Carl Dickson

Most proposals go bad in the introduction. Right from the start they are not written well. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you fix this, you can improve your proposal writing throughout the entire proposal. You don’t need to spend years studying every aspect of proposal writing. If you just learn how to write a great proposal introduction, you can write a great proposal. From learning how to write the proposal introduction, I learned to: Frame the entire proposal as fulfilling what the customer wants. In a single paragraph, you need to make your offering the customer’s best alternative. That doesn’t leave much room for describing your company, claiming understanding, reciting history, or talking around the issue. It means you must summarize your entire offering, what makes it superior, and how it best delivers what the customer wants. I learned to focus on this, make it the only thing you talk about, and put everything into this context. Deliver customer awareness to the start of the proposal. You can’t write about what makes you the customer’s best alternative if you don’t understand how the customer makes their decisions and what matters to them. I learned to make understanding these things my highest priority before I start writing. I learned that when I start a proposal with other people, I have to attain consensus on these things before we can write to achieve our bid strategies. I learned to build my proposal process around the things that need to happen and what writers need to know in order to write an effective introduction. Jump right into things from the very first sentence. I learned that the conclusion I want the reader to reach needs to come first and not last. I learned that many ways people talk around things in the first sentence have nothing to do with the point you want to make. I learned to drop all that noise and make my point. Skip slogans and bragging about unsubstantiated claims. Claims to greatness don’t make your point. They also hurt your credibility. So I learned to simply drop them. Instead of claiming greatness I simply prove that my proposal is the customer’s best alternative. Others can brag, talk about themselves, or sound like a commercial. I prefer to win the proposal. Differentiate. It does no good to make your points if everyone else can make the same points. Winning by being the same only a little better is not much of a strategy. I learned that it is always possible to differentiate. I learned to think through what makes my proposal completely different and perfectly well suited to being the customer’s best alternative. Then I write the proposal to present and support those points. Talk about understanding in the right way. I learned that reciting the customer’s description of themselves does not make any points and is a waste of space. What the customer needs to see is that you will deliver the results they are looking for in a way that will succeed in their environment. If you can do that, you clearly understand them. So when I need to prove I understand the customer, I do it by differentiating in a way that makes what I’m offering tailored to the customer. Then I explain why I tailored it that way and what the customer will get out of it. I prove understanding instead of claiming it. Write only about what matters. I learned that a long introduction paragraph defeats the purpose. So I also had to learn that I only have room to talk about what matters to the customer. This in turn made me a much better proposal writer. I stopped writing to make sure I said everything anyone wanted to hear, and now only talk about what matters and why. If you say things that don't matter, then your proposal doesn't matter. I learned to aim for insight instead of encyclopedic coverage. Write only from the customer’s perspective. I learned that the introduction isn’t about my company or what I want to say. It’s about what the customer needs to hear and writing from the customer’s perspective. It’s about how they evaluate the proposal and make their decisions. It’s about helping them through that process. I learned that talking about yourself and being self-descriptive is bad proposal writing. I learned to write by thinking about how the customer will read what I write. Combine all the different goals and ingredients into a single statement. You need to write about what makes your offering better. But you also need to explain what that offering is. And how it fulfills the customer’s goals. And what their future will be like with you in it. And write it all in the language of the RFP, especially the evaluation criteria. I learned not to write until I have all the ingredients lined up and how to connect them. Say it in fewer words. Summarizing the entire proposal into a paragraph is a challenge. I not only learned to be direct and focus on what matters, I learned to say things nice and succinctly. It’s a paragraph, not a page. Think many times. Write once. Thinking by editing doesn’t work. You don’t start with a thought and then edit it until it becomes the thought you want. You have to think about what you want to communicate and what the best way to express it is many times. Once everything is in alignment, then write it. Editing can improve your wording and presentation, but you’ve got to think things through first. Writing to discover what you should have been thinking will not get you there. Finally, I learned that every sentence is an introduction paragraph. Every. Single. One. Every paragraph needs to make a point. Every paragraph needs to differentiate. Every paragraph needs to be written from the customer’s perspective. Every one of these 11 points applies to every paragraph of the proposal. Every paragraph of a proposal is the introduction of a thought. And every paragraph needs to be thought through and presented with just as much care as the introduction. If you know how to write the proposal introduction, you know how to write the winning proposal.

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Don't let the name fool you. An Executive Summary has a specific purpose in a proposal. But it has nothing to do with the name. If you don’t have time to read the whole proposal, what do you want to know? Is it: A little about each section of the proposal? A recitation of your own mission and goals from someone who claims to "understand" them? Information about the company submitting the proposal? Why this proposal is your best alternative for getting the most of what you want? An Executive Summary has little or no "summary" in it. An Executive Summary is a decision making tool. A proposal answers "who, what, where, how, and when." An Executive Summary is not a summary of your answers to these. An Executive Summary answers "why." Why should they bother to read your proposal? Why is your proposal the best alternative? Why will they get more of what they want by selecting your proposal? Why should they reach a decision in your favor? An Executive Summary is not used like a mini-proposal or abstract of what’s going to be in the proposal prior to reading it. If the evaluator needs to read a separate document in order to understand your proposal before they read it, you’ve done something wrong. You've added more reading to the reading they don't want to do. Write your proposal clearly so that no extra written explanation is needed. Delete the excess verbiage, or better yet make the words matter. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that adding more words and calling them a "summary" will make it easier for the customer to get through your proposal. An Executive Summary is not a summary at all. It is a rationale. It should contain what the reader needs to know to reach a decision, whether that reflects a “summary” of what’s in the proposal or not. If you want to make things easier for the customer, don't give them a summary. Give them something that makes it easier for them to decide that what you are proposing is their best alternative. Your proposal provides all the details to substantiate your recommendations. If you write a great Executive Summary, they may not feel compelled to read all the details because they agree with your rationale. If the proposal will be formally point-scored during evaluation this remains true, although they may be required to go through the entire proposal to score it. But they will be doing that with an explanation of why your proposal is worthy of the highest score. And by "why" I mean the rationale, so the decision maker and other stakeholders will understand why the proposal got the score it did. The emphasis should always be on the needs of the evaluator as the decision maker, and not on how you think the evaluators should score your proposal. Should your Executive Summary show “understanding?” This depends on the subject matter and complexity of the proposal. How does your understanding impact whether customer gets what they want? Is your understanding necessary to get the highest score? The best way to show understanding is usually through results. If you are offering what the customer wants in a way that is better than any other alternative, you clearly understand their needs. You may not even need to use the word "understanding" to prove that you have it. No matter how much you claim to understand them, if you don’t provide the results they want you clearly do not understand their needs. If the evaluators have to read paragraphs of text copied from their website with claims of "we understand" added, but without any value added or insight, that can backfire and end up showing you really don’t understand them at all. Should your Executive Summary introduce your company and describe your qualifications? How much do you matter to the customer? If you are selling a commodity, then you might not matter as much as you think you do. If you do matter, then explain why. Only give them the details that matter. If your qualifications make you the customer’s best alternative, your Executive Summary should explain why. Which will impact their decision more, the fact that you have certain qualifications, or how they translate into better results for the customer? The answer to this depends on how that particular customer reaches their decisions. The same applies to the qualifications of any teaming partners you might have. Why they are on your team may matter more than a description of their qualifications. What you should do instead of summarizing Instead of writing a big fat proposal and then abstracting it into what is actually a little bit more to read, try making your Executive Summary an explanation of why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative. Your goal should be to enable them to make a decision in your favor with confidence. That makes it more like an assessment than a summary. Instead of summarizing, try adding things up. What do your responses to all of the customer’s requirements add up to? What do they mean? Why do they matter? This is what the customer is most concerned about. The decision maker wants to know what it all adds up to. If what you offer sounds like it could be their best alternative, they’ll read the rest of your proposal to find out if the details add up to what you claim. But they’ll read it in context and with interest.

Sometimes it helps more to know what not to do than it helps to hear more about “best practices” and all the things you should be doing. You can use this like a checklist to see where you might have gone wrong and improve your Executive Summary writing: Start your Executive Summary by introducing yourself. From the customer’s perspective, you are not as important as what they are going to get if they accept your proposal. Summarizing your qualifications. Whether or not you are qualified is usually just a pass/fail consideration. However, why your qualifications matter and what the customer will get out of them is worth explaining because it shows insight and value. Making unsubstantiated claims. An Executive Summary really isn’t a summary. And it definitely shouldn’t be a summary of your amazing claims, summarized by leaving any substantiation behind. In spite of your claims to the contrary, you are not special. Unsubstantiated claims do not “position” you as anything except lacking credibility, which in turn positions you as untrustworthy. Making the Executive Summary your story instead of theirs. The customer does not care about your story. They care a little more about how it impacts them. But what they really care about is their story, and how it changes with you in it. Don’t tell your story. Tell theirs. Ignoring the evaluation criteria. If your proposal is going to go through a formal or point-scored evaluation, then your Executive Summary will be viewed in the context of whether it shows why you deserve the highest score. Everything you write must be considered in the context of the evaluation criteria in order to maximize your score. No matter how great one of your attributes is, if it can’t be scored, it literally doesn’t count. Summarizing your proposal. An Executive Summary really isn’t a summary. The customer doesn’t want to read a little bit from every part of your proposal. They want to know why you are their best alternative. Not having any graphics. Less reading is still reading. The best Executive Summary is a single graphic that makes it clear how everything related to what you propose comes together to deliver the outcome the customer desires and why your approach is their best alternative. They are hard to create, but worth the effort. The customer would rather see it than read about it. No value added/purposeless/not mattering. If your Executive Summary does not say what matters to the customer, then your proposal does not matter. Your Executive Summary needs to make it clear what the point of it all is. If it doesn’t, your proposal is pointless. When they want details, they’ll read your proposal. Your Executive Summary should explain what all those details mean and what they add up to. What you want to say instead of what they need to hear. Don’t include everything you want to say in the Executive Summary. Only include what the customer needs to hear in order to decide that you are their best alternative. When you get there, stop writing. If you are not sure what they want to hear, that is the problem you need to solve, and you need to do it before you start writing. Make sure every single thing you say passes the "So what?" test. Long enough to become work to read. If your Executive Summary covers so much ground and contains so much detail that the customer has to work to read it, you’ve defeated the purpose. Failing to make firm statements. If your Executive Summary is full of promises, intent, and commitment, without unambiguous statements about what the customer is going to get by selecting you, then it will actually offer less value than a competitor's proposal who drops all those promises and simply says what they will do or deliver. Failing to prove that you’re the customer's best alternative. Are you the customer’s best choice? Did you prove it? The customer has alternatives… Consider your Executive Summary to be an explanation of why your proposal is the customer's best alternative, with the rest of your proposal being the details required to prove it. Failing to support their decision. The customer has a decision to make. Does your Executive Summary help them to make it? Have you answered their questions? Have you shown them how to move forward? Have you addressed the challenges? Failing to earn their trust/not being credible. Trust must be earned. Credibility results from proving your claims. Have you claimed trustworthiness or proven it? Whatever you do, don’t edit out your credibility or simply claim to be a “trusted provider.” An Executive Summary should be short, but it must be trustworthy. Customers buy from people they know and trust. But your unsubstantiated claims could be working against your bid strategies based on trust. Failing to show what's in it for them. It’s not about you. It’s about them. And more specifically, it’s about what they are going to get. If your Executive Summary is about your understanding, doing what they asked for in the RFP, or your qualifications, there may not be enough in it for them to accept your proposal. Failing to integrate with the rest of the document. Does your Executive Summary exist in a vacuum separate from the rest of your proposal? Or does it bring meaning to your proposal and point the way to where they can get answers? Focusing on what instead of why. An Executive Summary really isn’t a summary. It is not a summary of your offering, your RFP compliance, your features, your qualifications, or anything else. It’s the reason why all those things matter. It’s the reason why your offering is their best alternative. Telling instead of showing. Don’t describe. Don’t tell. Instead, trying showing. Showing with a graphic is best. But you can write to show what matters and why. Presenting details instead of what they add up to. Your proposal contains the details. Your Executive Summary should explain what they add up to for the customer instead of providing a redundant but small set of details for them to read before reading the larger and more complete set of details. Not differentiating. You can't be best if you are not different. An Executive Summary that sounds like all the others does more harm than good. You can always differentiate. If your Executive Summary doesn't explain why your differentiators make you the customer's best alternative and set a new standard for what the highest evaluation score should be, you need to start over.

What’s the point of it all? What does the customer want to hear from you? What do they need to complete their paperwork? What makes you their best alternative? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking as you prepare to write an Executive Summary for a proposal. To answer them, you need these four things: A winning solution or offering design. You can’t articulate why the customer should care about what you are offering, if you yourself don’t know what you are offering. You need to know what you are offering in order to describe how the customer will benefit from having it. One of the main goals of the Executive Summary is to show why your offering is the customer’s best alternative. You can do a great job of explaining why you are the customer’s best alternative using nothing but the RFP. Differentiators. What makes you and your offering better than any other alternative? Even when the RFP forces every bidder to offer the exact same thing, you still can differentiate. In fact, it becomes more important than ever. You can’t be great without also being different. When the customer compares proposals, they often focus on those differences. To articulate a winning message in your Executive Summary, you should start with the differentiators that make you better. The evaluation criteria. If your proposal will be scored through a formal evaluation process, your Executive Summary should match their scoring criteria. Your Executive Summary should show why your proposal deserves the top score, with the rest of your proposal providing the substantiation. All of the features of your offering, all of your differentiators, and every part of your proposal message should align with the evaluation criteria in the RFP. What matters. What matters about your offering? What matters about your differentiators? What matters about every single thing you say in your proposal? What matters to the customer? If you’ve said something in your Executive Summary that doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. Delete it. If you are saying something that matters, make sure it explains why. When your judgment matters to the customer, the reasons why you do things can matter more than what you actually do. Focusing on what matters helps ensure that everything you put in your proposal can pass the “So what?” test. Focusing on what matters in your Executive Summary is a great way to demonstrate understanding. Think twice. Write once. There is a school of thought that says you should write your Executive Summary before you write your proposal. That way, you can flow down the messages and ensure your proposal substantiates what you said in the Executive Summary. The problem is that you can’t write the Executive Summary first if you don’t know these four things. When people write their Executive Summary last, they get time to figure out how to articulate them. But then again, you probably shouldn’t write any sentence in your proposal without knowing these four things. How can you know what points to make and how to make them if you don’t know these four things? If you are writing without knowing what points to make, you are either writing a pointless proposal or a proposal that makes random points that aren’t likely to add up to the highest score on a competitive bid. What this means is that you should be designing your offering separately and before you start your proposal. It is a prerequisite and not something produced during or late in the proposal process. You need to understand your differentiators before you start writing, and not try to figure them out while writing the proposal. Think twice, write once.

Sometimes people put a lot of time and energy into making sure their proposal tells their story. They craft their story with great care. They become attached to it. They often use up valuable page space leaving less to address the RFP requirements. The story the customer wants to read is the one about how great their future is going to be. And it’s a short story. It’s a tweet about the summary of the abstract of the short story. Who wants a lot of reading? TL;DR… The person reading the proposal only wants to read enough to reach their decision. Proposals are scored and not read. A story about something the evaluator doesn’t care about gets in the way of scoring. It makes the evaluator’s job take longer. Proposal writing should not be about you. Proposals should be written from the customer's perspective. A short story about what the customer will get by accepting your proposal and what things will be like in the future as a result can be scored. Even better, this aligns their immediate need to score the proposal with their future aspirations. Your story about the customer’s future is told in your introduction sentence. It’s what they will get. It’s told as the conclusion of subsequent topic sentences to either explain why you are offering what you propose or to provide support for the promise that they will actually get it. It links every approach and the fulfillment of every requirement with the likelihood that they’ll realize the future you offer. Your story about the customer’s future should be about what they will get, what matters about it, and why it’s special. It’s about what it will be like to receive it and live with it. It’s about a better future. Stories have conflict and every procurement involves tradeoffs. Your story about the customer’s future gives you a common explanation for why your approach to the tradeoffs resolves the conflicts in the best way possible. But the story is not a book. It’s told in the introduction sentences that make the key points. It’s told in the conclusions of sentences about requirements fulfillment. It’s told when you combine what the customer will get with why you chose that approach or with your proof for why they should believe you that you can deliver what you've promised. It’s part of every sentence throughout the proposal. But it’s not an extra book the customer has to read before they get the pleasure of evaluating your proposal. If you're ready for advanced proposal writing, you can try these 11 ways to approach telling a story in your proposal that are accessible to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. The story about the customer’s future will be far more engaging and far more persuasive than a story about how you became a great vendor that believes the customer should pick them.

This is an article for people who are not writers and don’t know what words to use when they write a proposal. They may know how to do the work and what to offer, but they often go blank when it comes to how to say that in words on paper. Ok, here it goes… Don’t describe. Just explain. What does that mean? When you describe, you tell the customer the details about your approach, offering, or qualifications. But when you explain your approach, offering, or qualification, it shifts you into explaining why. It improves your proposal writing by helping you to communicate things like: Why it matters Why it's the best alternative What’s special about it How the customer will benefit from it What makes your approach different and better Explain what you have to write about. Don't describe things. An easy way to explain things in a proposal Every sentence should have two parts: Your response to an RFP requirement and your explanation. Often the customer is more interested in the explanation than the details. Even when they are interested in the details, they are even more interested in why you chose those details. Even when the RFP asks you to describe something, such as your approach, what the customer is really interested in is the explanation for why it matters. If you write everything to include a response and an explanation, you will impress people with the quality of your proposal writing. Even if it's not exactly what they had in mind, they'll have enough to turn what you wrote into exactly what they want. There are hundreds of articles on PropLIBRARY with tips and best practices for creating great proposals. But if you’re struggling, then trying to think of all the things you could write about, the many ways to position what you’ve said, and more ways to write like an expert is just going to distract you from what you really need to do. Which is to stop describing and explain instead. Making proposal writing even easier To make proposal writing even easier, here are some things you can ignore: Style. Just say what needs to be said in any style and the customer will hear you. Don’t worry about trying to sound like what you think a proposal should sound like. Most of them aren’t well written, and this will likely steer you in the wrong direction. Just be authentic in the style you are comfortable with. If you are too wordy, too formal, or too informal, so be it. If someone complains, let them edit it. The only opinion that matters is the customer, so the most important thing is to deliver an explanation the customer can understand. Construction. Don't let thinking about how many sentences should go in a paragraph and how paragraphs should be structured get in the way of providing the information the customer needs. Avoid the really big paragraphs. That is all. How to introduce things. Don’t write proposal introductions the way you were taught in school. Just jump into the heart of the matter and explain what they are going to get or what you are going to do for them. Focus on why they can believe you at least as much as what you are telling them. Proposal writing can be challenging Here are some challenges you will face trying to get your explanation written: Writing against an outline that you don’t control and can’t change. You’re going to want to rearrange the topics so they make sense. Only you can’t. If you do that, it may no longer make sense to the customer. The customer will most likely be looking for what the RFP asked for in the exact places it asked for them and the sequence they requested them. It may not seem ideal, but you should follow their lead. Getting the right level of detail. Most proposals have page limits. More than anything else, that will determine the right level of detail. What you don’t want to do is ignore the page limit and write something lengthy for someone else to summarize. That’s actually more work than it takes to write it within the page limit. If the page limit is too short for you to explain things in detail, focus on what matters instead of the details. RFP compliance. Some proposals, such as government proposals, must be completely compliant with all RFP requirements or the proposal will not be eligible for an award. It may not even get read. So what you are proposing must be fully compliant with what’s in the RFP even though it’s hard to write against requirements that are out of sequence, disjointed, outdated, or otherwise problematical. Not only that, but you have to use their terminology to ensure they realize it’s compliant. If you really want to learn how to write an RFP compliant proposal, you should learn how to create a compliance matrix. Getting the highest score. Proposals are evaluated and not read. The winner may not be the best reading proposal or even the best solution. The winner will get the best score. This means responding to the language of the evaluation criteria in the RFP. If you don’t do this, then your superior offering may lose to a substandard one that scores better. Writing using other people’s words. Achieving RFP compliance and optimizing your score against the evaluation criteria means using the words in the RFP instead of the words you are more comfortable with. It’s a challenge, especially when you’re struggling to express things in your own words. If you have to, make two passes at it: once to get the ideas lined up, and then translate it into their terminology. How to respond to an RFP with the right words is the topic of one of the online training courses available to PropLIBRARY Subscribers. When you are ready for more… When you can write explanations instead of descriptions and overcome all those challenges, then you’re ready to start thinking about writing from the customer’s perspective. Because ultimately, they are the only judge of what great proposal writing is. The best proposal writing anticipates what the customer needs to see in order to accept the proposal. When you reach this level, proposal writing becomes easy and the challenge becomes gaining customer insight.

An Executive Summary for a proposal is not really a summary at all. If you are the customer receiving a proposal, do you really want to read a redundant summary before reading the proposal? Or do you want to find out what you’re going to get if you accept the proposal? An Executive Summary is a tool to help the reader make their decision and the evaluator to score the proposal. Extra and unnecessary reading that gets in the way and tends to annoy customers. Writing an Executive Summary that is redundant but smaller is not helpful. Your Executive Summary should be written from the customer's perspective. To learn how to write your Executive Summary from the customer’s perspective you should learn how to read your proposal like the customer will. To write a proposal Executive Summary from the customer’s perspective, ask yourself: What is the first thing that a customer wants to see or find out from your proposal? What comes after that? And after that? And so on… What questions do they need answers to? The Executive Summary for a proposal should be written to provide quick answers to these questions so they don’t have to read your entire proposal to get them. One way that an Executive Summary is used is to tell the decision maker what they need to know about your proposal so that they don’t actually have to read the proposal. They may have staff read the fine print and evaluate the details, and then read just the Executive Summaries to confirm the recommendation made by their staff. Or they may read the Executive Summary to set context before reading the proposal to see if it supports your claims. Proposals are often scored and not read. An Executive Summary enables them to use your proposal as a reference to see the explanation for the things that interest them the most, without having to read the entire proposal cover to cover like a book. Your proposal may also need to cover a lot of detail that is routine, necessary, and not worth discussing or even thinking much about beyond whether it is present. Material like that does not need to be summarized. It just needs to be easy to find when they go looking for it. Summarizing it in the Executive Summary gets in the way of the reader discovering what matters about your proposal. From the customer’s perspective, the Executive Summary should answer these four questions. What am I going to get if I accept your proposal? The first thing on the customer’s mind is often: What are you offering? Why should I care about it? Does it excite me? Is it worth reading further? They may need to see this before they bother to read your proposal. The very first sentence in your proposal should not be some valueless introduction letting the customer know that this is a proposal, but should instead be a statement about what they are going to get that differentiates your proposal. Why is your proposal my best alternative? Why should the customer accept your offer? They have alternatives. The customer always has alternatives to accepting your proposal. What makes a proposal their best alternative depends heavily on how they will make their decision. The Executive Summary should provide the information they need to reach a decision in your favor. If your proposal will be scored and not read, this means providing information that shows why you should receive the top score. Can I trust you to deliver as promised? If the customer likes what you’re offering, then the next thing they want to know is whether they can believe in your ability to deliver as promised. That’s when they ask questions like: Who are you? Do I know you? Are you qualified? And by “qualified,” they mean have you met the minimal requirements and completed any necessary paperwork for you to be able to do business with them. But what they really want to know is “Can I trust you?” And no, they won’t take your word for it, so they start wondering: Have you ever done it before? Do you have a successful and relevant history that I can check up on? Are your proposed approaches credible? Is the staff who will do the work capable and reliable? Do you have the resources required? Are your estimates credible? Your Executive Summary should establish your credibility for being able to deliver as promised. What do I have to do to get it? If the customer likes your offering and finds you credible, then they want to know what they have to do to get it: Can they afford it? Is it still the best alternative when cost is considered? What steps do they have to go through, including both yours and theirs? If they have a formal procurement process, then their ability to get what you are offering may depend on your ability to navigate their procurement process. Answering this may include providing the information they need to conduct their proposal evaluation. It is a good idea to understand their procurement process so that you can provide the information they need before they have to ask for it. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes If you get answers to these questions in the first few pages, then you already know what conclusion to reach. Sure, someone has to read the proposal and make sure everything that has to be in there is actually there and evaluate all the details compared to all the other bidders. If you don’t get these answers, you remain indecisive and unmotivated. If your Executive Summary is about what you want to say, instead of what the customer needs to hear, that’s where you will leave them.

If your proposal is about giving the customer what they asked for, it's just not... special. It might be a little better, maybe, but that’s not special. That’s just being the same only a little bit more. You may have claimed to be special and probably believe it, but who cares about that noise? What the customer sees is marginal. Meh. Your proposal is not special, because you haven’t proposed giving the customer anything that’s special. You haven’t proposed anything they can only get if they select you. You've left them with choices. You are vulnerable. And your win rate shows it. What does it take to be special? Demonstrating some real understanding in your proposals is always a good start… Simply claiming understanding does not cut it. Scraping from the customer’s website and copy and pasting from the solicitation while saying "you understand them" is meaningless and hurts your credibility. Saying that you understand the requirements because you "have experience" is also weak because merely being present for something does not automatically result in any depth of understanding. Real understanding is demonstrated by creating an offering that is special. If you can’t do that, any understanding you claim to have has no value to the customer. Read the last sentence again, because demonstrated understanding trumps claims every time. It's not even close. But demonstrating understanding is only one way to be special. Special means rare. Special means something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Special means surprisingly effective or beneficial. If everyone does something or has it, it’s not special. Best practices are not special. They are the expected routine. You must do better to be special. Being RFP compliant is not special because you can count on everyone who is competitive meeting the requirements of the RFP. Compliance is needed to win, but it’s nothing to brag about. If you want to be special, try: Showing insight no one else has about things that matter or that could impact RFP compliance Offering innovative ways of being RFP compliant that produce surprising benefits Doing things in an exceptional way that results in surprisingly better results, less risk, lower cost, or other benefits Showing better judgment or addressing trade-offs in unique ways Being foolproof Fulfilling all of their goals and not just their requirements. Especially the goals they didn't mention Being useful in ways they didn't anticipate But they have to be extraordinary and not just a little better. They have to be things the customer will only get from you. And they can't be merely claimed, they must be proven. Even when the RFP requires all vendors to do or deliver the exact same thing, you can still be special. If you can’t be special in what you do, be special in how you do it, or why you do it. Sometimes companies that are truly special are not recognized for it, simply because they failed to explain why their offering is special. Being special can't be merely claimed Claims are not enough. Everyone claims to be special and no one earns any points during evaluation for that noise. Skip the claims and just go to the proof of your insights, innovations, exceptionality, better judgment, foolproof solution, alignment with their goals, being useful, and anything else that matters. When everyone claims to be special, no one is. Unless they prove it. Claiming it hurts your credibility because it makes you sound like a shady salesperson. Having done similar work before is a weak proof point. For a strong proof point, you need to show results that matter to the customer. Simply having approaches to fulfilling the requirements is not enough to be special. But making your approaches self-evidently more effective and proven under fire might be. The best way to be special The best way to be special is not for you to be special, but for the customer to get something from you that is special. Will they get better results, insight, fewer problems, better confidence, less effort, more reliability, etc.? Just keep in mind that, whatever it is, it has to be something they are not likely to get anywhere else to make your offering special in comparison to the others. In the Technical Approach, being special is usually achieved by being innovative. In the Management Plan being special is usually achieved by doing things more reliably. But the easiest way to achieve being special is to make sure that every single thing you say addresses why it matters. You can be special without being especially innovative by focusing less on what you do, and instead making how you do it matter. Proposals about things that matter to the customer are always special. Give the customer something special, and they have to select you in order to get it. Give them something that is special and that matters to them, and they will put effort into selecting you.

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There is one thing that if mastered will enable you to win every proposal, no matter what. The good news is that it is a simple thing. The bad news is that the implications are deep and achieving it can be challenging. The one thing you need to do is to get the customer to want you to win more than any competing priority. Keep in mind that it’s just a proposal. Your customer is not going to go to jail or lose their job just so you can win. They have other priorities that matter more to them than whether you win. They also have alternatives that might better match their priorities. There is no such thing as magic words that win proposals. You can’t hypnotize them into going against their other priorities. Understanding the implications This means that winning proposals is about positioning what you offer to be more supportive of the customer’s priorities than any other alternative. Understanding this is the secret to winning. The implications of it tell you what you should do in order to win. When you don’t know what points to make, you have three choices: 1. Guess and take a chance at being wrong 2. Water down your points so they can’t be wrong 3. Try to be everything to everybody None of those will win you every proposal. In fact, watering down your points and being everything to everybody is a great way to lose proposals. What most companies do to try to be the customer’s best alternative is to pile on the positive attributes. In reality, they usually pile on positive sounding claims that don’t pass the “So what?” test in the hope that something will stick. Their goal is to have more “positives” (whatever that is) than their competitors. If you list all the reasons why you think the customer should accept your proposal, you’ll find that some of them matter more than others. What you think matters doesn’t. It’s what the customer thinks that matters. So how would they weight them? Which ones are strengths, which ones will get ignored, and which will detract? You can guess. You can pile on, and hope some signal makes it through all that noise. Or you can write a proposal that reflects the customer’s priorities. When you get to the proposal, it’s probably too late to discover the customer’s priorities. But it’s not too late to think about them. Which do you think has the best chances of winning? Guessing about their priorities and writing a proposal based on that in order to show the customer why they should want your offering Piling on beneficial sounding fluff to somehow add up to the customer wanting your offering. Or not. It's not about you Great proposal writing is not about you. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Learn to write your proposals from the customer's perspective. Is a proposal similar to your priorities, or at least one that shows attention to them, with a few awkward spots the best? Or is looking through a list of sales slogans and finding a few gems the best? Do you read it all or do you skim? And if you skim, won’t the parts that grab your attention be the ones that reflect your priorities? And what about your boss and other stakeholders? Does it reflect their priorities? The real problem with a strategy of piling on beneficial sounding fluff (even if you don’t think your fluff is fluff) is that it is quite literally pointless. From one section/paragraph/sentence to the next, the point is opportunistic (that’s a nicer word than “random”). Basing your proposal on random, opportunistic points hurts your credibility and can make the customer question whether they can trust you, since it appears your priority is being self-promoting and you’re willing to say anything to win. When you base your proposal on making points that reflect the customer’s priorities, you create a more meaningful proposal in the eyes of the customer. Your points matter. They add up to more than a list of beneficial sounding fluff because they have meaning. Not only that, but you appear considerate. It shows you considered the customer in more than just a casual way, which makes you appear more trustworthy than vendors who didn’t. Can you discover them? Can you guess them? Can you be honest about them? Being honest about the customer’s priorities is perhaps the most challenging. How can you be honest about them, when the customer is often not honest to themselves about their priorities? When people think about and discuss their priorities, they often reflect their aspirations, and you can base your bid strategies on your customer's aspirations. But when people act, they do so based on their real priorities. Understand these and you will know what must be done to win every proposal.

This is a what a few days in the life of a proposal team can be like if instead of working with just an RFP and Microsoft Word, they use a performance support system. In her book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, Gloria Gery defined performance support systems as: An integrated electronic environment that is available to and easily accessible by each employee and is structured to provide immediate, individualized on-line access to the full range of information, software, guidance, advice and assistance, data, images, tools, and assessment and monitoring systems to permit job performance with minimal support and intervention by others. This makes a performance support system something very different from a workflow or automation tool. That’s okay, because unless you sell a commodity, proposal automation can do more harm than good. But a performance support system can enable your staff to produce better proposals. At least that’s been our experience in using the MustWin Performance Support Tool. We created it to bring together all of the content and training we’ve created at PropLIBRARY and make it part of the act of creating proposals. We’ve used it as an example below to provide the details necessary to visualize what preparing a proposal using a performance support system can be like. Walking through a typical proposal effort The Proposal Manager gets the go-ahead to start the proposal. Just like she usually does, she reads the RFP and begins creating a compliance matrix so that she can build a compliant outline for the proposal. When she’s done, she goes to the MustWin Performance Support Tool and clicks on the “Add Proposal” button and names the proposal. Then she starts entering the outline. It takes about 15 minutes to enter all the headings. When she’s done she can click on any outline item and have a place to plan the content of the proposal and enter instructions for the writers. Within the Mustwin Performance Support Tool, people can be “planners,” “writers,” or “reviewers.” So, the Proposal Manager needs to decide who will be involved in planning the content of the proposal. Will it be just her? Will she involve a few key people? Or will she give everybody access? Different companies have different needs at this stage. While she’s at it, she can also give the writers and reviewers their access. Now the Proposal Manager sends them email explaining what she wants the proposal content planners to do and when she needs them to complete it by. She likes to give people about 20% of the available schedule for content planning, so that she has a couple of days to review the plan and still have plenty of time to complete the writing. Making planning before you write a reality When the content planners click on the proposal in the MustWin Performance Support Tool, they see the outline and can select the items they are supposed to contribute to. If the Proposal Manager sets it up that way, that may be all they can see. When the content planners enter a proposal section, they’ll see seven topic headings covering key subject areas related to proposal planning. For example, “Win strategies: For identifying the points you need to prove, your differentiators, things to emphasize, and ways to maximize your evaluation score.” Within each of the topics they can enter instructions that cover not only what to write, but how it should be written, things that should be included, etc. There are six types of instructions that they can pick from. One type is called “Quality Criteria” and can be used to define the criteria that both the writers and reviewers will use to assess the quality of the proposal. There are filters that can be used to turn viewing of various types of instructions on or off, so that writers might focus on instructions, or when they are nearly finished only show the quality criteria so they can self-assess their work. Each person participating in content planning will go through their sections and add the various types of instructions across the seven topics in each section. This helps make sure that everything that should be addressed is included. When they enter the instructions, they can start fresh and say whatever needs to be said. Or they can click on an icon and look at the PropLIBRARY Recipe Library. There they’ll find hundreds of ideas for possible instructions. They can add them with a click of a button. Or they can customize the recipes based on the particular circumstances of this proposal. It only takes a few seconds to enter an instruction. Wrapping the plan with everything else needed for successful performance Over the next few days, the content plan starts to fill up with instructions. Soon it gets to the point where people can take a step back and really see what will be going into each section and how it will be presented. If there are holes or issues, they can bring someone in to address them with an instruction for the writer before they get stuck. The writers can see how much easier it will be to write with all that guidance, and they will feel less afraid of the proposal review process because the reviewers will be using the same instructions and quality criteria to assess the proposal. When the instructions are complete, the Proposal Manager asks the reviewers to take a look at the plan. The review of the content plan can be even more important than the review of the draft. Once the content plan has been approved, it’s time to invite the writers in to get started. The writers take over They don’t have to struggle to come up with what they should write about. Now, as much as I enjoy designing a winning proposal by crafting the instructions, this is where things really get fun. The writers go to the proposal page in the MustWin Performance Support Tool. If they can, they load it in a browser on a second monitor. Then they open Microsoft Word. If you have one ready to go, they load the format template with your headers, footers, and heading styles. They stare at the blank page, but only for just a second. Then they look at the instructions that have been entered in the MustWin Performance Support Tool. They don’t have to struggle to come up with what they should write about, if the instructions are well crafted. They don’t have to wonder about what points they are supposed to make. They see what they are supposed to write about and how they are supposed to present it. The results of doing this are so much better than handing them the RFP and a section assignment. It can turn proposal writing into a process of elimination instead of a risky black hole. The proposal writers don’t even have to fear the reviewers, since the quality criteria enable them to self-assess by applying the same standards the reviewers will be applying. But this is reality, and things aren’t always perfect. What if an instruction is difficult to interpret or implement? If a writer doesn’t understand an instruction or even objects to it, they can click on the instruction and post a comment. They can get clarification, discuss an issue, and figure out how to move forward as a team. Even if they are all working remotely, no one is alone. While they are working, the writers can signal their progress by clicking a traffic light icon next to each instruction. They all start off red, and when they are complete they should be green. The data show up on the proposal outline as an average, showing you the overall progress toward completion. It’s self-reported, but it’s a far more detailed, reliable, and data-driven way of measuring progress than you’ve ever had before. Proposal quality validation that goes beyond opinion-based reviews Proposal reviews are not a fishing expedition. The proposal manager has more choices for managing the review process. Should she require “pens down” during the reviews? The MustWin Performance Support Tool makes it easier than ever to have “rolling” reviews that don’t bring the writing to a screeching halt. But if you think it’s best to call a halt while the reviewers perform their assessment, you can. Reviews using the MustWin Performance Support Tool are not a fishing expedition. They target whether the instructions were followed and the quality criteria fulfilled. This makes the quality of the instructions more important, but it also makes the review of the narrative much easier. The reviewers get the same traffic light icons that the writers get for measuring progress. On one screen/window they have the proposal in Microsoft Word. On the other, they have the MustWin Performance Support Tool. The reviewers use the traffic light icons to declare whether the instructions were followed and the quality criteria fulfilled. Click. Click. Click. When published, the review results show up on the proposal table of contents. Section by section you can see where the reviewers scored the sections red/yellow/green. If the reviewers see something they want to comment on or explain, they can enter comments under the instruction or quality criteria. And don’t forget, you can still have a classic paper-based review with document mark-up and a debrief meeting. The MustWin Performance Support Tool just gives you new options for new approaches. For example, you can segment your reviews and have as many as you’d like. For example, you could have one or two experts review the instructions in the “RFP compliance” or “Offering Design” topic, but have others review the instructions in the “Win Strategies” topic. You can stage those reviews for when they make the most sense and conduct them without bringing the writing to a halt. You could even have them all going simultaneously. Then later, when you are ready, you can still have a traditional document review if you want. Or not. You decide based on what works best for the nature of your offering, the circumstances of this bid, and your corporate culture. Oh, and if your reviewers need training or guidance, it’s right there. They can take a course or read one of the articles we’ve published on making your reviews more effective. The Proposal Manager can take advantage of our library as well. The entire Proposal Quality Validation methodology that we recommend is available to them to help make their decisions and plan the reviews. What comes after the writing and reviews are complete? With the last click to green you can confidently take the proposal into final production. Experienced proposal professionals and most honest reviewers will tell you that many review comments are difficult to take action on, sometimes contradict each other, or have other problems. Writers are often not sure what to do to resolve some comments. Some comments get ignored. Some comments should get ignored. Within the MustWin Performance Support Tool, writers can ask questions after a review. They can discuss a comment. They can ask for suggestions or examples. And get them. No one needs to be left hanging when time is of the essence. You can also choose to have follow-up reviews to see if you can move any yellows to green. And they can be as quick as opening the file, looking at the yellow items in the MustWin Performance Support Tool, and re-reading just that part. With the last click to green you can confidently take the proposal into final production.

Take a moment and ask yourself why you're interested in reducing the amount of proposal writing. It could be because you're out of time. Or have strict page limits. Or have other priorities and want to reduce the effort required by a proposal. This is where I'd normally jump in with an ROI calculation that shows that the impact on your win rate of doing a proposal well makes it mathematically worth it. However, today I'm going to skip that and take an unjudgmental look at what it takes to reduce the amount of proposal writing. How to do proposals The Wrong Way™ is a topic I love to write about. Because, let's be honest, sometimes the "best practices" won’t help you. They generally aren't applicable to adverse circumstances. And sometimes just simply getting something submitted is such a great challenge that going the extra distance to improve your chances of winning is not an option. That’s when you may have to do a proposal The Wrong Way™. Doing a proposal The Wrong Way™ can ruin your chances of winning. You have been warned. But it can also help you survive the experience. Can you make a shorter proposal without hurting your chances of winning? The length of what you write for your proposal only matters if it’s related to what it will take to win. Adding detail may or may not impact what it will take to win. The trick to winning a short proposal is to understand what it will take to win so that you can say only that and do it in the fewest words possible. Most people add detail when they aren't sure what the customer is looking for and just want to cover the bases. The points below are not about how to achieve the best presentation or maximize your chances of winning. That's what the rest of PropLIBRARY is for. These are for when your top priority is to do less proposal writing. As anyone who has had to cut a proposal down to reach an RFP-mandated page limit can tell you, it can take a stupidly huge amount of time to shorten a proposal that's too long. If you want to save time and resources, the trick is to shorten it on the first draft. And since you’re probably working with proposal contributors who are not professional writers, you need simple, easy techniques like these to help them achieve that. The following tips are useful, risky, and problematic, but also effective in the right circumstances: Don’t talk about anything the customer doesn’t care about. Don’t say what you want to say. Only say what the customer needs to hear to make their decision. I could stop right there because it's really all you need to know about proposal writing in general, but you’d probably find that annoying. Separate features, benefits, qualifications, and what you are offering. Normally proposals contain a lot of narrative. And in that narrative, we try to do a bunch of things all at once. We add or expand our sentences to introduce, inform, include, claim, prove, differentiate, explain, position, qualify, score, comply, and more all in the same narrative. Stop doing that because it expands the amount of writing. Separate the points you are trying to make from the details of your offering. Use theme statements under headings, call out boxes, subheadings, tables, or anything else. Create zones where the parts go so that you don't have to connect them all with transition words or make them "flow." It will help you be less wordy, while still making the points. Go for punchy over smooth. Only do one thing in each sentence. Quit trying to write the perfect sentence. Quit trying to combine things like features and benefits in the same sentence. You still need to address the benefits. But when you weave them in and throughout, you make the proposal wordier than it needs to be. You can even create proposal writing formulas for your paragraphs with each sentence having a single purpose. Quit talking around it and just say it. Simply state the facts, details, proof points, qualifications, and benefits. You don’t have to ease your way into them. Don't introduce. Don’t be indirect. Think of your entire proposal as a checklist instead of a document. Instead of engaging with your narrative like it's literature, enable the customer to process their decision like a checklist that's presented as paragraphs. Don’t try to tell a story. Every proposal tells a story, even if you don’t try to. So tell a story about how easy you are to work with by making your proposal checklist simple. Just don’t explain the story. Let it be told by the clarity and simplicity of what you submit. Let your story be revealed without telling it. As much as possible, group things. When you group them, you can remove a lot of connecting words. You can make one point that addresses all of them. For example, in Quality Control Plan, you might say “Here are all the ways we improve quality by increasing transparency:” and then give them a super tight, concise list. Or you might say “Things we do to address the RFP requirement:” and then just give them a list. Write in lists. Bullets may or may not save space, but writing in lists definitely does. Write a long semicolon-separated paragraph with nothing but details if you have to. Just don’t explain every item in your list. Don’t summarize. Summaries are redundant. Skip them. Telling them what you are going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you told them makes for long proposals, just like this sentence. If your proposal needs a summary, then it's not well organized or you wrote too much. If your proposal needs a summary, the customer probably doesn't want to read your proposal (even if it has a summary). Don’t write warm-ups. Don’t introduce by setting a context, stating some universal principle, describing some background, providing history, or otherwise saying anything other than what you offer or why it matters. Don’t write conclusions. Building to the finish in a proposal is a mistake. Make your point up front and then support it. Don’t feel like you need to put something at the end. If you made your point, then the evaluator got what they needed. They want you to stop. Seriously. They don't need you to close out with something more. They just want to be done and don’t need to read through a recitation or a conclusion that doesn’t add anything new and just gives them more to read before they are done. Just stop. Do you hear me? Once the point has been made, that’s all they need. Giving them more to read might just be counter-productive. Don’t feel like you're leaving them hanging. Don't put them through a long goodbye. Just stop already. Make points, then stop. Spend a moment thinking before typing. What point do you need to get across? Make the point. Prove it. Then stop writing. Graphics. Graphics may or may not take less effort and space. In the right circumstances, they can radically simplify. If a process has more than half a dozen steps, you can probably illustrate it in less space than you can describe in writing. Just don’t explain the graphic in your text. Simply say “Our process is shown in the exhibit.” Don't create graphics that require explaining in the text. Ever. Tables. Tables work best when you can take a bunch of items in your outline and collapse them into a table instead of using headings. Tables are also great for making sweeping pronouncements and applying them to lists of things like RFP requirements. Another great thing about tables is that you can often structure them so you don't even have to use complete sentences. Often just a few words for each item will do. Try planning your proposal around tables and see how much less writing you actually have to do. Delete all the promises. I have reduced the length of some of the proposals I’ve reviewed by pages, simply by deleting all those statements about the company's commitment, values, dedication, or other expression of intent that don't actually say what the company is going to do. Don't promise things. Just do them. While you’re at it, simply delete any sentence that starts with “We understand” because all it's probably going to show is that you know how to copy and paste. Real understanding would show that you know how to deliver the results they are looking for and wouldn’t need to use the word “understand” at all to communicate that you deeply understand. Oh, and delete all those unsubstantiated claims too. Better yet, don’t write them in the first place. Make fewer claims. Focus on proof points. Remember, the goal is not to write a long proposal and then edit it down to a concise proposal. The goal is to write it that way from the first draft. Think twice, write once. Then go home.

It sounds so obvious that few companies bother to define it. But if you want to maximize your win rate, it’s worth giving some attention to how you define proposal success. You can't intentionally seek proposal success or consistently achieve it if you're just guessing at what it is. Let's start by looking at some common ways that people try to define proposal success. Anything that wins! During the proposal phase you haven't won or lost, so it doesn't help you any to use that to define success for the proposal you are working on now. A compliant, on time submission. Your goal should not be to simply submit the proposal. A late submission might be a loss, but an on-time submission does not mean you will win. Even if all your proposals are submitted on time, you could still lose them all. Similarly, all proposals that make the competitive range will be compliant. But only one of them will win. Being RFP compliant does not make you better than all the other companies that are also RFP compliant. A defect free proposal. Being free of defects doesn't mean your proposal is better than all of the other ones submitted. Proposal success is also not determined by the amount of effort put into it, how bad you want to win, how much you like it, whether it "sounds good," the most experienced person’s opinion, what the sales lead thinks, or even what makes The Powers That Be in your own company happy. So just what the heck in the world is it? Defining proposal successIf you submit a proposal that to the best of your knowledge reflects all the attributes of a winning proposal, you have done everything you can to achieve success. You just better make sure that the best of your knowledge actually reflects the way the customer thinks, evaluates, and decides. The way we like to say it is that what defines proposal success is whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win. Success comes when you: Conduct a reliable discovery phase that determines what it will take to win in a way you can articulate. Create a feedback loop that factors past customers' award decisions into future determinations of what it will take to win. Measure your win rate and the impact of the things you do to change it. Measure changes to your process by the impact they have on your win rate. If you leave "what it will take to win" undefined, or leave it up to opinion, you are just gambling. If you set your sales process up so that it is driven by opinion, you will not be competitive against companies that put more thought into it than that. If your bid/no bid process, pursuit strategy, offering design, proposal writing, and proposal reviews are all driven by opinion, you will not be competitive against companies that better understand what it will take to win. Believing that you know is different from doing the research. Belief does not win proposals. Almost everyone who loses a proposal believes they should have won. You may have great staff, but they will lose to the staff at another company who consistently put their energies into determining what it will take to win from the customer’s perspective, instead of basing their proposal on their opinions. If you pursue proposal quality by holding reviews that are basically subjective opinion-fests, you should take note. You could do so much better. Ensuring proposal successTo accomplish what it will take to win, you need to: Identify the attributes that make up what it will take to win Articulate them as quality criteria Assess the quality of your proposal by comparing it to those attributes To do this, your quality criteria need to be reliable. If they don't accurately reflect what it will take to win, they can actually become counter-productive and hurt the quality of your proposals. Your pursuit should start by researching what it will take to win. Sales should not just be about having “a relationship” with the customer and randomly finding out anything you can about the pursuit. Sales should use relationship marketing and intelligence gathering to discover what it will take to win. All the deliverables and progress reviews for the sales process should build toward being able to articulate this in the ways needed to win the proposal. They provide the input you need to create valid proposal quality criteria. Then you need a review process that ensures your quality criteria are reliable by making sure that: Everyone is on the same page and that how you have defined what it will take to win reflects the best knowledge available throughout your entire organization. The quality criteria themselves are reviewed and approved for use based on what it will take to win. This should include verifying that how you define what it will take to win is based on how the customer will reach their decision, instead of how you think they should reach it. When you do this, you define proposal success in a way that everyone can use to ensure their role contributes to achieving it. That is something that just basing your proposals on best efforts and opinions won’t do for you. How defining proposal success this way produces a better win rateWith this definition of proposal success, the people working on the proposal know what they need to accomplish. Before the proposal starts they need to discover what it will take to win. After it starts, what it will take to win should be turned into quality criteria so that the proposal writers can create a proposal based on what it will take to win. And to provide quality assurance, the proposal reviews should use the same quality criteria to determine whether the writers achieved what it will take to win.

I realized today when I was working on the specifications to support pre-RFP opportunity pursuit and capture, that nearly all of the functionality could be achieved right now using the current version of the MustWin Performance Support Tool. Sure, it would lack some of the automagic streamlining we're planning, but the core of what you need to use it during the pre-RFP phase is already there. I love it when things work out like that. It confirms that we're on the right track with how we've designed the architecture. Because the plan is to stick as close to the same database structure as possible and to use the same instruction-based information model, you can do much of what we’re working on right now. You’ll just have to do some things manually and it will require more clicks than it will when we officially add the pre-RFP support. Before we get into features, functionalities, and steps, let’s start with some requirements analysis. What do we need in order to smooth the transition from sales and business development into proposal writing? We need: Containers for the information gathered To provide guidance regarding what information to gather A mechanism for tracking progress and ensuring the right information has been collected To address the bid/no bid decision Within the paper-based MustWin Process, we recommend Readiness Reviews. So we definitely want the new features to support that, as well as be flexible enough to support the myriad gate reviews and pursuit processes already in use at companies. The first step is to add a “proposal.” Maybe we’ll rename that to a “pursuit.” But functionally it doesn’t matter. The next step is to create your “outline.” An outline item is really just a container. The outline might contain an item for each Readiness Review or gate in your process. Plus any other topics or containers you want to have. In essence, what you're doing is setting up the structure of your capture plan, along with any pre-RFP reviews and bid/no bid meetings. Try numbering your outline as decimals less than one (0.x). That way, they won’t conflict with the future proposal outline and you’ll end up able to have your pre-RFP information right next to your proposal information when the RFP is released. Our plan is to automate creating the pre-RFP outline, and enable you to save and reuse your own. Here is a sample outline to try. When you enter an outline item, you’ll see the topics we use in Proposal Content Planning. Not all of them are relevant to pre-RFP pursuit, so we’ll be changing them. For now, some of them will come in handy and the rest you can ignore. Within the relevant topics, you’ll want to add instructions and questions for your sales or business development staff to seek answers to. You can use the current instruction adding functionality to do this. We’ll be creating a default list of off-the-shelf questions that will instantly import. And it will be customizable. But for now you can manually enter the questions from the Readiness Review methodology or from our Master Proposal Startup Information Checklist. If you structure your pre-RFP pursuit around answering questions, the way we like to do, then your sales and business development staff can answer the questions by using the discussion feature. Every instruction item added automatically comes with a discussion area. You can use this to plan, review, and clarify your answers as you work to develop an information advantage ahead of the RFP release. When the RFP is finally released and it’s time to start the proposal, you’ll need to convert the information you gathered into input for the Proposal Content Plan. This will involve creating an RFP compliance matrix in order to develop your proposal outline and adding it in the MWPST. Once the outline is ready, you’ll need to manually copy and paste from your pre-RFP outline items to the final proposal outline and articulate things as instructions and quality criteria for the proposal writers. The bulk of the coding we have to do for pre-RFP support will be to streamline this, because we should be able to greatly reduce the number of clicks that are currently involved. The result will be that all of the customer, opportunity, competitive, and other intelligence you gather, along with the work that you do to design your offering and develop your win strategies, will all be in a place where it will be relatively easy to convert it into Proposal Content Plan instructions and quality criteria. Doing this will ensure that your information advantage gets translated into a better proposal with a competitive advantage. Down the road (don’t ask me when, but I'm expecting it to be less than six months), it will become even easier. You’ll click a button to start a new pursuit, set some configuration options, and then go straight into tweaking the questions and instructions that will already be there for your sales/business development staff. It will be easy to enter and build the information you gather. And then at RFP release, you’ll easily map what you’ve got to the Proposal Outline, maybe with some drag and drop. Then, when you are doing your Proposal Content Planning, you’ll have all of your pre-RFP intelligence right there in each section where it’s relevant so that you can turn it into instructions and quality criteria. It will be easier than I’ve ever seen this done before. But you don’t have to wait. You can do it all right now. We didn’t realize that it would work out that way when we built the Proposal Content Planning tool, but we’re glad it did.

All you need to do to produce a winning proposal is give the customer the information they need to decide in your favor. It really is that simple. And that totally hides how difficult it really is. While what you need to do is simple to understand, it is hard to achieve. Here are six top problems that get in the way of keeping proposals simple: You have to know what information the customer needs. It’s not about you or your offering. It’s all about them. It's their decision. What do they need to make it in your favor? You have to have the information the customer needs. If you know what you need to write about, but you don’t have the knowledge to write it, it’s a problem. When you don't have the subject matter and other knowledge you need, it's usually because you need someone else to provide it. See problem #5. You need to know how the customer will make their decision. You can’t give them the information they need to decide if you don’t know how they’ll reach their decision. If you’re lucky, they’ll tell you and it will be right there in the RFP. All you have to do is understand their process. Invest yourself in that. If they haven't told you, it's worth exploring and discovering what's important to them, what procedures they follow, what their preferences are, and who is involved. You have to say it from the customer’s perspective. You don't have to be able to write in any particular style to win a proposal. But it does help to be able to write from the customer's perspective instead of your own. And for some people this is a big challenge. Doing proposals bigger than yourself. It’s so much easier if you can do the whole proposal on your own. But you can’t. High-value pursuits tend to require more information than any one person possesses. What makes high-value proposals difficult isn't the size or the value. It's all those other people involved. Working on a document against a deadline with other people is hard. It shouldn't be, but it is. You have to recognize that and do something about it. It helps to have something the customer actually wants. If the customer thinks you aren't qualified, then you don't have what they want. While it’s good to believe in yourself and have confidence, selling your greatness despite not meeting the requirements is a contradiction. The customer sees it very differently than you do and their opinion matters more than yours. If you are selling what you’ve got and hoping to make the customer want it, you face an uphill battle. Now play them each back with a twist and you’ll see what you need to do to make your proposals as easy as they should be: Proposal writing is easy. Figuring out the customer is hard. Not knowing what information the customer needs. Proposal writing is easy. Figuring out the customer is hard and requires focus. It should be your highest priority during the pre-RFP phase. Not knowing the information that the customer needs is a major indicator that you shouldn’t bid. Put the majority of your effort into this and everything else will just fall into place. Not having the information you need to write a great proposal. If no one has it or knows where to get it, then this becomes an indicator that you shouldn’t bid. If you can get the information you need, then it’s just an execution issue. Once you’ve got it, the writing becomes easy. Not knowing how the customer will make their decision. When you don’t know how the customer makes their decisions, you only have two options: be everything to everybody or take a risk of being wrong. I’m comfortable taking risks, but most companies aren’t and make the mistake of trying to be everything to everybody. If you're watering down your positioning because you’re not sure what position to take, it’s another indicator that you shouldn’t be bidding. When you know how the customer will make their decision, it makes positioning and incorporating bid strategies in proposal writing easy. Not being able to write from the customer’s perspective. This is a skill that needs to be learned. Sadly, most proposal writing courses focus on process instead of how to assemble words the way the customer needs to see them. When you have the information you need, proposal writing becomes a simple matter of presenting it from the customer’s perspective. Other people. The primary reason companies implement a proposal process is to set expectations so that people can work together. But it is still more of a people problem than a process problem. It turns into a culture problem and an organizational development problem. Working with other people on a high-stakes document against a deadline is hard. If you resolve every other issue except the problem of working with other people, your proposals will still be hard. A case could be made that you have to solve this one first, before you can solve any of the other issues. When you solve how to write a proposal with other people involved, you may win the Nobel Peace Prize for being the first. But the closer you come to a solution, the easier your proposals will get. Having to sell something that’s not what the customer wants. Doing this forces you to write about what you think the customer should want, and that is not always the same as what they do want. Ignoring what the customer wants and presenting what you’ve got is a low-probability win strategy. That’s a nice way of saying it’s an indicator that maybe you shouldn’t bid at all. It’s much better to understand what the customer wants and then offer that to them. The next best strategy is to understand what the customer wants, show how what you’ve got relates to it, and then position any gaps as trade-offs that work in their favor. When what you are offering matches up perfectly with what the customer wants and how they’ll make their decision, proposal writing becomes a simple matter of telling them that and proving it. Note that I didn't include not having enough people to write the proposal. That's because it's probably not true. The reason you need more people is often that your company takes too long to make decisions, changes its mind after proposal writing starts, plays passive/aggressive games when people don't cooperate, and has to write in circles around the information you should have but don't. Fix these and you'll greatly reduce the number of hours it takes to produce your proposals. When you are in proposal crisis, remember that the problem is simple. All you need to do to produce a winning proposal is to give the customer the information they need to reach a decision in your favor. Being simple to describe does not make it easy to do. But it does help you gain some perspective on the problems. They are not inherent to proposals or insurmountable. All you have to do is figure out the customer and get people to cooperate and your proposals really will become easy. A little progress in these two areas will make a big difference. When you run into proposal drama, try thinking about which one of these is behind it. Then work on the real issue and you might be surprised at the progress you can make. How to use the MustWin Performance Support Tool to solve these problems Not knowing what information the customer needs. With the MustWin Performance Support Tool (MWPST) you still have to discover what information the customer needs to reach their decision, but the MWPST makes it easy to turn what you learn into instructions for writers to follow. And it gives you an easy means to validate that they did, helping to ensure that you end up with proposals that provide the information the customer needs. Not having the information you need for the proposal. The MWPST makes it easier for participants to contribute small pieces of information. Subject matter experts can answer questions or provide input without having to take on complete writing assignments. This makes it much easier to get input from many people without it slowing down the process. It helps ensure that when proposal writing starts, the information needed is there. Not knowing how the customer will make their decision. When you do know, you need to use that knowledge to drive the writing. The MWPST gives you the means to do that. When you don’t know, or there are multiple possibilities, the MWPST gives you the means to build your writing around the positioning and strategies you develop. You can build your proposal around intentional positioning based on what you think the hypothetical decision makers need, instead of just leaving it up to the writers to come up with something clever. This makes the writing much easier, by not expecting them to figure out something “clever” when they don’t have the information they need to do that. Not being able to write from the customer’s perspective. The MWPST enables you to remind people to write from the customer’s perspective while simultaneously prompting reviewers to check and make sure the draft was written that way. You can also include examples and explanations to help proposal contributors write from the customer’s perspective. And you can include links to online training for those who need it. Other people. The most important thing you can do to make it easier for people to work together on a document is to manage expectations. The MWPST gives you some new tools for doing that. If all you do is hand people an RFP and ask them to write something, you literally will get what you deserve. With the MWPST you can specify not only what should be written, but how it should be written. And you can include the quality criteria that will be used to assess whether it was written well. Not only that, but it enables people to discuss the instructions, seek clarifications, gather information, consider options, and more before setting it down in writing. Having to sell something that’s not what the customer wants. While the MWPST won’t design your offering for you, it will enable you to bridge the gap from what you are offering to what you need to say about it in the proposal.

Now that we've worked out MustWin Performance Support Tool and here's a link to a presentation answering frequently asked questions about it. If you want to know something and you don't see an answer, feel free to click the button below and send us a question. Or just give us a call at 1-800-848-1563. Click here to ask us a question

In the same way that the MustWin Performance Support Tool (MWPST) helps you plan, collaborate, validate, inspire, and accelerate the Proposal Content Plan, it can also be used to help implement a goal-driven process by: The MustWin Performance Support Tool shifts the focus from proposal data management and assembly, to creating proposals with meaning. Instructing proposal contributors regarding what is required to achieve each goal Facilitating their ability to ask questions and discuss options Enabling proposal contributors to self assess whether they have done what they needed to for achieving the goal Enabling reviewers to validate that what was done achieves the goal Inspiring proposal contributors with what to do, consider, or write to achieve their goal Accelerating their ability to figure out what to do to achieve the goal and then proceed This makes it easy provide guidance for how people should go about achieving their goals. This, in turn, helps your process become an asset that helps people achieve their goals instead of a burdensome mandate. When you apply this to each of the six goals we recommend, you can use the MWPST to: Readiness Reviews. Design the offering based on what it will take to win. Instruct SMEs regarding the anticipated scope and customer requirements. Discuss platforms and approaches. Self-assess whether the offering design will meet the needs of the proposal. Assessment by reviewers of the offering design's readiness for use in the Proposal Content Plan. Prepare a plan for the proposal content that defines quality and integrates everything related to what it will take to win. This is where the MWPST excels. But you still need input from the first two goals. So guiding people to bring what you need helps you excel. Write to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria in the Proposal Content Plan. Instead of a blank page, the MWPST puts the plan next to Microsoft Word as people write, enabling self-assessment, progress tracking, and discussion. Validate that the draft reflects the quality criteria. The MWPST is the only tool I know of that enables proposal writers and quality reviewers to work from the same quality criteria and make it checklist simple. Produce a final copy without any defects for an on-time submission. By the time you get here, the planning is complete and you are doing final production in Microsoft Word or some other word processing or publishing package. But you can use the MWPST to provide instructions and specifications, and to perform the final quality control checks before submission. The trick to implementing a proposal process that optimizes the flow of information is to put information in a form that best suits the next step in the process, instead of just storing it. Documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and the like) turn out to be poor formats for acting as an information repository. Documents require putting a lot of effort into things that get orphaned. This is why we prefer articulating things as instructions and quality criteria. Instead of simply pointing proposal writers at a bunch of files with data buried in them so they can spend their time finding and figuring out what to do with them instead of writing, the MustWin Performance Support Tool makes it easy to just tell them. It puts everything in a form that is useful to proposal writers. It shifts the focus from proposal data management and assembly to creating proposals with meaning.

Most proposal processes, whether they realize it or not, are about the flow of information. You could create a proposal process just by looking at how information needs to be discovered, transformed, and handed off from one person or step to the next. It works even better if you start at the end, with a winning proposal, and work backwards to define the flow of information needed to arrive at it. But it can get pretty complicated, especially when you take the enormous amount of flexibility required into account. Most proposal processes break from the first curveball the customer throws at you. You should keep the number of goals small. You want them to be memorable. You want people to know their goals without having to look them up. Here are some of the issues we are addressing with a set of goals that we are building the entire MustWin Process around: How do we get the information we need to win the proposal from the pre-RFP pursuit? How do we get an offer design early enough to factor it into proposal planning and keep people from engineering by writing about it? How do we get people to actually plan before they write? How do we get people to write the proposal correctly on the first draft? How do we achieve consistently effective reviews that actually result in a quality proposal? How do we complete the proposal without it being a train-wreck? It turns out these are all solvable problems. But when you rely on a process that is either poorly conceived or too complicated to survive implementation, they will seem impossible to solve. So turn each of them into a goal. If you articulate your goals well, when people do the things necessary to achieve the goals, the problems will not even arise. This is the best way to achieve quality. Instead of fixing your problems, prevent them from even occurring. Those of you are who inclined to build your own solutions can use this as a roadmap for achieving a goal-driven process. Those who want a solution now, might consider becoming a PropLIBRARY Subscriber and using the solution we’ve already built. Premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. For PropLIBRARY Subscribers, we have defined and documented the six goals we recommend for producing a proposal based on what it will take to win. We've also mapped these goals to the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, and turned it into a framework you can download to turn the process into something that will help people achieve the goals.

This is a framework we've developed for building a goal driven proposal processes, as opposed to a procedural driven process. It maps the major components of the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process to the process goals. When people agree to a set of goals like these, the process becomes a way of making the goals easier to achieve instead of a mandated set of procedures.

Unless your company sells a commodity, there can be great variations in the proposal process for every pursuit. It can be better to think of your proposal process as a series of goals than as a series of steps. It is not a procedure to be followed, it is a series of things to be achieved, with flexibility regarding how they are accomplished. Achieving the goals matters far more than the procedures used. Here are the six goals we use to drive everything we do, with links to the relevant portions of the MustWin Process that help people achieve them. 1. Discover what it will take to winYou can't build a proposal around what it will take to win if you do not know what that is. Discovering what it will take to win informs what you should offer and what quality criteria you should use to guide and assess your proposal. Within the MustWin Process, we use Readiness Reviews to reliably ensure all bids are pursued with an information advantage. Your understanding of what it will take to win is necessary to achieve the next two goals. 2. Design the offering based on what it will take to winEngineering by writing about it is a mistake. Before it becomes tangled up with writing, you should figure out at a high level what to offer in your proposal and do it with enough detail that you will not change your mind about what you are offering later. This means, for example, being confident that you can price it competitively, but not necessarily knowing all of your costs in detail. Your high-level offering design will become an input that is vitally needed for the next goal to succeed. 3. Prepare a plan for the proposal content that defines quality and integrates everything related to what it will take to win There are too many ingredients that go into great proposal writing for you to be able to write a winning proposal just with what you have in your head when you sit down at the keyboard. This is exponentially true for proposals with multiple subject matter experts and writers involved. Proposal writing should start by figuring out what should go into the proposal in the form of a Proposal Content Plan that does double duty as a definition for proposal quality and a tool proposal reviewers can use to validate the quality of the proposal. Proposal success depends on achieving this goal. 4. Write to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria in the Proposal Content PlanProposal writing is not a creative act without structure. It is not about discovering the magic words that will hypnotize the customer into accepting your proposal. Proposal writing is about fulfilling what it will take to win. If you discovered it in the first goal, prepared an offering based on it in the second goal, and used it to plan the writing of every section in the third goal, then proposal writing becomes about fulfilling your Proposal Content Plan and not just conceptualizing the proposal. Proposal writing becomes a process of elimination by incorporating all of the instructions and ingredients identified in your Proposal Content Plan and writing to fulfill your quality criteria. Instead of thinking about it as purely creative, try thinking about proposal writing as being like cooking. 5. Validate that the draft reflects the quality criteriaProposal reviews should be more than just a meeting where wise people share their opinions. Proposal quality should be validated for proposal reviews to be consistently effective. All four prior goals must be successful for proposal quality validation to be achieved. 6. Produce a final copy without any defects for an on-time submissionCompleting the proposal is always more difficult than it appears like it should be. This is because it comes at the end, and is impacted by the cumulative effect of schedule delays and issues that arise. This can turn the simple acts of not introducing any defects in the final formatting, production, and assembly and not running out of time into monumental challenges. What does it add up to?If you accomplish each of these six goals you will have: Discovered what it will take to win and designed you offering around it. Then you will have written the proposal to fulfill the instructions and quality criteria that were based on it. Your proposal reviews would have provided validation that you achieved these goals. Then you'd produce and submit the final proposal. Doing this diligently means that every proposal you submit will the final result of discovering what it will take to win and building your proposal around it. Get good at this and your proposal win rate will continuously improve.

When you sign into PropLIBRARY, you see your Dashboard and it replaces the home page. If you surf away, then simply going to the home page by clicking on our logo will bring you back to the Dashboard. Here's what's there and some of the ways to use it. See your statistics and your Score! At the top, just under your name are some statistics about your utilization. It shows the number of times you've visited, how many items you've viewed, and course activity. It also shows your Score! Everything you do on PropLIBRARY earns you points. Your Score! gives a quick, quantified way of showing how much professional development you've participated in here. Try clicking on your Score! That will show your transcript, including everything you did that contributed to your Score! It also shows your percentile rank, which gives you an idea how your Score! compares to that of other PropLIBRARY users. From your transcript, you can also decide whether to make your transcript visible to other users. This enables people, such as a manager or potential employer, to look up your Score! This turns your PropLIBRARY Score! into an objective, third-party, verifiable assessment of your professional development. Keep track of the courses you are taking and your favorite content The top of the center column is where we give you a list of the online courses that you've started but haven't yet completed. If you start a course and then have to take care of other business before you've completed it, you can easily find your way back from here. When you find a page in PropLIBRARY that you want to be able to refer back to, subscribers can click on the bookmark symbol next to the item's title, and it will show up on your Dashboard. Easily find subscription and customer information links Your Dashboard takes the mystery out of managing your subscription and other details. You can see your expiration at any time in the upper right corner. You can also renew at any time. Below that is where you can go to look up or print out invoices, download files you've purchased, update your email address, change your password, review and change your settings, and more. View other tabs with specialized features There are actually several Dashboards divided into tabs. You only see the ones you have access to. Corporate Subscribers can assign people to manage their accounts. They will see the tabs for Corporate User Administration and Training Administration. Corporate User Administration Tab This is where you control who has access under your corporate subscription. But it also gives you insight into how your staff are using their subscription. You can sort your user list by any of the columns, to see who are the most recent visitors, who visits the most frequently, or who views the most items. You can also reverse sort to see who hasn't visited or who has viewed the least number of items. You can also easily add new users, simply by clicking the button and entering their email address and password. For your existing users, you can change their Display Name (email address) and password. You can also delete users who should no longer have access. Finally, you can promote people to become additional Corporate Administrators so they will also be able to see this tab and make similar changes. We recommend that you have at least two Corporate Administrators to help ensure that someone is always available to make any changes required. Training Administration Tab The Training Administration tab enables you to see who has taken which courses. It also shows the total amount of training received by all of your staff. Then you can see who has taken each course and see each user's transcript. If you click on the "View User Details" button, you can see a list of your users and how many courses each has started, completed, and what their PropLIBRARY Score! is. Use the Dashboards to help continuously improve your win rate For Corporate Subscribers, the Dashboard gives you the information you need to change your organization. It turns PropLIBRARY from a simple online training site into a tool for organizational improvement. You can monitor, guide, and assist your users to develop the skills needed to increase your organization's win rate.

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