Carl Dickson

Winning government contracts requires knowing how to succeed at every step throughout a ridiculously long sales cycle. Winning government contracts requires attention and doing your homework. The good news is that most companies really aren’t that good at it. Most companies who are registered to do business with the government end up doing little or none. And most established companies merely do well enough. Most government contractors lose more contract bids than they win. They are vulnerable and can be beat by anyone who puts more focus and effort into accomplishing the things on this list. Government contractors with experience should already know every one of the steps below. And yet on any given pursuit they’ll fail to accomplish nearly half of them. If you have experience with winning government contracts, you should read this list with two goals: Be honest with yourself. Your first reaction may be denial. But knowing about something and achieving it are two different things. Trying and accomplishing are also two different things. Be honest with yourself about what you actually accomplish. Figure out how to accomplish all of them. It will involve working through other people. It will likely involve systematizing or institutionalizing how you accomplish them. That in turn involves pushing against organizational inertia. Being a big company only makes this harder. If you are new to government contracts: This is a list of what to accomplish. It is not enough to know how to accomplish each step. This is where you start understanding how to win government contracts, but not where you should stop. There is plenty more information on PropLIBRARY for each one and of course other sources of information about them. Your growth and competitiveness will depend on whether you can accomplish all of them better than your competitors. Quit telling yourself that you don’t have enough people to do what you should. What must be done has nothing to do with your head count. How much time you spend on each might. Put at least some attention into all of them. Don’t just pick the easy ones. Whether you are experienced or not, accomplishing these 14 steps will make you more competitive: Discover who buys what you sell. There is a ton of historical data about what government agencies buy, and it’s available from many sources. Some are even free. Essentially all government contract actions are recorded. This can help you understand where in the government they have the most interest in what you sell. It will help you realize who to reach out to, build relationships with, and learn more about. Understand the procurement process. Government procurement can be a very long process. It is governed by lots of complex rules. And yet, once you learn them, those rules can help you navigate the system. At any moment, you should know what the next step the customer must take, what their decisions will be based on, and be prepared to provide information that can help them. To do that, you need to know their procurement process. Since it’s all publicly available, there’s really no excuse not to. Understand the roles government staff play in a procurement. When you reach out to contact government staff, be aware that different people play different roles and bring different perspectives to the procurement. Contract officers, contracting officer's technical representatives, agency executives, and program staff all have different interests and involvement in the procurement process. If you understand their roles it will help you figure out who is capable, or at least interested, in answering your questions. Pro tip: Make contact with the people playing each of these roles, but do it in ways that are relevant to their roles to gain the full picture of a procurement. Understand the realities of teaming. There are companies that do a lot of business through subcontracting instead of prime contracting. There are many more companies that only get a small portion of what they thought had been agreed to as a subcontractor. There are many other issues. Learn everything you can about the realities of teaming if you want to be successful. Network and build relationships. Networking is important for finding teaming partners who are trustworthy. It’s also important for gaining customer, opportunity, and competitive insight. You can also network to meet customer staff. The larger you network, the more opportunities you'll have to practice relationship marketing. Be seen as a helpful, credible asset. When you land customer meetings, don’t be the vendor that nobody wants to spend time with. Be the vendor with useful information that helps them do their job even before they start working with you. Be the vendor that helps them understand and inspires them about future possibilities. And above all, be credible. Nobody wants to work with a vendor who is not credible. Most vendors wouldn't even accept their own proposals. If you want follow-up meetings, be seen as an asset and not a needy salesperson. Show up qualified. You think you’re qualified. But are you? Do you have the past performance, registrations, certifications, insurance, size standards, locations, and anything else that will be required to bid? It makes no sense to bid if they can’t award to you. So learn what qualifications will be required and show up with them all covered. Show up on the right contract vehicles. Government customers have different ways to buy things. They call them contract vehicles. Sometimes you respond to RFPs. Sometimes you respond to task orders. And sometimes they can put it on the equivalent of a government credit card. Each way they buy things has very specific rules and limits. Each agency will have preferences regarding how they buy things. Learn what their preferences are and make sure you are registered with or accepted on their preferred contract vehicles before you start selling to them, or else you may not be able to close any sales. Initiate, inspire, and define. Instead of waiting for public solicitation announcements, try initiating procurements. Get ahead of the RFP. Help potential government customers recognize and define their needs. Along the way, develop deep insight into their needs. Think in terms of initiating procurements instead of finding them. Help potential customers recognize their needs and what to do about them. Gain some influence over the RFP. Establish your credibility and insight before they even see your proposal. Understand how the customer will score your proposal. If your sales close with a proposal, then understand your customer's evaluation process. Learn to read your proposals like they do. If the highest scoring proposal will win, then discover how their scoring process works so instead of writing a proposal that you think sounds good, you can write a proposal that gets the highest score. Reading the evaluation criteria in the RFP is often not enough to be able to interpret how their scoring process will be applied. Anticipate the questions that proposal writers will have. If your sales close with a proposal, learn to anticipate the questions your proposal writers will have. Show up with the answers. When the RFP comes out and proposal writers start asking whether the customer would prefer this or that, or they should position something this way or that way, it’s too late to get the answers. Develop an information advantage. In services proposals, the best competitive advantage is often an information advantage. If you know more about what matters about the customer, opportunity, and competitive advantage, you can write a proposal that matters more than your competitors. Build your proposals around what it will take to win. Simple to say. Hard to do. It’s not the proposal writing that’s hard. It’s discovering what it will take to win. Hint: You need more than the RFP to puzzle it out. Perform. Hooray! You won a contract. Now what? There’s this thing call “past performance.” Look it up. If you blow it in performance, this could also be your last contract. Going forward, having exceptional performance can also be a huge advantage for winning more contracts. It's worth the investment. I have seen bad performance cause contractors to crash and burn. Even a slip to a neutral rating is the kiss of death because you can’t be competitive. Do whatever it takes to have exceptional performance. Plus a bonus tip: Getting ahead of the RFP is not easy, but here’s a hint: target recompetes. You can be aware of them five years in advance. If you are not ahead of the RFP and don’t go into the recompetes you target with a customer relationship that produces real insight, then you’re just not trying. What you do to capture recompete contracts is good way to catch what you’ve given up on and stopped trying to achieve.

The customer is more than one person. And different people have different perspectives. Developing a reliable relationship with the customer means interacting with as many levels and stakeholders as you possibly can. Here are some areas to focus on. Who to reach out to Each of these requires a different strategy. Each has different needs, priorities, and expectations. Each has a different perspective and can be a source for different information. All are worth contacting and getting to know. Executive level. If you can’t get face time, then pay attention to what they say when giving presentations and talking to the media. Your customer's leaders can be a good source for learning about the long-term trends impacting their organization and what might be pressuring them to change. Contracting officers (COs). COs are concerned with following proper procurement procedures. They are not there to help you. They also may not understand what they are buying and probably don’t need to. But they are the authority on how the customer buys. Understanding their needs can help you interact with the procurement process that they will implement. Contracting Officer's Technical Representatives (COTRs): COTRs often play a key role in writing the statement of work. After award they play a key role in monitoring performance and compliance. Make their life easier. Help them with their paperwork. Help them translate technical issues into the requirements language they will need to resolve those issues and fulfill their organization's needs. Operations staff. The end users who need what is being procured are only one group of people involved in the procurement. They tend to be mission oriented and care the most about the technical requirements. They often don't understand their organization's procurement procedures, and they may or may not play a role in proposal evaluation. They may control the budget that will be used to make the purchase. The recognition of needs and initiation of the procurement process often starts with them. Internal stakeholders (other departments that interact with your targets). The group that is doing the buying may not be the only ones at the customer impacted by the procurement. Internal stakeholders may or may not have a competing agenda. They may or may not be collaborative. But they probably have another perspective if you can get them to share. External stakeholders (outside groups or organizations impacted by or interacting with your targets). Your customer might serve, collaborate with, or get input from outside organizations and people. The happiness of external stakeholders may or may not be critical to the buyer. While they probably won’t have insider insight, you never know… Ways to research and make contact Finding out who to contact is a solvable problem. Actually making contact is hard. Remember, it's not about your needs. It's about their needs. So reach out in a way that's helpful to them and you have a better chance of holding their attention. Here are some ways you can try to reach out to them. Telephone. Cold calling is sometimes worth it. Warm calling, where you have an introduction or are following up on something relevant, is even better. Make it worth their time to talk to you. Or at least return your call. Email. It's a great way to share info of value to your customers. Try sharing highly relevant and useful website links. LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides multiple ways to research and contact people, including groups and direct messaging. You may be able to gain an understanding of the customer's organization just from studying their LinkedIn profiles. In his 2019 LinkedIn Federal Employee Census, Mark Amtower reports there are over 2 million civilian Federal Government and DoD members on LinkedIn. Conferences. Conferences are a great way to meet and greet, present, watch, etc. They are a great chance to quickly show some depth beyond selling. Make your outreach of value to them, instead of the other way around like most vendors so they’ll respond back to you in the future. Don't go in blind or fish for random contacts. It's worth putting some effort into learning which conferences your potential customers attend so you can get in front of them. Meetings. Can you land a meeting? The odds go up if you make them about the customer and not about yourself.

What you need to win a proposal depends on what happened before the RFP was released and the proposal effort kicked off. This means that winning proposals can depend on what you did before the proposal even started. So let’s take a look at what happens before the proposal starts: What the customer does before the RFP is released This is what the customer has to do, starting from RFP release and working backwards: The RFP is released. But before that: The customer announces there will be an RFP. But before that: The customer decides what will go in the RFP. But before that: The customer decides whether to release an RFP. But before that: The customer decides they have a need and can allocate funds to fulfill that need. You might want to know the exact steps your customer follows, and all of the little details that fall in between these generalizations. What you do before the RFP is released This is what you do, or at least should do, working backwards from RFP release: The RFP is released. You are ready to bid at a high win probability because you have an information advantage. But before that: You find out there’s an RFP coming and begin preparing. But before that: You (should) help the customer figure out what should go in the RFP. But before that: You (should) help the customer determine whether to release an RFP. But before that: You (should) help the customer determine what they need and how much it will cost to fulfill that need. But before that: You (should) have developed a relationship with the customer. But before that: You decide which potential customers to target. Most companies aren’t able to complete the “shoulds” because they never formed a relationship with the customer, which is critical to gaining the information advantage. They are left trying to win by being a little better at responding to the RFP requirements. They are at a serious disadvantage to anyone bidding with an information advantage. What comes before targeting customers for relationship marketing and prospecting? There are things you need to do before you even have customer targets. So starting from customer targeting and working backwards: You begin reaching out to your customer targets. But before that: You must identify points of contact at each. But before that: You must determine which customers buy what you sell. But before that: You need strategic planning to identify what to offer, how to position it, and what markets to explore. If you find yourself looking for RFPs to bid, it’s because you haven’t been reaching out to enough of the right customer targets to fill your pipeline. You’ve gone from bad (no information advantage at RFP release) to worse (no customer insight at all against competitors who do have it). You’re trying to fill your pipeline anonymously because you don’t have the targets and contacts you need. You’re trying to make up the deficit at the back end instead of fixing it from the front end. And your win probability will suffer as a result. Play it all back in reverse Start from the bottom of each list and work your way up. That’s what you need to do to achieve a high win probability. Judy Bradt of Summit Insight says that “People who start from databases and websites are starting in the middle and at a disadvantage.” The key is knowing who buys what you sell so you can form relationships with potential customers and fill your pipeline with high win probability leads. Judy shows companies how to get into position to explore their customers’ needs and gain an information advantage as they work towards releasing an RFP. Do this before the proposal starts and the proposal becomes a simple exercise of turning your information advantage into a competitive advantage by having the right win strategies and driving them into the text. This makes figuring out what to write in your proposal a solvable problem and leads to a high proposal win rate. If you don’t know what your win strategies should be, what to say in your proposals, or have a low proposal win rate, making sure that you are starting with an information advantage is the first thing you should improve.

The difference between marketing, business development, sales, and capture has nothing to do with titles. The difference is purely functional and it matters. People misuse the labels all the time because there is a lot of overlap and they prefer one title over the other. But you need some of each, even if you are short staffed and the titles people have don’t match. The goal of marketing is to attract customers so that you can sell to them. There are many approaches to attracting customers. Some involve outreach. Some involve making your company and its offerings more attractive. Outbound vs. inbound, push vs. pull. Some involve technology and some involve relationships. The more the complexity and pricing of your offering goes up, the more important having a relationship with your customers will become. The more your offering resembles a commodity, the less important relationships will be and the more important outreach will become. The goal of business development is to open new markets or to expand existing ones, either by developing new solutions or through partnerships. If you want to develop a solution that reaches new customers, expand an existing customer relationship into new areas, or combine your offering with someone else’s offering to reach new customers, that’s business development. Business development and product management are closely related, with product managers tending to focus more on creating the offering and business developers focusing more on what offering to have, where to market it, and how to sell it. The goal of sales is to qualify and pursue as many leads as possible. Sales can get its leads from marketing, business development, or find them on their own. They shepherd those leads to the closing process. They may overlap with marketing when they develop relationships with potential customers. They may overlap with business development when they open new territories. They may overlap with capture management if they participate in closing the sale. Capture management provides dedicated attention to closing a sale. Capture management is usually only required by complex or highly priced offerings. Having dedicated capture management means sales focuses on identifying and qualifying the maximum number of leads. Capture closes the sales, typically with a written proposal. Overlapping confusion Expectation management, role definitions, and of course clarity of incentives are critical to getting the right mix of these important functions. Marketing overlaps with everything because it comes first and sets the stage. Who is responsible for positioning? Who is responsible for identifying potential markets and customers? Who determines which new markets to enter? Business development overlaps with everything because it is cross-functional. It overlaps with marketing before, during, and after opening a new market. If it is successful, it results in sales. And if those sales are long lead, complex, and high value, it likely overlaps with capture management. Sales overlaps with everything because it sits smack in the middle of it all. Where does lead identification end and lead qualification begin? And who is responsible for each? Where does lead qualification end and closing begin? And who is responsible for each? Capture management overlaps with everything because it closes the sales. It depends on everything that came before. But it also adapts, changes, and finalizes everything that came before. Where does lead qualification end and closing begin? Who determines when, where, and how to close the sale? GovCon marketing expert Mark Amtower says, "These functions merge under what is now called social selling. Leveraging social media to find key influencers, get on their radar, share information and otherwise remind them of your presence at key points in the procurement process." He explains this in an article in Washington Technology. Marketing uses social media as a key messaging platform. Business development, sales, and capture management all use it for both research and relationship building. One person can do marketing, develop business, sell, and capture. One person probably can’t do all four well. In a small business, people wear multiple hats. In a large business there can be a department for each of these, with handoffs, confusion, and gaps the result. Every one of your sales will require elements of each of these areas. Very few companies do all of them well. Most companies ignore at least one of them. Which one does your company ignore? What are the consequences? Which require specialists? And perhaps most importantly, when do you want to go from having the problems that small businesses have covering everything to having the problems large businesses have with flawed handoffs, confusion, and gaps?

Proposal writing like these examples can turn a great proposal into one that is merely ordinary. You might not get fired for sounding just like everyone else, but it's also no way to win your proposals. I see these issues so frequently when I review proposals for companies that they are like clichés. The good news is that the opposite is also true. Learning how not to write like this can turn your good proposals into great proposals. Correcting bad habits like these can help your proposals stand out from the pack. More importantly, correcting bad habits like these can help you win. Instead of reading my proposal, first read what’s going to be in my proposal. Before example: The following section discusses… It is followed by… And in conclusion… Just say what you have to say. Don’t redundantly say what you are going say, say it, and then say what you told them. It's annoyingly not helpful if you’re the proposal evaluator. Remember, people don’t read proposals, they score them. They want to go to one place to score what they are evaluating. Not three places that overlap. Focus on making sure you put things where the customer expects to find them. After example: ABC Corp brings [results] to [customer] by [proof]. We do exactly what’s required. You should pick us. Before example: ABC Corp is fully compliant with all RFP requirements. Here is how we meet each one… Doing the minimum does not make you the customer’s best alternative. Even in a low price, technically acceptable evaluation. If the customer picks you, it will not be because you were compliant with the RFP. If the customer picks you it will be because in addition to RFP compliance you offered more of what they want than your competitors, and did it in a way that translated into a higher proposal score. So being compliant, while required, is nothing to brag about. And definitely not all you should offer. After example: In addition to fully meeting all RFP requirements, ABC Corp… We exceed RFP compliance. Before example: ABC Corp exceeds the RFP requirements. Your claim to exceeding RFP compliance will not impact your proposal evaluation score. In fact, it will be ignored. The things you do that exceed RFP compliance might. Focus on them and not the claim. Exceeding compliance must be proven. And once proven, the claim no longer matters. Skip the claim and go straight to the proof. How much exceeding RFP compliance matters will directly depend on what the impact of it is. So make sure you demonstrate that the ways you exceed RFP compliance have an impact that matters. After example: By exceeding the requirement to [specification] through [proof], ABC Corp will [enable|deliver] [improvement] to [customer]. We do things our way, but if you think about it, it’s fully RFP compliant. Maybe even better. Before example: Our approach is… [in our own words, ignoring the RFP wording, but delivering something functionally similar]. If you are being evaluated according to the RFP, then the evaluation will not consider whether what you are saying is functionally equivalent to the RFP. If it is not what the RFP asked for, then it is not what the RFP asked for. Similar is not the same. The evaluators expect to find what the RFP requires, in the terms used by the RFP. Don’t say things the way you want to say them and arrogantly expect the customer to adapt to you and recognize your superiority. Put the effort into saying things the way the customer expects to hear them. Don’t make it difficult for them to score against the RFP by using wording that’s different from the RFP. Once their requirements are satisfied and the connection to those requirements is established, you can go beyond the RFP terminology in order to differentiate yours offering. After example: Our approach to [using RFP terminology] uses [features also using RFP terminology] to deliver [benefits]. The result is [benefits] because we [now that they’ve found their requirements satisfied you can exceed them or introduce new features or terminology to differentiate your offering]. We’re the incumbent, so of course we can do it. Before example: As the incumbent, ABC Corp will continue to meet all requirements. Whether you are capable is not the issue. It’s whether you outscore your competitors in your proposal. A statement that you are capable earns you no points during evaluation. Simply being the incumbent earns you no points. You must turn your incumbency into better approaches that deliver more value in order to beat your competitors. After example: As the incumbent, ABC Corp will be able to quickly incorporate requirement changes and turn our attention to making improvements instead of merely getting up to speed on the status quo. We’re beneficial. (Just like everyone else.) Before example: ABC Corp will complete all RFP requirements on time and within budget. Yawn. I’m sure no one else will offer being on time and within budget. Putting sarcasm aside, every single company who makes the competitive range will have shown they are capable of that. If your proposals talk about the benefits you deliver, that’s a good step towards better proposal writing. But it’s really just a first step. Do your benefits differentiate your proposal? Everyone is offering benefits. Probably the same ones. What benefits are you offering that no one else is or can offer? Differentiators are what really separate you from your competitors. So once you’ve started including benefits in your proposals, don’t stop until you have differentiated and compelling benefits. After example: In addition to completing all RFP requirements on time and within budget, as shown in [proof], ABC Corp will [differentiated benefit].

A lot of proposal writing follows common patterns. When we review proposals for companies we see new examples of the mistakes below all the time. If you take a step back from the details, the patterns are quite simple. If you learn to recognize the patterns, you can avoid writing like this: First I’m going to tell you what you need. Then I’m going to say that I’ll provide it. Before example: XYZ agency needs to update its website. Our approach to building websites is based on compliance with the latest standards. Do you like salespeople to tell you what you need? Me neither. Why do companies behave like this in writing? Most of the time, it’s not even necessary. You can delete that sentence and nothing will be missed. If the second sentence delivers what they need, you don’t need the first to tell them that they need it. They already know that. After example: We will not only bring your website into compliance with the latest standards, we’ll build a foundation that will give you more and better options in the future. We’re great. Here’s what we’ll do. Before example: ABC Corp is a highly experienced, top quality, premier provider. We will… All those unsubstantiated claims to greatness do nothing to add value to what you’ll actually do for the customer. They do nothing to improve your proposal evaluation score. In fact, they get in the way because they are noise. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. That’s not what you want to read. You want to read about what you're going to get if you accept the proposal. Don’t tell them how great you are. Tell they what they’ll get by selecting you. After example: We will leverage our experience to… (achieve a better outcome). Our approach to quality will reduce defects and improve results while we… This is a great truth that can’t be denied. Now here’s what we’re going to do. Before example: Quality is critical to the success of this project. We’ll ensure success by… The first sentence is universally true, applies to all vendors, does nothing to improve your win probability, and adds no value. It can be deleted. Lots of proposal paragraphs start off with great indisputable truths this way, as if the author needed a chance to warm up before saying something substantive. Instead of a great truth, try saying what you’ll do about it. After example: We’ll ensure success by… (eliminating defects… improving results… ) We have years of experience. Before example: ABC Corp brings 17 years of specialized experience to this program. Which is better, a company with 16 years of experience, 17 years, or one with a credible approach to doing the work? Did they perform well or accomplish anything over all those years? How can you tell? Experience does not deliver value. Unless it has an impact. The impact of any experience you might have is what you should talk about. After example: ABC Corp will deliver better results at lower risk by applying our 17 years of specialized experience to anticipating potential problems like… We do this. We do that. And if you’re still reading, here’s a benefit. Before example: ABC Corp will complete the required report. Then we will perform quality control. Finally, we will submit the report. The result will be accurate data that enables you to track progress toward a successful completion. I call it building to the finish. That’s when you put the good stuff at the end. I blame it on the way we’re taught to write the conclusion last in school. In a proposal, you want the conclusion first followed by the substantiation. That way when they skim your proposal and skip parts, they see what matters. That way they get your point and can choose whether to read the proof. If you’ve got this bad habit, try reversing the order of your sentences. After example: ABC Corp will enable you to track progress toward a successful completion by submitting the required report. We will complete the report (by…) and perform quality control (how…) prior to submission. We’re growing fast (You should be a part of our growth)! Before example: ABC Corp is the fastest growing company in our sector. This fails the “So what?” test. Why should the customer care about that? Do you think they should be proud to let you do work for them? If there is some benefit to them that results from your growth, talk about that and not in a way that makes you feel better about yourself. After example: ABC Corp’s growth enables us to bring additional resources and respond faster as your needs change over time. See the graphic. Here’s what’s in it. Before example: See Exhibit X for a description of our process. In step 1 we… In step 2 we… In step 3 we… Don’t make the graphic and the text redundant. Use the graphic to replace text. Show the details in the graphic, and discuss what matters about them in the text. For example, use the graphic to identify the steps and use the text to explain why those steps are important. After example: Exhibit X shows how the steps in our process deliver the data you need to ensure informed decision making. We promise. Before example: We are committed to… We promise to… We intend to… Don’t promise. Do. Don’t offer an intention. Deliver. Any time you want to express an intention, simply do what it was you were about to promise. Adding commitment does not make it stronger. It makes it weaker because it says you will merely try instead of deliver. After example: We do it. Reliably and verifiably. You deserve us. Before example: XYZ agency deserves the best solution possible. This will not impact your score or make the customer prefer you. It’s just noise. Flattery will get you nowhere. If something is important, if it matters, then talk about what you will do about it. If the customer needs something, don’t talk about the need or how justified it is, talk about what you will do to fulfill it. Be the solution. Not the noise. After example: XYZ agency will get the best solution possible because we… We are proud to support you (if you pay us enough). Before example: ABC Corp is proud to support the XYZ agency. Your feeling of pride does not add value. Actually, it is a bit self-serving and the customer knows it. Instead of pride or commitment, provide proof. If you are so proud, then you must be willing to do something better. Talk about that. Don’t talk about trying harder or intending more. Talk about delivering better results. A better offering is something the customer will be pleased to receive. After example: ABC Corp will bring better results to the XYZ agency by…. The common thread running through most of these is passing the “So what?” test. Don’t talk around what the customer will get. Focus on what the customer will get. That’s what you’d want to see if you were them. Don’t try to sound in any particular way or like the business-speak you’ve been exposed to. Don’t try to win with magic words. Don’t try to claim to be great. Instead, offer something that is great and focus on why.

I learned some important lessons this week about proposals, capture, and business development by talking to some artists and people who know nothing about business. I got dragged to a cocktail party in a quaint little historic district populated by galleries and boutiques. I love the area, but when it unsolicited I usually don’t engage in talks about business with little retail startup businesses, especially boutiques that I believe are mostly doomed to fail. But I do listen. I listened to them describe what they make and sell, how they’ve had to change over time, and how customers only want certain things. I withheld talking about how making and selling things is easy, but finding customers is hard. And how you should start with figuring out how to get customers and not what to sell. As they talked, I listened. And I realized that they are artists. They have a creative vision and make what they make. And then hope people will come in and buy it. I realized that lots of people start there. The business failures are the ones who stay there. What does this have to do with Burt's Bees? I listened to a story about the founder of Burt’s Bees. I don’t even know if the story is true. I listened to how the founder started selling Burt’s Bees on the side of the road. And stuck with it. Day after day. And now look where the company is. At first, I thought it was a dumb story. Perseverance might be a good trait. But it is not the secret to business success. The founder of Burt’s Bees might have gotten lucky. Buying lottery tickets every day is not a smart business strategy. If they ever did, I'm sure that Burt’s Bees doesn’t follow the same strategy today. Today, they know who their customers are and have designed a product line that intentionally targets each group of them. Somewhere along the line they switched from “I like it, I hope somebody buys it” to “I know how to find my customers and what they want to buy.” Then I realized that it’s okay to start off as an artist who has the desire to start a business. But your success will be determined by whether you make the switch to focusing on where to get your customers quickly enough. Where to find, how to get in front of, and how to hold your customer’s attention is at least important as what they want to buy. And far more important than what you want to sell. Most retail stores are counting on their location and signage to find their customers for them. You don’t have to be a business expert to succeed. You don’t have to be a sales person. But you do need customer empathy, the ability to find them in sufficient numbers, and some creativity about how you earn their attention. PS: The real story of Burt's Bees is a lot more interesting. And maybe even a little sad. Try Googling it. I did and found this. What does this have to do with government contracting and winning major proposals? If you’re a small government contractor startup, it’s okay if you sell what you’ve got in terms of capability. But you probably won’t grow until you start focusing on finding out what the agencies are interested in buying and building the relationships you need to get in front of them. And if you write hundred million dollar proposals that take a month to prepare using a team of writers, customer empathy is just as vital to your success. And you can't just imagine customer empathy. You have to discover it through relationship marketing. But maybe it can be okay if you do your best to add value in proposals that are written to customers you don’t know. Today. But if you want to be successful, you have to make the transition to already having customer insight and an information advantage when you start your proposals. Your success will depend on how quickly you can make that transition. If you try to function like a retail business, and all you ever do is look for RFPs on the street that you can bid, you will doom your company to being a low cost provider of whatever you can scrounge up. Everyone has to start somewhere. Maybe it’s okay to sell what you’ve got today, so long as you develop your focus tomorrow. I see a lot of companies struggling because tomorrow never came. But it’s not the starving artists and business startups you want to learn from. It’s the ones who found their customers and changed their business to focus on them. It’s the ones who learned how to find more customers, what to offer them, and how to close enough sales that you want to learn from. Perseverance will help. But what you really need is empathy and the ability to find new customers.

Creating proposal graphics can be thought of in two parts. My friend Mike Parkinson of the 24hr Company refers to them as: • Conceptualization. Figuring out what to communicate visually and what the graphic needs to communicate. • Rendering. Drawing the graphic. Rendering is where all the artistic skills are required. But conceptualization is where you figure out what should go into the graphic and what the graphic should accomplish. Conceptualization does not require any artistic abilities. Conceptualization can include drawing a rough sketch or PowerPoint, but it doesn’t have to. You can conceptualize a graphic using nothing but text. Many artists, while capable of doing the rendering, are not capable of doing the conceptualization. Conceptualization requires subject matter expertise, knowledge of the intended offering, awareness of your bid strategies, and insight into your audience. Conceptualization does not require the ability to draw or use Adobe Illustrator. Conceptualization also requires identifying what topics in your proposal would be best communicated graphically instead of with words. But this turns out to be incredibly easy. The following things commonly appear in writing, and are always potential graphics: Processes and approaches Lists Comparisons Relationships But it’s really even easier than this. Rather than looking at a section and trying to picture it, instead simply look for bullets. Anything that can be written as bullets is a potential graphic. The reason is that most proposal graphics illustrate a relationship or a process. Bullets often contain a series of steps, a list of ingredients, or a list of examples. The best graphics are ones that reduce the word count. If you can provide a graphic of a process instead of explaining every single step with words in a narrative, the customer will more quickly understand your process. And it probably won’t take up any more space in a page-limited proposal. Start with a placeholderSometimes all you need to do is to recognize when something would be better communicated with a graphic. Here’s a hint: If you’re having trouble figuring out what your approach is, so will your customer. Maybe you would be better off creating the graphic first. Or maybe, you don’t even need to. Maybe all you need to do is insert a placeholder saying that a graphic should go there. If you are working with others, conceptualizing the graphic could be a collaborative exercise. Moving beyond the placeholderSo you’ve decided to have a graphic. Now what? There are things an artist will need to know to render your graphic. What’s going to be in it? What details should be shown. What's the point? What are you trying to communicate? What questions should the graphic answer? What is important about the subject matter? What do you want the reader to conclude after seeing the graphic? Who is the reader? What is their culture? What are the proposal evaluation criteria? What are your bid strategies? Write down these questions and the answers. Maybe throw in a hand-drawn wire frame or a PowerPoint mock-up. Then let your artist figure out the best way to visually communicate it all. An example of specifying a graphic using textTake a look at the instructions and evaluation criteria for this proposal section on Recruiting and Retention. Notice in the instructions it says, "Explain the methods..." and "how your recruiting and placement plan will..." They want to know your approach. Your process. All processes can be graphics. Now look at the evaluation criteria. Notice "illustrated capability..." Do you think they might prefer to see your process than read about it? In just a few seconds, we can create a quick placeholder simply by typing an instruction like this: But the RFP gives us some clues about what needs to be in your recruiting process. From the instructions we know they want a process that results in "full coverage." And that it should have "verification procedures" of the qualifications and certifications of potential staff. They want tracking of credentials and a clear accounting of qualifications by labor category. They want to see how it will meet required time frames, and for you to prove you can handle "difficult labor markets and undesirable geographic locations." Recruiting connects to onboarding, and since they want "procedures for ensuring new employees are provided with required training and meet pre-employment screen requirements" they probably want to see that. The references to "pre-employment screen requirements" is a pre-employment step. So at a minimum we have: Before recruiting even starts, account for all required qualifications, certifications, and other credentials for each labor category. Pre-screen applicants against this list. Recruiting on schedule. Select candidate(s). Verify candidates meet the credentialing requirements. Store and track credentials. Maybe add expiration monitoring as a value added. Onboarding that includes training. Your recruiting process can add steps and detail, but it must address these items, using the terminology of the RFP. We can go beyond a simple placeholder by creating an instruction more like this: There, that took me about a minute. Now I can have my recruiter, a subject matter expert, take a look at it later and advise how the process could be improved. I could even get some images. Maybe a photograph to go with each step. I can attach them to the instruction. Then I can get a PowerPoint wiz or a graphic artist to render the actual graphic. You could also add the graphic title, caption, exhibit number, etc., since whoever makes the graphic will probably ask for that information.

Getting input from subject matter experts is vital for winning proposals. However, the instincts of the people who do the work are often all wrong. Writing documents for proposals is different from writing project documents. It’s easy to get fooled. RFPs ask for documents related to projects in the proposals. They ask for things like: Quality control plans Risk mitigation plans Staffing plans Project management plans Security plans Safety plans Implementation plans Transition plans And more... Projects often require deliverables with the same titles. However, what goes into a proposal is different than what you would submit as a project deliverable. In fact, submitting something based on the project deliverable in a proposal can cause the proposal to lose. This can be true even when they say the document is to be used on the project. How can this be? The proposal and the project have a different audience with different needs. The evaluator of the proposal is not reviewing the document to determine if it is a good document for use on the project. They are evaluating the document to score it against the evaluation criteria and select a vendor based on that score. To serve this purpose, a document for the proposal must be easy to score. This generally means that it is organized per the RFP instructions and that it is optimized to fulfill the evaluation criteria. Doing this is more important than reflecting good project management practices. If you are lucky, the instructions and evaluation criteria will not be too far different from what a project document would typically consist of. However, you should organize, sequence, and use the terminology of the RFP and not organize it or articulate it according to your personal or industry preferences. In addition, a proposal is primarily used to make a selection and the plans or specifications it contains are secondary in function and importance. This means the first priority for proposal contributions is to explain why your approach is the best. The first priority is to differentiate your approach and not to explain your approach. The benefits of your approach are more important than the details of your approach. Why you have selected that approach may be more important than what your approach is. This remains true even when the RFP asks you to describe your approach, because of the way the evaluator uses the information. All contributions to a proposal are contributions to how the proposal scores. The evaluators do not score your contribution based on whether it is a good quality control plan or a good project management plan. They score it based on the evaluation criteria. Whether or not your contribution is any good depends on how well it scores. Scoring well is not some mysterious black art Proposal scores are only partially subjective. Actually, proposal evaluation is a fairly mechanical, forms-driven process. You should study the evaluation criteria and prepare a contribution that stacks up well against them. You should try to envision the forms they use to do their evaluation scoring and make it easy for them to do so. Don’t write something primarily based on your expertise doing the work. Don’t write something based exclusively on the statement of work. But please, oh please, bring all your experience and expertise doing the work to improve how the proposal stacks up against the evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria will typically ask you to demonstrate that you know what you are doing, but the words they use to do that are critically important. The RFP may also ask you to demonstrate that you’re innovative, without risk, full of strengths and without weaknesses, compliant, responsive, prepared, flexible, or any other attribute or qualification. And when this is the case, the purpose of your contribution is to prove that you are the customer’s best alternative for achieving the attributes or criteria they are looking for, whether you are contributing a quality control plan, a communication plan, or something else. The difference between an approach that demonstrates risk mitigation vs availability of resources vs flexibility and does so using techniques that differentiate you from the competition to enable the customer to itemize your strengths while also reflecting this customer's preferences, establishing RFP compliance, and not providing any weaknesses vs a plan that serves the needs of a project are huge. Form follows function. The function of your proposal contribution is different from the function of your project documentation. When you realize this, your experience and expertise can make you a hero by providing the insight and details needed for the proposal to prove that your company really is the customer’s best alternative.

A goal-driven proposal process is far superior to one based on steps or milestones because it is more adaptable and is easier to tailor to your company's specific needs. You can see how this works with a framework based on accomplishing 6 goals and with 49 questions that point you in the right direction for how to accomplish the goals that you can tailor to your circumstances. The challenge with a goal-driven proposal process is determining the best way to achieve your goals. The questions below lead you to that. The result is a process that can adapt as needed to maximize your win probability. Following the same steps over and over doesn't enable you to do that. When you read the questions below, make sure that you answer them with the best way of achieving the goal in mind. In a goal-driven process, you don't do things just because you're "supposed to," you do them to achieve the goal. Achieving the goal is more important than the procedures used. Goal 1: Discover what it will take to win Before you can build a proposal around what it will take to win, you must be able to articulate what that is. Then you must also understand what to do about it. The questions below will help inform you of these. How will leads be qualified? What gates or milestones do you need to prepare for? How will you make bid/no bid decisions? How will you itemize what it will take to win? How will you track and report progress towards being ready to win at RFP release? What do you anticipate needing to know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment in order to prepare the winning proposal? How will you accumulate an information advantage for use in the proposal? What format should information be kept in during the pursuit for future use in the proposal? How will the pursuit budget be managed? Who will be involved and in what capacities? Goal 2: Design the offering based on what it will take to win What you should offer in your proposal is a separate consideration from you should write in your proposal. Designing your offering by writing about it is not an effective engineering approach. The questions below will help you design an offering based on what it will take to win. How will you determine what to offer? Who will need to be involved? What form will your pre-RFP offering design take? How will your offering design be documented for use in the proposal? What will differentiate your offering? How should your offering be positioned? How will you assess its competitiveness? How will you assess the price to win? How will you validate that you have the right offering? Does the design of your offering sufficiently reflect your win strategies? Goal 3: Prepare a proposal content plan that defines quality and addresses what it will take to win In order to write a proposal based on what it will take to win, you must account for what it will take to win in a form that is organized according to the document structure. This is not likely to happen if you just start writing and try to figure it out as you go. A proposal content plan should also enable writers to validate that they have fulfilled the plan. This means it should incorporate your proposal quality criteria so that fulfilling the proposal content plan achieves what it will take to win. This enables proposal reviews to be based on something intentional and validated instead of opinions about what sounds good. The questions below can help guide you to create an effective proposal content plan. Will you use a compliance matrix to create your proposal outline? If not, then how will you account for the customer's instructions/expectations, evaluation criteria, and requirements in the proposal content plan? How do you define proposal quality? What are your proposal quality criteria? Are there criteria specific to each bid? What do you need to be able to articulate before the proposal writers start writing? What questions do you anticipate the proposal writers might have, and can you answer them? What must be accomplished in between having an outline and being prepared to start writing? If the writers follow the instructions you are giving them and fulfill the quality criteria, will it produce a proposal that fulfills what it will take to win and meets everyone’s expectations? What do you expect the proposal writers to figure out on their own, and what do you need to provide them? How will you communicate and document not only what to write, but how to present it? How will the writers know if they have properly completed their assignments, before they turn in their assignments? Goal 4: Write to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria in the Proposal Content Plan Proposal writing is not primarily an exercise in creativity or in proving how great you are. Proposal writing is the act of offering something that fulfills the customer's needs in a way that proves you are their best alternative. In practice, this takes the form of fulfilling the proposal content plan, where the customer's needs and all other considerations have been accounted for in the context of what it will take to win. Doing this needs to be managed, with the schedule, assignments, resources, issues, and other aspects of project management being addressed. The questions below will help you ensure that the writing phase of the proposal accomplishes this. How will you track and report progress during proposal development, and in particular during proposal writing? How will you identify and resolve issues encountered during proposal development, and in particular during proposal writing? How will writers self-assess whether they’ve not only fulfilled the proposal content plan, but have written a section that reflects what it will take to win? How will proposal files be managed? How will stakeholder expectations be coordinated and managed? How will access control be managed? (Don’t forget your teammates!) Goal 5: Validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria To consistently be effective and improve your win probability, your proposal reviews need to be based on something more than the RFP and the reviewers' personal opinions regarding proposal writing. If quality is defined based on written quality criteria, then quality can be assessed far more thoroughly and objectively. The questions below will help you transform your proposal reviews into assessments that validate quality instead of the collection of opinions. How will you use the instructions given to proposal writers and the quality criteria you have defined during proposal reviews for proposal quality validation? How many reviews do you need to validate all of your proposal quality criteria? How long will the reviews take? When should the reviews be scheduled? How will you monitor review readiness and schedule? How should each of these reviews be conducted? Which will be formal and which will be informal? Who will participate in these reviews? What orientation and training should be provided to reviewers? What is the production impact, if any, of each review? Goal 6: Produce a final copy without any defects for an on-time submission The last thing you want is to lose because of a mistake made in the final rush to submit the proposal. The final production and submission of the proposal should be a careful, deliberate act with detailed quality control checks to ensure there are no defects. This is completely different from making sure you've said everything in the best way possible. That must happen before final production. The questions below can help guide you to what to focus on during final production. How will you manage and track proposal completion? How will the submission copy be prepared? When and how will you inspect the final copy for defects prior to submission? How will the submission be conducted? Who will perform the submission? What could possibly go wrong and how do you prevent it?

Sometimes you have all the advantages. Sometimes a proposal is yours to lose. And while you can easily lose if you make mistakes, it takes more than a good defense to win. Playing defense in a proposal means focusing on compliance. It means giving the customer exactly what they asked for. It requires understanding the RFP and not making mistakes. I have seen proposals lose after spending a great deal of time scrutinizing the text, only to accidentally leave out a copy of one form. A simple oversight, right where you weren’t expecting one, can ruin all the care you put into everything else. It’s enough to make a production manager paranoid. Playing proposal defense means mitigating all the risks. But compliance also means addressing everything the customer expects to see, in the language they expect to see it in. Compliance means mentioning everything, even when the RFP is 300 pages and the proposal is limited to 25 pages. That’s enough to make a proposal manager even more paranoid. It doesn't help that compliance can be subjective and open to interpretation. You need detailed, disciplined quality assurance procedures to avoid losing due to noncompliance: You need to make sure that everything the customer requires has a place in your proposal, and make sure that place is where the customer expects to find it. Your best guide for this is the RFP. However, RFPs can be complicated and subject to interpretation. Creating a compliance matrix is crucial. Just make sure that your compliance matrix is valid. It doubles the effort to have someone thoroughly review and validate your compliance matrix. That effort is worth it if you don't want to lose. You also need to create a production checklist. A compliance matrix alone is not enough. While the issues are similar from RFP to RFP, you can’t recycle this checklist. It must reflect the particular RFP precisely. Every document that must be included should be itemized. Every production requirement for every document should be detailed. It should be impossible to overlook anything if you follow your production checklist. Don’t forget to validate your production checklist. Again, the value is worth it if you don't want to lose. Don’t forget to prepare a production checklist for the pricing and business volume. Last minute pricing changes happen. If you don’t already have the checklist to accelerate quality assurance, mistakes can happen. Mistakes in the pricing volume have a very high risk of proposal failure. For the written portion of the proposal, to avoid mistakes you need quality validation instead of subjective reviews. You need to validate against defined quality criteria instead of relying on opinions. Those quality criteria should itemize and validate everything that puts you at risk of losing. Be careful to construct your quality criteria to catch mistakes. If there are a lot of things that could go wrong, you'll have a lot of quality criteria. This is a good thing and not a hassle — if you don't want to lose. You should also review more than just the document. You should also review your decisions. You make dozens, if not hundreds, of judgment calls and trade-off decisions in preparing a proposal. If you’re playing defense and trying to avoid mistakes, each and every one of them should be double checked. Playing proposal defense vs. proposal offense You can avoid losing due to mistakes. But that may not be enough to win. RFP compliance alone is not enough to win. Playing defense only can prevent you from doing the things you need to get the highest score. That will result in a loss. Sometimes the things that could maximize your score may require taking risks. If the opportunity is yours to lose, that’s only true if your advantages make it into the proposal. It's only true if what you put into your proposal outscores your competition. Even though you may think the opportunity is yours to lose, if your proposal doesn't establish your advantages in the document, then your proposal is not better than any other proposal submitted. If you can’t articulate your advantages in the proposal in a way that maximizes your evaluation score, then no matter how important you think they are, your advantages literally amount to nothing. If you only play defense, you can end up with a fully compliant proposal with no mistakes and lose because someone else scored better. If an opportunity is yours to lose, you need to turn your advantages into the highest score in writing. The good news is that if your advantages are real, this should be relatively straightforward. If the opportunity is yours to lose, your strategy might be to avoid risks while articulating your advantages without making any mistakes. This is how you avoid losing. However, if you are bidding at a disadvantage you might have to take risks in order to achieve the highest score. If you are bidding at a disadvantage, your best (only?) chance of winning might include taking on risks that could cause you to lose. Taking the risk of losing could be the only way to have a chance at winning. This is because companies with an advantage won't take those risks, they'll play it safe, stay on defense, and create an opportunity for you that might just pay off. If the opportunity is yours to lose, everyone else will be taking risks to overcome your advantages. If they make a mistake, well, the odds were against them anyway. So even if you're writing a low-risk, defensive proposal, with a high win probability you need to defend against high-risk attempts to steal your win away from you. One way of doing this is to identify what the high-risk attempts at winning might be and defensively ghost against them in your proposal. In the end, there is very little difference between bidding to not lose and bidding to win. The real difference is the amount of risk you're willing to embrace and where you put your focus. The nature of risk is that it can’t be eliminated. It can only be managed. All proposals have risk. Even the ones that you think are yours to lose.

In many ways, the everything on PropLIBRARY is about training. Some of it takes the form of online training and some of it takes the form of guidance while doing. And some of it I deliver in person. My favorite form of training is to coach new staff from a junior level and help them become fully capable experts. By providing a few hours a week of guidance, quality assurance, problem solving, and feedback, a company with junior level staff can operate as if it has a proposal executive. And do it for roughly half the cost. Online proposal training The online training on PropLIBRARY is the most economical and extensive source of proposal training in existence. If you want online training, click on the menu at the top of this page. In person or remote proposal training If you want the personal touch, reach out to us and we can design a custom course that addresses your specific needs. We have a huge library of curriculum and resources to draw on, and can deliver in person or remotely. Video based proposal training We've even provided custom videos to help proposal writers and reviewers overcome problems that kept creeping back into their company's proposals. A 20 minute video viewed before starting a task can have a huge impact on the success of the outcomes. Quarterly staff development proposal training Each of the topics below involves a one-hour online meeting each week and runs for 12 weeks and costs $3,000. In between there are exercises, research, and homework assignments. Taken together over the course of a year or two and they can transform entry level proposal staff into professionals. Together we can flexible design a program that addresses the issues that are relevant to your company. When schedules match up, we'll substitute real world exercises so that training and performance overlap. These are private sessions. Only your company will participate. You can have as many people on speakerphone as you wish. The issues we'll discuss will be your issues. Quarterly staff development topics Fill a key gap in just a quarter, or take staff from entry level to professional in a year or two Entry level Federal contracting How to read Federal RFPs, understanding the language of govcon, using FBO, and an introduction to the FAR. Exercises based on completing a compliance matrix and proposal outline. Entry level proposal coordination Proposal logistics, content planning, teaming, compliance, introduction to pricing and contracts issues, proposal budgeting, and proposal input requirements. Exercises based on scheduling and proposal planning. Entry level business development, capture, and pipeline development Lead tracking, pipeline analysis, understanding win rates, contract vehicles, teaming, bid/no bid considerations, pre-RFP readiness, developing an information advantage. Exercises include creating a pipeline model and learning how to use it to maximize ROI Proposal writing Writing from the customer's perspective, RFP compliance and using the customer's words, optimizing your evaluation score, passing the "So what?" test. Exercises include writing and re-writing to demonstrate capability. Proposal management Process management, planning, risk and issue management, schedule and resource management. Exercises include quizzes to demonstrate knowledge. Proposal quality validation reviews Understanding proposal quality, defining proposal quality and quality criteria, quality validation process, review procedures. Exercises include developing proposal quality criteria and quality validation plans. Proposal content planning Planning before you write, shaping the proposal, guiding proposal writers, setting the stag for quality validation reviews. Exercises based on completing a proposal content plan. Process reengineering and implementation The MustWin Process, process acceptance, achieving goals through process, streamlining process, managing the flow of information, setting expectations, and proposal risk. Exercises include quizzes to demonstrate knowledge. Win rate improvement Understanding and calculating win rates, the impact of win rate on ROI, factors that impact win rates Executive level considerations Organizational development, improving ROI Options and add-ons 1 hr/week of problem solving and Q&A 1 hr/week of progress review, quality assurance, and feedback Taken together and you get ongoing staff development that is responsive to your needs and overcomes the challenges you face with quality assurance at the highest level.

People think proposal management is a thing, but it’s not. Proposals are not even a thing. Proposals at different companies have more differences than similarities, even though we tell ourselves otherwise. Proposal managers come in many different types. Some are a better match for a given company than others. When you see a type that’s the opposite of yours, you might think it’s wrong for proposal management. But there is an environment out there where that style is a better fit than yours. So don’t judge. The owner of the win. You think it’s your job to win above all else. You drive the development of the win strategies and themes. Your top goal is to submit the highest possible scoring proposal. You don't care about anything else. Depending on your management style you might lead, beg, borrow, steal, or bully your way to a proposal that meets your standards. You may be filling a void or stepping into capture manager territory. The producer of what people give you. Your goal is to turn what people do into a ready to submit document. You apply your document expertise to making sure that all the parts come together well. While you'll produce the proposal, you do not claim any ownership of the content and defer to others to decide what the proposal should be. You are constantly confounded by people not submitting what you need to complete the proposal on time. You may have played a support role in a past life. The leader who works through others to get what is needed. You’re the conductor of the orchestra. You provide the guidance and coordination that people need to work as a team to create the proposal. Process and tools are good and fine, but it’s people that get things done, so you work to get the most out of the people. The hands-on manager. You’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves and write what needs to be written or do what it takes to create the proposal. You may have come up through the ranks, have some skills, and have difficulty letting go. The technician. You see yourself as best supporting the people working on the proposal by refining the process and improving the tools. You manage the process and have trouble with people who won't follow it. You find this approach works best in the highly stressful environment of proposals, where people can be difficult but process is reliable. You may have been an introverted techie who worked in isolation in a past life. You might still be. The perfectionist. The idea of submitting a proposal with any kind of defect runs counter to the way the world should work. You demand time for proper editing. You focus on the reviews and double checking more than you do on coaching the writers or defining the message. You just want to make sure that what gets submitted is perfect. You may have been an editor in a past life. You also may be at risk of overemphasizing CYA. The editor. You didn't write it. But you see your job as making the document perfect and define that as without any typographical errors. You need the process to get you a document with enough time so that you can review it for editorial defects. You know that winning the proposal depends on the offering, but that's up to other people to figure out. You know a typo isn't likely to cause a loss, but that just means there's a non-zero chance it could. And you are here to prevent that at any cost. The complainer. a.k.a. Cassandra (Greek mythology). You know everything that is wrong with the proposal, the process, and what people are doing. You know how things are going to turn out. You help them by letting them know it. There are so many ways for them to improve. Only they never listen. The best way to improve the company's win rate would be to force people to listen to you. The recycler. Proposals are hard. The best way to make them easier is to start from a draft. The more the draft covers, the better. And the best way to get there is to take advantage of what the company has already written. Your contribution to the proposal is to recycle previous proposals into templates. You know that the sooner people get to a first draft, the better the chances they have of revising it into a winning proposal. The pleaser. You are a people person who defines successful support as pleasing The Powers That Be. You derive your concept of proposal quality from what will please the reviewers. After all, they have the experience. If they are happy, the proposal must be in good shape. You may have been an administrative support specialist in a past life. The know-it-all. It's not your fault that you know better than anyone else what to propose, how to present it, and how to prepare the proposal. You define the standards and expectations and make everyone else conform to them. Without this, you fear chaos will reign. At a minimum, your company would lose because no one else knows what you know. You may have been an only child in a past life. The only one who can do it. Very few people have that special combination of skills required to win a proposal. You are one of them. The others are often unavailable and you have to fill the gaps. There are people who are capable of some of the things required, but they can't do all of what's needed. Luckily they have you and you can do it all. The artist. Proposals are a form of creative expression. Process fails. Your creativity enhances the work of the subject matter experts and results in a proposal that is far better than they could achieve on their own. Proposal quality can’t be defined. Art rules. You may have actually been an artist in a past life. But now you are an artist with a job. The improvisationist. There is no time “in between” proposals, so you make it up as you go along. You’ve got an idea of how it should go. So you improvise. You don’t build. You create. You flit around like a butterfly. Or a busy bee. You are always so busy. It’s lucky you are so good at improvising or things would never get done or done as well. You may have played jazz in a past life. The enforcer. The chaos of proposals requires a firm hand. Rules must be made. And enforced. Most proposal failures are a result of people not following the rules. If you don’t have actual authority, you may get by on your force of will. Or just complain a lot. You may have been a policy supervisor in a past life. If you are a blend, you are easier to work with. If you are an archetype of one of them, then if you are in your element you’ll flourish. Outside of that, your lack of perspective will create friction that will impact your proposals. Even in your element, any lack of self-awareness will result in constant struggles. Which of these are you? Which ones are you in denial about? What does your company need? How readily do you switch points of view based on the circumstances? Have fun with this, but give it some real thought… PS: I wrote this with proposal managers in mind, but I think it applies to just about anyone contributing to a proposal. What do you think?

Win probability is the likelihood that you'll win your pursuit. It would be so nice to be able to predict the probability of winning a bid. It would be really nice to know what percentage your chances are. It would so help with resource allocation and making decisions. But there are just two problems with expressing win probability as a percentage: None of the algorithms that make the attempt to calculate your percentage chance of winning have statistically significant data to base their calculations on. They have no basis to claim accuracy, despite claims to the contrary. How many leads, comparing apples to apples, have you run through your algorithm and correlated with winning? Dozens? It’s probably not enough to establish statistical significance for a single variable let alone all the factors that could impact award. You can get more data by considering more companies, but then you also decrease the likelihood of having an apples-to-apples comparison. Even within the same company it’s hard to compare apples to apples when the customer, offering, evaluation criteria, and other circumstances can be so different. You don’t have enough data for it to average out. A vendor with data from many, many contractors have a lot of data that isn't relevant to your business creating an average estimate that is an interesting benchmark, but not a predictor of your win probability. All win probability algorithms that attempt to calculate a percentage are guesses piled on top of guesses. Since the chances of the customer accepting your proposal are not numerically calculable, we use proxies. Instead of quantified events we use indicators and guess at some numerical value to weight them with. Some of these indicators are quite subjective. What is your level of customer intimacy? What past performance score will you get? What are your strengths and weaknesses? If you try to quantify these, you at best have guesses. But what weight will you give each of them? How much do your indicators matter when compared to each other? Which will impact the customer's decision more? Converting the indicator into a number with a guess and using a guess for the weight means multiplying your guesses as well as your margin of error. Garbage in, exponential garbage out. Combine a statistically unreliable result with a huge margin of error and you get something not worth considering. Using guesses as input for guesses with no statistical significance can’t be made scientific. This remains true even if you use the word “probability” and assign it a number. Does anyone ever go back and compare their predicted win probability with their win rate to see if it’s accurate? I've never seen anyone do this. Think about what it means regarding the reliability of win probability percentages. Think about what it would take to do it. Think about what it would take to reconcile the differences. Garbage in, garbage out, and everyone knows it but pretends differently. By expressing win probability as a percentage, you may actually reduce your ability to guess your win probability accurately. It’s not just that you have a fake probability. You potentially have a misleading probability. Honest garbage in, unreconcilable garbage out. If your numbers are not accurate, the decisions you are making on those numbers will not be accurate either. Instead of having a data-driven culture, you have a culture that is based on cooking the books. What you really need isn't a number You really don’t need a number to use win probability as a decision support tool. Sure, it’s nice to allocate your resources by percentages. And maybe a guess is the only way to do that. But when it comes to making decisions, you don’t need win probability to be expressed as a percentage. What you need are the indicators. You need good quality indicators, so that when you guess it’s based on the best quality input possible. You can add up your indicators any way you want to provide a better guess and express it as a score, color, adjective or anything other than a number and not be misleading. What things impact your win rate the most? Start with what you think impacts the likelihood of winning your pursuit. Go ahead and guess. Guess a lot. Collect as many potential indicators as you can possibly think of. Include both the good and the bad. Then track those indicators across all of your bids. You might not have enough bids to achieve statistical significance, but using some data to test your beliefs about win probability is better than just going on your beliefs alone. And maybe you can refine them over time by collecting more data. Maybe you can even approach statistical significance if you can build a history that includes hundreds of bids. You'll find that some are better indicators than others. You will likely find some of the results to be counter-intuitive and not at all what you expected. Industry rules of thumb aren't. Knowing when this is true is a competitive advantage. Don’t trust people who say they know what it takes to win, especially when it's based on experience at other companies. Your customers, your relationship with them, the nature of your offering, your ability to turn information into a winning proposal, and your circumstances, add up to a unique context. I have seen the way hundreds of companies conduct their pursuits. Most of them are guessing. Some have convinced themselves that they are experts even though they are guessing. Put effort into finding indicators that are objective, so that the results aren’t as influenced by wishful thinking, misapplied incentives, and the convenience of the moment. And use a little logic. Knowing the customer for a long time can have zero impact on your likelihood of winning something new. But having an information advantage, calculated by the number of questions you can answer, is a potential indicator. In fact, if you only had to choose one indicator, having an information advantage would be a great one to base your guesses on. But still, confirm that by correlating it with your win rate. Just look out for apples, oranges, and statistical significance. And laugh at win probability numbers. But what do you tell finance? The head of finance needs a reliable basis of estimate for future wins in order to be able to deliver reliable financial projections. You do not have to present win probability as a percentage in order to accomplish this. If you can show that certain indicators correspond with a certain percentage ranges. Quintiles (20/40/60/80%) might be sufficient. Or even a red/yellow/green scale that converts to 25/50/75%. The more historical data you have, the more precise you can make the ranges. This is far more reliable than an "algorithm" that calculates a percentage based on guesses multiplied by guesses. What does win probability tell you about people What people trust tells you something of their judgment. For example, do they trust the algorithm they invented because they trust their own judgment? And do they expect you to trust it even though they can't prove it based on historical data? Do they like having a win probability based on their judgment without even having an algorithm because it's subject to manipulation? Do they make decisions based on subjective win probability mumbo-jumbo or do they make decisions on well defined, objective indicators? Are they data-driven, but ignoring statistical significance? Predicting the future with as many variables involved as win probability is beyond human capability. It's beyond AI capability, although AI might do a great job at surfacing the things that impact win probability if you have the data to feed it. How people approach predicting the future tells you a lot about their judgment and trustworthiness. PS: I considered the following alternatives for the title of this article: The ugly truth about win probability that no one talks about Lies, damn lies, and win probability Your carefully calculated win probability is wrong Calculating win probability is like intentionally following a mirage Your win probability comes with the certainty of being wrong Don't count on your win probability What are the chances that your win probability is correct?

When your bids win or lose based on how well your proposals help the customer reach their decision, the best competitive advantage is often an information advantage. Everyone has the same RFP. Knowing how the customer makes their decisions, what matters to them, and what they need to see in the proposal can give you an edge in how you respond. Gaining an information advantage is why relationship marketing is so important. The relationship is the goal. Your goal is the result of the relationship. And that goal is an information advantage that you can use to win the proposal. You can measure the strength of your customer relationship based on how well it helps you develop an information advantage. The extent of your information advantage can be measured by your ability to answer the questions that proposal writers have when trying to write a winning proposal. An ordinary proposal is self-descriptive and can be completed without a lot of insight simply by responding to the RFP. Unfortunately, an ordinary proposal is not going to be competitive. To be competitive, you want to prepare a great proposal. A great proposal requires insight to provide what the customer needs to see to reach a decision in your favor. Creating an insightful proposal requires an information advantage. All the great ideas you have on your own are no match for insight into what matters to the customer. The strength of your information advantage can be measured by its ability to answer your questions. Now, you just need to know what questions you need answers to in order to write a great proposal. On your next bid, try providing insightful answers to questions like these: What will it take to win this pursuit? What are the customer’s preferences? What are their goals? What is their management style? What matters to the customer? What is the price required to win? What should you offer? Do you have any gaps in your offering? How would the customer prefer you to handle the inevitable tradeoffs? What will make you a better alternative than your competitors? How does the customer make decisions? What information do proposal writers need to close the sale? The answers to these questions determine: Whether you should bid What you should offer How you should position, differentiate, and present your offering What your win strategies should be What points you should make when writing the proposal How to get the best evaluation score How you should price your offering How to make bid and tradeoff decisions The secret to consistently winning competitive bids is to go into each bid knowing the answers to these questions. Discovering the answers requires a customer who is willing to discuss them with you. This means that you need a relationship in which the customer feels comfortable talking to you. And this in turn means developing that relationship before the customer’s acquisition process reaches the point where they limit communications. This impacts which customers you should target, which you should avoid, and which bids you should invest in pursuing. You will never get all the answers you want and you should always consider far more questions than you will ever be able to answer. You won't get any answers if you won't know which questions to ask. If you can learn more than your competitors and turn that into writing a better proposal, you have turned an information advantage into a competitive advantage. Bidding without an information advantage means you are either gambling on your ability to guess better than your competitors, or you are betting that all you need is to offer the lowest price. Overconfidence in either of these will result in a low win rate as well as low profit margins. This is why we made pre-RFP Readiness Reviews part of the MustWin Process that is available to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. It provide a structure for developing an information advantage and a starting point for the questions you should ask. It includes our method for quantifying the answers to questions that you can use to quantify the strength of your customer relationships, correlate answers with your win rate, and identify trends in the effectiveness of your business development efforts. Not only can you measure the strength of your customer relationships by how well they produce an information advantage, you can measure the profitability of relationship marketing by how well it improves your win rate. An improvement to your win rate means increasing your revenue without having to chase more leads. When your company is new, it's hard to commit a large level of effort to relationship marketing. But when you do the math, you’ll find that it’s worth the effort to build customer relationships that provide the information advantage you need to win. Losing proposals are expensive. Winning pays for the cost of pursuit and then some. Companies that consistently win and generate positive returns know what "ROI" stands for…

Congratulations. You have a good proposal. Too bad you’re probably going to lose. If your proposals have a win rate under 50%, then mathematically you are probably going to lose your next one. Wishful thinking won't change that. If you want to win, you need to submit a great proposal. The good news is that you may not have to rewrite the entire thing to get there. If you have a good proposal, here are some things you can do to improve it and make it great: Have you maximized your evaluation score? If your customer will have a formal proposal evaluation, then the place to start is whether you have maximized your evaluation score. When proposals are scored and not read, an ordinary proposal might score well, but a great proposal is designed to achieve the highest possible score. Can you make it easier for the customer to complete their scoring sheets by using the same words that they use in the evaluation criteria? When you assess your proposal against those criteria, is it clear that you will not simply score well, but that you will get a great score? Can you better guide the customer to the reasons they can use to justify giving you the highest score? Is your proposal easy to navigate and easy to evaluate? Can you include references to the evaluation criteria in the text? Can you use tables that show how you stack up against the evaluation criteria? Are you filling your gaps with wishful thinking? Have you matched every requirement to a proof point? Or are you responding with claims? Are you responding to requests for experience with approaches, and responding to requests for approaches without details? Are you telling yourself that you should bid because you can do the work, even though you do not currently have the staff or any referenceable experience? Have you responded to a requirement for a plan with a plan to have a plan instead of actually providing a plan? Are you responding to requirements with commitment and promises instead of results? Is your primary qualification that you can hire the incumbent staff and they'll know what to do? What are you filling the gap with? Have you shown real insight? Or did you just copy some text from the customer’s website? Have you talked about what matters and what impacts success? Have you gone beyond what’s in the RFP? Can you show a depth of knowledge that makes you an asset to the customer? Instead of merely claiming to be innovative, have you shown ideas that are perceptive and clever? Have you explained the reasons why you do things? Have you incorporated all the intelligence you’ve gathered about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment? Or are you merely compliant? A compliant proposal is good. But if that's all your proposal is, it's not great. Have you differentiated? Have you claimed the same things that everyone else will claim? Have you proposed the same approaches, but only a little bit better? Or can you offer something different and better? You can’t produce a great proposal if it’s the same as everyone else’s. Great proposals are more than just a little better. Great proposals go beyond the same best practices that everyone else will bid. Great proposals change the rules. Great proposals give the customer a real alternative to choose from, and that requires them to be different. What do you do that’s special? Why do you do things the way you do? What does it add up to that’s great? Have you taken risks? If you don’t take risks, you can’t be exceptional. If you aren’t exceptional, you can’t be great. A great proposal is not normal. It is not safe. Competition is not safe. A great proposal may lose. But the odds of losing with a good proposal that plays it safe are actually worse. Good proposals can safely count on being #2 behind a great proposal. A good proposal can become great by taking strategic risks to differentiate or show insight that no one else would ever dream of. This is how you become the only alternative the customer even considers. Have you written your proposal from the customer’s perspective? You do not decide whether your proposal is worthy of winning. The customer does. Your attributes do not matter. What the customer gets as a result of your attributes matters. A great proposal is not about you. It is about the customer. A great proposal is not you telling your story. A great proposal is the customer reading your proposal and getting excited about their future. Can you read your proposal the way the customer will and say things that reflect the customer’s perspective instead of your own? Can you make the proposal about the customer and make them excited about what they will get if they select you instead of how important winning is to you? Did you get the context right? An ordinary proposal has all the right details. A great proposal puts the details in context. Putting things in context brings meaning to them. Can you explain to the customer what it all adds up to? Can you show insight about why the details matter? Can you make it clear why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative? To do these properly, every item above requires doing your homework before the proposal even starts. If you don’t start already having the information you need, you may not be able to achieve it during the proposal. Proposal writers can’t make up greatness. They can’t fake it. But you can make sure that you’ve fully leveraged all that you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. In the rush to get to a draft, companies often fall back on descriptive writing and sticking to the RFP. They focus on submitting instead of winning. Often, the people with knowledge about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment aren’t even the ones doing the writing. So if you can achieve a good proposal with some time remaining before your deadline, you might be able to turn it into a great proposal. If you can't achieve a good proposal with enough time left to make it great, then fixing that is a great place to start if you want to be competitive.

Understanding how to set your priorities is key to winning proposals. There are far too many things you want to do before the deadline than are possible to achieve. If you do not have the right priorities, you will waste time and effort on things that have a lesser impact on your probability of winning. Ideally, your priorities will perfectly match the impact of each item on your win probability. But calculating win probability is not always possible. That’s where Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes in. While it was intended as an assessment tool in psychology, it can be repurposed for proposals. When applied to proposals, it provides a framework of considerations that you can use to better guide your priorities. It also helps you be decisive by informing you what you must do, and what you should sacrifice. Because sometimes sacrifices are necessary in order to submit by the deadline. Sometimes proposal management is as much about what you’re not going to do as it is about what you are going to do. For all the bravado we have about not being willing to make any sacrifices and being willing to do anything to win, reality forces us to make and understand our priorities. Give me a proposal professional with clear priorities over a proposal hero any day. When Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is applied to proposals, the base level of consideration is RFP compliance. If you are preparing a US Government proposal, RFP compliance is absolutely necessary to even get considered. Non-compliant proposals are often thrown out before being fully evaluated. RFP compliance is the foundation that everything else can be built on. However, it is not enough to win. But without RFP compliance, you are not even in the game. If you are not preparing a US Government proposal, then RFP compliance is still the foundation of your proposal strategies and offering design because it defines what the customer wants. If your RFP contains evaluation criteria, then the very next consideration is how to achieve the maximum score. When the customer provides written evaluation criteria, it's a signal that the proposals may be scored and not read. In a formal evaluation, getting the top score is the only path to winning. In an informal evaluation, the evaluation criteria still inform your win strategies, making them a priority ahead of most others. The next level of consideration is your implementation of your win strategies. Once you have thought through the RFP compliance and evaluation criteria considerations, how well you choose and implement your win strategies will have the biggest impact on your win probability. Before you put effort into any of the higher levels of consideration, you need a base that addresses these three areas. Another way to say this is that you can’t rely on the higher levels to win the proposal for you if you don’t have this base underneath them. Once you have this base, you should consider visual communication and presentation. If you aren’t compliant with the RFP, don’t score the highest against the evaluation criteria, and have inadequate or poorly implemented win strategies, great visuals and presentation aren’t going to win it for you. On the other hand, if you do have those things, you are well positioned to create great visuals and know not only what to present, but what your presentation needs to achieve. People process information through visual communication better than they do through written communication. Make it a priority to turn this into an advantage for your proposal. Beyond these considerations, if you can get there, comes editing and proofreading. While a proposal full of typos can lose, a typographically perfect proposal is not enough to win. Most customers will tolerate some typos. It’s a risk. But is it better to take the risk of typos or the risk that your bid strategies are inadequate? The priority for this is challenged. If your proposal management is successful, you'll be able to carve out the time for it. If it is not, it may lose out to other priorities that have a greater impact on win probability. The highest level is style. Proposals against tight deadlines rarely make it to this level. You might want a proposal with multiple writers to read like there was one author. But is that the first thing to discuss or build your plans around? Is it your top priority? Or should it come up after you’ve successfully achieved the other levels in Maslow's Hierarchy? We want to achieve all the levels. But we do not want to achieve a low impact item at the expense of a high impact item. We do not want to lose because we focused on the wrong priorities. We want to eliminate all risks. But we don’t want to play it so safe we end up losing. You don’t have to give up on creating the perfect proposal. Maybe you’ll have the time and resources to address all the levels in Maslow’s Hierarchy of (proposal) Needs. Some day. Maybe. It's an excellent goal to have. The priorities you choose to focus on directly impact your win rate. If you have the time and resources to address the things that impact your win probability the most, then go for perfection. Proposals are a competitive sport. If you are competing against companies that will submit compliant, high scoring, proposals based on sound win strategies, then the higher levels might become the difference between winning and losing. But first you need to achieve a compliant, high scoring, and competitive proposal.

Most proposal assignments come with failure built in. They are essentially a plea for proposal writers to figure out how to win the proposal on their own. This is not a winning strategy. To avoid this, you need to give proposal assignments that are less about tasking and more about guidance. Start by giving better instructions Proposal assignments should cover not just what to write, but also how to write it. And all proposal assignments should come with quality criteria that let the writer know when they have completed the assignment correctly. Is that too much to ask? If the goal is a high win probability, is there any alternative? Quality criteria can be simple checklists, as long as they are reliable. Following your instructions and passing the quality criteria should not result in negative proposal reviews. Writers need to know how to fulfill expectations before they start writing. You should also supplement your proposal assignments with helpful suggestions, things to consider, and questions writers need to answer. Good proposal instructions: Save people time Provide reminders Point them in the right direction Deliver inspiration If your proposal assignments don’t address your win strategies and the points you want proposal writers to make, what do you think the impact will be on your win probability? If on the other hand, you provide assignments that explain what to write, how to write it, what points to make, and criteria they can use to assess when they’ve completed their assignment successfully what do you think the impact of that will be on your win probability? Focus on goals instead of steps It is far more important that proposal writers achieve your goals than it is to submit something on time that won’t win. So what are your proposal writing goals? These should shape your proposal assignments. Proposal assignments are not simply fulfilling outline items. They are fulfilling a vision based on what it will take to win. If you goal is to win, then can proposal writers realistically achieve that on their own in isolation? If your goal is RFP compliance, that is an achievable goal. But is it enough? And do your quality criteria enable writers to know when they’ve achieved it? The same applies to any particular style, results, or preferences regarding the proposal. Without proposal quality criteria defining success, you are assuming the writers know what you are thinking and waiting until after they’ve completed their drafts and the deadline is near to find out whether that is true. This is very risky. This is another reason why I prefer to do a thorough job of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Sure, you want everything on your wish list. But what are your must haves vs nice to haves? What are your priorities? The instructions and assignments you give set the priorities. Do so wisely. What’s in your writers' packages? What are you giving your proposal writers other than a section title and a copy of the RFP? Is it what they need to be successful? Is it even based on what it will take to win? Does it explain to your writers what the customer needs to make a decision in your favor, or are the writers supposed to figure that out? What you give to your proposal writers has a direct impact on your win rate. If you prepare a Proposal Content Plan, it essentially is your writers' package. It’s a tool for achieving all these goals.

Obsessing over the deadline and resource pressure that defines most proposal efforts can make you forget about other important things and limit your ability to maximize your win rate — not to mention it can also lead to total burnout. It’s a curious dilemma and a bit counter-intuitive but obsessing over getting your proposal done can help you lose. So take a moment and put away your deadline and resource pressures. Take a moment to think about the purpose of it all. Because the purpose is more than making your deadlines and surviving the experience. It’s more than simply winning. Proposal writing should have meaning. Purposeful proposal writing Do you write to fulfill, complete, and comply, or do you write with a purpose that gives what you are writing meaning? If so, what is that purpose? Proposal writing requires fulfilling requirements and compliance, but those should just be things you write about, and not why you write. Why you write proposals should involve considerations like these: Do you write proposals to solve problems? Do you write proposals to help people? Do you write proposals to achieve growth for you, your company, and your customer? Are you creating jobs so that people can prosper? Do you write proposals to achieve a mission? Do you write proposals to make your tiny part of the world better off? If so, then how do you do that? How do you write proposals with a purpose? The answer is one sentence at a time. One paragraph at a time. One section, one solution, one proposal at a time. But start with a sentence. What is the point of that sentence? Is your goal in writing that sentence simply to comply with the RFP and complete your assignment? Is that all your customer wants? Or do you write to make a point that supports your broader purpose? Even if your purpose is simply to win, writing to make a meaningful point can make your proposal far more compelling. It can turn proposal writing from a task into something with purpose. The opposite of writing to make a point is to literally write something that is pointless. It is entirely possible to write a fully compliant proposal that is completely pointless. It turns proposal writing into nothing more than a transaction. The only way you are likely to win by writing a proposal like that is if all the customer cares about is the price. Writing with purpose is part of competing on something other than price. So start writing with the intention of making a point. Then another. Then another. Just make the points add up to something that matters to the customer. And yourself. Does it matter? If you choose a shallow purpose, you will make points that do not matter. For example, you might make the point that your company specializes in something. But this does not matter. It's a skill. It's a qualification. But it is not an outcome. It is a claim with no impact on the customer. If your purpose is to be whatever you need to be or say whatever you need to say to win, then what you have to say won't matter. The customer doesn't care about how great you think you are. And obsessing over how great you are can fill you with pride (good or bad), but it won't give you meaning. If you choose a purpose that does have an impact, then the points you make in your proposal will have a similar impact. The amount of impact your point has determines how much it matters. It's good to matter. But it's even better when it matters in a way that fulfills your purpose in writing. If your purpose is to change the world, help organizations fulfill their missions, create jobs, or anything else you find worthy, then write proposals that matter in ways that fulfill your purpose. Write proposals that have a major impact. But what impact should you have? If you don’t know what major impact would interest the customer, you’ve got a problem. Most companies water their impact down if they think there might be any risk at all of anyone along the way not agreeing with something they said. And when they do this, they water down their purpose until they do not matter. Doing this ignores the fact that customers want they money they are spending to result in something that has a major impact on what matters to them. [Video] Finding meaning What do you do that has an impact? What matters, both now and in the future? How will all of the stakeholders be impacted? Having an impact brings meaning to a proposal. It doesn't have to be the most important thing to you as an individual. It just has to be worthy. It doesn't even have to be a single thing, although that makes it easier to communicate. People rally around worthy causes. Doing this brings meaning and purpose for your company. It brings meaning and purpose for the staff who will work on their project. It brings meaning and impact for the customer and their stakeholders. It brings meaning and impact for each individual proposal writer. Proposal writing is not just fulfillment, compliance, and a search for the magic words that can persuade. Proposal writing is about meaning something. Proposal writing with a team of contributors is about finding meaning for everyone involved. Proposal writing is not just about making a submission with something that can win. It is a chance to actually matter and have an impact.

Just like a great chef can only do so much without great ingredients, great proposal writing requires great input. A great proposal writer can’t win it for you on their own. But you don’t need a mountain of raw input. Collecting customer documents and gathering whole conversations will not necessarily do the proposal any good. In between what you’ve gathered and the proposal, you need to do an assessment. You need to turn what you have into what you should do about it and what you should say as a result of it. When the input gets to the proposal writers, it needs to explain how to position the things they’ll be writing about and how it should impact the decisions they will make about the writing. For proposal writers, it’s all about context. It’s not simply about describing your offering, your approaches, and fulfillment of RFP requirements. Great proposal writing requires making points that matter to the customer, while responding to the RFP. Great proposal writing requires showing that the points you’ve made add up to making you the best alternative for the customer. It’s about helping the customer make their decision and not simply describing your company and your offering. To write a great proposal, proposal writers need great input. So instead of random tidbits of intel that you happened to stumble over, here is how you should inform your proposal writers: What it will take to win. You can’t build a proposal based on it if you don’t know. Proposal writers don't discover or make up what it will take to win. They start from someone else being able to articulate it. It’s the most important ingredient. If you think you know what it will take to win, but you haven’t talked to the customer, then you’re really just guessing. Then again, a good guess is better than nothing. Starting your proposal writers without any input other than the RFP is a recipe for a low win rate. What the customer will find compelling about what you are offering. If you figure out what to offer by talking to people in your own company, you’re really just guessing. To find out what the customer finds compelling, you have to talk to the customer about what matters. If you want to write a proposal that’s meaningful, then you have to know what matters to the customer about what they are procuring. If you don't know this, then all you can do is let the RFP be your guide and hope none of your competitors have better insight. Hope is not a strategy that leads to high win rates. The right features and the right benefits. Making up the features and benefits of your offering based on the RFP will not get you to a great proposal. You need the right features and the right benefits, based on the customer’s perspective. Most features can have multiple benefits: speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness, etc. Which matters the most to this customer? Did the customer tell you or are you guessing? If you're going solely by the evaluation criteria in the RFP, then you can't write a great proposal. You can only write an ordinary proposal like everyone else who has the same RFP. You need differentiated features and benefits that the customer finds compelling in order to write a great proposal with a high win probability. How the customer makes decisions. Is the customer's decision-making process consensus driven or authoritarian? Who is involved? Is it formal or informal? Is it a rigid point scoring evaluation system with a lot of paperwork? Or is it personal? If you are going to write a document that influences the customer’s decisions, you need to know. Who is the customer? Is it the buyer, the users, the decision maker, or another stakeholder? Just how many stakeholders are there and how much influence do they have? Is the customer one person? Does the customer have a consensus or are there multiple agendas? Is any one department or group in control? Who should the proposal be talking to or about? Make sure you have the full perspective. If you are talking to the customer's programs, operations, or technical staff, do they have any influence over contract types, vehicles, or the evaluation process? Do they even know anything about how their organization handles the procurement process? If you are talking to a contracts specialist, do they know anything about the technical subject matter? Do either the programs staff or contracts staff know what their organization’s future plans and priorities are? Have you talked to an executive at a high enough level to know how this procurement fits into the bigger picture? If you’ve only talked to one person at the customer, the answer is “no.” If you want to maximize your win probability with a great proposal, you need to understand the procurement process, organizational trends and goals, and what the program staff need to fulfill their mission. Why should the customer select you? Start by considering what makes you different. What makes you better? Combine that with what the customer finds compelling. Then add in what you know about how they make decisions and what their proposal evaluation process is. Just remember: why the customer should select you shouldn't be based on what you think is great about you, it should be based on what the customer thinks would make a great provider and a great offering. How should you interpret what the customer said in the RFP? Can you interpret what is in the RFP the same way the customer interprets it? If the RFP is well written, then every competitor has it and knows what to write to be compliant. So what is your information advantage? If the RFP is broken, then every competitor has it and no one is sure about what to write. So what is your information advantage? What is the customer expecting to see in response to the RFP they wrote? Optimal positioning, how to differentiate what you are offering, customer insight, and competitive assessment are all things that your proposal writers can help you articulate, but they can't make them up on their own. Instead of the phrase software developers like to use "garbage in, garbage out," with proposal writing it is more like "nothing in, garbage out." If you don't know or don't tell them the things they need to know, your proposal writers will still try to sound compelling. They'll just be faking it and the customer won't be fooled. That's not a great strategy for being competitive. Guessing is not necessarily bad. If you haven’t talked to the customer, guess and guess well. Be aggressive and take risks. Because that is all you can do. But if you are guessing and someone else knows, you are at a competitive disadvantage. So don’t fool yourself into thinking you know something when you are really just guessing.

How do you go about influencing the customer’s RFP to give your company an advantage? When you start thinking about it and peeling back all the layers, it can seem quite complex. There's a lot to consider. And where should you start? Here is a simple formula that’s easy to memorize and can help you cover all the important aspects of the problem. Who. Who is the customer? Who is the decision maker? Who needs help? Who can make changes to the RFP? Who is playing the contracts role? Who is in charge of the technical requirements? Who are the other stakeholders? Who has what concerns that can be addressed by inserting language into the RFP? Whose need is the reason behind the procurement? What. What would you like to see in the RFP? What would you like changed? What will give you an advantage? What will make things difficult for your competitors? Instead of trying to make responding to the RFP easier, consider how to make it incredibly difficult for everyone except your company. Is there a qualification or certification that you have that most or all of your competitors do not? Wouldn't it be nice if the customer made it a requirement? Where. Where in the RFP would you like to have some influence? There is more to think about than just the technical requirements. What about terms and conditions? Contract type? Pricing model? Instructions? Evaluation criteria? Go for all of the above. How. How do you identify and make contact with the right people? LinkedIn can be very helpful for this. Does the customer have a staff directory? How will you suggest the language you'd like to see in the RFP? Being the customer and writing an RFP that gets what you need is even harder than writing a proposal. You can’t write the RFP for the customer. But you can write a whitepaper using language that they can simply copy and paste, if they are so inclined. You can make recommendations for the customer to consider about any possible future RFP. Or even just what's important about things that the customer is interested in and how to select them. But what will motivate them? Do they need some help because they don’t know the subject matter? Or maybe they’re just not sure how to articulate their needs. If writing the RFP is a lot of work, maybe they could use some suggestions. If they are risk averse, they might be concerned and willing to listen to some advice. Maybe they just want to make sure that when the complicated procurement is complete, they actually get what they wanted at the beginning. When. When should you make your suggestions? When are their decision points, approvals, and other milestones? When should you make your suggestions to a contract specialist and when to a technical program specialist? Suggesting a contract vehicle after the acquisition strategy has been approved won’t do you any good. It’s easier to suggest language for the RFP before it has been written. It’s even easier before the decision has been made to issue an RFP. In order to be in synch with the customer's procurement process, you have to know it in detail. Timing matters. Getting there at the wrong time, when you can't have much influence, might even be a reason not to bid if someone else was there at the right time. Why. “Why” is by far the most important question. Why should the customer accept your suggestions? Why should the customer trust your suggestions? Why will they get better results if they do? If you leave out any of the “who, what, where, how, when, and why” topics, you will be far less effective at influencing the RFP. And while the model starts off as questions, you can turn it around and convert it into a pursuit plan. But instead of conducting a strategic influence campaign, you might be better off just helping the customer get what they need. Being seen as a helpful asset is usually a good position to be in. Trust matters.

Most proposal software fits one (and sometimes more) of these seven categories. Some are a better fit for winning proposals than others. Your needs depend partly on the nature of what you offer and partly on your corporate culture. It may very well be that what you need the most isn't proposal software at all... Automating proposal assembly. The only time you should automate the assembly of your proposals from reusable parts is when you sell a commodity, compete primarily on price, and don’t have sufficient profit margin to invest into increasing your win rate. For most companies, you will gain far more revenue by customizing your proposals to maximize your win rate, than you can possibly save from recycling narratives. Often the difference is two or three orders of magnitude. Since I rarely work with companies that sell low-margin commodities, I never use automated proposal assembly. I create custom proposals to maximize win probability and don’t create proposals the same way people create brochures. Your best alternative to automating proposal assembly is to streamline how you plan the content of your proposals. Inspiring proposal writers. By far, people spend more time thinking and talking about the proposal than they do writing it. The best way to make proposals more efficient is to decrease the amount of time people need to figure out what to offer and how to write a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. While recycling narratives does more harm than good for most people, what you can do is provide suggestions, topics, strategies, and more at the bullet level. We take all those ingredients and turn them into Proposal Recipes. When they are designed well, they will often inspire ideas that weren’t found in the Recipe Library. The goal is to get people thinking more quickly so that they can come up with the right answer for the particular bid they are working on, and not to feed them the same answer every time. Incidentally, you do not necessarily need special software to provide an inspiration library. Guiding proposal writers. The proposal process is not sequential. It is best to think of it in terms of goals instead of steps. But there are high level phases you can guide people through. And there are options you can help them consider. You can help them assess when they’ve done things correctly. A little bit of guidance at the moment of need can make a big difference. Other than creating the guidance itself, the trick to making it effective is to pay attention to the user interface. Wrap your tasks in what people need to know to guide them through it. It must not be out of sight, but it also must not get in the way. Collaboration. The more that you need to figure out what to offer and how to present it in the proposal, the more you will benefit from collaboration software. Collaboration software should help you think better and faster as a team. The real challenge, however, is making decisions. Software can get people talking, but you still need an organizational culture that’s decisive or it won’t amount to much and indecision will eat up valuable time instead of saving it. I’ve never settled on any particular software package for collaboration. It’s not the software that matters most to me, it’s how you use it, whether everyone has it, if it’s a pain to install, and whether you can turn discussion into action. Proposal planning. There is so little software available that’s effective for proposal planning, that I had to go and build my own. Planning the content of a proposal and integrating it with quality validation is not as simple as building an outline and grabbing document fragments from a library. At least not if winning matters. Planning the content of a winning proposal involves first identifying what it will take to win, planning that proposal, managing the creation of what is needed to achieve it, and validating that what got created fulfills what it will take to win. What I’ve found is that using software to help with the planning, validation, and guidance of staff has a much larger return on investment than software to manage or assemble the files you submit. In fact, if you took the tens of thousands of dollars you might spend on proposal software and put it into rolling out a manual process for planning the content of your proposals and validating the quality instead, you’ll probably be better off. Effectively planning to win pays for itself many times over because it increases your win rate. Software for proposal production has a questionable ROI. Reviewing proposals. Proposal quality validation can be greatly streamlined when performed online. Instead of reviews that require paper-based production and putting everything on hold while people read and comment, when the validation of proposal quality criteria is done online it becomes a checklist driven exercise that goes as quickly as you can click through the proposal. If you are stuck in the purgatory of ineffective traditional review approaches, you might be able to use a tool like PleaseReview to relieve some of the administrivia burden and make better sense of the comments. Search and retrieval. If you have libraries of files for research or reuse, you’ll need to be able to search them. The search tool hardly matters. How you organize and maintain the libraries matters a whole lot. The cost of the hours and hours you will put into organization and maintenance will likely not only exceed the cost of the search tool, it will likely exceed the value of what people find using the search tool. File library maintenance is so much easier when you quit trying to find and reuse narratives, and abstract them into Proposal Recipes. Is winning or cost reduction your highest priority? It’s good to make things easier, reduce effort, and ultimately reduce costs. But automating proposals without building them around what it will take to win will reduce your win rate more than you save. On the other hand, proposal software that guides your staff to plan and execute a proposal based on what it takes to win and does it better than they can do on their own manually, pays for itself many times over. The middle ground is software for collaboration and process. You can implement collaboration tools with little or no cost. You can improve your process for planning and executing by investing nothing more than your time. How do you decide what to do? Ask yourself what is holding back your win rate. I’m willing to bet that not getting the input you need to know what it will take to win and an ineffective review process that doesn’t provide actual quality validation have a bigger impact than being able to look up past proposals or reduce the time it takes to assemble proposal files. I’m willing to bet that flaws in your corporate decision making culture have a bigger impact than being limited to phones and email for collaboration. Sometimes people turn to software because they think there’s nothing they can do about the real problems. And they’re usually wrong about that. But then again, it may be easier to get the Powers That Be to write a check for tens of thousands of dollars than it is to get them to make quick and consistent decisions based on well-defined quality criteria.

The proposal process is not about efficient repetition. It is not even primarily about managing the steps that go into creating a proposal. The proposal process is about problem solving, starting with figuring out what will it take to win. It is about solving the problems that can reduce your chances of winning. Each time you execute the proposal process you will encounter new, unanticipated problems that mostly result from the customer asking for things in different ways. This is where you should focus. This is what you must obsess on and get good at. If you base your proposal process on rigid repeatable steps, it will break because customers and RFPs are wildly inconsistent. Even small differences will break most processes. Even though it is our nature to want to make proposals routine, they are not. Proposals are a series of problems within problems to be solved in a competitive environment. A certain amount of repeatability can help set expectations and keep everyone on the same page. However, achieving repeatability is not the path to maximizing your win rate. Solving the problems and variations better than your competitors is the key to maximizing your win rate. Your proposal process should be based on problem solving and not on task repetition. And problem solving means being flexible about how you fulfill your goals. A goal-driven proposal process is much better than a procedure-based proposal process for solving problems that can't be anticipated. To transform your process into one that achieves your goals and maximizes your win rate, instead of mechanical steps, try focusing on: Improving proposal contributor performance and proposal quality. Before reengineering your proposal review process, try simply supplementing it with questions for people to address during reviews. Questions can set the foundation you need to start moving reviews from subjective opinion-fests to quality criteria based validation. Proposal quality criteria are simply questions that assess whether quality standards have been met. When people are used to a question-driven process, then reengineering your process by changing the questions becomes a simple incremental step instead of a revolution. You can also synch the questions that both the proposal writers and the proposal reviewers use for guidance. This helps the writers to know what to write to pass the review and it helps the proposal validate whether what was supposed to be done by the proposal writers was actually accomplished. Gaining proposal process acceptance. A key part of gaining proposal process acceptance is to make it easier to follow the process than it is to make it up as people go along. Instead of creating questions that are a burden, create questions that deliver what people need to accomplish their goals and questions that enable them to think things through more quickly. When you do this well, people will naturally pick up the lists of questions, which you might encourage them to call "checklists" or "cheat sheets" because they make doing the proposal easy. People covet checklist driven proposals and always love a cheat sheet. Passing the proposal process minimization challenge. Encourage people to point out anything in the process that is unnecessary or that won't matter. You should challenge them to point out anything that can be dropped from the process without lowering your win rate. This will not only make the process more reliable, but it will also increase acceptance. Setting and accomplishing goals. Instead of mandating procedures, focus on what you need to accomplish. Then move on to "What do you need to make that happen?" and "How will people know if they've done what is needed?" With just these questions you can start to see how the combination of goals and the right questions shapes the process better than boxes on a flow chart. Questions can get people thinking about how to accomplish things and meet standards instead of going through the motions with steps. I’d much rather work on a proposal with people who are defining goals and thinking about the best way to accomplish them, than with people who are simply following and only doing what they are told. The right questions can inspire thinking. Sometimes I don’t even care what the answers are. I just care that they are well thought through and position us to win. Streamlining the flow of information. Answering questions carries information from one person to the next. Questions can transform information from one format to another. Questions can be used to assess, consider, and validate information. Questions can make sure that the next person has what they need to accomplish their goal, while simultaneously communicating what that goal is. When the information is uncertain and what to do with it depends on a lot of factors, like we typically encounter in preparing proposals, the flow of information is better managed through questions than procedures. Accumulate metrics you didn’t even know were possible. Did people skip questions? Which ones? Did they give any shallow non-answers? Over a series of proposals, what can you learn from the way people answered the questions? How do the answers correlate with your win rate? You can gain insights you otherwise would have missed that unlock win rate improvements that make it all worthwhile. Filling your gaps and addressing your weaknesses. If people answer all the questions but the proposal still runs into difficulties you can add questions that prevent the problems from recurring. You can write questions that force people to change procedures. Or even behaviors. You can write questions that change styles and approaches. You can write questions that change results. Lessons learned and continuous win rate improvement. You can implement a continuous win rate improvement program simply by improving the questions that define your process regularly and raise the bar every time. It helps when you encourage people to use the lists of questions as checklists. It makes it easy to check in with people after each proposal, get feedback (formal or informal), and tweak the questions for next time. Just don't let the lists grow too long or you'll start to see resistance. You can even have business line or customer specific sets of questions. Anticipating and solving problems. You can write questions that prompt people to be on the lookout for indicators of problems. You can write questions that simply prompt people to consider the risks. You can write questions that ask if people have taken mitigation actions. You can write questions that ask whether certain people have been notified about unpredictable problems. You can write questions that keep people informed, on the lookout, and guide them to the right response. Since proposals are about problem solving, you can use this to shape the entire development effort. Changing behaviors over time. The right question at the right time can set expectations, be a reminder, and prompt action. The right question at the right time forces a choice. Very few people will intentionally do things to harm a proposal, if they are aware and don’t have conflicting priorities. The right questions can address both of these. Building in expectation management and communication. Everything you do on a proposal comes with expectations that flow in every direction. Ignore them at your peril as they are the number one source of proposal friction. Instead build in clarity. Everything you do should come with communication before, during, and after. And every communication should clarify expectations. Instead of focusing on proposal reuse, try creating communication templates so that this becomes easy to do. Timing matters Ask the right question at the wrong time and it will have no impact. The right time to ask a question depends on what has been done, what comes next, what resources are available, and the person being asked. Focus less on dates and deadlines, and more on goals and dependencies. Also, since far more time is spent thinking and talking about a proposal than actually writing it, you can use questions to accelerate thinking and discussion. You can use questions to greatly reduce open-ended circular discussion and rumination that never ends. But you have to anticipate what and why people ruminate, so that your questions can eliminate the need before it occurs.

You need to do this, you need to do that. Everyone already seems to know what they should be doing to increase their win rates. But they have many excuses reasons for why they are not. Those reasons usually boil down to other people not doing what they should. Improving your win rate requires changing other people’s behavior. Instead of creating a process based on steps and then using carrots and sticks to get other people to change, try building your process around asking questions. You can change people’s behavior simply through the questions you ask. Pre-RFP examples Instead of telling people to establish customer intimacy, try asking them, “What is your information advantage over your competitors?” If they don’t have customer intimacy, they’ll have difficulty answering. If they get caught unable to answer, they’ll have some incentive to gain customer intimacy on the next bid. Instead of telling people to describe your win strategies or prepare some (usually watered down) themes, ask them, “What differentiates our offer?” If they are struggling to identify your differentiators, they’ll start strategizing how to position your company on the next bid to have some real differentiators. If people aren’t discovering pursuits early enough ask them, “What have you done to influence the RFP?” If they are finding pursuits by looking for RFP releases, they will not have done anything to influence the RFP. If people are chasing any pursuit they find ask them, “How does the pursuit relate to the company’s strategic plans?” This is a double whammy. First, the company has to do some actual strategic planning. Then the folks chasing bids have to actually pay attention to it. Proposal examples Instead of telling people to plan their proposal, try asking them, “Has your Proposal Content Plan been reviewed?” It’s kind of hard to review something that doesn’t exist. Instead of telling people to create an RFP compliant outline ask them, “Will your outline meet the customer’s expectations?” This subtly forces people to make their own opinion secondary to what they think the customer wants, such as what they itemized in the RFP instructions. It also can force the use of a compliance matrix. This is also a great example of how you can use questions to not only get people to do things, but to change their behavior. Instead of telling people to follow the style guide that they usually ignore, try asking something like, “Is the proposal written from the customer’s perspective?” To answer this, they have to know what “writing from the customer’s perspective” means. You can do this with any writing style or preference that you feel strongly about. Getting people to change their writing style can be challenging. Telling them to do it has a low probability of success. But asking them a question that forces them to assess what they’ve done may just work. Instead of talking about an opportunity at the kickoff meeting, try working through a script of questions. Anticipate what your proposal writers will need to know and turn it into a proposal input form. Then see what those pursuing the lead can answer. Correlate their answers with your win rate and you’ll be able to quantify the importance of starting proposals with an information advantage. By using the same script every time, you can train the business development function regarding what information you need to write a winning proposal. See if you can get them to give out a copy of your script at the beginning, when they decide to pursue a lead. If nothing else, this approach will dramatically improve your company’s ability to weasel word around questions it can’t answer. If you win rate is really low, this alone might improve it! Seriously folks, I’ve seen how lots of companies weasel word things, and the quality of the weasel wording could be greatly improved. Of course, it might be easier just to find answers to the questions.

Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the performance layer into the following areas: proposal management, proposal writing, and quality validation. The performance layer is where the proposal document gets created. It is what is traditionally thought of as the proposal process, only it is organized architecturally instead of sequentially. This is because we are addressing functionality and not sequence, and functionally proposal development consists of the actual writing and production of the proposal, managed according to the proposal process, with completion validated by quality assurance. Proposal Management: Implementation of the proposal process How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Preparations and input processing. What do you need to do to get ready for proposal development? How will you collect the required inputs? How will you assess them for use in the document? Assignments and progress tracking. What resources will you require? How will they be assigned? Once assigned, how will you track progress toward assignment completion? Process implementation. How will you implement your proposal process? Do you have a process to implement? Will this pursuit require exceptions or changes to your process? Issue management. What issues can you anticipate and prevent or mitigate? What responses should you have for contingencies? Tools/resource development. What tools should you have or build? These can range from simple checklists to major systems. What needs do contributors have that might be addressed by having a tool? Training and performance support. What skill or capability gaps do you anticipate that might be filled with training? What can you do to improve the performance of contributors during proposal efforts? Proposal Writing: Creation of the document How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Assignment completion and goal accomplishment. How will assignments be issued? How will you track progress towards completion? How will you validate the quality of completion? Will assignment completion fulfill the process goals? Expectation management. What do proposal contributors expect? What should you do to address those expectations? Are you communicating your expectations? Are everyone’s expectations being agreed to? Execution. Are things getting done as they need to? Pricing. Is pricing being completed on schedule according to RFP specifications? Is pricing competitive? Is pricing being done in isolation? Is pricing part of offering design or completed after the proposal is complete? Produce deliverables. Are required proposal deliverables (such as the proposal, forms, pricing, certifications and representations, etc.) being produced on time without defects? How is the quality of proposal deliverables being validated? Quality Validation: How do you know if you are doing a good job? How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Definition of proposal quality. Is proposal quality defined? How should it be defined? If it is defined, how is it impacting performance during proposal development? Development of quality criteria. Do you have quality criteria that can be used to measure how well you are fulfilling your definition of proposal quality? Are you experiencing issues that could be resolved or mitigated by changing your quality criteria? Self-assessment. How are people checking their work? Are your proposal quality criteria being used for self-assessment as people complete their proposal assignments? Implementation of quality validation. What is your review process? Does it fulfill your definition of proposal quality and your quality criteria? Is it consistently effective?