Carl Dickson

It saves so much time to write a short proposal than writing a long one and editing it down. It also involves a lot less risk. However, it does require you to think about what you are going to write before you start. But you should be doing that anyway. Skip the introductions See also: Proposal Writing You don’t need a page to introduce your company. You don’t need half a page to introduce each section. Just say what matters — to the customer. Just because something matters to you does not mean it will matter to the customer. What matters about your company to the customer is what they’ll get by selecting you, and whether they can trust you to deliver as promised. If you can’t say what matters about your company to the customer in just a few focused sentences, then you just don’t matter that much. If what you have to say will matter to the customer, then take as much space as you need and delete something else that matters less. A heading called “Introduction” or “Executive Summary” doesn’t have to take up a lot of space, so it’s up to you whether you start off with one or just make the first paragraph of the first section the introduction. Let the customer’s expectations guide you. Just don’t assume because you have a heading that you have to put more than a few lines under it. As for the section introductions, you can skip them. The customer doesn’t need to read about what you are going to say before they read what you said. They don’t need it to be put into context because they know what they asked for. Just give it to them. That’s what the customer is telling you they want by setting the page limit so low. And skip writing an introduction sentence for each paragraph as well. You don’t need to get warmed up to say something that matters. Just say it. Don’t try to prove thoroughness through detail Demonstrate thoroughness by being insightful. Focus on what all those details mean. You can show that you’ve considered everything without detailing it all. Talk about what things add up to. Talk about the impact of things. Talk about what matters about things. Combine, collapse, integrate, and summarize the steps, procedures, and details. Only talk about the details if the customer asked for them or there is a specific reason why each of those details matter. And then consider focusing on the reason why they matter instead of the details themselves. A well written plan in a proposal is not the plan with the most detail. Instead it’s the plan that the customer finds to be the one that understands and anticipates the issues and is insightful. It’s the plan that matters the most. The customer of a tightly page limited proposal isn’t looking to select an architect by studying blueprints. They will make their selection by reading the rationale for the design. If the page limit is really tight it means they don’t even want details about the design, and just want the rationale. Demonstrate understanding by having the right approach and not by claiming it Unless the customer asks for it, avoid creating a separate section called “Understanding.” When you receive a proposal, you determine who understands by what they offer and how well they anticipate the issues related to delivering it. Their grasp of what matters proves their understanding. So prove you understand through how you present your offering and approaches. Whatever you do, don’t waste page space with material copied from the customer’s webspace that tells them about themselves. Think about what gives the customer the most value in performing their evaluation It’s not about you. It’s about the customer. And in particular it’s about the evaluator. What do they need from you? How can you help them? A helpful proposal shows them how to accomplish their goals by way of your offering and shows them how it matches their priorities per the evaluation criteria. It makes the decision easy. A helpful proposal will likely score higher than a proposal from a vendor that just talks about themselves in as much detail as they can pack into the page limit. Don’t write about the subject of your assigned proposal section. Write to help the reader discover why you are their best alternative and to easily complete their evaluation. A good way to get started Stop trying to think about all the things you should write about. Instead focus on the points you must make in order to win. Then include only the details needed to prove your points and establish compliance with the RFP. Compliance in a page limited proposal may not mean what you think it means. Stop trying to make your plans in the proposal actual project plans. Implementation plans are often detailed. But good proposal plans are not the same as implementation plans. Good proposal plans make points about preparation, capability, and readiness for implementation. They are not a recipe for every task required for implementation. Stop trying to make your approaches about steps and procedures. What points do you need to make about your approaches? How will you prove those points? That is what you should talk about. The evaluation criteria are a clue In an RFP, the evaluation criteria will tell you what factors the customer will consider in making their decision. These are the things that the customer thinks are the most important. What you think makes for a good plan, approach, or proposal section matters far less than what the evaluation criteria says matters about them. This is not only true because the evaluation criteria will be used to score and select the winner. It is true because when the customer considered what will matter when making their decision, this is what they selected. Take that as a clue. Address the evaluation criteria as if they matter and let what you think matters get cut in order to stay within the page limit. The shortest proposal Only say things that matter to the customer. When you run out of things that matter to the customer, stop. That’s how long your proposal should be. Do not keep writing in the hope that you might stumble across something that matters. If you’ve only said things that matter to the customer and you’re still over the page limit, you should revisit your assumptions. And prioritize. Prioritize what you give page space to based on what matters to the customer the most. When the page limit is tight, a meaningful proposal will beat a proposal that crams details margin-to-margin and removes spacing between paragraphs, lines, and even characters. What makes a page limited proposal any different? Even if there is no page limit, you still have to communicate effectively and get the highest score. So if you think about this, these techniques aren't just for writing a page limited proposal. They are relevant to writing any proposal.

Incumbents like to play it safe, especially when things have gone well. When the recompete comes up, they often focus on not making any mistakes and submitting a proposal that is fully compliant with the instructions. You shouldn't assume the recompete is wired for the incumbent contractor. But if you want to beat the incumbent, you must take risks. Just not any risks. You should target the things the customer cares about the most. Your proposal can be more credible than the incumbent’s proposal, even though the customer knows the incumbent and doesn’t know you. But you won’t achieve that unless you do it deliberately and with the highest levels of competence. You won’t beat the incumbent with unsubstantiated claims of greatness, relying on your experience, or making it up as you go along. You also need to target what the customer is concerned about, and that depends on the nature of what they are buying. If the customer is buying… See also: Winning A unique solution, then trust and risk are their primary concerns. To win you need to be more trustworthy and offer better risk mitigation than the company currently doing the work. This can be a challenge. But if the incumbent rests on their relationship, it will create an opportunity for you to propose an approach that is more transparent, accountable, foolproof, reliable, etc. You won’t convince the customer that you are trustworthy and low risk simply by claiming it, or stating that you’ve done it before. To convince the customer to leave their current contractor, you need to show a formal, documented process that anticipates all issues and will not fail, no matter what contingencies occur. Doing this can win when the incumbent merely proposes to continue doing what they do. A commodity, then meeting the specifications at the lowest price will be their primary concern. For commodity services, focus on what acceptably meeting the specifications means. To convince the customer to leave their current provider, you’ll need to demonstrate strength in areas where they failed to deliver. For commodity products, demonstrate that your supply chain can more reliably deliver under any circumstances. Products, then supply chain and price are their primary concerns. However, the more the product resembles a unique solution, the more their priority will shift from price to quality. Winning as commodity product seller means being able to deliver at a lower price. If you have a higher quality offering, it will help if you can quantify how the improvements in quality result in lower long-term costs. If the product is not a commodity or is difficult to deliver, then your approach to delivery and reliability become important concerns. If the incumbent has failed in these areas, you have an opportunity to win if you can prove that you are better. Services, then customer satisfaction is their primary concern. Understanding what drives that is critical. If the services resemble a commodity, then any vendor that can deliver will do. If the services resemble a unique solution, then their concern will shift from price to expertise, staffing, and approach quality. In between unique solutions and commodities, and products and services, customers are concerned about: Risk. The customer is always concerned about what might go wrong. If the incumbent doesn’t address it, or if they just claim they are “the low risk solution” because they’ve already been doing the work, it creates an opportunity for you to point out that even the incumbent has risks and to list what they are, followed by your detailed approach to mitigate each and every one of them. Performance measures. How do they know if what you’re doing is effective? The customer may be satisfied with the incumbent’s work even though they didn’t measure it. But the fact that they didn’t measure it, or measure it as well as you are proposing, raises questions about their ability to manage it when circumstances change. Performance measures enable you to demonstrate to the customer that your work is well done at every step, and make it clear if anything slips. Performance measurement can be a key part of demonstrating that you will do a better job of managing the project than the incumbent will. Value. Price always matters. But in the middle between commodity and unique or product and service, it is not the only thing that matters. When the customer balances their concern about price with other concerns, they do it by focusing on value. If the incumbent doesn’t address value or merely claims to offer the “best value” it opens the door for you to prove that you offer a better value. Differentiators. When customers compare proposals, they look for what differentiates them so they can decide whether the difference is an advantage. Being better starts by being different. The incumbent is known. It’s hard for them to be anything other than what they are. But you are not known and therefore can offer something better. But it has to be better enough to overcome their concerns about trust and risk. So don’t just claim to be better. Prove it. In nearly every recommendation above, it takes proof to beat the incumbent. Claims will not do. This makes each one of the circumstances described above a bid/no bid consideration. Either you can prove it or you’re just gambling that the incumbent failed in ways you don’t know about, and has lost the customer’s trust. Proof is in the details. Don’t just meet the RFP requirements, prove in detail why your proposal is not only compliant but thoroughly addresses the customer's concerns. Let the incumbent play it safe.

We want to free you up to focus on relationship marketing by doing the online searching and monitoring of opportunities. When we monitor websites like SAM and identify opportunities for upcoming recompetes you can focus lead generation through relationship marketing. We’ll even help with that by letting you know when to reach out to customers before the RFP for recompetes are written so you can reach out and establish a relationship, influence the RFP, and get into position to win. We’ll stay behind the scenes so you own your customer relationships. And the best part is you’ll only pay for the leads that are worth pursuing. You won’t pay us for the daily searching we do. If you don’t like the potential leads we discover, you won’t pay anything. Each time we send you something, you’ll decide whether to take it further. Then you pay, but only for the next step. At each step we prepare deliverables that make the available data more relevant and useful for your pursuit. The total cost for a completed, ready to bid lead is $1680. There is no charge for leads you don’t like. And if you decide to drop a lead in the middle, you only pay for the phases you entered. The result is a solid lead with your insights and positioning well articulated and ready for RFP release. Once the RFP is released, your company owns the bid and what comes next. You don’t have to use us to do the proposal. But we’re here to help if needed. Proposal support is not part of the search service. What happens when…. We find a potential lead? We’ll let you know so you can decide whether you want to pursue it and provide feedback. A lead gets updated? We’ll let you know so you can determine what if anything needs to be done. A sources sought, draft RFP, or similar announcement comes out? We’ll let you know so you can respond appropriately. You can respond to it on your own. Or you can engage us as consultants to help. An RFP gets released? We’ll let you know. Hopefully it’s one of the ones we were anticipating and you already have a plan in place. You can respond to it on your own. Or you can engage us as consultants to help. An award notice comes out? We’ll let you know if it is one of the leads we’re following. We miss something? We’re incentivized not to, but our searches are only as good as our filters. You can help us get them right and fine tune them over time. Customers do wacky, inconsistent things in what they post. When we discover something got missed, we’ll improve our filters for the future. We have an ID/IQ, BPA, or GSA Schedule contract vehicle we’d like to monitor? If you forward the emails to us or provide us with a login, we’ll include any lead source you’d like. What sources do you monitor? We use SAM. A lot. We also use some commercial databases of Federal opportunities and some that cover state and local opportunities. We’re constantly experimenting with the mix to determine which are the best match. What if we pursue the leads on our own without paying? We’re not worried about that for three reasons. The first is that it’s a better use of your time to have us doing the searching and monitoring. The second is that our structured approach will help you win. And finally, you’d be missing out on future leads worth far more than what you’d save. We are both heavily incentivized to help each other. How do we get started? First, reach out to us below. Let’s see if we’re a match for each other. If we are a match: Normally we charge a startup fee to cover the time for us to discuss what leads you are interested in, what leads you are not interested in, how you qualify your leads, and to set up your search filters and add you to our system. Once we start searching, we’ll need to refine the filters. For the first week or two, we’ll need a lot of feedback and leads that we’re not sure how relevant they are. We’ll immediately start with monitoring current announcements. But we’ll also start going through the last 5 years of recompete data. That may take some time, but we’ll start with the opportunities that might be up for recompete in the next 6 months or so, and work from there. If we don’t find anything, we’ll still send you an occasional email so that you know we’re looking.

The reasons why tables help reduce the page count are: RFPs usually allow for a smaller font size in tables The text that goes in a table can be succinct, use fewer words, and not to be complete sentences Table text can be repetitive, but tables also help you eliminate the repetitive parts Tables enable you to show relationships without explaining them Tables can show required data without having to talk about it. Just don't fill your tables with whitespace. The main challenge to using tables is designing the rows and columns to balance out without using valuable whitespace. If page count is your primary concern, you don’t want a heading in one column with a lot of whitespace, while another column has a bunch of text. Be careful about going overboard See also: Proposal Writing I have seen proposals that moved a large portion of the text into tables. But be careful. While I’ve never heard of it happening, sooner or later someone’s going to go too far and get thrown out for non-compliance. That said, I have tempted fate more than once because tables can be that effective for reducing your page count. Table techniques for achieving minimal compliance One approach is to have a column to identify a section and a column to detail requirements compliance. However, the section cell will likely have a lot less text than the requirements response, and mostly contain white space. Another approach is to make the section a column-spanning row with a cell underneath to describe what matters about the section and your approach to fulfilling the requirements and a cell that itemizes your compliance. This has the virtual of identifying the requirements in the RFP and saying something beyond what’s in the RFP in as tight a space as possible. You might also consider having a cell for each RFP requirement and a cell for (pick one) who, what, where, how, when, and why. Remember, in a table you don’t have to write in complete sentences. Sometimes this can shorten a paragraph into a few lines. As an example, if the RFP lists a set of steps you must follow, instead of responding with your implementation approach, you can put the steps in a table with a cell for the step/requirement and a cell for why that step matters, what it must achieve, or other language relevant to the evaluation criteria. If you convert your approach write-up to a single line per step you might reduce the length substantially while still saying that you’ll do each step as required. No approach to responding to too many requirements in too little space works in all situations. Think of these approaches as the middle ground in between simply stating your compliance and fully describing your approach to compliance. Use text judiciously The text in a page-limited proposal should focus on what matters to the customer. Details such as steps, requirements acknowledgement and fulfillment, resources, qualifications, etc. that don’t need to be talked about should be presented as data and lists in the most compact form possible. This form will often be formatted using tables. Use your text to explain why you are the customer’s best alternative, demonstrate insights, and explain what matters. Simple table formatting tips to take up less space Make sure you optimize the formatting of your tables. If the text in the table word wraps, you can adjust the column widths until the table takes as little space as possible. But first, go into table properties and adjust the padding above, below, left, and right inside each table cell. This will give a surprising amount of space and reduce word wrapping. Make sure the text is formatted without unneeded space above or below. Also, adjust your bullets so they have little or no indentation. Keeping the proposal on schedule If you don’t have time to waste, you need to plan your tables up front. You don’t have time to write a long proposal and then convert it into tables. This kind of conversion requires substantive editing and may not be something to give to people who are not subject matter experts. This means you really need to think through your table designs before you start writing and validate the design with your proposal reviewers before you get to a late-stage review when it will be too late to reformat and rewrite.

RFP compliance means demonstrating fulfilment of all the instructions and requirements contained in the RFP. RFP compliance is mandatory for some bids, such as Federal Government RFPs. The problem is that full RFP compliance often cannot be achieved. See also: Proposal Management Proposal managers are taught from birth that: Proposals must be 100% compliant or they will lose and it will be your fault. Do not parrot the RFP. It even says so in the RFP. Do not merely state compliance. That is not compliant enough. You must explain how you will be compliant and do it in your own words. All are wrong. But only sometimes. And that's what makes compliance so much more challenging than we have been taught. Unfortunately "you must be fully compliant with the RFP" is a mandate that contractors repeat as a mantra. It began in a time when people had to be convinced to write in compliance with the RFP. Today this only comes up rarely, making a compliance mantra unnecessary. Especially when the mantra is frequently wrong. RFP compliance is non-binary. It’s not pleasant to be responsible for full RFP compliance when it is not possible to achieve. RFP compliance is not an absolute. When the customer releases a hundred-page statement of work but limits you to a 20-page proposal that must address both the technical and management responses, full RFP compliance simply is not possible. So what is RFP compliance? Compliance with the RFP is simply meeting the customer’s expectations. But what are the customer's expectations? RFPs often (usually?) fail to communicate the customer's expectations unambiguously. Have you tried asking the customer what their expectations are? If you haven't or can't, all you can do is try to interpret the RFP and guess when you have to. The company that makes the most informed guesses has a significant competitive advantage. We want RFP compliance to be simple. "Are you fully compliant with the RFP" sounds like it should get a yes/no answer. " But wanting things to be simple does make them so. We want to avoid being to blame for non-compliance. But something subject to interpretation shouldn't be the subject of blame. RFP compliance requires a strategy and that requires judgment. Being absolute in your response to someone else's expectations when they are arbitrary in how they apply them is not good judgment. RFP compliance depends on what matters What matters about RFP compliance is totally and completely up to the customer. Only the customer gets to decide whether your proposal is any good. The customer picks and chooses which things said in the RFP they care about, and they get to ignore a lot that they don't care about. It's good to be the customer. Your job, in responding to the RFP, is to guess at what matters to the customer. This will require a combination of RFP interpretation, research, customer awareness, and good judgment instead of a mantra. Your bid strategies depend on what matters to the customer. Do you know what matters to the customer about what they are buying? And do you know what matters to the customer about RFP compliance? If the customer is buying a commodity, they will evaluate it completely differently than they would if they are buying complex services. Sometimes the specifications are the only thing that matters, and sometimes they are more concerned with what they are going to get and only give a minimal consideration to the RFP specifications. With commodities, sometimes the only thing that matters is price, and sometimes they want every specification met, and sometimes they can accept a little less if it lowers the price. Government proposal evaluators are themselves supposed to comply with everything they put in the RFP. But there is often room for interpretation and judgment. The proposal evaluator may not be the person who wrote the requirements. Their priorities may be different. Keep in mind that the customer is more than one person. What matters to the contracting officer is different than what matters to the end users. What matters to the executives can be different from both the contracting officer and the end users. The contracting officer is concerned with making sure the acquisition process requirements are fulfilled, while the end users are concerned with getting their needs fulfilled. The executives may have goals, budgetary concerns, and a strategic vision that are different from the contracting officer and the end users. For each of them some of the requirements matter more than others. Some of the requirements in the RFP exist because they are required by the procurement process. Some must be responded to, while others get incorporated into the contract and really don’t need to be talked about in the proposal. This is an example of the importance of being able to interpret the RFP the same way the customer does. Some of the requirements in the RFP tell you what the customer wants, more or less depending on the level of subjectivity. If the customer must inspect what you are offering to make sure they are getting what they asked for, they’ll need to validate that the RFP requirements are fulfilled in the proposal. If they don’t trust their vendors or if that fulfillment is complicated or subjective, they’ll need to see how you fulfill them and may care more about your approaches than your promises of delivery. If the requirements are routine, they’ll focus more on the results or what they are getting as evidence that the requirements were fulfilled. This is an example of the importance of having customer awareness and good judgement regarding which requirements to address and how. Some (most?) of the requirements in the RFP will be poorly worded. Are they ambiguous? Overly specific? Realistic? Feasible? Routine? Some critically affect the results. Some don't. Some imply that a written response is required. Some are simply stated and may or may not require written acknowledgement. This is another example of the importance of being able to interpret the RFP. Writing for multiple audiences The decision to accept a proposal is almost never done by one person in isolation. Proposal evaluations may include junior staff, senior staff, procurement specialists, subject matter experts, executives, stakeholders, and random people who got drafted into participating in the evaluation. The proposal should be written to address what matters to all of them. Luckily, some messages will work for multiple audiences. If the customer expects to receive a lot of RFPs they may divide the evaluation into two or more parts, with one focused on compliance and the other focused on more qualitative evaluation criteria. The compliance review is often designed to be a quick, low effort pass to eliminate as many proposals as possible before the more substantive review. Understanding how to pass the portion of the evaluation that focuses on compliance is critical for you to even have a chance at winning. Whether the customer evaluates this way formally or not, compliance is not enough to win. It just gets you to the review that counts. This review is where they consider what matters to them. If you don’t push past compliance and address what matters you will lose the review that counts. The trick is to address the aspects of RFP compliance that will get you past the initial review. This makes being able to interpret compliance the same way the customer interprets it important, but not the most important part of winning. What should you do to achieve compliance? Give the customer what they need to address their concerns as decision makers. Those concerns will depend on what they are buying. Your job is not simply to establish RFP compliance. It is to add value to the evaluation process. You can do this even in a low price, technically acceptable evaluation by making it easy for them to satisfy their concerns. If you don’t know what their concerns are, you shouldn’t be bidding. Even if you don’t know the customer, you should be able to look at their circumstances, the nature of what they are buying, and the competitive environment and anticipate at least some of their concerns. If you can define compliance the same way the evaluators do, you can try being fully RFP compliant in the ways that matter for what they are buying. Try to be fully compliant every way you can, but when the number of pages of RFP requirements exceeds the page limit for your response, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions and take some risks. Following the instructions vs complying with the statement of work (SOW) vs scoring against the evaluation criteria RFP compliance starts with following the instructions. If they are well written (good luck with that), this will be straightforward. But what about fulfilling the requirements of the SOW? While that also requires compliance, the SOW is often where judgment calls have to be made. Do you need to address every keyword mentioned in the SOW? Is that even possible? What does SOW compliance mean? And what do you need to say in the proposal to achieve it? Then there are the evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria are not really a compliance item. But if you don't get the top score, it's doesn't matter that you were fully compliant. If you think that "compliance comes first" you overlook that compliance is not the top priority. Winning is. Winning requires earning the top score based on the evaluation criteria. You can win if you are minimally compliant. You can't win if you get a minimal score. Do not allow an obsession with compliance to take too much time and resources away from optimizing your proposal to get the top score. Proposal management requires balancing the instructions, requirements, and evaluation criteria against the page limitation. This requires exceptional judgment. A mantra can't save you from the risks All proposals involve taking some risks. Take your risks strategically. If you try to not take any risks, you’ll still be taking risks — you’ll just be doing it unintentionally. Take the right risks on purpose. This means the most effective proposal process is one built around risk assessment and not CYA RFP compliance. Avoid the blame game A culture of blame and shame makes people fear for their jobs. It makes them avoid taking risks that are necessary. A culture that obsesses over RFP compliance to avoid blame will cause the company's win rate to suffer. Risks should be anticipated, considered carefully, and taken deliberately after validating the decision. Interpreting an RFP requires risk assessment. Compliance is about risk management and not reciting mantras. Obsessing over compliance means that for every loss you possibly prevent to make yourself feel safer, you've lost many more by not focusing on winning.

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Companies often ask their proposal specialists to wear many hats. They blur the lines between sales, business development, capture, and proposals. And when it comes to proposals, they don’t make any distinction between proposal management, proposal writing, or proposal production. Some companies, usually the smallest ones, have one person doing all of them. When that person is working on a proposal, prospecting for new leads stops. When someone is writing, they stop managing. And capture gets dropped completely because they go straight from database searching to bidding with no relationship marketing in between. This is a great way to stay small. But you’ve got to start somewhere. And all service contractors are understaffed, no matter how large. This is actually a good thing, because keeping overhead low is critical for ensuring cost competitiveness. And cost competitiveness helps achieve growth. And growth is the primary source of opportunity for the staff working at a service contractor. The first thing an overworked proposal specialist needs to do is to figure out what kind of proposal specialist you want to be. Are you the kind of proposal specialist that: See also: Faster Takes ownership of winning Supports others leading the effort to win Owns message development Produces what others give you Ensures absolute accuracy Obsesses over compliance Orchestrates the process Defines the process Makes it up as you go along Creates and maintains the resources that others use Builds what you need and uses it yourself Enforces deadlines that others have to meet Is at the mercy of others who determine when deadlines get met Coordinates proposal reviews Manages proposal reviews Participates in proposal reviews Etc. There is no single, right answer that applies to every person in every corporate culture. If you are overworked, you probably cover several of the bullets above. You still must decide what kind of proposal specialist you want to be, because that determines how you should invest your time. How to invest your time If you are responsible for winning or message development, then your time should go into creating tools that get you the information about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that you need to articulate the winning messages. If others are involved in sales or the customer relationship, you need to create tools to get input from them for the proposal. You need to guide them to bring you the right kind of input. You can’t expect them to realize what input you really need. If you have to go get the information yourself, then you need tools to make that quicker and easier. If you are producing what others bring you, you can help them get it to you on time and in better shape by providing checklists that facilitate their ability to do that. The more you help them understand what is required to play their role, the more likely it is to come to you quickly and without defects. Just don't give them an entire style manual they'll ignore. Keep it simple. Spending some time making their job easier will pay off for you by making your job easier. If you are responsible for accuracy and compliance, then consider creating tools that will help them define proposal quality and provide quality criteria that they can use to self-assess before the material even gets to you. You can only accelerate a review after the writing is complete by so much, and then you have to deal with fixing the defects on the back end. It is much better to be the guide on the front end than one blocking crossing the finishing line because their work wasn’t good enough. If you define the proposal and implement it, then you need more than a diagram and templates for your process artifacts. Spend some time creating goals for each activity in your proposal process, because people are more responsive to accomplishing goals than completing steps. Give them checklists that let them know when they’ve done a good job. The one thing that's absolutely vital But by far, the most important thing you can do is educate your stakeholders about return on investment (ROI). If your proposal function is profitable, then The Powers That Be will throw resources at it to maximize their return. It is well worth spending the time to: Understand how to calculate the return on investment of the proposal function Being able to demonstrate how revenue growth benefits the people you need to motivate Get, track, and analyze the data needed to assess ROI Enable data driven decisions based on ROI Use ROI to track performance Prepare reports and educational materials to teach it to others Telling The Powers That Be that every time you work on a proposal you stop looking for leads may sound compelling to you. But what sounds compelling to them is how much money they lose as a result. It is one thing to evangelize about improving the company’s win rate. It is another thing to quantify the money to be gained by investing in improving win rate. The Powers That Be are not born knowing these things. If you want them to share your understanding you have to guide them to it.

See also: Customer Perspective This one page of a brochure contains all of the following claims: Everybody loves us. You can depend on us. You can trust us. Family owned and operated. Since 1984. We pride ourselves on… Excellent customer service. We can help with everything… We’re the most recommended. Customers love us. It’s a mixed bag of unsubstantiated claims and claims that fail to pass the “So what?” test when taken on their own. It’s also pretty normal for a brochure where you don’t know who the reader is and you don’t have much space to explain yourself. For a brochure, it’s not bad. Maybe even good. I have no idea how good the product is because I’m not a customer. I have no idea how good the company is because I’ve never dealt with them. I’m assuming without evidence that they’re excellent, because I’m optimistic like that. If they are still in business or even exist. The company isn’t the point. The style of communication is the point. This brochure is just a convenient example to use for comparing brochures to proposals. For a brochure, these claims may be enough to spark your interest enough to make contact and find out for yourself. That’s the primary purpose of a brochure. However, once you get to the proposal stage, you should no longer be communicating like you do in a brochure. The primary purpose of a proposal is to convince the customer to take a specific action, such as signing a contract. If you want someone to read your proposal, talk about what they are going to get and how it will make them better off instead of talking about how great you are. If this copy was used in a proposal for water systems, it could lower the win probability of the proposal. Imagine a customer issuing an RFP for water systems. They’d have specifications. They’d skip right over those claims about people “loving us” “depending on us” and “trusting us”. Everybody makes similar claims and proposal reviewers just roll their eyes. The reviewers would look for whether the proposal followed the instructions and meets the specifications that define a quality product from the customer’s perspective. If dependability is an issue, the customer might include mean time before failure or related specifications. They might ask pointed questions about how the water systems are built, delivered, installed, and maintained. They might check with past customers as references. If all the customer sees in the proposal are claims like these without the facts to back them up or the details that answer their questions, they might just get annoyed or even offended. The references to being “family owned” since “1984” are meant to tell a story of longevity and accountability. But in a proposal, they’d fail to pass the “So what?” test. So what if you were founded in 1984? How does that impact your ability to fulfill the RFP requirements? If you don’t say how something impacts what the customer is getting, then it simply does not matter. Beneficial sounding statements that don’t actually matter in a proposal are considered to be “fluff” and can annoy the customer who has to read through the noise to get to the things that do matter. When a salesperson tells you they have “excellent customer service” and that their “customers love us” or that they are “the most recommended” do you pay it any attention at all? The worst is when a salesperson says “You can trust us” without any substantiation. In a proposal, that can backfire and hurt your credibility instead of establishing it. In a proposal, every unsubstantiated claim hurts your credibility just a little more because a proposal is supposed to prove your claims. Making claims that aren’t provable in a proposal makes you seem untrustworthy. So pay attention to this brochure. It may be good as a brochure, but don’t write your proposals to sound like a brochure. Write your proposals to prove you will deliver as promised, and earn trust through credibility instead of unsubstantiated claims.

The following items can be used as a quality criteria checklist to determine whether what you have written is a proposal or a brochure. A brochure gives people something to buy. A proposal gives them something to consider and helps them reach a decision about it. Good brochure copy makes for bad proposal writing. You can use this list to determine whether what you have written reads like a brochure or reads like a proposal: Does it read like it is primarily an offer to sell the customer something, or a plan for how to solve challenges, find solutions, and make improvements? Is it all about you? Or is it about what the customer will get and how much better off they’ll be because of it? Taken as a whole, is your proposal an explanation or a series of claims? After reading it, can you articulate what that explanation is? Does this explanation make your proposal the customer’s best alternative? Does your proposal say what you want to say, or what the customer needs to hear? Is it you presenting your best attributes in the hope they care, or is it a tool to help the customer reach a decision? Does it talk to a specific customer, or just whoever happens to be reading? Brochures are written without knowing who the customer will be. At best they target a market segment. Does your proposal say things that matter to the specific potential customer you are submitting it to, or does it just talk about things that universally matter? If an employee, business partner, or vendor gave it to you, would you accept your own proposal? Would you be skeptical of its claims? Would its level of detail inspire confidence? Or would you have more questions than answers? Would you feel offended at the lack of consideration? Would you criticize them for not doing their homework or just reject it outright? Can you write the justification for selecting your proposal, based on what you see in the proposal? Is it easy or do you have to hunt for it and cobble it together from various sections of the proposal? Does your proposal show insight or merely say that you will give them what they asked for? Is it really just a quotation based on your specifications, or does it show a competence that would add value? Have all of the claims been proven? Note: This is different from whether you believe your own claims. Brochures make lots of claims. Proposals skip the claims in order to prove that it represents the best alternative. When you complete reading the proposal, what have you learned? What conclusions would you draw? Are they all about the company submitting the proposal? Will the customer find your proposal useful, even if they decline to accept it? Does the proposal itself have a value? Or does it seek to get value from the customer, instead of the other way around? Is it credible to the reader? Note: This is different from whether you are capable or whether you believe in yourself. Every unsubstantiated claim, act of irrelevant bragging, ambiguity, universal truism, unanswered question, lack of justification, and failure to add value reduces your credibility in a proposal. Brochures can get away with that. Proposals can’t.

Nearly all of the examples of selling in writing that we see in life teach us the wrong ways to write for proposals. From the ads on TV and the junk mail we receive, to the ads in publications. Even the materials handed to us by other companies are written completely wrong for proposals. And yet, when people sit down to write a proposal, they can’t help but emulate what they’ve seen when others try to sell in writing. Even what we learn in school about writing is wrong for proposals. When you write a brochure or an ad, you are guessing who the reader will be. You have very little idea how they will make their decision or what information they need. You have to make your pitch blind. Most customers won’t bother to read your brochure so you really have to grab their attention and sell, sell, sell. It’s a numbers game. However, when the customer has asked for a proposal, you know more about them. If you have met the customer or have a relationship with them, you will know even more. You can write the proposal directly to them and they will read it differently than they will a brochure. This changes things: See also: Great Proposals PropLIBRARY Subscription information and premium content access What compels the customer to read your proposal is to find out what they might get if they accept it. This means that instead of some hook, promotional copy, or statement to qualify your company, the first thing they should see should be what they will get and what the benefits of having it will be. Next, the customer needs to find out what differentiates what you are proposing. Why is it their best alternative? Why should they take the action you are proposing over doing nothing? Why should they choose you over other vendors? Why should they choose you over doing things themselves? Or over doing something different with their limited resources? Then, if the customer likes what you are offering, they will read more because they also have to determine whether they can trust you to deliver as promised. This is a key difference. People will not trust a proposal that sounds like a brochure or advertisement. To earn their trust you need to credibly show that no matter what happens you will deliver as promised. No amount of commitment or claims will do. To be credible you have to prove that you not only have the capability, but that you have also accounted for every contingency to ensure success. The customer will also need to obtain approval to make the purchase, so they need information to justify the decision. Again, you need proof points and not the claims you see in brochures and ads. If they don’t find the language they need to justify your selection in your proposal, you may lose. Unsolicited proposals vs RFP based proposals An unsolicited proposal is when you send the customer a proposal without the customer asking you to do that. It may or may not get considered. Would you consider a random proposal sent from someone, especially someone you don’t know? Some unsolicited proposals are really just long-form brochures. The message in these proposals tends to be “Hey, I’m glad I stumbled across you. You should do business with us.” Other unsolicited proposals are trying to influence a decision. These are effectively the sender trying to convince the receiver to go along with what the sender wants. Their success is largely dependent on how well their interests overlap and how good a job the sender does of showing that the receiver's interests are best served by accepting the proposal. A solicited proposal usually takes the form of a Request for Proposals (RFP) that describes what the customer wants. When the customer has already decided that they are going to make a purchase, they only need proposals so they can select who the vendor is going to be. The customer isn’t looking to be convinced to purchase, they are performing an alternatives analysis. If the customer will conduct a formal proposal evaluation, they will need to complete forms and write justifications based on what they see in your proposal. They will seek to quantify the alternatives analysis. They may even skip reading your proposal and instead focus on scoring the alternatives. Your score against the evaluation criteria and your differentiators will have the biggest impact on their decision. A brochure will lose out to plainly written details that make the proposal evaluator’s alternatives analysis and ultimate decision easy. How can you tell if your proposal is really just a brochure? It’s hard to keep brochure messaging from seeping into proposals because when we see thousands of ads every day, that language sounds normal. Proposals that contain messaging like this often pass their reviews because no one sees anything wrong with them. They sound normal. To help PropLIBRARY Subscribers improve the effectiveness of their proposals, we created this 12 point checklist to determine if their proposal sounds too much like a brochure. This checklist provides quality criteria that get to the heart of what your proposal communicates so you can assess whether the messages in your proposal are being properly delivered. In addition, here is a link to a 30-point checklist for assessing customer reactions and whether you would accept your own proposal.

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The scope of work required to achieve a high proposal win rate is bigger than one person. If your company depends on winning proposals for its revenue, you may need a Proposal Department instead of a proposal person. When to expand is really an ROI decision. When it comes to proposals, you do more to maximize your ROI by winning more than by keeping expenses low. It's time to expand your proposal department when adding another person will enable you to win far more than that person will cost. What you don't want to do is fall into the trap of trying to figure out how few people you can get by on to fulfill your proposal volume. This leaves money on the table by failing to maximize your win rate. What you should pay attention to is how much revenue will result from even a small increase in your win rate. Improving your win rate, even without an increase in volume, can easily pay for the new staff needed to achieve it. But once you've decided you need to expand your proposal support, how should you go about it? A good place to start is to consider the differences in the roles that proposal professionals often play and determine which will make the most contribution to improving win rate in your circumstances: See also: Proposal Management The things that a Proposal Director does are different from what a Proposal Manager does. A Proposal Director might not, and probably should not, even manage individual proposals. A Proposal Director sets standards, defines processes, ensures staff are trained, and allocates resources across all of the company's proposals. They play a critical role in quality assurance for proposals. A Proposal Director also addresses problems that cross organizational boundaries, which is a common problem for proposals. A good way to look at it is that instead of managing proposals, a Proposal Director manages the win rate, ensuring that all proposals do what it takes to maximize their win rate and that the win rate continuously improves. A Proposal Director pays off by helping each proposal manager improve their win rate, and that collective revenue increase adds up to far more than the Proposal Director costs. A Proposal Manager implements the process for the development and submission of proposals. In an organization with a Proposal Director, they typically focus on the individual proposals they have been assigned. Proposal Managers herd the cats guide the proposal contributors through the process to complete their assignments. If the company has capture managers, a Proposal Manager works with the capture manager assigned to their proposal. A key requirement for a Proposal Manager is to understand how a compliance matrix helps you create a structure for the document that will meet the customer’s expectations. This is key for understanding the relationship between achieving RFP compliance and maximizing your evaluation score, and for providing a structure you can build your messaging around. When your Proposal Managers are focusing on submissions instead of wins, it's time to bring in additional Proposal Managers so that you have the resources to do what it takes to win instead of doing less to submit in volume. An organization with multiple Proposal Managers may also have a Production Manager who specializes in formatting and file management. The Production Manager is responsible for configuration management of the proposal information to prevent version conflicts, ensure backups, enable people to find the information they need, and improve efficiency. The Production Manager handles the initial setup of files so the proposal team can get to work, final production and formatting of files for delivery, and any baseline changes or file management at milestones in between. Increasing your production support can enable your Proposal Manager(s) to handle more volume and improve the production quality of your proposals. Production Managers typically cost less than Proposal Managers, but improving production quality also tends to have a limited impact on win rate. Production Management can also be treated like a stepping stone toward Proposal Management, and a way to train people to first become Proposal Coordinators and then through continued training become Proposal Managers. It's a promote from within and training them in how you want things to work approach instead of hiring people with experience obtained doing proposals the way other companies do them. The key is to train Proposal Managers to win instead of training them to produce. This approach works better when you have a Proposal Director guiding Proposal Managers to become winners. In most organizations, the role of Proposal Coordinator is poorly defined and ends up being a mini Proposal Manager, or someone who is cheaper, has less experience, has little or no authority and who assists the Proposal Manager. I prefer not to use the title "Proposal Coordinator" because it is too ambiguous and results in misuse of the role. I prefer to call them "Proposal Process Administrators" because what they should be doing is ensuring that process deliverables are completed, enhancing communications, facilitating expectation management, and helping to surface issues. The Proposal Director sets standards and the Proposal Manager sets expectations for achieving them. The Proposal Process Administrator documents the expectations, makes sure that everyone is aware of them, and discovers if there are any issues in fulfilling the expectations on time. This is the technical sounding way of saying that they track all the many, many moving parts that become a proposal so the Proposal Manager is managing expectations instead of tracking all the details. Proposal Writers are responsible for completing the narrative portion of the proposal. Most Proposal Writers are not specialists, and many proposals have at least one contributor who is doing proposal writing for the first time. A distinction can be made between Subject Matter Experts and Proposal Writers. Sometimes Subject Matter Experts are Proposal Writers and write proposal copy, and sometimes they just provide information to Proposal Writers. Either way, Proposal Writers are responsible for fulfilling expectations regarding their proposal assignments. They are also helpful for raising the bar on making your proposal writing reflect what it will take to win. The Proposal Manager runs the process, but shouldn't be taking writing assignments. A Proposal Manager who is writing the proposal is not managing the proposal. Adding a(nother) Proposal Writing to your team provides a writing resource that the Proposal Manager can count on to write based on what it will take to win, instead of writing based on their technical background. Proposal departments usually include specialists who form a supporting cast for the proposal. These may include graphics illustrators, editors, content managers, tool administrators, review team managers, production support staff, and others. Don't think of these staff as specialists who enable you to increase the volume of proposal submissions. Think of them as specialists who enable you to increase your win rate in the areas you are targeting for improvement. Proposal organization at small companies vs large companies Large companies have more people. But small businesses can be better organized. This directly impacts proposal development and win rates. Small businesses can have better win rates than large businesses. There's also the difference between small proposals and large proposals to consider. Small businesses often have one proposal specialist. Large businesses may have a whole department. But the curious thing is that what it will take to win your proposals is functionally the same whether you have a single person or a whole department to do it. Titles do not matter. What matters is whether you understand what it will take to win, have people with the skills to turn that understanding into proposals, and have the capacity to meet your bid volume. Proposals at small companies. When a small business has one person effectively “doing” the entire proposal, it should still think in functional terms. Each person you hire will have strengths in some but not all the functions required. How will you fill the gaps? If you start with a junior or mid-level proposal specialist, who will play the role of Proposal Director? If you hire a proposal writer, will they be capable of creating a compliance matrix? As you grow, how will you split the functions? Will you promote your first proposal specialist? Will they be capable of fulfilling the functional aspects of their new role? Will you hire someone new, give them a title, and just expect the work to get divided up? Or will you hire someone who can fill your functional gaps? As you grow, it is better to organize around covering the functionality required to win than it is to create positions based around the skills of the people you have or hire. First, identify your functional requirements and then map your people to them. Then fill the gaps. Along the way, you can also use consultants and training to address your gaps. Proposals at large companies. Large businesses need the ability to do more proposals at one time than a single person can support. They have multiple Proposal Managers. Their proposal volume also supports having specialists and a supporting cast (see above). As the number of Proposal Managers increases, they begin to need a Proposal Director. If they have a high volume, multiple locations, and major impact on the company's financial health, a large business might also add a Proposal Vice President. The difference between a Proposal Vice President and a Director is that the Proposal Vice President focuses on ROI. Proposal resourcing should be based on the ROI contribution of the Proposal Department to the company. When the Proposal Department plays a key role in the financial health of the company, ROI management needs the attention of someone who understands finance as well as proposals to interface with the company.

This proposal template applies to any industry. When combined with your subject matter expertise, it will enable you to quickly write a proposal in a way that matters to your customers. The easiest way to understand this approach to proposal writing is to think about using it to structure your paragraphs. Once you see how to do that, you can use the exact same template at the section level by breaking down each section into its components (topics, steps, features, locations, etc.). The introduction paragraph makes the point, followed by paragraphs for the details. Within each paragraph, you have a main point supported by the details. Tips for preparing proposal outlines: Proposal Outlines This template will make it quicker and easier to write your proposal sections once you have your proposal outline. A proposal outline is not a generic thing, like you might have been taught in school. It must be created from the customer's perspective to help them make their decision and meet their expectations. Outlines based on a written RFP may require creating a compliance matrix first in order to get the outline right. A compliance matrix helps you map the RFP instructions, evaluation criteria, and requirements so that you can build an integrated outline that puts everything where the customer expects to find it. Follow the links in the highlight box for advice to help you prepare your proposal outlines.Proposal writing template There are two parts to this template. The first is the point you want to get across, and the second is how you will substantiate it. People often get these backwards. Here are 10 examples of what people do wrong when writing their proposals that this template can help you fix. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, here is a visual that shows how the parts of the template below fit together. Start by thinking about the point you want to make Choose the point you want to make. In proposal writing, the conclusion should come first and not last. It’s really what the customer cares about. So what conclusion do you want the customer to reach? The rest of the paragraph substantiates the point and only gets read if the customer agrees with the point you made, cares about it, and it describes what the customer wants. Here are some examples of what the point can be about: How you will comply with requirements Your differentiators What the customer will get What the result will be An advantage you’ll bring How the customer will be better off Why you are offering what you are offering Relevance to the evaluation criteria The point you'd like the customer to reach about what you are going to write If you make the right points in your proposal, the customer will be sufficiently interested to read the details that follow. Paragraph after paragraph, the points you make should add up to why the customer should accept your proposal. Follow your point with sentences that substantiate and prove your ability to deliver as promised. This will show the customer that the point you made is valid and prove you can deliver and are trustworthy. Here are some examples of the details you might need to prove your point: The details of your approach Procedures or steps you will follow Details about how you will comply with the requirements Schedule details Resources and allocation Coverage This is where you demonstrate your credibility so that the customer will accept the point you made. Feel free to use bullets, tables, or graphics instead of narrative text in your proposal paragraph. A simple technique for proposal writing See also: Reuse If you are struggling with what to say about those details, you can use this simple technique. Address: Who What Where How When Why Click here for more details on this deceptively simple sounding but powerful approach to proposal writing. Tips to help you write a winning proposal In addition to the details, consider sprinkling some of these into your proposal sentences. Examples Experience citations Testimonials Graphics Finally, make sure you use the language of the RFP and optimize the points you make to score highly against the evaluation criteria. Use this over and over to iteratively build your proposal. No template can give you the points you need to make about your subject matter in a way that will reflect your customer’s preferences. But you can use this template to take what you know about your customer and offering and quickly create a great proposal.

What is a pink team proposal review? We define a pink team proposal review as an assessment of whether what you plan to write will produce the proposal that your company wants to submit, before you write it. This ensures that people know the points they need to make in order to win, and sets the stage for reviews that lead to improvements instead of re-writes. A simpler version of this would be to determine whether you are ready to start writing the proposal. Unfortunately, at a lot of companies, instead of figuring out what the proposal should be and then writing it, they throw together some quick draft writing to see what they've got and instead of a quality validation review, the pink team review ends up being a subjective progress review of the draft that sets the stage for the whole proposal to be thrown out at red team because it didn't turn into what people think the proposal should be. If you define your pink team review as a review to make sure you are on track for having a successful red team review, your pink team review is likely to degrade into a draft review. This turns the pink team review into an exercise of trying to discover what you want in your proposal by tripping over it. This in turn contributes to a red team review that is a purely subjective attempt to decide whether you like the proposal that was written. A pink team review like this results in the expectation that you will do rewrite after rewrite until the proposal is due and submit whatever the proposal happens to be at that point. What should an effective pink team proposal review accomplish? An effective pink team review validates what you intend to write before you start writing it so that you can write it once and improve it from there. An effective pink team review is not of a draft proposal. It is of the plan for the proposal. A plan that leads to a first draft that already reflects what it will take to win, because you've verified that you know how to do that before you start. In reality, “pink team” is really a category of proposal reviews and not a single event. There are a number of things you need to assess to determine if what you are going to write is correct before you start writing it. Think about what you should accomplish before you start proposal writing: See also: Proposal Quality Validation You need to be able to articulate what it will take to win. You simply can’t write a proposal that reflects what it will take to win until you can articulate it. Writing to discover what to write is not a winning strategy. It’s a time-wasting effort-expanding strategy that will reduce your win probability. You need to know if the proposal outline will meet the customer’s expectations. You should also think through any structure (subheadings, tables, etc.) that you’ll use at the subsection level and whether it will help the customer perform their evaluation. If RFP compliance is an issue, then you should start with a compliance matrix that shows which RFP requirements should be addressed in each proposal section. Before you write, you should verify that you know what to talk about where in order to achieve compliance and to maximize your evaluation score. You should know what points you want to make in each proposal section, if not in each paragraph. This is important if you are going to make your proposal about substantiating the points needed to make your proposal the customer’s best alternative. Any win strategies or messaging developed before RFP release should be mapped to the post-RFP release proposal outline and reformulated based on the evaluation criteria. A list of themes is not sufficient to drive your messaging into the document. You need your messaging to correspond with the structure of your proposal and how the customer will evaluate it. You should have a written definition of proposal quality. This should establish a standard to be used by proposal reviewers. It should provide written proposal quality criteria not only for the proposal reviewers, but also for the proposal writers to use so they can determine if their efforts are delivering what is expected. How many of these do you think you can skip and still win consistently? How many of these can achieve if you skip having a plan before you write? You not only need to have these things before you start writing, you need to be able to rely on them being correct. This means you need to validate these things before you start creating a proposal based on them. If you don’t, you risk having to rewrite portions of the proposal because you changed your mind. You know, the kind of thing that frequently happens between an ineffective pink team and an ineffective red team. You can’t reliably assess all of these in a single review. Perhaps if you have 5 or 10 reviewers, with 1 or 2 assigned to each. A series of validation efforts is often far more effective than one big, disruptive, formal proposal review that can't possibly assess everything it should. A pink team "review" really needs to be a review of all 5 items above. Is it worth it to change? The bottom line is that everything you do on a proposal should be prioritized by how much of an impact it will have on your probability of winning. What does starting proposal writing with a plan that addresses all five items listed above contribute? Prioritize your effort according to that impact. If the alternative is to skip the plan and quickly pull together a draft, how does that compare? If the way you are conducting your pink team is just because that’s how it’s always been done or when you tried to herd the cats that’s where they ended up, and you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort to change, make your decisions based on what will impact your win rate. Improving a 20% win rate by 10% leads to a 50% improvement in revenue. How much effort is that worth? Make all the discussions related to “what to do about the pink (or other color) team” about win rate instead. If you are going to argue, then argue over what impacts win probability the most. You only need to change if the way you are doing things is producing (or is likely to produce) a low win rate. P.S.: Color team labels are traditional and cause more trouble than they are worth. They are meaningless. Ask 10 people what a “pink team” is and you’ll get (at least) 10 different answers. The name has no relationship to the goal or scope. It’s meaningless. Give your reviews purpose. And then give them a name with meaning and a single definition. Otherwise you will watch your review effectiveness degrade over time, just like we see with blue teams, red teams, green teams, and all the other colors.

Getting into position to win before the RFP comes out requires preparation. Preparation doesn't just happen. The things you do before the proposal even starts can have a huge impact on your win rate. It makes more sense to focus on them than to rely on last minute proposal heroics. Here are links to five sets of tips that lead to even more content that can help you put just enough structure into place to be successful: Discovering what it will take to win. We think of sales as driven by charisma. But when the sale closes with a written proposal, sales is really driven by intelligence gathering. Charisma can be a part of that, but knowing what you need to know and discovering it is what determines the success of your sales efforts. What is even more important than charisma? It’s knowing what questions to ask and being able to ask them in such a way that the customer will want to answer them. Here are a bunch of tips and examples for doing just that. Gaining an information advantage. For proposals, an information advantage is the best competitive advantage you can have. The extent of your information advantage is how you can measure the real strength of your customer relationships. You can’t build an information advantage without knowing what information to gather and then gathering it. But it’s what you do with your information advantage when you do have one that determines whether you win or lose. Here are more than a dozen links with hundreds of potential questions and guidance for getting answers. Influencing the RFP. How can you help the customer write an RFP that will get what they want? Have you even tried? Do you provide them with tips and recommendations? When you respond to a draft RFP, do you respond with self-serving questions or do you suggest requirements, instructions, and evaluation criteria that will help the customer, while also helping you to make sure the RFP contains more opportunities than problems for your company? Here are more links to ways to get ahead of the RFP and tips for influencing it. Bid/no bid decisions. How do you get past the fact that making effective bid/no bid decisions is vital, but at the same time sounds a lot like not bidding potential opportunities? Making effective bid/no bid decisions is more than vital. It has a huge impact on the fate of your company, whether your company grows strategically or like a weed, and how well positioned it will be for bigger and better opportunities in the future. But first you’ve got to herd the cats into a rational way to approach them. Here are over a half-dozen links with examples of bid/no bid decision criteria and tips for how to make your bid decisions more effective. Readiness reviews. How do you know if you are on track for being ready to win when the RFP is released? Simply holding monthly business development meetings can do more to harm your chances than help them. How do you introduce just enough structure without creating something burdensome? How do you tie asking the right questions to discover what it will take to win, gaining an information advantage, influencing the RFP, and making effective bid/no bid decisions all together? That’s what readiness reviews are for. Getting ahold of the process details is one of the benefits of becoming a PropLIBRARY Subscriber. But we freely share the concepts that drive implementing Readiness Reviews.

The goal of writing a proposal is to persuade the customer that you are their best alternative, so that they will accept your proposal. Being the best alternative means taking into consideration all of the factors that impact whether the customer selects your proposal. Even if your proposal is the only one under consideration, the customer may decide to do nothing. In fact, the customer deciding not to do anything can be your greatest competitor. See also: Winning Who decides what the customer’s best alternative is? So you think that your offering is the best. Of course you do. So does each of your competitors. But frankly neither your opinion nor any of their opinions matter. The only opinion that matters is the customer making the decision. You might think that your offering is superior in some pretty objective and compelling ways. You might even be correct in that assessment. However, those might not be the only factors involved in the customer's determination of what alternative is best for them in that moment. In addition, whether your proposal speaks to how the customer goes about making their decision can determine whether or not the customer perceives your offering as superior when compared to their other alternatives. So how do customers decide? Some choose what they want, and others follow detailed proposal submission instructions with written evaluation criteria that tell them what they are going to get. Some customers make a selection and other customers follow procedures and complete forms. Before you try to influence their decision, have you asked the most important question? Have you asked them what they think their best alternative will look like? You might also consider asking what concerns them, what they are hoping the outcome will be, and what their preferences are. If you don’t, all you can do is guess at the best way to influence their decision. What can you do to influence that decision? If the customer is following a formal process with detailed proposal submission instructions and written evaluation criteria, then you must achieve the top score in order for the customer to accept your proposal. You get the top score by presenting what the customer wants in a way that makes it easy to give it the top score. This means that you must accomplish two separate goals. Having an offering that the customer considers their best alternative and writing to achieve the top score. Doing both requires insight and execution in order for your proposal to truly become the customer’s best alternative. If you understand their process you can make educated guesses that drive your score up, but you will not maximize your win rate unless you are making your decisions with insight into the customer's hopes, concerns, and preferences. If the customer interprets their evaluation criteria as humans tend to do, or if the customer has no written evaluation criteria or decision making process, they will make their decisions as fallible humans do, with as many approaches to that as there are humans. If your customer is like this and you have not spoken to them, you can’t make an educated guess. You can still make a guess. But you are gambling and not being strategic. Your win rate will be much lower than someone with insight. The trick is to change how you think about becoming the customer’s best alternative Becoming the customer’s best alternative does not come from trying really hard to be the best. It comes from figuring out what the customer needs to see in order to reach a decision in your favor. Once you realize that, you also quickly discover that research into understanding your customers is as important as proposal writing, and proposal writing is as important as having the best offering. You must become the best at all three of those in order to consistently become the customer’s best alternative.

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If you don’t want your proposal to look and sound like every other proposal the customer will have to read, then you need to get good at reading your proposal like the customer, and being honest about what you see… See also: Differentiation Read your proposal and look for the differentiators. Ask if other companies will claim the same things, whether or not they are true, whether or not your claim is stronger. If they can say the same things, you’ll all sound the same. Differentiators are the secret to writing a proposal that stands out from the pack. Focus on getting them right. Make your whole process revolve around your differentiators. Try standing for something that is better than normal. Read your slogans. On second thought, don’t even bother. Just throw them out. Along with the slogans, throw out everything that sounds like advertising. Those claims belong in brochures going to strangers and not in proposals. They won’t convince the customer that you are their best alternative. But they might convince the customer that you sound like every bad ad they’ve ever seen. Read your statements about the subject matter. If you’re using academic or universal pronouncements that apply to everyone equally as an introduction to what you have to say, then rewrite them so they only apply to you or so they become part of what you will do or deliver. For example, I often see proposal writers start by saying things like… [insert something that is factually true] is [critically important|vital|a big fat concern|etc.] to achieve [the success of the project|a goal that everyone bidding will share or claim, probably because it says so in the RFP]. For example, “In these troubling times, it is critical that everything possible be done to maximize efficiency in order to continue to meet the performance specifications. [Company name]’s approach will…” The first sentence does not differentiate you because it is true no matter who wins. Efficiency is always important and the sentence doesn’t say that you’ll do anything about it or that your competitors won’t. And it doesn’t prove your understanding or set the stage in any meaningful way. Introductions like this can often be simply deleted, but sometimes they can also be turned into a statement about what [Company name] will do or deliver. And if you really want to stand out from the pack it will describe the differentiated approach [Company name] offers. Read your proposal and ask why it is more credible than those of your competitors. Then ask whether your proposal explains that and then proves it? If not, you’re no more credible than you competitors, no matter how much you want to believe in yourself. Being more credible than your competitors is important for standing out from the pack, because it makes you more trustworthy than the pack. You don’t become more credible by claiming it. You become more credible by proving it and by having approaches that deliver it. Focus on credibility and your approaches to risk and quality may write themselves in a way that is more authentic. Read your proposal and ask whether you’ve treated the customer and the opportunity as if they are unique and worthy of special attention. Have you offered something that is a perfect match, or have you just done what you were told? Like everyone else. If your offering is as unique and special as the customer and the opportunity are, you will stand out from the pack. But you can’t claim uniqueness. You shouldn’t even use the word “unique.” Instead, just propose an offering that is a perfect match for what is unique and special about the customer. Read your proposal and ask whether the approaches you describe are merely competent and routine. If so, they will sound just like everyone else who is competent. Widely accepted best practices can easily become boring when you have to read through dozens of them. The standard of care does not make you stand out from the pack. If your approaches aren’t exciting, you’re just not trying hard enough. You can improve on the standard of care by going beyond procedures and focusing on your interactions, communications, transparency, delivery, metrics and performance measures, decision making, logistics, or any of the other factors that impact the efficacy of your practices. Try writing your approaches as if failure is not an option and you need to prove that they will hold up under any contingency. Read your proposal and ask whether you sound beneficial or whether you sound like you will have a profound impact. Every one of your competitors will sound beneficial. Addressing benefits in your proposals tends to degrade into a lack of specifics. For example, people start claiming their experience will deliver benefits without itemizing what those benefits will actually be. Will accepting your proposal have an impact on the customer? Or will it just keep the trains running on time, just like everyone else will promise? Try showing how you matter by having an impact. Read your proposal and ask if you are avoiding talking about certain things. Are you saying things to yourself and cynically mumbling under your breath when you read it? If so, then your self-censorship is probably making you sound like everyone else. You may be hiding some awareness that could be turned into advantages if you address them properly. If you want to stand out from the pack and sound different, try sharing some truth that you don’t normally reveal. By far, the best way to stand out from the pack is to start before you read your proposal. Start before the proposal is even written and determine how you are going to stand out and differentiate. Then plan the content around proving how you’ll deliver your stand-out offering as promised. Fixing these issues on the back end of your proposal is like trying to repair the foundation of a house after it is built and doing it against a tight deadline. That’s not a reliable way to create something exceptional that someone else would want to purchase.

Don't look at filling your pipeline as one big monumental task. Divide and conquer. Do this based on defining categories for your leads and setting targets. People often look for “a” source of leads, when they should be looking for all of the potential sources of leads. But what percent of your leads should come from each? This varies a great deal, company by company. What you don’t want to do is chase them all with the results being random, because then your company will grow like a weed. Decide what a healthy mix of leads for your company will be and set targets accordingly in each of the categories. This will ensure your long term growth is balanced and strong. It will also help keep you from getting overwhelmed because each problem you have to solve, like how many leads can you get from relationship marketing, becomes a smaller more solvable problem. It will also help provide focus, resource allocation, and time management. Finally, it brings some structure to how you track your progress toward filling your pipeline. Here are some sources to consider: Recompetes of your competitors. These will most often be found in databases. But nearly every government opportunity you decide not to bid or lose will come back around. Private sector opportunities are not as likely to be recompeted periodically, so this may not be a viable market segment if you are not a government contractor. If you are, you can know of recompetes years in advance. These are often the easiest to get ahead of the RFP and practice relationship marketing on. Organic growth. Can your current contracts expand in scope or volume? It may require a contract modification, but if the customer agrees that there is a need and a budget, a contract modification is easier than a new procurement. Always be thinking about what else you could do for the customer and try to have the kind of discussions where they can discover that you have capabilities that are broader than what you are currently doing for them. Relationship marketing generated leads. For some portion of your leads, you should drop the databases and discover those leads by talking to and getting to know your customers. How do you know which customers will provide leads? Start with a database that can show you who buys what you sell. Then get to know them by becoming an asset to them instead of a narcissistic vendor. The more what you offer resembles a commodity, the less interested the customer will be in having a relationship with their vendor. However, the more what you offer resembles unique solutions to problems or complex services, the more that the customer will want to know enough about its vendor so it can decide whether to trust them. In between is a bell curve and your offering will likely lean to one side or the other. How much it leans determines how many of your leads should be generated through relationship marketing. Relationship marketing will pay off even on bids where the customer doesn’t tell you about the leads by giving you the kind of insight that provides an information advantage for your proposals. Marketing. Marketing is about reaching out to potential customers to bring them into your sales funnel. It comes in both inbound (waiting for them to contact you, such as through your website) and outbound (email, associations, tradeshows, etc.) variations. Marketing is crucial for companies that sell commodities. It is often ignored by companies that look for a relatively small number of large contracts for complex solutions. Small businesses tend to ignore marketing because it looks like a high risk expense. However, if you're planning for the long term and you don’t start marketing in the short term, you’ll never get there. Contract vehicle considerations. Customers have different ways of buying. This is especially true for government customers, who may purchase through specific contracts, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts, catalogs, ordering agreements, sole source contracts, micropurchases, and simplified acquisition. You want to be able to sell through the contract vehicles that your customer prefers to use. If they like a certain ID/IQ, you need to be on it. If they like the GSA schedule, you need to be on that. If you are an 8(a), you want to find agencies that do a lot of sole source procurement. And if what you sell can be packaged under the threshold for simplified acquisition (currently $250,000 but it can vary so look it up), then ask because you might be able to make things easier for your customers. And if what you sell can be packaged under $10,000 it might be as easy as a credit card transaction through micropurchases. Having more contract vehicles means having more options, but don’t expect the vehicle to bring your customers to you. Expect to bring the vehicle that the customer prefers to them. Prime vs sub considerations. When contracts cover more than any one company can provide, they form teams that share the work and provide a stronger solution than any of them could provide individually. In some areas this is so routine that all business involves teaming. In others, it’s the opposite. While there are companies that prosper with all their business coming from subcontracting, they tend to be manufacturers of unique devices that aren’t easy for other companies to make, and services that are truly unique. This means that everyone else needs to be a prime. You can still do some subcontracting, and the mix will vary. It will largely depend on how well you trust your primes, and that will largely depend on how much they need you. Small, minority, and disadvantaged contracting requirements play into this. So set your targets strategically according to how much you want to play each role and begin networking with companies so that you can better find the prime or sub that you want instead of getting stuck with whatever you can find. RFIs and Sources Sought. Requests for Information (RFIs) and sources sought notices are often announced ahead of a solicitation, usually around 30 days. If the customer plans to announce a draft RFP, sometimes longer. Occasionally much longer. If you start your pursuit at a public announcement it is not the same as getting ahead of the RFP. They are nearing the end of their acquisition process and are not at the beginning. Your chances of influencing it are small. But you can try. The first thing you should do is determine why they made the announcement. In some cases it will be an inconsequential routine. In others it will be strictly to determine whether two or more small businesses will respond by saying they can do the work to determine whether to make it a set-aside. In other cases it will be to head off any protests. And in a few rare and precious cases, it will be because they aren’t sure how to write the RFP and want to get some industry advice. The reason they are making the announcement will determine how or if you respond. Responding will almost never give you an advantage during the evaluation of proposals. But it does give you a chance to introduce your company and show that you can be an asset to them.

Recently I talked to a government employee who was transitioning to the private sector. He asked me if I could recommend any particular contractor because they all sound the same. I thought of all the articles I’ve written about good and bad proposal writing habits and the things I see over and over again when I review proposals for companies and realized it’s true. If the problems I see are in most companies' proposals, then to the customer, those companies must all sound the same. Thinking about it more, there are reasons why your proposals all sound the same. Some may not apply to you. But I’m betting that some will. Maybe most. Hopefully not all. But possibly. And I doubt there’s a company out there that will not have at least one apply to them. Warning: This may not be easy to hear. Sometimes I can be too honest. But every harsh reality I’ve pointed to is an opportunity to beat your competitors who stay where they are. And if you can’t do anything about them, then at least have a good laugh at yourself and your industry. Here's why your proposals sound just like everyone else’s proposals: See also: Great Proposals Your proposals are about your company. When the customer says “Describe your company’s…” or “Contractor shall describe its approach to…” you do just that instead of focusing on why the customer asked for that or what the customer hopes to get out of it. If you want to differentiate, make your proposal about the customer. Then whatever you say about your company has to matter to the customer. Describing who you are while sounding beneficial is easy. Showing how you matter to someone else is not so easy. You make the same writing mistakes as everyone else. You are pleased to submit, fully committed, understand, brag, and claim all the same way. You even use the same clichés. It’s easy and it passes your proposal reviews because it sounds like all the other proposals. You've developed some bad proposal writing habits. If you want to sound different, try sharing some truth. You all talk about quality and risk in the same way. You provide the lowest risk and the highest quality without any proof just like everyone else. If that was true you wouldn’t have had any problems on any of your past projects, and yet… Maybe this one should have been titled that you tell the same lies as everyone else. Try doing something about the risks or improving quality and then proving that you’ll follow through after award. Try focusing on credibility and your approaches to risk and quality may write themselves in a way that is a bit more authentic. You lack insight and are talking around it just like everyone else. So the RFP came out and you decided to bid it because “you can do the work” and your proposal is responsive to everything in the RFP while trying to sound beneficial. But there’s nothing in there that anyone would look at and say “Wow! I’ve never thought of doing it that way before. That’s going to make a huge difference.” The truth is you just don't have any insightful information to work with and are trying to word around it like you do. Try treating the customer and the opportunity as something that is unique and special. Then offer something that is a perfect match. You won’t take the risk of saying the wrong thing so you end up saying nothing just like everyone else. Being exceptional requires being different. But if you do something different you might get dinged in a review, or worse. If the proposal loses you might get fired. So you do something normal and completely expected. Try making the entire proposal process revolve around differentiators. Try standing for something better than normal. Your approaches are good enough. You have achieved RFP compliance. This is important. You may have even eked out a little better than merely compliant here or there. That’s good enough to submit and maybe you’ll win on price. Try raising the bar. There is no good enough. Losing is always blamed on price. It’s politically acceptable to lose on price. Every proposal that makes the competitive range and loses will be blamed on price. The truth is you scoped it wrong, your overhead is too fat, or your value is too low. Try being honest about why you lost so that you’ll leave your comfort zone in order to change. You implement the same best practices. The acceptable ways of doing things are not competitive. Everyone does acceptable. You’ve got to be better. Try taking what’s acceptable and then modifying it to be a better match for this particular customer, their preferences, and their circumstances. Your management plans are all boring. Most management plans are competent and routine. If your management plan isn’t exciting, you’re just not trying hard enough. Try writing your management plan as if success or failure of the entire project depends on it. You aim to be a little better than your competitors. You’ve done what the RFP told you to. You’ve done it well. This means that you may have done what you were told to do better than your competitors. And if so, you might win. But you're probably going to lose. How far below 50% is your win rate? And aiming to be just a little better is not much of a long term competitive strategy. You are all writing to the same RFP and trying to be better. Try doing what the RFP requires in ways that are different from what others will bid and matter in ways that are compelling. When it comes to service proposals, your capabilities are defined by who you can hire. You didn’t get into the service business by assessing the market or trying to disrupt the market. You got there by responding to RFPs that were low hanging fruit and then hiring staff to do the work. Whatever the customer said they wanted in their RFP, you morphed into. You are all hiring from the same labor pool and you all claim staff counts that are true but will have no impact on the next customer because they are all already billable. When someone asks about your capabilities you often start talking about your experience, as if the two are the same. Try focusing on your differentiators other than experience. Those are what can define a company that isn’t defined simply by who it hires. Then turn those differentiators into sustainable ways of operating that are different and use them to produce differentiated capabilities. Add it all up and you all sound the same. And not very credible. And there’s no connection between what you’ve said in your proposal and how the project goes. So your customers don’t believe half of what vendors say in their proposals anyway. And the next one they read sounds like more of the same. Is it yours?

Everything you want your customer to conclude about your proposal should be in your Executive Summary. Not the details. But what the details mean, what they add up to, and why that makes you the customer's best alternative. Your Executive Summary should introduce every key point you’re trying to make. It's not actually a summary at all. If you don’t know what to say in your Executive Summary, it’s because you don’t know what the point of your proposal should be, and this is a major problem to solve before you start writing anything. You won’t discover what the point of your proposal is by writing about it. You want your proposal writing to prove the points you make. The points won't make themselves. You need to know the points you want to make before you start writing. In fact, you should probably hold a major review to make sure you intend to make the right points before investing in writing to support them. This is a solid argument in favor of writing your Executive Summary before you write the rest of your proposal. What’s in most Executive Summaries When you read your Executive Summary the way the customer will read it, you may not like what you see. Here is what most companies offer their customers: See also: Executive Summary Bragging. Clichés. Unsubstantiated claims. The word "unique." Beneficial sounding platitudes that everyone will claim and are ultimately meaningless. Statements of commitment instead of how you will deliver results. A great deal of focus on being exactly what the customer asked for instead of being something better. A great deal of focus on your being experienced and qualified, as if everyone who is a contender to win won’t be. And just to top it all off, some background about the customer that they already know, as if being able to copy and paste from their website proves how well you understand them. Or worse, a claim that you understand them without anything to make it credible. And a pinch of stating the obvious about what will be “critical to the success of the project” or what is "vitally important" presented in such a way that it applies to everyone bidding. Oh, and let’s not forget the big revelation about how pleased you are to take the customer’s money submit your proposal. If these things are in your Executive Summary, then this is what you have offered. In some Executive Summaries I have reviewed for companies, you have to read through almost a page of this stuff before you see anything offered at all. And then it's not differentiated. Is this what you think the customer wanted? You may think your offering consists of the details that appear in your technical approach. However, the Executive Summary is essentially a statement of what you are offering. The way you articulate it in the Executive Summary is what you are offering. The rest just provides details that prove you can deliver what you’ve promised. Is this really who you are? The Executive Summary is also who you are. Your mission statement, branding, and/or corporate identity statement are not who you are. You are what you claim to be in your proposal. And the Executive Summary is your proposal. If your Executive Summary is pointless then you are pointless. If your Executive Summary doesn’t say things that matter to the customer, then your offering does not matter and you do not matter. It does not matter how much you want to matter. And if your Executive Summary is all about you instead of being all about the customer, then who you are is narcissistic. You don't have to tell the customer who you are or what's great about you. You have to show the customer that they will get great results by selecting you. The proposal is who you are until you win. Only if you win the proposal, do you get the chance to become what you deliver. Prove that you matter If you really do matter, then your Executive Summary should explain why. Only it shouldn’t be about you and why you matter. Your Executive Summary should be about what matters to the customer and how by accepting your proposal they will be better off than by choosing any other alternative. This is what your offering should be, and what your Executive Summary must show. Your Executive Summary is not a summary of your proposal. It is the reason why the customer should accept your proposal. And you can’t write your proposal without knowing what that is. So start by figuring out why you are the customer’s best alternative and write an Executive Summary that demonstrates it. Then your Executive Summary truly is your proposal.

How much experience do you have? How relevant is it? How about staffing? Do your staff have the right qualifications and skills? Do you have enough staff? Behind these questions are two win strategies you should know by name: depth and breadth. They are not mutually exclusive, but sometimes one is more relevant to a customer than the other. Depth communicates sufficiency of quantity See also: Themes If the customer is looking for one type of experience and I have 10 project examples, I may have the depth of experience they are looking for. If I have more staff than the minimum needed, I have sufficient depth to be able to replace staff due to turnover. Depth can be applied to things other than just experience and staffing. It can also apply to resources, technology, parts, and more. Depth can prevent disruption, provide back-ups, increase speed, mitigate risks, improve capacity, and enable you to meet surge requirements. Depth implies resilience. Breadth communicates coverage If the customer is looking for a range of experience and I have a project example for each, I may have the breadth of experience they are looking for. If I can cover all of the positions with the qualifications or skills required, I have sufficient breadth to cover the requirements. Breadth can apply to more than just experience and staffing. It can also apply to locations, technology, resources, skills, procedures, and more. Breadth can meet all the requirements, reach all the locations, cover the hours of operation, and ensure readiness in every area. Breadth implies coverage and range. Presenting depth and breadth A table or matrix is commonly used to show depth and breadth. For example, a staffing matrix might have columns for the qualifications required, and rows for the labor categories. If you are showing breadth, you want to cover every single cell to show that you have staff with every qualification in every labor category. If you are showing depth, you might show the number of staff in each cell, or better yet, the number you have above what is required. Or even both. With a combination of colors/shading and numbers you can show both depth and breadth at the same time. Other examples where depth and breadth can be presented in a table or matrix: Experience in each statement of work area Staff in each statement of work area Staff with degrees, years of experience, certifications, etc. Locations with numbers of staff Years in each location Required parts coverage Ability to cover the level of effort (hours) Ability to cover the positions (people) Coverage of the range of technology needed Coverage of the skills required for the project Current hires, contingency hires, and recruiting required to fill positions Staff available by the prime contractor, subcontractors, and other sources Size, scope, and complexity of experience Equipment required Depth is usually quantified. But breadth doesn’t have to be. When you have both depth and breadth, then you can communicate that you cover all of the requirements with sufficient back-ups to mitigate risks and ensure delivery. I like to use depth and breadth by name because they are easy for the customer to understand. And presenting them in a table or matrix makes them easy to evaluate.

When I tell people that they should exceed RFP compliance if they want to win, they often reply “But if we do that we’ll be too expensive.” This comes from an assumption that time is money and that anything you do takes time. When I point out that you can go beyond the RFP without it actually costing anything, they often reply with “But how do we do that?” Well, here’s how… Proposal writing examples See also: Examples 1) Focus on “why” in addition to compliance. Show that you are the better alternative for the customer to select because you have better judgment. Having better judgment does not cost anything. Not having good judgment is what will cost you. The reason we do [RFP requirement] by [differentiated approach] is that it [mitigates risk | improves quality | achieves a benefit]. 2) Make something common uncommon. Everyone is going to propose a quality assurance plan, probably because the customer requires it. But even if they don't, you probably will do things according to quality principles because it prevents risk to your company. If you're going to do things anyway, you might as way get credit for doing them! But how can you avoid having an approach that is minimal and the same as everyone else's approach? What makes your approach special? Everyone is going to have an approach to staffing the project. Everyone is going to be compliant (at least the only competitors to be concerned about will be fully compliant). Everyone can do the work. Everyone has experience. Most of these are routine. So in everything you do, what can you do so that it is not routine? Show that in addition to what you do and the reason why, there is also something added. This simple change in presentation makes the ordinary something more, something special. Our approach to [quality | something else] goes beyond the [double checking | something else] so that it also serves as a [project management | design | something else] tool. This not only achieves [goal] but also adds value by [additional benefit]. 3) Focus on how you will deliver instead of what you will deliver. This works best when the RFP forces everyone to bid the same thing. Everyone who makes the competitive range will be compliant. If you are going to differentiate, you have to do it without adding to the cost. So don’t change what you will deliver, just deliver it in a better way. Something as simple as checklists or documented standard operating procedures that are kept as records so they can be verified can take you from someone who promises, to someone who has verifiable, accountable delivery. By [differentiated approach] we ensure [better | faster | more reliable] [delivery | implementation | execution]. 4) Use compliance to solve a problem that others leave unspoken. Everyone will be compliant. But you can show more value delivered by talking about the problems your approach to fulfilling the requirements will solve. This is also much more compelling than telling the customer you’ll do what they asked you to do. While it may be true that everyone who is compliant will do the same thing, by mentioning the issues you demonstrate more understanding, preparedness, risk management, and value than those who don't mention the issues you do. By meeting the required deadline for [requirement] we ensure we have enough time later for [second requirement]. This [mitigates the risk | something else] of [problem] and ensures we can [benefit]. 5) Ghost the competition. Explain why if someone else doesn’t do things the way you do they’ll be unacceptable. This involves explaining what you do that's different, the problems it solves, and the possibility of those problems occurring if another vendor doesn't do things the way you do. We do [differentiated approach] because it [avoids a problem | mitigates a risk | ensures compliance | adds value]. A contractor that doesn’t do this will expose the customer to unacceptable risk of noncompliance and [other problems]. 6) Offer something intangible. Intangible benefits are difficult to quantify and usually less compelling. But as a last resort, they can sometimes earn you a few points in evaluation. While intangible benefits can be real, the challenge is that they are not quantifiable, tangible, or easy to prove. Because we have experience with [reference], we can better anticipate problems like [examples]. 7) Make something intangible tangible. Do you provide better quality? Are you faster? More reliable? More experienced? More capable? More responsive? More flexible? If you simply claim these attributes, they will likely be ignored. What can you do to make them tangible? Can you quantify them? Can you draw a picture? Can you provide an example? Can you make the impact clear? Making intangible differences tangible can be challenging. Which is why most of your competitors will not do it and why if you do it you can outscore them. Quality is often promised, but especially when delivering services it can be very subjective. If you make it less subjective, you can appear much more thorough and provide a tangible difference that the evaluators can score as a strength in your proposal. The reason our services are of better quality is that we define it. See Exhibit X for a sample of the quality criteria we use. We use one checklist for each task assignment to ensure that we can define success. We use the second checklist after completion to verify that we delivered as promised. By simply checking the boxes, we accumulate performance metrics that identify trends, uncover problems, and support making decisions such as resource allocation. The result is tangibly better quality of service. 8 ) Quantify things they don’t. Take the key tradeoff decisions from your basis of estimate (BOE) and explain why they are the right choices. Or explain why your capacities beyond what the RFP requires mitigate risks or provide other benefits. This can involve citing things you already have that the customer didn't ask for, but in the right circumstances could prove to be a benefit. In addition to the X staff required for this project, we have an additional X staff who enable us to respond quickly in the event of turnover or a change in the requirements. 9) Address the stakeholders. You may be delivering the exact same thing, but by citing benefits to the customer's users, partners, executives, and other stakeholders you can show greater understanding and value. Often delivering benefits to the customer's stakeholders also benefits the customer. We will leverage [compliance with requirement] to ensure that [needs] of [customer]’s stakeholders are not only met but that they also [receive benefits]. 10) Don’t just comply, accomplish the goal. Make the benefits of everything you do achieve the goals the customer has for conducting the procurement. They may be ordering paper clips with certain specifications, but their goal might be having well organized recordkeeping. While everyone will be compliant, you will be accomplishing something that matters to them. We will achieve [goal] by [approach to compliance with RFP requirements] so that [bigger picture]. 11) Offer a better future. Think of it as a long-term relationship. What are the possibilities down the road? What does this project set up for the future? What kind of foundation will you lay? Making this your goal is another way to show understanding and added value while simply meeting the requirements of this project. In addition to [required capability] we bring capabilities in [related but not required]. As [project] matures, these additional capabilities will become more relevant and could position [customer] to better meet its future goals. 12) Be easier to work with. If you’ve got several vendors who can all supply what you want at a reasonable price, who would you pick? Would it be one that’s uninspiring but compliant, or one that seems super helpful? A lot depends on what you’re procuring. Is it a bit uncertain? Outside your area of expertise? Complicated? Sometimes being easy to work with matters a lot to the customer even though it’s not part of the specifications. In several important ways, our approach adapts to [customer]’s preferences. Since they require similar level of effort, we will consult with [customer] to determine which of the following approach options you prefer. 13) Exceed the specifications. If you can complete the transition in half the time, then do that and explain how the customer will benefit. If some of the performance specifications are easy to meet, offer to accept a tougher standard that you know you can still meet. Because others won’t. Don't be afraid to commit to doing things better when you can. While the requirement is that monthly reports be delivered on time 90% of the time, we commit to delivering these reports on time 98% of the time. The difference is that we will be late five times less than our competitors who merely comply with the RFP. 14) Be more compliant than compliant. Offer compliance that goes beyond the RFP. When customers care about compliance, it is usually because they have things they have to comply with. In addition to complying with the RFP requirements, we will ensure that the work is performed according to [relevant laws, regulations, and directives]. Do you want to submit an ordinary proposal or a great proposal? Taking approaches like these enables you to go from submitting an ordinary proposal to submitting a proposal that is better. And you can do this with any RFP, no matter how specific or limiting the requirements. You can do these things without adding any cost to what you are offering. And if you are in a best value competition, you can take each of these things further by investing time or resources into turning them into differentiators and then quantifying the difference in value to the customer.