Carl Dickson

Proposal managers get all the glory and usually more money. Proposal writers are sometimes treated like low-skilled interchangeable assembly-line workers. It's as if anybody who can complete a sentence can do the job. But proposal writers are different from other forms of writers. And if you care about your win rate, it’s a difference that matters. Proposal writers are matchmakers as much as they are writers. They don’t merely put things on paper, they put things in context. They don’t merely find the right words, they consider what things add up to, and then find the right way to express it so that it matters to the proposal evaluator. There is always more than one way to say something. Proposal writers find the combination that produces the best chance of winning. Proposal writers focus on a lot more than just getting words written Their skill at what to consider is as important as their skill at writing. First, they must consider RFP compliance. Then they must consider what wording will get the highest evaluation score. Then they must incorporate the company’s bid strategies and positioning. They might even need to reference the company’s strategic plan or branding guidelines. Then there is the consideration of graphics and visual communications which are often initiated by the proposal writers. And oh yeah, while they’re at it they must not only describe the offering, but do it while focusing on what matters about it. They must figure out how to articulate things so that your aspirations become real and proven. Doing this usually means collaborating with one or more subject matter experts who understand the offering, but usually don’t understand the context that it must be presented in. And everything must be written not as simple descriptions, but from the perspective of what the customer needs to see to make their decision. They must translate not only the words, but the perspective as well. Proposal writers as matchmakers And this is just the mechanics. Considering the strategies, positioning, and other elements required to put the offering in a context that makes it the customer’s best alternative is where a proposal writer's matchmaking skills come into play. Proposal writers create a match between you and your customer. Proposal writers create a match between your best attributes and strategies, and what the customer needs to see in order to reach a decision based on the customer's evaluation process. They not only produce a proposal, but they help you realize what your company needs to become to reach its full potential. They are transformative. And they don't get the respect they deserve. While other forms of writing are pure art, proposal writing is just as much a process. It has a discovery phase, an assessment phase, a planning phase, and an implementation phase. It’s not just as simple as putting words on paper. It requires steps. In many ways, the writing part is the smallest. It's one part writing and 999 parts figuring out what to write. Proposal writing is closer to systems integration than it is to art. Proposal writers as winners Proposal managers provide vital leadership. They herd cats. They implement the necessary process. It’s a critically important role and very difficult. But proposal managers need writers who can do more than put RFP compliant words on paper. Proposal managers lead, but they require proposal writers to win. And just as all types of writers are not the same, they don’t all have the skills required to win. Think about that the next time you select a proposal writer. Think hard about it when you are selecting the most inexperienced person to do proposal writing simply because they are available. You aren’t selecting a writer. You are selecting a winner. And to win you need someone who understands how to do that in writing. And oh, by the way, the skills a proposal writer needs do not always correlate with experience or training. Sometimes well-trained proposal writers with tons of experience still write descriptive copy from their own perspective. If you are a PropLIBRARY subscriber, here’s an assessment tool we created to help you identify those who have the gift.

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The reason that very few writers can do both technical writing and proposal writing well is that they have different goals, methods, expectations, and processes. All writing is not the same. Having experience with one set of goals, methods, expectations, and processes does not guarantee success at the other. In fact, it may increase the odds of failure. Technical writers value clarity and accuracy. People must be able to not only understand their instructions, but follow them. Technical writers describe carefully. They help people learn and execute tasks. Their methods and processes emphasize accuracy. Proposal writers put things in context. A descriptive proposal is a bad proposal. Proposal writers seek the alignment between the RFP, the offering, and pursuit strategy. They position for advantage in a competitive environment where a single winner takes all and defines success. Great proposal writers explain what matters about things instead of simply describing them. They translate what needs to be known into what matters from the customer’s perspective. They help evaluators learn only what they need to know to make their selection. They write about things that are imprecise, not well defined, unknowable, emotional, and yet vital. They do this competitively. Even though both are writers, both are writing for a purpose, and both believe they can express what needs to be expressed, very few people can do both types of writing well. All proposal writing needs to make a point and not simply inform. The points made by proposal writing involve positioning against everything that will impact the evaluators' decision. These typically include how the buyer will benefit from the offering, how the proposal relates to the evaluation criteria, and everything that matters to the customer. Proposal writers tell a story. They also think as much about pursuit strategy as they do the details they are writing about. Both technical writers and proposal writers need to anticipate the questions their readers will have. However, proposal writers position their answers to put them in the context that gives them the best chance of being selected. Both technical writers and proposal writers need to understand their reader’s perspective to translate what they want to communicate into terms the reader will best understand. However, proposal writers must anticipate the reader’s reaction and put things into terms that have the best chance of getting selected. But what about writing the technical proposal? Is a technical writer a better fit for writing the technical proposal? Probably not. The technical proposal is not really about technical sophistication. The two main goals of the technical proposal are to demonstrate that you are the customer's best alternative for achieving their goals and that your claims are trustworthy. While you may not need a technical writer, you probably do need a technical solution architect. And for most companies, a technical writer is not the best person to do the solutioning behind what you want to propose. A technical writer would be a great candidate for documenting what the technical solution is, but might not be the best candidate to convince the customer that your solution is a better match for their needs. A proposal writer and a technical writer might start with the exact same subject matter to cover, for example a process for doing something. A technical writer will produce a clear and accurate description of what needs to be known in order to execute the process. A proposal writer will produce a rationale based on the subject matter, written from the customer’s perspective, that makes it clear why their approach is the best alternative. Instead of describing the details, the proposal writer will position those details to relate to the decision the customer is going to make. Technical writing and proposal writing have different goals, they have different approaches, and they produce very different documents. Where a technical writer communicates what needs to be known in terms the reader can understand, a proposal writer considers how the details relate to the evaluation process and bid strategies, and then articulates what the customer needs to hear to be convinced. Is it possible for technical writers and proposal writers to do a good job of both? Possibly. Not all of them can, but there may be some who can do both. The problem is that a good proposal is not enough to win. You need to beat all the other good proposals. And that requires a great proposal writer. Great proposal writing requires a set of skills that are not only different from technical writing, but in many ways conflict with the skills and goals required for great technical writing. Don't just assume the two are interchangeable. In selecting a proposal writer, your highest priority should be to find someone who understands that great proposal writing is based on what it will take to win and how to structure the writing to achieve it.

The way most companies do it Most companies have one proposal review, which is often worse than having none. Some have more than one, but still base them on milestones making them more progress reviews than quality reviews. This is especially true since almost no one actually defines proposal quality. The result is that quality is not quantified and they commit the worst sin in proposal development. The way everyone aspires to do it Everyone loves the idea of reviewing and scoring the proposal the same way the customer will do it. Unfortunately, this is easy to say and nearly impossible to do. It is a rare RFP that has enough detail to enable you to actually score the proposal. It is a rare company that has enough customer insight to score it the same way the customer will. The result can be a quantifiable assessment of quality, but not an accurate one. Because it is not reliable, it can be part of the mix, but should not be your only way of defining, assessing, and quantifying proposal quality. Define it and measure against your definition Proposal quality should be defined. Then you can use criteria to determine whether your proposal fulfills the definition. Few companies have the discipline to do this because you must define proposal quality before you write the proposal, and not fall into the trap of writing and rewriting until you think you’ve got it figured out. Few companies have the discipline to do this because it makes the job of the review assessing the narrative against proposal quality criteria and not simply reading and judging. Few companies have the discipline to do this because creating criteria that are sufficiently objective enough to become measurable is not easy. Combining them all Milestone reviews are necessary to prevent getting ahead of yourself. If you start writing narrative based on an outline that is invalid, you are creating the potential for a quality disaster. The outline needs to be reviewed before proposal writing starts. There is a similar issue with bid strategies. You can't write to substantiate the points you are trying to make, if you don’t know what they are before you start writing. Then there are bid/no bid and proposal readiness reviews, pre-final production, ready for submission, etc. Once you have identified your proposal quality criteria, you can allocate them to milestones in order to assure that proposal quality builds over the life of the effort. You can also make emulating the customer and scoring the proposal as the customer might one of your criteria defining proposal quality. Scoring is just one way to assess whether the proposal reflects the customer’s point of view and gives them the information they need to conclude that your offering is their best alternative. We use a combination of our Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation methodologies to combine all these elements and quantify proposal quality. We start with a baseline set of sample proposal quality criteria and look at over 60 quality considerations that we then customize around what it will take to win each pursuit. In addition to quantifying proposal quality, this provides traceability from the proposal narrative to your bid strategies and what it will take to win. Combining them all enables you to assess proposal quality as it progresses through its phases of development. When you score your quality criteria, such as with a simple red/yellow/green or a scale of 1-10, you can chart the progress of your proposal. Do it across all your proposals and you gain a benchmark and can assess what correlates with your win rate. You can turn proposal development from an art into a science.

When every company intending to bid is struggling to prepare their proposal, then the one who does the best job of recovering from their mistakes is the one who is most likely to win. It may be counterintuitive, but in addition to giving your attention to implementing best practices, maybe you should give some attention to getting better at submitting imperfect proposals. It takes both offense and defense to winPutting effort into writing a great proposal is like playing offense. Putting effort into turning around a problem proposal is like defense. You need both a good offense and a good defense to win the championship. I’ve seen many more proposals that were a mess than I have proposals that went smoothly. This has remained true at the precious few companies I've known who were great at proposal development. Herding cats against a deadline through problematical RFPs with reliable pre-RFP preparation and a mixed bag of experience in your writers is simply challenging. A good way to hurt yourself is to review a proposal that you thought was one of your best, after you have submitted it, and start counting all the defects. You will be appalled at the number that were submitted after detailed processes, multiple reviews, and so many eyeballs looking for them. Every proposal is subject to Maslow's Hierarchy and the time available rarely lets us reach the pinnacle. We’ve never seen a proposal, including the ones we’ve worked on ourselves, check every box for how we define being a great proposal. We all aspire to be perfect, even though none of us really are. In addition to striving for perfection, a case can be made for striving to be able to turn imperfect into winning. Perfection is not possible when trade-offs are requiredAll proposals, including the great ones, involved trade-offs, risks, and compromises. Facilitating trade-offs, taking risks, and expediting compromises better than your competitors is just as important to winning as aspiring to best practices. During a proposal we make dozens if not hundreds of decisions regarding strategies to take, what the best approach to something is, which way to word or present things. How to make most of those decision is less than clear and usually made with less information than we'd like to have. All decisions like these require balancing risks. Perfection is not possible. However, improving your ability to balance risk is possible. Maybe, just maybe, instead of submitting a proposal that is as perfect as you can make it, you should improve your defense and simply aim for a proposal that doesn’t make critical mistakes like: Compliance failures that get you thrown out Outlines that change after the writing has started Figuring out your bid strategies and the points you want to make after the writing has started Figuring out what to offer by writing about it These are highly disruptive mistakes that can be impossible to recover from. Other mistakes and defects are easier to recover from or can even be tolerated. If you avoid these mistakes, there’s a much better chance your team will say enough good things to outscore a competitor who was also struggling to complete their proposal and made the mistakes you avoided. Relying on your competitors to fail isn't the best win strategy, but the other team will make mistakes and you want to be in position to take advantage of them. If you also bring a good offense, your win strategies will not be weak. Since you'll never achieve a 100% win rate, the best win rate will come from combining a solid offense with an improved defense. When perfection is not possible go for the best at imperfect trade-offs and risky strategies. This is how you achieve the best win rate. Four mostly counterintuitive tips that can make a big differenceOkay. I get it. You aspire to not have any failures on your proposals. Everyone will fulfill your expectations. And you will aim high and always hit your target. In my experience, it doesn’t play out that way. And insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over expecting different results. Even though it may be counterintuitive, you might achieve more success if you try doing things differently: Fail quickly. If you wait for a major review to discover and fix your mistakes, your chances of recovering are less than those of a competitor who did smaller, less formal reviews more frequently. Consider validating decisions as they are made instead of waiting for the Powers That Be to see the document. Design your process around validating things in real time instead of putting it off as some kind of "milestone" in the name of a “quality review” that comes too late to do any good. Manage expectations. The sooner you know that your expectations won’t be met, the sooner you can figure out how to work around them. The more you do to have clear expectations, the more you can prevent expectation failure. And allowing expectations to be rejected will enable you to find out more quickly than waiting for a deadline to be missed. Aim lower. Simplify. Go for simple elegance instead of ornate. Make it easy to produce and require fewer people. Aim for preparing proposals that are reliably good instead of heroically failing at producing great ones. It’s hard to look like an overachieving employee full of esprit de corps when you’re pulling your punches, but the odds sometimes favor a defensive game instead of relying solely on offense. Maximize your score by hitting what you aim for instead of overreaching. Make sacrifices for the greater good. We all want a proposal without typos. But sometimes it's better to sacrifice proofreading to allow more time to get your bid strategies right. If you don't have time for both but you can't make the sacrifice, the result could be everything falling apart during final production, creating multiple unknown chances of losing. It’s better to ship an intentionally imperfect proposal than a broken one. A wise co-worker of mine used to say, “Better is the enemy of good enough.” Being imperfect is better than being a proposal heroManaging your mistakes is about reliability and managing risk. Inflexibly attempting to eliminating all mistakes can actually increase risk. And increasing risk is not a good strategy for maximizing quality. Heroically challenging bad odds is a way to mostly lose. That occasional heroic win won’t make up for the lost revenue. I'd rather work on proposals with professionals than with heroes. Be the tortoise instead of the hare. Or better yet, build a process that is reliable instead of heroic, that recovers from problems, that tolerates imperfection when it doesn't impact your win probability in a meaningful way, and best of all steadily cranks out proposals that are better than those of your similarly struggling competitors.

Most people approach reviewing a proposal the same way they approached reviewing papers in school. They think of the task as reading and commenting. Unfortunately this is only one way to review a proposal, and it is far from the most effective. Consider: What are reviewers supposed to be commenting on? Are reviewers following a checklist or compliance matrix? Will reviewers complete a form or have questions to answer? Are reviewers even working from a definition for what proposal quality is? Are they all using the same definition? Do reviewers have written proposal quality criteria to validate? Are reviewers sight-reading or being formal and deliberate? Will reviewers provide subjective opinions or is effort being made to be objective? How? What are reviewers trying to accomplish via the review? What are the goals for this review? Are they being asked to "review" the proposal without any guidance, and assuming they know what to do? How are the reviewers going to cover everything that needs to be considered? Are reviewers going to be divided up to focus on different things? There are so many things that need to be considered and factored into proposal writing. There are so many requirements and trade-offs. There are so many sources of input. And there are so many strategies. This also makes a proposal hard to review. How do you consider and double-check everything during a review? The answer is, “you don’t.” It’s not possible, unless you want your review to take nearly as long as the writing took. Don't set your reviews up for failure by being open ended with expectations. Do you really need to double-check EVERYTHING? My answer is to prioritize attention based on the impact each thing has toward winning. You are not trying to submit a perfect, flawless proposal. You are trying to submit a winning proposal. The distinction is important. It drives how proposal quality should be defined. When your reviews complete without reviewers getting through the whole document or providing the validation required, it usually means you've over-scoped the reviews. In one sitting, it's not possible for a single person to review: RFP Compliance; and Bid strategies; and Messaging; and Level of detail and completeness; and Writing, style, consistency, and grammar; and Graphics, layout, and presentation; and Competitiveness A partially completed review is not better than nothing if it misses something that results in a loss. That defeats the purpose of having reviews. This means it’s not so much a question of “what should I look for” during a proposal review, but rather how to structure your proposal reviews so that you can check EVERYTHING that impacts WINNING (and nothing else matters). What do you mean by "proposal review?" When you review a proposal, should you be looking at whether you followed the instructions, whether it is optimized around the customer's evaluation criteria so that it gets a high score, or whether you have the right solution? Should you look at compliance or value? What about whether it's compelling, tells the right story, and has the right positioning and messaging? What about whether it's competitive? Or if it contains differentiators, win strategies, proof points, experience citations, etc.? Most companies want their reviews to consider ALL of that. You should realize is that you’re not going to review EVERYTHING in one sitting. This means you’re going to need more than one review. In fact, it’s vital to have more than one proposal review. If you have multiple reviews, then each review should have a different focus, and you need to define the scope of each review. Reviews of "a draft" that consider EVERYTHING are a good way to lose. A proposal review without a defined scope is a safety net with holes, relying on luck to catch the problems. The best way to define the scope of your reviews is to start by defining what “everything” means. Identify “everything” that needs to be validated. Then allocate those things to as many reviews as it takes. There is no reason why you can't validate things in parallel, and most quality validation does not require the proposal to be formatted the same as for submission. How many reviews should you have? The only answer, if you want to win, is all of them. For some proposals, covering everything you want to review may require a large number of small, manageable informal and formal reviews. For others, it might be just a few major reviews. The number of reviews does not matter. What you are reviewing and whether your reviews fulfill their goals matter tremendously. Along the way, you’ll find that the things you need to validate fall into categories and phases of the proposal’s development. But don’t make the mistake of organizing your reviews around moments in time. Organize your reviews around what you want to validate. Whatever you do, don’t look at the calendar, decide to have a certain number of reviews, and then decide what they should focus on. This tends to result in multiple un-scoped, inconsistent, and ineffective reviews. How do you define the scope of a proposal review? Start with what you need to validate. What you review is far more important than how you review it or when you review it. You might have multiple teams validating different things at the same time. You might even have some things that can be validated while the proposal is still being written. Some things need to be validated before others can start. Some things can be reviewed by someone working on the proposal, while others might require some distance and objectivity. There are many ways to conduct proposal reviews and none of them is best for all the different kinds of validation you require. If the proposal is small, you might have one person validate an item. But if the proposal is valuable, you might require a team of people to validate the very same item. Start with what you need to validate. Then allocate it to reviews, reviewers, and the calendar. This enables you to make sure that everything that needs to be validated gets addressed, and that you do it at the appropriate level. This becomes the scope for each review, giving your proposal reviews specific purpose, greater accountability, and more reliability. When you reach this level, there are several benefits that result. The first is that you can define your review criteria before the writing starts, so your writers and reviewers are on the same page. You can also turn the process of identifying criteria and allocating them to reviews into a forms-driven process that not only makes it quick and easy, but also enables you to review how you are going to review the proposal. This enables you to tailor the review to the needs of the proposal, while validating that it still meets the needs of your company for oversight. This takes you to much higher levels of proposal quality and improved win rates than simply having an un-scoped, un-defined proposal “review.” To accomplish all of this, we created a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation. This formalizes how to identify proposal quality criteria, allocate them to reviews, use them to define the scope of reviews, and even how to validate that you have sufficient validation.

PropLIBRARY is rapidly changing from being a resource library into an organizational change tool for improving win rates. That’s not a bunch of marketing speak, that's a result of combining our information resources with a customizable online training platform. We have added more than a full day’s worth of online training to our process documentation and best practice guidance. We will continue to add courses until we have about a week’s worth. And we’re not charging extra for it. Our Corporate Subscribers can use PropLIBRARY to provide a week of training and business and proposal development to up to 50 staff. What will the impact of that be? But online training is not our full vision. We want to build something that shows people how to overcome their challenges so they can prosper. We’ve taken the idea of online training a few steps forward. We started by making our training customizable. We can tailor our courses to match your particular needs, like when, where, and how to account for time spent working on a proposal. Or to teach people the information you need to qualify a lead in your particular line of business. Then we realized something far more important about it. We can use that customization to solve problems. When you recognize a need to change, such as from a lessons learned session, you need to get that message in front of the right people at the right time. Building training into the process helps. But when the training itself adapts and changes, it takes things to a higher level. Imagine deciding that reviewers need to be on the lookout for something. So you make a change to the 20-minute reviewer orientation course. Then you send the link to your review team and ask them all to go there before the review on Wednesday. Incidentally you can track who does. The same approach can work with writers. You can have them take a course, whether short or long, prior to starting to work on the proposal. Or, if you look at their draft and realize there’s a problem, like if it’s not written from the customer’s point of view, you can send them a link to a course that explains it to them. The same approach can also work with subcontractors, consultants, or anyone else who needs to know your process or procedures. But wait, that’s not our full vision. We’ve taken the whole tracking and reporting thing, and turned it into a way to implement an internal certification program. You can have people certified as being qualified to review proposals, write them, etc. And they are certified in doing things your way. They have to prove their knowledge through the quizzes built into the training, and they have to demonstrate their skills through the exercises. PropLIBRARY tracks their course participation and issues awards and certificates when they meet the right thresholds. PropLIBRARY transforms training into something continuous and built into the process. It transforms it into a tool that you can use to develop an organization's ability to win what it pursues. It enables you to track participation and use your win rate and lessons learned as feedback to continuously adapt and improve. That way it’s more than just an online training platform. From a business model perspective, we’re aiming to get you there with our off-the-shelf training for about $100/person and customized for less than $400/person. We can show up and do instructor-led training when needed. But with online training, there are no travel costs and billable staff can stay billable. For less than the price of a single course per person, we’re delivering continuous organization development that continuously improves your win rate. A PropLIBRARY Corporate Subscription currently costs $3,000. On May 1st, it will increase to $6,000. We'll also be offering a fixed price customization service. If you purchase a Corporate Subscription before then, or at least contact us to let us know you've started the paperwork and are just waiting for it to complete, you get the current price. Click here to ask us a question Or call 1-800-848-1563

Your company is losing proposals because your people are afraid to lose proposals This is true even though most companies lose more proposals than they win. Maybe it's the large value and huge amount of effort that's on the line. Maybe it's the fear of being blamed. Unhealthy fear The people you most need to grow your business often live in fear. And it’s not a productive fear. It’s an accountability avoiding I don’t trust you to watch my back I’m not going to take a risk win rate limiting kind of fear. Sometimes it’s an I need some CYA to avoid getting blamed if something goes wrong and I'd better blame someone else first kind of fear. Or a don't ask me to do anything, and if you do spell it out in so much detail that I can't be blamed if something goes wrong kind of fear. Unproductive and unhealthy fears hide in the dark while making you more likely to lose. Do you know anyone like this or resemble it yourself from time to time? Healthy fear Healthy fears can result from agreeing to maximize our chances of winning by discussing expectations until we agree on them. Or taking some calculated risks together so we can beat the competition. Or making an innovative, unproven, choice that gives us a better chance of winning, but if the customer doesn't like something about it, it will certainly cause us to lose. Healthy fears come from choosing to do things that might fail because it's necessary in order to have a better chance of winning. If you are going to be the best, you can't let the fear of possible failure hold you back. Do you know anyone like this or resemble it yourself from time to time? Looking in the mirror Business Development. Have you known business developers who avoid process because they are limited by how open and willing to share each customer is? Or who don’t want to be held responsible for providing information they can’t always get? Or who don’t admit what they don’t know and can’t find out? Or who don’t want to be held accountable if the information they get from one source is wrong or if that source does not participate in the decision? Have you known business developers who obfuscate and avoid participating in the proposal where spoken words become concrete? Have you noticed how they stay in prospecting and avoid closing? All because of fear. Fear reinforced by incentives that have negative side effects. Proposals. Have you known proposal specialists who are terrified of being blamed for a loss because they are the last to touch the document? Have you noticed they sometimes create a process that’s not actually documented but they still blame people for not following it? When reviews are performed inconsistently and ineffectively, have you known proposal managers who sandbag the reviews by running out the clock and lumping everything into a single review that can’t possibly consider everything it should, just so they can pick and choose which comments to ignore and which to take action on? Have you seen proposal specialists retreat and just focus on production, which is the only thing they control, rather than helping people prepare winning content? All because of fear. Reviews. Have you known executives who participate in reviews just enough to take credit, but not enough to establish accountability for oversight? Who demand "quality" but will only say that they know it when they see it? Or who create strategic plans that are all about the financials and encourage bidding anything, with meaningless positioning statements that have nothing to do with winning proposals? Or who arrive at reviews unprepared and avoid defining quality, let alone validating all its components on every bid? Have you known executives who don’t enforce deadlines, but expect people to be grateful when they expense some pizza because people are working a late night because deadlines were missed? All because of fear. Is your corporate culture based on fear? When the corporate culture is too heavy with fear, they tend to submit merely compliant proposals that are low on price. If you do a minimally decent job you'll almost never lose because of compliance and nobody gets blamed for losing because of price. Of course, compliance isn't enough to win consistently so you'll have a low win rate, but people will avoid bringing that up. Instead, when they do win they'll convince themselves that bidding anything is a good way to win and their undocumented process is just fine. Because no one can be blamed and no one has to fear. This is how unhealthy fear dooms a company's win rate. Why do most companies "play it safe?" The answer is "Fear." They hedge their bets, don't go out on a limb, and get by just well enough that it takes away any incentivize to change. The effort of changing never seems worth the risk. The fear is there, quietly changing people's behaviors and eating away at your win rate. How much higher would your win rate be without this fear? The problem is that a good proposal is not enough to win. And a safe, low-risk proposal isn't enough to win either. What if people weren't afraid of losing, didn't stay on defense, and went on offense to win your proposals? What if the entire company was willing to change in order to become what it takes to win? When you see companies that are shooting up and seem to be on an extended winning streak, do you think their culture plays it safe? How do you get there? What are some practical, achievable things you can do to create a culture of growth? Create an environment where you can have clear expectations without turning them into threats. People want to fulfill expectations. They want the company to succeed. That should be enough. Unless fear gets in the way. People who don't want to fulfill expectations should simply be let go. Focus on positive incentives instead of negative incentives. Reward accomplishment. Do not penalize failure. Failure from taking the risks needed to win is an acceptable thing. Failure from not taking risks is easy to hide. Intrinsic rewards instead of extrinsic rewards. Encourage, inspire, and support. Don't pay or quantify, whether it's abstract or concrete. For example, instead of enforcing deadlines, try enabling them. It works so much better. Be careful with accountability. It very easily degrades into legalese and putting effort into constantly closing loopholes and trying to specify instead of doing. Accountability should be informative and not a mandate. I don't even like the word "accountability." I much prefer "expectation." Expectation management is more effective because expectations flow in both directions. Does accountability take into consideration the needs of those held accountable? What are the people who make the mandates accountable for? And as soon as you ask that, the legalese starts to flow in both directions. Accountability has a good side, but it must be strictly limited to informing and tracking. That information is part of bringing clarity to expectation management. Be very careful that it doesn't become more. Every time an executive in the room uses the word accountability, the temperature goes up and the fear gets in the way of people collaborating on the expectations. Set standards for what constitutes a valid process. It's not enough to say you have a process. If the process falls apart without a particular person leading it, it's not a process. It's just their way of doing things. If someone can't learn the process well enough to execute it from your documentation without requiring someone to "show" it to them, then it's not a process. It's a habit. A valid proposal process will be minimal (everything removed that does not directly contribute to your win rate), will survive the real world, and will be easier to follow than to skip. Here's how to recognize whether your proposal process is broken. Define proposal quality. You can't expect it from people if you can't articulate what proposal quality is. Implement a bid/no bid decision process that doesn’t put people through low probability pursuits that are understaffed and being bid just because the company can. Make sure people understand how ROI, overhead, and trade-off issues impact staffing and resource allocation decisions. Of course you're understaffed. When people understand why and see a path to fixing that, they're more likely to buy in and help you grow your way out of it. Make sure the potential upside of winning is far greater than the fear of making mistakes. You want people incentivized to take the risks that are necessary to be the top competitor. You want people avoiding mistakes because they want to win and not minimizing risk because they are afraid of being blamed. Make trustworthiness as important as performance when people accept a proposal assignment. Completing assignments that fulfill the quality criteria by the deadline should be rewarded. Winning will come when people fully commit to their proposal assignments instead of treating them as their last priority. A case can be made that reliability is more important than accountability. Involve reviewers as collaborators and supporters, not as critics or drive-by lecturers. Make sure reviewers are as dedicated to their role as the rest of the proposal team. Or at least that they show up prepared. Never permit executives to show up unprepared. It sets a bad example for everyone else. Make sure people are emboldened to take risks and foster a culture that recognizes the necessity. Plan and manage risk. Don't punish it. Just make it rational. Make sure people realize that you don't have to do proposals — you GET to do proposals. The difference is important. Overcome fear with inspiration, at all levels of the organization. This is more than just having pep rallies. This is about giving people a reason to believe in what they are doing. Make sure they understand that growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. If you're not sure about whether you have the right staff, watch how they interact during a pursuit. Many truths will be revealed that hide behind the metrics you are tracking. Who is experiencing fear and where is the fear coming from? You know how you can’t win a proposal if the customer doesn’t trust you? You also can’t win proposals if your people are too afraid to trust you and each other.

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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