Carl Dickson

When you are alone you have to work within your own limitations. What you know is all you know. What you can write is all that’s going into the proposal. What you can do before the deadline defines your standard of quality. It’s not about winning or creating a great proposal. It’s about whether you can complete the proposal at all. Here are some tips that won’t help you win, but they might help you get your proposals submitted. What is the minimally viable proposal submission? The gap between the minimally viable proposal submission and a great proposal is a concern for another day. Right now, you have to focus on the gaps between where you are and what constitutes the minimally viable submission. The minimally viable proposal submission is usually whatever won’t get your proposal thrown out. Perform triage. Only try to save the ones that can survive, because trying to save them all will only result in greater loss. Use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals to help you make decisions about priorities. Focus on filling your gaps. Since you’re on your own, you have no one to write the missing pieces. It’s just you and Google. You may have to cheat. You may have to do the proposal The Wrong Way. Yeah, it’s ugly. But it may be all you’ve got to work with... Write to what a customer like this one might want instead of what you know this customer wants. Describe what goes into your plans instead of providing an actual plan. Avoid commitment. Use numbers that aren’t precise. Think “more than” or “almost.” Streamline the formatting. Don’t use elaborate formats. Minimize keystrokes and clicks. Go for simple elegance instead of a work of art. Make sure the formatting is within your skill set. If you don’t have any win strategies, differentiators, value proposition, and reasons for the customer to select you to work with, then base them on what it will take to win. If you can’t be great and prove it, then simply be what the customer wants. Who, what, where, how, when, and why. Repeat that until you’ve got it memorized. Then whenever you need more detail, answer the ones you can. If you need an approach for something and you have no idea what it should be, you can talk all around it by addressing who, what, where, how, when, and why. Be prepared to do less. Peel it back like an onion. Do only the things that impact winning the most. And if that fails, do only the things needed for a minimally viable submission. Everything is a trade-off. Make your trade-off decisions based on what requires the least effort. Go up a level in granularity. Make this proposal a learning experience for your stakeholders. If this proposal isn’t going to be great, can you use it as a demonstration so things go better on the next one? Separate what changes from what doesn’t. Don’t mix the details that don’t change with the win strategies and customer insights that have to be tailored every time. Use a question and answer format, even when they don’t ask for it. You can organize reuse material around questions and answers. Questions and answers already make a point and have a defined context, reducing the editing required. Questions and answers stand alone and lend themselves to being interchangeable parts. If you find you’re working on proposals that don’t have a chance of winning, identify the criteria that can be used to decide when not to bid a pursuit. Complaining about having to work on low probability pursuits sounds like resistance. But providing a set of lead qualification criteria is something that people can take action on. Avoid using names. It waters things down, but the more you can avoid using customer, company, personnel and other names, the less editing you’ll have to do. For example, try to refer to people by their role. Be a big picture thinker. When you don’t even know the details, stick to the big picture. Avoid procedures and specifications. Embrace missions, goals, and intentions. Rely on what you do know. If all you know are your company’s qualifications, then make everything about them. Have research tools handy. Invest in relevant textbooks. Get a bookmark tool for your web browser. Make some friends. Why are you alone? Learn the language of return on investment. How much would your win rate need to increase to pay for some help? If you don’t know the numbers, learn them. The odds are that a small increase in win rate will more than pay for the help you need. I’ve talked to companies that bid everything they could find and had win rates as low as 7%. At 15% they’d double their revenue. It would be like doubling the number of leads they have. What would they invest to double the number of leads they have? That’s what they should be investing in improving their win rate. They need you to quantify and explain it to them. Note to companies reading this: If you don’t want your proposals written like this, don’t leave people alone. Get them the information they need. Every once in a while, give them a little help. If you see these things in your proposals, it’s a good indicator you’ve overloaded your staff, those who know the details aren’t providing them, or no one knows the details. Note to proposal staff: If you’re doing these things because you didn’t know any better, change now. If you understand the relationship between win rate, lead identification, and revenue, you’ll never let this happen. But we see it all the time. If you find yourself here and don’t know how to escape, reach out. We can help.

what matters to the customer.

Summary What the customer cares about depends on what they are buying. The closer things get to a commodity, the less the vendor matters and the more that price matters. The closer you get to a unique solution, the more trust and risk matter. Products and services can be either unique solutions or commodities, but what matters to the customer about products and services is different. How the customer perceives their need in relation to this chart matters. If it does not match what you offer, then your positioning will be wrong. Perceptions may not be clear and range over an area instead of point, and may be subject to change, although this can be a tough sale. How to correctly position your offering depends on having the right information about the customer and their needs. The items in the middle can lean towards the corners. For example, what matters about "risk" can depend on the nature of the offering. What is the nature of what your company's offering? Where is your offering in the mix? If a company is not highly focused, they all may seem to apply. Sometimes company's have multiple offering that might not group together on the chart. This might appeal to a broader group of customers, or require different approaches to market. The goal of thinking about this is to see if you can: Anticipate what will matter to the customer? Gain better customer insight by bringing some structure to your customer interactions? Implement a process or model that makes it easier to figure out what to do about it, once you've discovered what matters to the customer. Convert a structured like this into a process that drives customer awareness into the written proposal? You can use this model to connect the dots and streamline the transition from sales to the proposal. You can also use it to increase win probability, by bringing a little structure to your message development instead of making it up during proposal writing. Discussion topic: To design your process, you need to honestly assess what your company offers so that you can implement a process that guides people to discover the customer's concerns and address them with the correct positioning. Different people in your company may have a different perception of your offerings, making the discussion itself a valuable exercise, separate from the process considerations. Also, your current offerings may different from past or future intended offerings. Ultimately it is not even your perceptions that matter. Use the chart to discover what matters to the customer and how to position accordingly.

2019 adds up to some big numbers Since we started in 2001, we have had over 8 million visitors. That's nearly half a million visitors a year, on average. Over 71,000 have requested to join our newsletter. Over 3,500 became PropLIBRARY Subscribers. A lot of people who need to win proposals for their business to succeed give us their attention and we appreciate it so much. I remember when I started down this path and could remember all their names. I still try to respond to nearly all the support requests myself. The topics we published in 2019 covered a mixture of business development, capture, and proposals, with preparing to win as a common theme. The best free articles we published in 2019 Are you one of these 11 kinds of proposal manager? How to make better proposal decisions by using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Why you can’t just follow the steps to create a great proposal Examples of proposal content planning using MustWin Now 47 questions that tell you if the way you are preparing your proposals is any good Improving your win rate by asking the right questions Proposal writing: 10 before and after examples 16 things that need to happen long before proposal writing starts How to get ready to win before the RFP is released 6 examples of bad proposal writing and how to fix them In 2019 we released MustWin Now as a free benefit for PropLIBRARY Subscribers MustWin Now takes our recommendations related to how to win your pursuits, and turns them into a tool. Instead of learning about the MustWin Process via online training and written materials, and then implementing and following it, you simply use MustWin Now. The "process" simply becomes what you do, and what you do makes sense and delivers immediate gratification. And all of our online training and content becomes guidance available within the tool to inspire and accelerate everything people do to win your proposals. We thought about packaging it as a separate product, but instead we chose to add it on top of all the other benefits of subscribing to PropLIBRARY. We didn't even raise the price. If subscribing to our online training and content library and using it to supercharge your company's growth was worth it before, it is now doubly so. The best of the premium content we published for PropLIBRARY Subscribers in 2019 Our premium content is far more practical and detailed than the free articles listed above and provides information that is ready to use as checklists, templates, forms, etc. In 2019, we focused on a combination of process tools and and practical resources that can help solve key problems. The MustWin Process Architecture Assessing the impact of the organizational layer on your process Assessing the impact of the input layer on your process Assessing the impact of the performance layer on your process 6 targets for relationship marketing and 5 ways to reach out to potential customers How to build quality into every step of your proposal What's the difference between capabilities and corporate experience? A simple formula for influencing the RFP Why all proposal reviewers need training before every review Proposal Quality Validation Implementation FAQs Looking forward to 2020 Next year, our development efforts will focus on MustWin Now, while our content efforts will focus on integration. By integration, I not only mean integrating content with MustWin Now, but also integrating the articles themselves with how they are used. Think of the titles above organized through a user interface that enables people working on a pursuit to drill down to whatever detail they need in that moment, while using MustWin Now to take action on the recommendations. That's where we're heading. We're actually already there when it comes to topic coverage. But I want it to be more streamlined and intuitive, and that means reorganizing the content to better fit the new workflow. That ends up being quite a bit more work than it sounds. Don't expect a lot of fireworks and flash. The more intuitive we make things, the less things will stand out. PropLIBRARY and MustWin Now will just be there with what you need, when you need it, and it won't be as hard for you to produce great proposals. What you will notice is your win rate going up while your stress levels go down.

Getting ahead of the RFP is critical for relationship marketing and obtaining an information advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP does not have to be hard, but it can take a long time. Those that put the time and effort into it are able to achieve an information advantage as well as a competitive advantage. This is a PDF handout, suitable for printing. It includes a cheat sheet you can print and posts on your wall as a constant reminder. ?

Slow down. Take your time. Get comfortable. Ponder the meaning of it all. These topic hubs lead to hundreds of links with over a thousand pages worth of material. Don't try to consume it all in one sitting. Study them like a book that can change the future of your company and the direction of your career. Or maybe just give you an occasional smile. Before the proposal: business development and capture Relationship marketing Making effective bid/no bid decisions Preparing for proposals ahead of RFP release How to respond to Request for Proposals (RFP) and win How to design an offering your customer will love How to plan your proposal content so it meets everyone's expectations Articulating bid strategies and proposal themes Writing proposals from the customer's perspective Making proposal writing faster and easier Making proposals simple Recycling proposals, creating proposal templates, boilerplate, and re-use libraries How to validate the quality of your proposal Successful proposal process implementation Winning vs. Losing Proposal win rates and how to improve them Doing proposals the wrong way Now. What are you going to do about it all?

Form for implementing our recommendations from the article, 36 ways to tailor proposal re-use content before using it. Use it to assess proposal re-use material against the current environment to enable you to determine how to best tailor it.

When you recycle proposal content, you can’t rely on people to simply tailor it. You can’t rely on them because you can’t count on them to be aware of everything that has changed. Unless you tell them. Re-using proposal content requires more than just updating it. It requires changing the context to reflect everything that has changed about the customer, your company, your offering, the competitive environment, and the external world. People often think nothing has changed. Sometimes this is because the work that they will do on the project really will be the same as what they did before. However, while the work may be the same, the words required to win it likely will have changed far more than anyone realizes. I challenge you to find out. I challenge you to do a before and after comparison. The challenge is to compare your current circumstances with the previous circumstances to determine what has changed in the environment that should also change the writing. It’s a simple before and after comparison. Only it’s not so simple. There are a lot of considerations. After reviewing them you may confidently conclude that nothing has changed. Or you might discover that it will take longer to edit what you have than to create something fresh. I’m betting that re-use will only save you time if you do not properly assess what needs to change. But take the challenge and find out. If you have or intend to build a proposal re-use library, you should build in procedures for doing this assessment every single time your content is recycled. You should challenge your users to prove that re-use is safe and that it will save time. For form for quick implementation. PropLIBRARY subscribers can also use MustWin Now to guide your proposal contributors to make considerations like these and write your proposals based on them. Consider each of the following to determine what is different about the circumstances for this proposal that should be used to tailor your re-use material: Who will perform the activities described? Who will receive the results described? Who will be impacted? Who will interact? Who will oversee performance? What RFP requirements are new? What is required to achieve compliance under the new RFP? What RFP contract terms and pricing requirements have changed? What RFP formatting and submission requirements have changed? What RFP terminology is different? What matters to this customer? What points should be made? What results need to be achieved? What approaches, procedures, methods, etc., need to change? What tools, assets, resources, etc., are needed? What subcontractors or teammates will be used? What needs to be updated? What differentiates our offering? What is required to get the highest score under the new evaluation criteria? What risks are anticipated? Where will work be performed? Where will deliveries be made? Where will work products be used? Where will resources be obtained from? How will schedules change? How will the customer be impacted? How will risks be mitigated? How will quality assurance be achieved? How will roles and responsibilities be defined? When will performance start and end? When will interactions occur? When will decisions be made? When will customer participation and input be required? Why were these options selected and these trade-offs chosen? Why does what we’re proposing matter? Why is what we’re proposing this customer’s best alternative? We prefer to use questions like these in MustWin Now to drive people to write a great proposal that is a perfect match for the new circumstances and is optimized to win. Writing to win is profitable. Recycling to avoid writing may enable you to complete the document but is less profitable. The increase in your win rate easily pays for doing your proposal well compared to taking an easier approach that produces a less competitive proposal. Instead of accelerating your efforts and helping you get ahead, recycling proposal content means starting from behind. Instead of thinking it through and moving forward, recycling proposal content means you think it through and then go back and have to think some more about how to fix what was done before. You may actually have more work to do because you started from something already written. But often the only way to get people to realize that is to have them try. So challenge them!

Most proposals are won or lost before they begin. Either you go into the proposal with an information advantage, or you are trying to fake your way through the proposal without one. Even though this is true, most companies don't have a mature process for pursuing a lead before the proposal starts. Their process amounts to: Hire a good salesperson, whatever that means, to dig up some information. Create the illusion of process by having bid/no bid reviews. As a company matures, bid/no bid criteria tend to become more sophisticated. However, believing you have a chance at winning is not the same thing as having the information you need to write the winning proposal. Having a standard for whether to bid a pursuit is not the same thing as having a process for lead pursuit and capture. When most companies start thinking about formalizing their pursuit and capture process, they often only think about activities, like meetings, events, and contacts. And because they don't know what sequence the events will occur in, they can't imagine how to turn it into a process. They create bid/no bid criteria and often just make the rest up as they go along. What they need are goals for pursuit and capture. Goals inform people about what they should accomplish. And goals can be used to prepare to close the sale with a winning proposal. 1. Establish that you have an acceptable lead When your prospecting efforts appear to have found something, you need to establish that it's an acceptable lead. Some companies track every lead they consider. Some companies only track leads they intend to pursue. Some companies incentivize lead discovery. It’s not a lead until it has been accepted as such. Note that an acceptable lead still needs to be qualified as worth investing in pursuit. An acceptable lead is generally one worth looking into so you can determine whether it is a potential match for your company. What is required to identify a lead as acceptable at your company? 2. Qualify that the lead is worth the expense of pursuit Once you have a lead, the next goal is to qualify the lead and prove that it is worth pursuing. This goal is an investment decision, because capturing a pursuit is expensive. Some companies have rigorous requirements for qualifying a lead, while other companies merely need to know if they can do the work. The level of effort put into lead qualification is usually proportionate to the cost of closing the sale with a winning proposal. If you sell commodities and crank out lots of proposals, lead qualification might be a simple checklist. If you sell complex services or unique solutions in a competitive environment with large, complex proposal efforts, you should put more effort into proving your leads are worth the cost of pursuit. The criteria used for lead qualification are often similar, if not identical, to what you use for making bid/no bid decisions. A company with an ineffective bid/no bid process will also usually have an ineffective lead qualification process. In an effective bid/no bid decision process, each goal, step, or review is another bid/no bid decision gate. Each one is an opportunity to cancel a pursuit that is a bad investment. When you limit each decision to whether to take the pursuit to the next phase, the decision criteria can be more specific. You don’t have to do a detailed win probability assessment in the early stages. But in later stages that would certainly be one of the considerations. In early stages you will be operating with less information and what is acceptable then may not be acceptable for bid decisions in later stages. 3. Pursue with the intent to capture Once you have qualified that a lead is worth pursuing, the next goal is to prepare to capture the pursuit. This requires achieving several goals all at once: Discover what it will take to win Develop an information advantage Respond to customer requests (requests for information, sources sought notices, draft RFPs, etc.) Determine what to offer This phase might take 80% of the pre-proposal capture level of effort. It will require regular (weekly or monthly) progress reviews. 8. Prepare proposal input If the sale closes with a winning proposal, then it's critical that the pursuit process delivers the information needed to write a winning proposal, in the form that proposal writers will need it in. Otherwise, all that effort may not do anything to impact the award decision. What good is having an information advantage, if you don't take action on the information you have? What good is having an information advantage, if the proposal writers are unaware of its significance, or what to do with that information in the particular sections of the proposal where it is relevant? If all you do is gather information and wait until RFP release, you will not achieve the highest win rate possible. What about relationship marketing? Having a customer relationship is not the goal. A customer relationship is a means to achieving your goals. Every one of these goals will be more easily accomplished with a strong customer relationship. None of these goals may be possible to achieve without a strong customer relationship. The strength of your customer relationship is often a good lead qualification and bid/no bid decision criterion. The strength of your customer relationship can be measured by how well it produces an information advantage. Turning your goals into a process Each goal will have activities to accomplish. Each will also have process deliverables to complete. And each will have quality criteria that define whether the goal has been successfully accomplished. You should articulate your goals and design your process deliverables so that the result produces the information advantage required to close the sale with a winning proposal. That is what having a pursuit and capture process look like. It requires more than just holding progress meetings. The Goldilocks pursuit and capture process Introducing too much structure all at once can be overwhelming. A goal-driven process can be introduced a little at a time. Achieving the goals is far more important than the procedures used in achieving them. If all you do is define your goals and nothing more, you will improve performance. As an organization matures, it can introduce things that make achieving the goals easier. This is the real reason to have quality criteria. Quality criteria are better used to enable people to know when they’ve accomplished a goal, rather than simply using them to catch defects in performance. A goal-driven process is less about procedures and forcing people to do things in a particular way, and more about helping people accomplish their goals. Setting up pre-proposal goals enables you to seek a Goldilocks solution. You don’t want too little structure. You don’t want too much structure. You want just the right amount of structure. Just the right amount of structure makes performance easier for people while maximizing your win rate.

The things you need to know to determine if a lead is worth pursuing are different from what you need to know to close the sale with a winning proposal. A sales process that qualifies your leads is important. It is also not enough to win. If you are addressing "Should we pursue this" and "Should we bid this" as if they are the same thing in a single meeting, it's a bad sign. Lead qualification is a determination of whether it is worth investing in the pursuit of a business lead. A qualified lead is worth pursuing. A lead that is not qualified is not worth the time or expense. Sometimes companies try to base their lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions on their probability of winning the pursuit. But if we’re being honest, this is just a guessing game. You may be using a carefully concocted algorithm and going for a SWAG instead of a WAG (look them up), but it’s still a WAG. Instead of trying to calculate probability, you will get better information by considering whether the lead meets criteria like: Size, scope, and complexity Staffing, resource, and qualification requirements Anticipated release schedule Risk Your ability to bid competitively (the best you can achieve by trying to predict win probability) Strengths and weaknesses relative to your competitors Relevance to the company’s strategic plans and target markets Acceptable terms and conditions Any information advantage or other advantages you might have Your differentiators Most companies include information like the above in their lead tracking or CRM systems. However, most companies miss other important considerations that include whether you have an information advantage and your readiness to write a great proposal (this is not the same as willingness to try). Whether you have an information advantage, how strong your information advantage is, and whether your information advantage provides what is needed to write a great proposal can all be quantified. Whether the customer will pick your bid to win can’t be quantified. Whether you are ready to write a great proposal is determined by whether you can answer the questions your proposal writers will have when writing the proposal. Most companies rely on salespeople to supply the right information based on their experience alone and their proposals end up being based on: The random nuggets of insight their salespeople dig up Whether those random nuggets get articulated and delivered in a form the proposal writers can use, which is usually not the case While it is clearly better than nothing to work with and can sometimes be decisive, it is also clear that people are fallible and perform better as part of a process that provides inspiration, guidance, and reminders. No matter how good your proposal writers are at wording around the information they don’t have, they can’t write as strongly as they could if they had the right information. Proposal writers have lots of questions. On PropLIBRARY you will find hundreds of examples of the questions that proposal writers typically have so they can write a better proposal. Your ability to anticipate these questions determines your success at developing an information advantage. Training your salespeople to answer these questions and giving them the tools that integrate these questions into the pursuit enable your salespeople to operate at a higher level. It’s the difference between sending them out into the field on their own, and sending them out with the tools and support they need to play an active role in gathering the information needed to close the sale with a win. All people do better work when they have quality checklists, guidance, and tools to work with. One of the reasons that companies have capture managers is because going from lead qualification to developing an information advantage requires different goals and customer interactions. It also requires knowing what questions to ask, which in turn requires understanding the nature of what your company offers, what it will take to be competitive, what goes into a winning offering, and what will be required to write the winning proposal. Capture managers specialize in going beyond lead qualification and preparing for a proposal. But even capture managers perform better with checklists and tools to guide them.

Companies that want to get better at doing proposals often struggle with their proposal process. They struggle with the steps. They struggle meeting deadlines. They struggle with time management. But mostly, they just struggle. Part of the reason for the all the struggles is their process. It’s not that it needs improvement. It needs replacing. And it’s not just the process that needs replacing. It’s the whole way you look at the proposal process. Proposals are not completed in stepsIt would be more accurate to describe proposals as a flow of information. Information flows from the customer to people in your company where it gets transformed, travels through the RFP, gets filtered into sections according to the outline, and ultimately put on paper. But the information does not flow in a straight line. It meanders. It flows back on itself. It goes in circles. It builds. It changes. The proposal “process” should not be thought of as steps. That’s how you end up with one step called “writing” that never ends, and another step called “reviewing” that endlessly repeats. The proposal “process” is really a collection of things you do to guide an unpredictable amount of information, from unpredictable sources, in unpredictable forms, from whatever it is at the beginning to what it needs to become in order to win the proposal. Here are five alternative ways to look at the proposal process that can help you find more success at channeling and guiding this information into what it needs to become: Training. If you work with different people on every proposal, then you can think of the entire effort as training. The final exam is the proposal. Or maybe it’s better to think of the proposal as a dissertation with a team of authors. Each thing that you need people to do is an assignment. Sometimes you need to teach how to complete the assignment. You should have rubrics that tell people what is required for successful assignment completion. Tutoring should be available for people who fall behind. You’re showing them how to win a proposal instead of mandating a process for them to follow. Questions and answers. Questions are a great way to gather the information you need. Questions can also be used to inquire whether the information is in the right format or whether it’s been transformed in the way needed. Questions can make suggestions or offer considerations. You can script the entire “process” as a series of questions. If you do, there will be a lot of questions. A whole lot of questions. But if you set them up as checklists, they aren’t perceived as a burden. Picture a checklist of questions to determine whether you are ready to start something. Another checklist of questions for what you need to consider when doing it. And another checklist of questions for how to tell when you’ve completed it successfully. Questions can do a lot more to help people contribute to the flow of information than a process diagram. Goals. A goal-driven proposal process can leave the steps up to the participants to figure out. A goal-driven process can also improve people’s willingness to follow the process, by giving them an easy way to achieve their goals. After all, following something called The Proposal Process really isn’t important. It’s fulfilling the goals that lead to winning that’s important. Quality validation. Can you define success? Can you define success for every activity? Then why not give contributors the success criteria at the beginning? When each activity is wrapped with success criteria, it’s as good as having a “process.” Thinking through and being able to put your success criteria in writing may do more to achieve the desired results than have a “process.” Issue tracking. Everything is an issue. Literally. A proposal assignment is an issue to be resolved. A lack of information or resources is an issue. Show stoppers are issues. But so are simple questions. Accounting for what needs to be written and writing to incorporate all of the ingredients that need to go into the section are also issues. Instead of tasking assignments and then dealing with the issues that come up, just track issues. A contributor’s role on the proposal is not to write something that crosses off an item on the outline. A contributor’s role on the proposal is to resolve issues. Individuals can have issues directed to them. But as a team, the goal is to resolve all of the issues that might get in the way of submitting a winning proposal.

The customer?s key concerns are often unspoken. While the RFP will ask you to describe your qualifications, it often won?t say that they are asking for your qualifications so they can determine whether they should trust you. When you realize this, you can write about your qualifications in the context of proving that you are trustworthy. Talking directly to the customer?s concerns gives the customer more of what they are really looking for and raises the apparent value of your proposal.

Your proposal process is broken. But don’t feel bad. Everyone’s proposal process is broken. And while it might be easier to accept that the proposal process can always be improved, it's better to be honest about just how broken it is. I have worked on countless proposals at a few hundred different companies. Some proposal process implementations are better than others. But all of them have serious defects and people are usually in denial about it. This doesn’t get their proposal process fixed. In fact, it makes their proposal win rates lower than they could be. This might be the single biggest thing keeping companies from maximizing their win rate. When people don’t know how to fix their proposal process, they sometimes conclude that it’s the environment that’s broken and not the process. The truth is they’re both broken, and while you might not be able to change the environment, you can change the process. And maybe fixing your process will improve the environment. When problems appear unsolvable, people stop paying attention to them. They stop thinking of them as problems. Many of the issues on this list are tolerated by most companies, because they don’t believe they can fix them. Rather than evangelize about our process recommendations, this article is about how to recognize when your proposal process is broken but solvable. People talk about the proposal instead of creating a tangible plan for the proposal People bring information to the proposal instead of what to do about it Any research done before the RFP is released doesn’t end up being useful for preparing the proposal Intelligence gathering is based on whatever people are able to find instead of discovering what it will take to win The top reasons given for bidding include “we can do the work,” “we have the experience” or “the opportunity is perfect for us” The compliance matrix isn’t validated before proposal writing starts The proposal outline is reviewed at Red Team The top goal after receiving the RFP is to start writing People think it’s easier to skip the process than follow it Proposal writers don’t know what the reviewers expect Self-assessment tools aren’t provided to proposal writers Proposal writing starts from copy recycled from a past proposal Proposal writers can’t tell you how to achieve RFP compliance Proposal writers can’t tell you how their sections will be scored or what they need to do to achieve a top score Proposal writers either don’t start from the points they are trying to prove, or don’t know what points they should be proving Proposal writers have questions that could have been answered, but no one asked the questions Win strategies are developed after proposal writing starts Win strategies aren’t validated until the Red Team Your plan for what to say in your proposal doesn’t go any further than a compliance matrix, outline, and occasionally some attachments like a list of themes People figure out what to propose by writing about it Key documents don’t make it to the proposal writers Key documents are ignored by the proposal writers The highest priority for proposal writers is completing their assignments and not getting the top score The highest priority for proposal writers is their other work Single points of failure Color team labels are used and no two people define them the same way Reviewers arrive without having read the RFP Reviewers decide what to look for on their own No two reviewers define proposal quality the same way Reviews don’t start until the proposal is in finished form or “the way the customer will see it” The most important person changes everything when they finally get around to looking at it There are no written proposal quality criteria Priorities and decisions aren’t based on the potential impact to the score of the proposal Decisions are based on what you think, instead of what the customer thinks Someone thinks there’s a better way than what it says in the RFP How many of these occurred during your last proposal?Rather than trying to solve them one at a time, look for common root causes. If you solve the root cause, you can fix many problems at once. For example, most of the items related to the proposal review process are a result of not defining proposal quality or having written proposal quality criteria. Many of the items related to proposal writing are a result of giving up on finding a way to plan the proposal before you start writing it. Solving some of them will require you to look at things differently. The proposal process is not about paper. Sure, it ends up on paper, but how it gets there is the result of a flow of information. Information must be sought, recorded, transformed, validated, and guided into a winning proposal. If you start by asking yourself how to create the document, you’ll end up with problems like those above. However, if you start by asking what information you need, where it comes from, and what guidance the other people you work with need to gather, then record, transform, and validate that information, you will see much better results.

Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. Prices are locked in for the duration of the contract. Even when you account for pricing escalations, that usually just covers inflation, and not promotions, new hires, new tools, etc. Without growth, most contractors can’t even tread water for very long. Without growth, rising costs will force them to cut overhead expenses. Investing for the future almost always comes from growth. Everybody in the company benefits from its growth. If you got a raise and it wasn’t offset by cutting somewhere else, it came from growth. If you’re sitting on a new chair, it was probably paid for by growth. If you can’t get a new chair approved, there probably isn’t enough growth. If you want a promotion, you need the company to grow enough to grant it. A growing company is a happy place. A company that is treading water can be stifling. A contractor that is shrinking is a fearful place. The same, by the way, is true of people. People need growth to prosper. Most growth for a contractor comes through winning proposals. You don’t have to work on proposals. You get to work on proposals. You get to grow. You get to bring growth to the others you work with. Whatever you think your job or corporate mission is, it's really about growth. Growth Hack #1 Proposals are an investment and not an expense. People minimize expenses. When an investment is paying off, you go all in. But you have to know when an investment is generating a positive return. Win rate is a proxy for ROI. Carefully track what things are impacting your win rate (it can be counterintuitive and rules of thumb aren’t). If you want to grow by winning proposals, then instead of minimizing your proposal efforts you should invest in doing your proposals better. Growth Hack #2 Growth comes from winning and not from chasing leads. At a 30% win rate, a 10% increase is mathematically the same as adding 30% more leads. How much would a company invest in gaining 30% more leads? But increasing your win rate is better because you don’t have to chase 30% more leads to achieve it. Increasing your win rate is also more profitable than chasing more leads. On top of all that, increasing your win rate will pay off again next year, but you'll have to find new leads to chase. So invest as much as you would in getting 30% more leads into increasing your win rate and you’ll be better off. Hoping for more leads is not the same as winning. It's time to get serious about winning business. Growth Hack #3 Winning easily pays for more winning. What is 1% of your proposal submissions last year? Now multiply that by 10. That is what a 10% win rate improvement would have returned. It’s typically many times what it would cost to do your proposals well. Doesn’t that make the effort a worthwhile investment? Shouldn't you respond to RFPs like you're trying to get good at it? Growth Hack #4 Shortcuts kill your ability to grow. Do you think that it’s too hard to get ahead of the RFP? Or that you can’t make your subject matter experts available to adequately support proposals? Or that executives are too important to read the RFP before participating in a proposal review? Or that it makes financial sense to stretch the people trying to win as thinly as possible? Shortcuts like these reduce your win rate, and the cost of them is far more than it saves. It’s penny wise and pound foolish. See Growth Hack #3 and run the numbers in the other direction. Is it worth a few hours of cost reduction if it produces a 1% reduction in win rate? A reduction in win rate typically costs you far more than the “cost savings” of trying to get by on the cheap. Most companies lose before they even start their proposals. Growth Hack #5 Growth requires everyone to participate. Proposals need subject matter expertise. They need customer awareness. They need competitive intelligence. They need a price to win. They need appropriate terms and conditions. They need staffing. They need facilities. They absolutely depend on having great past performance. Not only does everyone in the company benefit from growth, but everyone in the company has something to contribute to achieving that growth. If you want to do proposals bigger than yourself, you've got to make contributing to growth the normal routine and not an exception. Growth Hack #6 Beware the hand-offs. Now that you’ve got everyone contributing, you’ve got a problem. Are people worked in silos, or are their efforts integrated? Is sales delivering the information needed to write a winning proposal to the people writing the proposal? Is sales even participating in the proposal? Are the project staff who have customer contact providing insight? What about the hand-off to pricing? Is pricing working in isolation from your win strategies? Is pricing introducing strategies that aren’t reflected in your proposal narrative? Every hand-off is a chance for things to get watered down. Here's a list of 90 things someone needs to do to win proposals and who is usually responsible. Growth Hack #7 Work backwards from the goal. What will it take to win? How do know whether the draft proposal reflects it? How do you build your proposal around it? How do you discover what it will take to win? The goal that you are trying to achieve informs each prior step required to fulfill it. Your proposal process shouldn’t start from a blank sheet of paper. It should start from a winning proposal and reverse engineer it. Your proposal process should be goal-driven and not steps that people can ignore or skip. Growth Hack #8 Small companies can’t put off growth. You’re pulled in many different directions. You wear many hats. The only thing that will make it better is growth. Prioritize what you must do to achieve that growth. Only bid what you can win, and do what it takes to win what you bid. Growth Hack #9 Don’t be afraid of losing. One thing that holds companies back from investing in improving their win rate is that they worry about not actually achieving an increase in their win rate. This is partially a result of not knowing how to improve their win rate. It's also partially because they still view proposals as creative expression based on people just trying hard, instead of a deliberate process based on quality validation. But it’s funny how they never avoid investing in sales just because it might not bring in the business or they haven’t already identified the leads they intend to pursue. Growth Hack #10 If you can’t follow your proposal process, you have the wrong proposal process. Most companies don’t follow their own proposal process. It’s usually not because they aren’t capable or dedicated. Or because the process isn't enforced. It’s because their proposal process is based on common but flawed ideas. Don’t beat your head against a wall. Throw your broken process out and start over. It's worth the investment. Proposals can be a lot of work, but they shouldn’t be a struggle every time. If you accept that a chaotic train wreck is normal for proposals, then you will never achieve the highest win rate possible for your organization. Growth Hack #11 Healthy growth requires developing and maintaining an information advantage. Maximizing your proposal win rate requires having an information advantage about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. When writing proposals, an information advantage is a competitive advantage. All of your customer interactions, whether sales, technical, or otherwise, should be part of developing and maintaining your information advantage.

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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?