See also: MWN PM A typical proposal has a lot of moving parts. More than most people realize. Hundreds or even thousands more. Keeping track of them all and making them come together before the deadline is enough to make your head spin. Most of what you’ll need to track to resolution will be issues and not just proposal section writing assignments. To complete their assignments, people will need things. Multiple things. Every assignment will need one or more reviews. Possibly with production support, which will have its own needs. Multiple needs. Every meeting will need an agenda. And follow-up action items. Multiple items. It adds up. Rapidly. Every assignment and issue is related to multiple things. One or more proposal sections. One or more RFP sections. One or more people. Maybe a deadline. Not all issues have the same priority. Risk can be higher or lower. The potential impact can be very different. Using MustWin Now to manage the proposal as a process of elimination In MustWin Now, we make it easy to report risks. The submission form is always present. We want issues to surface early. We don’t want people dwelling over whether to ask a question or declare a need. An issue reported is easily marked resolved. When an issue is reported, it shows up at multiple levels: The affected user(s) see it on their personal dashboards. If a proposal contributor needs to focus, they can work from their personal dashboard alone, fulfilling assignments and resolving issues. The proposal manager and others see it on the proposal-wide dashboard. This way you can get a sense for how much there is to be done and how much progress is being made. Within each proposal section, you can see what issues are related. This enables you to see what’s impacting section completion. Within each tool you can see issues related to that tool. This helps identify issues related to a phase of activity. When you look at an issue, you’ll be one click away from the people assigned to it, the sections impacted, the relevant RFP requirements, etc. You can also easily filter the issues on any dashboard, so you can see what’s new, what’s been resolved, what's past due, and more. At the proposal level, you can see who has the most issues, who needs help, what issues are the most severe, etc. The proposal manager can assign, reassign, edit, and manage the issue reports. People can also resolve issues. Easy issues resolve as quickly as they come in. Some take work. MustWin Now supports collaboration. You can resolve an issue and restore it later if you find out that it’s still a problem. Instead of a notepad or whiteboard, MustWin Now enables you to sort and filter issues in real time, with people reporting them directly through the tool. And through the dashboards, it makes communication about issues and collaboration to resolve them much quicker and easier. Issue tracking without using MustWin Now The next step up after notepads and whiteboards is a shared tool like Microsoft OneNote. For disorganized ad hoc notes, it’s a great tool. But it won’t filter and sort the way you need to manage a proposal with more moving parts than you can keep in your head. You can bring structure to your issue tracking by using a spreadsheet. This gives you some much-needed sorting and filtering. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are not relational databases. If you try to relate everything relevant to your issues, you’ll end up with lots of columns and redundant typing that’s difficult to keep up to date. Data entry and management will become a full-time job, and people will stop using the spreadsheet because it will grow too complex. You can create your own relational database. But then you’ll end up designing screens and writing code, when you should be working on the proposal. You can use “to do” list and help desk apps. But you’ll find they aren’t built with proposals in mind and the compromises will impact your ability to manage your proposals. Most people end up settling on spreadsheets for proposal issue tracking as a middle ground. They’re what I used before creating MustWin Now. With MustWin Now we’ve done the relational database work for you. Is it done yet? Everyone wants to know, “Is it done yet?” Is the issue resolved? Is the proposal ready for review or finished? You can track that with lists, crossing them out one at a time. With MustWin Now, you can see the lists grow smaller by contributor, proposal section, and overall. Each person working on the proposal can see when they have nothing left to do. And section-by-section, you can see when it’s done. Part of the fun of doing a proposal is turning the corner to where that list starts getting smaller instead of larger. And crossing off that last item is so very sweet. Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business Click here to start a conversation by email Or click below to get on my calendar to talk by phone

Here are a few dozen quantifiable ways to assess whether your proposal management function is accomplishing what it should. See also: Proposal Management Depending on your circumstances and goals, you might collect and review this data after every proposal. Or you might track it over time on multiple proposals to determine an appropriate baseline. If you were to implement all of these, you’d have a ton of data to track. The only way to realistically approach some of them is to use software to do the data tracking, and work off of real time reports that translate data into actionable information. Done extremely well, and you could use them to create a data-driven proposal winning monster of a company. But even if you don’t track the data with useable precision, you can treat these as a principles, goals, or targets. They can help you raise the bar on your proposal management from just doing things that you think are useful and productive, to having a rough order of magnitude way of approaching things in a quantified way. Some of these tips can be used to track personnel performance. However, first you need to explicitly decide what you want the proposal management role to accomplish and how much of it is distributed among contributors. Some of these are corporate measures, some are team measures, and some are individual measures. But which are which will vary depending on the nature of the collaboration on proposals at your company. Progress tracking and time management. Progress can be tracked by the number of content plan line items that have been addressed. For each review or milestone, what percent of the schedule did it occur at? For example, was Red Team at 60% or 80% of the available schedule? The more things pile up at the back end, the more time management needs to be improved. How many changes were made after pens down? Did the offering change more than 50% into the schedule? These are also signs of issues not being surfaced early enough. Compliance. Did you make the competitive range 100% of the time? Did any customer debriefs report a non-compliance? Surfacing and resolution of issues. You can also track progress toward proposal completion by the number of issues addressed remaining, weighted by severity. Issue aging is also good to track, as well as the percentage of issues aging by days, and the schedule days when issues were reported. This is much easier when you use software to report and track your issues instead of whiteboards. The combination tells you how long it took to surface issues, how long are issues sitting unresolved, and is the team being responsive to issue reports. Prevention of problems. Do you see a decline in issue reports over time? Do you see issue reports coming in sooner? Situational awareness. Do you see a decline in questions asked because they already have the answers and it was more convenient to access the information than to ask the question? This is especially true for questions like who is addressing what, when something is due, is something complete, are there any issues, and what should be addressed in a section. These are questions that shouldn’t need to be asked. However, you can provide reports, but if they aren’t easy to access, people will ask because it’s easier. Expectation management. Are they documented? Are they updated? Are they being treated like issues and getting resolved? Or are they expectations that can’t be resolved? Expectation can be treated like issue management and tracked. This can tell you whether you are surfacing them ahead of time or encountering conflicts because they were discovered too late. Quality control and quality assurance. Are quality criteria for each proposal defined? Are proposal writers able to use the quality criteria for self-assessment? Do reviewers use the same quality criteria? Could any of the issues reported have been avoided with the right quality criteria? Were all the quality criteria validated prior to implementation? Did any quality criteria require changing after being published? Was the document validated against the quality criteria? Was any self-assessment validation overturned by later reviews? Can you create a timeline (much easier using software) for when validation was performed at the criteria level? Collaboration and configuration management. Is access to information set appropriately and securely? Are people able to share information without conflicts? Are people able to access the information they need without asking for it? Can invalid changes be reversed? Can the proposal continue in the event of technology failure?

Proposal management involves doing a lot of different things. But the things that it needs to accomplish is a much shorter list. It’s easy to get lost in all the things that need to be done and the tools and techniques for doing them. It’s so easy that some companies build their organization based on those things instead of what those things should accomplish. Instead of starting from people, process, and tools, here are 9 things that proposal management must accomplish to be successful: See also: Proposal Management Progress tracking and time management. If the deadline for your proposal is absolute, then the first rule of proposal management is don’t be late. Accomplishing this requires more than just publishing a schedule. It requires tracking the progress of proposal writing and development in order to synchronize activity and bring everything together with absolute certainty by the deadline. Progress tracking should involve something more accurate than asking people how things are going and time management will be more than subjective reckoning. Compliance. The second rule of proposal management is don’t get thrown out. The proposal management function must deliver a proposal that meets the minimum requirements to be evaluated. While not ultimately as important as winning, winning won’t occur unless this is accomplished. Done well, and every proposal will make the competitive range and no customer debrief will ever cite a compliance issue. Surfacing and resolution of issues. During proposal development, people will have questions and there will be gaps in resources, the solution being proposed, and the company’s knowledge about the customer and opportunity. One key reason we need proposal management is to address these issues. Before issues can be addressed, they must be surfaced with enough time to resolve or mitigate the issue. Proposal management must implement the means to accomplish this. Done well, and the team will be not be surprised by any last-minute problems. Prevention of problems. The best issue resolution is the prevention of an issue in the first place. Preventing issues enables people to focus on writing the proposal. All problems that can be prevented should be. Preventable problems should never recur. Done well, and the proposal will look easy. Situational awareness. Who is doing what, when will it complete, and what follows? What contingencies are anticipated? What is the status of all of the moving parts that will become the proposal? Proposal management must accomplish a continuous situational awareness for everyone on the proposal team. Done well, and the team will have it without apparent effort. Lines and methods of communication. People working on the proposal should not have to figure out how to ask questions or get information. The lines of communication should be obvious and the methods should deliver the information needed. When this is accomplished, everything will flow better. Expectation management. Expectations should be clear, known in advance, and flow in both directions. Otherwise, conflicts will occur and dissatisfaction will settle in. When expectation management is done well, the conflicts get surfaced and resolved immediately. Expectation management does not mean that everyone always gets everything they want. It just means that no one is surprised or left with an unmet need that impacts the proposal. Quality control and quality assurance. Achieving proposal quality requires more than subjective reviews. It requires defining quality, enabling self-assessment, and validating that what gets produced meets the quality criteria. Proposal management is more than production or process implementation. It is also the application of quality control and quality assurance to the proposal effort. When done well, you produce the proposal you think is needed to win. When not done well, winning depends on luck instead of strategy. Collaboration and configuration management. How should people work together? On what platforms? With what standards and conventions? Proposal management should enable the team to be greater than the sum of its parts by enabling the members of the team to work together in ways that are frictionless. Done well, and people don’t have to figure out how to work together, they just do it. It also makes the other accomplishments easier, as situational awareness occurs without extra effort by anyone, lines and methods of communication are obvious, issue identification and reporting are timely and easy, progress tracking is effortless and continuous, and everyone knows what quality criteria they are trying to achieve. Plus 6 more things that are nice to have Don’t make the mistake of thinking the following are top priority items. They come after you’ve accomplished the above. But it is nice when your proposal management can also provide them: Inspiration and acceleration. Instead of leaving it up to proposal writers to figure out, it’s nice when proposal management provides guidance regarding what to write and how should they present it. It’s nicer still if that can be provided in ways that make writing go faster. Articulation. Optimizing your wording to reflect the instructions, evaluation criteria, win strategies, and RFP requirements is extremely difficult for people who have been drafted into proposal writing. It’s nice when your proposal management can help them figure out how to articulate things. Pursuit strategy. How should what you propose be positioned, taking into consideration the evaluation criteria, competitive environment, the RFP, and your strengths and weaknesses? Should this be left up to individual contributors to figure out? Ideally you should start your proposal with this positioning already determined and articulated. When this doesn’t happen, it’s really nice if your proposal management can help you get there. Training and guidance. The vast majority of proposals have a significant number of inexperienced contributors. It’s nice when your proposal management does more than issue and track assignments, and can help people understand the issues and what is required to be successful. BD/Capture/Proposal transition support. Business opportunity pursuit should start well before the proposal. Business development and capture efforts should provide input to the proposal. It’s nice to have proposal management actively participating in what form that input should take and creating process artifacts to make it easier to provide. Offering design. A major factor in what should be proposed is what it will take to win based on the evaluation criteria. And the information you need about what you are proposing will depend on the RFP instructions and requirements. It is nice to have a proposal management function that can have a seat at the table in deciding what to offer and guide the team to make the right choices and then provide the right information. And one thing we left out on purpose Winning. If a proposal manager doesn't have authority over who decides what to bid, what to offer, how to price it, and how to present it then they only contribute to winning and don't have control over it. They can’t be responsible for the win. How to best use this list All of these things can be used to define responsibilities. But they are better used for determining how to structure your team, how it should function, and what people need to successfully interact during a proposal. Most companies just leave it up to people to figure out or fight it out amongst themselves, often in unproductive, win rate reducing ways. If you figure them out ahead of time, you can watch your win rate soar. For PropLIBRARY subscribers, we’ve taken these necessary accomplishments and turned them into potential performance measures to take it to an even higher level.

A Business Development manager's job is to find as many qualified leads as possible. If you make Business Development cover lead identification through closing, Business Development will have to stop chasing leads when the proposal starts if they make it their job to win. Your company will see-saw between having leads to chase yesterday but none tomorrow because Business Development got sucked into capture or a proposal. If you want a continuous flow of leads, you need continuous lead identification and qualification. If you want to get ahead of the RFP you need to begin practicing relationship marketing. You won’t be successful doing this a few months here and a few months there. If you want to gain insight into your customers and the opportunities, you need to form relationships strong enough to produce an information advantage. If instead of waiting for procurements to appear, you want to initiate them so that you can shape the requirements and have the advantage, you need business development to form the relationships that can make this happen. This is their job. It’s a fulltime job. And it alone is a major contribution to winning. See also: Relationship Marketing Business development cultivates the leads and qualifies them. Keep in mind that it's your company's responsibility to define lead qualification criteria. The company shapes business development’s contribution to winning by setting the standards for lead qualification, and not simply chasing everything found. However, when a business developer spends a big fraction of time on capture or proposals, the company ends up less likely to have strong lead qualification. The leads found between pursuits tend to get less effort put into their assessment. There is also more incentive to chase them to get out of the “dry spell.” So not only do the leads come in spurts, but they also tend to be lesser quality. The company should set a high bar regarding what's an acceptable lead worth investing in winning. If that means hiring a capture manager because a lead is worth the cost of having put dedicated time into preparing to win the pursuit, then do that. Because the math shows it's worth it. Doubling your chances of winning a qualified lead doubles your long-term revenue. The cost of capture compared to that is peanuts. Increasing your win rate is one of the most profitable things a company can do. And the converse is also true. Allowing low win probability bad habits to set in will leave a ton of money on the table and suck the potential right out of your company. What you can do without crossing the line and making Business Development responsible for winning? Consider making part of Business Development's incentive package based on winning to encourage support and collaboration during the pursuit. Business Development does cultivate relationships that are vital for winning and you want their insights to show up in the document. You just don't want them to stop identifying qualified leads to provide them. What about capture management? Business development finds leads and qualifies them. They need to hand off those leads to someone who is going be dedicated to doing all the tasks needed to be prepared to win them. That is the role of capture, and it’s a vital role. You just can’t be dedicated to two different roles at the same time. A qualified lead is worth investing in winning. It’s worth dedicated attention. But continuous lead generation is also worth dedicated attention. Do the math. If the numbers don’t show having dedicated attention for both of these roles is worth it by orders of magnitude, then you have a strategic planning problem at the top level. Neither business development nor capture management can save you if your strategic planning does not lead to enough business to give dedicated attention to both lead generation and capture. If you are a startup, and haven’t reached the point where you have the cashflow to support both roles, then you have to be strategic about how you will get there. The size and profit margin of your pursuit determine whether you will need lots of leads or a high win probability on the leads you do have. You can start with someone capable of doing both business development and capture, but you’ll need to focus their attention strategically so that you can grow to where the two roles split. The same ends up being true for proposals. You need dedicated attention to all three to maximize your win probability and ROI. TL;DR Business development cultivates winnable leads, but only if you have strong lead qualification and strategic direction. The best ROI comes from having someone else capture them. Business Development makes a vital contribution to winning, but making winning their job gets in the way of maximizing your ROI.

There are so many directions I could take this. This is not a tutorial for being a consultant or being an employee. Or about whether you should hire proposal consultants or employees. This is about what it’s like to experience being an employee or consultant and work in proposals. None of what you see below are rules. There are no rules. There are just people trying to figure things out and this is just how it commonly goes. The proposal experience for an employee is to develop the routine and improve it over time. You know what you’ve got to work with and won’t lose time at the beginning figuring that out. Your tools are your own and this matters a lot (for both good and bad). Much of your success depends on how well the executives have defined organizational territories, put in place a growth-oriented culture, and how well thought-through their ROI strategies are. See also: Roles The proposal experience for a consultant is often to show up, discover what there is to work with, do a gap analysis, figure out the best way to proceed, and do it in minutes not days. For consultants, things start off with a written agreement and budget. This creates a scope that is far more explicit than employees typically have. Employees get a handoff and are expected to make it work. Consultants get high-level conversations, a written agreement, and budget scrutiny. That changes things. You get a chance to discuss the company’s capability and process gaps. For an employee, you find out that another proposal is going to start. Maybe you find out ahead of time and can prepare, and maybe you’re jumping right in. You look at the process as steps: Distribute the RFP, schedule the kickoff meeting, prepare the assignments and schedule, etc. Most of the people involved know what’s coming. And your boss has expectations. You are working to do the best you can within the routine. For a consultant every proposal can start off like a job interview to determine whether you and the client are a match. Part of this is an orientation to the pursuit. And part of it is a gap analysis to see what you’ve got to work with and what gaps you’ll have to fill in. Your preferred way of doing things may need to adapt to the client’s existing infrastructure and realities. Even though a consulting agreement may not have been signed yet, you are already working on proposal planning, if only to be able to prepare the estimates you’ll need. The company may or may not have much in the way of expectations. They may or may not be looking for you to define their process. The less mature their process, the more people will not know what is coming and the things you ask will be new to them. A major part of your efforts may go into explaining how to do things and not simply directing traffic. Your first couple of days will be largely consumed by discovery. Note that the size of the company doesn’t necessarily dictate this. I’ve parachuted into large companies and found that their process lacked key artifacts like written proposal quality criteria and that their review process amounted to simply having a specified number of subjectively defined draft reviews and had to put together training for the reviewers on the spot while managing the proposal. That’s the life of a consultant. Proposal employees are supposed to work this stuff out “in between” proposals during breaks that never come. Some of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY are consultants. They use it to educate themselves and their customers, and provide tools to fill gaps in their client engagements. Most of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY are employees. They use it to educate themselves and their coworkers, and to provide tools to fill gaps in their process documentation. I love that it helps people in both roles. There is also a form of working as a consultant that is a bit of a hybrid. Companies with mature processes often use consultants as staff augmentation. There is a lot less discovery and more routine when doing staff augmentation. You get an assignment and you follow directions. You may be doing the exact same work as their employees with the exact same expectations. I personally see benefits to being an employee as well as being a consultant. They are equal in my mind, even though my life has taken a path that keeps me in a consultant role. Employees can build glorious empires because they don’t start from scratch with each new proposal. Then again, just how glorious an employee’s empire can be is often limited by their boss or corporate culture. Your relationship with your company matters. If you didn’t negotiate a seat at the executive table before you were hired, you might be stuck in a support resource role. But that could be good or bad. Finding the right place for yourself depends on knowing yourself as much as it does knowing about the place. While it’s easier for a consultant to nudge a company in the right direction, it’s rare that you’ll get to stay involved over the years it takes to completely transform an organization. Your long-term success as a consultant depends on your ability to handle extreme peaks and valleys in your pay, or whether you need your income to be predictable. This in turn means success as a consultant depends on finding client after client. You need a strong sales pipeline right from the start. Only part of your experience will be parachuting into companies and turning chaos into accomplishment. A lot of your daily experience will be performing bookkeeping and sales instead of proposal heroism. Your ability to sell your services is more important to your success than your skills at doing the work. It helps to find your niche. Then again, this is somewhat true for employees as well. Only for employees it’s more like selling your ROI and avoiding getting confined to a niche. Both employees and consultants occasionally wonder what life’s like on the other side of the fence. Be careful what you wish for. You might just find out.

Take a step back from what you think you know about proposal management, if only for a minute. What you can learn from this grid is what information people need, and where to create information products that flow it to them. But studying it can also provide some other insights: Process, tools, and techniques combine and have a big impact on your ability to flow information and manage issues. It’s easy to fixate on a problem in the moment and think a tool can solve it. But your needs change over time. Any tools you implement have to be able to meet the needs through the proposal lifecycle. It’s easy to think of tools as labor saving assembly tools. But that’s not where process, tools, and techniques can contribute the most to your ROI. Much of your success depends on issue management. Assignments, questions, and gaps are basically all forms of issues and you’ll encounter hundreds of them on a typical proposal. Each one adds to your risk of losing. Your strategies and approaches for issue management will have as much impact on your win probability as your offer design and proposal writing. No wonder flow charts can’t adequately define the proposal process. It also shows why a success proposal process requires a lot more than just steps. There is no one answer or optimal approach. Even before you consider the differences between products, services, solutions, and industries, you can see that one company will be impacted by these things differently than another. Things change over the course of a proposal. Look carefully at the issue management row and how it changes over time. What you need to manage your issues during startup, planning, performance, and production are all different. If you try to manage your proposal in Excel, you’ll need a different worksheet for each stage. Excel might not be the right tool. MustWin Now As a PropLIBRARY Subscriber, you have access to MustWin Now, which is built around tools that flow information from one stage to the next while enabling you to manage the associated issues. This chart can be used as a test for process and tool functionality and applicability. It can also be used to bring improvement and better integration to your techniques. When I compare the latest version MustWin Now, it matches up pretty well. I see some ways to refine how issues are reported to streamline getting answers to these questions. But I really like the idea of being able to track your content plan, quality criteria, and issues in a window you open and keep right next to your proposal.

Writing a proposal requires transforming the information you have to enable the customer to make a decision in your favor. The larger and more complex the proposal, the more people that will be involved. Throw in a tight, unforgiving deadline and you’ve got a complicated undertaking that involves getting people to understand how the transformation will take place, being capable of making the transformation, doing it by the deadline, and doing it so well the outcome is successful. When herding cats and going from proposal to proposal, it's easy to forget the big picture. It's easy to slip into being a traffic cop instead of a guide. It's easy to start focusing on deadline enforcement instead of winning. It's easy to lower the bar by throwing re-use at it instead of raising the bar. Sometimes it's a good idea to take a step back and think about what you need to accomplish instead of how to turn the proposal process into a mechanistic, assembly line driven production effort. Here are six proposal management process considerations to help you focus on what's important: See also: Proposal process implementation Are you trying to manage people to assemble a proposal or lead them to the win? A good place to start is to determine what your role really is. What kind of proposal manager do you want to be? Are you simply trying to crank out submissions as quick as they throw them at you, or are you trying to change the company and everyone in it to turn it into a winning organization full of constantly increasing opportunity? That can be impossible to do if the organization has a culture that works against it, so it's a legitimate choice. Getting the information needed to do the job. Proposals will starve without the right input. But what is needed changes over the proposal lifecycle. Try creating forms, checklists, and other information products to collect the information that proposal writers will need to write a great proposal. Information products that assist in the transformation. Within each activity, information products can gather input, provide guidance, help achieve quality assurance, and prepare for the next activity. The proposal that gets submitted is the ultimate information product you produce, but it is not the only one. Proposal writing doesn't take place in one step. You can help people think through what the proposal should be and get it right on the first draft. You just have to guide them through it, by showing them what to consider and then turning it into a plan or blueprint for the proposal. An approach to issue management that is sufficient for the complexity of your environment. Proposals can be seen as an exercise in problem solving. Typical problems include, but are in no way limited to, tasking assignments, tracking progress toward meeting the deadline, answering questions that people have, filling gaps in the offering, interpreting the RFP, etc. Each issue must be discovered, tracked, and resolved. And the nature of those issues also changes with each stage in the proposal lifecycle. Successful proposal management is not simply a matter of issuing assignments. Issue management is required to mitigate the risks that can cause proposal failure. Where this often goes wrong is that people start with a simple list of items they cross off as they go. This breaks down if you also need to track who is assigned each issue, who they need helping them, whether there will be follow-up, what inputs they need to resolve it, deadlines, severity, impact, etc. It helps to be able to sort, filter, track aging, etc. Implementing the right processes, tools, and techniques required to create and validate the information products you create. This is the area that gets the most attention. But process design, tool selection, and technique development really depend on the nature of your proposals. What you need to track issues on a proposal with dozens of people involved is different from a proposal with three people involved. The same is true between a proposal with a table of contents that fits on one page, and a table of contents that requires five pages. The problem with most tools is that they don’t meet the needs of proposals because they don’t map to the outline and cover the needs across the proposal lifecycle, or they aren’t useable by the entire team. The problem with most processes is that they aren’t self-explanatory to the people doing most of the work and they aren’t consistently followed because the RFPs are all different. Techniques are usually a personal matter, leading to the illusion that winning proposals requires a hero instead of a routine. Implementing proposal quality validation. In each stage of the proposal lifecycle, what do you need to ensure everything is valid or was done correctly before you move on? How will you define quality and the quality criteria you need to do that? When in doubt, track goals and instructions instead of steps. Structuring your process around accomplishing goals instead of steps can enable people to flexibly figure out what needs to be done. Instructions provide guidance that steps do not. Every part of your process should address: What information do you need to accomplish the next goal? What will you do with the information? How will you store, transform, and present the information to make accomplishing the next goal easier? How will you track everything to completion? How will you define your proposal quality criteria and use them to validate the information products you create? For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, we have created a grid that shows the goals, input requirements, products, and issue tracking requirements across five stages in the proposal lifecycle. You can quickly build a proposal development operation off just this table alone, if you have to. But you can also use it to identify your gaps, set priorities, and mature your existing process.

Everything is a trade-off. You need to keep your overhead costs low, but you also need to win contracts in order to grow and increase the size of your overhead pool. A lot of companies make the mistake of treating the proposal function as an expense instead of an investment that can be approached mathematically. The purpose of this article isn’t to teach you that math. But you should know that going from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate will increase your revenue by 50% with the same number of leads you already have. That 50% increase in revenue will more than pay for giving your proposals the attention they need to increase your win rate. The purpose of this article is to show you how bad decisions will cause your proposal efforts to lose focus and hurt your win rate, so you can make better decisions. There is a natural tendency to want to wring more out of your staffing resources. And frankly there’s nothing wrong with that. But a small reduction in win rate will cost you far more than it would to staff the effort with the focus you need to win. Here are some considerations: See also: ROI How many people do you need to develop the solution or offering? The more people involved in defining what you intend to propose, the more complicated the proposal and the more moving parts. With each person added, the level of effort to track all of it doesn’t just add up, it multiplies. How much time needs to go into herding the cats? This is part assignment management, part progress and completion tracking, and part training. Either the content is planned, which takes some effort, or it is unplanned which takes a lot more effort. Where do you want to invest some time? How much control does your proposal specialist have over assignment completion? Control takes some time. But uncontrolled content development and unmanaged assignments take much longer. If you want the people working on the proposal managed, you can’t load the manager up with production tasks. When the proposal manager is writing and producing, they are not managing people. At some point this increases your risk and lowers your win rate, making it not worth the squeeze. Is the proposal manager in charge of the entire scope of the proposal effort? Is the proposal manager responsible for the pricing? What about the other parts of the business volume? Or is it just the technical proposal? The wider the scope, the weaker the focus. And that’s before you start adding in the other elements discussed here. How much time goes into figuring out how to win? And along with this, who should articulate the messages you need to get the top score? Do you just task this to your staff and expect them to figure it out? Or do you want someone who understands the evaluation of proposals involved to provide guidance? Do you really want everyone on the team to work on this separately and form their own opinion, or do you want coherent strategies figured out before writing starts and driven into the document by everyone involved? While this is a process question, it is also a staffing question. Who is the strategic planner and driver? Can they do that while also herding the cats and coordinating everything? How much time needs to go into assessing and cross-referencing the RFP? If you want someone to read and understand the RFP in detail, you have to give them the time to do that. If you don’t do this, you are relying on everyone else involved to not overlook anything. That can be a very high risk assumption and win or loss depends on the outcome. How much time needs to go into preparing the outline and proposal content plan? If you only allow time for a quick outline, don’t expect a winning outline. Expect the outline to have to change multiple times during the writing process, making things take longer and increasing your risk. Who’s responsible for defining quality and validating it? The review process is practically a separate process. Do you want to take your proposal manager out of everything else to plan the reviews, coordinate participation, set procedures, and train the reviewers? Or do you just plan to hand them a draft and ask their opinion? There are many things you might expect of your proposal specialists. But should you? Unlike many other tasks, if you overload your proposal manager with too many things to focus attention on, you will reduce your win rate. And this will likely cost more than adequately staffing the effort. Could you be better off with enough proposal staff to focus on each element that contributes to a high win rate? If you understaff these things it will impact your win rate. If you expect a single proposal specialist to track assignments, cross-reference the RFP, develop the outline, track progress, prevent disaster, and validate quality you are either going to get all of them done partially or some of them not done at all. That’s what kills your win rate. Everything is a trade-off. So do the math and understand what the value of a small increase in your win rate is. Then you can decide how to staff your proposal efforts.

In most companies, proposal development is the most immature part of the company. But they don’t realize it because they’ve bought into myths that enable them to think all that work they’ve put in amounts to more sophistication than it really does. Often what they do is different from what they say they do. Because of the myths that people have bought into, management practices that would not be tolerated in any other part of the company become expected as the norm in proposal management. These are not all of the myths, but some with implications that less obvious and more interesting. If I keep writing to address the rest of the proposal myths, it will likely fill (another) book. Myth: Successful assignment completion is defined by meeting deadlines See also: Proposal Management A.K.A.: Your assignment is to complete this section by this deadline. If you ask someone to complete a section by a deadline that becomes their job and that is what they will focus on. That deadline could be a review it could be the final deadline or any milestone in between, but the way they measure their progress and performance is by completion. And completion is measured by how much ink is on the page and not by the impact on win probability. Their real goal ends up being getting the proposal out of the way. And this seeps into the corporate culture, resulting in people seeing the proposal as an interruption, an exception, and not part of their real jobs. When their job is completion, it becomes somebody else's job to win. It also makes the writer the person who determines what completion means and what a good enough response is. When people understand their assignments to be fulfilling certain quality criteria by the deadline, then that is what they will set out to do. Those criteria must define successful accomplishment and should define how you will determine whether they’ve created a proposal based on what it will take to win. This puts the onus on you to do a good job of defining the quality criteria. But the real advantage is that people are working to accomplish goals that are measurable and are based on winning. They are not simply trying to get the proposal out of the way. Myth: Everyone wants to win If everyone is trying to win and everybody knows what that means, then why do so many proposal experiences turn bad? Everybody says they are trying to win the proposal when they make contributions, and yet some people merely do what they've been told. Some not even that. Everybody says they are trying to win the proposal and yet the proposal is clearly not the top priority for some people. The people who are there to win are the ones who are participating in the discussions about what it will take to win. Those who are listening are not contributing. There are many possible reasons for this. Everyone does want to win. But some will be a part of making that happen, while others are there because it’s their job and believe that that job does not including figuring it all out. You may (or may not) get what you ask for out of them, but you can’t rely on them to be absolutely competitive in writing. They aren’t even trying to figure out what that means. Myth: Proposal writers should follow the RFP While the RFP may be the single written truth defining the requirements, it’s not enough to write a great proposal. And yet it’s often all proposal writers are given to work from. This results in bad solutions as well as bad proposal writing. Your opinion about what a good solution is or what good proposal writing is does not matter. Only the customer’s opinion matters. You need to know the customer’s goals, preferences, and reasons for why they wrote the RFP the way they did if you are going to write a proposal that the customer thinks is great. To understand how to make the trade-offs the way the customer would like them made, you need to build your solution and presentation on more than just what’s in the RFP. It helps to have customer and competitive intelligence, but guessing at what the customer prefers so you can attempt to write from their perspective is better than nothing. Just don’t expect each proposal writer to do this on their own. The entire team needs guidance and to share the same customer insights. People working on proposals should follow the customer’s perspective, and the RFP is only part of divining that. Myth: To follow the proposal process, you have to follow the steps The proposal process doesn’t lend itself to steps. This is the nice way of saying any proposal process based on following steps will break in practice. But it would be the wrong approach to take even if it could be made to work because you can’t be competitive when people simply do the steps the way they’ve been told. You want people to seek out what it will take to win and then adapt their approaches to deliver it. And what it will take to win changes with every new customer, set of evaluation criteria, group of evaluators, and change in the competitive environment. If instead of spoon-feeding people steps to follow you give them goals to accomplish then they have to actually apply themselves. The proposal process should be about accomplishment. It should define all the things you need to accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Some of this work is done in sequential steps, and some not. But it is not the steps that matter, it is what gets accomplished. People will, of course, try to skip steps. But if they can do that then you have not set the goals correctly. You can also offer your process, steps, and techniques in ways that enable people to accomplish the goals more quickly and with better quality. Because if your steps aren’t enabling people to work faster and better, then maybe they shouldn't be following those steps. Takeaways The way you give your proposal assignments determines what you get back. Merely giving writers a section and an RFP will not reliably produce competitive proposals. The way you measure progress, performance, and completion has a profound impact on how well people work. When they are working on a proposal, these things have a big impact on your win rate. Powering through is not the best way to be competitive. People need more than tasks, steps, and deadlines to perform well. If you go beyond just handing out an RFP, give people the right guidance, and get them involved in the act of winning, then they can power through to become champions.

Most people who want to win contracts realize they need a proposal management process. An unfortunate percentage think they have a proposal process when they really just have a way of doing things. But what really messes companies up is that they have the wrong goals for their proposal management process. Sometimes their process even works against what they should be trying to achieve. Here are 8 things that people often want from a proposal management process: See also: Steps Lowering costs and increasing efficiency. Proposal efficiency is a bit counter-intuitive. A proposal function is efficient when it hits its maximum win rate and not when it gets the maximum productivity out of the fewest resources. The reason is that wins are profitable and cost reductions tend to bring fewer wins. You achieve the best return on your proposal investment when you win the most of what you bid and not when the proposal function is the lowest cost. In fact, lowering the cost at the expense of win rate ensures that you will get less profitability out of the proposal function. A proposal management process that maximizes win rate is very different in both design and implementation from one that minimizes proposal effort and cost. Instead of implementing a proposal management function with the goal of making the proposal require less effort, try focusing on winning everything you bid. Do the math. This will provide much more funds to get help for overworked staff than you could possibly save by cutting costs at the expense of win rate. Guidance. It is better to think of the proposal management process as guidance than as an assembly line. A proposal management process shows people what they need to know, when they need to know it, so they can win in writing. The key is that they need to be shown how to do the things that need to be done. Repeatability. The reason we want repeatability in the proposal management process is to keep people from making it up as they go along. It also prevents you from being locked into a “proposal hero” who determines what to do, only usually at the last minute with great disruption. If your proposal management process can only be executed by a single person, then you don’t really have a process. Repeatability is not about creating an assembly line to crank out your proposals. Repeatability in the proposal process is about institutionalizing the things that lead to a high win rate. Quality assurance. How do you know whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win? If you leave it up to an experienced person, you can never grow beyond that person. The proposal management process should define proposal quality and enable anyone to know what to do to achieve it and assess whether they have. Progress measurement. Is it done yet? How about now? When will you finish writing that section? Questions like these are important and surprisingly difficult to answer. A proposal management process lays out the planning, writing, and quality assurance checkpoints. A good proposal management process lays them out with clever, objective ways to assess progress against the plan. Knowing the status of the proposal is vital to prevent a proposal from getting into trouble. Risk mitigation. A proposal management process ensures that you identify and mitigate the risks in bidding and of losing. Leaving this up to people in the moment means, well, increasing your risks. Risks that aren’t mitigated destroy your win rate, ruin your profitability, and kill your customer relationships. But aside from that, don’t worry about them. Scalability and adaptability. The proposal management process for a one week turnaround mid-value RFP should be exactly the same as a one month turnaround high-value strategic RFP. You don’t need two processes. You need a process that scales. The things you need to do to build a proposal around what it will take to win are the same no matter what the size or schedule. The amount of effort you put into a proposal, the delegation of authority, and the number and type of staff assigned will change. But the process itself doesn’t have to. In addition, the order that things happen in will change. RFP amendments can break any flowchart driven process. But if you build your processes on goals instead of steps you can have scalable levels of effort with a single process that scales and adapts. The proposal process is not about steps. It never plays out the same way twice. It is about achieving goals. Win rate improvement. To achieve maximum ROI, this will need to be the top goal of your proposal management process. If win rate improvement is important to you, you’ll want a process that enables you to discover what it will take to win, build a proposal around it, and then validate that your work on the proposal reflects it. This is what the MustWin Process is designed to do for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. You will need to be able to track your success with these things to correlate what has the most impact on your win rate so that you can focus more on it. And doing this tracking will enable you to direct your resources to the things that improve win rate the most. You’ll find you're focusing less on having “proposal heroes” and producing lots of cheap proposals with a low win rate, and instead focusing on maximizing your return by having enough resources to achieve a high win rate. You can have all of these things. But they can’t all be your top priority. And you really need to be careful about whether your goal is to lower costs or to increase win rate. A small increase in win rate will provide a much larger return than any cost reduction you can squeeze out of the proposal process. This is why we designed the MustWin Process for PropLIBRARY Subscribers around discovering what it will take to win and then building your proposal around it. If you are creating your proposal management process, or if you are updating or reengineering the one you’ve had, then don’t start by planning out the steps. Start by figuring out what the goals should be. You’ll be surprised how challenging it is and how many different points of view your stakeholders will have on the topic. What we’ve discovered at companies we’ve implemented the MustWin Process at is that simply getting everyone on the same page regarding the goals of the proposal process makes a profound impact. People focus their proposal processes too much on what to do than on what they should accomplish. Once you get everyone on the same page regarding what the goals for your proposal management process should be the steps will work themselves out.

Maybe you’ve got a great proposal process. Maybe you don’t. But when you’re in the middle of one, you’re stuck. You can't go back in time and prepare better before you start. The resources you have may be all you're going to get. You may not be able to get answers to your questions. And yet, you must conquer. So how do you figure out what to do when? How do you herd the cats to work like a team? Where should you devote your attention? How do you make the most of your circumstances? Is there anything you can do to make them better? Who are you? Keep in mind that sometimes “you” is just you. And sometimes it’s your whole organization. Usually it’s a mix of both. The following tips are written from a proposal manager’s perspective. Kinda. Even though they’re mostly about proposals, if we all did these things every day, at work and at home, we’d be better people and the world would become a better place. But even if you’re not that ambitious, just addressing them on a proposal can improve your win rate and make for a much better experience. Answering these questions can lead you to doing a better job on your proposal See also: Dealing with adversity Think carefully on the tips below, because many of them can be considered from multiple perspectives. In fact, gaining perspective might be worth adding as another tip. Use these questions to gain the perspective you need to help you do a better job on your proposal: How are you measuring your performance? How are you measuring progress? Do you understand what it will take to win? Are you completing a proposal or winning one? Are you making decisions based on their impact on the probability of winning or based on something else? Does everyone agree on what the customer expects? Have you figured out what to do to get the highest score? Do you have the same priorities as everyone else involved? When was the last time you spoke to everyone involved? Are you arguing over things that are worth arguing about? What have you done to force potential problems to the surface? What will the customer think of the work you’ve done? What have you done to make sure everyone else does better than they would on their own? Does everyone know how to pass their next review? Does anyone have an assignment they don’t know how to complete? Are you fighting fires or preventing them? Does everyone have the information they need to complete their assignments? How will everyone get the information they’ll need for their future assignments? Are you building without a blueprint? What needs to be done that hasn’t been accounted for? Is anyone going off script? What is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about? After identifying all the known knowns and known unknowns, have you eliminated the potential for surprises? Does everything above include your teaming partners? The answers to these questions will have a profound impact on your success, separate from which process you follow, your level of preparedness, or even your bid strategies. But if you use them to help you prepare, implement an effective process, and conceive your bid strategies the impact will be multiplied.

Sometimes the customer recycles their RFPs. They use generic evaluation criteria. They hurt themselves when they do this, but they still do it. The advantage of using generic evaluation criteria to the customer is that they can interpret them any way they want. They can select the bidder they prefer and then justify it. It’s not supposed to work that way, but when you see generic evaluation criteria, you have to wonder… The disadvantage to the customer is that generic evaluation criteria doesn’t tell bidders what the customer’s priorities are and what matters about what they are buying. This makes it more difficult for bidders to provide an offering that reflects the customers preferences and priorities. It makes it more likely that the buyer will get less of their needs met, even by the winning bidder. See also: RFPs Here are some examples of meaningless evaluation criteria: Bidder has sufficient capacity to deliver the project requirements. How does the word “capacity” apply to what is being procured? Are you supposed to guess? Is it a performance metric? Or is it having the staffing available, the right skill sets, sufficient financing, productivity, resources, span of control, or something else? Experience with the type of services specified in the solicitation. Does the customer care more about the size, scope, or complexity of the work you’ve done in the past? Are they looking for specific details, such as services performed or technology used? Do they care more about the amount of experience, the relevance of the experience, or what you actually achieved? Simply “having” experience doesn’t add much value or help the customer perform their evaluation. But what is it about your experience that they are concerned with? Objective and subjective criteria will be used to evaluate the proposals. Gee, I never could have guessed that. Does this say anything that can be used to ensure the customer gets what they want? How exactly will they evaluate these criteria? The answer is however they want. This is not a criterium, it is a justification for acting on a whim. Meeting the mandatory minimum requirements. I already understand that you have requirements. Because I want to win, I’d like to do more than the minimum. In fact, I’d like to give you more of what you want than anyone else, while still remaining cost competitive. So how will you score something that goes beyond the minimum? Addresses the issues discussed in the RFP. This is the same as telling me that I must meet the minimum requirements to win. The challenge for the bidder isn’t addressing the issues discussed in the RFP, it’s knowing what matters to you about the issues that matter to you and any preferences you might have regarding how those issues get addressed. When there is more than one way to approach an issue, we want to do in the way that you prefer. Illustrates a comprehensive understanding of work requirements and mastery of the subject matter. What do you, as the customer, consider to be a comprehensive understanding? Does that mean a proposal in which the bidder says “we understand” the most sincerely will win? Or should the bidder restate the requirements that you just gave them? Or repeat the mission statement you have on your website? Or will you score understanding based on which proposal has the most detail? Or select the bidder with the most experience? Or the staff with the most experience? Or does the customer want to see credentials and qualifications to establish “understanding?” Will the best approach prove understanding? Or will it be the proposal that comes closest to your budget? When you use a term like “understanding” without saying how you will assess it, you are more likely to get proposals that lack clarity and make a lot of claims. Overall quality of the proposal. This tells the bidder absolutely nothing about what you want to see in the proposals you receive. What bidders would like to know is what you think would indicate a quality proposal for this specific procurement. When bidders have to make a trade-off decision, and proposals often require hundreds of them, we’d like to make them based on your preferences instead of just guessing at them. When the evaluation criteria are this poorly defined, the customer will get proposals based on guesses instead of what they really want. The bidder that guesses the best may not be the best vendor and what they offer will not add as much value as they would have if the customer said what is important to them. Getting the best value is worth doing more than just releasing a generic or recycled RFP. So hopefully the RFP moves from these meaningless criteria into details that shed some light on what’s important and not just what’s required. How should you write your proposals when the evaluation criteria don’t provide any real guidance? If the RFP only provides meaningless evaluation criteria, bidders have to go beyond them to develop win strategies. This is where it’s really important to know the customer. You need to know what matters to them, how they make decisions, and what they need to see in a proposal to give it the top score. If you haven’t had a single conversation with the customer, you’re at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to interpreting what they wrote in the RFP. This is especially true when the RFP evaluation criteria are meaningless. If the customer gives you meaningless evaluation criteria and you don’t know how to interpret them, try explaining your rationale and why you’ve made the choices that you did. It is entirely possible that the evaluator doesn’t understand how to score against their own meaningless evaluation criteria, in which case your rationale will appear stronger than someone else’s claims of greatness. You’ll need to cover the bases on the more quantifiable considerations like qualifications and experience. But the reasons why your approaches are the best will give them reasons to give you a good score. Your reasoning about what matters may help them to apply their ambiguous evaluation criteria in your favor. In the absence of knowing what matters to the customer, focus on what should matter to them. And articulate all of your features, benefits, and reasons in ways that present them as strengths. You may not know how they’ll score their ambiguous evaluation criteria, but most scoring systems look for strengths and weaknesses in the proposal, even if they don’t use the terms “strengths” and “weaknesses.” And if you find out that the customer was looking for something else, you would never have guessed it anyway. If only they’d have told you, maybe you could have offered something better than what they accepted.

Most companies have their priorities backwards and it’s hurting their win rate. To show them, I like to tell companies that they should spend as little time as possible figuring out how to win, what they need to say to the customer to get the top score, and how they should present their offering. The much easier alternative is to write draft after draft until you run out of time without ever having figured it out. Do as little as possible to win. Of course, you’re not going to win if you don’t build your proposal around what it will take to win and say what the customer needs to hear to give your proposal the top score. When you think about what doing these “as little as possible” means, hopefully you’ll realize that they are critically important and should be what drives your proposal scheduling priorities. Beyond simply completing the proposal and making an on-time submission, where you should spend time on a proposal? Proposal writing can take a little time, or it can take a lot of time. When you prioritize the time to write and minimize planning, it means figuring out what to write by rewriting until you discover it. You’ll end up doing a lot of writing if you combine proposal writing with solutioning and figuring out what it will take to win, but you’ll end up creating a patchwork proposal and run out of time without achieving a proposal that is built around what it will take to win. To build your proposals around what it will take to win, you need to make figuring out that and what you should offer a higher priority than proposal writing. They should come first. To achieve this, you need to give planning your proposal more time and proposal writing less time. Minimize the amount of time needed for writing and not planning. This does not mean having less time for writing than it requires. It just mean spending less time writing in circles. How much time should you spend on proposal planning? See also: Successful process implementation Let’s look at a high-level textbook example of a 30-day proposal schedule: Day 2: Bid decision complete. Day 5: Compliance matrix, proposal outline, and kickoff meeting complete. Proposal writing starts. Day 19: Proposal section drafts finished and Red Team Review complete with 5-6 days left. Day 30: Submit proposal. Unfortunately, here's how it really plays out: Day 3: Bid decision usually complete. But sometimes not. Day 5: Compliance matrix, proposal outline, and kickoff meeting rushed, but complete. Just not reviewed. Proposal writing starts. Day 19: Red Team Review says the draft sucks. The offering is all wrong. Take 2 days to figure out what to offer. Take 5 days to rewrite. Day 26: Attempting to figure out what to offer and what to write. Hold a Redder Than Red Review and find out it's still got problems. Continue rewriting. Day 28: Give up on color labels but have another review to figure out what can be done in the time remaining. Day 29.5: Wrap it up, no matter what. 4 hours remain for production. Day 29.9: Submit minutes before it's due. No one knows what changes got made. Here is how it plays out when you reduce the time required for proposal writing: Day 3: Bid decision must be complete. Period. Begin proposal content planning. Day 8: Review the plan. Discover and fix the proposal approach and issues now. Day 12: Plan is done. Start writing. Day 19: Review to ensure the draft reflects the plan. Day 20: Draft is okay because the plan was reviewed. But there is room to improve the presentation. Day 24: Have a final change review to catch any remaining problems before entering final production. Day 27: Final production. Day 28: Review production draft and finalize. Day 29: Ready to submit, a day early in case of submission difficulties. Notes: With the emphasis on proposal planning, proposal writing starts 7 DAYS later and the time for writing is cut in HALF. But the draft review ends up on the same day. This is because having a fully validated Proposal Content Plan accelerates proposal writing. HALF of the time originally allocated writing is spent thinking things through and validating them before turning them into narrative. The Red Team Review recovery also takes much less time because the planning included an intensive review of the plan, which caught the major defects before the narrative was written. The quality of the proposal at submission will be much higher, because the changes at the back end represent presentation improvements instead of strategy repair. The most important dates for the proposal shift from being the Red Team, with 5-6 days left before submission, to the Content Plan Review with 11 days left. Normally you don’t find out whether the proposal is a disaster until the Red Team. But when you make the Content Plan review the priority, you find out before the document is even written. The wrong way to look at things Trying to maximize the time available for proposal writing because of the (inevitable) problems is the wrong way to look at things. You should minimize the amount of time it takes to write your proposal, instead of leaving it open ended. You should apply that time to: Accelerating how quickly you can surface the problems before you invest in writing narrative, when they are still easy to fix. Accelerating writing, by having a plan that provides sufficient guidance to turn it into a process of elimination. Accelerating proposal reviews by defining what the reviews should validate. Transferring time from endless rewrites to planning and reviewing the plan is how you achieve getting the proposal right on the very first draft and make the back end of the schedule about improvement instead of recovery. For the best success, try this… Double down and put more time into reviewing the plan than you do into reviewing the draft proposal. Challenge your reviewers to validate that it's right at the beginning. The draft proposal can be quickly reviewed by comparing it to the plan, but only if the plan is valid. Reviewing the draft should be an afterthought and a mere quality control double check. Reviewing the plan should be where you determine whether the proposal will reflect what it will take to win. The rest is just presentation. If you're waiting until the draft and reviewing it to figure out if the proposal can win, you did something wrong before you even got there. This is a key, objective sign that your current process is not maximizing your potential win rate. Since reducing the time to write will be counter-intuitive for some, you can: Ask people if the outcome was critical, would they start any other valuable project without a plan and start building right in order to complete the project on time? Track the data comparing the amount of time spent planning, the amount of time spent writing, and your win rate. Turn it into a chart that shows where the curve that maximizes win rate. You can also use this chart to refine how you do your content planning. Don’t be pushed around just because people are nervous about something they are not good at. Instead, you have to help them overcome their fear and do the right thing instead of following their panic reaction. And yes, people who are not confident writers panic at the thought of having a deadline to complete their writing assignments. Some will even admit it. Guide them. Nurture them. But be strong my proposal warriors. Don't settle for table scraps when it comes to proposal planning if you care about winning.

My wife broke the screen on her phone recently. The repair turned out fine, but her experience with the vendor wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad either. But listening to her describe it, all I could think of was what a great teaching moment it was for proposal writing. Yeah, I’m wired that way. The vendor didn’t have the right screen replacement and had to order it. When it came in, it sat until my wife called to see if it came in when it was supposed to. When she got home after she dropped her phone off to be fixed, she realized that they had no way to contact her and tell her that it was ready for pickup. The only phone number they had for her was the phone they were fixing. When she just showed up later, the person who helped her pulled out a phone and asked her if it was hers. It was. When she got her repaired phone home, she noticed it had adhesive marks on it that hadn’t been cleaned up. But the cracks in the screen were gone and everything went pretty much as promised. However, I couldn't help but notice some opportunities for improvement. And if I was writing a proposal for one of their competitors, I would offer a process that: See also: Examples Minimizes wait times by proactively calling the customer when parts arrive Includes multiple ways to contact the customer, and for them to contact us, so that communication is always timely Maintains the chain of custody to prevent loss or theft Cleans and packages completed work to provide a new purchase experience Follow-ups afterward to ensure customer satisfaction, collects feedback for continuous improvement, and maintains the customer relationship for the future Tracks repair time planned vs actuals and reports on any differences The beauty of this is that it would cost the vendor nothing. They’d need a few forms that could easily be automated. But they are already doing the work. It won't take any more effort to do these things and deliver more value like minimizing the repair time, ensuring things don’t get lost, accelerating response times when things go wrong, and quality assurance and continuous improvement. Not doing these things makes them vulnerable to a competitor who does and delivers more value. The reality is that both the product and the service are exactly the same regardless of who provides them. It’s the same repair, the same level of effort, the same staffing, with the same level of training. However, if you were the customer receiving proposals for a repair service like this, and one proposal offered simply to perform the repairs and the other proposal addressed the bullets above, which would you select? If the incumbent was the vendor and you showed up with a proposal that addressed the bullets above, could you steal the opportunity away from them? The current vendor may be competent. But you could be so much more in your proposal. All you have to do is care a little more. Proposals aren’t just about coming up with fancy words that hypnotize the customer. Proposals are not just about doing the work. They should be about doing the work reliably and effectively in ways that will delight the customer and that you can document and prove. You can differentiate what you offer, even when you offer the exact same thing. You can win without offering anything different, simply by addressing the customer’s concerns and demonstrating you do the things needed to make sure everything goes as promised. Pay attention to your vendors, because they can teach you how to beat your competitors.

Victory for a proposal means that the customer accepts your proposal instead of their other alternatives. Depending on the customer, there are different paths that can get you there. And sometimes getting there means taking more than one path. The paths to victory include: See also: Winning Getting the top score. This is not nearly as straightforward as it sounds. First you have to assess the categories that get scored, and then what you have to do to maximize your score in each category. If the language is simple, bland, and generic, it won’t help you understand what is important to the customer. But sometimes you will gain insights that are tremendously helpful. For example, if they assess your ability to perform by giving points to experience, and they assess the quality of your staff based on their experience, and they assess your ability to manage the project based on whether you’ve managed projects of similar, size, scope, and complexity, and they have a separate experience section with a point score of its own… what do you think is most important to the customer? What do you think the entire proposal needs to be about? What context should everything be written in? Even if the evaluation criteria aren't this obvious, you should still write to put everything into a context that best reflects the evaluation criteria they gave you. Try looking at various combinations of the evaluation criteria and how they add up. You might find that a certain combination of evaluation criteria guarantees a win. When that's the case, guess what your proposal should focus on? Reflecting the customer preferences. The fewer details provided by the evaluation criteria, the more being able to write in a way that reflects the customer’s preferences matters. And on occasion, customer preferences matter more than the evaluation criteria. But either way, to maximize your score your offering has to reflect the customer’s preferences. The way you become the vendor that the customer prefers is when what you offer is what the customer prefers, the trade-offs you select are the ones the customer prefers, the approaches you take are the ones the customer prefers, the benefits you deliver are the ones that the customer prefers, what is in your proposal is what the customer prefers, and it is presented in the way that the customer prefers. If you read the evaluation criteria and can't find any particular path to victory, then look to what you know about the customer's preferences. If you read the RFP and you still don’t know the customer’s preferences, you will have to guess. But it’s much better when you know the customer well enough that you don’t have to guess. Having competitive pricing. Sometimes this means having the lowest pricing and sometimes it doesn’t. If pricing only counts for 10% of the evaluation, you can win by having a score that is less than 10% higher everywhere else. If pricing counts for 30% of the evaluation, your pricing is the second lowest, and the lowest price gets 30 points to your 25, you only need to be ahead by 6 points elsewhere to win. If pricing the most important evaluation criteria, then being competitive means having the lowest price and it’s not worth trying to maximize your score elsewhere if it means increasing your price. When trying to figure out what to say in your proposal and how to present it, search for the path to victory. The path to victory will be what the customer needs to see in your proposal in order for it to be the one selected. When you can see what has to happen during evaluation in order for you to be selected, you can use that path to guide how you build your proposal. Start by figuring out what the RFP tells you about how to win. Fill in the blanks with what you know about the customer’s preferences. And make sure you are competitively priced, realizing that can mean something different in each new RFP. Treat each one of these paths as a journey of discovery. Don’t assume you know the path before you read the RFP. The RFP contains clues, but they can be cryptic. Look for the new twists and turns hidden in the RFP, and plot a path to victory that takes them into account. The customer is waiting for you. You just have to find your way there. Otherwise, you're just writing while wandering around hoping you end up in the right place.

There’s a line that you should not cross. It’s hard to tell exactly where that line is. But once you cross it, your proposal manager is no longer focusing on increasing your win rate and instead is simply getting proposals out the door. At the simplest level, a proposal manager is responsible for implementing the process. And being the heroes they are, they tend to fill gaps. But each gap they fill means giving up something else. And when they cross the line from overseeing the process into being part of production, they put the proposal at risk because while their attention is on writing, teaming issues, pricing, tool implementation, staffing the proposal, etc., their attention is not on things that have a major impact on whether you win. When the proposal manager is overloaded, these are some of the things you give up: See also: Proposal Management Defining what it will take to win. The biggest pursuits have dedicated capture managers to figure this out. Mid-sized pursuits sometimes have a business developer or project manager assigned as a “capture manager.” But most of the proposals submitted have a bunch of people sitting around a table shouting out potential “themes.” If the proposal manager doesn’t structure the proposal around what it will take to get the top score, who will? If the proposal manager isn’t putting time into this, it’s because they’re too busy fighting fires. Where do you want them to put their attention? Planning the proposal content and not just producing an outline. If the proposal manager is too busy planning a kickoff meeting, checking the status of teaming agreements, and building a compliance matrix so they can build an outline so they can start tasking assignments and discover just how short they are on resources, they are not likely to be focusing on planning the content of the proposal before people start writing. The result is that the proposal will be what you have when you run out of time instead of something planned and built around what it will take to win. Defining quality criteria. If your writers and reviewers aren’t given a set of written quality criteria to guide their efforts, why not? The answer will most likely be that the proposal manager “didn’t have time.” But what priorities are so important that they could take attention away from defining what it will it take to win? Only things that could prevent the proposal from getting submitted at all would come first. And if your proposal manager is responsible for production, writing, etc., they won’t have time to define quality criteria, let alone structure a review process that validates the proposal fulfills them. Providing coaching for writers and SMEs. Every proposal has a mix of people who have proposal experience and people who do not. Subject matter experts, in particular, can make great contributions. But they need coaching in the evaluation process and how that impacts what matters. This coaching simply involves a lot of discussion before writing, during writing, extra informal reviews, and help responding to formal review comments. The first thing that happens when the proposal manager is overloaded is that this coaching only happens when it’s requested, instead of being a constant presence. Tracking everything in real time. When the proposal manager is overloaded, they naturally focus on the critical path. When they are extremely overloaded, they do their best to make sure that they can see the critical path to an on-time submission. If your proposals lack thorough coordination and status awareness for everyone, the problem isn’t that it hasn’t occurred to the proposal manager. The problem is that they can only do it when they can get to it, and it has to wait in line. Production and review checklists. When you see people performing reviews and flipping through the RFP, it’s a sign that the things they should be checking haven’t been distilled into a checklist. By the time you get to the review and production stages, you will be pressed for time. Do you want people working inefficiently when they are trying to rush through quality assurance? Reviews focused on quality validation instead of opinions. When proposal reviewers are handed an RFP and asked for their comments, you’re not going to get the best quality. In fact, what you get might be worse than not having any reviews. You certainly won’t get past subjective opinions about how to win that come too little too late. Good reviews are based on a written definition of proposal quality, have well defined proposal quality criteria, and validate that the proposal is what it was supposed to be. This takes more than just a copy of the RFP that too many reviewers don’t even read to achieve. Who is going to provide that guidance? I’m all in favor of having a review team leader take on that responsibility. But how many companies do that? In the absence, it’s one more thing that lands on the proposal manager’s to do list. Consider the sunk cost of the total proposal effort and the revenue lost if you do not win. When you see these things not being done, it’s a sign that you are trying to skimp on costs, not adequately staffing your proposal effort, and reducing your ROI. Which of these things do you want to give up? How does the lack of having them impact your win rate? What is the cost of that reduction in win rate in terms of lost revenue? Proposal staffing decisions should be ROI decisions. If your proposal function isn’t delivering these things, you’re not achieving your maximum ROI, and you won’t get there with resources allocated the way they currently are.

It is possible to start at RFP release and win. It may be challenging, maybe even extra challenging. It’s not something you should attempt if you’re going to be ordinary in your approach. It’s not something that should be your routine. But it is one of those things that if you are going to do it, you better seek to do it better than the folks who had time to prepare. But how? See also: Dealing with adversity Avoid being disqualified. Do you have the minimum registrations, certifications, and qualifications for their purchasing department to be willing to contract with you? You can’t count on them working with you to fill in the gaps after they select you. They are far more likely to reject you without any further consideration. So find out before you write your proposal what those minimum requirements are before you bother to prepare a proposal you might not even be eligible to win. Understand how what the customer is buying impacts what they are concerned about. If the customer is buying a solution to a mission-critical problem unique to their organization, they are really going to have to trust the provider. And they are a lot less likely to trust a stranger to be that provider. If the customer is buying a commodity, they may only care about the price and not care about who provides it at all. If it’s labor intensive, they may be concerned about your ability to quickly provide enough people. If it’s specialized, they may care about your ability to provide people with the right qualifications. If it involves their legacy systems, they’ll likely want experience with them. To win, you’ll need to provide more of what they care about than anyone else. Even if you start at RFP release, you can anticipate what that will be. Give the customer a reason to select you instead of the company currently doing the work. Don’t bid because you can do the work. Bid because you can prove your ability to do the work so much better the customer will be impressed. When the customer already has someone capable of doing the work, they need another reason to switch. And that reason must be compelling enough to make switching worth it. Be easy to work with. Contract the way they like to contract, on the vehicles they prefer to use. Allow payment the way they like to pay. Don’t create extra steps. Don’t try to change the customer. Anticipate their needs and provide the information they need before they ask for it. An outsider showing up at RFP release who is more work than the companies they already know is not likely to win. Assume the competition has problems. If the incumbent or other competitors are perfect, then you’ve already lost. If you don’t know the competition, make assumptions. Solve the problems you imagine them having. When you show up with a solution for something that’s caused the customer pain, they might see you as a better match for them. Bid as if your competitors are unresponsive, lack innovation, have fallen behind the times, missed opportunities to excel, have quality problems, aren’t efficient, are too expensive, don’t produce the best results, are slow to improve, and anything similar you can think of. Then prove that you are not. Sure it’s better to have intelligence that tells you what their problems are, but not all problems get reported. Sometimes a less than satisfied customer can be lured away when they realize something better is available. Only they won’t be impressed by claims and promises. They need proof. So show up with solutions to the problems you assume they have. Eliminate their worries. If things are going well enough, the customer may not want the hassle of changing vendors. Your mission is to prove that there will be more hassles if they stay with the status quo than if they select you. You need to show that not only have you anticipated and eliminated all the hassles, you’ve made improvements that will make their future even more hassle-free. Get the top score. In a formal evaluation with written evaluation criteria, the company that gets the top score wins. Before you decide whether to bid, determine whether you can outscore everyone else who might bid. If the evaluation criteria put weight on qualifications, staff, or experience you don’t have, walk away. But if they put weight on your approaches, you have an opportunity to prove that you’ve got the best way to do things. Don’t propose being capable. Be the company that matches the evaluation criteria perfectly. Avoid killing your past performance record. You can always skip everything above and simply win by having a low price. But then you have to deliver. Every proposal you win is a chance to fail in performance. If you want a top past performance record and a customer that will write you testimonials so you can continue to beat future competitors, you must deliver. Past performance that is merely satisfactory is enough to hurt your win rate. If you can’t win and then perform in a way that the customer will love, you shouldn’t bid. If you can do the work, that’s not good enough — don’t bid. Only bid if you can get the top score. You won’t get the top score by watering down your message and sounding just like everyone else. You won’t get the top score by claiming to be great. Your greatness will either be proven or you will lose to someone better prepared. Maybe today will be the day they didn’t try hard enough, and your hard work will pay off.

It’s a mistake to have the same person providing proposal management and proposal writing. Not only will it increase your failure rate, but it will also decrease your company’s ability to write great proposals. No matter how many times people say this, you still see companies thinking they can get away with having the proposal manager write small proposal sections. Here are the risks: See also: Proposal Management Stand-up and progress meetings. If I’m the proposal manager and I take on a writing assignment, then instead of monitoring progress, surfacing issues, checking other people’s work, and providing them input to help them do better, I’m trying to complete my writing assignment before the next status meeting, just like everyone else. That status meeting ends up becoming about issue discovery instead of resolution. And in fact, you routinely see standu-p meetings conducted as if their only purpose is to have people self-reporting issues as a safety net because the proposal manager isn’t able to talk to each person every day. Driving win strategies into the document. If the person responsible for proposal management is writing, they are not helping the people who are not proposal specialists implement the techniques that drive win strategies into the document. If they aren’t doing that, how is it supposed to happen? How do you build a proposal around your win strategies if they haven’t been articulated before they get to the writers? Do you tell writers what win strategies apply to their sections or do you expect the writers to just figure it out? Preventing people from making it up as they go along. Who is going to put the time required into figuring out how to structure the content, how to allocate the win strategies to the document, and what points should be made throughout the document? If you say “everybody” what you will really get is “nobody.” Proposal writing is a structured process. Remove the structure and what you get is a herd of cats making it up as they go along. When this happens, the proposal review process tends to become a way of trying to define what the inconsistent proposal should be instead of a tool for double checking that nothing got missed. And when this happens, it’s often because proposal management and proposal writing were combined instead of being kept separate. Preventing the proposal manager from making up the process as they go along. What evidence is there that you actually have a proposal process? Is it written down? Is it more than a chart? What checklists, quality criteria, guidance, and tools are provided for every step? If your process definition is lacking, it’s because the proposal management function is putting its attention elsewhere. Defining proposal quality criteria. Who is going to define proposal quality criteria and when? Will it be done before proposal writing starts so that it guides the proposal writers, or will it come after the draft review? Or not at all? If you do define proposal quality, who is going to oversee how it gets applied to the proposal? Proposal content planning. One of the responsibilities of proposal management is to plan what the proposal should become instead of letting that happen by chance. But once you have a plan for the proposal content, who is going to make sure it gets implemented? Waiting until there is a draft to discover that a section is off-track is a great way to ruin a proposal. Once the proposal content plan is complete, do you want proposal management providing oversight, or off on their own being one of the writers? Proposal reviews. The main reason that most companies have highly subjective and ineffective proposal reviews is that there is no dedicated review management function. In the absence of having review team leadership, the role of proposal management needs to fill the void. When proposal management and writing are combined, the proposal manager tends to assign some people to the review and let them figure it out. Wouldn’t you rather have quality criteria defined, a structured process like Proposal Quality Validation for performing the review, and training provided to the review team? How are you going to get that if the proposal manager is spending their time leading up to the review writing? Subcontractors and teaming partners. It is a law of nature that subcontractors will always be late with their proposal assignments, and what they turn in will have problems. When you are bidding as a team and your teammates are contributing to the proposal, the need for oversight goes up. You might think you’ve made things easier by finding a sub who can contribute, but managing subs on a proposal is more work than managing your own staff. Don’t water your proposal management down with writing assignments when you need them providing extra oversight and coordination. Flying solo. When the entire proposal is prepared by a single person, the proposal management process tends to become a highly personal and informal thing. Maybe that’s okay. But just because someone can do a proposal on their own, doesn’t mean they rustle up a herd of cats using the same techniques. In fact, attempting to do so typically results in people making things up as they go along. To prepare proposals bigger than a single person requires guidance, coordination, oversight, and quality assurance. All of those are weakened when proposal management and proposal writing are performed by the same individual. The real driver for what the proposal manager should take on is the number of people involved in the proposal. If the proposal effort only requires one proposal specialist and one or two subject matter experts, maybe you can get away with the proposal manager doing some writing. Quality will take a small hit, but maybe it’s survivable. Maybe it has to be on a small proposal. But once you get to three or more contributors or proposals with teammates, the risk skyrockets. But the real problem isn’t writing, it’s attention. Who is going to give attention to these things? And what will happen if these things don’t get enough attention?