Carl Dickson

A presentation Carl Dickson, founder of PropLIBRARY gave on the topic of What defines proposal quality and how can you develop quality criteria to assess it.

Saying things that differentiate your offering from your competitors is a well-known best practice. Proposal writers spend a lot of time identifying differentiators and then working them into their proposals. At least they should. What we see in a lot of the proposals we review are things that do the opposite. People write things in their proposals that make them sound ordinary. You can’t be competitive and sound ordinary. We call these statements anti-differentiators. If you can’t write a great proposal built around your differentiators, you should at least try really hard not to base your proposals on anti-differentiators. 5 examples of anti-differentiators Anti-differentiator: “Our company is fully capable of performing the required work on time and within budget.” When you say that you can do the work, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is a potential competitor can do the work. Being able to do the work will not win you the bid. Doing the work in some way that is exceptionally better is what will win you the work. Talk about how your way of doing the work is superior or will deliver superior results instead of simply saying you can do the work. Adding “on time and within budget” to the list is like saying “pick us because we will do a merely acceptable job.” When you claim that you will do the work exceptionally, no one will believe you. So don't say that you are an excellent performer, have a great track record, or will do a great job. Being exceptional must be proven. Ordinary companies claim all kinds of things without proving them. No one ever pays them any attention. No proposal evaluator ever told their boss that they should approve a proposal because the vendor they’d never heard of before said they are the industry leader. A company that proves they have a credible approach to mitigating the risks resulting in more reliable delivery will beat them every time. Anti-differentiator: “Our company meets all of the qualifications required by the RFP.” When you say that you are fully qualified, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is a potential competitor will be qualified. Being qualified will not win you the bid. Being over qualified will not win you the bid. However, being qualified in a way that matters and makes a difference can win you the bid. Focus on why your qualifications will make a difference and prove that it matters. A vendor that brags about “meeting all qualifications required by the RFP” will lose to a company that shows how their qualifications will result in better delivery or that simply offers better qualifications. Every time. Anti-differentiator: “Our company will staff every position required for this project.” When you say that you have the staff or that you’ll just hire the incumbent staff, you sound ordinary. Everyone who is bidding will claim to have the staff or be capable of getting them. And they’ll be just as credible as you are. Don’t just say that your staff or ability to get them is better, somehow. Say what the impact of your better staff or ability to get them will be. And prove it. Anti-differentiator: “We will meet all of the requirements in the Statement of Work (SOW).” If you really want to sound ordinary, say that you’ll fulfill or comply with all of the contract requirements. Because everyone will say that and you’ll have lots of company. You’ll be one of many and just like all the rest. And it’s not even what the customer really wants. It’s merely the minimum of what they must have. What they want is someone who will do better than the contract requirements. Only if you’re going to say that you have to detail how you’ll do that and what the impact will be. Anti-differentiator: “Our company delivers the best value.” When you say that you or your approach provides the best value and leave it at that you sound ordinary. If you prove the value impact of what you offer is greater than the value impact of other offers, then you sound compelling. Only how are you going to do that? The best you can usually hope for is to explain the trade-offs and how the trade-offs you chose will strike the best balance between cost and performance. Skip trying to claim to be the best value. Your claim means nothing. The customer will determine who is offering the best value. And they’ll do it by considering the trade-offs. Information about those trade-offs that help them understand what matters is the kind of thing that customers cite as strengths on their proposal evaluation forms. Don’t be the minimum Anything that involves doing the minimum, meeting the requirements, and being capable, will always be anti-differentiators no matter how affirmatively you state them. Why would the customer choose a vendor who is merely acceptable over someone who is better? Any claims that are unproven, no matter how complimentary or grandiose, will also be an anti-differentiator. They do the opposite of what you intend and make you look like an ordinary, somewhat untrustworthy, vendor deserving of skepticism. Each anti-differentiator that you include in your proposal lowers your competitiveness. Don’t be ordinary because ordinary doesn't win. If you can’t find a real differentiator, at least just prove that you are good at what you do. Proof points can be differentiators.

Not only will you never have enough people to help write and produce a proposal, but many of the ones you do have will be inexperienced. You need to get the most out of what you’ve got to work with. Sometimes this means that instead of best practices and a great proposal, you need to figure out how you're going to be able to submit anything with the staff you have to work with. And hope you can still win. Maybe your proposed price will be low. Basic things you can do to improve your chances Anticipate everything an inexperienced proposal writer is going to mess up and have questions about. Don’t just think about the procedures. They won’t already know what the goals should be and you can’t afford for them to get stuck. They won’t know how to structure their response or what points to make. They won’t know what the expectations are. Keeping them from wandering around in the dark will save a lot of time. Make sure people can fulfill their assignments. It will help tremendously if you have practical guidance you can give those contributing to the proposal effort. It will also help if you take the time to detail your proposal assignments. Most proposal assignments come with failure built into them. If you just pass out an outline, you’re setting yourself up for a bad proposal experience. Detailing your proposal assignments means telling people what they need to succeed with their assignment and not just giving them a heading to fill in. Guide them towards success. Proving training is beneficial, but can increase the time burden that the proposal represents. Classroom training is best for procedures, knowledge transfer, or contextual awareness and pays off best for staff who will do more proposals in the future. But practical proposal training is best embedded into your process and doesn’t have to even look like training. Think of it as guidance that can be implemented in the form of explainers built into forms, cheat sheets, and checklists. A little goes a long way, even if it’s just explainers included with assignments. The further you go beyond an outline and a schedule, the more you will get out of the staff you’ve got to work with. Set the bar low and be careful where you raise it. Decide whether your goal is to submit an ordinary, compliant proposal that no one will be embarrassed by without mentioning that it’s not a competitive strategy, or whether you are going to stretch your thin resources to the breaking point in an attempt to win against better prepared and resourced competitors. You’ll do a better job if you assess your circumstances and make an intentional choice between those two instead of leaving it unstated or claiming to do both. Going all heroic without the right resources tends to result in a last minute train wreck of a proposal full of defects that no one will want to admit to. Going beyond the basics to really get more out of people If you only task your proposal writers with writing, you are in for a bad proposal experience when insufficient and inexperienced staff try to figure out what to write and how to present it on their own. There is a lot more to winning a proposal than showing up and putting enough words on paper to fill the page limit. The more you do to goals and expectations instead of procedures. Build for the future In this moment on this pursuit, the staff you’ve got to work with is limited and the best you may be able to do is accelerate the time from thinking to writing and eliminate rework. But over time and on future pursuits, you can improve those staff and possibly find new ones. Building people’s awareness about how to streamline the writing through planning and improving their understanding of proposal quality criteria will benefit future proposals. How much to invest in proposal staffing is an ROI consideration. If you want The Powers That Be to better resource your proposals, you need to show the impact that will have on revenue, and that the return is orders of magnitude more than it costs. The converse is also true. Understaffing proposals will reduce revenue by far more than it saves. Maximizing ROI depends on improving your win rate. Regardless of whether your proposals are fully staffed, understaffed, or most likely somewhere in between, improving the effectiveness of the staff you’ve got to work with will always be part of improving your win rate.

Proposal management is not just about implementing the proposal process. Procedural oversight is an archaic view of the primary role of management. Proposal management should be about accomplishing the goal of submitting a winning proposal. Having a process does support that goal, but a more important part is looking beyond the process to what is required for people to be successful and guiding them to achieve it. Proposal management is more about things like training and problem solving than it is about procedural oversight. Proposal training itself is about a lot more than just procedural training. By default we think of training as learning what to do. We always seem to want to start with Step 1. But the reality is that proposals aren’t really a developed in a series of sequential steps. Proposal training needs to cover expectation management, issue resolution, and seeing things from the customer’s perspective as much as it should cover the proposal lifecycle. When it comes to proposals, “what to do” is fifth in line even though it’s often the first thing people ask for. Ahead of it should be: What are the goals? Developing great proposals is best done through a series of accomplishing goals instead of following steps. Understanding the goal people are trying to accomplish is more important than which procedures they follow to accomplish it. This is because it is completely possible to follow procedures and not achieve any of the goals. What to expect from each other. You can’t fulfill stakeholder expectations if you don’t know what they are. This is the basis for how people work together and not the “steps” in the process. How to prepare. Being able to get the right information in the right format so that you can turn it into a plan before you start writing will do more to ensure success than any skills you might have at writing. The most highly skilled proposal writers in the world will lose to highly skilled proposal writers who are better prepared. Every time. How to validate that you did it correctly. Most proposal writing is… ordinary. Ordinary is not competitive. Most proposal writers can’t define proposal quality. Think the two might be connected? Learning how to define proposal quality criteria, use them as guidance for writing, use them for self-assessment, and use them to validate that what was written is what it should be will do more to ensure success than clever wordsmithing. What to do to accomplish the goal. What can be done? What options are there? What must be done? What must be done in a particular way? Proposal procedures can be accelerators that prevent people from having to figure out what to do to accomplish the goals. Presented this way, people more readily accept steps and procedures. But what is important is achieving the goals and not procedural compliance. The doing part of proposals becomes straightforward when you first understand the four things that come before that doing. And to the extent that you have a proposal process, it should do these things first, before tasking people with assignments. The management of proposals is practically built in when you have goals, expectations, preparation, and validation in place before the doing. The challenge for proposal contributors is learning what goals to accomplish, what is expected, how to prepare before writing, and how to validate proposal quality. This should be the focus of proposal management and proposal training. Give me someone who has learned these things and we can win. Give me someone who has not learned these things and we’ll be able to submit… something. The good news is you don’t have to deliver hours of training for each of these before you start. You just need to communicate things and give people handy checklists and reminders: Do you even tell people the goal for each activity? Do you put it in writing? We recommend using a goal-driven process instead of a step-driven one. What do you do to set expectations? Do you define the expectations for each activity? Is it all talk? Or is it in writing? Do you provide it as a handout? Learn how to communicate expectations in writing during every activity, event, or phase. An assignment without written expectations is just telling someone to do something and not how to do it. An assignment with expectations helps people work together. How do you help people prepare? Do you tell people how to prepare before you need them to do something? Do you give them time to prepare after you’ve told them how? Or do you wait until they fail to give you what you need? Every task on a proposal requires input. Planning How do you validate that proposal assignments were done correctly? Do you enable people to self-assess their work? Do you give them the same criteria that the proposal reviewers will use? Or do you set them up to be surprised at the review? How do people bring you completed assignments with a high likelihood of them being well done without it just being based on opinion and hope? We recommend enabling proposal quality validation by having written quality criteria. They can even take the form of checklists. Always give writers and reviewers the same criteria. Proposal management after the fact without these things is just complaining and attempting to fix things that shouldn’t have shown up broken. Proposal management with these things is competitive. It’s managing to win instead of managing to submit.

Most proposal issues have at their root the fact that we have to work with other people, with different needs, agendas, and expectations. We come together for a proposal and bring our expectations. When those expectations go unfulfilled or conflict, problems result. And those problems ultimately hurt your win rate. This course provides a structured approach to define and communicate proposal expectations so that we can work more smoothly together and maximize our win rate. The target audience for this course: This course is for companies with RFP-based proposals large enough to require a team of people to contribute. It is equally relevant to large government contractors as it is to small businesses trying to make the leap from one person who's done all of their proposals to an environment with multiple contributors. A little history to put things into context… In 2004, Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com launched the MustWin Process as a fully documented proposal process with innovations to improve win rates. In 2017, we began migrating the MustWin Process from a milestone-based process to a goal-based process, in which achieving the goals were more important than the steps used to achieve them. This opened up tremendous flexibility. In 2021, we began developing a new model for proposal development, based on defining expectations instead of steps. When combined with the goal-driven MustWin Process, it achieves full awareness of what needs to be done, what is required to do them, when they need to be done by, and how to assess whether they were done properly. In practice on real world proposals we are finding this to be transformative. People don’t need to follow a flow chart that breaks with the first curveball thrown by an RFP. Proposal contributors and stakeholders can all know what’s expected of them for every activity without even asking. When there are issues, the expectations are clear so that the team can focus on resolving the issue in a way that puts them back on track. People are less likely to ignore a set of written expectations that will come up later if they do. People tend to appreciate having the expectations spelled out at the beginning. We’re ready to teach our model to you, along with how to apply it across the life of the proposal. We’ll focus on the key roles contributors and stakeholders play so that everyone will understand what expectations they need to fulfill during a proposal. In this new training course, you will learn to use our Expectation Model to: Enhance an existing proposal process. You'll learn how to bring more clarity to the people participating. As a step toward formalizing how you do proposals. If you don't have an established process or it isn't well documented, in this course you'll learn how to build a foundation for better proposals. To be honest, you can get by without a Proposal Process if people understand the expectations for working together. And once they do, implementing a process later becomes an easier, incremental step. The real issue isn’t whether, how much, or what type of proposal process to have. The real issue is how to improve your win rate and how to get there from here. This course will give you what you need to improve your win rate on the people level instead of the flow chart level. But the two can work together. Eliminate friction during proposals. More proposal friction is caused by unfulfilled or conflicting expectations than any other cause. Except maybe for RFP amendments ;-) Address expectations with a 360-degree perspective. All proposal stakeholders have expectations that flow in every possible direction. And they all matter. Improve efficiency. People should know the expectations without having to ask. “Work late until it’s done” is an example of a poorly communicated and flawed expectation for a very real need. That need can be better addressed with better expectation management. Handoffs between people go much more smoothly when expectations are clear. Smooth handoffs mean effort spent on improvement instead of rework. Increase your company’s competitiveness. When everything else is the same, the proposal team that works together the best has a competitive advantage. If you are in a line of business where differentiators are hard to find, this becomes even more important. Introduce beneficial change over time. Expectations change. And when they do, you need an effective way to communicate the changes. If you have a model for defining and communicating expectations, you can use it to introduce change. Got a recurring problem? Change the expectations to prevent it. Got a lesson learned? Change the expectations to address it. Got an RFP mandated curveball that no one would expect? Now you’ll have a way to change and communicate the expectations for each stakeholder group throughout the process. Overcome problems with process buy-in and acceptance. Resistance happens when people are asked for things that are too far out of line with their expectations. When you improve how you communicate expectations you reduce resistance and increase acceptance. Or you surface the issue. The real problem is how do you resolve the expectation conflict? Having a structured way to declare expectations gives you something you can change if needed to gain acceptance. Expectations flow in both directions. You want to address your stakeholders' expectations as well as your own. This course will put you in position to be able to do that. What does this course consist of? Two 1.5-hour zoom sessions per week, for four weeks Examples you can tailor Homework assignments to research and articulate expectations Conversion of expectation lists into checklists and assignments The first cohort for this course will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11am, starting on February 7th, 2023. Pricing You have two options, single participant and dedicated group: Single participants are $1,595 with a $600 discount if you are already a PropLIBRARY Annual Subscriber or become one first. Dedicated groups: $5000 with only your company participating, up to 30 attendees, and 3 free annual subscriptions ($1500 when purchased through our website) or renewals to PropLIBRARY Invite your key stakeholders to participate in defining expectations Use company specific role definitions and milestone terminology By the end of the course you will complete a ready-to-implement expectation matrix that will transform your process Schedule at our mutual convenience Inflation fighting tip: You probably waste more than this in B&P spending on every single proposal you do, due to issues that directly result from problems with expectation conflicts... A day of schedule slippage here. An extra day of review recovery that should not have been necessary there. A tenth of a percent point decrease in win rate due to having to lower the bar instead of raising it… Multiply by the number of people impacted and soon you're talking real money that this course can help you stop wasting. Instead of fighting inflation by reducing the headcount on proposals (which we both know will lower your win rate), try reducing the number of wasted hours instead. How do I enroll? Click this button and let us know whether you would like to enroll as one or more single participants or as a dedicated group. Based on the option you select, we’ll check your PropLIBRARY membership status and send you an invoice for online payment, with payment by check as an option. Along the way, feel free to ask any questions you may have. Register, ask a question or get more information We strongly encourage you to make sure you are a paid subscriber to PropLIBRARY first so that you can take advantage of the discount. You can become a subscriber to PropLIBRARY here.

We like to think that when someone didn’t fully complete an assignment on time even though they accepted it, it was just a problem with motivation. It’s easy to throw shade. But experience shows us that it’s more complicated than that. It’s also easy to assume there’s an easy solution, like better deadline “enforcement” by The Powers That Be. Or that people should “just follow” the process. But experience shows us that it’s more complicated than that. The key to being able to make improvements is to get to the root causes of assignment failure, and not to assume reasons or solutions. The root causes are often pretty basic: 1) The person receiving the assignment isn’t capable of fulfilling it Maybe it’s a lack of training reducing their effectiveness. That can be fixed, but only if you anticipate the need and do something about it. Just muddling through with staff trying to figure things out as they go will reduce quality. Maybe it’s something else that makes them not capable of completing their writing assignments on time. If you give them the assignment anyway, hoping they can stretch and complete it anyway, the proposal will suffer if they can’t. How are you going to prevent that? How can you tell the difference between able to stretch and not able to stretch that far? What can you do to help them make the stretch? Sometimes people aren’t capable of completing their assignments effectively, but they either don’t realize it or they aren’t willing to say it. Maybe they think it’s better to give it a try than to look like they don’t “want” to contribute. Asking directly won’t help. You’ll need to ask probing questions about what they plan to write, what it will address, how it will be presented, and when you can check in on them informally to see if there are signs of evasion. If you don’t have clarity about the capability of your contributors, you are already in trouble. Gaining that clarity should be a priority. Waiting until a review increases your risk instead of lowering it. Keep in mind that you’re not looking to just get something written, you’re looking to get something written that will win. It’s extra challenging understanding what a person’s proposal contribution capabilities are when you haven’t worked with them before. But understanding what you have to work with early enough to do something about it is often the difference between winning and losing. 2) Things changed Circumstances change. Things pop up, whether business or personal, and they aren’t always predictable. This is especially true for your star contributors, because they are the most in demand. Another place you need clarity is regarding priorities. This should come from The Powers That Be to ensure they aren’t assumptions or preferences. Or subject to debate. If the priorities are set well, then it will be clear what must be done so that action can be taken more quickly. The problem with avoiding priority conflicts is that it often involves saying, “No.” Some people, including executives, really struggle with that. They’d rather have everything done “good enough,” than to say “No” to something. The problem is that there is no such thing as “good enough” in proposal writing. There is only what it will take to win. Losing because you shorted the proposal some hours that cost the company a tiny fraction of the cost of the proposal sucks. But what sucks worse is when you compare the cost of resolving the priority conflict with the cost of the lost revenue. Priority conflicts can be difficult to untangle. Instead of focusing on expedience, try to focus on ROI. Multiply your win rate by the anticipated award value and compare that to your overall cost of pursuit so you can be mathematically clear on what resolving the conflict is worth. It helps to discuss contingencies ahead of time and gain some clarity on what the priorities are. It also helps to be decisive and quick when unexpected changes do occur. 3) They were never going to do it Some staff are so overloaded that they are shorting everyone. Usually, they are trying to do the best they can. For proposals, this creates a conflict over whether that will be enough to win. But sometimes they not only know when they accept the assignment that they’ll be incomplete or late, they also have an attitude that you’ll just have to accept it because that is all they have to give. Sometimes they just want you to know their excuse for failing ahead of time. Sometimes people assign a lower priority to the assignment you give them than you do, and they don’t bother to tell you. Sometimes people will passively accept an assignment and aggressively respond when they are late or it’s incomplete. Understanding their constraints is the secret to determining what kind of assignments to give them and whether to coax them along with assistance or add pressure. Sometimes you are just better off without them. What good is it to put extra effort you don’t have into getting an assignment completed if it’s not going to be done well enough to win? And sometimes you can’t replace them because they are your key subject matter experts. Before you try to apply pressure, try to understand their constraints regarding time, capacity, capability, and personality. Maybe there are ways around those constraints they haven’t thought of. Maybe you can just get the information you need from them and have someone else do the writing. Maybe you can use them as a reviewer instead. This can be dangerous if they also have the attitude that only they know the right way to do things and whatever is brought to them is going to be all wrong. But sometimes you can work a section in stages, by discussing what is going to be written and how it is going to be presented, followed by an early informal draft, and then a more formal draft. 4) There was an expectation mismatch If people don’t bring you what you need after saying that they will, there is an expectation mismatch. Either they did not understand your expectations, your expectations were not feasible, or something else got in the way. In any event, they failed at delivery because you failed in expectation management. You can do something about that. You can describe your expectations. You can coax them to describe theirs. But you will still run into conflicts, because expectation fulfillment is often a subjective thing. When people are conflicted over unfulfilled expectations, they often don’t handle it well. They feel let down, irritated, and defensive. You need to separate their reaction from what needs to be done. When you have an expectation conflict, ask yourself whether your assessment is real if it is based on interpretation. When talking to other people, ask them to do the same. Is it real? Is that true? Or is it an interpretation? Was the reason that they missed a deadline really that they “don’t take deadlines seriously?” Or is that your interpretation? It might be real that the deadline wasn’t their top priority. But why was that? And is your reason for that also true? Or is that also an interpretation? What are their priorities? Are you making assumptions or do you know because you’ve discussed them? This is especially important for small businesses and proposal teams. You might be tempted to claim that someone “always does this” or that you “knew they were going to do that.” But that’s not real or true. And if they are true, why did you give them the assignment without mitigating the risks? It is even more important to depersonalize expectation management when you work with the same people over and over again. Once you can separate the truth at the core of the conflict from people's feelings about it, you can do something about it. Because what happened doesn’t matter nearly as much as what needs to be done next to win before the proposal deadline. Try not to get overly distracted by who said what, what assumptions were made, what was justified, who was to blame, what changed, or what was unexpected, because now you not only need a new plan, you need a new set of expectations. And since your expectations were either wrong or not communicated with sufficient clarity for the receiver the first time, you need to adjust and try again.

People bring their expectations to work with them. People form expectations while at work. Expectations run in every direction, between every stakeholder. Humans generally do a poor job of communicating them, and an arguably worse job of fulfilling them. It is a wonder that anything ever gets done. We can do better. What if expectations were communicated more clearly? And accepted? What could we accomplish if we fulfilled all of our expectations for each other? What stands in the way of this? Problems with managing expectations The biggest thing standing in the way of expectation fulfillment is that our expectations clash. A missed assignment deadline is a common form of conflicting expectations. Conflicting expectations during proposals come about in various ways: Sometimes one person’s expectation is not accepted by another. Sometimes this is communicated, and sometimes it is held back. New expectations form, often the result of competing priorities, after an expectation is set. The person with the expectation does not realize that the people they expect things from have expectations of their own. Each new stakeholder with a new set of expectations further complicates the dynamic. Some people’s expectations count more than others. Sometimes an expectation is not valid. We want things we cannot have. Or we ask for the wrong things. Potential issues with expectations are not anticipated and prevented or mitigated. Expectations are interpreted differently than intended. And we thought it was going to be simple. What you can do about it Here’s a little advice that can have a big impact: Instead of defining your expectations, start by fulfilling the expectations of your stakeholders. This will make it far more likely that they’ll be able to fulfill your expectations. It also requires you to understand your stakeholders' expectations, which is rather important. Define the scope. You don’t need to also address expectations that are set by corporate or human resource policies. You can’t possibly address the entire universe of expectations. Quality methodologies don’t give up on trying to achieve quality because we can’t actually define it universally in a way that is useful. Instead we define a scope in which we can define quality and focus on that. You need to do the same thing with expectations. Instead of articulating your expectations as what people should do, articulate them as goals to be accomplished. This is the difference between discussing needs and micromanaging. Try focusing on what has to happen. Minimalism rules. Especially when it comes to expecting things from other people. What expectations must be fulfilled for what has to happen to be achieved? Only then should you try to deal with expectations related to the options, considerations, and contingencies. This also helps to de-personalize expectations. Separate what you expect from how you expect it to be fulfilled. Do you need both expectations fulfilled? Can you leave it up to them how to accomplish the goals? Or make suggestions instead of mandates? Balance every expectation you have against every possible expectation the people you depend on might have. Other people’s expectations are the most common reason your proposal expectations aren’t getting fulfilled. Remember the difference between expectations and rules or mandates. You’re not trying to codify compliance backed by threats of enforcement. You’re trying to make sure that everybody is on the same page regarding how you’d all like things to go so that you can work together to accomplish great things. Rules deal with differences in interpretation by adding more rules. This gets in the way of expectation fulfillment. Remove room for interpretation. This is not about closing loopholes. It’s about achieving clarity and simplicity so that people can understand each other without conflict. Surface differences in expectations as quickly as possible. You want to know about them because if you leave them unaddressed, they are more likely to result in expectations being unfulfilled in a way that jeopardizes overall success. And the sooner you find out about the differences, the more likely you are to be able to reframe them in a way that provides a path to a successful outcome. Improving your management of expectations will not only improve efficiency and the proposal experience. It will also increase trust. When people know what others expect and can count on each other to fulfill those expectations they begin to trust each other. And when people don’t understand each other’s expectations or how to fulfill them, distrust can seep in. It is so much easier when change does occur or a chaotic element rears its ugly head to overcome the challenge when you are working with people you trust. And as a bonus, when people understand each other’s expectations, changes are less frequent and the way to resolve them is often readily apparent.

Before people invest in a pursuit, they like to know what their chances of winning are. They want to know the odds of winning are high enough before they commit. To make their estimate of their chances sound more scientific than it really is, they often call this estimate “probability of win (pwin).” The problem is that no one can accurately predict pwin Try this… Add up every pwin estimate your company has done over the last year and average them. Now compare that average to your win rate over the same period. The difference proves that your pwin estimates were inaccurate. If your pwin estimates were accurate, they’d average out the same as your win rate. How much would you like to bet that most pwins are much higher than the actual win rate? People who want to bid tend to estimate high. Most companies avoid comparing their win rate with their pwin so they don’t have to admit that all of their pwins, and quite possibly all the decisions based on them, are wrong. Not only that, but nobody in charge of business development wants to admit that they don’t know the likelihood of winning. And nobody in finance is willing to make future revenue projections without something “quantified” to base them on. So people go along with the mythical fiction that is pwin. Because they need some way of quantifying the chances of winning. Pwin can’t be fixed Go back to your pwin average. Where did your pwin estimates go wrong? Which factors were too high, low, or missing? And how can they be changed to be accurate under future circumstances instead of last year's circumstances? You don’t know. You can guess, but your guess won’t be accurate. If we come back next year, your pwin estimates will not match your win probability. Again. Because pwin is a myth. There is no way to accurately represent pwin as a percentage. No matter how much we want it to be true. It’s just that pwin is a myth we can't do without. We need to be able to make decisions based on the likelihood of winning. Should we pursue it? How much should we invest? How much revenue will result? What we can do to understand our chances of winning We can stop pretending we can estimate pwin as a percentage with sufficient accuracy. We can admit it’s a guess and not a mathematical probability. I recommend using simple pros and cons and then talking it out. Whatever you do, don’t try to convert it into a percentage. There is value in talking about whether a lead is worth pursuing. But let’s not fool ourselves that there’s mathematical precision to our guesses. I mean forecasts. A good reason to base your pursuit decisions on talking about the factors in favor of and against bidding, is because that is what will drive your win strategies. A percentage just gives a false sense of confidence. Pros and cons can both be turned into action items. A percentage does nothing to help you win and may work against it. But pros and cons help you know what you need to do to win. Arguments for and against bidding articulate your strengths and weaknesses in a way that you will need if you bid. If you must assign a number to pwin so you can do spreadsheet calculations, then do what you have to do. My recommendation for this is to do that as a factor above or below your average win rate instead of as a percentage of the chance of winning a future competition. If we think this one has a 10% better than your average chance of winning, you can calculate your estimates. You are likely to be more accurate with an amount over or under your actual win rate than you are starting from zero to estimate your chances of winning. And could you at least once a year compare your pwin average to your win rate average and improve your estimates? Create a feedback loop. And can we have some corporate tracking and accountability for these numbers? Because if a number for pwin is so important we must have it, then it’s important enough to refine our accuracy and to make those who make the estimates accountable for them.

When I wrote Are you one of these 11 kinds of proposal manager? it was as a fun self-exploration with some interesting implications about the nature of proposal work. If you haven’t read that article, you should start there, because it defines the types discussed below. Most people find that they are more than one type. But what types are appropriate for a given environment and for your future? I’ve seen great proposal managers fail because they clashed with the environment they found themselves in. I’ve also seen people with potential limit their career growth by sticking to their comfort zone. You can use the list below to determine whether you are a good fit for a corporate culture before you join it. You can also use it to get out of your box and improve. What type of proposal manager should you become? The owner of the win. If you define success as winning and not just completing proposals, measure success by how much the proposal function pursuit strategy (and can do so without conflict within your company), then this type of proposal manager is an option. If your company has capture managers, then you might focus on articulating pursuit strategy. If your company does not have capture managers, then you might end up filling the void. This approach is most successful in an organization that understands the importance of ROI and the impact on win rate on its success. The producer of what people give you. If you are without support, overwhelmed by the volume of bids you work on, not capable of playing a role in the pre-proposal phase, and not able to influence key factors that determine win or loss (Do you have the right offering? Do have the price to win? Can you accomplish a proposal written to maximize its score?), then you might just want to let other people take on those roles and focus on production. There’s nothing wrong with that. Unless no one takes on the role of winning. The leader who works through others to get what is needed. If you know what other people need to do to accomplish a winning proposal, can coach them through it, and are sufficiently assertive and charismatic to get what you need out of them, then you can be the one who leads the proposal team to victory. If you hate herding cats and no one ever listens to you, you might not want to take this on. The hands-on manager. It’s good to be able to roll up your sleeves, fill gaps, and write what needs to be written or do what it takes to create the proposal. But it’s only good to act on that capability if you have the capacity and aren’t really just in denial about needing to control everything by doing things yourself. If you don’t have the capacity, you might be better off applying yourself to being the leader who works through others by training, coaching, and guiding their efforts. And occasionally demonstrating. The technician. If you are in an environment where you can’t take it all on yourself and people are difficult, you might be able to shift from being the manager in charge of the proposal to the manager in charge of the process and tools instead. You have to be able to position as supporting the people who are doing the proposal, instead of being responsible for getting the proposal done. The perfectionist. Good luck. Everything in a proposal does not impact your probability of winning equally. If you are a perfectionist, you might be prioritizing things that have little or no impact on winning. If you understand what impacts your win rate the most, can effectively prioritize effort accordingly, and simply are an overachiever pushing to maximize win probability, you might just succeed. But a lot of perfectionist Proposal Managers ended up that way not because they are good at winning, but because they are afraid of losing. Sometimes fear can be healthy. The pleaser. If your proposal reviews are dominated by assertive staff who must get their way, you either need to tame them or go along with them. You might not be able to retrain them, assert other ways of doing things, or successfully introduce other considerations. If you are a people person, instead of seeing this as a problem, you might just define success as supporting them since they probably have more experience and authority. The know-it-all. If you know what needs to be done better than anyone else and if you do not assert your will, chaos will reign. You may just need to take over to prevent this from happening. If you see things as a choice between chaos or being assertive and telling everyone else what to do, then you have no choice. You must become this kind of Proposal Manager. In reality that’s not true, but that’s how you see it. And you know best. However, some know-it-alls are also proposal heroes. It is much better to be a proposal professional than a proposal hero. The artist. If you see a kind of beauty in the messiness and complexity of proposals and believe no amount of process is up to the task, too much structure is a bad thing, and proposal quality can’t be defined, you might just have to become a Master of the Art of Proposals instead of a Proposal Manager. Can your creativity win, or will it fail? Or like many people, should you keep your artistic side hidden while at work? The improvisationist. If you think proposals are different every time, are too complex to script out, and you don’t have time for that anyway, then you might need to be the kind of Proposal Manager who makes it up as you go along. Hopefully you have enough of the “know-it-all” in you that have good judgment when doing that. Improvisors are rarely perfectionists. And improvising often requires more skill than planning. If you are not a planner and have the skills, you might be able to pull off being this kind of Proposal Manager. In orderly environments, this type of Proposal Manager might not be a match. But in chaotic environments where every proposal is different, it could be a good capability to have. The enforcer. If you don’t have time to develop relationships or work in an authoritarian culture, you may need management by rules. Rules must be made. And enforced. Failures are a result of people not following the rules. If you don’t have actual authority, you may get by on your force of will. Which type of Proposal Manager do you need? Enforcers and improvisors are polar opposites. Enforcers do better in highly structured cultures and improvisors do better in unstructured cultures. They may not get along if they have to work together. Artists and improvisors may get along well, enjoying complicated environments and unstructured cultures. Improvisors may do well as consultants, parachuting into a new company with every proposal and surviving off the land. Enforcers work best in highly structured cultures and are more likely to get along with know-it-alls and perfectionists. Know-it-alls aren’t going to be a good fit for collaborative, consensus driven environments. While know-it-alls and hands-on managers overlap, hands-on managers are best on proposals that are small enough for them to do it all. The leader who works through others, on the other hand, requires larger proposals and may not do so well on the smaller ones. Similarly the producer of what people give you requires there be enough people to complete what needs to be produced. Pleasers get along with everyone, as usually do technicians. Both are more of supporting roles, and do best on proposals where someone else takes overall responsibility. The owner of the win is necessary for company success. However, the owner of the win really shouldn’t be the proposal manager. It’s just that proposal managers tend to fill voids. This really should be a capture manager role. However, the proposal manager may be able take ownership over turning the vision for winning into a document. Ultimately, the success of the proposal function is determined by its ROI and not the role the proposal manager takes on. Will it blend? We all naturally fit into more than one of the areas above. Which ones we emphasize should depend on the type of proposal, the people we have to work with, the corporate culture, and the expectations the company has for the role of proposal manager. If you work in mixed environments, being able to switch from one type to another has advantages. What you don't want is to be a stuck like a fish out of water, being the wrong type of proposal manager for the environment you find yourself in. But the key question isn't what kind of proposal manager are you, it's what kind of proposal manager do you want to become?

We all know that it’s a best practice to write proposals from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. So when we discuss preparing to win a pursuit or whether we should bid it, why do we usually do it from our own perspective? Why do we focus on our capabilities, our qualifications, what we can offer, and our advantages instead of what matters to the customer? It’s natural to start from self-assessment, but shouldn’t we be looking at whether to bid and how to prepare from the perspective of the customer who will be making the decision whether we win? When we prepare by focusing on ourselves, is it any wonder that most proposals end up being about us instead of being about the customer? Maybe we should be conducting the entire capture process based on the customer's perspective. How to create a capture plan based on the customer's perspective What would it look like if we prepared our capture plan from the customer’s perspective instead of our own? Instead of defining what we should offer, it would focus on what the customer will get from what we offer to them. It would minimize the use of “We” or “Our,” and the use of our company name, and instead use the customer’s name as much as possible. The goal is to make the capture plan about the customer and not about you. Doing this can force you away from talking about your greatness and make it easier to talk about what the customer wants. It would present everything from the perspective of what matters to the customer instead of what matters to your company. Everything that you decide or do during the pursuit will have an impact on the customer. Talking about those things in terms of how they matter to the customer will do more to help you win the pursuit than will talking about your own preferences. It would address the customer as a stakeholder, instead of just as a source or target. The goal is to focus on working together with them and what you can accomplish together instead of just how you’re going to get them to buy from you instead of someone else. The only reason they’re conducting a procurement is because they have something they want to accomplish, and focusing on this will help you position as their best alternative. At each step during the pursuit, it would address the value delivered to the customer instead of the value extracted from the customer. Instead of focusing on what you can get them to tell you, what information can you provide to help them? It would be readable by the customer. If the customer was able to read your current capture plans, would they be offended? Would they feel manipulated? Or would they feel appreciated to be considered and involved? How this impacts your probability of winning This isn’t some intangible feel good approach. This is tangibly setting up the proposal to win. Here’s how… People who struggle for what words to use when proposal writing usually struggle even more when also asked to shift from their perspective to the customer’s perspective while writing. The current way we approach the capture process delivers information to the proposal and why you think it’s great, but doesn’t usually do that from the customer’s perspective. The result leads to proposals about your company and its offering instead of proposals about how the customer will be better off by selecting you. It relies on the proposal writers, typically with no customer interaction, to be able to channel the customer’s perspective. When the capture plan is written from the customer’s perspective, then proposal writers start from a much better place to create a winning proposal. If you can't articulate the customer's perspective in a way that's compelling, then you shouldn't bid. If you can’t empathize with the customer enough to recognize and articulate how they see things, then you can’t be competitive against companies that can. Bid/no bid isn’t simply about whether you know the customer. How should what you know impact the proposal and influence the customer’s decision? If you bid because of things that matter to the customer, you will be bidding with a higher win probability than if you simply convince yourself that what you know gives you a sufficient chance of winning to bid. Being able to articulate why you should bid from the customer’s perspective instead of your own should be a critical lead qualification criterion and a primary bid/no bid consideration, instead of something left for the proposal stage to figure out. Defining your offering according to the customer’s perspective during development will produce a superior offering to one that is developed according to your own perspective and then described in a way that you think might reflect the customer’s perspective afterwards. Doing these things will turn your capture plan into something more than just a status tracking and preparation assessment tool. It will turn your capture plan into a vital part of winning. It will set your proposal writers up for success in a way that gives your company a competitive advantage. No one will be scratching their heads for “themes” at the last minute and accepting watered down claims the customer will ignore anyway. Instead, proposal writers will take the customer’s perspective from the capture plan, update it with the specifics of the RFP, and put it in the context of the evaluation criteria. They will have what they need to write the proposal from the customer’s perspective and make it matter to the customer more than any other alternative. And it will be based on a corporate-wide assessment of the customer instead of some writers working in isolation. Can you make the change? I find it interesting that this approach doesn’t require much, if any, change to the steps in your process to implement. It requires that you change who your capture plan is about instead of what goes into it or the steps in preparing it. It simply requires changing from talking about you and your preparations, to talking about the customer and what they’ll get from your preparations. If you can’t make that shift in the capture plan, how do you expect to be able to make it in the proposal? The only impediment to taking this approach right now is overcoming inertia and people's resistance to change. It doesn’t require a new process. It just requires changing writing styles and assessment considerations. And people hate changing their writing style or how they review things. You have to decide whether the effort to overcome that inertia is more important or whether the potential increase in your win rate is more important.