Carl Dickson

Price always matter. But some customers define price as value. They are willing to pay more to get more. Other customers want the lowest possible price. And the lowest possible price depends on what is the minimum they will accept. One term for this kind of evaluation is low price, technically acceptable (LPTA). In an LPTA evaluation, no matter what you say or do that's better than the minimum acceptable, the customer will not care. It looks like all the customer cares about is the price. And while this is mostly true, there is one thing other than price that the customer may pay attention to. A good strategy for winning an LPTA evaluation is to influence what “technically acceptable” means. This is far easier to do before the RFP is written, when you can discuss with the customer what they need to do to ensure they get what they need despite the award going to whoever lowballs the price the most. The end user is likely to be receptive to language that will prevent cost-shaving tricks. But what do you do after the RFP is released? How do you write a proposal, when what you say in the proposal hardly matters? In an LPTA evaluation it does not matter if your approach is better. It only matters if an approach is good enough. What can you do during proposal writing that will make a difference when the customer will only be evaluating minimal compliance? Try writing about what minimal compliance means Define your minimum standards and explain what happens when they are not met. Explain why they are your minimum standards. You want to provoke the customer into making a comparison and asking whether the other bids meet that standard. You want the customer to decide that if a company doesn’t meet that standard, their bid is not acceptable. The customer will not do this just because you think they should. They will only do this if the problems that result from failing to meet the standards you describe can’t be tolerated or lived with even a little bit. They will not do this if there’s a chance that something unacceptable might happen if the standards are not met. I’m not a big fan of selling by scaring the customer. But in an LPTA evaluation, you need to inform the customer about unacceptable things that can happen and motivate them to accept the standards you describe. If an award is made without discussions, then your definition of minimum acceptability must be clear, quotable, and result in any bid lower in price than yours getting thrown out. This is a long shot. But you know the subject matter, and you know what opportunities to look for to make your case. If the customer responds with questions or requests for clarifications before making an award, there’s a much larger chance that the issues you raise will become questions sent to your competitors. When a company receives a question from the customer asking if they meet a certain standard or have accounted for something, it’s hard to say “no.” You want those questions to trigger your competitors to raise their prices in order to meet those standards. In defining minimal acceptability, look for things that may cause your competitors to raise their prices. You must do this so many times and in enough magnitude that your proposal is not only the only one technically acceptable, it is also the lowest in cost. How do you implement this approach in your proposal? At every opportunity, preferably in every paragraph… Position everything you do that might be more expensive than a competitor’s approach as being absolutely necessary for success. Prove this point. Explain why your minimum standards are the absolute minimum for acceptable performance. Stay objective and avoid qualitative values like “less risk” because the customer has no way to evaluate qualitative differences in an LPTA evaluation. Avoid things that are improvements above the minimum requirements. You get no credit for being better. You get no credit for adding value. You only get credit for being acceptable. If you must propose an improvement, then it must be something that is necessary (and not just better) and you must prove that. Explain the trade-off decisions you made. But remember, there is no “better.” All trade-off decisions must be between unacceptable and minimally acceptable. Prompt the evaluator with everything that your competitors should account for in order to be minimally acceptable. Articulate things to give the customer the wording to use in justifying a claim that another bid is not acceptable, or to ask a competitor whether they meet a standard or have accounted for something.

Most companies perform their proposal reviews at level two. They recognize the need and are serious about reviewing their proposals. However, the results are not always effective, definitely not consistent, and many ask themselves if it's worth it. Some have made it to the third level and they understand that reviews are needed across all phases of the pursuit. But they too suffer from inconsistent results. Few, if any, companies ever reach the higher levels. I wonder why that is. It's especially perplexing when you realize that your competitiveness depends on the level of sophistication of your proposal reviews... How do you know if your proposal writers are doing a superior job? Where do your proposal writers get guidance for how to raise the bar? These questions are important if you want to make sure your proposal beats your potential competitors. Each of the review maturity levels below raises your win rate. And raising your win rate pays for the effort of being more mature. It probably pays orders of magnitude more. Proposal review maturity levels We review most of our proposals. We don’t have enough staff/time to review all of our proposals. If you have reviews and no written quality criteria, then you do not have a quality process. You have a review process. A review process is a good first step, but you will be more competitive if you evolve it into a quality process. We do a major review of every proposal before it goes out the door. This seems like an accomplishment, but unless you push to the next level, you are vulnerable to discovering that systemizing one proposal review can be worse than having none. You have achieved improvement but not quality. We have several proposal reviews over the course of each proposal. This is a huge advance over only having a single review. It narrows the scope considerably, but can still leave the scope for a given review undefined or too wide. You still have a problem with subjectivity, writers and reviewers not being on the same page, and getting contradictory or irrelevant advice from reviewers, because you are still effectively asking reviewers to give their opinions. You have gone from one opportunity for them to provide their opinion, to having several opportunities for them to provide their opinions. You have well organized improvement over the life of the pursuit, but not quality. We have multiple reviews of each proposal, and we train our reviewers. Ten minutes of discussion about what to look for before starting the review does not count as “training.” Do you train them in procedures, or in what to look for? Review procedures are just part of production. Training reviewers in what to look for means training them in what proposal quality is and what your standards are. You have no quality standards for your proposal unless you create them, publish them, and your reviewers consistently enforce them. The process of debating, standardizing, articulating and implementing your proposal quality criteria is one of the most important things you can do to increase your competitiveness. It’s how you set the bar. It’s how you raise the bar. It’s a necessary step toward making sure things are done correctly. Without doing this, proposal review effectiveness will be inconsistent. It is only at this level that you have begun to define proposal quality and what it will take to achieve it. Our proposal reviews are based on criteria and not on milestones. At this level, you realize that what matters most is to validate the fulfillment of your quality criteria. The number of reviews or how they are conducted is a lesser concern. You have begun to move away from mandating a certain number of reviews in favor of mandating reviews that address all of the quality criteria. To maximize your competitiveness, some of these criteria must be pursuit-specific. This means you need a process for defining your quality criteria on every pursuit, and reviewers trained to enforce pursuit-specific quality criteria. This is the level where you switch from having a review-oriented process to having a quality-oriented process. It is as big a step as when you first implemented reviews, and it requires organizational commitment to change how you perform proposal reviews. We have a written definition of proposal quality based on what it will take to win that we use to inform our quality criteria, we customize our criteria for each opportunity, and our proposal writers and reviewers both use the same criteria. This is the level you should be trying to get to. This is where your approach to closing the sale is fully integrated with quality criteria driven reviews and reviews are not just a way of fixing the proposal after the fact. When you create your quality criteria before the writing even starts, so that writers and reviewers both have the same expectations and the same standards, you integrate quality into your entire process. You design quality in from the beginning. This results in better proposals that are far more competitive than proposals that have been reviewed, no matter how many times. Which level is your company at? I've worked with a lot of companies that are willing but struggle with time management and getting everyone on the same page. The senior staff who often participate in proposal reviews often only have a limited amount of time to give. Making the shift from milestone-based reviews to criteria-based reviews can mitigate the time management issues. But it requires an organization that is willing to change how they perform their reviews, and it often requires a strong mandate to get everyone to leave their review process behind and embrace a quality-oriented process instead. Companies that embrace quality methodologies everywhere else often fail to apply them to their proposals. It is basically an investment decision. How much are you willing to invest in increasing your win rate?

While proposal sight reading is a good technique to know, if you are using it to perform all of your reviews something is wrong. It is better to have a proposal quality methodology that is comprehensive and not simply quick. You can read more about improving your proposal reviews here. The process we recommend for methodically reviewing proposals and maximizing their quality is called Proposal Quality Validation. We will post online training in how to implement it soon!

monthly_2025_08/proposal-sight-reading.mp4.13575bfdc7e23a1837d7ecccf4cfb2ea.mp4

https://captureplanning.wistia.com/medias/aozgf567f4

Congratulations! You've reached the point where you always have proposal reviews. You may even recognize that only having one review can be worse than having none, and have several reviews. But while your reviews make clear improvements, reviews alone are not enough to achieve quality proposals. It all comes down to how you define your proposal quality criteria. The odds are you don’t have any. Most companies don't have written quality criteria (and there is no other kind). Most reviews are performed by getting experienced people around a table with little or no advance preparation and having them sight read a draft of the proposal and give their opinions about what should be changed. A collection of people, no matter how gifted and wise, who think they know what quality is when they see it is not a quality methodology. If your reviewers just show up and render an opinion, then your definition of proposal quality is based on a whim. Sometimes many whims. That often conflict. So where do proposal quality criteria come from? It turns out that they're the same as the guidance you should be (but possibly aren’t) providing to your proposal writers. If the instructions you give your proposal writers reflect your definition of proposal quality, the instructions can be converted into quality criteria for use by your reviewers. We created a methodology for providing instructions to proposal writers called Proposal Content Planning and a review methodology based on converting them into quality criteria called Proposal Quality Validation. If you plan to convert the instructions in your Proposal Content Plan into quality criteria, you really should have a review to validate those instructions. And if you do this, that review will become as important as, if not more important than, the review of the draft proposal that comes later. Yes, your organization's decision regarding how quality will be defined for the proposal will do more to impact the quality of the proposal you submit than the review of the narrative draft if that definition is used as the blueprint for building the proposal. These instructions will need to reflect what it will take to win. And knowledge of what it will take to win will require customer intimacy, which will in turn require relationship marketing. You also need a way to design the winning offering that does not amount to engineering design by writing about it. To achieve proposal quality validation, you need more than reviews. You need quality criteria that derive from the instructions you give to your writers and are based on a flow of information that extends back in time to before the proposal even starts. In other words, to achieve proposal quality validation you need to integrate the steps that produce your quality criteria and not just simply have some reviews. Quality results from an integrated process and not from a step that occurs near the end. In many ways, the proposal process is not a writing process. It is a process of defining and achieving proposal quality. Since most companies don’t bother to define proposal quality, you can gain a significant competitive advantage and improve your organization's ability to win what it bids by being the one who does.

PropLIBRARY is a tool for companies who want to respond to RFPs like their businesses depend on it. The improvements a PropLIBRARY Subscription will help you make on your win rate will give you a huge return on investment. A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks the premium content that makes it easy to turn theory into practice. Standard Subscription Single User Comes with +9 hours of online training and access to our premium content libraries $495 for the first year Annual renewals starting next year are only $195 Advanced Subscription Single User Comes with +X hours of online training and access to our premium content libraries $695 for the first year Annual renewals starting next year are only $295 Corporate Subscription Up to 50 users at the Advanced level Provides +X hours of training for as little as $100/person and access to our premium content libraries $5,000 for the first year Annual renewals are only $3,000 PropLIBRARY provides: An instant process, resource, and training library that explains what to do at every step Dozens of checklists, forms, tools, and methods for accelerating and checking your work Proposal recipes to accelerate and inspire your writers Extensive online training Coverage of both the pre-RFP pursuit and post-RFP proposal phases Subscribers get access to: X Starting Points X Topic Hubs X Articles X Files X Recipes X Courses Subscribers also get access to: 9.5 hours of online training X items explaining the MustWin Process PropLIBRARY is ready off-the-shelf for the most sophisticated B2G and B2B pursuits. It is used to help small businesses win over much larger firms, and it is used by billion dollar companies to fill gaps in their processes, cost-effectively reengineer, and improve their win rates. PropLIBRARY is used by companies in all industries and over 170 different countries. The material it contains has been vetted by literally millions of visitors over the last 10 years. It's also highly customizable, so that you can integrate it with your existing processes and adapt it to the specifics of your business. PropLIBRARY does all this for a small fraction of your training budget. It costs less than any other training option, but delivers far more. PropLIBRARY could very well deliver the best ROI of any purchase you will ever make. How many contract wins will it take? FAQs follow...

See a sample of a Proposal Content Plan being built through each of the 8 iterations. Includes comments discussing some of the choices that have to be made along the way.

This presentation is from our Introduction to Proposal Content Planning course, which is free for PropLIBRARY Subscribers.

Contain a differentiator. When customers compare proposals, they look for the differences. Your proposal should call out the differences that make it the customer’s best alternative. Deliver a result or benefit from the feature. Features do not matter as much as what the customer gets from those features. Customers don’t just want features, they want their goals and desires fulfilled. What will they get out of what you have said? Matter. If what you just wrote doesn’t matter to the customer, then either delete it or rewrite it to make it matter. Pass the “So what?” test. Pretend you are the customer. Read what you just wrote. Ask yourself, “So what?” Now make sure it provides the answer. Align with the evaluation criteria. No matter how brilliant it is, if it doesn’t fit the customer’s scoring or decision making procedures, it won’t help you win. Prioritize the points you make to reflect how you will be scored. Address who, what, where, how, when, and why. It’s an easy mantra that can help ensure you exceed RFP compliance and ensure you answer all of the customer’s questions. Address everything the RFP required. What you write should add up to full compliance with all of the RFP requirements. Did you ignore, skip, or fail to meet any of them? Use the same terminology the RFP used. The customer will evaluate you against the words in the RFP. Using other terminology, no matter if it is more up to date or otherwise superior, can reduce your score. State the conclusion and substantiate it instead of building to the end. Customers read proposals by first looking for what they will get and then looking for why you are their best alternative. Then they look for the details to see if they can trust you. When you build to the finish, you make their decision harder and reduce the chances of it being successful for you. Be about the customer (and not you). Everything in a proposal should be about the customer and their decision. Even when they ask you to describe yourself, what they really are looking for are the things that they care about that might impact their decision. It’s all about them. Don’t make your proposal all about you. Every sentence should provide information from the customer’s perspective. Demonstrate instead of claim. Your claims may be hurting your credibility. The customer does not accept it when you say you “understand” them, have the best solution, have the most experience, etc. They want proof. Don’t make a claim and support it. Instead, offer a benefit or result and support your ability to deliver that. Show why you are the customer's best alternative. If you are not, you won’t win. It’s that simple. Just make sure you carefully apply #11 as well. Every single sentence of your proposal should be part of achieving this goal. Plus 6 things you should never do: Make unsubstantiated claims. See #11. Simply describe. See #3, #4, and #10. Talk only about your company. See #10. Use passive voice. See #9. Lead off with a universal truth that applies to all competitors equally, like "quality is vital for this project." See #3 and #4. Say anything that doesn't matter. See #3, #9, #11, and #12. You can’t do all of these in every sentence of your proposal. But you can do at least one. And in each section (if not each paragraph), you should cover them all. So check yourself. See how well you did. And the next time you're not sure how to approach writing something for a proposal, pick one and start. #9, #12, and #1 are good places to start. If writing like this is too unnatural for you, then just focus on achieving #3 and let your passion for the subject matter come through. But you should still check it against the full list when you are done.

Different people bring different perspectives to a proposal, both good and bad. They also bring different skill levels. Unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve a great proposal with contributions that are merely good. Or worse. It takes more than trying really hard to get good people to produce a great proposal. And yet, working with a team is the only way to create proposals larger than yourself. The only way to achieve a great proposal with a team of people is to design a great proposal, guide people through how to build it, and then verify that is what they accomplished. A design requires specifications. Specifications require knowing what to specify. But where most proposals fail is in the guidance. Assignments are given, but no guidance is provided until a draft is completed. On top of this, most proposal reviews are not based on any specifications other than the RFP and are not in synch with any guidance that is provided. This is not a path to greatness. Instead of proposal design specifications and construction guidance, it might be easier to think of them both as simply “instructions.” The instructions that you give the writers, and how well you validate that they were followed, determines whether you can achieve a great proposal using a team of people of mixed skill levels. We created a methodology called Proposal Content Planning that we use to create a container that you put your instructions into and ensure that nothing gets overlooked. What it really does is give you a way to ensure that all those great ideas you have about what should go into a great proposal actually make it onto paper, and it does it in a way that supports Proposal Quality Validation. Proposal Content Planning is a structured way to create instructions for proposal writers. The purpose of this article is not to describe the Proposal Content Planning methodology in detail. It’s to show how delivering the right instructions to proposal writers can help a team of people with mixed backgrounds achieve a great proposal. Here are 9 examples of how instructions can help you get past intent and put the right words on paper: Best practices. Writing from the customer’s perspective is an example of a proposal best practice. Specifying in the instructions that something should be written from the customer's perspective not only prompts the writer to do it, but compliance with the instructions can be validated to ensure it happens. Every recommendation that we’ve ever provided on PropLIBRARY can be turned into an instruction this way. Follow the formula. There are many formulations you can use to help you construct your proposal. One involves using who, what, where, how, when, and why. Another involves passing the “So what?” test. There are many variations on features and benefits that add details like proof or risk mitigation. Whenever you want a formula to actually be followed, you can turn it into an instruction, put it into a Proposal Content Plan, and validate that it was followed. Reminders. Want the first sentence of every section to focus on what the customer will get? Try reminding your writers. The odds of it happening without a reminder may be pretty low. Do you have an internal procedure to be followed? Insert a reminder for that. All those ideas about what should go into the proposal that often get left behind in discussion? Reminders are how you can make sure they get onto paper. Graphics. Want people to use more graphics in your proposals? Try reminding them. Or better yet, point out where the subject matter lends itself to creating a graphic. The best way would be to give proposal writers the graphic and have them explain it. But you don't have to be able to draw the graphic to know that a process should be illustrated, a relationship visualized, or a set of related items turned into a table. A simple instruction for the writer can make it happen. Inspiration. Inspiration can help people get past the fear of a blank page. Inspiration can help people raise an ordinary descriptive response to higher levels of greatness. Inspiration also works when you don’t know the answers, but you can ask intelligent questions that can inspire the writers with things to consider. The Proposal Recipes in PropLIBRARY are designed to do just that. But you can use the same technique and incorporate considerations that are unique to your organization. Standards and preferences. While I’ve never made it a priority, some people believe that you should never use the word "will" in a proposal. Some people have other editorial preferences. If you have a corporate or other standard, or just a particular way you’d prefer to have things presented, you can turn it into a Proposal Content Plan instruction. Strategic plans and positioning. If your company is serious about strategic planning, it should flow down into how you position the company in your proposals. An instruction to the proposal writers is a good way to implement this. Customer, opportunity, and competitive intel. When the staff who have customer contact don’t participate in proposal writing, what the company collectively knows about the customer’s culture and preferences often never makes it onto paper. Instructions can act as an intermediary, providing a place to record intelligence but tasking the writers with figuring out how to articulate what needs to be said. What it will take to win. Discover it. Explore it. Explain it. Explain how it impacts this section. Guide the writers on how to respond to the requirements while incorporating what you know about what it will take to win. If it’s just you doing the proposal, you are probably so smart that you can keep all this in your head without notes and write the proposal perfectly on the first draft. But as soon as others get involved, the proposal will settle into an average that is somewhat less than great. You can talk with them for hours and hash everything out. But the minute they leave the discussion, what makes it onto paper will be something less. This is where most companies start discussing it again. And they go over and over the same topics and the same issues. Then they submit whatever they’ve got at the deadline. Converting those discussions to instructions, preferably right there in the meeting, puts them on paper. This saves time by bringing resolution to circular discussions. But most importantly it gives you something to compare the draft to. When the draft is written, you can see whether it reflects everything that it was supposed to. This greatly improves the quality of your proposal reviews and establishes traceability from the draft all the way back to what you discovered about what it will take to win.

Proposal development should not be treated as an expense to be minimized. It is an investment as part of the cost of sales. When you compare what an increase in win rate does to your revenue, you find that the investment generates a positive return. Decreasing the investment leads to a lower win rate, and what that does to your revenue is create a death spiral. The trick is to lower proposal development costs without lowering your win rate. A winning proposal is one that is based on what you have discovered about what it will take to win, and is written from the customer’s perspective. Your best chances of winning come from fully customizing the proposal to make everything presented matter to the particular customer it is being submitted to. This makes automating proposal writing, recycling proposal narratives, and fill-in-the-blank templates bad approaches for maximizing your proposal ROI because they lower your chances of winning. Unless your bids are small or you sell commodities, any benefit of lower costs will be less than the loss of revenue from the decrease in win rate. This has been proven true every time we've run through the numbers with real companies. A better approach to lowering costs is to reduce the time spent on things other than proposal writing. This is an overly precise way of saying the best way to lower costs is to not waste time. If you watch proposals being produced, you will notice that far more time is spent with hands not on keyboards, than is actually spent writing. That is the time you want to reduce, not the time spent writing since the writing is what delivers the win. Most of this time spent not writing is spent thinking and discussing what should go in the proposal. This can be accelerated with these approaches: Have the information writers will need. A great deal of time is wasted talking in circles around things when the proposal team doesn’t know the customer's preferences, intentions, and how to make trade-offs. If you structure your process, including your pre-proposal process, to deliver this information, you will lower your proposal costs. This not only saves time during proposal writing, but it saves time during proposal reviews as well. Make sure writers know what to do with the information they have. Can your writers take information and present it from the customer’s perspective instead of merely describing it? Do they know how to feature differentiators instead of beneficial-sounding platitudes? Do your writers know how to plan and validate proposal content before it gets written? If you want writers to waste less time and make fewer mistakes, they need to know what to do with the information they have. This means training them to turn information and insights into winning proposal copy. This doesn’t mean generic once-a-year training. It means building performance guidance into the process. And that means having a process and not merely a way of doing things. It means creating an organization that develops the staff you need to achieve a high win rate. There is no alternative to this. Fail to develop staff who know how to prepare winning proposals and the process that supports them in doing it, and you will spend a lot of time failing to win. Accelerate through inspiration instead of recycling. Give people a list of questions to accelerate their thinking instead of generic win-rate lowering pre-written answers. Bullets that remind people of topics to address are better than paragraphs written for the wrong customer preferences and evaluation criteria. We like to create proposal recipes to provide inspiration and accelerate the thinking process. Separate proposal writing from offering design. Figuring out what to offer is something different from proposal writing and trying to do them both at the same time is a big time waster. Have an efficient methodology for designing your offering that doesn’t involve writing and re-writing until you trip over what you think you should offer. Know your bid strategies before you start writing. If your proposal is going to articulate why your proposal is the customer’s best alternative, you need to know what points to make in your proposal before you start writing so that the writing can substantiate them. If your writers are searching for bid strategies and making up themes as they go along instead of proving them, a great deal of time is being wasted. On top of that, if they started writing before they can articulate what points to make, there’s a good chance they’ll be tacking on the points at the end instead of writing based on the points to be made. This is wasting effort to produce a less competitive proposal with a lower win rate, which is a double whammy. Eliminate rework. Eliminating proposal rework doesn't just mean preventing defects. It means resolving differences of opinion and designing in improvements instead of changing direction in the middle layering them on at the end or rushing to a draft and correcting it instead of thinking it though and writing it once. There are three aspects to this: Collaboration and validation instead of break/fix. Waiting for things to break and then fixing them is not the best way to achieve quality. It is far better to design proposal quality in and prevent things from becoming broken. Writing a proposal and reviewing it to see if it is broken and then rewriting it is basing your win rate on a break/fix approach. A better alternative is to validate your decisions (offering design, bid strategies, etc.) before writing to produce a first draft that is correct in its composition. Achieving this requires many small collaborative reviews instead of one big corrective review. Giving detailed instructions to writers lowers the total effort. The better and more detailed the instructions you give your proposal writers regarding what to write, the more likely you are to get that back. See how that works? See how it relates to how thinking takes longer than writing? See how much easier it makes validating the proposal without having to write, read, and rewrite draft after draft? Using Proposal Content Planning to figure out what you should write before you actually write mitigates proposal risks and turns writing into a process of elimination instead of endless write and rewrite cycles. It also facilitates preparing for the proposal before the RFP is released. But the main thing it does is eliminate wasted time by dramatically reducing draft cycles. Focus on what to review instead of how to review it. Instead of organizing reviews around events (like a “Red Team”) and only looking at full drafts, try focusing on what needs to be reviewed instead of how you review it. Identify what needs to be validated. If you have a Proposal Content Plan, validating it will be more important than validating the draft. If you are trying to design quality in, then validating individual decisions as they are made can be a major focus. Catching errors early is much better than waiting to see a proposal that “looks ready to deliver” and then deciding it needs to change. This is a huge waste of time, and amounts to creating two proposals to get one you can submit, and instead running out of time and submitting what you've got. Criteria-based reviews give the proposal writers a clear set of expectations for what will be required to pass the review so that they can get it right on the very first attempt. When you follow these approaches for proposal development, you accelerate the things that take the most time, while eliminating your biggest sources of waste. But the best part is that you lower your costs while preparing a proposal that will beat those that focus on cost reduction by giving potential new customers the same recycled narrative they give to all their customers. Author's Note: I always feel relieved when I get to the end of an article like this and I check to see if what I wrote is consistent with what we've recommended in the past and built into our process, and find that it is consistent. In this case, I'm especially pleased with how the Readiness Reviews, Proposal Content Planning, and Proposal Quality Validation methodologies built into our MustWin Process all support the goals of reducing effort and lowering costs while increasing win rate. You can verify this yourself by looking around PropLIBRARY.

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There’s a gap between what you do to identify leads and winning. Once you identify a lead, then what? That’s where things get challenging. If you are going to get past the gap between identifying a lead and capturing the win, you’re going to need to build a bridge. To build a bridge you need to know things like: The size of the gap and what’s in it How to design a bridge to get you there How to validate your bridge design so it doesn’t fail after it’s built What resources you will need to build it How long it will take How much should you invest in its construction for it to be reliable How to build the bridge When you just start writing a proposal as soon as the RFP comes out, it’s like skipping straight to building the bridge without doing any of the other steps. When bridges are built like that, they fail. Disastrously. Yet, this what most companies do. They throw good people into construction before developing the organization that people need to successfully build a bridge. What’s in the gap? The gap between lead identification and winning consists of two things that your bridge will need to successfully accomplish for you to pass: The pursuit that happens before the RFP is released Proposal development, submission, and contract award after the RFP is released If you want to consistently capture the win, you can’t simply tell people to cross the gap. They might make it across. But they won’t be able to do it reliably. And if do this routinely, your win rate will suffer. To reliably cross the gap you need a bridge that provides a path to follow. And it needs to address both the pre-RFP pursuit and post-RFP proposal efforts. The MustWin Process is about bridging gaps The MustWin Process prompts people to discover what it will take to win. During the pre-RFP pursuit, it manages the intelligence gathered to build an information advantage. When the proposal phase begins, it delivers the information needed to plan the content of a proposal that is based on what it will take to win. It guides people through discovering and then articulating the messages in the right format to submit a proposal. It provides a quality validation methodology to ensure that the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win. But process is not enough For people to successfully implement a process they need to understand what is expected of them and be capable of fulfilling those expectations. The MustWin Process builds a considerable amount of expectation management into each step, but people also need to have the right skills. That’s why PropLIBRARY combines MustWin Process guidance with just-in-time online training. The MustWin Process also provides a framework for metrics and measurements that enable you to refine your techniques and increase your win rate over time. When combined with customized online training, this gives you the means to continuously improve your organization's ability to win proposals. Increasing your win rate over time requires change. It requires anticipating problems where you can, and implementing future solutions to the proposal problems you face today. Our approach with PropLIBRARY is to give you an efficient means to change, by enabling you to implement improvements and keep proposal contributors informed and trained. This is a key part of providing the organization required for people to be able to reliably cross the gap and capture the win. Our goal isn’t just to build a bridge to capture a win. We want to show people how to get so good at building bridges they capture all the wins.

Most of the examples of proposal outlines we see on the internet are bad. Really bad. And many of them are used in textbooks and taught as best practice! Here is a typical example: Title Summary/Abstract Introduction/Background Statement of the Project Problem Recommendation/Solution Objectives Scope Methods Schedule Budget/Pricing Resources/Staffing Conclusion References Now, forget you ever saw it and never use any of these headings. While this outline may get you a good grade on a lab report, using it in a proposal could result in a loss because: It forces the decision maker to read halfway through your proposal before they find out what exactly it is you are proposing. Do you really think they are going to work that hard? At best it creates extra reading for the decision maker and at worst it is patronizing, because it tells them about themselves and tells them what their problem is. Business proposals are not lab reports or scientific papers. Recitation does not show actual understanding. It’s giving them information they already have when what they want is a solution that proves you understand because it addresses their concerns. Understanding is best demonstrated by showing your solution is insightful and addresses their needs. It saves the conclusion for the end, when that should be the place where a proposal starts. Proposals should start with a conclusion about what you are offering, with the rest of your proposal substantiating your ability to deliver it to earn credibility instead of building up to a conclusion. Readers don't read a proposal all the way through to find out how it ends. If they don't see something compelling up front, they skip ahead looking for something that is compelling. If that doesn't come until the end, they may not ever read it. You see variations on this bad outline all over the place, probably because it's what people learned in school. It might be easy for a teacher to grade, but it makes a buyer’s decision more difficult, and that will increase your odds of losing your proposal. This outline is not competitive against an outline that’s written to give the decision maker what they need. The headings in your outline should tell the customer what they need to know The best way to understand how to write a proposal is to put yourself in the shoes of the person making the decision. When someone sends you a document asking you to do something, what do you need to see to decide whether you should do it? The decision maker starts with questions and looks for answers. They don’t read your proposal. They look for answers. When you are the decision maker, your questions might include: What am I going to get or what will the results be? Is the effort to read the proposal worthwhile? Have my expectations been fulfilled? Do I have sufficient information and have my questions been answered? What could go wrong? Why should I believe I’ll get what’s been promised? What does the vendor want from me? How much is it going to cost and is it worth it? Am I sufficiently motivated to move forward? If I accept the proposal, what do I have to do? Now pretend that you are receiving a proposal from someone who wants you to do something, approve something, or buy something. Think about the first thing you want to read. If you weren’t expecting to receive a proposal, it might be “What do you want (from me)?” If you were expecting the proposal, then the first thing you'll probably want to know is “What am I going to get?” This is closely followed by “What do I have to do to get it?” and “Is it worth it?” If you agree that it’s worth it, you’ll want to dig deeper and find out what it will take to make it happen. At that point you start looking for things that could go wrong and will want to make sure you can trust the person or company who brought you the proposal to deliver what they promise. If this is what the decision maker is looking for, then that is what your outline should be. You can use the questions above to organize your proposal: Introduce what the customer is going to get Are you fulfilling their expectations? Explain how you will do or deliver the desired results Are you answering all of their questions, addressing and mitigating any risks, eliminating obstacles, establishing value, and proving that your proposal is their best alternative? Have you credibly shown that they will get what you’ve promised? If you are basing that (at least in part) on your experience or track record, have you shown what they’ll get as a result of your having that experience or how it will impact this project? Describe the cost and explain how to move forward Have you made it clear what they need to do to act on your proposal (including both their procedures as well as yours) and given them sufficient motivation to take that action? When you write your proposal you should be goal-driven. When addressing what the customer is going to get, you should describe it in a way that is compelling and motivating. When you explain how you will do or deliver the desired results, you should explain why you do those things and show insight, so that the customer will see value in what you offer, and hopefully that the only way to get their needs fulfilled is by accepting your proposal. When discussing costs and moving forward, you should deliver a strong value proposition that makes the benefits so much better than the costs that accepting your proposal is their best alternative. Converting what the customer needs to know into your outline You should organize your proposal around the questions that you anticipate the customer will have. But to convert these questions into an outline you present the answers. Instead of words that define categories, you can use your headings to deliver a message. If your headings are answers instead of questions, they can tell a story on their own. They should all add up to proof that you are the customer’s best alternative. When you answer the questions you anticipate the customer having, provide each answer as a heading and then substantiate the answer in the text. Each heading should provide one more reason why the customer should accept your proposal. After you do this, compare it to the outline at the top and ask yourself which best provides the buyer with what they need to know. What about the RFP? If you're writing a proposal in response to a written RFP that specifies how they want the proposal organized, you must follow their outline. If you are like me, you didn't learn in school how to parse the instructions in an RFP into an outline, let alone how to incorporate multiple sections of the RFP to create a compliant outline. And you definitely didn't learn how to create a cross-reference matrix that shows which RFP requirements are addressed where in your proposal. If RFP compliance is required to win, an outline for an RFP-based proposal may need a cross-reference matrix to ensure that there is a place to address every RFP requirement and that place is where the customer expects to find it. However, the evaluator of your proposal still has the same questions and they still need to find the answers in your proposal. An excellent way to exceed the RFP requirements without increasing the cost of your solution is to do a better job of answering these questions, especially the ones they didn't ask. If the RFP permits it, you can usually add to the customer's required outline. This gives you a chance to create a proposal that does a better job of answering the customer's questions. The primary goal of a proposal is not to inform or describe, it’s to persuade by helping the reader decide. To win your proposal, you need to provide the decision maker with the answers they need and then motivate them to accept your proposal. Your outline should be organized to meet their needs and not simply recite the problem or categorize information.

One way to approach proposal messaging is to make it about something. It helps to focus your thoughts. And it can give you something to stand for. Instead of simply positioning against the competition and everything else, you position to matter about something. This helps the customer perceive your value. When the competing proposals aren’t very different from each other, this kind of subtlety can determine who wins, because it shows better insight, understanding, and even value. The list below is also a good tool for learning to think about things from the customer’s perspective. You shouldn’t just focus on what you’d like to make your proposal about. You should make your proposal about what matters to the customer. 16 things to consider making your proposal about: You. It’s usually a mistake to make the proposal about yourself. But most companies do. It’s kind of like trying to get a date by talking only about yourself. Likewise, if you are the buyer, do you want “pick me!” to be a constant refrain? You can make the proposal about your being the customer’s best alternative, but this works best when you take it a step further and make it about what the customer will get by selecting you, instead of simply being about why to select you. The customer. All proposals are about the customer, whether you write them that way or not. Recognizing this explicitly and writing from their perspective is very powerful. Your offering. While you need to describe your offering, that’s not what your proposal should be about. Your proposal should usually be about why your offering is the best alternative for the customer. It’s always about the customer. Fulfilling the customer’s needs. Making your proposal about fulfilling your customer’s needs is one way to bring focus to making your proposal about the customer. Just be careful to make it about the customer getting their needs fulfilled and not about you as the one who will fulfill them. Don’t cross the line and make it about you by accident. And don’t make it about the fact that the customer has needs because that awareness of that fact doesn’t deliver any value. Instead make it about the fulfillment of those needs. A solution. While you’re offering a solution, what the customer is really interested in is why that solution is the customer’s best alternative. What the customer will get out of your solution and what makes it the best alternative may matter more than the solution itself. Giving the customer what they asked for. When the customer tells you exactly what they want and expects your proposal to be about that, it’s still about them. It’s about why your way of delivering exactly what they asked for will give them the best results or benefits. It’s about them getting what they asked for with the most value added. Even if price is the only value they are concerned with. And keep in mind that everyone else will be proposing at least what the customer asked for. Being about something doesn't have to cost any money and can make the difference. Getting results. It’s not the offering that customers usually want, it’s the results that offering delivers. Or more accurately, it’s about how much better off they’ll be because of those results. It’s always about the customer. The results of a procurement are often just a means to an end. When this is the case, the results that best facilitate achieving that end will have the most appeal. A recommendation. If you want the customer to take action, you can make a recommendation. You can recommend that the customer select you, but that’s the same as making the proposal about you. If the customer isn’t sure about what they want, or if they don’t realize the implications of what they’ve asked for, you can make recommendations that will achieve better results. If this deviates too far from their expectations and evaluation process, this can be risky. But if you deliver what they asked for, and can give them better options while staying within the structure of the RFP, you can offer a value that is highly differentiated. If the customer lacks expertise or has difficulty deciding what to do, you can make your proposal about your willingness and ability to make recommendations and enable the customer to make better informed decisions. Informing and teaching. Sometimes the customer just doesn’t know what they are doing. Maybe they’re just not good at writing RFPs. If you can avoid patronizing and offending them, you can deliver a proposal that is informative and teaches them what they need to know, and along the way you can show them that you are their best alternative. Even a well written RFP will require trade-offs, and your rationale in resolving them can matter. When you make your proposal about informing and teaching, you demonstrate the value of your expertise. Demonstrations trump declarations. Preventing a problem. When a key feature of an offering is that it prevents problems, you can make your proposal about that. The trick is to make it about the benefits of the resolution, and not about the problem itself, because your value is the resolution and not the problem. Focusing too much on the problem is just selling fear. Reducing risk. Reducing risk is similar to preventing problems, but with more uncertainty. With risk it’s not a feature in your offering that prevents a problem, but your techniques for identifying and mitigating risks that matters. You might not even know what the risks are at the beginning. For example, in systems development there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Your ability to prevent, monitor, and respond when they happen may matter to a risk averse customer. Making an improvement. Do you know a better way? Can you help the customer become better, more capable, faster, or more efficient? Just remember to make it about the customer and how much better their improved future will be instead of the improvement itself. And make sure you address any reluctance they may have in changing the status quo. Return on investment. Does the customer consider what you are proposing to be an expense or an investment? What they need from a vendor is different between the two. How does the customer perceive the procurement? You can prove it is worth it to spend as much as possible if your proposal nets a high return on investment, but if they view your proposal as an expense you need to reduce costs. If your proposal is about return on investment, make sure you prove your case. When a customer talks about obtaining the best value, it means they may be willing to invest in a better return but that their ability to do so may be limited. Answering the customer’s questions. If the customer is full of questions, your proposal can be about providing answers. But don’t just simply provide answers. Your proposal is really about generating sufficient confidence for the customer to move forward with what you propose. A destination. Where will the customer end up if they accept your proposal? How wonderful will it be? You can go beyond features and benefits and make your proposal about where they’ll end up as a result. Just make sure that’s where they want to end up. A differentiator. Customers look for the differences between proposals to determine which is better. If you are not actively identifying differentiators and featuring them in your proposal, you’re not trying to win. If you are, you can take it a step further and make your proposal about your differentiators. If you do so, make sure you make it about how the customer will be impacted by those differentiators and not the features that are different themselves. Features that differentiate get noticed, but it’s their impact that determines whether you win. Because many of these are related, you might be able to employ a couple at a time. But even though many will resonate with you, you can’t use them all at the same time and still have a proposal that is about something.

Proposals should stand for something. They are inherently aspirational. You aspire to win and beyond. The customer aspires to procure, reap the benefits, and beyond. Proposals matter when they fulfill aspirations. You want your proposal to matter. But are they your aspirations, your company’s, or your customer’s? Even within your own company, executives, sales, marketing, and proposal development staff all have different aspirations. Something similar is true for the customer’s aspirations. And which aspirations should impact your strategies? How do they impact what ink you put on paper? Discovering how you and your company’s aspirations impact your bid strategies: Are your aspirations tied to this particular pursuit, or are they broader? Should your strategies be aimed at developing the foundation for your broader aspirations? Are your aspirations personal or organizational? And if you answer “organizational,” who defines those organizational aspirations? How does this pursuit relate to them? Where is the line between your dreams and what can be achieved through this pursuit? How do those aspirations produce benefits for the customer of this pursuit? If you achieve your aspirations, why would that matter to the customer? Why should your aspirations make the customer more likely to accept your proposal? What should you change in your approach to the bid that would make this more likely? Discovering how your customer’s aspirations impact your bid strategies: Will the customer’s personal aspirations impact their decision making? Who defines the customer’s organizational aspirations and do the decision makers share them? Are the customer’s aspirations well focused, overly broad, or somewhere in between? Where is the line between what the customer dreams of and what can be achieved through this procurement? Does the customer have a consensus regarding their aspirations? How could this procurement impact the customer’s organizational aspirations? How do the customer’s mission, goals, and needs relate to their aspirations? Are there any conflicts between the solicitation requirements and the customer’s aspirations? Is your understanding of the customer’s aspirations up to date? What about fulfilling their aspirations could lead a customer to select one proposal over another? What can you do to further you and your customer’s aspirations in a way that makes your proposal the customer’s best alternative? Answering this in a way that impacts your bid strategies and what you say in your proposal can put you in a position of being the way for the customer to achieve their aspirations. What can you do or say in your proposal to become a vital part of the customer’s dreams? Or should you simply respond to the RFP like everyone else?

Q&A or point-by-point proposal formats are so easy. You don’t have to give much thought to the outline. But that’s not the reason to choose them. Easy is not always the best. What should drive your approach to creating the outline for your proposal is what the customer wants to see in your proposal and where they expect to find it. You do not want to lose just because the customer didn’t see things where they expected them and didn’t go looking for them. What information do they need to reach a decision? In what sequence? Remember, proposals are not read (like a book), they are evaluated. People don't want to read every word. They only want to read the parts they need to in order to make their decision. They need to be able to find these quickly. Don't get thrown out The first goal for proposals is to not get thrown out. If the customer has given you instructions regarding the outline or proposal organization and you do not follow them, they may throw out your proposal without even reading it. If there is an RFP, you should start there. Your outline should make it easy to find what they will be looking for. Usually, this is best done by putting things in the sequence and terminology used in the RFP. Within the structure mandated by the RFP, you can add more headings of your own underneath theirs if needed. That might lead you to a Q&A or point-by-point low level outline. Or not. If the RFP itself specifies a Q&A or point-by-point response format, then you are lucky because it is clear what the customer expects and you’re not just doing it because it is easier. Should you choose a Q&A or Point-by-Point format? As long as they don't conflict with the RFP, there are many ways to organize the material you want to present. A Q&A format is best when the customer has given you questions to answer, or when you can anticipate the questions that the customer will have. A point-by-point response is best when that suits the nature of your offering. This can happen when there are specific locations, components, or details about your offering that fit with the customer’s needs or understanding. What about other alternatives? But not all offerings lend themselves to a Q&A or point-by-point response. A proposal to provide complex services or a solution might not have a finite set of objective components to structure your response around. They might be better suited to organizing based on: Results Processes Functions A work breakdown structure Risks Or something else that matters to the customer If telling a story is part of your proposal strategy, a Q&A or point-by-point response format can also make it more difficult. If the customer will have a formal evaluation process, like they do in government procurement, you might organize your response first around the RFP instructions, then the evaluation criteria, and then the offering in response to the requirements in the statement of work. Organizing around the way the customer makes decisions or will perform their evaluation is a powerful way to build your outline. How do you choose the best outline format for a proposal? The best outline format is one that the customer thinks is best, and not necessarily the one that you think makes the most sense. For the customer, proposals are a decision-making tool. Q&A outlines have the advantage of helping to make sure you answer all the questions that a customer might have. But not all subject matters are best organized around questions. You should choose the outline format that will: Not get you thrown out Meet the customer’s expectations Best support the customer’s evaluation or decision-making process Facilitate telling your story Help guide them to realize that your proposal is their best alternative Consider each of these carefully before committing to a Q&A or point-by-point outline format for your proposal.

Some people are faster than others. Estimating how long it will take someone to read something or perform an exercise can sometimes be very subjective. Here are some benchmarks we use to estimate course lengths to help refine and standardize our guesses: 1 article = 5 minutes 1 quiz question = 1 minute 2 presentation slides = 1 minute 1 video minute = 1 minute 1 page file = 5 minutes Here are a couple of examples: A one-hour course might consist of a single module with 5 articles, a 10-question quiz, a 10-slide presentation (or 5-minute video), and a 20-minute exercise. A 1.5-hour course might consist of two modules with 10 articles, a 15-question quiz, a 10-slide presentation (or 5-minute video), and a 20-minute exercise. A 2-hour course might consist of two modules with 8 articles, one 20-slide presentation, one 10-minute video, and a 1-hour exercise. Many other combinations are possible. Courses can be longer, there really is no limit. But for online consumption and development, it's better to break things up into smaller pieces. Sixteen one-hour courses are better than one 16-hour course.

We'll do the actual posting of your content online. You just need to show up with the right content, ready to post. But there will be overlaps where we need to work together. Here are some examples: You have files that might be better converted to articles You have PowerPoint that could be post as a presentation, video, or just a file You have recordings that are long and may need to be broken up into small pieces You need to create quizzes and exercises You need help estimating the length of the material you have and whether to add, delete, or change it to fit your target Contact us early. That way we can talk through what needs to be done, help you avoid problems, and figure out how to best work together to get your course posted.

If you have existing content, then your primary consideration will be identifying and filling any gaps. If you are creating a course from scratch, you will first needs to identify your needs. But even if you have existing content, you need to understand those needs to fill the gaps. Mapping instructional needs to course Start by identifying requirements such as: Capability to perform tasks Knowledge, awareness, or understanding Preparation required for contingencies Creating courses from scratch Map requirements to courses and identify course item topics to fulfill the requirements For each course item topic, identify the course item type based on subject matter (articles, presentations, videos, etc.). Consider whether subject is best learned by reading, stepping through the material, having it explained, performing exercises, etc. Consider quizzes for knowledge-based courses and exercises for skills-based courses Consider course length and reorganize courses as needed Create draft items Use the system to track progress and work towards a process of elimination Repurposing existing content While you should still consider the instructional goals above, repurposing content can be as easy as: Create a course item library Drag and drop into courses to create drafts Consider whether to post items as files, article, presentations, or videos Create draft items to fill any subject matter gaps Add quizzes and exercises Creating an outline You should plan your courses in an outline that looks like this: Course name(s) Module name(s) Item name(s) and type(s) Quiz or exercise in each module (optional but recommended) If you put your outline in a spreadsheet you can track other details like contributors, number of quiz questions, length targets, etc., it convert at least some of your course development into simple data entry.

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