Carl Dickson

Developing customer relationships and growing customer intimacy is time consuming, and that makes it expensive. Many companies fall into the trap of believing they can’t afford to develop relationships with all their potential future customers. They trick themselves into thinking that if they can land a contract with a new customer, then they can develop a relationship with them. What they don’t realize is that by doing this they doom themselves to low win rates, low margins, and shallow customer relationships. How do you win a contract with a customer who doesn’t know your value? You win on price. How do you build a relationship with a customer while managing the project to keep the cost below the ridiculously low price you bid to “get your foot in the door?” How do you build customer awareness, gather intelligence, and position for future work using the lowest cost project staff you can find? By falling into the trap of thinking that customer relationship building starts with landing a contract, you doom yourself to a future of just getting by. If you put the relationship first, things play out differently. By putting time into getting to know the customer, listening to them instead of talking, but giving them tons of advice regarding options for solving their problems, you gain an information advantage that translates into a higher win rate. You also gain influence over the requirements and evaluation criteria. By proving your value before you get a contract, you give the customer a reason to evaluate you based on value instead of just price. You can win with a higher price. You enter the project with an existing relationship and the margins to grow that relationship. However, this requires that you be willing to cover the upfront cost of the time it will take and have the patience to recover that cost over a time measured in years. How can you afford to invest like that in all your potential customers? That’s where strategic planning comes in. You don’t invest in all the potential customers, just the ones who meet your strategic objectives. This is a very different business model. It’s more like product development than hunting. You invest in strategic targets and recover your investment with sales over time. You won’t get there by trying to avoid investing and only hiring staff who are billable. You have to not only identify strategic targets, you also have to determine how much investment each target is worth. When you decide to approach new customers as an investment instead of prospects, you begin focusing on smart investing. You not only have to select the right targets, you have to invest the right amount with the right timing. But keep in mind, your investing time. And how you manage and use time can be more important than how much time you invest. By making the most of the time you invest in developing customer relationships and growing customer intimacy, you maximize your return on the investment. When you take this approach, your success at business development is based on the wisdom of your strategies and how effectively you invest time in relationship building. This is a much better path to success than bidding blind until you chance upon a win and then hoping that the customer likes your low-price performance enough to want to do more business with you in the future. For some companies, this seems like too much work and too much risk. However, by skipping it they take on more risk with worse odds, bidding more with a lower win rate and ending up with lower margins. But at least they don't have to think so hard about it. If you start by hunting for contracts you’re going about it backwards. You won’t increase your win rate by hiring a smooth talking hunter/salesperson or submitting more bids until something sticks. If instead of looking for the right contracts you look for the right strategies and follow them up with the right approaches for relationship marketing, everything you do will increase your odds of success.

A proposal describes your offering, but writing a proposal requires having an offering to describe. Instead of being problems with your proposal process, many of the problems that occur during proposal development are really problems with your offering design process. The two easily get tangled up. Showing up with a non-compliant or merely compliant offering isn't going to maximize your win probability. Trying to figure out your offering in writing and then fix it by re-writing is a recipe for proposal disaster. So here are some indicators that can tell you the true nature of your problems. Indicators that the problem may be with your approach to offering design: You don't have enough detail in your approaches. This indicates that you have not put enough thought into your offering before writing about it. You change your approaches after you've written them. This indicates that you have not collaborated or reached consensus on what the offering should be before writing about it. It is important to validate that you have the right offering before you commit to writing narrative about it. You can't decide what your approaches should be until you see them in writing. This indicates that you are thinking in writing instead of thinking and then writing. Writers are responsible for figuring out what the approaches should be. This indicates that either you have no offering design before writing starts, or you are designing by writing narratives. Each new contributor changes the approaches as they re-think it from the beginning. This indicates that you have no process for collaboration, integration, decision, or consensus about what the offering design should be before you start writing. The only input is the RFP. If you figure out what to offer based solely on the RFP, it won't demonstrate any customer insight beyond the RFP. It will also tend to result in a solution that is merely RFP compliant and not competitive. It may also indicate that those designing the offering aren't trying hard enough. Indicators that the problem may be with your proposal process: You can't decide on the outline. This indicates that you don’t have a process for developing, validating, and approving the outline, which results in writing against a moving target. The proposal is not optimized against the evaluation criteria or an assessment of what it will take to win. This indicates that your process for determining how to position the offering is flawed. Writers don't know what is expected of them. This indicates that you either have not defined the role, have no process for planning the content before writing it, and/or have no criteria defining proposal quality. Assignments are late. This indicates that your management processes or techniques need improvement. It could be that your initial estimates or your progress assessments were off. Or it could be that contributors failed in performance. But part of the process needs to anticipate that as a contingency. Proposal quality is not defined. This is a very common process failure. When proposal quality is not defined, individuals will definite it differently and the content will fluctuate as a result. Figuring out what to write and figuring out what to offer are done at the same time. These are best done separately because engineering by thinking in writing has a high failure rate. This is also an indicator that you are rushing into writing without thinking things through. Indicators of problems that could have multiple sources: Non-compliance. Non-compliance can indicate an offering that was developed without consideration for the RFP in an otherwise compliant proposal, or it can indicate a compliant offering that was presented in a non-compliant proposal. Reviews lead to changes in direction. Reviews can take proposals back to the beginning to change direction because the offering is wrong or because of bad presentation. The schedule keeps slipping. Things are taking longer than expected. Is that because they can’t figure out the offering, because the proposal process did not account for everything, because resources aren’t available, or a lack of accountability? The document has holes, or portions that are incomplete. Do those holes represent an offering that is still being figured out, or a failure in assignment and resource management? The proposal is not well written. Is that because the offering design came so late that there was not enough time for editing? Or is it because the content planning or instructions to writers were insufficient? Is it a training problem or a process problem? Your win rate is lower than it should be. Taking the time to think things through and produce high win rate achieving proposals is very profitable. A small change in your win rate often pays orders of magnitude more than the additional time it took to do it right cost. Trying to minimize proposal effort at the expense of win rate can happen because of bad financial advice, people being pulled in too many directions with poor guidance regarding priorities, a corporate culture that doesn't integrate growth into all aspects of the company, a lack of executive participation, or a process that focuses on the wrong things. Problems involving offering design are generally a result of not thinking things through before you start writing. The result is figuring out what to offer by writing and re-writing. If you built a bridge by writing and re-writing narratives against a deadline, either it would never get built or it would collapse. It helps to realize that the workflow for creating the proposal document and the workflow for figuring out the offering design are very different. Both involve planning before writing, but the nature of that planning is different. Designing your offering is an engineering process. It needs to define what the offering is and its components so they can be described in writing. The offering design should be more like a blueprint than a narrative. How you define your offering design process depends on the nature of what your company does. The combination of what your company does, how it does it, and its culture is unique. These differences make it extremely different for an outsider to tell you how you should design and define your offering. But if you have experienced any of the offering design problems described above, you need a process for designing your offering that runs in parallel with the proposal process, but is separate and is not based on writing narratives. You need to show up for proposal writing with an offering design that is already figured out and has been validated. It is easy to assume that the problems that snowball at the end of a proposal and produce the train wrecks (to intentionally mix metaphors) are proposal problems. But often they are not. Instead, they are often the result of not having a methodology to design your offering (even though you probably have methodologies for design after the project starts). The process of writing a proposal is not a substitute for the design process you need to define your offering. If you are designing your offering by writing about it, that's a clear indicator that something is wrong.

Most businesses obsess over lead generation. Unfortunately they fail to realize there is something else that delivers 3-5 times the ROI. That’s right. They could be growing their business faster with fewer leads. It’s mathematical. And we have the proof. While we were doing a pipeline assessment for one of our consulting customers we discovered a remarkably simple mathematical relationship. But to understand it, you have to understand a little bit about the math that drives the business pipeline. You don’t bid all the leads you find. You only bid a percentage of them. If you’re smart, you’ll qualify your leads through several steps, with fewer leads making it past each one. The final step before you start working on the proposal is usually a bid/no bid decision that comes once the RFP is released. One of the things we do in assessing the health of a company’s pipeline is to determine how many bids they throw out at each qualification step. If they aren’t throwing any out, they aren’t being selective. When a proposal is complete and submitted, it doesn't always win. The percentage that wins becomes the revenue that drives your business. If you want a certain amount of revenue, you can backtrack the percentages and calculate how many leads you need to identify to hit your revenue number, even after you throw some out along the way. The key variable in this is your proposal win rate. If your win rate is high, then you need fewer leads to hit your revenue goal. If your win rate is low, you need more leads. Consider this scenario: You start off with $10M in leads and you drop some of them along the way and only end up submitting $7M in proposals Your win rate is 30% It took $10M in leads to score $2.1M in revenue If you change the win rate to 31%, you only need $9.67M in leads instead of $10M. Not impressed yet? What if I told you that for that 1% change in win rate, you needed 3% fewer leads? What if I told you that if you increase your win rate by 10% you’ll be able to hit your numbers with 30% fewer leads? Still not impressed? What if I said that increasing your win rate 10% would have the same impact on your revenue as finding 30% more leads? Wins. Wins are more important than leads. Leads do not put money in your pocket. That takes wins. And your win rate is more important than lead generation. Low quality leads are worse than useless. Medium quality leads get in the way. High quality leads are great, but they become wasted effort if you don't close the deal. If you only submit five proposals next year, going from winning one to winning two doubles your win rate (and potentially your revenue). If you focus on lead generation instead, you would have to double the number of leads to achieve the same thing. You would need an additional five leads instead of one more win. If you plan to submit 20 proposals next year, going from a 20% to a 30% win rate increases your wins by 50%, from 4 to 6. Achieving that through lead generation requires that you go from 29 leads to 42 leads you have to find. If you focus on win rate, you need two more wins from the leads you already have. If you focus on leads you need 13 more leads to achieve the same increase. However, calculating your win rate is challenging. And even if you calculate it properly, you still have the problem of statistical significance. If your proposal volume is low, you won’t be able to discern a 1% difference in your win rate. If you do five proposals a year, your win rate will only change in 20% increments! It takes 100 proposals to be able to measure your win rate in 1% increments, and more if you want to segregate the data into categories like new business vs. repeat customers. However, the multiplier effect that improving your win rate has on your ROI will remain true over time, regardless of how you measure it. A spreadsheet model PropLIBRARY Subscribers can download free of charge The custom models we create for our consulting customers can get quite involved, because they reflect the specifics of a particular business. We’ve created a generic model that you can use so you can see how it works and play your own “what if” scenarios. PropLIBRARY Subscribers can download it for free. If you are not a subscriber, you should join now so you can download it when we post it. Setting Priorities Leads are good. If you have zero leads, it doesn’t matter how high your win rate is. But the human nature mistake is to assume that each new lead adds directly to your revenue. They conflate this into believing the best way to increase revenue is to chase more leads. The truth is that each new lead adds a percentage chance at new wins. But increasing your win rate adds a much, much larger percentage, which means the same leads produce much, much more revenue. It can produce orders of magnitude more revenue than the effort it took to increase the win rate. Leads are good and I wouldn’t give up on lead generation. But when you focus on your win rate it will tell you a lot about what kind of leads you want, and what kind of leads aren’t worth bothering with. Better quality leads produce an even higher win rate. In fact, lead quality is the biggest driver of your win rate. But only if you measure and improve it. Don't assume you know what a quality lead is until you've measured what actually impacts your win rate. We work with a lot of company and see counterintuitive results all the time. What else can you tell from win rate analysis? When we do a pipeline assessment for one of our consulting customers, we look at your targets and what it will take to achieve them. We create a mathematical model of your pipeline in a spreadsheet. We look at how many leads you need, how many proposals you’ll have to submit, and how many resources you’ll need to handle the volume. We look at how much time you should be investing in each phase of lead qualification and how that correlates with your win rate. And we look at what size proposal is too small to bother with, based on what it costs to produce a proposal. We also look at critical numbers like your win rate and what can be done to change them, so that everything you do is based on achieving the highest ROI possible. But instead of just discovering interesting facts about your business, we turn the pipeline into an ROI progress tracking tool. As leads come in and go through the qualification phases, you use the model to track whether you are on target to meet your goals. You can also see the impact of being above or below your targets, and what that means to your bottom line. We create a feedback loop so that any assumptions we make in the model are continuously refined by reality. It’s so much easier to look at your business development and proposal functions as an investment and not a cost when you can see that you’re hitting your numbers, and that the return will be far greater than the cost. Breaking out of the bad habit of chasing every lead you can find and submitting proposals just because you can is easier when you can see that mathematically there are better ways. It also helps with that human nature defect that wants instant gratification, when you can see that whether you pursue, no bid, win, or lose a particular lead, it’s all part of hitting your numbers and you can see that you are on the path to success. And if, just by chance, you stray from the path to success, it’s extremely helpful to be able to see exactly where it happened. At the end of the day it’s all about decisions and whether you make them informed or not. If you are a PropLIBRARY Subscriber feel free to contact us with questions about the model and how a little “fun with math!” can give you insight and confidence in the future of your business.

All the cool cats know that the best proposals tell a story. But no one can really explain how to do that, let alone actually consistently achieve it when working with a group of proposal contributors who aren't specialists. Usually they just emphasize that your proposal should have a message. But what message and how do you construct it and put it in writing? So the next thing they try is proposal themes. But while everyone says they know what themes are, everyone defines them differently. And being able to define them doesn't tell you how to construct them. Sometimes proposal managers put a placeholder for a theme statement at the top of each section because they doubt their proposal contributors will write thematically, but hope they can get at least one good positioning sentence out of them. People working on the proposal just want to know what to write, what words to put on paper. Most of the time they give up and just try to make positive sounding points. They don’t realize that approach is not competitive and just assume that if they stack up enough positives, they have a shot at winning. Unfortunately, the customer needs more than just positive sounding points to make their decision. Fortunately there is something that’s easier to understand than stories, messages, or even themes. One of the key questions a customer has when evaluating a proposal is, “What makes this proposal different from all the others?” They want to know, “What makes it best?” You don’t get there by stacking up positives when your competitors are stacking up the same positives. You win by: Being different Explaining why those differences matter Showing the customer what they will get out of them If you skip all that storytelling and messaging stuff and just focus on having differentiators in every section, every paragraph, and even every sentence, the strengths in your proposal will be clear. Why the customer should select you will be clear. But the best part is that without doing anything special, your story and messages can emerge on their own. It happens because your proposal story should be about what makes you special, why that matters, and how the customer will benefit from it. When you focus on what differentiates your offering, even without thinking about your story, you complete the elements necessary to have one. It takes a lot of training to get your technical proposal contributors to be able to understand proposal storytelling and know what words to put on paper to make it happen. It takes little or no training to get them to understand differentiators. There is one big challenge when trying to implement extensive differentiation. Actually, it just seems like a big challenge. Really all that is needed is a little creativity. Sometimes it seems hard to find ways in which your offering is different. Sometimes that’s because the RFP says exactly what the customer wants you to do, so you assume that every proposal will contain the same approaches. Sometimes it’s because there are standard ways of doing things in your industry. Sometimes it’s because you are afraid of anything that might increase the cost of your offering. However, you can always find differentiators, if you know where to look. It may be that instead of differentiating what you offer, you need to differentiate how you design, create, or deliver it. Even when everything else is exactly the same, you can differentiate by focusing on what you think matters, or on how what you offer better aligns with the customer’s goals. If you explain what the customer will get out of your offering, and your competitors don’t, that alone can be enough of a differentiator to increase the perceived value in what you offer. When proposal contributors learn that if they can’t differentiate on the specs, they can instead differentiate on what matters about them and what the customer will get out of your approach to fulfilling them, they start writing proposal text that positions your company as offering something better. That is how the message can emerge, without anyone even focusing on it. If you really want to drive your message home, start discussing your differentiators before you start writing. Bring consistency and harmony to your differentiators across the proposal, by standardizing them so that everyone talks about the same or similar differences, why they matter, and what the customer will get out of them. If you are able to train your technical proposal contributors to become gifted storytellers, that’s great. But if you are like most people, and struggle to get what you need out of those contributing to the proposal, instead of confusing them with all that talk about storytelling, messages, positioning, and themes, try just focusing on differentiators.

There are so many ingredients that go into winning a proposal that we developed a whole methodology to account for them all. But one stands out. It is an attribute that should be a part of every other ingredient. Everything about your strategies, approaches, qualifications, writing, aspirations, and goals should revolve around it. Understand it and you gain a key to unlocking the secret to winning in writing. Nothing else you do will have as much impact on winning as this one, crucial ingredient. The way most people approach proposal writing is not competitive. Or at least not reliably so. Most people try to enhance their offering by piling on features. If they are smart, they’ll even describe the benefits to the customer of those features. They'll claim to be better than their competitors at everything conceivable that the customer might want. But that’s not the best strategy for winning a proposal. When the customer evaluates your proposal, they compare it to their other alternatives. A feature that all of your competitors also have is not going to help them choose you instead of them. The aspects of your proposal that differentiate you from your competitors are what the customer needs to make their decision. No matter what the evaluation process or scoring criteria, the differences will have a bigger impact on the winning score than all of the undifferentiated features you can pile on. Once you have achieved RFP compliance to avoid getting thrown out, differentiators are the most important thing to talk about in your proposal. You can pretty much assume any real competition will submit a compliant proposal. You can pretty much assume that everyone who is compliant also has experience, and those who will get seriously considered will have enough of it to be eligible to win. You should also assume that they are all just as committed to the success of the project as you are. Saying that you are compliant, that you have experience, or that you are committed does not help you win. Saying that you have more experience, are fully compliant, or are more committed than anyone else can possibly be does not make it so. These can keep you from getting thrown out. But they won't help you win a competitive proposal. And bidding a lot of proposals so you can win the ones that aren't competitive is a terrible strategy. What helps you win is when you show that your experience results in benefits that no one else can deliver. What helps you win is when you offer features that no one else does or when you offer the same features in a way that delivers benefits no one else delivers. What helps you win is dumping the lame promises about commitment and writing about what differentiates your proposal instead. Sometimes it can be tough to figure out what you can offer that is different. This is especially true when the customer has set up the RFP to tell everyone to bid the exact same thing. You can always differentiate your offering: Even if you have to bid the same thing, you can offer unique ways of creating it, delivering it, or making sure it is without defects. Even if everyone has the same approach, the reasons why you do things and the way you approach the inevitable trade-offs can show unique insight. Every proof point you write in your proposal that goes answered is a differentiator. Drop the claims. Focus on the proof points. If you can prove that you are better, faster, stronger, etc., you will stand out from the crowd that merely claims it or has a good slogan. If you can show better alignment with the customer’s goals, then you can show better results, even from the exact same offering. The easiest way to differentiate your proposal is not based on what you offer. It's based on why you chose to offer it that way. Each additional reason is a potential differentiator. Consider: The customer is considering two proposals for the exact same thing at the same price. One focuses on differentiating how the offering is delivered and how those differentiated approaches better achieve the customer’s goals. The other proposal is fully compliant. Both deliver the exact same thing. But the two will score differently and the one that focuses on differentiation will score higher because the features will deliver more apparent value to the customer. This will be true even if the deliverable or service is exactly the same. Now, take a bunch of non-proposal specialist proposal contributors. Ask half to focus on the strengths of your approach. Ask the other half to focus on strengths that differentiate your approach. Without any special training or coaching, which group is more likely to produce a higher scoring submission? The secret to winning is differentiation and not piling up the same features and claims as everyone else out of hope that their list will be shorter than yours. Everything you say in your proposal should be a differentiator. Every. Single. Thing. Differentiation should be the top criterion that you measure the quality of your proposal writing against. That is how you outscore the competition. When the customer starts comparing features and strengths, it is the differentiators that enable them to make their selection. Take a very critical look at all of your positive attributes. How many of them will other companies claim (rightly or wrongly)? Meeting the requirements will not differentiate you when the customer has narrowed it down to compliant, qualified companies. A feature that everyone has is not a strength, no matter how positive it sounds. A strength that everyone has will not enable you to outscore the competition. You need to make your features into differentiators for them to count as strengths and give the customer a reason to select you over your competition. Your differentiators will give the customer a reason to select you instead of your competitors.

One of our customers had asked us to provide them with training so they could do a better job of preparing for an upcoming proposal. Naturally, before the training could get started they received notice that a customer was about to release an RFP, and had released a draft. So we incorporated the draft into the training. But the approach we took surprised me with how effectively it opened their eyes, how well it reached beyond just the proposal specialists, and how it contributed to real organizational change. It shows what you can do to open people’s eyes to what RFP compliance means and what you have to do to achieve a proposal the customer will find easy to evaluate. The training took the form of several sessions, roughly two hours each and about one per week. With an uncertain RFP release date, we anticipated having four sessions, and possibly more. We picked a section from the draft RFP that was big enough but not too big. Then we picked a handful of people to participate, and the rest just observed. The participants represented future proposal specialists and key section leaders/writers. Each of the participants was given a homework assignment to prepare a compliance matrix. The key was that they were all creating what you might think should be the same compliance matrix. They were all working from the same RFP. But we knew from experience that they would all make different judgment calls. We wanted them to make those judgment calls, see how they were all different, and gain experience in how to make them better and reconcile them. The next session was a show and tell session. We looked at each of the compliance matrices. What we saw was that each person took different approaches and worded things differently. This gave me an opportunity to provide some guidance as we compared and contrasted what they came up with. What made this remarkable was that they saw the problems they created for the customer. They saw how the customer would receive wildly different proposals, all based on the same RFP, and what a huge advantage the company whose proposal matched what the customer expected would have. Between that session and the next, I consolidated the compliance matrices and fixed them along the lines we had discussed. That gave us a baseline compliance matrix. Then we discussed Proposal Content Planning, and how to go from the outline generated from the compliance matrix into win strategies and points of emphasis, and account for all the ingredients that need to go into a winning proposal, before it is actually written. That session ended with another homework assignment to create a Proposal Content Plan based on the compliance matrix. The next session started off with a new round of show and tell. But here we were dealing with a lot more material. Still, you could see which ways of presenting instructions would be the most helpful to the proposal writers and how the planning could make the writing go much, much more quickly. You could also see the shift from reviewing and fixing on the back end, to designing proposal quality in from the beginning. But the Proposal Content Plans overlapped extensively and had some conflicts. This was to be expected. However, instead of me consolidating the Proposal Content Plans, I had them do it by having each participant take turns working their Content Plan into what they received, adding in anything new and of value while identifying and resolving any conflicts. This way each of them not only got to see and become aware of how that happens, but had a chance to personally be involved in resolving them. They gained hands-on experience. But the main takeaway was that instead of just hearing it explained, they got to see how important the wording of the instructions in the Content Plan is and how to make theirs better. The end result of the third session was a baseline Proposal Content Plan that was far better than any of them could produce on their own. All before release of the final RFP. Another thing I liked about this approach was that it gave us options for dealing with the uncertainties of the draft RFP. We could continue to enhance the Proposal Content Plan. If the Final RFP introduced changes, they would be much easier to manage in the Content Plan than in a narrative draft. We weren’t sure whether to hold the major review of the Content Plan before RFP release and then do an update review after RFP release, or just wait until release of the final RFP. If we did a round or two of Content Plan enhancement and the final RFP was still not out, then we could face that decision. Either way, we’d be in position for changes, whether small or large, and ready to respond quickly whether the RFP came soon or late. But what I liked the most was the way participants got way more than just procedural training, they got experience. They saw how what they did would impact the customer’s evaluation. And they had to fix it themselves. And since they represented key SMEs as well as future proposal specialists, the improvement in understanding just what it takes to have a compliant proposal that is optimized to win and the importance of not jumping straight into writing was spread across the company. That’s incredibly valuable and hard to achieve. The company went from being undisciplined to being a focused team with everyone on the same page, and achieved it before the RFP was out. It was amazing seeing that happen. And it took less than a dozen hours. The cost was peanuts compared to the impact it made, on that proposal and on future proposals. If you’d like to chat more about how this worked out or may implement something similar at your company to increase your chances of winning an upcoming proposal, just call me at 800-848-1563 or contact me through PropLIBRARY. If you want to learn about our Proposal Content Planning methodology so you can implement something like this on your own, the full documentation for it is available to PropLIBRARY Subscribers.

Instead of being well-oiled intimidating machines, most large companies are a collection of political territories that often don’t know what resources are available to them and don’t cooperate very well anyway. They don’t have an abundance of staff because all those bodies are all already committed and their proposals are just as understaffed as the ones at small companies. And even though they have billions in revenue, they can only spend what’s in their budget on the proposal. But they do have some advantages over small businesses, they just aren’t what you think. Large companies have more patience. They target bids they know are coming up for recompete years in advance. They may not do much more than track them, but they are patient, and know where most of their future business will come from. If they want to win a big RFP years from now, they'll get into position by winning smaller bids over the next couple of years and get to know the customer. IF they have their act together, they’ll go into it with an advantage in preparation. If they don’t have their act together (which happens far more often than you would think) they may still have at least a little advantage in customer awareness. Large companies use more senior staff and specialists. Large companies usually don’t have an advantage in the number of people they can throw at their bids. The difference is they have more experienced managers and more business development, capture, and proposal specialists. Their proposal manager usually isn't also their administrative assistant. Also, because they're more hierarchical, the people doing the proposals at large companies usually have more authority to get things done. Large companies budget according to metrics and not according to cash flow. If they think they need to spend 2% of award value to win a bid, they spend it. If they think the proposal will require 8 hours a page over 200 pages, they will be prepared to cover the cost of 1,600 hours to write the proposal. It’s not that they have more money to spend. It’s that they can wait to recover it when they win, even after taking their win rate into account (you don’t win them all). A small business might think spending $30,000 is a lot of money to win a $3 million dollar bid, even though it may generate up to ten times that amount in profit, because they’re concerned about cash flow now. A large business will spend that much or more on ten bids in a row, knowing the profit from winning a few will cover that cost several times over. It may take a couple of years just to break even, but they can ride it out. Large companies hire more consultants. See the item above about budgets. If they need outside expertise and they’ve got the budget to cover it, they get it. They don’t hesitate like they’re taking money out of their own pocket. If they don't have the staff they need to work the proposal at the standards needed to achieve a high win probability and the size of the proposal justifies it, they do what it takes. Large companies have more mature processes. They’ve done it before. Many times. So even if they are a bit dysfunctional or have processes that are outdated or otherwise aren’t the most effective (which is usually the case), they’ve got more to work with and are more used to working as a team than a company with limited or no institutional knowledge. The advantages that large companies have come down to experience, patience, and willingness to invest. Small companies that want to beat larger companies need to use smart processes, discipline, and customer awareness to overcome the experience and budget advantages of their larger competitors. It also helps to have the financing needed to take a long-term view of your proposal investments. But even without that, you can submit better bids with fewer people if you are smarter about how you go about it. Large companies waste more effort than small ones. A well thought through process applied with discipline that produces solid, differentiated win strategies while eliminating unnecessary rewriting cycles will improve your win rate while reducing waste. And that's just what you need to take on much larger companies and win.

Is proposal layout design just the icing on the cake? Does it improve your chances of winning? Is presentation everything? Or is it completely irrelevant to the decision maker? How much do impressions matter? How much effort should you put into the design of your proposal layout? What is the most important priority? I think it is like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. At the base, and your first priority, is RFP compliance. If you are not compliant with the requirements in the RFP, you may not even be eligible to win. If you can’t at least follow the instructions and comply with the requirements, you aren’t even in the game. If there is no RFP or the customer will tolerate a certain amount of non-compliance, which may be true in some B2B proposals, you still need to address your approach to the customer’s requirements first. Next comes messaging, and by that I mean articulating what the customer needs to realize to select your proposal from the alternatives available to them, and to articulate it from the customer's perspective instead of your own. Most companies do not do a good job at this level and never really get past it. At this level, layout design can be as simple as possible. It can be plain and ordinary without lowering your chances of winning. A great layout design can't make up for ineffective messaging in a proposal, because it is read differently than a brochure or advertisement. Once you have effective messaging, then you can learn to communicate it visually with graphics. It does not make sense to jump into graphics without being able to articulate your messaging. But once you can do that, graphics can take it to a far more effective level. Learning to conceptualize your message and conceptualize graphics can go hand in hand. It depends on whether you are a visual thinker or not. But regardless of whether you conceptualize both at the same time or take them one at a time, you must have solid messaging. Visual messaging is a big improvement, but not an absolute requirement. Once you have messaging communicated visually, then you are ready to consider layout. Proposal layout design is at the tippy-top of the pyramid. That makes it either a finishing touch or the last priority. Proposal layout design, like graphics, supports visual communication, but it is a far more subtle tool. Very few companies ever make it to the level where the highest priority for improving their proposal win rate is to focus on layout design. Actually, none that I have ever known. I'm usually too focused on winning to put time into proposal layout design I started my career in layout design and typography. I love the subject. I almost never bring it up with the customers who engage me to improve their proposals, even when I think their layouts could be greatly improved. This is because there always seem to be higher priorities to focus on that will have a bigger impact on their chances of winning. People are tempted to jump straight into layout design because they want to submit a proposal that looks impressive. But messaging is hard and requires inputs from many people, so an improvement in layout design can look like low-hanging fruit. But in proposals for anything more complicated than a commodity, messaging counts for far more than presentation. That said, if your role in the process is to finalize and produce the document and someone else is responsible for messaging, then it makes sense that you take pride in the layout design, advocate for it, and put all your effort into it. But if you look at proposals holistically, there are definitely other things that have a bigger impact on whether the proposal wins. If you want to play a critical role in the proposal, you need to get out of the back end of the process and use layout and design to drive the parts of the proposal that have a larger impact on whether it wins. The best product development efforts incorporate design at the very beginning. They don’t wait until the product specifications are complete and then think of design as just being about appearance. Apple starts with design and its product development efforts are led by designers. This is because they define design as satisfying the end user and not as appearance. Proposal design, including layout and graphics, can be used to drive the considerations that go into achieving a great proposal that reflects what it will take to win a proposal. If proposal layout design is simply about typography and appearance, most companies will never reach the point where that is the highest priority for increasing their win rate. But if layout is really about proposal design, then it’s about discovering, articulating, and building a proposal around what it takes to win. And that should always be the highest priority in proposal development.

I continue to be fascinated by how similar really bad proposals tend to be. They all make the same mistakes. And even if you follow good processes and do the right things, when the writing is that bad it can prevent you from winning. So I’m going to take a step back from writing about what it takes to submit a great proposal, and just focus on how to make sure your proposal writing is not awful. If you just stop doing these six things you can make a huge improvement in your proposals: Stop introducing things by defining the world. If you start off by saying “[blank] is critical to the success of this project” or [blank] plays a key role in…” you are saying something that applies equally to all your competitors. It is universally true and does not differentiate you. Instead you should be proposing to do whatever is in the blank. If it’s critical to the project, then it better be something that you are delivering, or better yet, something they can only get from you. That makes it a reason to select you. Stop telling the customer about themselves. Sometimes it’s just flattery as is “[blank] plays a vital role in saving the world.” Sometimes it’s to tell them what their needs are, as in “[blank] needs [blank] in order to save the world.” Sometimes it’s to tell them how to achieve their mission: “To achieve [blank’s] mission of saving the world, you need a…” Stop telling the customer who they are, what they need, what they should do, what their mission is, or how to achieve it. It doesn’t show real understanding, it’s patronizing, it doesn’t differentiate you, and the customer won’t be impressed by your ability to copy and paste from their website. If there is a need, fill it. If there is a problem to be solved, solve it. If it aligns with their mission and goals, they’ll realize that you understand far better than the vendor who submitted all that fluff and they’ll need to select you to get those results. Stop making statements of intent. Never use the words committed, intend, believe, value, seek, is designed to, or any variation. Don’t promise to do things. Do them. Don’t weaken or hedge on what you do. Be the company they need to get things done and not the one that makes a lot of promises, has a lot of concerns, or claims a great many beliefs while proposing to merely do what the RFP requires. Who cares that you have experience, when you were founded, or how fast you’ve grown? If there is a reason to care, then say it. Simply having experience adds no value and does not differentiate your proposal. Everyone will have experience. Yours isn’t any better unless you say why it is. What matters is not where your experience is or what you were doing, what matters is what the current customer will get out of the fact that you have that experience. Will it somehow make you better, faster, or lower in risk? The same is true for when you were founded or how fast you’ve grown. The customer has to get something out of it for it to differentiate your proposal and to become a reason to select you. Make sure your strengths are actually strengths. If you call out your strengths in a proposal, I think that’s great! But if your strength is that you’ll meet the customer’s requirements I think it’s a tragic missed opportunity. To be considered a strength, it must exceed the requirement or achieve the requirement in a way that delivers added value. A real strength becomes a reason to select you. If all you’ve got is what the customer asked for, you’re really easy to beat. Drop everything that’s not a differentiator. People struggle with finding differentiators, especially when the RFP forces everyone to do the same thing. But when you describe the results of what you do, or why you chose to do things that way, then you are saying something different from everyone else. Why you are offering what you are offering can be more important to the customer’s decision making process than what you are offering in the first place. The simplest way to make a radical difference in the quality of your proposal writing is to just stop saying anything that is not a differentiator. If it does not give the customer a reason to select you over other alternatives, it does nothing to help the customer select you. I think most of these habits come about because people are warming up while figuring out what to say and they fall back on making it sound like everything else they see in the business world. Only you shouldn’t want your proposal to sound like everything else. If you simply stop doing these things you will greatly improve your proposals. Pull an old proposal off the shelf, see how many times it does these things, and then look at how much better it will be without them. Perhaps the best part of stopping these really bad habits is that it forces you to say things that matter, things that differentiate your proposal, and those things provide the customer with reasons to select you. There are a ton of things that go into creating a great proposal, but if you just stop doing these awful bad things you’ll see a huge leap in the quality of your proposal writing.

The best way to organize your proposal is around what the customer is looking for. But you have to do it in a very literal sense. The customer is looking for something tangible. They are looking for something in black and white, spelled out, and written down. Different customers look for different things. But if you can anticipate what your customer is looking for, you have a significant advantage. Here are some examples of what your customer might be looking for: Answers to questions Keywords that match the RFP Evidence that you followed instructions Strengths and weaknesses Reasons Solutions Product names, company names, or brands Alternatives or options Something that wasn’t in the RFP Whether they can trust you What they should do What to tell their boss How to complete their evaluation forms Insight Capabilities that could come in handy Things that differentiate you from your competitors Affordability and savings Feasibility Risk mitigation Reliability and quality The path of least resistance Short term or long term gain ROI A better future If you understand what the customer is looking for, then the critical question becomes how will they find it? And what can you do to make that easier? Making it easy for the customer to find what they are looking for impacts: How you develop your outline How you word your headings How you design your layout to draw the reader’s eye What you say, how you say it, and the order you say it in What you emphasize How you incorporate citations and references What you leave in, what you take out, and the level of detail you go into In other words, everything about your proposal. Everything about our proposal should be driven by how to make sure the customer can easily find what they are looking for. It really is that simple. Of course, the hard part is knowing what they are looking for. That is harder than writing the proposal. But instead of worrying about how your proposal should look, or what you should write, or even how to be persuasive, just focus on what they need to find and make it easy. Considering what the customer needs to see is a great place to start your proposal efforts. Once you understand what the customer is looking for, you can build your proposal around making it easy for them to find what they need to see. If you are putting all your effort into the proposal, you might want to reconsider and put more effort into finding out what the customer is looking for. Research it, study it, and ponder it. When you can articulate it, you’ll know what should go into your proposal.

Customer intimacy sounds so much cooler than customer awareness. No company is going to say that they’re not interested in achieving customer intimacy. It’s pretty easy to convince the executives that customer intimacy is something you just have to have. But then you have a problem. How do you get it? Customer intimacy is about trust and sharing. You have to earn trust and be willing to share before you are even a candidate for achieving customer intimacy. And some customers are reluctant to trust and do little sharing, let alone anything more… intimate. Do you really think your customer wants to be intimate with you, just because you want it? What is required for customer intimacy? So for starters, don’t expect to get intimate with your customer on a first date. Just because the customer agreed to a meeting, doesn't mean you've got customer intimacy. If you don’t arrive looking for a long-term relationship, you’re probably not going to get past their public persona. Showing up looking for a contract and asking for a chance won't cut it. You have to do more than just say you’re looking for a long-term relationship. You have to walk the talk. You have to invest. You have to earn trust and share, and do it consistently over time, before you can expect the customer to consider you worthy. In some ways it is a courtship. a period where you prove yourself worthy of the customer. So how do you prove that? For starters, it takes more than just claiming to have a compliant, useful, or even beneficial product or service. It requires long-term relevance to be worthy of the commitment. It requires the delivery of value worthy of the investment the customer will make. Proving yourself worthy to the customer requires establishing trust that the risks won't become issues. Above all it requires you to demonstrate that you give value rather than simply take it, and do so during the courtship period. Instead of pleasing talk and promises, it requires trustworthy behavior over enough time for confidence to take root. How NOT to achieve customer intimacy A big part of achieving customer intimacy is avoiding the things that will destroy it and letting time do its magic. If at the first meeting you say "here I am" and "here's what I'm capable of," why would anyone care? If you show up and do nothing but talk about yourself, you’re going to look like a taker and not a giver. If you, and your written collateral, do a lot of bragging and are full of unsubstantiated claims, you’re not going to look credible. If you ask for information from the customer but don’t provide anything of value to them, such as information that could help them pursue their goals, you’re going to sound like just another vendor trying to close a deal and not at all like a potential asset and long-term partner. Once you start forming a relationship with the customer, you need to step up your game and not rest on your laurels. If you do some work with them and your performance is perfectly normal and sufficiently adequate, you can expect to get treated just like everyone else. It doesn’t mean you're worthy just because they didn’t complain about anything. You can expect the customer to keep looking for someone else because, let’s face it, you’re boring—merely okay if they haven't found someone better. And if you do have customer satisfaction problems, you can forget about anything intimate. How to be worthy of customer intimacy Once you make contact, you need to demonstrate how exceptional you are. Note the word “demonstrate.” It is far more noteworthy than all those claims in your brochures and proposals. Demonstrating in this context is synonymous with proof. Exceptional claims require exceptional proof. All relationships start with an introduction. If you have to, you can introduce yourself. But it helps if you are a familiar face and have a good reputation. How you make contact matters as well. There are many ways to stay in front of the customer and prove that you have shared interests: Associations Networking Subcontracting Events Trade shows Webinars Online contacts like email and LinkedIn Capability briefings (better after an introduction than a first contact) When you are familiar, the customer is far more likely to say "yes" when you ask for a meeting so you can get to know each other a little better. That meeting is where you start to form you reputation with the customer. Building your reputation is supported by your: Qualifications Awards Experience Friends in common Association participation and sponsorships Publications Website Social media presence Press Just make sure that you focus on the customer more than you focus on yourself. You should do more listening than talking. Even if you've been invited to a capabilities briefing, consider wrapping all the details about your company with questions about the relevance to the customer. You should be exploring compatibility and not looking for an opportunity to brag. Everything on the lists above helps to lay an important foundation before intimacy even has a chance to occur. Each contact is an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re not the kind of vendor who's only interested in one thing by delivering value to the customer. Remember, it's not about you. It's about the customer. Put everything into a context that matters to them. Try helping them to understand: The issues The alternatives What they need to do to achieve their goals Giving them the information they need to make future decisions is a great way of delivering value. You can provide information by email, website, or in white papers. You can bring in subject matter specialists or executives to demonstrate interest and responsiveness. The key is to be helpful and to demonstrate that you're willing to invest effort into giving attention to the customer. You're not just trying to get their attention. Remember, do not expect intimacy on a first date. Your first meeting with the customer must result in follow-up meetings to get to that stage. If you think you’ve achieved something because you got a meeting, wait until you see if you can get another. If you walk out of your meeting without an agreement to meet again or at least follow up, you may not have made much of an impression. Try showing enthusiasm for what you can accomplish together and see if they return it. Keep in mind that most customers are being courted by multiple companies that seek to influence their decision-making process. It can work against you if you only contact one person at the customer. If you know one person at the customer and never reach out to anyone else, you’re not really showing much interest in the customer as an organization. You're also likely to get that person's perspective instead of a full picture. To have an accurate view of the customer, you need to have relationships at the: Program or operations level Procurement or contracting level Executive level Stakeholder level You should reach out to all stakeholders involved in or impacted by your goals, as well as the decision makers or proposal evaluators themselves once you learn who they might be. Timing matters. If you show up after they’ve written the RFP, then they have already made a commitment and you should not expect to have much influence over it, no matter what you think your relationship with them is. If you show up after they’ve decided their acquisition strategy, don’t expect to be able to get them to change to the contract vehicle you prefer. We all desperately want the kind of customer relationships where they call on us for advice and where we work together to imagine the future and solve challenges as if we were one and the same organization. What a precious but rare thing that is. It doesn’t happen like magic in a storybook. It happens because: You were there for them when they needed it You did things for them they couldn’t do themselves You solved problems they didn’t even know they had before they even realized it You made their jobs easier and never were a burden You were easier to work with than their own staff You were more than just talk You were thorough and reliable Everything you said was credible and they trusted you They came to depend on you And you delivered Maybe it’s so rare because most vendors aspire to be like this but rarely follow through. Doing all the right things is what separates you from all the other vendors. It is what makes customer intimacy bloom. So how do you know whether you've achieved customer intimacy? Does the customer come to you? Or do they wait for you to come to them? Do they ask you for help? Better yet, do they ask you for advice? If you are of real value in their eyes (in spite of whatever you claim) they will seek out that value. They won't wait for it. The other way you can tell is what they share with you. A major part of winning proposals is having an information advantage. If all you have is the same information as everybody else bidding, you do not have an information advantage. When the customer shares their preferences, perspectives, concerns, and things that matter to them in a way that gives you an information advantage, you have a real relationship. You can even quantify the fact of its existence. But they've only shared like that because they want you to do something about it. They want value. Now it's your turn to share.

Are most of your interactions with potential customers these days in writing? Relationship marketing is about providing support and building trust. This is still true when your relationship is conducted by writing. When communicating with potential customers in writing, are you giving them value or just asking for things? What can you give in writing that helps a potential customer? They don’t have to cost a thing to give, but can still have value to the customer. How about Explanations Comparisons Descriptions Requirements Criteria Processes and procedures Reviews Examples Templates Case studies Terms and conditions Estimates Specifications Summaries Answers Questions to ask References Referrals Instructions Preferences Perspective Guidance Training Facts or data Pictures, illustrations, or graphics Associations Contract clauses or language Schedules Allocations Considerations Amounts Alternatives Durations Deadlines Inspiration Events Trends Contingencies Things to anticipate Confirmation Congratulations Recognition Substantiation Plans Forms Checklists Suggestions Organization Ranges, limits, starting and ending points Best practices A reason to smile Clarification Direction Targets Models Assessments Risk identification Risk avoidance Risk mitigation Research Rules Regulations Loopholes Precedence Exceptions Inclusions Exclusions Compliance Options Background Reminders Improvements Pros Cons Lessons learned Wording Structure Penalties Rewards Incentives Action items Concerns Insight Creativity Testimonials Feedback Opportunities Solutions Sources Destinations Secrets Announcements News Advice Observations Corrections Quantities Objectivity Collaboration Justifications Insights Preventions Aspirations ingredients Prompts Steps Motivators Approaches Validation Sympathy Encouragement A light at the end of the tunnel Demonstrations Ideas Diagnostics Points of contact Market research Sources Links Resources Focus Distraction Stories I saved my two favorites for last: 124. Things they’ve never thought of before or wouldn’t think about on their own 125. What they need to take the next step or to do their job These can be precious gifts. The kind that earn goodwill. The kind that can start or cement a relationship. The kind that lead to winning business. Just don't call them gifts. Don't even call them a favor. It's just communicating and demonstrating. Providing support and earning trust in writing is about delivering value and establishing credibility. Every email or written interaction is subject to scrutiny. Are you a giver or a taker? Do you expect anything in return? As you a nuisance or a risk? Are you a time sink or do you add value? How do you want your potential customer to perceive you? The next time you’re trying to be an asset instead of being a burden, this list should give you some inspiration.

Selling in writing is about influencing the decision process and the decision maker with what you put on paper. Procurements that require a proposal are not impulse purchases. When the customer will make their decision based on the proposal you submit, you need to sell in writing to influence the outcome in your favor. A salesperson has influence in person, but if they don’t carry that over to what gets put in writing they have no influence over closing the actual sale. Influence in person vs influence in writingTo sell in writing, the salesperson must discover how to influence both the decision process and the decision maker when they are reading instead of talking in person. Then you must provide instructions to the proposal writers that explain what will achieve this influence. This is very different from influencing potential customers through charisma and personal sales technique. Winning in writing means the salesperson can't just "leave the writing to the experts" and stay out of the proposal effort. It also means they can't sell the same way they do in person. The salesperson doesn't have to write the proposal or even choose the words, but they must inform the writers of the customer's decision process, preferences, and how to position those words for maximum influence. Who else would know how the customer makes buying decisions? How persuasion in writing is different than in personWhen you try to persuade someone in person, they often make their decision on the spot. When you have to persuade someone in writing, they take their time deliberating. They think more about how they should decide and what criteria should guide them. They try to be more logical. They compare, often line by line, in a way that can’t be done with the spoken word. Differentiators matter more than impressions when selling in writing. When there are written evaluation criteria, the customer assesses and often completes forms. Sometimes proposals are not read by evaluators, they are scored instead. Imagine selling in person in a meeting where the customer staff present are assessing what you said against written criteria, giving what you say a score, and making their decision based on that. This makes selling in writing completely different. Winning in writing requires influencing the decision processThe customer may have a formal process with an evaluation team to score the proposals they receive. If it’s a government proposal, then winning in writing is all about writing to optimize the scoring process. The salesperson's role becomes communicating how the customer implements their evaluation process, how to interpret the RFP, who is involved and how they make their decisions, and what needs to go into the proposal to achieve the maximum score. No matter how the customer tries to create an evaluation process that is objective and impersonal, they can't quite remove all of the subjectivity. Different evaluators will score the same thing, using the same evaluation criteria differently. When they read the proposal, they will look for different things because some things concern them differently than the other evaluators. Salespeople play a crucial role in discovering the concerns that the proposal evaluators have. These concerns often do not make it into the RFP. One crucial part of a good proposal win strategy is being able to articulate the customer's concerns and preferences in ways that proposal writers can translate into how to position the things they are writing about. To win in writing, you must take how the customer will reach their decision into account, make sure they have the information they need to reach their decision, and if possible guide them through it. Before proposal writers can do that, you have to give them this information. You can't expect your proposal writers to know the customer well enough to know their current concerns and preferences related to this particular procurement. The information a salesperson seeks from the customer must anticipate what the writers will need to know to write the winning proposal. The salesperson’s success at closing the sale depends on it. When everyone has the same RFP, winning in writing requires achieving an information advantage before you start any actual writing. This changes the sales process and how it is conducted. Salespeople are vital to the proposal processThe salesperson is the connection between the people at the customer and the proposal document. Watch a salesperson in action when interacting with a customer: they ask questions, make suggestions, and choose their approach based on the answers. You can’t do that in writing. If someone hasn't done that in person before the writing starts, you will write your proposal with all the charm of an ignorant stranger. If a salesperson talks to the customer, but then doesn’t participate in planning what to say on paper, you lose any insight they may have had. You still end up proposing like a stranger. From the customer’s perspective, you set the relationship back because everything that was discussed is absent when they read the proposal. It makes your company look like it is all talk with no follow-through, which happens to be correct. This makes having a salesperson's insights vital to the proposal process. However, it requires translating from in-person talk to persuasion through writing. If you depend on proposals to close the sale, you need a salesperson who speaks both languages. You need a salesperson who understands what goes into proposal writing and how to be a part of that process instead of being a random element or attempting to command it. You probably don't want the salesperson doing the writing, because then they are not selling. But you do want them to understand what good proposal writing is and how it more closely resembles cooking than creative writing. They are a vital part of the proposal team. If your company depends on selling in writing, then your sales force better play a key role in that writing and not simply hand it off to someone else to produce — at least not if you want to be competitive. Winning in writing requires more precisionMistakes made in writing are permanent. Never mind typos. If you misinterpret the customer, misunderstand what they want, or fail to write from their perspective, they will be constantly reminded of it every time they look at your proposal. Your salesperson needs to vet what you intend to offer and what you think matters with the customer so that when you present it in the proposal you position it correctly. Proposing blind is gambling where the house has better odds than you do. In a face-to-face meeting, trust is earned through body language, questions and answers, challenges and responses, and interaction. People decide to trust each other based on their responses and interactions. In writing, customers decide whether to trust a vendor based on how thoroughly the offering meets their needs, how accurate what they put in writing is, and how well what they see in writing demonstrates that the vendor listened to them. People only buy from people they trust. To win in writing you must prove you are trustworthy and not merely claim it. If you are going to write your proposal from the customer’s perspective, you must be able to relate everything about your offering to what matters to the customer. It must reflect their preferences and fulfill their needs, goals, and desires. To achieve that, you need someone who can not only talk to the customer and discover those things, but who can anticipate what the writers will be trying to do later and get the input they need to be successful. You also need to get it right, with precision, and in writing. You need a quality-driven proposal process to achieve this reliably. Good people working hard is not enough to consistently deliver winning proposals.

Most proposal assignments are a plea for the writers to figure out how to win the proposal on their own. Is that realistic? Is that even possible? It probably depends on how much customer insight the writers have. But instead of hoping for someone to save the day at the tail end of the process, a proposal process designed to win should gather that information and give it to them up front. Instead of assignments or steps in your process, think about setting expectations. What do stakeholders need to know and when? To improve your proposals, you need to make sure that when people sit down to work on them, they have what they need. If they don’t know what they need, you might conclude that you have a training problem. Only instead of looking at it as a training problem, with proposals you’d probably be better off looking at it as a problem with delivering what stakeholders need to know. Part of what they need is information to work with, and part of it is what to do with that information when they get it. A proposal process that gets the most out of people will deliver both. And that’s important, because if you want to escape the problem of people not following your process, the best way is to make following the process easier than skipping it. And the best way to achieve that is to deliver what stakeholders need to know in order to play their parts. You can see this in practice when proposal assignments are issued. Does the assignment tell the receiver: What the definition of success is? How to achieve that success? Where to get the input they require? If the assignment is to write something to complete an outline item, then it fails all three. If the assignment is to write something demonstrating compliance with the RFP requirements, then it fails two and sets the bar for success below what it will take to win. If the assignment is to write a winning proposal with the RFP as input with an unspecified definition for what a winning proposal would be and some unspecified additional input, then you can expect an uncertain result. In all three cases, the assignment set the receiver up for failure from the beginning. An assignment that is not doomed to failure will: Define proposal quality Provide the criteria required to fulfill proposal quality to the receiver in the context of their assignment Provide the information they will need to fulfill those criteria For example, if a winning proposal requires writing from the customer’s perspective, then the assignment should: Make reflecting the customer’s perspective at least part of what defines a quality proposal. Provide the criteria the reviewers will use to determine whether the proposal reflects the customer’s perspective. For example, one criterion might be: Is the response about what the customer will get out of what we propose, instead of being about us and what we offer? Describe what results the customer is looking for, what their preferences are, and what they hope to achieve as a result of the procurement. If the assignment does not do that, how can they possibly succeed? You can make a huge improvement in your proposals by forgetting about how you currently view your proposal process and just focusing on making better proposal assignments. No amount of proposal reviews or improvement in how you do your reviews can fix things on the back end when poor proposal assignments are made on the front end. No amount of complaining that people missed their deadlines will accomplish anything when you don’t give people what they need to do their tasks. Forget about the steps. Focus on the assignments. And what you need to give better proposal assignments. How assignments are made is an early indicator of the success or failure of the whole effort. Either you have the information you need to give proposal assignments or you’re just hoping for someone to save you from the fact that you’re not prepared. Improving your ability to give better proposal assignments means arriving at the proposal better prepared. Arriving at the proposal prepared to win is often out of the hands of the proposal manager making the writing assignments. Achieving better proposal assignments only happens when you have a solid process in place to make it possible and an organization that delivers what is needed. If your current process isn’t delivering what you need to make better proposal assignments, then maybe it’s time to replace it. And if all parts of the organization aren’t delivering their parts, the right process will make that apparent. Either way, the assignments should define success and not failure.

Great proposal writing isn't based on slick words. Great proposal writing does not require the editing skills of a professional. You really don’t have to be an expert in anything to be a great proposal writer. But there is one thing that is absolutely necessary, and not everyone has it. I’m not even sure that everyone can develop it. That thing is perspective. To write a great proposal, you must be able to conceive which words to use from the customer’s perspective. You must be able to think like the customer, read like the customer, and care about what the customer cares about. Proposal writing requires articulating what the customer needs to hear in order to reach a decision in your favor. But before you look at these things the ways the customer does, you must be able to consider perspectives beyond your own. You must be able to see things from the customer's perspective. If you want to improve your proposal writing skills, start by improving your ability to see the customer's perspective when they receive and evaluate a proposal. Looking through someone else's eyes Perspective is a skill that must be developed. Everyone thinks they have perspective, but my experience working with hundreds (thousands?) of proposal contributors has shown me that not everyone does. Some people are only capable of thinking, let alone writing, from their own perspective. This affects not only the way we see things, but how we describe them. If the only perspective someone has is their own, then they interact with the world based solely on their own way of looking at things. When they write, they describe themselves instead of describing the things that matter to the customer. When they propose an offering, they write about what they are providing or will do instead of how it relates to why the customer is trying to procure it. When they consider proposal quality, they do it based on whether they think the proposal is presented the way they think it should be, instead of how the customer will see it. If the proposal says all the good things about them that it should, they think it’s a good proposal. Only they are not the customer and only the customer's opinion matters. They come up blank when you inform them that a good proposal should present what the customer needs to see instead of what they want to say. Because they lack the customer’s perspective, they see getting selected as being completely about them. From that one perspective, how else could it be? The result is that their goal is to be as descriptive as possible and full of details about themselves. They want the customer to know how great they are. So that's what they tell them. From their customer's perspective, however, they just talk about themselves a lot. A proposal that is instead written from the customer's perspective will show considerably more value to the customer than a monologue about how great you are. Only being able to look at the world through your own eyes is a competitive disadvantage. If your proposal is about you, your offering, your approaches, your commitment, your intent to be wonderful, and why the customer should select you, it will be vulnerable to a proposal that is written about what the customer will get, how it will improve things for them, why what you are proposing and your qualifications matter to them, and how it will fulfill their goals. If you can't make that shift, you've got a perspective problem that will keep you from writing great proposals. A proposal may be full of good details, but the proposal won’t be great if it's about you instead of being about what the customer is looking for. Someone else proposing the exact same thing will evaluate much higher by describing it from the customer’s perspective instead of their own. This is because when you write from the customer’s perspective, you demonstrate that what you are proposing aligns with what matters to the customer and will fulfill their goals. Skilled proposal writing requires articulating things from the customer's perspective because it ensures that you provide the information they need to reach a decision in your favor and present it in a way that matters to them. Being really good at describing yourself and talking about yourself in impressive detail will not make you a better proposal writer. How do you write from the customer's perspective? Improving your proposal writing skills starts with doing a little bit of research to understand what matters to the customer. You have to know enough about them to be able to articulate things from their perspective. But that research alone is not enough. You have to consider things from the customer’s perspective and then write what they need to read to see, as opposed to what you think you should say. This is the skill you need to develop and continuously improve. Perspective is an interesting thing. To grow beyond your own perspective and cultivate it as a skill, you have to learn to see things through other people’s eyes. Perspective requires a great deal of empathy. If you can’t imagine what someone else thinks or feels, or if it never occurs to you, then you need to work on your ability to do that effectively if you want to improve your proposal writing skills. How to tell when you are NOT writing from the customer's perspective Here are four warning signs that your proposal writing lacks perspective and is about yourself instead of being about the customer: Everything starts with “we,” “our,” or your company name. Your company or team is the subject of every sentence. Your proposal is about your approaches, what you do, what you sell, the benefits you bring, and why you should be selected. The text of the proposal is all about you describing yourself, your qualifications, your experience, and your strengths. Your proposal is about you and how what you offer is great, instead of being about what the customer will get and how it will fulfill their goals. A great proposal is about the customer and what they get out of everything you do or every qualification you have. You, your offering, and your qualifications only matter if they matter to the customer. The goal of shifting perspective is to be able to articulate your proposal in the ways that matter to the customer. When the customer sits down to read a proposal, they are looking for what they might get out of you, your offering, and your qualifications. You need perspective to be able to articulate in writing what the customer is looking for instead of merely saying how great you are. To cultivate perspective as a skill, you need to think about what would matter to you if you were the customer, reading and evaluating a proposal. You need to understand the customer’s environment, pressures, goals, and aspirations. You need to learn to want the same things they want. You need to think through making a decision the same way that they will. Then you write what they need to hear in order to decide in your favor. Your style of proposal writing, techniques, formatting, capabilities, and experience all matter very little compared to that. Style does not win proposals. Perspective does. It takes a wide range of perspective to do this well The customer is more than one person. The customer has more than one opinion, agenda, or set of goals. If it's an important procurement, there always is more than one person involved in reaching a decision. You not only need to write from the perspective of the decision maker, but you also need to be able to write to the perspective of everyone who influences the decision. In practice, this means considering all the points of view that might exist within the customer's organization and satisfying all of them that your proposal represents their organization's best alternative. Anyone can do it. Except those who can't. Someone with minimal experience and little knowledge but a solid grasp of the potential perspectives of the various readers can write better proposals than highly experienced proposal specialists who lack perspective. Proposal writing skills do not correlate with experience. Some people show up being able to do this naturally. However, even some highly experienced proposal writers write self-descriptive, accurate, but hopelessly ordinary proposals. Experience as a proposal writer matters far less than someone's ability to see the customer's perspective and write a proposal based on it. If you cultivate perspective at an organizational level, it becomes a competitive advantage for your company. This is another reason why effective proposal content planning has such a huge impact on your win probability. The proposal process shouldn't be primarily about steps, procedures, and production. The proposal process should be about how to consistently build every proposal around the customer's perspective. While some research is required, perspective mostly requires empathy. Since we all share the same basic human nature, we all have similar concerns and motivations. This includes the people also known as "the customer." Twisting wording around in our heads to look at them from the outside in requires a lot of effort. And a little skill. It comes easier to some people than it does to others. In my experience, most of the people who struggle to find the words to write in a proposal are really struggling with perspective and not with proposal writing. The challenge is not putting words on paper, it's putting words on paper from someone else's perspective. If you have spent your life only looking through your own eyes, you may not be able to twist your mind around enough to write from someone else’s perspective. It’s easy to think about what’s important to you. It’s a lot harder to think about what’s important to someone else who has different concerns, values, knowledge, experience and priorities. The more you imagine what someone with different concerns, values, knowledge, experience, and priorities cares about, the better you will get at being able to articulate their perspective. The better you get at it, the easier it will be to write from someone else’s perspective. And the better you get at doing that, the better you will be at writing great proposals. Writing good proposals vs. writing great proposals You can write better proposals by learning more about what should go into them. But if you really want to write great proposals, just learn to channel the customer, do a little research, meditate on the Zen of proposal perspective, or simply ponder what it’s like to be the customer conducting a procurement and trying to get your needs met. Then don't try to be a great writer. Just try to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own and the customer will think you've written a great proposal. And their opinion is the only one that matters.

Sometimes the world is just too big. It’s full of customers, but finding them is like playing the game, “Where’s Waldo?” And just like in the game, you need a strategy for finding your customers. You only have so much time and resources to put into the search. But unlike the game, you have to capture sales from Waldo. And it’s competitive. You may find him, but that doesn’t mean he’ll become a customer. When the game is business development, it’s not just about finding as many Waldos as you can, it’s about converting as many Waldos into customers as you can. When you do business in a complex environment, your ability to convert Waldos into customers will have as much of an impact on your sales as your ability to find leads. Probably more. Finding buyers is easier than turning them into customers. This means that what you do when you find Waldo is more important than finding as many Waldos as possible. Selecting the right targets means both looking in the right places for Waldo, and looking for the right Waldos, the ones who may become customers. It’s almost enough to make you want to wait for Waldo to hold up a sign saying “I’m a customer” and “Download my RFP!” The problem with that approach is that you are a stranger to Waldo. Not only does he not trust you, but you don’t know anything about him to make your proposal matter to him. And if your proposal doesn’t matter, he’s a Waldo with a low probability of becoming a customer. You want a Waldo who you can get to know a little bit before he puts out his RFP, so you can make your proposal reflect the things he cares about. Since the world is so big, you have to make it smaller in order to find that kind of Waldo. How you go about doing that is the key to targeting. You want your smaller world to be full of potential customers, who you can get to know and convert a high percentage into paying customers. Here are five considerations: What does your sales cycle look like? Is it short? Long? Simple? Complex? Seasonal? Event driven? If you have a nice, easy, and short sales cycle, you can reach out to many potential customers. But if you have a long, complex sales cycle, you need to be selective to ensure you pick the right Waldos because it takes time to guide them through the procurement process. Seeking Long Term Relationships. People buy from people they know and trust. So start with people you know. You might not know the buyer, but you might be able to get there through a friend of a friend. Work your network. Grow your relationships into something larger. It’s a quicker payoff than trying to start new relationships from scratch. Especially if you’re going about it randomly. Who buys what you sell? This is a simple data problem, but it’s amazing how many people want to start selling before they know this. Targeting is about figuring out who you want to get to know. The organizations you want to build relationships with are the ones that buy a lot of what you sell. Do your homework and crunch the numbers, then prioritize your efforts. Market segmentation to divide and conquer. There are an infinite number of ways to divide up potential customers to create a group that’s small enough for you to reach, but large enough to fulfill your needs. The most common forms of segmentation are by market, location, size, and demographics. Who’s willing to talk to you? Some customers are better to have than others. Some are easier than others. If you have limited resources, you should focus on the customers who are willing to talk to you, and skip the rest. This means ignoring potential customers who want to keep you at arm’s length or who treat vendors as the enemy. They might be worth pursuing later, when you’ve got the resources and the time. The smaller you make your world by matching potential customers to your sales cycle, segmenting it down to a manageable size, and limiting it to customers you have relationships with or can develop relationships with who frequently buy what you sell, the better your chances are of finding customers. But then there's… The elephant in the room If you make your world too small, it will be full of customers, but even if you win them all there won’t be enough of them. The question becomes whether you can reach enough buyers for what you offer? Sometimes your customers segment easily. For example, they’re all in one location. But sometimes it’s not so easy because they are widely spread out and you can’t reach them all. The elephant in the room is whether you should be offering something else that will appeal to the customers you can reach to better sustain your business. Sometimes finding Waldo isn’t about the hunt. It’s about the bait. Waldo has to want to become your customer. You have to be able to position your offering relative to what Waldo needs and is willing to purchase. And there has to be enough of the right kind of Waldos within your reach. You are far more likely to capture Waldo’s business through strategy than by waiting for him to hold up a sign, ignore all of your competition, and pick you even though he does not know you.

If it’s so obvious that your proposal should describe your strengths and downplay your weaknesses, why do so many proposals do such a poor job of proposal writing? This article was written after spending a day discussing that with a customer who evaluates proposals. I love testing my assumptions and learning everything I can about the customer's perspective from an actual customer. The customer I spent the day talking to worked in the Federal Government. But this topic is one of those that applies equally to commercial proposals. Clearly the Federal proposal evaluation process is strange and mechanical compared to the way companies evaluate proposals. But it’s precisely that level of methodical detail that enables us to see the issue more clearly. Both markets can get something out of it. An RFP issued by the Federal Government has written evaluation criteria. They’ll break down the proposal into sections or volumes and provide the criteria for each one. Here is an example: To get an “Exceptional” rating, the proposed approach must reflect numerous strengths and no weaknesses. To get a “Good” rating, the proposed approach must reflect multiple strengths and only a few minor weaknesses. To get an “Acceptable” rating, the proposed approach must have strengths and may have some weaknesses. To get an “Unacceptable” rating, the proposed approach must have either multiple weaknesses or one or more major weaknesses. Winning with a formal evaluation based on criteria like these becomes a mechanical process of stacking up strengths and weaknesses. You should design your offering so that the evaluator finds those strengths in your proposal. You should anticipate the evaluation forms so that the evaluator can copy and paste your descriptions of your strengths right onto their forms. The only hard part is knowing how to articulate your proposal strengths. If you just do this the way you normally would, you will probably lose to someone who understands the definitions and the way the terms are used in the RFP. For example, if your approach fulfills all of the requirements of the RFP, you might think this is a proposal strength. But you would be wrong. Complying with the RFP is a minimum requirement. It is not a strength. A proposal strength has to represent value to the customer beyond the requirement. Being qualified is also not a strength. But you can turn your qualifications into strengths. All you have to do is show how they differentiate your offering and explain how the customer benefits from it. Simply explaining why you do something can turn it into a strength, if the reason benefits the customer. Every trade-off decision is a potential strength. Every feature of your offering is probably not a strength, if it merely meets the requirement. However, if you do something the customer requires in a way that is innovative or designed to be better, then the reason why it is better makes it a strength. Proposal writing is not about describing things like your approach, or listing all your features in the hopes that the customer will pick some out and call them "strengths." Proposal writing is about describing things in such a way that they fulfill the customer’s definition of being a strength. To win the evaluation, each section of the proposal should be worded to present as many strengths as possible. You can accomplish this simply by calling out your differentiators and explaining why your approach delivers better benefits than what as required. It works best if you design your layout to feature these statements through typography, formatting emphasis, text boxes, etc. So now let’s talk about weaknesses. Weaknesses are not ways in which other proposals are better. Weaknesses are non-compliance. If you are not as good as another provider, the evaluator doesn’t score that as a weakness (your competitor will just have more strengths than you do). But if you fail to meet an RFP requirement, then you have a weakness. While you might think of weaknesses as ways in which your offering is insufficient or fails to meet the customer’s needs, when those needs are defined by the RFP, weaknesses are ways in which your offering fails to meet the RFP requirements. But there’s an even easier way to look at weaknesses. Weaknesses are no-bid indicators and not something you need to write away or hide. If you look at the evaluation criteria above, the winner probably is not going to have any weaknesses. If you are truly non-compliant, your proposal may not get evaluated at all. You can’t explain away the fact that you don’t meet the requirements, or find some clever way to hide it. Weaknesses are a quick way to get an “Unacceptable” rating. So if you are in the game, you won't have any weaknesses. If you are in the game, you will be fully compliant and then it is all about stacking up strengths. This means that if you want to win, you should no-bid everything where you have weaknesses (even if you have already started the proposal and feel invested) and make your proposal process about presenting your strengths. You can even plan what you need to write in a section by listing your strengths in a way that shows how they differentiate you and benefit the customer. Then the rest of the writing becomes much easier. But more importantly, your chances of winning go way up.

Copy of the presentation Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com gave at the American Express OPEN DC Summit for Success

Most people do not follow their company’s proposal process. Most proposal managers blame process failure on the participants not having enough discipline to follow the process. People focus on the burden of following a process. Or the need for training about the process. But those are not the real reasons that people are not following the process. The real reason your process is failing is that it’s not delivering the information that people need. They get an assignment and an RFP that they may or may not understand. Everyone knows that the RFP requirements are only part of what they need to do their assignment, but that’s all they get. Maybe they get a list of “themes.” They ask for templates and re-use libraries because they know they need more information than you are giving them. They just don’t know what to ask for. They have to set out on their own because the process has failed to deliver what they need to complete their assignment. If the goal of the process is to create a proposal that reflects what it will take to win, and the process doesn’t define that, then the process has failed before any proposal writing has even started. If you are trying to write a proposal that reflects the customer’s perspective, and you haven’t anticipated and answered the questions the writers will have about the customer’s preferences, then the process has failed. If you get to the review and the reviewers have to decide for themselves what defines proposal quality, then the process has failed. The key thing to realize is that the process does not matter. The steps do not matter. It’s the information that matters. The process is just a vehicle to organize discovering the information you will need and delivering it to people when they need it in the form they need it in. If your process is all about requirements and assignments, but doesn’t address the information needed to complete those assignments, then it is not providing what the writers need to execute the process. It will fail. But process can also guide people to discover, assess, and transform information into what is needed, while measuring their progress and giving them a way to determine whether they have achieved a quality product. Try this: Drop the process. Completely. Now, just deliver the information people need to write a winning proposal. Start at the end with a winning proposal and work back to the beginning to identify what information is needed to get there. Anticipate the questions people will have and deliver the answers. That is all. Think about each stakeholder. Some stakeholders didn’t participate in the proposal but need to know that it is a quality proposal. Some play a very specialized role, like contracts or pricing. Some make contributions but don’t actually write. Some write, and may or may not have subject matter expertise. Some know the customer and have insight. Some participate in developing the strategies, and may or may not write the narrative. Some plan, track, and oversee. Some have to write the darn thing and struggle to make it reflect the customer’s perspective. Etc. What does each need to know and when? Don’t think in terms of kickoffs, assignment tracking, and quality assurance. They can support the flow of information, but it’s the information that matters and not the activities. You’ll need some or all of those activities (and more), but you only need them if they contribute the right information and they can only be successful if they receive the right information. You’re going to run into a problem. The need for information stretches back to before the start of the proposal. If the right information isn’t delivered at the start of the proposal, the entire effort is doomed before it begins. And yet, many of you are in that position and can’t use it as an excuse. You’re tasked with making a good show of winning regardless of what you are given to work with. That’s why you need to start with a nice, long list of questions. Ours has 135 questions. The answers to those questions tell you what you’ve got to work with. You can even quantify it by counting up how many answers you've got. And over time you can correlate that with your win rate. But the most important thing is that it gives you a foundation of information that you can move forward with. It gives you something to create bid strategies out of. It gives you something to provide guidance to the proposal writers. It gives you what you need to define what it will take to win and turn it into quality criteria. You will never get answers for all the questions you ask That’s okay. Sometimes the questions you don’t have answers to are the ones that drive your bid strategies. But you can’t figure that out until you know what you’ve got to work with. Your process succeeds or fails based on whether you can deliver the information that people need. If they fail because the process didn’t deliver that information, it had nothing to do with a lack of discipline. If the process delivers the information people need, they’ll follow the process because that’s how they get what they need. If the process doesn’t deliver the information they need, they have to go outside the process in order to fulfill their assignment. That’s why the process is less important than the information. Achieving an information advantage is the single most important thing you can do to position yourself to win But achieving an information advantage is only part discovery. It’s also part what you do with the information you have. If it doesn’t make it into the right black ink on paper, then it’s not part of the proposal. Winning in writing has more to do with getting the right information than it does with the act of writing itself. If people aren’t following your process, ask yourself what they need to complete their assignment that the process isn’t giving them. If your proposals are making it to the review stage and then things go bad, ask yourself what the reviewers know that the writers didn’t. And why. If you are forced to start your proposal without the input you need to write a winning proposal, then figure out what your strategies are going to be in its absence and instruct the writers accordingly. Don’t just push the assignments to the writers and expect them to figure it out. Who wants to be on the receiving end of a process that works like that? One of the advantages of a process that is based on questions that direct the flow of information, instead of a process that is based on steps and assignments, is that you can track where you needed information and didn’t have it. You can even quantify it. But most importantly, you can connect what you didn’t have with what the impact was on the proposal and how it relates to what it takes to win. That is powerful feedback for driving change so that your company can improve its ability to write proposals that do reflect what it will take to win.

If you think the best way to figure out what to write about in your proposal is to start writing, you may be making a colossal mistake. The mistake is that you’re skipping the part where you “figure it out.” You are thinking by writing about it. Look at how inefficient it is to have a conversation in writing. You think of something to say, and then you write it down. Meanwhile, the other person waits. When they get what you wrote, they read it and you wait. They figure out their response and write it down. You wait some more. When you finally get their response, you realize they misinterpreted something and you have to clarify. In writing. This could go on all day. At least with email you can do something else while you wait. When you approach a proposal by writing a draft so you have something to think about you are doing the same thing. When you think after you write, every new thought spawns a re-write cycle. It is incredibly time consuming and inefficient. But what really hurts is that you still don’t know what the proposal should be. It’s like looking for something in the dark. The only way to find it is to trip over it. And if that doesn’t happen, you could be looking for a long, long time. I have seen too many huge, must win proposal efforts embarrassingly fail because of this approach. But usually they blamed it on something else like not starting early enough --- if we start earlier next time, we'll have enough time for all the "inevitable" re-write cycles. And then they take the same approach on the next one. You don’t have forever to wander in the dark looking at draft after draft to try to find the right proposal. You have a deadline. Thinking in writing against a deadline means that you stop when you run out of time. Instead of defining quality and doing what it takes to achieve it, you define quality as being better than the first draft and submit whatever you’ve got when you run out of time. The alternative is to: Figure out the points you are trying to make before you start writing Identify what needs to be included before you start writing Decide how everything should be positioned before you start writing It's really just a matter of making lists. It helps to do it within the structure provided by the outline. But it's just a series of lists that provide reminders, placeholders, and instructions for the proposal writers. When you have a list of things to address and something that acts like a thesis that all the details should support, you still aren’t ready to write. You need to validate that your points and list of items to address are accurate and complete. Now is the time to think it through. Not after the draft is complete, when improvements become costly. Re-writing a narrative to prove a different point than the one in the draft is a big deal. That’s one reason why many proposals contain unsubstantiated claims. It’s so much easier to make a statement than it is to re-write the narrative to support it. If your approach to identifying what should go in the proposal is to look at the draft and try to see what’s missing, each set of additions will take a re-write cycle, and you’ll never know when you’re complete. It won’t even be your goal. You’ll be looking for a proposal that’s good enough instead of one that is ideal. When the only guidance proposal writers get is the RFP, then compliance is all that you can expect to get back. As important as RFP compliance can be, it’s no way to beat the competition. Proposal writers need to know what points to make and what to include. If you don’t tell them, if you make your assignments at the outline level and leave the details for them to figure out, then all you can expect back is compliance. If that. If the writers are better than average, maybe they’ll tack on some unsubstantiated points and call them “themes.” Never give out an outline as a proposal assignment and expect the writers to figure it out. If they need to figure something out, make that a separate assignment. Ask them what points need to be made. Ask them what needs to be included. Pass it around to collaborate. Review it to be certain. That is the essence of what Proposal Content Planning is an iterative approach we developed to help people figure out what should go in their proposals. It’s part of the MustWin Process that’s in PropLIBRARY. It’s a pretty sophisticated methodology. But at its heart, it’s just a way to avoid thinking in writing. Or, as we like to think about it, a way to beat companies who do their thinking in writing.

Eliminating waste is the only way to reduce proposal costs without lowering your win rate. Lowering your win rate always costs more than the intended cost savings. Most of the wasted effort that occurs during proposals occurs as a result of poor decisions or the failure to be ready at three critical moments in time during the development of the proposal. A little bit of effort applied at those critical moments can prevent a ton of waste later. If you want to reduce proposal costs, these three points in time are what you should focus on. 1. The Bid/No Bid DecisionFirst, the obvious: If you decide to bid something you can’t win, the entire effort is a waste. While true, that’s usually not very helpful. Companies don’t bid things they can’t win when they know they can’t win them, unless they are setting the stage for a future win. And how do you know you can't possibly win? Most bad bid decisions are based on the hope that it's possible even if the odds aren't what you'd like them to be. Bid decisions are always made based on limited or non-existent information. The problem isn’t how they made the decision. The problem is that they permitted circumstances that forced them to make a decision without the right information. Perhaps they should always decline bidding when that’s the case. But that’s not realistic either. The key point is that bad bid/no bid decisions are more often a result of insufficient information than they are of deciding wrongly. The bid/no bid decision is the point in time where the failure to obtain the information needed becomes clear. At that moment of clarity, when you realize that you are having trouble deciding because of what you don’t know, if you decide to bid and continue anyway you guarantee that a higher percentage of your proposal effort will be wasted. The cost of putting effort into gaining more information is less than the cost wasted on low probability proposals because you don't have the information you should. The reason you increase the percentage of waste is because if you don’t have the information at the moment of decision, you certainly don’t have it to give to the writers who need it to write a winning proposal. They will be forced to start writing without the right strategies and information, while attempting to figure it out as they go along. What this really means is that you guarantee they will have extra re-writing cycles to correct the things they didn’t know when they started. And if the information never comes, which is usually the case, it means you will be re-writing until the time of submission without ever getting to a draft that reflects knowledge of what it will take to win. Most of the effort that goes into writing a proposal like that is wasted effort, even if by some remote chance it wins. That’s “most,” as in more than half. That means you doubled the cost of producing the proposal on a pursuit that you knew at the time of the bid decision you were not prepared for and would be a low probability pursuit. So you double your costs while lowering your odds. This in turn means that by investing in getting the right information, you can cut the proposal effort in half. Or do twice as good of a job of producing it. You lower your costs while improving your odds. Where should your company spend its resources? Re-writing to make the most out of a pursuit you were unprepared for, or investing the time it takes to be better informed about the next bid? 2. Proposal StartupWhen the proposal is starting up is a critical moment. Either you can articulate why the customer should select you, what differentiates your bid, and what the results of selecting you will be for them and do it all from the customer’s perspective, or you can’t. You find this out when you prepare the outline. Either you can take the outline further and give the writers guidance regarding the points you are trying to make, or you can’t. And if you can't, you're going to burn proposal time trying to make up for it. If you leave it up to the writers to figure out what points they should make as part of their writing assignments, you guarantee wasted effort. Either they will choose the wrong points, or more frequently, no points at all beyond RFP compliance. Inevitable and unnecessary re-writes will follow. Each re-write cycle is characterized by the writers taking longer to think about it because they lack the right information. Sometimes they just get stuck. Sometimes they work around the issue without actually solving it, completing their assignment with the hope that the reviewers won’t notice. They continue to write and re-write in search of more and better points until they run out of time and you ship what you have instead of what the proposal should have been. It takes longer to write a proposal you are not prepared for than it does to write a proposal when you are prepared. This is another way you increase your costs while lowering your win probability. And that is such a waste! Are you connecting the dots yet? Failure to have customer insight at the time of the bid/no bid decision means insufficient guidance to writers and extra re-write cycles result with no hope of creating a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. Your bid strategy amounts to consuming twice as much effort to win less. Where should your company spend its resources? Re-writing until it figures out what the proposal should say, or anticipating the questions that writers will have and that will drive your win strategies so the first draft can reflect them? Better preparation lowers the effort while increasing your win probability. 3. Proposal ReviewsProposal reviews are when most false starts are discovered. Your writers get to the review, after following the meager instructions they were given, only to be surprised that the reviewers don’t like it and expect them to do it again. The really cruel part of this is that it can happen with a perfectly good proposal. The problem is that the writers and reviewers are working from different instructions. This creates a moving target for the proposal writers because if they don't know the reviewer's expectations, they can't reliably fulfill them. If you can’t give the writers sufficient guidance regarding the points they should make, how can the reviewers use those same points as quality criteria? If you do not define the quality criteria before the writing starts, you guarantee the worst kind of wasted effort. You guarantee that towards the end of the process, close to your deadline, you’ll trigger re-writes. The kind of re-writes that are rushed and can lower win probability instead of raising it. Where should your company spend its resources? Performing heroic acts after a late-stage review that caught everyone by surprise, or putting in the effort to define your review criteria before you start writing? The lack of criteria to bring writing and reviewing onto the same page is an information problem. It is really an extension of the same information problem that showed up during the bid decision and proposal startup. The reason there are no review criteria is that people don’t know what they should be, because they don’t know what it will take to win. 1... 2... 3...If you've continued to connect the dots, then you’ve realized what all three key points in time have in common. It’s information. Failure to deliver the right information at those key points in time is what drives the vast majority of proposal waste. And at each of those key moments, you know how it’s going to turn out based on whether you have that information. If you want to eliminate the vast majority of proposal waste, all you have to do is deliver the right information at those three key moments. To deliver it, you have to anticipate what you will need later and ensure that you get it before you start. Companies have difficulty motivating to do this. But when you realize that instead of resorting to win-rate destroying templates or laying off staff you could cut your proposal costs in half, would that help motivate you? The elephant in the room: AIGo ahead and waste the AI's effort. The cost of doing that is less than the cost of wasting people's effort. But don't actually waste it. Use a lot of it on things that people wouldn't do due to availability, an inability to process large amounts of mind-numbing details, and a low tolerance for boredom. Use it on things that will improve your win probability that people don't like to do, and aren't really their strengths anyway. Use it to sweat the details. Just don't waste AI by failing to explain in detail what you need, mitigate all the ways things can go wrong, and simply feeding it a simple prompt and the SOW. That's shoddy, low-effort human laziness and it will kill your proposal's win probability. The way you avoid wasting AI effort is for you to put effort into guiding it. Invest in AI so that instead of instantly producing losing proposals you can produce winning proposals a little bit faster. Curiously, what you need to guide AI to a higher win rate is the same as what you need to avoid wasted human effort. The information needed for an informed bid decision is what the AI needs to differentiate your proposal. The preparation needed at proposal start-up is the same preparation you need to guide AI from the very first prompt. And the quality criteria you need to increase human review effectiveness are what you need for AI to be an effective proposal reviewer. AI can even help you develop those quality criteria.

I tend to focus on winning proposals instead of efficiency. One more win can produce enough revenue to cover the inefficiency of many proposals. If you want more revenue, you are better off focusing on winning than reducing proposal effort. Unfortunately, many organizations treat proposals as a cost instead of as an investment (let alone the core competency of the organization). Proposal costs are covered out of the overhead portion of the budget, and that’s always under pressure for reduction. But the best ways to reduce effort on proposals have very little to do with proposal production. Here are eight ways companies waste a ton of money on proposals: Not being selective in what they bid. Fooling yourself into thinking a bid is an “opportunity” just because you have an RFP and think you can do the work does not mean that you are prepared to win it. Fooling yourself into thinking you can win it, even though you’re not prepared, only makes it worse. Each low probability bid that loses adds the entire cost of the proposal to the efficiency equation. Just one can do more damage than buying magic proposal software can fix. Not being ready to win at RFP release. If you are not ready to win at RFP release, it means you’ll be trying to figure out what it will take to win while writing. This means you’ll have to do re-writes every time you figure out something new. It means you won't be able to write to prove the points you want to make because you'll be figuring out those points as you go. Those points will be less numerous, weaker, and torn up during review without time to fix it. Your win rate will suffer accordingly. To save the cost of losing proposals, try investing a much lower amount in pre-RFP preparation. Changing the outline. Nothing is as disruptive to proposal writing as changing the outline can be. It can burn a huge number of hours. Far more than setting aside a little bit of time to review and approve the outline. Reviewing the outline should be given the same priority as reviewing the content. Never leave it to one person to determine the outline. Discovering their bid strategies by writing about them. If your proposal is going to accomplish your bid strategies, they need to be known before the writing starts. You can’t sprinkle some "themes" on at the end and expect them to win it for you. When you change your bid strategies after proposal writing has started, you’ve changed the thesis or the point you’re trying to make. This can cause a complete do-over because everything in your proposal should be trying to make that point. Change the point and you should have edits everywhere. If you don’t, it literally means your proposal was pointless. An investment in content planning prevents this and saves far more than it costs. Proposal content planning can actually be seen as a profit center, since it will increase your win rate and bring you revenue you would have lost in return for the investment. Not being able to decide their approaches. When people don’t know what to write, it often has more to do with not being able to decide what to offer than it does with the writing. What are you going to offer? How are you going to do it? Why are you going to do it that way? When you can answer those questions, writing it down becomes straightforward. When you can’t answer those questions, you waste time getting started and then every reconsideration spawns a re-write that wastes even more time. Don't waste effort writing in circles if you want to lower your proposal costs. Not being able to answer the writer’s questions. Would the customer prefer this or that? How should we position our offering? What matters to the customer? When the writers don’t have answers to questions like these, they either stop and wait, write something lame with the intention of re-writing it later, or simply pull their punches and not bother making the point. This leads to waste when they don’t have the answers before they start writing. Not defining proposal quality until the review. Proposal writers should start with the same criteria the reviewers will follow. If the reviewers make up their criteria at the time of the review, you are guaranteed to introduce unnecessary and costly re-writes. Not reviewing the proposal until all the narrative is in place. Waiting until all the text is in draft form before you start reviewing means the review takes place later than needed and the changes will spawn more extensive re-writes with less time to accomplish them. It’s wasteful. By the time you get to a draft, you should have already reviewed your outline, bid strategies, approaches, positioning, and many other things, leaving only wordsmithing and presentation to be reviewed. Add up all the delays and re-writes and it’s not unusual for companies to waste more than half their proposal effort. How much effort should a company go through to prevent some of that waste? It’s an 80/20 problem. For 20% of the effort, you can reduce 80% of the waste. Why don’t more companies invest in that 20%? Looking back on what I just wrote I find it very interesting that by reducing the waste, you’ll also win more proposals. The things you do to eliminate the waste are some of the same things you should do to increase your win rate. Reducing cost at the same time you increase revenue is a fantastic way to increase your ROI. If you do the math and compare the costs to the benefits of reducing a percentage of that waste while increasing your win rate by a percentage, it’s not hard to see benefits that are orders of magnitude greater than the costs. But what I like best is that instead of having to psych yourself up to invest effort to achieve your gains, by eliminating waste you’ll actually be putting less effort into achieving your gains. Or you could just wastefully muddle through like you are now.

The proposal becomes part of the conversation when it responds to something the customer said, usually in the form of an RFP, and then gives them an opportunity to continue the conversation, usually by accepting your proposal. But there is more to it than that. When making the proposal part of a conversation is part of your strategy, you have to be the company that the customer would most like to continue the conversation with. That means you have to put things on the table to discuss in a way that engages the customer and makes them want to participate and hear more. The conversation that the proposal is usually a part of, is a conversation about what you and the customer can accomplish together and how to make it happen. The customer will want to continue that conversation if it involves great things that are feasible from someone who is credible. Making a proposal part of a conversation is a bid strategy. It is a conscious choice to engage with the customer in a certain way because you think it will make them more likely to accept your proposal. It is a strategy that does not apply to every proposal. It is best suited for: Proposals to provide solutions, things that must be developed, or complex services An RFP that provides goals instead of specifications or one that asks you to tell them what the best approach is When you have questions that the RFP and/or customer can’t answer When both you and the customer will have to puzzle through questions as part of doing the work proposed In other words, when there are a lot of unknowns and the two of you really need to talk instead of exchange documents, turning the documents into a conversation is a way of demonstrating that you are a good pick for the customer to talk through the issues with. To make the proposal part of a conversation you pick up from the last customer communication, possibly the RFP, and provide a framework for continuing the conversation. The project becomes part of the conversation, just like the proposal. But the conversation must involve discussion in both directions. You must both take turns speaking for it to be a conversation. You have to provide opportunities for the customer to have a voice. Everything that goes into making a verbal conversation successful also applies to a written one. The key difference is that it is less interactive. It is similar to a discussion that takes place in email, but even less interactive. But just like there are things you can say in writing that encourage conversation, there are things you can say that discourage conversation. Personality counts as much in a written conversation as it does in a verbal one. When you successfully position your proposal as part of an ongoing conversation, then from the customer’s perspective, they see that you’ve listened to them and responded with something interesting. You’ve shown that something special can be achieved if the two of you work together. You haven’t nailed down all the details, but you’ve shown how the two of you can work them out. You’ve backed up what you’ve said to make it credible. When they look at the other proposals, they see plans and details, but they have no idea what the other vendors will be like to work with. And since the nature of the project involves some uncertainty, that’s a big deal. Who will the customer pick to work through the uncertainty with? You might assume it’s the incumbent, but if the incumbent hasn’t been completely responsive, there’s an opening for someone who is demonstrating their responsiveness, as opposed to simply claiming it. If the incumbent submits a proposal that is not engaging, and you submit one that is engaging, credible, and feasible, you can steal it away from them.

We usually think of a proposal as a tool to close the sale. Does that mean it’s an ending to the conversation you’ve been having with the customer? Or is the start of another conversation? What if you go into the proposal and you haven’t had any conversation with the customer? Can you have a conversation on paper? How does that work? We discover the customer’s needs, we brainstorm solutions that match our capabilities, and we offer them to the customer for consideration. We really want to ask questions that drill down to a deeper understanding of those needs. After we do some brainstorming of our own, we’d like to do some more with the customer. When we offer them things for consideration, we’d really like to hear their feedback. That sounds a lot like a conversation. But too often, we start with an announcement or statement of requirements that we get either by email or on a website. We respond to that in writing. Sometimes, without any discussion beyond some minor negotiation, we find out that we won or lost in writing. Contracts are signed and people start working. Then we actually start having real conversations with the customer. When your conversation is mostly on paper, you can see why having verbal conversation prior to the announcement is so critical. It’s your only chance. And you can see how those who have actually spoken to the customer have a very real competitive advantage. One way to mitigate this is to better understand what a conversation really is, and build your business development practice around it. Conversation is more than just telling. It is more than just describing. Having a conversation with someone who just talks about his or her self is boring. Conversation is interactive. If you are stuck in a procurement process that is turn-based (on my turn I release an RFP, on your turn you submit a proposal), you can still demonstrate your conversational skills. Part of having good conversational skills is recognizing the needs of the other person. It’s adapting what you say and how you say it to what you know about them. When your conversation is on paper, you need to do the same thing. Part of having good conversational skills is asking questions and listening to what the other person has to say. When your conversation is a proposal, you can offer approaches that will give the customer an opportunity to speak and demonstrate your skills at listening. When the proposal is part of the conversation, it shows that you listened to what they said (even if it’s in writing), provides things for them to consider, invites them to share their thoughts, and then seeks an opportunity to resolve those considerations in person. This is a different style of writing than most people are used to. You may not actually propose doing anything differently, but you must communicate it with a different attitude, desire, and intent to escape the trap of describing yourself and invite the customer to participate in a conversation. Instead of fronting like you’re omniscient and hiding what you don’t know, in a conversation you feature it. Share what you would like to learn more about the customer in the proposal. Don’t patronize them by telling them who they are or what they need. Tell them about what you see and what the possibilities are. Tell them what their options and choices will be if they accept your proposal. Show them that you have an approach for getting to know them and adapting your offering to their preferences. Focus on how you will be able to deliver better results because your approach involves listening to them. If you are bidding against someone who has already had a conversation in person with the customer and earned their trust, the odds are stacked against you and you may not even want to bid. But if the customer found them unresponsive, there’s an opportunity to demonstrate your responsiveness in your proposal. When a customer considers a vendor unresponsive, that means they weren’t available for conversation or didn’t take action in time. Instead of telling the customer your approach and describing your qualifications, try setting up a conversation. If you are the customer and your choice is between: A vendor who says the same-old things, restates the customer’s requirements and says they understand, makes many promises, brags, flatters, and sings their own praises with unsubstantiated claims; or Another vendor who shows they have listened to the things you’ve said, demonstrates that they actually listened with insightful comments and options for you to consider, is up front about what they don't know but has an approach to finding it out, and then invites you to a real conversation so that the things they do will reflect your preferences Who are you tempted to pick? The best thing about the conversational approach is that it doesn’t involve doing anything differently than how you otherwise should be doing them. You need to discover the customer’s needs and preferences. You need their approval for what you intend to do. You want their feedback along the way. Instead of hiding behind meetings, reports, requirements analyses, surveys, and other process instruments of customer interaction, approach it all like one big conversation. Keep all the process instruments, just recognize that a conversation is bi-directional and interactive. Each meeting and each deliverable is just one part of a larger, ongoing conversation. When you remove the conversation, you are just pushing paper. When you make it all part of an ongoing conversation, then you have a relationship. If you go into the bid without an existing customer relationship, you have a critical weakness against someone who does. Your only shot at overcoming that weaknesses is to become a better conversationalist than your competitors. Even if you have to start the conversation in writing.

Customers ask for descriptions, even though that is not what they really want. They are not being sneaky, they just don’t know what to put in their RFPs, so they ask you to describe things they think are relevant to what they are trying to do. If you understand the decision they have to make, then you can address what they really need to know when you respond to what they asked for. When they say: Describe your company. They mean, “What can you do for me?” They also mean, “Can I trust that your company is able to do what I need?” Describe your qualifications. They mean, “Can I trust that you know what you’re doing and will you be able to deliver on your promises?” What is your transition plan? They mean, “Will you be ready on time and will you meet our deadlines?” They also mean, “Can I trust that there won’t be any disruption and that I won’t be worse off by selecting you?” What is your approach? They mean, “What am I going to get if I select you?” They also want to know if they can trust that you know what you are doing. They also mean, “Why should I pick you? What will I get that’s better than if I pick someone else?” What is your experience? They are thinking, “Maybe if you’ve done it before I can feel confident that you’ll be able to do it again.” But what they really mean is, “Can I trust you to deliver on your promises?” They do not want your experience. They want to know what they will get out of it. Describe your understanding. They are wondering, “Do you know what I mean, as opposed to what I’ve said?” They are concerned about whether you know what they need better than they were able to explain it. They want to know if your interpretation of their requirements reflects what they really want. They want to know if they can trust you to do things the way they would like them done. They also want to be sure that you know what matters to them and have good judgment. Describe your management approach. They want to know if they can trust you to actually deliver the results you’ve promised. They want to know if your experts will stay focused on delivering the right results. They want to know if they’ll have all the support, resources, and processes needed for them to receive the results you’ve promised. Describe your staff approach. Regardless of what you’ve promised, they want to know that the people who will be doing the actual work can be trusted to deliver the results they need. Describe your quality approach. They want to know what you’ll do to prevent mistakes and whether they can trust you to catch them when they occur. Describe your approach to risk mitigation. They know that things go wrong. They want to be able to trust you to deliver anyway. They are not looking for empty promises about some abstract concept of risk or lame examples. They want to know what they can trust you to prevent and what you will do to fix things when they go bad. Provide proof of insurance and a performance bond. They’ve had bad experiences with vendors they thought they could trust. They need more than just empty promises to be convinced. Did you notice that every example of what the customer really means has the word “trust” in it?. Every one. Maybe you should stop loading your proposal up with sales slogans and unsubstantiated claims. Maybe instead you should focus on being trustworthy, and the things you do that impact it. And just maybe, instead of describing yourself you should give them what they really want.