Carl Dickson

Maximizing win probability requires going beyond simply trying to provide the best response to the customer’s requirements. This is because: The customer is more than one person. Evaluators often have different ideas about which submission is “best.” We often do not know who will be participating in the evaluation. And yet, we know we need to write our proposals from the customer’s perspective instead of our own. This makes understanding the range of perspectives that the evaluators might bring important. You can’t write to their perspectives unless you can empathize with them. Unfortunately there is a whole range of potential perspectives to consider. This requires advanced empathy in order to write proposals with the maximum win probability. Advanced empathy requires going well beyond what does “the customer” want. It requires understanding that there are multiple stakeholders in making an organizational decision, and what matters to each of them as individuals. Here are some ways to apply empathy to winning proposals: Roles. A Contracting Officer plays a specific role that is very different from a Program Manager or a Source Selection Officer. And they are all different from the end user. Each brings a different perspective regarding what they want to accomplish. The result is that what they want to see in the proposal is different. You should write your proposal to satisfy the needs of all the potential evaluators. Stakeholders. Some stakeholders will participate in the evaluation. Others may not participate in the evaluation, but may influence the decision. These stakeholders can even be people outside the customer’s organization! It depends on the nature of the customer’s mission, how strong the voices of their stakeholders are, and how much this procurement will impact those stakeholders. If the customer cares about keeping its stakeholders happy, your proposal may need to address that. Goals. Goals occur at multiple levels. There can be individual goals and organizational goals. There can be personal goals and business goals. There will be unstated goals as well as stated ones. And within an organization, every territory can have different goals. But when the individual sits down to evaluate a proposal, they are looking to fulfill their goals. Put yourself in the place of all the possible individuals and imagine what might be shaping their goals. Maximizing your win probability depends on figuring out which goals of which individuals to address. Agendas and motivation. Similar to goals, each person participating in the decision will have things they want to accomplish. Those are the things that motivate them. But they are never clear and can sometimes contradict those of other evaluators. It can be as simple as wanting to complete the evaluation so they can get back to their “real” job. Or it can be as big as reshaping their own organization by impacting how this procurement plays out. You will do better if you help them get what they want. Culture. The culture of the organization strongly impacts how it makes decisions. Is it hierarchical? Is it chaotic? Is it serious? Is it deliberate? Is it accountable? Is it the opposites of these? How will that impact the individuals participating in the customer’s decision? How can you write the proposal to be a better fit for the customer’s culture? Attitude. We are rational animals. We are also emotional animals. Each individual participating will be a mixture of both. What attitude will they bring to the evaluation and what can you say to influence it? Processes. Formal evaluations follow a process. Proposal evaluations are conducted according to that process. So how closely will they stick to their process? And how does that change what the evaluator needs to see? How does that change the evaluator’s attitude, preferences, goals, and agenda? The more you understand about the customer’s acquisition process, the more influence you can have on it. Training. Do the evaluators know what they are doing, or are they making it up as they go along? Do the evaluators understand what matters about what is being procured? Do they even understand the terminology? Who are you writing for? Should you be subtly training them through your proposal? Or would that be patronizing? What do you know about who will participate in the evaluation and how should that impact the way you present your proposal? Regulations, directives, policies, etc. Rules are rules. Usually. We think of proposal compliance in terms of the RFP. But the customer thinks of compliance in terms of all the rules at all the levels that impact their organization. The RFP is just a small part of that. Showing that you are not only aware of that but will make it easier for the customer to achieve compliance at their level can put you ahead of your competitors. The great unknown. Does the customer know what they should ask for? Or even what the implications are of the requirements they wrote? Do they know how to achieve their goals? Do they even know what their goals should be? Do they even know what they don’t know? How can you help them face the great unknown? You do that without making them admit what they don’t know, simply by explaining the trade-offs and why you recommend the approach you chose to offer. This gives them something to rally around. Conflicts. The individuals that comprise the customer may not all agree. They may not agree with what’s in the RFP. They may have conflict between what they want and what they can afford. They may have conflicts with their end users and other stakeholders. They may be indecisive. Proposing something that helps the customer unravel their own conflicts is a great way to leap ahead of the competition. But being in the middle of their conflicts is a great way to lose if the turf battles don’t go your way. I have seen more than one customer lose because they thought they knew the customer, only to discover the one person they were talking to was on the losing side of a conflict inside the customer’s organization that played out during proposal evaluation. Aspirations and the future. Beyond this procurement, how do they want the future to turn out? How do they see themselves in that future? Do you understand your customer well enough to know? Can you paint a picture of that future? How will that vision impact how they evaluate your proposal today? I have helped companies win with customers who didn’t know how to get there, but knew where they wanted to end up by focusing on their future aspirations and being flexible about the steps required to get there. Take all that into consideration before thinking you know what the customer will find compelling. Taking it all into consideration is basically, trying to understand what the evaluator thinks and feels. That’s empathy. Trying to do that across the customer’s organization or even just the team of evaluators is advanced empathy. Turning what your empathy tells you into compelling proposal messaging is where great proposal writing comes from. It’s also why actually talking to your customer before bidding is so important. You can project what you might think if you were in their position, and it’s good to be able to do that. But your accuracy will be questionable if you haven’t actually interacted with them. Building an information advantage is important for winning. But right behind it comes building an empathy advantage.

Effective proposal management requires thorough expectation management. But while some expectations will be the same for every proposal, many will change. Many will need to be determined, figured out, or updated as things change during the proposal. But with a little structure, you can improve how you communicate expectations and do a better job of making sure everything is covered. Remember: If you overwhelm people with too much information about expectations, they will not absorb it all and even though you think you’ve communicated it to them, your expectations will not be met in full. Expectations are bi-directional. The proposal manager has expectations. So does everyone receiving their assignments. So does every other stakeholder. They all need to be communicated for expectations to be met. Not just yours. How you articulate your expectations matters greatly. If you expect participation, that’s what you’ll get. But you might get better results by defining outcomes that you can objectively assess and the full scope of contributions. The structure for proposal expectations below can be documented in different ways, depending on your goals. For example, you can implement this structure as a: Matrix in Microsoft Excel. This is great for consolidating your view across all the roles and phases, but less useful when you are trying to focus on a particular role or phase. Series of slides in PowerPoint. This works well during online meetings, giving you talking points for setting expectations. Series of handouts made in Microsoft Word. This gives you something to attach to assignments or pass out at the beginning of each phase that defines expectations. The structure for proposal expectations should be tailored to fit your stakeholders. Start by focusing on the roles people play and the phases in your pursuit lifecycle. Identify the key roles people will play For example: Business Development Manager Capture Manager Proposal Manager Coordination Proposal Writer(s) Graphics Production Pricing and Contracts In some circumstances, you may need to consider stakeholders who are not part of the proposal team, and issues like whether to include subcontractors. Create a list of phases for your proposal, based on deliverables For example: Pre-proposal pursuit and preparation. What is expected of each role before the proposal starts? Proposal startup. What is expected of each role immediately after RFP release? Content planning. What is expected of each role during content planning? Writing. What is expected of each role during proposal writing? Production. What is expected of each role during production? Every phase, or even every step within a phase, can be thought of as being wrapped in planning, execution, and quality assurance. Each of these can have their own set of expectations. For each phase, create a list of categories for expectations For example: Deliverables. For each role, what deliverables are expected? Who is responsible for those deliverables and who makes what contributions? Deadlines. When are assignments expected to be complete? Formatting. What format must deliverables be in? Communication. When, where, and how should notifications, updates, and other information be communicated? Responsibilities. Who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed? Procedures. What steps must be followed in order to perform a task? Guidance. What information can you provide to help the contributors? What policies must they be made aware of? Resources. What tools, facilities, equipment, staff, or other things are available or must be located? In some organizations, during some phases contributors will be expected to submit deliverables in the required format. In other organizations, during some phases writers will not be expected to perform formatting at all. This structure gives you the means to define expectations for that particular pursuit, in that particular phase, under the particular circumstances you find yourself in. Simply as “what do we expect?” And then document it. Pro tip: If you want your expectations to be met, you should make sure your expectations are feasible and those making the contributions are capable (available, sufficiently trained, etc.).

Proposal content planning should give a lot of guidance to proposal writers regarding what to write and how to present it. They should be able to follow the content plan like a set of instructions, that they can follow to create the right proposal on the very first draft. You can anticipate many of the things that will need to be addressed in your future proposals, based on the nature of the work that you do and how you manage it. The problem is that unless every RFP really is the same, and not merely similar, reusing the text from your past proposals can easily do more harm than good. The good news is that it is far easier, and safer, to reuse your content plan instructions. You can think of them as recipes for your proposals. And you can quickly pull them together and greatly accelerate preparing the level of guidance needed to raise the bar on your proposals. When you practice proposal content planning, you will discover that sometimes you know just what to specify for the proposal, and sometimes it must be figured out by other people. This directly impacts the guidance you can provide. In addition, sometimes you have options, choices, and decisions to make between alternate approaches. Some may work better in certain circumstances than others. Or you might have recommendations to make but don’t want the writers to feel like they have to take the advice if they have something better in mind. This can all be confusing, until you realize that it’s the secret to organizing the guidance you give to your proposal writers. Whether you implement a proposal recipe library or are simply giving ad hoc guidance, here are four ways you can organize the guidance you offer to your proposal writers: Instructions. These guide your proposal writers regarding what to write about and how to present it. They focus on things like what to include, what to leave out, what points to make, how to differentiate, what to emphasize, what not to forget, and how to incorporate your customer, opportunity, and competitive awareness. If you explain what matters, your writers can put things in the right context on the very first draft. This is a huge accelerator for proposal writing and can turn it into a simple process of elimination when done thoroughly. But it requires knowing how you want to shape the proposal, knowing what should be offered, and already having the necessary details. Questions for your writers to answer. When you don’t know what to offer or have the details, you can still provide guidance in the form of questions they should address when they write their sections. You can still lay out what should be addressed in each section, without knowing the details. For example, you can prompt them to address features and benefits in a particular way, without knowing what the features or corresponding benefits might be. This can point them in the right direction and still provide some acceleration. Even if you don’t completely frame each section, just pointing out a few key questions ensures they get attention and leads to a better proposal. Options/ things to consider/ recommendations/ examples. A little inspiration goes a long way, providing both acceleration and raising the bar. You can inspire your proposal writers with ideas and choices, with them even being required to do the things you’ve cited. If you leave the door open, you might even inspire them to think of something better than what you recommended. Options, examples, and considerations are eye openers that can prevent writers from getting stuck by not knowing what is expected of them. And that turns them into potential accelerators. How to guidance. When you hear the word “guidance” one thing all people think of is “how to” guidance. As in “Proposal Writing 101.” This kind of guidance can be good, especially when you have inexperienced writers. It embeds training into the document specifications. But it’s not the only kind of guidance, so I put it last. “How to” guidance can encompass the proposal process, writing techniques, task procedures, goals, domain knowledge, institutional knowledge, and more. At a minimum, you should provide sufficient guidance so that those assigned to the proposal can complete their assignments. An example of how they can be combinedWhen you combine these, you might get guidance like this: An instruction regarding how to introduce the section. Options for potential win strategies depending on whether your company is the incumbent or not. Questions about what matters to the customer so they build the section around it. Instructions for how to set up a table as part of the response. “How to” guidance related to meeting proposal writing expectations and proposal department procedures. Compare what you can anticipate getting back from your writers when you provide guidance like this to what you can expect to get from proposal contributors when all you give them is an outline and a copy of the RFP. Should you create ad hoc or pre-written guidance?If you build a library of instructions, questions, and options, you can very quickly assemble your proposal content plans. This can be important for adoption if you are currently struggling to plan your proposal content before you jump into proposal writing. You don’t need complete coverage for your content plans to have a large, positive impact on how your proposals turn out. A recipe library like this is much easier to both create and maintain than a content reuse library based on pre-written narratives. And pre-written instructions won’t hurt your win rate the way recycling narratives will. Even if you don’t have a recipe library, you can use this as a technique to focus on the guidance you conceive of in the moment of need. Building a libraryStart with your subject matter or other domain topics and drill down. When you get to the lowest level, organize the guidance items you have by these four categories. This will stage your material according to your future needs. When you can specify what should go into the document and how it should be presented ahead of time, you’ll have instructions to pass on. When you don’t know the details and you need your writers to figure things out, you’ll have questions to guide them. When you have potential approaches that are good in the right circumstance, you’ll have the options category to draw from.

Before you begin proposal writing, you should prepare a proposal content plan that accounts for everything that should go into the proposal and how it should be presented. Here is some inspiration for writing the instructions that should go into your proposal content plan. Decide what type of guidance you can provide Provide instructions that tell proposal writers what to offer or say Provide instructions to guide the writers to figure out what to offer or say Provide details the writers will need or options to consider Provide instructions that identify the details others should find and include Provide instructions to proposal writers regarding the key points they should make How to achieve the best score against the evaluation criteria The results of your approach/how the customer will benefit Your strengths Your differentiators Things they should prove Information/data they can use when making proof points Providing instructions related to positioning How they should introduce the section, offering, etc. How to present things How to talk about features, issues What to emphasize or focus on Why you’ve chosen this approach or made trade-offs Competitive positioning, ghosting, or comparison What matters The impact Provide instructions related to anticipated customer fears, concerns, and risks What are they aware of What are they not aware of What you plan to do about it (risk identification/mitigation methodology) Provide instructions for research they should do or things writers need to figure out Qualifications Certifications Related details Names to name Capacities Amounts Dates or schedules Provide instructions related to using graphics in this section Guidance or examples regarding the use of graphics and tables Suggestions for graphics to use Instructions for them to figure out what graphics to use Describe the conclusion you want the reader to reach Provide instructions to help the writers figure out what to offer or how to fulfill the requirements What we should offer/do/deliver Achieving RFP compliance Features/benefits/proof What to include Phases or steps in your proposed approach Components of your offering Capabilities Solution architecture People, processes, and tools to propose Roles that project staff or stakeholders will play Who, what, where, how, when, and why Deliverables Estimates Availability or use of resources Provide instructions related to proposal concerns Assumptions Limits in what can be done or amounts Issues Dependencies Proposal risks Mitigations Definitions RFP interpretation Alignment with the pricing or other proposal sections Provide instructions related to discussing your experience/ past performance/ citation/ testimonials Relevant project experience Details about experience Important things about your performance Stories/Anecdotes Accomplishments Testimonials Instructions related to proposal writing Writing from the customer’s perspective Conventions Procedures to follow Style guidance Instructions related to contracting Procurement rules and advice Relevant FAR Clauses and what to do about them

If you need to write a winning proposal to close the sale, then the pre-RFP pursuit phase isn’t just about lead identification. The pre-RFP pursuit phase becomes about preparing to win the proposal. People can’t achieve the goal if they don’t know what it is. If you have more than one, they need to be prioritized. Qualify the lead. Does it fulfill for the company’s lead qualification criteria? Discover what it will take to win. Can you articulate what it will take to win? How will the customer make their decision? What must the customer see in your proposal in order to conclude it is their best alternative? Develop an information advantage. What matters to the customer? What are their preferences? How should you interpret the things they say? What do you need to know to design your offering? Turn your information advantage into a competitive advantage. What are you going to do about it? What should you say in your proposal based on what you’ve learned? How should you present what you have to say? Influence the future RFP. If you are serious about winning, you can’t just be passive and wait for the RFP to see what’s in it. If you are serious about winning you should be helping the customer understand their needs and how to articulate them as RFP requirements. If you’re not trying to influence the RFP, you’re just waiting for someone else to. To support this, your pre-RFP pursuit process should be built around: Discovery. What information should you seek? Consider building your pre-RFP pursuit process around questions instead of charts. Positioning. Articulating how you will position against the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and other potential considerations. Guidance. People perform better when they have good guidance. The challenge is to deliver it in a form that doesn’t tie their hands, is accessible from where they happen to be, is useful when they are in the field as well as at their desk, and scales to the time available from start until RFP release. Guidance should cover what to discover, how to do it, and what to do about it. Development. Developing your offering design and validating it with the customer before RFP release is a huge advantage. This assumes you have a process for designing your offering and a way to discuss it with the customer. But even if you can’t validate it with the customer or even complete your design without the RFP, the more you document what you plan to propose and why, the better off you will be at RFP release. If your pre-RFP pursuit process is built around lead identification and bid/no bid decisions, then even though leads are passing the decision-gate, you likely aren't doing a lot of the things needed to maximize your win probability.

Marketing is often poorly defined. What one company calls “marketing” can be very different from another company. Business development is often poorly defined. What one company calls “business development” can be very different from another company. This makes comparing them fun. They overlap so much that some companies don't really do marketing. And that makes understanding the comparison important. What is marketing? What is business development? Marketing is what brings people to your sales process. Business development is that sales process. Except when it’s also marketing. It’s more like business development contains a little of both marketing and sales. And that’s the problem. Business development overlaps with marketing when it is responsible for identifying new markets and customer segments (as opposed to individual customers). For example, by partnering with other companies to bundle their offerings, a business developer might gain access to their partners' customers as well as their own. Or by figuring out that if it develops a new solution, the company can win new business. However, when business development is also responsible for identifying new individual customers, it also overlaps with sales. When business development is responsible for hitting targets based on closing sales, it is a sales function. How much of that marketing do you think will really get done? The overlap between marketing and business development is mostly at the front end. The central issue is what needs to happen before you start prospecting, and who should be responsible for it. There is another set of issues at the back end, revolving around who leads the pursuit once a lead is qualified, who decides what to offer, and who is responsible for proposal development, Where do you want people to spend their time? Do you really want your business development staff spending time on marketing? Do you want them designing a web site to attract the right customers and figuring out how to flow them to the information that will convince them to make contact, or do you want them spending time with the customers that do make contact? Do you want them spending their time crunching analytics to determine what kind of customers to chase, or do you want them selecting individual customers to pursue? Do you want them segmenting markets to determine the right composition to fill your pipeline, or do you want them identifying specific customers to fill those segments? If your business development staff are incentivized based on deals, that’s where they will spend their time. And you will get no marketing. But you definitely do need marketing. And for a lot more than just “branding” or name recognition. Even if you can get by just responding to publicly announced RFPs, you need marketing to figure out which market segments to target and where it’s worth developing relationships. If you just turn your business developers loose, what you’ll get are the low hanging fruit. And over time you’ll grow like a weed instead of growing strong. Beware the seesaw effect When business developers are incentivized based on leads and sales, they won’t start marketing until they run out of leads. Marketing requires time to pay off. It won’t pay off fast enough when you’ve run out of leads and then start. I’ve seen companies go up and come right back down because of this. Marketing would have saved them by creating a continuous funnel of leads for their business developers to spend their time qualifying and pursuing. Instead of an either/or approach or a relationship based on territories, consider having an integrated approach. Ultimately the goal isn't to have marketing, or to have business development. The goal is to win and win big. This requires skills and effort that are beyond what we can reliably expect of one person. It's so much bigger than one person that it really should be the corporate culture and not simply roles that people play.

The problem with planning a Black Hat review is understanding what people’s expectations are. Everyone defines it differently. I’ve never seen two practiced the same way. The very name tells you nothing about its scope. But it does sound cool, and everyone wants to have one. So let me start off with a definition: A Black Hat review is a (preferably pre-proposal) competitive assessment. But that doesn’t tell you what should go into it or how it should be conducted. Learn what your stakeholders' priorities are To get to that level of detail, you need to know your priorities. Is the "Black Hat" going to be about: Articulating language for the proposal? Uncovering what your competitors might propose so you can better position against them? Assessing competitors' strengths and weaknesses? Maybe a SWOT chart? Assessing competitive pricing ? When is a Black Hat really a Price to Win? Attempting to score the competitors against the evaluation criteria as if you were the customer? Before conducting a Black Hat review, I recommend circulating a list of possible goals to be discussed and ranked first by all of the stakeholders to the review. Some people want everything. But you need to prioritize. One reason I’ve never seen a Black Hat review done the same way twice is that doing them well is time-consuming and expensive. You can’t just show up to the review, throw some opinion bombs, and pat yourself on the back for not needing to do any research. Building your Black Hat review around your goals Once you have defined and prioritized the goals, a "Black Hat" is just intelligence gathering and strategy development to achieve the goals people said were important to them. How to plan and implement your Black Hat review becomes a solvable problem once you know the goals. Keep in mind that the goal is not going to be to prepare some wicked PowerPoint. The ultimate goal is to impact the proposal. The Black Hat review deliverables should provide guidance to the proposal writers regarding what to talk about, how to position things, and how to present them. Use the Black Hat to determine where you need to change your offering, your team, or your messaging. Then section by section drive those changes into the proposal. Instead of making your Black Hat review about aggregating data about the competitors that none of the proposal writers will know what to do with, try making your Black Hat about discovering and articulating what it will take to win.

I was recently asked about what’s changed in the proposal industry over my career. My response was that what strikes me far more is how little has changed. It’s not just that we have the same problems we had decades ago, it’s that there are viable solutions just waiting to be implemented. Every other part of the companies that depend on winning proposals for their revenue have developed and matured their practices. Except the proposal function. Please read the following as motivation and focus on what to do about the need for change instead of making excuses. This isn't venting. We’ve heard all the excuses and done our share of venting. Note that I haven’t pointed fingers. It’s not the proposal department’s fault. Or sales. Or the executives. The fault belongs to all of us. But fault doesn't matter. Only progress does. I'm sure not all of these apply to every company. But consider just how many of them do still plague your company… Why are we still doing proposals without defining what proposal quality is? Instead companies still practice “I’ll know it when I see it” quality management. But only on their proposals. Is there any quality methodology in existence that sets that as its standard? Why does every aspect of what we do have actual standards but the critical proposal function which impacts, give or take 100% of the company's ability to generate revenue, does not? Why aren’t we giving writers and reviewers the same set of quality criteria? Why are we surprising the writers with what the proposal should be or say after they have prepared their draft? Why after all this time are we still expecting writers to guess what will be required to pass proposal reviews? How do we ever expect this to work? This is a completely solvable problem. So why haven’t we implemented the solutions? How often are we still beginning proposal writing with little more than the RFP to guide the writers? Even when you start at RFP release, you should have some ideas about what it will take to win that you can use to guide people. Why are we still throwing RFPs at people and expecting them to just figure it out? How is that we’re still getting little or no useable input from business development or capture effort? It’s always amazed me how little the business development briefing or capture plan had in it that helped put the right words on paper during proposal development. Why haven’t we helped them prepare better and create more useable inputs that would have a greater impact on the win rate? Why aren’t we giving them input forms for what we need to know in order to write a winning proposal, and why aren’t they building their processes around delivering it? How is it even possible that engineers and subject matter experts who know better are designing the offering or solution to be proposed by writing narratives about it? This is a major cause of the proposal death spiral. What engineering school or best practice recommends designing things by writing narratives about them? Why do we still do this? Are we really incapable of figuring out what to offer and validating it before we starting writing? When are we going to starting measuring proposals by ROI instead of cost? Going from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate would increase the company’s revenue by 50% and pay for all the effort required to do it many times over. So why are we still under investing in the proposal function instead of tracking its ROI? Is there any other business line or function with the potential to increase the company’s revenue by that much which isn’t tracking its ROI? How much would the company pay for a sales function that could increase revenue by 50%? Increasing your win rate can do that with the leads you already have. And yet, we get stingy with proposals. Maybe it’s because companies don’t know how to increase their win rate. And maybe that’s where they should start. Why haven’t win rates changed? Separate from the ROI issue above, why haven’t companies improved their ability to win proposals enough to change industry average win rates in an amount that’s noticeable? If our “best practices” really are such, shouldn’t there be a quantifiable impact? Why are we still preparing “lists of hot buttons and themes” that do not map to either the proposal outline or the evaluation criteria? We’ve convinced ourselves that we have a process because we have themes. By why do those themes never seem to actually cover the outline or relate to how we’re going to maximize our score against the evaluation criteria? And why are so few themes differentiators? Why can so many of the themes on the lists I see companies preparing be claimed by any company that makes the competitive range? Weak themes are not a best practice, do not mean that you have a process, and are ultimately uncompetitive. Why are they still tolerated, let along offered as something to brag about? Why are people still giving more attention to proposal content reuse than proposal content planning? We all know that content reuse does more to lower win rates than improve them. So why do we focus on that while assuming that planning before writing is just too hard to achieve? Still. By now, we should all know that we spend more time thinking and talking about the proposal than actually writing it. So why do we continue to believe that recycling content is a better way to accelerate things than speeding up figuring out how to prepare a proposal based on what it will take to win? Still. Can we finally kill the meaningless color team labels and milestone-based proposal reviews that don’t actually validate proposal quality? Why can I still ask everyone at the [insert color label here] review what the scope of the review is and get a different answer from everyone participating with nothing defined in writing? And if it is defined in writing, why does everyone still define the scope of the review differently? And regardless of the scope why do we simply ask reviewers to tell us whether the proposal is “any good?” Still. And why do we think that reviewers can read the entire RFP and the entire proposal and assess everything that needs to be validated in a few hours? And do it without any written quality criteria. Are we really still giving assignments to writers with the only guidance amounting to heading titles and the RFP? Why do we still say “write this section” without providing any guidance regarding what to write about and how to present it? Still. Why do companies still treat business development/sales, capture, proposal, contracts, and pricing as sequential silos instead of fully integrating them into winning proposals? Is it because we still try to staff everything proposal related with people who have day jobs and the proposal isn’t their top priority? See the items about ROI and win rate above. Why do we tolerate people expecting the proposal to magically appear without them touching it or learning about it as little as possible? What kind of win rate is that supposed to generate? With everyone claiming to know the “best practices,” how is it that we continue to tolerate train wrecks at the end of proposal production? Why do I still find people who think that a train wreck at the end of the proposal is just the nature of the universe? What other function potentially increasing revenue by 50% or more is allowed to continuously have obviously disruptive results because “that’s just the way it is” and “we can’t do anything about it?” Why are (unsubstantiated) claims still showing up in proposals? We’ve known that this is the most common and curable win rate stealing worst practice for decades. Why is it still showing up? We talk about it. Everyone knows about it. And yet companies have done nothing to eliminate it. Do we care so little about win rate that we can’t even fix this? Since you’re on PropLIBRARY, you probably are not the source of these problems, and if you are a subscriber you have access to solutions for all of them. But the Powers That Be have some mighty bad habits. They’ve accepted these problems for so long they may not even be looking for a solution. Or they’ve institutionalized these problems for so long they’re afraid of what it would take to tear down and rebuild. Or maybe they’re just afraid to admit they don’t know how to solve these completely solvable problems. You can help them with that. But they have to show up motivated and with the will to make it happen. None of these problems are technical. All of these problems are habits. Habits may not be easy to change, but these are opportunity stealing, growth limiting, and revenue reducing habits that are within your power to change. Everyone says they want to win. Now’s the time to finally prove it.

It may seem a bit counterintuitive, but streamlining your proposal management process starts by writing down your proposal quality criteria. In fact, it’s the quickest and easiest way to launch your process. It works better than starting at the kickoff meeting and trying to chart the steps. Just simply having proposal quality criteria gives you a way to: Provide guidance to your proposal writers Enable reviewers to validate the quality of what your writers produce Inform the activities before the proposal starts about what information will be needed to successfully complete the proposal Ease into proposal content planning by establishing a framework it needs to accomplish. People can attempt proposal content planning without any other guidance beyond the quality criteria, and mature the planning process over time. Enable performance metrics and the discovery of what impacts what it will take to win the most Basically, having proposal quality criteria makes every step better and can be implemented before you’re ready to formalize all the other steps. That’s the sophisticated-sounding way of saying that in the beginning you can make do without having any other process details, if you’ve got your proposal quality criteria figured out. What do you need to get started? To create proposal quality criteria you must: Have a written definition of proposal quality. You don’t know what to achieve if you can’t define it. And oh by the way, proposal quality is not defined by whether it wins. That is out of your hands and can’t be used to guide the people preparing the proposal. Be able to articulate what it will take to win. If you do want your proposal quality criteria to be based on what it will take to win, you’ll have to discover that and be able to itemize the components of it. But if you can’t do that, how are you going to be able to prepare a winning proposal other than by luck? Use that to validate what you’ve written. This means you have to get The Powers That Be who participate in your proposal reviews to accept the quality criteria and use them to conduct a review that is not subjective. Hint: You might want to get them involved in creating your proposal quality criteria. Incidentally, the defining proposal quality and having quality criteria. It has all the details needed for immediately implementing a proposal management process that does all these things. How does this streamline your proposal process? Having proposal quality criteria sounds sophisticated, but turns out to be easy to implement and acts as an accelerator for other parts of the process: Your proposal quality criteria can be presented as a checklist. This checklist is usable by proposal writers and reviewers to accelerate and improve performance in both areas. Your proposal reviews are planned by allocating quality criteria to reviewers and dates. This is something that can easily be turned into a form, producing a written proposal review plan in minutes. With slight modifications your quality criteria become a set of pre-RFP goals. This can also take the form of a checklist. Doing this helps ensure that the information you need to fulfill the quality criteria is delivered to the beginning of the proposal effort. With some other changes, your quality criteria become worksheets for planning themes and win strategy development, proposal section planning, offering design, and more. The things required to fulfill the quality criteria can be turned into worksheets for proposal writers. This provides a little structure that helps ensure what they write passes the proposal reviews. It shows what the proposal content plan should result in, providing a defined scope for the planning. Between the checklists and worksheets, you can accelerate proposal content planning, which accelerates proposal writing, and helps ensure you get the proposal right on the first draft. It makes all the other parts of the proposal management process easier to implement. But the most important thing having written proposal quality criteria does is: It enables the people doing the work to know when they’ve succeeded. It increases the likelihood of passing quality validation on the first draft, eliminating unnecessary revision cycles and saving far more time than it took to create the quality criteria in the first place. It pays for itself many times over by improving your win rate. If defining and achieving proposal quality doesn’t improve your win rate, you have the wrong proposal quality criteria. If you want to streamline proposal writing in addition to the proposal process, focusing on reducing revision cycles will save far more time than increasing the amount of proposal text reuse (which can actually increase revision cycles). So why is it that… Nearly every company out there with a proposal process has it backwards? Why do they have the steps, but no written definition of proposal quality and conduct their reviews without any quality criteria? Like I said, it’s counterintuitive. When someone asks you to create a process, people naturally start with the steps. However, in this case, it’s better to start in the middle. The steps should be driven by itemizing what is required for success. When you start with the steps, you get a process designed to make a submission. When you start with defining success, you get proposals designed to win.

Even when you can’t think of any differentiators, you can still show insight. And if you can’t do that, all you have left is to win based on a lower price. If you have no insight and your competitors do, maybe you shouldn’t bid. What is insight and why does it matter in proposals? Insights are the realizations you have that show the customer you not only have a deeper understanding than your competitors, but that you know how to deliver better results. Your insights can lead to a better offering, better win strategies, or better pricing. But even when the customer forces everyone to bid the exact same thing, your insights can make the difference between winning and losing. In fact, that’s when you need them the most, because your insights may be the most important difference between you and your competitors. Insight is winning by being smarter. Even if you don’t know as much as someone else. How does insight become a differentiator? Results that matter. When the customer has told you exactly what to do or deliver and everyone will have the same approach and deliver the same results, showing insight about why the results matter may show that you know best not only how to achieve those results, but why to achieve them. Proving understanding. When the customer asks vendors to describe their understanding, it’s a safe bet that 100% of the vendors responding will claim that they understand. Instead of being one of them or focusing on your experience (which is not the same as understanding and is what most will do), try showing insight about why you do things and why you’ve proposed doing things the way that you have. The reasons why you do things will do more to prove your understanding than any claims. Earning trust. We all know from personal experience that customers prefer to buy from vendors they trust. But how do you prove that you are trustworthy in a proposal? Your insights can demonstrate that you have good judgment. Your insights can show that you are prepared, capable, and reliable far better than your claims about it. Examples! Here are a few, simple ways that insight can transform a proposal section from something routine and ignored into something the customer will pay attention to: When companies write about communication, they write about the tools they use, the frequency, topics, etc. This does nothing to prevent miscommunication, or prove that you will communicate as promised during a moment of need. However, showing insight regarding how communication can prevent problems or keep them from getting worse, innovative ways you’ve built communications into your everyday processes and procedures, or which forms of communication actually get used by people will do more to make you look credible than saying you have regular meetings in Zoom. Instead of talking about the same best practices that everyone else does, try showing some insight into which parts have the most impact on success. Instead of just talking about fulfilling the requirements, try talking about the impact you will have on all the stakeholders, including the ones you may never directly interact with. Don’t just show you know how to do the work. Show that you will do the work in ways that help everyone impacted. Instead of just describing what you are proposing, try explaining why you made the choices you made in order to select what you did as your offering. Instead of just showing the steps in your recruiting process, try talking about what recruiting challenges will be the most significant for this project. How does insight defeat the competition? Winning proposals requires more than just saying good things. It requires outscoring your competitors. Here’s how to leverage insight to do just that: Set yourself as the standard that everyone else gets compared to. When you show insight regarding why you do things and what the impact will be, you show that you know the best way to accomplish the project goals. Once the customer finds the best, everything else they read gets compared to that anchor point to determine if it is still the best. You remain in the front of their mind, even when they consider the proposals submitted by others. Ghosting the competition. In addition to explaining why you do things, you can also explain why you don’t do things the way your competitors to. You can position their approaches as inferior. Your insights about the problems with their approaches can help the customer understand why not to score them highly. Strengths. An insight that isn’t obvious that can positively impact the outcome is a strength. Even when the nature of the RFP means there are no differentiators, your insights can turn doing the same thing as everyone else into a strength for you that they did not score. Do you need to know the customer to show insight? If you are trying to show insights about the customer, such as their preferences and the reasons for them, you need to know the customer well enough to have those insights. But insights don’t have to be based on having a special customer awareness. You can also show insight by talking about what matters: What matters about your approaches, management, or experience? What matters about risk, quality, or performance? What matters about fulfilling the requirements, pricing, or evaluating the proposals the customer receives? What will impact the outcome of the project? What should the customer care about, consider, or be concerned about? What should the customer prefer? Becoming insightful Something matters about every single consideration that goes into creating a proposal. You just have to have the insight to see it. Cultivate insight. It’s not a process. It's a way of looking at things. It’s more like a dedication to considering things from many perspectives. It helps to have a culture that reinforces that particular kind of dedication. On second thought, only put as much effort into it as you think you need to. How well do you think you’ll do against competitors who put it at the top of their priority list?

When the customer reads your proposal there are many reasons they might decide your proposal is their best alternative and select it for award. The goal of proposal writing is to enable them to reach a conclusion in your favor. Some of the reasons they might do this include: They can trust you to deliver as promised better than any alternative You know what needs to be done and how to do it better than any alternative You bring lower odds of failure or problems than any alternative You are ready to start when they need you to and able to deliver by when they need it Qualifications and experience that enable you to achieve the best outcomes for them You have the most resources You know how to overcome the challenges better than any alternative You bring the most insight into what matters and how to accomplish their goals You have the most strengths and the fewest weaknesses You offer the best value or the lowest price, depending on their preference You have something no one else has that they want They see how to give you the top evaluation score All of these require that they see what they need to reach that conclusion. When I review proposals what I usually see is…What the customer will conclude when they read your proposal depends on what they see. Here is what I usually see when I review proposals for companies: A lot of claims. Often about what the company thinks their strengths are. What I don’t see enough of are proof points. Often the strengths claimed are the exact same strengths everyone else bidding will claim. A lot of description. Usually about the company, its qualifications, and its experience. What I don’t see enough of are the reasons why those details matter or will impact the customer or the project outcome. A lot about what you will do or deliver. This usually covers the proposed approaches and things that will be done to fulfill the RFP requirements. What I don’t see enough of are the reasons why the company has chosen to do things that way and how that makes their approaches deliver better outcomes. Learn how to read your proposalsNow read your proposal like a proposal evaluator instead of someone trying to point out everything great about themselves. Read your proposal like someone who depends on getting what they need and has to reach a decision about which proposal to select. This is important if you want to see things the way a proposal evaluation will. What you want the evaluator to see is: Proof points that support your strengths. Better yet, strengths that are differentiated, with a solid rationale for them, that prove that they deliver better outcomes. A minimum of description detail and more about why they matter and how you will leverage them to do things better than anyone else bidding. Being able to do what the customer asked does not make you their best alternative. Delivering the best outcome does. While you need to demonstrate that you can credibly fulfill the requirements to be considered, you really must prove you can deliver the best outcome to win. These are the things that will enable them to reach the conclusion that they should select your proposal. If you want them to see these things, you need to change the focus of your proposal writing. What you need to be able to give the evaluators what they needThe process of preparing a proposal is not a production process. It is a process that starts by discovering what it will take to win, figuring out how to structure a document that enables the customer to select your proposal, planning not only what to write but how to write it, performing the actual writing, conducting quality validation to ensure that what got written reflects what it will take to win, then performing final production and submission. Whether the proposal is small or large, all of this needs to be done. And done better than your competitors do it. If you are only doing a single proposal, you may try mightily. If your company does a lot of proposals, then you need to structure things so that you accomplish them every single time. The return on investment for winning more of what you bid makes it all worthwhile. So why will the customer select your next proposal? It’s not because of how great you are. It’s because of what they see in your proposal. Will they see what they need to conclude that you are their best alternative?

We tend to obsess over the technical approach and treat the management plan as if it's routine. Yet companies have won major proposals by focusing on the management plan instead of the technical approach. How do you know when the management plan is more important? It depends on: The evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria sometimes favor either the technical or the management section. When they do, it is an indicator of which the customer thinks is more important. Since the evaluation criteria determine how you are scored and whether you win or lose, they should receive the most consideration. However, the closer to equal they are, the more you can show understanding and increase the credibility of your ability to perform by showing insight related to the other items in this list. What is the customer’s role? Will the customer be managing things and in control, or will you be? If it will be you, then how can they have confidence that under your management things will go well? Remember, it’s the customer’s perception of their role that counts. If they perceive themselves to be running things, then they may not want you go into detail about certain aspects of management and if you do you might conflict with the customer’s perceptions. What is the customer’s experience with what they are procuring? The more experience the customer has with what they are asking for, the more they will have their own ideas of how it should be managed. The opposite is also true. The less experience they have with it, the less confidence they’ll have in their own RFP and the more trust will be a concern for which proposal they select. Can they trust you to deliver as promised? How do they know things will go smoothly, on schedule, and within budget? Risk. How much risk is there in performance or delivery? The more risk, the greater the need is to manage things carefully. Risk itself may need to be managed. Quality. You can describe your technical approach in detail, but how will you ensure that every important part is done correctly? If there are major consequences, you might want to focus on managing quality. There are other reasons to manage quality, including efficiency. Span of control. The more people and moving parts, the more management effort will be required. Are logistics a concern? Supply chain and other logistics considerations require management and oversight. Simple logistics may not be a problem to manage. But even if the project is highly technical, if the logistics are complicated, then management can equal or exceed the importance of the technical approach. Predictability. When things are stable and predictable they are much easier to manage. But when workloads fluctuate, there are many changes, issues surface unpredictably, quality varies, risks are difficult to identify and mitigate, etc. The lack of predictability can make an otherwise routine project difficult to manage. Staff experience and training. If your staff have a lot of experience and are well trained, they may not need as much management and oversight. New, inexperienced, and untrained staff need more supervision. A corollary to this is that projects with high turnover need stronger management. But the bottom line is that your insights about the staffing profile for the project should inform the priority you put on the management and technical approaches. Process maturity and reliability. Are your procedures written or do you make them up as you go along? Are your procedures tested? Are staff trained in them? Do they account for all contingencies? Do they address all of the issues in this list? Do they operate routinely? Are they repeatable? If your processes are mature and reliable, you’ll need less oversight and supervision to run the project. If your processes are new and untested, you might want to focus on reinforcing them with other aspects of your management approach. Tools. The tools you use can mitigate management concerns. They can centralize or decentralize, improve coordination, track issues, provide automated oversight, eliminate the need for quality control by humans, accelerate performance, provide customer reporting, and so much more. If you understand which management issues will be the most critical for project success and select appropriate tools, you can make management more than just a set of promises. Level of innovation. Innovation is usually perceived as increasing risk. If a project requires innovation, the customer may also perceive the need for stronger management approaches.

The more proposals the customer has to read, the harder it will be to get their attention and keep it. This is especially true when the customer defines the outline and has a page limit so tight you can’t use layout design. How to get the customer's attention in a proposal Give them a path to get their goals fulfilled (instead of your own). When the customer reacts with “That’s what I want,” you’ve got their attention. But complex proposals require more than just saying something beneficial sounding. What the customer wants is not simple. If it’s sufficiently complex, they may not know how to achieve what they want. They are looking for something more than what they asked for, often because they didn’t know how to ask. Provide graphics that show insight and a better way to get what they want. Graphics speak louder than text. They deliver more detail and are easier to understand. If something is difficult to illustrate, it’s probably even more difficult to understand by reading about it. If you have a great solution and you want to get the customer’s attention, show it to them. Don’t tell them about it. Show insight. This means providing graphics that literally open their eyes to new realizations. But it also means saying things they hadn’t considered that prove you know what you’re talking about and are the kind of company they’d like to work with. The more difficult it is to find tangible differentiators, the more important it becomes to show insight. Help them understand their alternatives. What makes you their best alternative? What makes all other alternatives worse? Go beyond claims and provide an analysis that proves your case. Give them the reasons why you considered but intentionally didn’t select those other alternatives. If you show insight while doing this, the analysis will hold their attention. Use a layout design that directs their attention to the good stuff. Layout design can be very effective to lead the eye. This unfortunately doesn’t work so well when the customer specifies a page limit so tight that you have to suck all the whitespace out of the proposal. Matter. What matters to the customer? What matters about what you are proposing? What else should matter to them? If you don’t write about what matters, then you don’t matter. If what you write matters to them, it will grab their attention. Be foolproof. A cynical reader will be cataloging their objections to everything you write. But if you show no weaknesses, and cover every contingency and risk, you might just win their respect. Along the way, their attention will be yours to lose. How to keep the customer's attention once you’ve got it Proof over claims. Proof points and analysis will hold the reader’s attention. Simple claims won’t. Proof points get scored. Claims don’t. Why. When you show insight or are discussing what matters, the reasons why matter. Why are you offering that? Why will it work? Why is it reliable? Why should the customer care? Easy evaluation. Proposals are often scored and not read. If it’s easy to score, then they’ll be able to find what they are looking for. If it’s not easy to score, they may not try very hard. Consistency. If they see that every section and even every paragraph starts off with an insightful point that matters, you’ll be able to hold their attention while they go from one to the next. If they reach a lengthy section where this isn’t true, they may zone out. Don’t just follow the seven tips above as things randomly occur to you. Build a structure so that they are consistently addressed to hold the reader’s attention. 3 things to avoid so you don’t lose the customer’s attention Don’t make claims. Everyone knows unsubstantiated claims do more harm than good in proposals (except for the people who still write them). But really it’s all claims that are bad. The best you can hope for is that the customer will not get offended when you sound like a TV commercial and will ignore your claims. That’s not the impression you want to make, especially if you're trying to get and keep their attention. Don’t make a claim and then try to prove it. Simply replace every claim with the proof statement. Don’t build to the finish. Don’t fall into the trap of wanting to finish on a high note, or end with an impressive conclusion like they taught you in school. You’ll lose the customer’s attention before they get there and they may end up skipping over your impressive conclusion. So put it first and then prove it. Don’t make it a claim, but do make it the point of what they are reading. This will give them a reason to read and the proof points will give them a reason to keep reading. Don’t ignore the customer’s perspective. Quit talking about yourself. The proposal is not about you. It’s about whether the customer will get what they want. Make your proposals about the customer and not about yourself.

People make the mistake of thinking that proposals are about promotion. They promote in the way they see all around them. Advertisements are full of claims. But their purpose is to get the customer to enquire to find out what they need to know. Proposals happen after the customer has expressed their interest. When the customer asks for a proposal, it’s the last step before they agree to sign a contract. They need all the information required to examine, consider, analyze, and decide whether to sign. If you approach your proposal like an ad on TV, you will be saying things the customer doesn’t want to hear and not providing what they are looking for. Think about your proposal as a decision support tool instead of a promotional tool. What does the customer need to see in order to make their decision? Should you tell the customer about your company? The customer doesn't want you to tell them how great your company is. The customer wants to know what they will get, why what you are proposing is their best alternative, and whether you will deliver as promised. Your claims of greatness, qualification, RFP compliance, experience, etc. only get in the way of them finding what they are looking for. They will make their decision based on how well you prove your case and score against the RFP evaluation criteria. A claim is when you tell the customer what your capabilities are, how great you are, or what you’ll do. Do you want a salesperson to tell you how wonderful they are or do you want them to prove they have a better offering delivered in a better way that will bring better results? Do you want them to claim amazing results or provide the details that prove it? Do you want them to say what they’ll do, or why they’ll do it that way? If it will be a formal evaluation, for example like you see in government contracting, the decision itself will be based on evaluation criteria and proposals will be scored against them. Will they consider your claims to strengths worthy of recognition in evaluation? Or will they simply be disregarded? Will the customer react the same way to your proof points? Will they compare your claims to those of your competitors or will they compare your proof points to your competitors? Which will affect your win probability? Which deserves the most page space? Which should your writing focus on? Don’t tell the customer anything. Make a point that matters to the customer, and then prove it. Do customers care more about your approach or the results it delivers? When the customer asks what your approach is to something, they won’t be evaluating whether it’s a good approach. They’ll be assessing whether it’s the best approach. What would make it the best approach? People, process, or tools? Results? Do they merely need to conclude that your approach is adequate, standard, and just like everyone else’s approach? Or are they looking for the best approach? What does the customer need to see in order to conclude that what they are reading is their best alternative? Will they focus on the details of what you do or will they focus on the results it produces? The answer depends on what they are procuring. Are they procuring your approaches or are they procuring the results? If they are procuring your approaches, then what are their goals? Will they measure your performance by how well they accomplish those goals or by something else? Does the customer care about you? When the customer is buying a commodity, they can get the same thing from many vendors. Do they care which supplies it? When the customer is buying a solution or complex service, they know that they can’t get it from just anyone. They need to know that the vendor they select is capable of delivering what they need. They need to be able to trust the vendor. But it in either case, it’s not the vendor that’s important to the customer. It’s getting what they need. Don’t be fooled when they ask you to describe yourself and your qualifications. They don’t care about you. They care about whether you’ll deliver as promised. Accept the requirements or explain how you will fulfill them? Does the customer want you to accept the RFP requirements or do they want you to provide your own response to them? The answer depends on what matters more based on what they are procuring under the circumstances they are procuring it. On a simple bridge contract being sole sourced to the incumbent, they may only need blanket acceptance of the SOW. But a services procurement can go either way. Do they want you to follow their process and procedures or do they want you to tell them how you’ll do the work? All RFPs say that you shouldn’t merely restate the requirements, but sometimes it's truer than others.

Over time, best practices become simply the way things should be done. They become ordinary. Best practices are not competitive. Everyone claims to follow them. The use of the term “best practices” no longer adds value or conveys meaning. Proposing to follow the best practices is certainly not a differentiator. However, best practices are a good starting point — if you go beyond them. The more your proposal is better than the “best” practices, the more competitive it will be. Here are some ideas to inspire you to go further. Take the best practices and: Improve the reliability, performance, efficiency, responsiveness, accuracy, accountability, etc. Whatever the best practices say you should do, do that plus something else to make your approach better. Remove defects. The best practices are designed to help you avoid defects. You can do better. You can do so much to fixing them after they have occurred. Try preventing them on the front end, or even designing them away entirely. While the best practices minimize defects, you can aim to eliminate them entirely by making it impossible for them to occur. Reduce friction. There are always inefficiencies, extra steps, unnecessary effort, challenges to overcome, limitations, and other things that get in the way and slow things down. They may not show up as defects or prevent delivery, but they are annoying. Often it is friction that wears away at the relationship between customers and vendors. Can you identify it? Can you eliminate it? Can you turn it into better results? Can you turn it into a better customer experience? Prove your claims. Best practices are typically claimed. If you really want to be compelling, prove your claims. Instead of claiming to "follow best practices," prove your practices are the best. Prove they get results. Prove that you follow them. Prove that you continuously improve them. Claims are usually ignored, but proof is compelling. Use better staff. Whatever staff your competitors have, provide better. But you have to prove they are better. That is not easy. Start by defining what “better” means. Most people rely on qualifications. But what customers really want are results. Reengineer. Best practices get stale. Maybe it’s time to drop them and reengineer something better. Explain the problems with the ordinary way of doing things. Then show that you’ve eliminated those problems with a better approach that starts refresh and isn't tied to legacy assumptions. Tailor. The best practices tend to be generic. One way to improve them is to tailor them for the customer’s specific environment and needs. A purpose-built solution is often better than just doing the same thing everyone else does. Introduce better performance measurement. Even if you do the same things, you are more credible if you measure your performance. Continuous improvement backed by analytics that come from performance measurement is far more credible than unsubstantiated claims of “continuous improvement.” RFP compliance is more credible when backed by performance measures than if it simply claimed. The challenge to performance measurement is to make it unobtrusive, or better yet automatic. Use better tools. If your tools are better, then make sure the customer knows it. Make sure they know what the impact of your better tools will be. Technology refresh. “Cutting edge” technology is stale five years later. Any project that hasn’t been continuously refreshed is likely running on stale technology. But don’t just offer new technology for technology’s sake. Offer new technology that will have an impact. Better yet, solve the problem of irregular technology refresh to prevent it from being a problem in the future. Get full credit for what you are already doing. Most contractors are already doing things that add value. They do them so routinely they forget to mention them. Make sure you are getting credit for all the ways you’ve improved on the “best” practices in your day-to-day operations.

Solutioning is figuring out what to offer the customer to solve their problem or address their need. However, in practice, it really involves incorporating subject matter expertise to figure out what to propose. While the term implies creating the solution for proposals that address customer problems, it is similar to systems architecting or offering design. We’re using the term solutioning to cover all of them just to keep it simple. Solutioning may not be needed in every proposal. Sometimes the customer tells you exactly what you should propose. Some RFPs specifically ask for solutions to problems. Others ask for approaches to achieve the customer’s goals. The more complex, technical, or uncertain things get, the more likely you’ll need help from a specialist who can solve what to offer. How to tell when you need solutioning Here are some signs that you need solutioning prior to proposal writing. Does the RFP tell you: How many people to bid? What the level of effort will be? Everything that your staff should do? Desired quality standards, but not how to achieve them? About problems the customer has with an expectation that you will propose how to solve them? Or does the RFP tell you what to accomplish but not: What approaches to take? How much effort will be required? How trade-offs should be made? If the RFP does not give you the answers, then the customer expects you to provide a solution that does. The more technically challenging the requirement, the more subject matter expert (SME) participation you’ll need. Another consideration is that the SMEs are often the ones who will be performing the work and are stakeholders in ensuring that what gets proposed is feasible. Even if you think you know what should be offered, it might be a good idea to involve the stakeholders. Solutioning and technical proposal writing are not the same While there are some SMEs who can do proposal writing, no one should do solutioning by writing about it. Figuring out your solution or what you plan to offer by writing about it is not only bad engineering, it’s a recipe for proposal disaster. If you don’t figure out what to offer and validate it before you start writing, you condemn yourself to re-write after re-write based on every change to your offering in search of something that will win. It never comes because you run out of time. Solutioning by writing about it can ruin a perfectly winnable proposal. Solutioning should be completed and validated before you start writing your technical approaches. This means that once you think you have a solution, you should have it reviewed to make sure it's what the company thinks will win and is what it wants to propose. You should do this before you invest in writing about it. Figuring out what to offer can be thought of as an engineering process. Or it can be thought of as a business process improvement effort. Or a design effort. Or an implementation planning effort. It depends on the nature of what your company does and what the RFP requires. The level and type of documentation required will also vary. When should you start writing about your solution? Proposal writing can start when you know enough about the components of your offering to describe them and you have validated that you have the right solution components. It usually does not require the same level of detail as pricing. It may simply require a few answers to questions or details that aren’t obvious. Having enough detail to illustrate your offering can help with both getting ready to write and with validating the solution. Working out at least a conceptual graphic is a great way to get started because it can show the components, what they accomplish, how they relate to the customer's needs, how they play out over time, and what the customer will get out of it all. A big part of death spiral — where each change to the solution initiates another rewriting cycle that concludes with another attempt to improve the solution and produces another rewriting cycle. This can continue without end until you run out of time and submit what you have instead of the proposal you wanted to have. Trying to figure out what to propose while solutioning by writing paragraphs about it is a primary cause of the proposal death spiral.

Proposal content planning is scalable. You can go into great detail, but even just a little can be a big help. Use this form to plan the depth, breadth, size, and complexity of the effort to put into your content plan.

Writing an RFP is harder than writing a proposal. And it’s even harder when you are not the expert in what you need to buy or are missing information. When customers and vendors work together, they can mitigate issues like these: How to get the right vendors to bid. Who out there could add value or bring better solutions? How do they find them? Would they bid? Who will ultimately bid? If they put out an RFP, what are they going to get back? Should they get more vendors just to have “competition” or should they focus on getting to know select vendors (and allowing them to get to know the customer)? What should they do about all that? How to reconcile what they know about their technical needs with what they need to do to conduct the procurement. They know they’ve got needs, but they may or may not know how to get those needs fulfilled. But if they have to go through a procurement process, how do they translate what they need into something that will survive their procurement process? This is why it’s critical for vendors and customers to talk before the RFP is written. Customers should create opportunities for this, and vendors should seek them out. Whether what they’ve asked for is feasible. When the customer writes the RFP, sometimes they put everything they might want into it. But the combination might just not be feasible, and they may not even realize it. How much it should cost. As they put together the list of requirements, the customer may not realize what each should cost, let alone what it should all add up to. Depending on what is being procured, the rationale for the vendor’s pricing can be as important as the pricing itself. Inflexible RFP pricing formats can get in the way of bidding better solutions. And sometimes small requirements drive a disproportionate amount of the cost. If the customer doesn’t realize this, they can blame vendors for being too expensive without realizing they could have lowered the cost substantially by dropping a low priority requirement. This is another area where discussing the basis of the estimate and how to present pricing should occur in discussions between the customer and vendors before an RFP is issued. How to control costs over time. For many reasons, costs can change after RFP award. Controlling those cost changes is tricky. Sometimes vendors game the system. Sometimes requirements evolve as part of the project. And sometimes customers want things that weren’t in the RFP. No one knows how to best control costs over time and both customers and vendors are to blame. This implies that only a solid partnership between them can address it. Achieving a solid partnership between the customer and the vendor after award starts with an RFP that requires and rewards it. How to get the most for the customer’s budget without telling vendors what their budget is. The customer knows how much they can afford to spend. They’d like to get the most for that amount. However, they fear that if they tell the vendors what their budget is, all proposals will be scaled to consume the whole budget. But that’s the only way to get the most value for that amount of budget. Customers rarely know what to do about that. The better the customer understands how vendors will approach their basis of estimates, the better they can make this decision. The best approach may vary according to what is being procured, the customer’s desire for ROI, and the range of possibilities in what could be proposed. How to maximize ROI. Sometimes customers are flexible on the budget based on what they are going to get. They are willing to invest more to get more. But they have no idea how to achieve that, let alone how to assess vendor claims regarding it. What problems could come up during performance. If the customer isn’t the expert in what they are buying, they may not be able to anticipate the problems that a given vendor approach might run into. They can ask vendors to describe them, but can they trust the answers? What makes one vendor better than another. The customer may not know industry best practices or typical ways to cheat. They’re not in the vendor’s business. This translates into the customer not knowing what things to ask about or how to write evaluation criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you know your customer is going to release an RFP, you can educate them about these things. Tell them what to look out for. Better yet, word your recommendations in ways that can easily be used in an RFP. For example, if you know that some companies lowball their pricing in ways that cause the customer problems after award, give them the requirements language that will enable the customer to prevent the problem. What’s wrong with the RFP they just wrote. RFP writing is hard. It requires projecting unknowns into the future. There are all kinds of potential problems, and many of them are not obvious: technical problems, editorial problems, things that aren’t problems now but could be problems in the future, obsolescence, incompatibilities, inefficiencies, risk, leaving things out, disorganization, ambiguities, loopholes, requirements that get in the way of other things you want, etc. When you see problems in the RFP, you can’t assume the customer did it on purpose or is even aware of it. Pointing it out might help them. Giving them wording that could resolve it might help them out even more. But better than either of those is to help them get the RFP right before it’s released, because fixing it after release can be disruptive. How to determine whether vendors will deliver what they promise. RFPs invite vendors to make a lot of promises. They attempt to get vendors to substantiate their ability to deliver on those promises. But when the customer does not know how to do what you do, it’s hard for them to set procedures or ask questions that will verify that vendors will deliver what they promise. What might work better than what they asked for. The customer might not know the best way to get from where they are to where they want to be. They try to research it as best they can before they release an RFP. But once the RFP is out, vendors might not be able to propose an approach that is better if it contradicts the RFP requirements. This happens when the alternative didn’t occur to the customer. Customers concerned about this should actively seek alternative approaches before releasing the RFP. The challenge here is that vendors like to save their “secret sauce” for the proposal, don’t want everyone to be prompted to take their better approach, and may not discuss it before the RFP is released. The trick is for vendors to share enough so that their better approach isn’t ruled out by the RFP, while not turning their approach into a requirement for everyone. Vendors can help by crafting wording that opens the RFP to their approach without defining the approach or making it a requirement. How to compare one proposal to another. Some RFPs try to inappropriately force everything into an apples-to-apples comparison. RFPs like this are particularly susceptible to preventing vendors from proposing better alternatives or adding value. The more dialog between customers and vendors to enable them to determine what separates a good solution or vendor from another, the better. How different people in their own organization approach decision making. Some people want one thing. Some people want another. The chain of command can be unpredictable. What matters to the customer can depend on which people at the customer are participating in the decision, and how they go about making their decisions. The evaluation process defined in the RFP is just a tool. Different people may use that tool in different ways. And the person writing the RFP, the people who need something procured, and those involved in the outcome may not know how it all will play out. For better or worse. How to maximize competition. The customer wants the best deal. But what does that mean? The best tool they have is usually relying on competition. But in highly specialized areas, the number of companies who realistically can meet the requirements without disruption to the customer can be quite small. And introducing more companies is not always quick or practical. This leaves the customer caught between wanting to maximize competition and wanting to solidify its vendor relationships. They may not know how to get this balance right. How to balance the trade-offs. When you create a list of all the things you want and call them “requirements” it’s easy to overlook that each of them brings new trade-offs. We tend to obsess over the trade-offs that impact pricing, but there are many other trade-offs. Vendors want to make the trade-offs that the customer would prefer. But the customer often doesn’t signal their preferences. RFPs focus on objective criteria and requirements instead of subjective criteria like preferences. The best way to manage the work. The customer might understand the specifications, but not be clear on the implementation (and vice versa). They might not know how to validate quality or mitigate the risks. And sometimes asking vendors about quality and risk is frankly a waste of effort. They often do not understand how to measure performance or what benchmarks to use. Asking vendors to commit to meeting performance measures or benchmarks is practically begging for a half-hearted response. For astute vendors, this creates an opportunity and an easy way to differentiate. Talking to your customer about the issues before the RFP is released is the best way to mitigate these issues. Don’t expect the customer to tell you what they don’t know. But don’t let that stop you from discussing the issue and providing information that might fill a gap. Vendors who understand how difficult writing an RFP is should help their customers by providing information in ways that aren’t self-serving or aren’t specific to a single procurement. Complaining about the quality of RFPs after they are written is an admission that you weren’t helpful enough at the right time and just waited. Instead, consider changing your pursuit process to better anticipate your customer’s needs before the RFP is written. Customers who are trying to get past the things they don’t know and still get their needs met have to look for ways to get past their distrust of vendors so they can discuss issues like these. Many of these issues can be talked about in ways that aren’t specific to any one procurement, but can increase understanding and produce better procurement outcomes across all of them. When customers are seeking input ahead of RFP release, I don’t see enough questions that start off like “What would you do to...” or “If you were writing an RFP how would you…” Complaining about the proposals submitted by your vendors or differences after award is often just an admission that you didn’t do your homework or didn’t talk to vendors before you wrote the RFP. Instead, consider creating opportunities for vendors to add value before RFPs are written. Take advantage of them. They want you to. We’re all in this together. We want the same outcomes. Being adversarial to each other or opportunistic isn’t going create the best outcomes for either of us.

If your proposal messaging amounts to: We’re fully capable of doing the work because we have experience and bring qualified staff, so here’s our approach that fully complies with all RFP requirements… Then you're telling the customer you are merely acceptable and not competitive. Every other proposal that makes the competitive range will also be acceptable. And most will be better. Most will be competitive. Assume that every proposal submitted will meet the specifications. Some will and any that don’t are not your competition. The companies you need to beat will all have met the specifications. They will all have relevant experience. They will all be fully qualified. To get selected, you need to be better than all of the acceptable proposals. You need to be the best. And to be the best, you need to offer something more than mere capability, experience, and doing what the customer asks you to do. You need to meet the specifications in ways that are better. You need to deliver more value as a result of your experience and qualifications. Instead of writing your proposal like the example above, how about something like this: The reason our approach is better is because… Our experience proves this delivers better results. Here is an example… We don’t just simply hire the same qualified staff out of the same labor pool as everyone else. We support the staff we hire with better processes and tools that include… The combination produces better outcomes for our customers, like… Instead of featuring what is essentially what they asked for, just like everyone else, and instead of talking about the same things that everyone else will be offering, try featuring the extraordinary. Here are four ways to do that: Superior approaches. In addition to meeting the specifications, provide something else that matters. Better reliability? Faster? Improved results? Lower costs? Remember, everyone will propose the best practices. Best practices are, in reality, the minimum for doing things acceptably. To win, you must deliver something better. Experience that has an impact. Why does your experience matter? What does the customer get out of it? How does your experience translate into better results? What does your experience prove? Everyone will have experience. Make sure your experience has the most impact. Better results. If you provide services, you provide people. How can you credibly claim to deliver better people? This is even harder to claim when you haven’t even hired all the people you need. If your offering is more than just your people, then feature better results delivered in a better way. Proof instead of claims. Everyone makes the same claims. You may feel like your claims are better deserved, but one unsubstantiated claim is just as good as another. Besides, customers ignore them. All of them. You never hear them mentioned during debriefs or showing up on evaluation forms. What does get scored? Proof points. Every time you write a claim, replace it with a proof point. Doing this alone can greatly improve your win rate. It will transform your proposal from being ordinary to being full of substance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen companies who were confident in their ability to win write a pleasant sounding but hopelessly ordinary proposal. You are what the customer sees and not what you believe yourself to be. Learn to see your proposals the way your customer will see your proposals. Then learn to be extraordinary.

This surprised me, so I thought I’d share. I’ve published dozens of articles about how recycling proposal content can hurt your win rate more than any possible cost savings it provides. Then I stumbled on this quick and easy proof: Take 10% of txe litters in a documgnt and replqce them w&th gprbage or intertional typos. Then, tome how lonk it taker you to fnx all the tipos. The imterestIng thing is tkat the sintences with the typqs are 90% simalar to the ones wlthout the typoz. If yuur recvcled propisal contept is 90% simliar to what you nead for the nuw proposel it’s a faer comparsion to the levil of efort to taillor the boilerplate context. Osce you’ve cleened up this paragraf, than tyme yourself tipping it. See if “tailoring” the sumilar contempt is fast then writen when you need. The lessor to be leerned is…. Similar is not the same. Not even 90% similar. A similar draft written for a similar RFP at a similar customer with similar needs in a similar competitive environment is not good enough. Because words. The words have to be identical to be useful. Anything in your content library is inherently written in the wrong context. It was written for the wrong customer preferences, with the wrong evaluation criteria, delivering the wrong benefits, for the wrong competitive environment. Even if it’s 90% right, optimizing it to win will take longer than creating something based on what it will take to win. You’ll spend far more time, effort, and cost creating your library and maintaining it (which is excruciating) than it is worth. It will constantly suck effort away from doing the things that do contribute to winning. But try the test and see for yourself. Why do people crave having a content library? People crave having existing proposal content they can use because they don’t know what to write. The solution to this problem is not to submit substandard proposals based on previous submissions. The solution is to build a process that discovers what it will take to win, inspires people with ideas, and then helps them understand how to quickly write a proposal based on them. Instead of giving them a content library to misuse, because you know some of the people who don’t want to be drafted into proposals or know what to write will not tailor sufficiently to maximize win probability, try giving them ideas for what to write about. Give them lists. Give them recipes. What are the steps in your recruiting process? Don’t write it out. Let them write it according to the type of recruiting needed for the future proposal based on the future evaluation criteria. But do give them the steps. The options. The considerations. The possibilities. Just give them a list of things that could go into their recruiting section. How will you achieve the customer’s objective? Teach them the who, what, where, how, when, and why technique. Maybe give them a list of possible objectives. Maybe give them the steps in your project management approach that identify customer objectives and measure performance in achieving it. But don’t prewrite it. Just give them a list of ideas. The previous customer may have high-level objectives. The next customer may want you to just do what you're told. The previous customer may have been risk averse. The next one might be seeking innovation. If you put your fulfillment of their objectives in the wrong context, it will hurt your win probability. But if your writers start from a list of possibilities, they can quickly determine what they need to write for the new customer. It helps if you’ve followed a process that is based on discovering what it will take to win, like the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. Show it to me Perhaps we should counter every time someone on a proposal says "but we've written it before" by questioning whether something has been written to match the wording of the RFP, the new customer’s preferences, changes in the instructions, the differences in the evaluation criteria, and the particulars of the competitive environment. Show me where we have that already written and I'll not object to reusing it.

There is a big temptation on proposals to get words on paper. The problem is that having too many words on paper too quickly becomes a problem when they are not the right words. The right words are very specific because a proposal doesn’t win by chance. Your proposal wins when the evaluators see what they need to give your proposal the top score. And that requires they see the reasons why your proposal is their best alternative. And that requires differentiation. And it requires RFP compliance. And that requires following the instructions and using the terminology of the RFP. And what one customer perceives as the most advantageous is different from what another customer will want to see. Add it all up and the words you need to win one proposal can be very different from the words you need to win the next proposal, even though the kind of services requested may be the same. So here are 11 key issues where you can see this in action. Most of them include alternatives that work better than starting from a draft proposal for addressing that topic. Before you start proposal writing, ask yourself: What points do I need to make? Does your draft make the right points? Rewriting to change context like that can take more time than writing something that makes the right points. Be very, very careful about inheriting points of emphasis from past proposals because they could be all wrong for the new proposal. On any given topic, having a list of the points you might want to make, organized by their circumstances (Are you the incumbent? Is the customer seeking innovation or risk averse?) is often more useful than something previously written in a context that is not applicable to the new customer. What do I need to say to get the top evaluation score? If the old evaluation criteria emphasized experience, but the new evaluation criteria emphasize staffing or something else, you may have a similar problem. Every approach and every benefit needs to add up to the top score for this RFP. The start of every proposal should include strategies for obtaining the highest score and those strategies should be turned into quality criteria for proposal writers. What do I need to say to establish RFP compliance? When the words in the RFP are different, the words in the proposal need to change, even if you’re talking about the same topic. What you might think of as “the same work” will need to be described differently to be considered compliant. A change of sequence here, different terminology there, and a slight change in priority and you’ve got major rewriting to do to turn your draft into what it needs to be. What are our company’s strengths? The strengths you present should focus on what matters to the customer and getting the top evaluation score. The strengths in your draft might sound good in a generic kind of way, but are they the right strengths to feature in this proposal? How much will need to change as a result? Don’t just throw beneficial sounding strengths at the customer hoping something sticks. Hope is not a strategy for consistently winning. Like the points you need to make, having a nice long list of your corporate strengths with proof points can be very handy and improve your proposals. It’s much better than having to dig through pages of text to find them. How can we differentiate ourselves? Differentiation is critical for successful proposals. However, the way you differentiate should reflect the new customer’s preferences. If the previous draft was built around differentiators that mattered to the previous customer, they may not be effective for this proposal. Changing differentiators can change your entire proposal strategy and the context that everything is written in. Positioning strategies and differentiators depend greatly on circumstances. You can take a similar approach for creating a reference list as described in the bullet list about the points you need to make. Sometimes your differentiators are the point. How can we prove it? Claims are lame and don’t get scored as strengths. Proof points are what you need for the customer to pay attention. Data-driven proof points are gold in a proposal. But researching and establishing a proof can be challenging. Having a list of common proof points with the data supporting them as a reference can be much more useful than a narrative that you have to extensively edit and where the proof points might not be optimized for this bid. What is the best that we can offer? What was offered in your previous proposal should have been based on the RFP requirements, evaluation criteria, and competitive environment. All three of those may have changed. Is what you wrote last time what you need to win this proposal? Is it sufficiently strong and differentiated enough to achieve a higher score against these evaluation criteria than any of your competitors? Do you need to improve on it? Do you need to reengineer your solution? And how does that impact the writing? How should we position ourselves against the competition? For some companies, the competition is always the same group of companies. But if your company offers a wide variety of services, then your competitors may change from bid to bid. And if you are attacking an incumbent, that company will likely be different from the last time. When the competition is different, your competitive positioning should change. This impacts the language you use to describe the benefits of your approaches and the reasons why you do things. And this can be woven throughout your paragraphs making it difficult to change. What matters? What mattered about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment for the last proposal? What matters for this one? How much does the draft need to be changed to reflect what matters? What is the customer’s perspective and what do they expect? Different customers have different expectations. Some are formal, some are informal. Some are centralized, some are decentralized. Some are authoritarian and some are consensus driven. Some are innovative and some are risk averse. Some are specific and some are flexible. These differences affect what they expect from contractors when they evaluate the proposals submitted. The perspective your last customer had could be very different from the next. Is the draft written with the right perspective and does it fulfill the right expectations? What trade-offs were made? Every proposal involves countless trade-offs. But the trade-offs made for one set of customer preferences and circumstances could be very different. And it may not be obvious when reading the previous proposal what trade-offs were made or why they were made that way. It’s easy for proposal specialists to want to make everything a document. However, consider putting this information in PowerPoint, Excel, or something like Microsoft OneNote instead. For lists and ad hoc fragments, these can sometimes be easier to maintain and browse. The most challenging part of trying to tailor a draft is that it can be difficult to recognize which language was originally put in to ghost the competition, which was put it to optimize the score against the previous RFP, which was put in because it mattered to that particular customer, etc. If it sounds beneficial, your proposal writers might not refocus and tailor it, leaving you with a proposal optimized for the wrong customer and lowering your probability of winning. But the key question will be “How much does the draft need to change in order to become what is needed?” What I often see is that more words will change than will be left alone. And the effort it takes to change that many words through multiple change cycles ends up being more than the effort to write it correctly the first time. In fact, most proposals run out of time before they discover what it will take to win. To break the endless writing and rewriting cycles, you should start by defining what it will take to win and measure everything against it. Build your proposal around it. That’s the primary goal of the MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY. Whether you start from a draft, read a draft and use it for inspiration without recycling the text, or create focused lists of differentiators, proof points, etc., for inspiration, you should always be comparing the language to what it will take to win this pursuit.

I like to think of it as the “other people” problem. Proposals would be so much easier if you didn’t have to work with other people. If they would just do what you need them to do… At work we tend to think that working with other people is just a matter of management and leadership. But proposal specialists often (usually?) work with people that they have no direct supervision of. Proposals borrow people. And those people have other priorities. If the only techniques you have are management and enforcement, your proposals are going to be full of people problems. The only real people problem you have is yourself. You don’t need to make them change. If you change, then how they will respond will change on its own. Here are 8 areas where you can change the performance of an entire proposal team simply by changing yourself. Value delivery. All opportunity requires growth. Proposals are the primary source of growth for contractors. People need to get something out of their efforts. It doesn’t always have to be something for them personally. But make them aware that working on proposals creates jobs, promotions, and improvements for the customers and all of the customer’s stakeholders. Working on proposals often delivers more value to more people than people’s normal jobs. Make them aware of it. Allow them to be proud of what they are accomplishing. People shouldn’t have to work on proposals. People should get to work on proposals. Inspiration. Encourage people to think bigger. You don’t necessarily need a sense of aggression to conquer the competition. A better vision will do. A grand vision of what could be. Thinking out of the box and changing the rules. Going way beyond the routine. And then turning it into something completely feasible and even practical. Help people break out of their routine so they can create a proposal that is far better than what your competitors are capable of. Motivation. Sometimes people need a little extra motivation. Motivation can be tangible, but often intangible motivation works better. But be careful. Too much cheerleading can be worse than none. Lubrication. What are the sources of friction that impede people's ability to complete their proposal assignments? Sometimes it’s competing priorities. Sometimes it’s a lack of clarity regarding how to fulfill the assignment. Sometimes it’s emotional. Friction adds up and makes things grind to a halt. Apply lubrication and make the proposal run smoother by reducing or eliminating all points of friction. Expectations. People show up with expectations. You have expectations. Can they all be met? Maybe. Maybe not. But they do need to be clear. All kinds of problems lurk under the surface when they are not. The good news is that most of the expectations that most people have are at least somewhat flexible. By surfacing expectations you gain the ability to find workarounds that maximize fulfillment for all. If you articulate your expectations as mandates, you immediately reduce the room for compromise and innovative ways to maximize fulfillment. Encourage innovation. I like to tell people that I will gladly steal their good ideas for how to do things better. I want them to find a better way. I’d much rather be debating which way is better with people who only want the best than to be trying to force people to do things my way. Make it easier for people to be uncomfortable. Winning proposals means leaving your comfort zone behind in order to improve your win probability. Staying in your comfort zone is not competitive. This is true for you as well as your team. This does not mean to take stupid risks, but it does mean you have to rationally assess risks and commit to the ones you decide to take. And you have to do this as a team, because all will be impacted. Embrace it together. Revel in it. Reread the bullet about inspiration. Mitigate conflicts. There are going to be conflicts. Because other people have their own opinions and agendas. Approach each one not as an argument or debate, but as a chance for productive improvement. Mitigate your conflicts by anticipating them, preventing them where you can, and resolving them all. Start by defining the conflict. Then ask yourself if that’s true. You are part of the conflict. So own it by finding a path to resolution that makes the team and the proposal stronger than it would have been without the conflict. Enjoy the process because it is necessary and can be good. You do not have to transform yourself into a “people” person or learn how to be emotionally intelligent. I’m not. I’m simply someone who needs to get things done through other people against a deadline. Since I can’t just get rid of them all and do it myself, I have to make them productive. It’s good to understand management. It’s good to understand leadership. But it’s crucial to be able to make a team of strangers you just met of varying skills and personalities productive. When you do it all yourself, you can only win opportunities that are within your reach. When you work through other people, you can win opportunities of any size and complexity. And to do that, you have to solve the “other people” problem.

Here are a few dozen quantifiable ways to assess whether your proposal management function is accomplishing what it should. Depending on your circumstances and goals, you might collect and review this data after every proposal. Or you might track it over time on multiple proposals to determine an appropriate baseline. If you were to implement all of these, you’d have a ton of data to track. The only way to realistically approach some of them is to use software to do the data tracking, and work off of real time reports that translate data into actionable information. Done extremely well, and you could use them to create a data-driven proposal winning monster of a company. But even if you don’t track the data with useable precision, you can treat these as a principles, goals, or targets. They can help you raise the bar on your proposal management from just doing things that you think are useful and productive, to having a rough order of magnitude way of approaching things in a quantified way. Some of these tips can be used to track personnel performance. However, first you need to explicitly decide what you want the proposal management role to accomplish and how much of it is distributed among contributors. Some of these are corporate measures, some are team measures, and some are individual measures. But which are which will vary depending on the nature of the collaboration on proposals at your company. Progress tracking and time management. Progress can be tracked by the number of content plan line items that have been addressed. For each review or milestone, what percent of the schedule did it occur at? For example, was Red Team at 60% or 80% of the available schedule? The more things pile up at the back end, the more time management needs to be improved. How many changes were made after pens down? Did the offering change more than 50% into the schedule? These are also signs of issues not being surfaced early enough. Compliance. Did you make the competitive range 100% of the time? Did any customer debriefs report a non-compliance? Surfacing and resolution of issues. You can also track progress toward proposal completion by the number of issues addressed remaining, weighted by severity. Issue aging is also good to track, as well as the percentage of issues aging by days, and the schedule days when issues were reported. This is much easier when you use software to report and track your issues instead of whiteboards. The combination tells you how long it took to surface issues, how long are issues sitting unresolved, and is the team being responsive to issue reports. Prevention of problems. Do you see a decline in issue reports over time? Do you see issue reports coming in sooner? Situational awareness. Do you see a decline in questions asked because they already have the answers and it was more convenient to access the information than to ask the question? This is especially true for questions like who is addressing what, when something is due, is something complete, are there any issues, and what should be addressed in a section. These are questions that shouldn’t need to be asked. However, you can provide reports, but if they aren’t easy to access, people will ask because it’s easier. Expectation management. Are they documented? Are they updated? Are they being treated like issues and getting resolved? Or are they expectations that can’t be resolved? Expectation can be treated like issue management and tracked. This can tell you whether you are surfacing them ahead of time or encountering conflicts because they were discovered too late. Quality control and quality assurance. Are quality criteria for each proposal defined? Are proposal writers able to use the quality criteria for self-assessment? Do reviewers use the same quality criteria? Could any of the issues reported have been avoided with the right quality criteria? Were all the quality criteria validated prior to implementation? Did any quality criteria require changing after being published? Was the document validated against the quality criteria? Was any self-assessment validation overturned by later reviews? Can you create a timeline (much easier using software) for when validation was performed at the criteria level? Collaboration and configuration management. Is access to information set appropriately and securely? Are people able to share information without conflicts? Are people able to access the information they need without asking for it? Can invalid changes be reversed? Can the proposal continue in the event of technology failure?

Proposal management involves doing a lot of different things. But the things that it needs to accomplish is a much shorter list. It’s easy to get lost in all the things that need to be done and the tools and techniques for doing them. It’s so easy that some companies build their organization based on those things instead of what those things should accomplish. Instead of starting from people, process, and tools, here are 9 things that proposal management must accomplish to be successful: Progress tracking and time management. If the deadline for your proposal is absolute, then the first rule of proposal management is don’t be late. Accomplishing this requires more than just publishing a schedule. It requires tracking the progress of proposal writing and development in order to synchronize activity and bring everything together with absolute certainty by the deadline. Progress tracking should involve something more accurate than asking people how things are going and time management will be more than subjective reckoning. Compliance. The second rule of proposal management is don’t get thrown out. The proposal management function must deliver a proposal that meets the minimum requirements to be evaluated. While not ultimately as important as winning, winning won’t occur unless this is accomplished. Done well, and every proposal will make the competitive range and no customer debrief will ever cite a compliance issue. Surfacing and resolution of issues. During proposal development, people will have questions and there will be gaps in resources, the solution being proposed, and the company’s knowledge about the customer and opportunity. One key reason we need proposal management is to address these issues. Before issues can be addressed, they must be surfaced with enough time to resolve or mitigate the issue. Proposal management must implement the means to accomplish this. Done well, and the team will be not be surprised by any last-minute problems. Prevention of problems. The best issue resolution is the prevention of an issue in the first place. Preventing issues enables people to focus on writing the proposal. All problems that can be prevented should be. Preventable problems should never recur. Done well, and the proposal will look easy. Situational awareness. Who is doing what, when will it complete, and what follows? What contingencies are anticipated? What is the status of all of the moving parts that will become the proposal? Proposal management must accomplish a continuous situational awareness for everyone on the proposal team. Done well, and the team will have it without apparent effort. Lines and methods of communication. People working on the proposal should not have to figure out how to ask questions or get information. The lines of communication should be obvious and the methods should deliver the information needed. When this is accomplished, everything will flow better. Expectation management. Expectations should be clear, known in advance, and flow in both directions. Otherwise, conflicts will occur and dissatisfaction will settle in. When expectation management is done well, the conflicts get surfaced and resolved immediately. Expectation management does not mean that everyone always gets everything they want. It just means that no one is surprised or left with an unmet need that impacts the proposal. Quality control and quality assurance. Achieving proposal quality requires more than subjective reviews. It requires defining quality, enabling self-assessment, and validating that what gets produced meets the quality criteria. Proposal management is more than production or process implementation. It is also the application of quality control and quality assurance to the proposal effort. When done well, you produce the proposal you think is needed to win. When not done well, winning depends on luck instead of strategy. Collaboration and configuration management. How should people work together? On what platforms? With what standards and conventions? Proposal management should enable the team to be greater than the sum of its parts by enabling the members of the team to work together in ways that are frictionless. Done well, and people don’t have to figure out how to work together, they just do it. It also makes the other accomplishments easier, as situational awareness occurs without extra effort by anyone, lines and methods of communication are obvious, issue identification and reporting are timely and easy, progress tracking is effortless and continuous, and everyone knows what quality criteria they are trying to achieve. Plus 6 more things that are nice to have Don’t make the mistake of thinking the following are top priority items. They come after you’ve accomplished the above. But it is nice when your proposal management can also provide them: Inspiration and acceleration. Instead of leaving it up to proposal writers to figure out, it’s nice when proposal management provides guidance regarding what to write and how should they present it. It’s nicer still if that can be provided in ways that make writing go faster. Articulation. Optimizing your wording to reflect the instructions, evaluation criteria, win strategies, and RFP requirements is extremely difficult for people who have been drafted into proposal writing. It’s nice when your proposal management can help them figure out how to articulate things. Pursuit strategy. How should what you propose be positioned, taking into consideration the evaluation criteria, competitive environment, the RFP, and your strengths and weaknesses? Should this be left up to individual contributors to figure out? Ideally you should start your proposal with this positioning already determined and articulated. When this doesn’t happen, it’s really nice if your proposal management can help you get there. Training and guidance. The vast majority of proposals have a significant number of inexperienced contributors. It’s nice when your proposal management does more than issue and track assignments, and can help people understand the issues and what is required to be successful. BD/Capture/Proposal transition support. Business opportunity pursuit should start well before the proposal. Business development and capture efforts should provide input to the proposal. It’s nice to have proposal management actively participating in what form that input should take and creating process artifacts to make it easier to provide. Offering design. A major factor in what should be proposed is what it will take to win based on the evaluation criteria. And the information you need about what you are proposing will depend on the RFP instructions and requirements. It is nice to have a proposal management function that can have a seat at the table in deciding what to offer and guide the team to make the right choices and then provide the right information. And one thing we left out on purpose Winning. If a proposal manager doesn't have authority over who decides what to bid, what to offer, how to price it, and how to present it then they only contribute to winning and don't have control over it. They can’t be responsible for the win. How to best use this list All of these things can be used to define responsibilities. But they are better used for determining how to structure your team, how it should function, and what people need to successfully interact during a proposal. Most companies just leave it up to people to figure out or fight it out amongst themselves, often in unproductive, win rate reducing ways. If you figure them out ahead of time, you can watch your win rate soar. For PropLIBRARY subscribers, we’ve taken these necessary accomplishments and turned them into potential performance measures to take it to an even higher level.

A Business Development manager's job is to find as many qualified leads as possible. If you make Business Development cover lead identification through closing, Business Development will have to stop chasing leads when the proposal starts if they make it their job to win. Your company will see-saw between having leads to chase yesterday but none tomorrow because Business Development got sucked into capture or a proposal. If you want a continuous flow of leads, you need continuous lead identification and qualification. If you want to get ahead of the RFP you need to begin practicing relationship marketing. You won’t be successful doing this a few months here and a few months there. If you want to gain insight into your customers and the opportunities, you need to form relationships strong enough to produce an information advantage. If instead of waiting for procurements to appear, you want to initiate them so that you can shape the requirements and have the advantage, you need business development to form the relationships that can make this happen. This is their job. It’s a fulltime job. And it alone is a major contribution to winning. Business development cultivates the leads and qualifies them. Keep in mind that it's your company's responsibility to define lead qualification criteria. The company shapes business development’s contribution to winning by setting the standards for lead qualification, and not simply chasing everything found. However, when a business developer spends a big fraction of time on capture or proposals, the company ends up less likely to have strong lead qualification. The leads found between pursuits tend to get less effort put into their assessment. There is also more incentive to chase them to get out of the “dry spell.” So not only do the leads come in spurts, but they also tend to be lesser quality. The company should set a high bar regarding what's an acceptable lead worth investing in winning. If that means hiring a capture manager because a lead is worth the cost of having put dedicated time into preparing to win the pursuit, then do that. Because the math shows it's worth it. Doubling your chances of winning a qualified lead doubles your long-term revenue. The cost of capture compared to that is peanuts. Increasing your win rate is one of the most profitable things a company can do. And the converse is also true. Allowing low win probability bad habits to set in will leave a ton of money on the table and suck the potential right out of your company. What you can do without crossing the line and making Business Development responsible for winning? Consider making part of Business Development's incentive package based on winning to encourage support and collaboration during the pursuit. Business Development does cultivate relationships that are vital for winning and you want their insights to show up in the document. You just don't want them to stop identifying qualified leads to provide them. What about capture management? Business development finds leads and qualifies them. They need to hand off those leads to someone who is going be dedicated to doing all the tasks needed to be prepared to win them. That is the role of capture, and it’s a vital role. You just can’t be dedicated to two different roles at the same time. A qualified lead is worth investing in winning. It’s worth dedicated attention. But continuous lead generation is also worth dedicated attention. Do the math. If the numbers don’t show having dedicated attention for both of these roles is worth it by orders of magnitude, then you have a strategic planning problem at the top level. Neither business development nor capture management can save you if your strategic planning does not lead to enough business to give dedicated attention to both lead generation and capture. If you are a startup, and haven’t reached the point where you have the cashflow to support both roles, then you have to be strategic about how you will get there. The size and profit margin of your pursuit determine whether you will need lots of leads or a high win probability on the leads you do have. You can start with someone capable of doing both business development and capture, but you’ll need to focus their attention strategically so that you can grow to where the two roles split. The same ends up being true for proposals. You need dedicated attention to all three to maximize your win probability and ROI. TL;DR Business development cultivates winnable leads, but only if you have strong lead qualification and strategic direction. The best ROI comes from having someone else capture them. Business Development makes a vital contribution to winning, but making winning their job gets in the way of maximizing your ROI.