Carl Dickson

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

There are so many directions I could take this. This is not a tutorial for being a consultant or being an employee. Or about whether you should hire proposal consultants or employees. This is about what it’s like to experience being an employee or consultant and work in proposals. None of what you see below are rules. There are no rules. There are just people trying to figure things out and this is just how it commonly goes. The proposal experience for an employee is to develop the routine and improve it over time. You know what you’ve got to work with and won’t lose time at the beginning figuring that out. Your tools are your own and this matters a lot (for both good and bad). Much of your success depends on how well the executives have defined organizational territories, put in place a growth-oriented culture, and how well thought-through their ROI strategies are. The proposal experience for a consultant is often to show up, discover what there is to work with, do a gap analysis, figure out the best way to proceed, and do it in minutes not days. For consultants, things start off with a written agreement and budget. This creates a scope that is far more explicit than employees typically have. Employees get a handoff and are expected to make it work. Consultants get high-level conversations, a written agreement, and budget scrutiny. That changes things. You get a chance to discuss the company’s capability and process gaps. For an employee, you find out that another proposal is going to start. Maybe you find out ahead of time and can prepare, and maybe you’re jumping right in. You look at the process as steps: Distribute the RFP, schedule the kickoff meeting, prepare the assignments and schedule, etc. Most of the people involved know what’s coming. And your boss has expectations. You are working to do the best you can within the routine. For a consultant every proposal can start off like a job interview to determine whether you and the client are a match. Part of this is an orientation to the pursuit. And part of it is a gap analysis to see what you’ve got to work with and what gaps you’ll have to fill in. Your preferred way of doing things may need to adapt to the client’s existing infrastructure and realities. Even though a consulting agreement may not have been signed yet, you are already working on proposal planning, if only to be able to prepare the estimates you’ll need. The company may or may not have much in the way of expectations. They may or may not be looking for you to define their process. The less mature their process, the more people will not know what is coming and the things you ask will be new to them. A major part of your efforts may go into explaining how to do things and not simply directing traffic. Your first couple of days will be largely consumed by discovery. Note that the size of the company doesn’t necessarily dictate this. I’ve parachuted into large companies and found that their process lacked key artifacts like written proposal quality criteria and that their review process amounted to simply having a specified number of subjectively defined draft reviews and had to put together training for the reviewers on the spot while managing the proposal. That’s the life of a consultant. Proposal employees are supposed to work this stuff out “in between” proposals during breaks that never come. Some of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY are consultants. They use it to educate themselves and their customers, and provide tools to fill gaps in their client engagements. Most of the subscribers to PropLIBRARY are employees. They use it to educate themselves and their coworkers, and to provide tools to fill gaps in their process documentation. I love that it helps people in both roles. There is also a form of working as a consultant that is a bit of a hybrid. Companies with mature processes often use consultants as staff augmentation. There is a lot less discovery and more routine when doing staff augmentation. You get an assignment and you follow directions. You may be doing the exact same work as their employees with the exact same expectations. I personally see benefits to being an employee as well as being a consultant. They are equal in my mind, even though my life has taken a path that keeps me in a consultant role. Employees can build glorious empires because they don’t start from scratch with each new proposal. Then again, just how glorious an employee’s empire can be is often limited by their boss or corporate culture. Your relationship with your company matters. If you didn’t negotiate a seat at the executive table before you were hired, you might be stuck in a support resource role. But that could be good or bad. Finding the right place for yourself depends on knowing yourself as much as it does knowing about the place. While it’s easier for a consultant to nudge a company in the right direction, it’s rare that you’ll get to stay involved over the years it takes to completely transform an organization. Your long-term success as a consultant depends on your ability to handle extreme peaks and valleys in your pay, or whether you need your income to be predictable. This in turn means success as a consultant depends on finding client after client. You need a strong sales pipeline right from the start. Only part of your experience will be parachuting into companies and turning chaos into accomplishment. A lot of your daily experience will be performing bookkeeping and sales instead of proposal heroism. Your ability to sell your services is more important to your success than your skills at doing the work. It helps to find your niche. Then again, this is somewhat true for employees as well. Only for employees it’s more like selling your ROI and avoiding getting confined to a niche. Both employees and consultants occasionally wonder what life’s like on the other side of the fence. Be careful what you wish for. You might just find out.

Take a step back from what you think you know about proposal management, if only for a minute. What you can learn from this grid is what information people need, and where to create information products that flow it to them. But studying it can also provide some other insights: Process, tools, and techniques combine and have a big impact on your ability to flow information and manage issues. It’s easy to fixate on a problem in the moment and think a tool can solve it. But your needs change over time. Any tools you implement have to be able to meet the needs through the proposal lifecycle. It’s easy to think of tools as labor saving assembly tools. But that’s not where process, tools, and techniques can contribute the most to your ROI. Much of your success depends on issue management. Assignments, questions, and gaps are basically all forms of issues and you’ll encounter hundreds of them on a typical proposal. Each one adds to your risk of losing. Your strategies and approaches for issue management will have as much impact on your win probability as your offer design and proposal writing. No wonder flow charts can’t adequately define the proposal process. It also shows why a success proposal process requires a lot more than just steps. There is no one answer or optimal approach. Even before you consider the differences between products, services, solutions, and industries, you can see that one company will be impacted by these things differently than another. Things change over the course of a proposal. Look carefully at the issue management row and how it changes over time. What you need to manage your issues during startup, planning, performance, and production are all different. If you try to manage your proposal in Excel, you’ll need a different worksheet for each stage. Excel might not be the right tool.

Writing a proposal requires transforming the information you have to enable the customer to make a decision in your favor. The larger and more complex the proposal, the more people that will be involved. Throw in a tight, unforgiving deadline and you’ve got a complicated undertaking that involves getting people to understand how the transformation will take place, being capable of making the transformation, doing it by the deadline, and doing it so well the outcome is successful. When herding cats and going from proposal to proposal, it's easy to forget the big picture. It's easy to slip into being a traffic cop instead of a guide. It's easy to start focusing on deadline enforcement instead of winning. It's easy to lower the bar by throwing re-use at it instead of raising the bar. Sometimes it's a good idea to take a step back and think about what you need to accomplish instead of how to turn the proposal process into a mechanistic, assembly line driven production effort. Here are six proposal management process considerations to help you focus on what's important: Are you trying to manage people to assemble a proposal or lead them to the win? A good place to start is to determine what your role really is. What kind of proposal manager do you want to be? Are you simply trying to crank out submissions as quick as they throw them at you, or are you trying to change the company and everyone in it to turn it into a winning organization full of constantly increasing opportunity? That can be impossible to do if the organization has a culture that works against it, so it's a legitimate choice. Getting the information needed to do the job. Proposals will starve without the right input. But what is needed changes over the proposal lifecycle. Try creating forms, checklists, and other information products to collect the information that proposal writers will need to write a great proposal. Information products that assist in the transformation. Within each activity, information products can gather input, provide guidance, help achieve quality assurance, and prepare for the next activity. The proposal that gets submitted is the ultimate information product you produce, but it is not the only one. Proposal writing doesn't take place in one step. You can help people think through what the proposal should be and get it right on the first draft. You just have to guide them through it, by showing them what to consider and then turning it into a plan or blueprint for the proposal. An approach to issue management that is sufficient for the complexity of your environment. Proposals can be seen as an exercise in problem solving. Typical problems include, but are in no way limited to, tasking assignments, tracking progress toward meeting the deadline, answering questions that people have, filling gaps in the offering, interpreting the RFP, etc. Each issue must be discovered, tracked, and resolved. And the nature of those issues also changes with each stage in the proposal lifecycle. Successful proposal management is not simply a matter of issuing assignments. Issue management is required to mitigate the risks that can cause proposal failure. Where this often goes wrong is that people start with a simple list of items they cross off as they go. This breaks down if you also need to track who is assigned each issue, who they need helping them, whether there will be follow-up, what inputs they need to resolve it, deadlines, severity, impact, etc. It helps to be able to sort, filter, track aging, etc. Implementing the right processes, tools, and techniques required to create and validate the information products you create. This is the area that gets the most attention. But process design, tool selection, and technique development really depend on the nature of your proposals. What you need to track issues on a proposal with dozens of people involved is different from a proposal with three people involved. The same is true between a proposal with a table of contents that fits on one page, and a table of contents that requires five pages. The problem with most tools is that they don’t meet the needs of proposals because they don’t map to the outline and cover the needs across the proposal lifecycle, or they aren’t useable by the entire team. The problem with most processes is that they aren’t self-explanatory to the people doing most of the work and they aren’t consistently followed because the RFPs are all different. Techniques are usually a personal matter, leading to the illusion that winning proposals requires a hero instead of a routine. Implementing proposal quality validation. In each stage of the proposal lifecycle, what do you need to ensure everything is valid or was done correctly before you move on? How will you instead of steps. Structuring your process around accomplishing goals instead of steps can enable people to flexibly figure out what needs to be done. Instructions provide guidance that steps do not. Every part of your process should address: What information do you need to accomplish the next goal? What will you do with the information? How will you store, transform, and present the information to make accomplishing the next goal easier? How will you track everything to completion? How will you define your proposal quality criteria and use them to validate the information products you create? For the goals, input requirements, products, and issue tracking requirements across five stages in the proposal lifecycle. You can quickly build a proposal development operation off just this table alone, if you have to. But you can also use it to identify your gaps, set priorities, and mature your existing process.

Everything is a trade-off. You need to keep your overhead costs low, but you also need to win contracts in order to grow and increase the size of your overhead pool. A lot of companies make the mistake of treating the proposal function as an expense instead of an investment that can be approached mathematically. The purpose of this article isn’t to teach you that math. But you should know that going from a 20% win rate to a 30% win rate will increase your revenue by 50% with the same number of leads you already have. That 50% increase in revenue will more than pay for giving your proposals the attention they need to increase your win rate. The purpose of this article is to show you how bad decisions will cause your proposal efforts to lose focus and hurt your win rate, so you can make better decisions. There is a natural tendency to want to wring more out of your staffing resources. And frankly there’s nothing wrong with that. But a small reduction in win rate will cost you far more than it would to staff the effort with the focus you need to win. Here are some considerations: How many people do you need to develop the solution or offering? The more people involved in defining what you intend to propose, the more complicated the proposal and the more moving parts. With each person added, the level of effort to track all of it doesn’t just add up, it multiplies. How much time needs to go into herding the cats? This is part assignment management, part progress and completion tracking, and part training. Either the content is planned, which takes some effort, or it is unplanned which takes a lot more effort. Where do you want to invest some time? How much control does your proposal specialist have over assignment completion? Control takes some time. But uncontrolled content development and unmanaged assignments take much longer. If you want the people working on the proposal managed, you can’t load the manager up with production tasks. When the proposal manager is writing and producing, they are not managing people. At some point this increases your risk and lowers your win rate, making it not worth the squeeze. Is the proposal manager in charge of the entire scope of the proposal effort? Is the proposal manager responsible for the pricing? What about the other parts of the business volume? Or is it just the technical proposal? The wider the scope, the weaker the focus. And that’s before you start adding in the other elements discussed here. How much time goes into figuring out how to win? And along with this, who should articulate the messages you need to get the top score? Do you just task this to your staff and expect them to figure it out? Or do you want someone who understands the evaluation of proposals involved to provide guidance? Do you really want everyone on the team to work on this separately and form their own opinion, or do you want coherent strategies figured out before writing starts and driven into the document by everyone involved? While this is a process question, it is also a staffing question. Who is the strategic planner and driver? Can they do that while also herding the cats and coordinating everything? How much time needs to go into assessing and cross-referencing the RFP? If you want someone to read and understand the RFP in detail, you have to give them the time to do that. If you don’t do this, you are relying on everyone else involved to not overlook anything. That can be a very high risk assumption and win or loss depends on the outcome. How much time needs to go into preparing the outline and proposal content plan? If you only allow time for a quick outline, don’t expect a winning outline. Expect the outline to have to change multiple times during the writing process, making things take longer and increasing your risk. Who’s responsible for defining quality and validating it? The review process is practically a separate process. Do you want to take your proposal manager out of everything else to plan the reviews, coordinate participation, set procedures, and train the reviewers? Or do you just plan to hand them a draft and ask their opinion? There are many things you might expect of your proposal specialists. But should you? Unlike many other tasks, if you overload your proposal manager with too many things to focus attention on, you will reduce your win rate. And this will likely cost more than adequately staffing the effort. Could you be better off with enough proposal staff to focus on each element that contributes to a high win rate? If you understaff these things it will impact your win rate. If you expect a single proposal specialist to track assignments, cross-reference the RFP, develop the outline, track progress, prevent disaster, and validate quality you are either going to get all of them done partially or some of them not done at all. That’s what kills your win rate. Everything is a trade-off. So do the math and understand what the value of a small increase in your win rate is. Then you can decide how to staff your proposal efforts.

In most companies, proposal development is the most immature part of the company. But they don’t realize it because they’ve bought into myths that enable them to think all that work they’ve put in amounts to more sophistication than it really does. Often what they do is different from what they say they do. Because of the myths that people have bought into, management practices that would not be tolerated in any other part of the company become expected as the norm in proposal management. These are not all of the myths, but some with implications that less obvious and more interesting. If I keep writing to address the rest of the proposal myths, it will likely fill (another) book. Myth: Successful assignment completion is defined by meeting deadlines A.K.A.: Your assignment is to complete this section by this deadline. If you ask someone to complete a section by a deadline that becomes their job and that is what they will focus on. That deadline could be a review it could be the final deadline or any milestone in between, but the way they measure their progress and performance is by completion. And completion is measured by how much ink is on the page and not by the impact on win probability. Their real goal ends up being getting the proposal out of the way. And this seeps into the corporate culture, resulting in people seeing the proposal as an interruption, an exception, and not part of their real jobs. When their job is completion, it becomes somebody else's job to win. It also makes the writer the person who determines what completion means and what a good enough response is. When people understand their assignments to be fulfilling certain quality criteria by the deadline, then that is what they will set out to do. Those criteria must define successful accomplishment and should define how you will determine whether they’ve created a proposal based on what it will take to win. This puts the onus on you to do a good job of defining the quality criteria. But the real advantage is that people are working to accomplish goals that are measurable and are based on winning. They are not simply trying to get the proposal out of the way. Myth: Everyone wants to win If everyone is trying to win and everybody knows what that means, then why do so many proposal experiences turn bad? Everybody says they are trying to win the proposal when they make contributions, and yet some people merely do what they've been told. Some not even that. Everybody says they are trying to win the proposal and yet the proposal is clearly not the top priority for some people. The people who are there to win are the ones who are participating in the discussions about what it will take to win. Those who are listening are not contributing. There are many possible reasons for this. Everyone does want to win. But some will be a part of making that happen, while others are there because it’s their job and believe that that job does not including figuring it all out. You may (or may not) get what you ask for out of them, but you can’t rely on them to be absolutely competitive in writing. They aren’t even trying to figure out what that means. Myth: Proposal writers should follow the RFP While the RFP may be the single written truth defining the requirements, it’s not enough to write a great proposal. And yet it’s often all proposal writers are given to work from. This results in bad solutions as well as bad proposal writing. Your opinion about what a good solution is or what good proposal writing is does not matter. Only the customer’s opinion matters. You need to know the customer’s goals, preferences, and reasons for why they wrote the RFP the way they did if you are going to write a proposal that the customer thinks is great. To understand how to make the trade-offs the way the customer would like them made, you need to build your solution and presentation on more than just what’s in the RFP. It helps to have customer and competitive intelligence, but guessing at what the customer prefers so you can attempt to write from their perspective is better than nothing. Just don’t expect each proposal writer to do this on their own. The entire team needs guidance and to share the same customer insights. People working on proposals should follow the customer’s perspective, and the RFP is only part of divining that. Myth: To follow the proposal process, you have to follow the steps The proposal process doesn’t lend itself to steps. This is the nice way of saying any proposal process based on following steps will break in practice. But it would be the wrong approach to take even if it could be made to work because you can’t be competitive when people simply do the steps the way they’ve been told. You want people to seek out what it will take to win and then adapt their approaches to deliver it. And what it will take to win changes with every new customer, set of evaluation criteria, group of evaluators, and change in the competitive environment. If instead of spoon-feeding people steps to follow you give them goals to accomplish then they have to actually apply themselves. The proposal process should be about accomplishment. It should define all the things you need to accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Some of this work is done in sequential steps, and some not. But it is not the steps that matter, it is what gets accomplished. People will, of course, try to skip steps. But if they can do that then you have not set the goals correctly. You can also offer your process, steps, and techniques in ways that enable people to accomplish the goals more quickly and with better quality. Because if your steps aren’t enabling people to work faster and better, then maybe they shouldn't be following those steps. Takeaways The way you give your proposal assignments determines what you get back. Merely giving writers a section and an RFP will not reliably produce competitive proposals. The way you measure progress, performance, and completion has a profound impact on how well people work. When they are working on a proposal, these things have a big impact on your win rate. Powering through is not the best way to be competitive. People need more than tasks, steps, and deadlines to perform well. If you go beyond just handing out an RFP, give people the right guidance, and get them involved in the act of winning, then they can power through to become champions.

Most people who want to win contracts realize they need a proposal management process. An unfortunate percentage think they have a proposal process when they really just have a way of doing things. But what really messes companies up is that they have the wrong goals for their proposal management process. Sometimes their process even works against what they should be trying to achieve. Here are 8 things that people often want from a proposal management process: Lowering costs and increasing efficiency. Proposal efficiency is a bit counter-intuitive. A proposal function is efficient when it hits its maximum win rate and not when it gets the maximum productivity out of the fewest resources. The reason is that wins are profitable and cost reductions tend to bring fewer wins. You achieve the best return on your proposal investment when you win the most of what you bid and not when the proposal function is the lowest cost. In fact, lowering the cost at the expense of win rate ensures that you will get less profitability out of the proposal function. A proposal management process that maximizes win rate is very different in both design and implementation from one that minimizes proposal effort and cost. Instead of implementing a proposal management function with the goal of making the proposal require less effort, try focusing on winning everything you bid. Do the math. This will provide much more funds to get help for overworked staff than you could possibly save by cutting costs at the expense of win rate. Guidance. It is better to think of the proposal management process as guidance than as an assembly line. A proposal management process shows people what they need to know, when they need to know it, so they can win in writing. The key is that they need to be shown how to do the things that need to be done. Repeatability. The reason we want repeatability in the proposal management process is to keep people from making it up as they go along. It also prevents you from being locked into a “proposal hero” who determines what to do, only usually at the last minute with great disruption. If your proposal management process can only be executed by a single person, then you don’t really have a process. Repeatability is not about creating an assembly line to crank out your proposals. Repeatability in the proposal process is about institutionalizing the things that lead to a high win rate. Quality assurance. How do you know whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win? If you leave it up to an experienced person, you can never grow beyond that person. The proposal management process should define proposal quality and enable anyone to know what to do to achieve it and assess whether they have. Progress measurement. Is it done yet? How about now? When will you finish writing that section? Questions like these are important and surprisingly difficult to answer. A proposal management process lays out the planning, writing, and quality assurance checkpoints. A good proposal management process lays them out with clever, objective ways to assess progress against the plan. Knowing the status of the proposal is vital to prevent a proposal from getting into trouble. Risk mitigation. A proposal management process ensures that you identify and mitigate the risks in bidding and of losing. Leaving this up to people in the moment means, well, increasing your risks. Risks that aren’t mitigated destroy your win rate, ruin your profitability, and kill your customer relationships. But aside from that, don’t worry about them. Scalability and adaptability. The proposal management process for a one week turnaround mid-value RFP should be exactly the same as a one month turnaround high-value strategic RFP. You don’t need two processes. You need a process that scales. The things you need to do to build a proposal around what it will take to win are the same no matter what the size or schedule. The amount of effort you put into a proposal, the delegation of authority, and the number and type of staff assigned will change. But the process itself doesn’t have to. In addition, the order that things happen in will change. RFP amendments can break any flowchart driven process. But if you build your processes on goals instead of steps you can have scalable levels of effort with a single process that scales and adapts. The proposal process is not about steps. It never plays out the same way twice. It is about achieving goals. Win rate improvement. To achieve maximum ROI, this will need to be the top goal of your proposal management process. If win rate improvement is important to you, you’ll want a process that enables you to discover what it will take to win, build a proposal around it, and then validate that your work on the proposal reflects it. This is what the MustWin Process is designed to do for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. You will need to be able to track your success with these things to correlate what has the most impact on your win rate so that you can focus more on it. And doing this tracking will enable you to direct your resources to the things that improve win rate the most. You’ll find you're focusing less on having “proposal heroes” and producing lots of cheap proposals with a low win rate, and instead focusing on maximizing your return by having enough resources to achieve a high win rate. You can have all of these things. But they can’t all be your top priority. And you really need to be careful about whether your goal is to lower costs or to increase win rate. A small increase in win rate will provide a much larger return than any cost reduction you can squeeze out of the proposal process. This is why we designed the MustWin Process for PropLIBRARY Subscribers around discovering what it will take to win and then building your proposal around it. If you are creating your proposal management process, or if you are updating or reengineering the one you’ve had, then don’t start by planning out the steps. Start by figuring out what the goals should be. You’ll be surprised how challenging it is and how many different points of view your stakeholders will have on the topic. What we’ve discovered at companies we’ve implemented the MustWin Process at is that simply getting everyone on the same page regarding the goals of the proposal process makes a profound impact. People focus their proposal processes too much on what to do than on what they should accomplish. Once you get everyone on the same page regarding what the goals for your proposal management process should be the steps will work themselves out.

Maybe you’ve got a great proposal process. Maybe you don’t. But when you’re in the middle of one, you’re stuck. You can't go back in time and prepare better before you start. The resources you have may be all you're going to get. You may not be able to get answers to your questions. And yet, you must conquer. So how do you figure out what to do when? How do you herd the cats to work like a team? Where should you devote your attention? How do you make the most of your circumstances? Is there anything you can do to make them better? Who are you? Keep in mind that sometimes “you” is just you. And sometimes it’s your whole organization. Usually it’s a mix of both. The following tips are written from a proposal manager’s perspective. Kinda. Even though they’re mostly about proposals, if we all did these things every day, at work and at home, we’d be better people and the world would become a better place. But even if you’re not that ambitious, just addressing them on a proposal can improve your win rate and make for a much better experience. Answering these questions can lead you to doing a better job on your proposal Think carefully on the tips below, because many of them can be considered from multiple perspectives. In fact, gaining perspective might be worth adding as another tip. Use these questions to gain the perspective you need to help you do a better job on your proposal: How are you measuring your performance? How are you measuring progress? Do you understand what it will take to win? Are you completing a proposal or winning one? Are you making decisions based on their impact on the probability of winning or based on something else? Does everyone agree on what the customer expects? Have you figured out what to do to get the highest score? Do you have the same priorities as everyone else involved? When was the last time you spoke to everyone involved? Are you arguing over things that are worth arguing about? What have you done to force potential problems to the surface? What will the customer think of the work you’ve done? What have you done to make sure everyone else does better than they would on their own? Does everyone know how to pass their next review? Does anyone have an assignment they don’t know how to complete? Are you fighting fires or preventing them? Does everyone have the information they need to complete their assignments? How will everyone get the information they’ll need for their future assignments? Are you building without a blueprint? What needs to be done that hasn’t been accounted for? Is anyone going off script? What is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about? After identifying all the known knowns and known unknowns, have you eliminated the potential for surprises? Does everything above include your teaming partners? The answers to these questions will have a profound impact on your success, separate from which process you follow, your level of preparedness, or even your bid strategies. But if you use them to help you prepare, implement an effective process, and conceive your bid strategies the impact will be multiplied.

Sometimes the customer recycles their RFPs. They use generic evaluation criteria. They hurt themselves when they do this, but they still do it. The advantage of using generic evaluation criteria to the customer is that they can interpret them any way they want. They can select the bidder they prefer and then justify it. It’s not supposed to work that way, but when you see generic evaluation criteria, you have to wonder… The disadvantage to the customer is that generic evaluation criteria doesn’t tell bidders what the customer’s priorities are and what matters about what they are buying. This makes it more difficult for bidders to provide an offering that reflects the customers preferences and priorities. It makes it more likely that the buyer will get less of their needs met, even by the winning bidder. Here are some examples of meaningless evaluation criteria: Bidder has sufficient capacity to deliver the project requirements. How does the word “capacity” apply to what is being procured? Are you supposed to guess? Is it a performance metric? Or is it having the staffing available, the right skill sets, sufficient financing, productivity, resources, span of control, or something else? Experience with the type of services specified in the solicitation. Does the customer care more about the size, scope, or complexity of the work you’ve done in the past? Are they looking for specific details, such as services performed or technology used? Do they care more about the amount of experience, the relevance of the experience, or what you actually achieved? Simply “having” experience doesn’t add much value or help the customer perform their evaluation. But what is it about your experience that they are concerned with? Objective and subjective criteria will be used to evaluate the proposals. Gee, I never could have guessed that. Does this say anything that can be used to ensure the customer gets what they want? How exactly will they evaluate these criteria? The answer is however they want. This is not a criterium, it is a justification for acting on a whim. Meeting the mandatory minimum requirements. I already understand that you have requirements. Because I want to win, I’d like to do more than the minimum. In fact, I’d like to give you more of what you want than anyone else, while still remaining cost competitive. So how will you score something that goes beyond the minimum? Addresses the issues discussed in the RFP. This is the same as telling me that I must meet the minimum requirements to win. The challenge for the bidder isn’t addressing the issues discussed in the RFP, it’s knowing what matters to you about the issues that matter to you and any preferences you might have regarding how those issues get addressed. When there is more than one way to approach an issue, we want to do in the way that you prefer. Illustrates a comprehensive understanding of work requirements and mastery of the subject matter. What do you, as the customer, consider to be a comprehensive understanding? Does that mean a proposal in which the bidder says “we understand” the most sincerely will win? Or should the bidder restate the requirements that you just gave them? Or repeat the mission statement you have on your website? Or will you score understanding based on which proposal has the most detail? Or select the bidder with the most experience? Or the staff with the most experience? Or does the customer want to see credentials and qualifications to establish “understanding?” Will the best approach prove understanding? Or will it be the proposal that comes closest to your budget? When you use a term like “understanding” without saying how you will assess it, you are more likely to get proposals that lack clarity and make a lot of claims. Overall quality of the proposal. This tells the bidder absolutely nothing about what you want to see in the proposals you receive. What bidders would like to know is what you think would indicate a quality proposal for this specific procurement. When bidders have to make a trade-off decision, and proposals often require hundreds of them, we’d like to make them based on your preferences instead of just guessing at them. When the evaluation criteria are this poorly defined, the customer will get proposals based on guesses instead of what they really want. The bidder that guesses the best may not be the best vendor and what they offer will not add as much value as they would have if the customer said what is important to them. Getting the best value is worth doing more than just releasing a generic or recycled RFP. So hopefully the RFP moves from these meaningless criteria into details that shed some light on what’s important and not just what’s required. How should you write your proposals when the evaluation criteria don’t provide any real guidance? If the RFP only provides meaningless evaluation criteria, bidders have to go beyond them to develop win strategies. This is where it’s really important to know the customer. You need to know what matters to them, how they make decisions, and what they need to see in a proposal to give it the top score. If you haven’t had a single conversation with the customer, you’re at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to interpreting what they wrote in the RFP. This is especially true when the RFP evaluation criteria are meaningless. If the customer gives you meaningless evaluation criteria and you don’t know how to interpret them, try explaining your rationale and why you’ve made the choices that you did. It is entirely possible that the evaluator doesn’t understand how to score against their own meaningless evaluation criteria, in which case your rationale will appear stronger than someone else’s claims of greatness. You’ll need to cover the bases on the more quantifiable considerations like qualifications and experience. But the reasons why your approaches are the best will give them reasons to give you a good score. Your reasoning about what matters may help them to apply their ambiguous evaluation criteria in your favor. In the absence of knowing what matters to the customer, focus on what should matter to them. And articulate all of your features, benefits, and reasons in ways that present them as strengths. You may not know how they’ll score their ambiguous evaluation criteria, but most scoring systems look for strengths and weaknesses in the proposal, even if they don’t use the terms “strengths” and “weaknesses.” And if you find out that the customer was looking for something else, you would never have guessed it anyway. If only they’d have told you, maybe you could have offered something better than what they accepted.

Most companies have their priorities backwards and it’s hurting their win rate. To show them, I like to tell companies that they should spend as little time as possible figuring out how to win, what they need to say to the customer to get the top score, and how they should present their offering. The much easier alternative is to write draft after draft until you run out of time without ever having figured it out. Do as little as possible to win. Of course, you’re not going to win if you don’t build your proposal around what it will take to win and say what the customer needs to hear to give your proposal the top score. When you think about what doing these “as little as possible” means, hopefully you’ll realize that they are critically important and should be what drives your proposal scheduling priorities. Beyond simply completing the proposal and making an on-time submission, where you should spend time on a proposal? Proposal writing can take a little time, or it can take a lot of time. When you prioritize the time to write and minimize planning, it means figuring out what to write by rewriting until you discover it. You’ll end up doing a lot of writing if you combine proposal writing with solutioning and figuring out what it will take to win, but you’ll end up creating a patchwork proposal and run out of time without achieving a proposal that is built around what it will take to win. To build your proposals around what it will take to win, you need to make figuring out that and what you should offer a higher priority than proposal writing. They should come first. To achieve this, you need to give planning your proposal more time and proposal writing less time. Minimize the amount of time needed for writing and not planning. This does not mean having less time for writing than it requires. It just mean spending less time writing in circles. How much time should you spend on proposal planning? Let’s look at a high-level textbook example of a 30-day proposal schedule: Day 2: Bid decision complete. Day 5: Compliance matrix, proposal outline, and kickoff meeting complete. Proposal writing starts. Day 19: Proposal section drafts finished and Red Team Review complete with 5-6 days left. Day 30: Submit proposal. Unfortunately, here's how it really plays out: Day 3: Bid decision usually complete. But sometimes not. Day 5: Compliance matrix, proposal outline, and kickoff meeting rushed, but complete. Just not reviewed. Proposal writing starts. Day 19: Red Team Review says the draft sucks. The offering is all wrong. Take 2 days to figure out what to offer. Take 5 days to rewrite. Day 26: Attempting to figure out what to offer and what to write. Hold a Redder Than Red Review and find out it's still got problems. Continue rewriting. Day 28: Give up on color labels but have another review to figure out what can be done in the time remaining. Day 29.5: Wrap it up, no matter what. 4 hours remain for production. Day 29.9: Submit minutes before it's due. No one knows what changes got made. Here is how it plays out when you reduce the time required for proposal writing: Day 3: Bid decision must be complete. Period. Begin proposal content planning. Day 8: Review the plan. Discover and fix the proposal approach and issues now. Day 12: Plan is done. Start writing. Day 19: Review to ensure the draft reflects the plan. Day 20: Draft is okay because the plan was reviewed. But there is room to improve the presentation. Day 24: Have a final change review to catch any remaining problems before entering final production. Day 27: Final production. Day 28: Review production draft and finalize. Day 29: Ready to submit, a day early in case of submission difficulties. Notes: With the emphasis on proposal planning, proposal writing starts 7 DAYS later and the time for writing is cut in HALF. But the draft review ends up on the same day. This is because having a fully validated Proposal Content Plan accelerates proposal writing. HALF of the time originally allocated writing is spent thinking things through and validating them before turning them into narrative. The Red Team Review recovery also takes much less time because the planning included an intensive review of the plan, which caught the major defects before the narrative was written. The quality of the proposal at submission will be much higher, because the changes at the back end represent presentation improvements instead of strategy repair. The most important dates for the proposal shift from being the Red Team, with 5-6 days left before submission, to the Content Plan Review with 11 days left. Normally you don’t find out whether the proposal is a disaster until the Red Team. But when you make the Content Plan review the priority, you find out before the document is even written. The wrong way to look at things Trying to maximize the time available for proposal writing because of the (inevitable) problems is the wrong way to look at things. You should minimize the amount of time it takes to write your proposal, instead of leaving it open ended. You should apply that time to: Accelerating how quickly you can surface the problems before you invest in writing narrative, when they are still easy to fix. Accelerating writing, by having a plan that provides sufficient guidance to turn it into a process of elimination. Accelerating proposal reviews by defining what the reviews should validate. Transferring time from endless rewrites to planning and reviewing the plan is how you achieve getting the proposal right on the very first draft and make the back end of the schedule about improvement instead of recovery. For the best success, try this… Double down and put more time into reviewing the plan than you do into reviewing the draft proposal. Challenge your reviewers to validate that it's right at the beginning. The draft proposal can be quickly reviewed by comparing it to the plan, but only if the plan is valid. Reviewing the draft should be an afterthought and a mere quality control double check. Reviewing the plan should be where you determine whether the proposal will reflect what it will take to win. The rest is just presentation. If you're waiting until the draft and reviewing it to figure out if the proposal can win, you did something wrong before you even got there. This is a key, objective sign that your current process is not maximizing your potential win rate. Since reducing the time to write will be counter-intuitive for some, you can: Ask people if the outcome was critical, would they start any other valuable project without a plan and start building right in order to complete the project on time? Track the data comparing the amount of time spent planning, the amount of time spent writing, and your win rate. Turn it into a chart that shows where the curve that maximizes win rate. You can also use this chart to refine how you do your content planning. Don’t be pushed around just because people are nervous about something they are not good at. Instead, you have to help them overcome their fear and do the right thing instead of following their panic reaction. And yes, people who are not confident writers panic at the thought of having a deadline to complete their writing assignments. Some will even admit it. Guide them. Nurture them. But be strong my proposal warriors. Don't settle for table scraps when it comes to proposal planning if you care about winning.

My wife broke the screen on her phone recently. The repair turned out fine, but her experience with the vendor wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad either. But listening to her describe it, all I could think of was what a great teaching moment it was for proposal writing. Yeah, I’m wired that way. The vendor didn’t have the right screen replacement and had to order it. When it came in, it sat until my wife called to see if it came in when it was supposed to. When she got home after she dropped her phone off to be fixed, she realized that they had no way to contact her and tell her that it was ready for pickup. The only phone number they had for her was the phone they were fixing. When she just showed up later, the person who helped her pulled out a phone and asked her if it was hers. It was. When she got her repaired phone home, she noticed it had adhesive marks on it that hadn’t been cleaned up. But the cracks in the screen were gone and everything went pretty much as promised. However, I couldn't help but notice some opportunities for improvement. And if I was writing a proposal for one of their competitors, I would offer a process that: Minimizes wait times by proactively calling the customer when parts arrive Includes multiple ways to contact the customer, and for them to contact us, so that communication is always timely Maintains the chain of custody to prevent loss or theft Cleans and packages completed work to provide a new purchase experience Follow-ups afterward to ensure customer satisfaction, collects feedback for continuous improvement, and maintains the customer relationship for the future Tracks repair time planned vs actuals and reports on any differences The beauty of this is that it would cost the vendor nothing. They’d need a few forms that could easily be automated. But they are already doing the work. It won't take any more effort to do these things and deliver more value like minimizing the repair time, ensuring things don’t get lost, accelerating response times when things go wrong, and quality assurance and continuous improvement. Not doing these things makes them vulnerable to a competitor who does and delivers more value. The reality is that both the product and the service are exactly the same regardless of who provides them. It’s the same repair, the same level of effort, the same staffing, with the same level of training. However, if you were the customer receiving proposals for a repair service like this, and one proposal offered simply to perform the repairs and the other proposal addressed the bullets above, which would you select? If the incumbent was the vendor and you showed up with a proposal that addressed the bullets above, could you steal the opportunity away from them? The current vendor may be competent. But you could be so much more in your proposal. All you have to do is care a little more. Proposals aren’t just about coming up with fancy words that hypnotize the customer. Proposals are not just about doing the work. They should be about doing the work reliably and effectively in ways that will delight the customer and that you can document and prove. You can differentiate what you offer, even when you offer the exact same thing. You can win without offering anything different, simply by addressing the customer’s concerns and demonstrating you do the things needed to make sure everything goes as promised. Pay attention to your vendors, because they can teach you how to beat your competitors.

Victory for a proposal means that the customer accepts your proposal instead of their other alternatives. Depending on the customer, there are different paths that can get you there. And sometimes getting there means taking more than one path. The paths to victory include: Getting the top score. This is not nearly as straightforward as it sounds. First you have to assess the categories that get scored, and then what you have to do to maximize your score in each category. If the language is simple, bland, and generic, it won’t help you understand what is important to the customer. But sometimes you will gain insights that are tremendously helpful. For example, if they assess your ability to perform by giving points to experience, and they assess the quality of your staff based on their experience, and they assess your ability to manage the project based on whether you’ve managed projects of similar, size, scope, and complexity, and they have a separate experience section with a point score of its own… what do you think is most important to the customer? What do you think the entire proposal needs to be about? What context should everything be written in? Even if the evaluation criteria aren't this obvious, you should still write to put everything into a context that best reflects the evaluation criteria they gave you. Try looking at various combinations of the evaluation criteria and how they add up. You might find that a certain combination of evaluation criteria guarantees a win. When that's the case, guess what your proposal should focus on? Reflecting the customer preferences. The fewer details provided by the evaluation criteria, the more being able to write in a way that reflects the customer’s preferences matters. And on occasion, customer preferences matter more than the evaluation criteria. But either way, to maximize your score your offering has to reflect the customer’s preferences. The way you become the vendor that the customer prefers is when what you offer is what the customer prefers, the trade-offs you select are the ones the customer prefers, the approaches you take are the ones the customer prefers, the benefits you deliver are the ones that the customer prefers, what is in your proposal is what the customer prefers, and it is presented in the way that the customer prefers. If you read the evaluation criteria and can't find any particular path to victory, then look to what you know about the customer's preferences. If you read the RFP and you still don’t know the customer’s preferences, you will have to guess. But it’s much better when you know the customer well enough that you don’t have to guess. Having competitive pricing. Sometimes this means having the lowest pricing and sometimes it doesn’t. If pricing only counts for 10% of the evaluation, you can win by having a score that is less than 10% higher everywhere else. If pricing counts for 30% of the evaluation, your pricing is the second lowest, and the lowest price gets 30 points to your 25, you only need to be ahead by 6 points elsewhere to win. If pricing the most important evaluation criteria, then being competitive means having the lowest price and it’s not worth trying to maximize your score elsewhere if it means increasing your price. When trying to figure out what to say in your proposal and how to present it, search for the path to victory. The path to victory will be what the customer needs to see in your proposal in order for it to be the one selected. When you can see what has to happen during evaluation in order for you to be selected, you can use that path to guide how you build your proposal. Start by figuring out what the RFP tells you about how to win. Fill in the blanks with what you know about the customer’s preferences. And make sure you are competitively priced, realizing that can mean something different in each new RFP. Treat each one of these paths as a journey of discovery. Don’t assume you know the path before you read the RFP. The RFP contains clues, but they can be cryptic. Look for the new twists and turns hidden in the RFP, and plot a path to victory that takes them into account. The customer is waiting for you. You just have to find your way there. Otherwise, you're just writing while wandering around hoping you end up in the right place.

There’s a line that you should not cross. It’s hard to tell exactly where that line is. But once you cross it, your proposal manager is no longer focusing on increasing your win rate and instead is simply getting proposals out the door. At the simplest level, a proposal manager is responsible for implementing the process. And being the heroes they are, they tend to fill gaps. But each gap they fill means giving up something else. And when they cross the line from overseeing the process into being part of production, they put the proposal at risk because while their attention is on writing, teaming issues, pricing, tool implementation, staffing the proposal, etc., their attention is not on things that have a major impact on whether you win. When the proposal manager is overloaded, these are some of the things you give up: Defining what it will take to win. The biggest pursuits have dedicated capture managers to figure this out. Mid-sized pursuits sometimes have a business developer or project manager assigned as a “capture manager.” But most of the proposals submitted have a bunch of people sitting around a table shouting out potential “themes.” If the proposal manager doesn’t structure the proposal around what it will take to get the top score, who will? If the proposal manager isn’t putting time into this, it’s because they’re too busy fighting fires. Where do you want them to put their attention? Planning the proposal content and not just producing an outline. If the proposal manager is too busy planning a kickoff meeting, checking the status of teaming agreements, and building a compliance matrix so they can build an outline so they can start tasking assignments and discover just how short they are on resources, they are not likely to be focusing on planning the content of the proposal before people start writing. The result is that the proposal will be what you have when you run out of time instead of something planned and built around what it will take to win. Defining quality criteria. If your writers and reviewers aren’t given a set of written quality criteria to guide their efforts, why not? The answer will most likely be that the proposal manager “didn’t have time.” But what priorities are so important that they could take attention away from defining what it will it take to win? Only things that could prevent the proposal from getting submitted at all would come first. And if your proposal manager is responsible for production, writing, etc., they won’t have time to define quality criteria, let alone structure a review process that validates the proposal fulfills them. Providing coaching for writers and SMEs. Every proposal has a mix of people who have proposal experience and people who do not. Subject matter experts, in particular, can make great contributions. But they need coaching in the evaluation process and how that impacts what matters. This coaching simply involves a lot of discussion before writing, during writing, extra informal reviews, and help responding to formal review comments. The first thing that happens when the proposal manager is overloaded is that this coaching only happens when it’s requested, instead of being a constant presence. Tracking everything in real time. When the proposal manager is overloaded, they naturally focus on the critical path. When they are extremely overloaded, they do their best to make sure that they can see the critical path to an on-time submission. If your proposals lack thorough coordination and status awareness for everyone, the problem isn’t that it hasn’t occurred to the proposal manager. The problem is that they can only do it when they can get to it, and it has to wait in line. Production and review checklists. When you see people performing reviews and flipping through the RFP, it’s a sign that the things they should be checking haven’t been distilled into a checklist. By the time you get to the review and production stages, you will be pressed for time. Do you want people working inefficiently when they are trying to rush through quality assurance? Reviews focused on quality validation instead of opinions. When proposal reviewers are handed an RFP and asked for their comments, you’re not going to get the best quality. In fact, what you get might be worse than not having any reviews. You certainly won’t get past subjective opinions about how to win that come too little too late. Good reviews are based on a written definition of proposal quality, have well defined proposal quality criteria, and validate that the proposal is what it was supposed to be. This takes more than just a copy of the RFP that too many reviewers don’t even read to achieve. Who is going to provide that guidance? I’m all in favor of having a review team leader take on that responsibility. But how many companies do that? In the absence, it’s one more thing that lands on the proposal manager’s to do list. Consider the sunk cost of the total proposal effort and the revenue lost if you do not win. When you see these things not being done, it’s a sign that you are trying to skimp on costs, not adequately staffing your proposal effort, and reducing your ROI. Which of these things do you want to give up? How does the lack of having them impact your win rate? What is the cost of that reduction in win rate in terms of lost revenue? Proposal staffing decisions should be ROI decisions. If your proposal function isn’t delivering these things, you’re not achieving your maximum ROI, and you won’t get there with resources allocated the way they currently are.

It is possible to start at RFP release and win. It may be challenging, maybe even extra challenging. It’s not something you should attempt if you’re going to be ordinary in your approach. It’s not something that should be your routine. But it is one of those things that if you are going to do it, you better seek to do it better than the folks who had time to prepare. But how? See also: Dealing with adversity Avoid being disqualified. Do you have the minimum registrations, certifications, and qualifications for their purchasing department to be willing to contract with you? You can’t count on them working with you to fill in the gaps after they select you. They are far more likely to reject you without any further consideration. So find out before you write your proposal what those minimum requirements are before you bother to prepare a proposal you might not even be eligible to win. Understand how what the customer is buying impacts what they are concerned about. If the customer is buying a solution to a mission-critical problem unique to their organization, they are really going to have to trust the provider. And they are a lot less likely to trust a stranger to be that provider. If the customer is buying a commodity, they may only care about the price and not care about who provides it at all. If it’s labor intensive, they may be concerned about your ability to quickly provide enough people. If it’s specialized, they may care about your ability to provide people with the right qualifications. If it involves their legacy systems, they’ll likely want experience with them. To win, you’ll need to provide more of what they care about than anyone else. Even if you start at RFP release, you can anticipate what that will be. Give the customer a reason to select you instead of the company currently doing the work. Don’t bid because you can do the work. Bid because you can prove your ability to do the work so much better the customer will be impressed. When the customer already has someone capable of doing the work, they need another reason to switch. And that reason must be compelling enough to make switching worth it. Be easy to work with. Contract the way they like to contract, on the vehicles they prefer to use. Allow payment the way they like to pay. Don’t create extra steps. Don’t try to change the customer. Anticipate their needs and provide the information they need before they ask for it. An outsider showing up at RFP release who is more work than the companies they already know is not likely to win. Assume the competition has problems. If the incumbent or other competitors are perfect, then you’ve already lost. If you don’t know the competition, make assumptions. Solve the problems you imagine them having. When you show up with a solution for something that’s caused the customer pain, they might see you as a better match for them. Bid as if your competitors are unresponsive, lack innovation, have fallen behind the times, missed opportunities to excel, have quality problems, aren’t efficient, are too expensive, don’t produce the best results, are slow to improve, and anything similar you can think of. Then prove that you are not. Sure it’s better to have intelligence that tells you what their problems are, but not all problems get reported. Sometimes a less than satisfied customer can be lured away when they realize something better is available. Only they won’t be impressed by claims and promises. They need proof. So show up with solutions to the problems you assume they have. Eliminate their worries. If things are going well enough, the customer may not want the hassle of changing vendors. Your mission is to prove that there will be more hassles if they stay with the status quo than if they select you. You need to show that not only have you anticipated and eliminated all the hassles, you’ve made improvements that will make their future even more hassle-free. Get the top score. In a formal evaluation with written evaluation criteria, the company that gets the top score wins. Before you decide whether to bid, determine whether you can outscore everyone else who might bid. If the evaluation criteria put weight on qualifications, staff, or experience you don’t have, walk away. But if they put weight on your approaches, you have an opportunity to prove that you’ve got the best way to do things. Don’t propose being capable. Be the company that matches the evaluation criteria perfectly. Avoid killing your past performance record. You can always skip everything above and simply win by having a low price. But then you have to deliver. Every proposal you win is a chance to fail in performance. If you want a top past performance record and a customer that will write you testimonials so you can continue to beat future competitors, you must deliver. Past performance that is merely satisfactory is enough to hurt your win rate. If you can’t win and then perform in a way that the customer will love, you shouldn’t bid. If you can do the work, that’s not good enough — don’t bid. Only bid if you can get the top score. You won’t get the top score by watering down your message and sounding just like everyone else. You won’t get the top score by claiming to be great. Your greatness will either be proven or you will lose to someone better prepared. Maybe today will be the day they didn’t try hard enough, and your hard work will pay off.

It’s a mistake to have the same person providing proposal management and proposal writing. Not only will it increase your failure rate, but it will also decrease your company’s ability to write great proposals. No matter how many times people say this, you still see companies thinking they can get away with having the proposal manager write small proposal sections. Here are the risks: Stand-up and progress meetings. If I’m the proposal manager and I take on a writing assignment, then instead of monitoring progress, surfacing issues, checking other people’s work, and providing them input to help them do better, I’m trying to complete my writing assignment before the next status meeting, just like everyone else. That status meeting ends up becoming about issue discovery instead of resolution. And in fact, you routinely see standu-p meetings conducted as if their only purpose is to have people self-reporting issues as a safety net because the proposal manager isn’t able to talk to each person every day. Driving win strategies into the document. If the person responsible for proposal management is writing, they are not helping the people who are not proposal specialists implement the techniques that drive win strategies into the document. If they aren’t doing that, how is it supposed to happen? How do you build a proposal around your win strategies if they haven’t been articulated before they get to the writers? Do you tell writers what win strategies apply to their sections or do you expect the writers to just figure it out? Preventing people from making it up as they go along. Who is going to put the time required into figuring out how to structure the content, how to allocate the win strategies to the document, and what points should be made throughout the document? If you say “everybody” what you will really get is “nobody.” Proposal writing is a structured process. Remove the structure and what you get is a herd of cats making it up as they go along. When this happens, the proposal review process tends to become a way of trying to define what the inconsistent proposal should be instead of a tool for double checking that nothing got missed. And when this happens, it’s often because proposal management and proposal writing were combined instead of being kept separate. Preventing the proposal manager from making up the process as they go along. What evidence is there that you actually have a proposal process? Is it written down? Is it more than a chart? What checklists, quality criteria, guidance, and tools are provided for every step? If your process definition is lacking, it’s because the proposal management function is putting its attention elsewhere. Defining proposal quality criteria. Who is going to define proposal quality criteria and when? Will it be done before proposal writing starts so that it guides the proposal writers, or will it come after the draft review? Or not at all? If you do define proposal quality, who is going to oversee how it gets applied to the proposal? Proposal content planning. One of the responsibilities of proposal management is to plan what the proposal should become instead of letting that happen by chance. But once you have a plan for the proposal content, who is going to make sure it gets implemented? Waiting until there is a draft to discover that a section is off-track is a great way to ruin a proposal. Once the proposal content plan is complete, do you want proposal management providing oversight, or off on their own being one of the writers? Proposal reviews. The main reason that most companies have highly subjective and ineffective proposal reviews is that there is no dedicated review management function. In the absence of having review team leadership, the role of proposal management needs to fill the void. When proposal management and writing are combined, the proposal manager tends to assign some people to the review and let them figure it out. Wouldn’t you rather have quality criteria defined, a structured process like Proposal Quality Validation for performing the review, and training provided to the review team? How are you going to get that if the proposal manager is spending their time leading up to the review writing? Subcontractors and teaming partners. It is a law of nature that subcontractors will always be late with their proposal assignments, and what they turn in will have problems. When you are bidding as a team and your teammates are contributing to the proposal, the need for oversight goes up. You might think you’ve made things easier by finding a sub who can contribute, but managing subs on a proposal is more work than managing your own staff. Don’t water your proposal management down with writing assignments when you need them providing extra oversight and coordination. Flying solo. When the entire proposal is prepared by a single person, the proposal management process tends to become a highly personal and informal thing. Maybe that’s okay. But just because someone can do a proposal on their own, doesn’t mean they rustle up a herd of cats using the same techniques. In fact, attempting to do so typically results in people making things up as they go along. To prepare proposals bigger than a single person requires guidance, coordination, oversight, and quality assurance. All of those are weakened when proposal management and proposal writing are performed by the same individual. The real driver for what the proposal manager should take on is the number of people involved in the proposal. If the proposal effort only requires one proposal specialist and one or two subject matter experts, maybe you can get away with the proposal manager doing some writing. Quality will take a small hit, but maybe it’s survivable. Maybe it has to be on a small proposal. But once you get to three or more contributors or proposals with teammates, the risk skyrockets. But the real problem isn’t writing, it’s attention. Who is going to give attention to these things? And what will happen if these things don’t get enough attention?

1) Is what you’re offering really the best? Having the best people is not good enough. You need the best people with the best processes. But even having the best people and best processes isn’t even good enough. You need the best people and the best processes supported by the best: Quality assurance Tools Executive oversight Issue resolution Resource allocation Communication Oh, and you need them to have the best impact on the stakeholders and deliver the best results. If you merely propose the most qualified people and don’t demonstrate the rest, your proposal will be vulnerable to someone who is more competitive. Claiming it is not enough. If you "already do these things" you may need to formalize your processes to make what you do tangible in your proposal. To design quality into your proposal you must think through how all these impact what you need to say in your proposal before you start writing it. Can you show how your approaches to these things reinforce each other to provide a better solution for the customer? Will your approach deliver more of what the customer wants than anyone else’s proposal? To design quality into your proposal, what you write must be based on a winning design. If you write your proposal in hopes of discovering what it will take to win, you’ll never find it. Design your offering based on what it will take to win and then design your proposal around it. 2) Do you have more insight than anyone else? Is what you’re proposing based on better ideas? Have you applied your awareness about the customer to creating a better offering? Do you see opportunities to more reliably achieve better results than anyone else? Do you have the kind of ideas that make the customer want to do business with you? Instead of claiming understanding, are you demonstrating understanding by offering something that will deliver more of what the customer really wants than anyone else? Or are you merely responding to the same requirements that everyone else is responding to, and hoping to be just little bit better? To design quality into your proposal, show insight in every paragraph. Show insight in what you choose. Show insight in why you do the things you do. Show insight in how you will deliver. And show insight about what the customer will get as a result. 3) Are you delivering what the evaluator needs to see to do their job? If you are writing in hope of saying things the evaluator will like, you are not designing quality into your proposal. You are fishing and hoping for a bite. To design quality into your proposal, before you type the first word you should understand how the evaluator will do their job. Will they divide the proposal into sections? How will they approach establishing RFP compliance? How will they score it? What will they be looking for? What will they consider a strength? Or a weakness? Do they care about you or just the offering? What are their concerns? To design quality into your proposal, build it around the evaluation. Help them do their job by giving them the information they need to conclude that you are their best alternative. What you want to say about yourself is irrelevant to them. 4) What makes you so special? Are your approaches more than the same “best practices” everyone proposes? Why should the customer care about what you are proposing? Why should they care about your company? What is it they do care about? To design quality into your proposal you should build it around the things they care about. To win, they must care more about your proposal than anyone else’s proposal. This starts with giving them a difference to care about. What differentiates your proposal? What will turn your proposal into the one they compare all the others to? To design quality into your proposal, you need answers to questions like these. But you will only have limited information. Focus on what matters about what you do know. Simply responding to the RFP is not enough to be competitive. What is the process for designing quality into your proposals? It really just comes down to not trying to think things through by writing about them. This only ensures that you figure it all out after the proposal is written, when there isn’t enough time to do anything about what you’ve learned. Half of having a proposal process is simply thinking things through before you write. The method you choose for this hardly matters. But we recommend Proposal Content Planning because it’s got the flexibility you need to survive the messy real world of proposals. It amounts to a minimally structured approach to identify the ingredients that should go into your proposal before you write it, including not only what you should write about but also how you should present it. Doing this is actually more important than reviewing the draft proposal on the back end, even though that’s what amateurs obsess over.

Better proposals require becoming a better company. The question “How can your company do proposals better?” starts by asking “How can your company do the things you write about better?" and that in turn becomes "How can you be a better company?" Want a better management plan? Start by determining what better management would look like. Ask yourself what you have to do to deliver that. Then become that kind of company. Want a better technical approach? Start by determining what a better offer might be and what you have to turn yourself into to in order to deliver it. Want better pricing? Quit asking how you can shave another nickel and ask what you can do to disrupt how performance is accomplished. Then become an insightful company like that. At all levels. Every day we encounter friction. Problems that are easy to ignore or put off until tomorrow to solve, but ultimately that wears us down. If we take the path of least resistance today and are able to get by and pay our bills, we can create a nice little comfort zone for ourselves. While it lasts. But changing that would risk today’s comfort. And so it becomes easier to look for neat, tidy, and low-risk incremental improvements that don’t rock the boat. People have their jobs and it is work. But steady work. If that’s where you want to stay, you can stop reading here. Doing things better starts with articulating how. Proposals are a great place to start becoming better because they require you to articulate how you are going to do things better than your competitors. Maintaining a high win rate requires constant evolution. Better proposals come from becoming the solution and not just going through the motions A company that defines itself by how it is now, is not thinking about what else it could be. Instead of thinking about what they could become, they just want to be more. The proposals they create simply describe themselves as they are. However, a company that defines itself by what it wants to become, writes proposals based on how they can be better. They win more and are far more likely to become something great. This is why companies end up submitting proposals written from their own perspective instead of the customer’s perspective. They write about what they can do, what their qualifications are, what their approaches will be. Companies focused on becoming what the market needs or what will help their customer write about what problems they will solve, how their qualifications result in better deliverables, and how customers will benefit from their approaches. While this wording sounds subtle, in the proposals I review the difference is striking and has a major impact on their success. The problem runs deeper than simply whether a company is focused on evolving, changing, and becoming better. It impacts staff as well. Are the people working on your proposals empowered to change the company in order to win? Sure that might need to be discussed first, but do they spend their time thinking about better approaches, or do they spend their time living within a structure they can’t change, typically focused exclusively on RFP compliance? Do your staff see their mission as doing proposals or as winning proposals? This is the stuff that culture is made of It starts with how the company hires its staff. Does it hire people to do a task and lighten everybody’s load? Or does it hire staff to make the company better? Is it hiring proposal staff to enable the company to do more proposals? Or is it hiring staff to help the company become what it needs to be to win its proposals? This is the stuff that culture is made of. Is the role of executives to run the company or to transform the company? Are they incentivized to become a little more of what they are, but to stay in their comfort zone? Or are they incentivized to make the changes needed to disrupt the competition? If you are an executive reading this, what kind of company are you creating? This is the stuff that culture is made of. Transforming your proposals can transform your company, but only if you let it A company that describes itself, is what it is. But a company that is not satisfied with being what it is now and wants to evolve writes proposals that redefine the limitations. Proposals can be the tail that wags the dog. They can change people, processes, tools, and even policy. They can change priorities. They can change how people interact. But this is only true for companies that don’t ignore their own proposals. Staff working on proposal can be change agents. But only if they are allowed. If they’ve never been allowed, they won’t even know how. It will take a lot of encouragement. And it will only succeed if the staff who perform the work if you win don’t ignore what it said in the proposal. Writing proposals from the customer’s perspective is not simply about getting the customer to like you more. Writing proposals from the customer’s perspective is the first step in gaining insight about what you need to become. So who are you? And more importantly, who will you be tomorrow?

I’ve seen way too many proposals produced by experienced people that were thoroughly ordinary. In my worldview this means they sucked so bad it was embarrassing, because ordinary isn’t competitive. When your job is cranking out proposals at high volume under adverse circumstances, people tend to give up polishing them. If people do this long enough, they sometimes stop trying. But they continue to reliably crank out acceptably adequate ordinary proposals that they try really hard to make good. But the reality is they are full of bad habits that pass all the reviews and are easy to beat. Having lots of experience with proposals like that does not make someone a great proposal writer. The problem is that instead of looking at trying to do better as polishing or something that comes at the end and is easy to skip, we should be designing the proposal to win from the beginning so that it’s the clear winner, even if it doesn’t get polished. But when you don't control the win strategies, don't have adequate input, and are struggling just to make the deadline, or are pigeonholed into back-end production, that doesn't even get considered or is treated like it's someone else's job. The list below shows the difference between focusing on completion and focusing on winning. The thing that I find striking about it is what it implies about the things that need to be done before the writing even starts, how the proposal function should be organized, and how to create the culture needed to win consistently. If you look carefully, you’ll see the core principles behind the pre-proposal and proposal processes behind the differences. Doing a proposal means responding to what they asked for. Winning a proposal means offering a response that the customer thinks is better than all the others. Doing a proposal means offering something based on the best practices. Winning a proposal means offering something that will beat the competitors who merely propose the best practices. Doing a proposal means complying with the RFP requirements. Winning a proposal means applying your compliance with the RFP requirements to achieve more of the customer's goals than anyone else. Doing a proposal means proving you are qualified. Winning a proposal means proving that your qualifications will provide superior results. Doing a proposal means making claims about your company and your offering. Winning a proposal means writing proof points to demonstrate instead of claiming. Doing a proposal means declaring your intentions and promising to do great things. Winning a proposal means delivering results and deleting the promises. Doing a proposal means saying you understand the customer and what they want. Winning a proposal means proving you understand the customer by offering the results they want delivered in the way they want. Doing a proposal means talking around the subject to sound like you know it. Winning a proposal means giving the evaluators what they need to see without distractions. Doing a proposal means following the instructions in the RFP. Winning a proposal means showing the evaluators what they need to decide you are their best alternative and to give you the highest score. Doing a proposal means stating your case. Winning a proposal means passing the “So what?” test. Doing a proposal means telling your story. Winning a proposal means telling a story about the customer that happens to have you playing a starring role. Doing a proposal means carefully crafting the outline before you start writing. Winning a proposal means identifying the points to be made and how to present them in every section and subsection. Doing a proposal means carefully reviewing the draft proposal. Winning a proposal means validating the proposal against written quality criteria based on what the proposal needs to be. Doing a proposal means carefully producing the final copy without defects. Winning a proposal means prioritizing your efforts based on what it will take to win. Doing a proposal means making the most of what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Winning a proposal means developing an information advantage and using it to show more insight than anyone else. Doing a proposal means getting the writing started so you have enough time to do all the revisions you’ll need to turn it into something good before you run out of time. Winning a proposal means discovering what it will take to win, figuring out what to write about, and how to present it all before you start so that the very first draft reflects it all and you can improve from there. Doing a proposal means writing it all out in text because you don’t think you have time to prepare graphics or consider yourself an artist. Winning a proposal means figuring out which parts of the proposal are potential graphics before you start writing so that you can build the proposal around them. Doing a proposal means trying hard to write something that wins. Winning a proposal means winning before you start to write. Is your company focused on doing proposals or on winning proposals?

If you ever find yourself competing against me, please use these themes! I want you to use these themes because they are easy to beat. They basically promise the minimum. They demonstrate insecurity, lack of insight, and zero initiative. They sound like the claims people expect to hear made in bad commercials. They get ignored. They will never increase your evaluation score. They usually find their way into proposals when the writers haven’t received any better input and have to make something up on their own. So if you and I are ever working on competing proposals, I would love it if you use these themes. Because I won’t… We have the capability to fulfill all of the requirements. I have the capability to run 50 yards. Does that mean I should be in the Olympics? Even when the customer asks about your capabilities, that’s not what they really want to know. They only ask to weed out people who aren’t qualified so they don’t have to evaluate those proposals. Out of the ones that are remaining, the ones that all meet the minimum qualifications, they can take your capability as a given and instead want to know if you can deliver as promised and if you have more value to offer than any other alternative. In my proposal, I will deliver results because of my capabilities and deliver options because of them that go beyond the requirements. I’ll make sure our proposal is qualified and compliant, but that’s not what I’ll focus on. You can focus on merely being capable of fulfilling the requirements all you want. Our proposal is fully compliant with all requirements of the RFP. Compliance is critically important. It’s how you get a chance to compete. It is not how you win. Everyone who makes the cut will also be fully compliant. Featuring compliance is a bit like saying you’re willing to do the minimum. I’m going to focus on differentiation and adding value. Above the minimum. Way above it. As far above it as I can drive it. We are the industry leader. Most of the proposals the customer evaluates will make this same claim. And none of those claims matter one bit. I doubt a single customer anywhere has cited “they are the industry leader” on a proposal evaluation form. Hardly any customers reading that believe you, unless it’s so true it doesn’t need to be said. This means that what most of your customers learn from this theme is that you are not trustworthy. Please use it when competing against me. I’ll find something of substance to say. We are highly experienced. Everyone who is a competitor will be sufficiently experienced. The number of years beyond sufficiency is hardly worth mentioning. Amongst those sufficiently experienced enough to be worthy of consideration by the customer, experience does not matter. Unless you make it matter. What is it about your experience that makes you a better selection than someone else who is also sufficiently experienced? That may be a difficult case to make. But unless you can make it, featuring your experience will not be enough to win. If I decide that experience is a differentiator at that stage of evaluation, it will be on how the customer will be impacted by my experience. And it will matter. We understand. “We understand the work.” “We understand you.” “We understand the importance of [fill in the blank].” The only problem is you haven’t actually said you’ll deliver anything of value to the customer. And you haven’t proven anything. All of your competitors will be able to make similar claims of understanding, and most probably will. Saying that you understand because you are experienced won’t help either. Because they will be similarly experienced. Understanding is best proven and not claimed. When I want to show understanding, it will be by delivering the results the customer wants, delivered the way the customer wants them delivered. Take one of your past proposals and count how many times these claims were used. These five claims seem like they matter. They sound good enough to pass many internal proposal reviews. But if you use these themes you will not be competitive. Because everyone who is competitive will be able to make these claims. You need something better to win. While you focus on claims like these, your competitors will be focusing on things that matter more.

Submitting low quality proposals and making it up in volume is a bad strategy. A better strategy is to target doing the least costly things that return the most revenue. When it comes to proposals, the things that generate the most revenue may not be what you think they are. A key lesson for companies that depend on proposals Preparing a proposal can be costly. But preparing a winning proposal returns a large amount of revenue. The problem is that not every proposal wins. When you increase your win rate, you gain revenue without additional cost. If you produce 5 proposals in order to win one, and you make improvements so that you only need to produce 4 proposals to win one, you will increase your company’s revenue 25% on average (the increase from a 20% win rate to a 25% win rate). That 25% increase in revenue will come without producing any extra proposals. The only cost will be what it will take to improve your chances of winning. That will be much, much lower than the 25% increase in revenue it returns. Maximizing your proposal return on investment Is there any other way to increase your revenue by 25% with a lower investment? If so, do that too. But still focus on improving your win rate. The flip side of this is that by under-resourcing proposals and cutting costs in a way that impacts your win rate, you could be losing 25% of your future revenue. Test it. Track it. Measure it. If you aren’t tracking how the things you do and the decisions you make impact your win rate, you’re really not trying hard enough to maximize your return on investment. How do you improve your win rate? There are lots of little things you can do. But instead of focusing on techniques, it’s better to start by focusing on strategy. Your win rate depends on the customer giving you the best score. Your proposal must be constructed to maximize this score. Your proposal must present what the customer wants to see in such a way that they can give it a top score, rather than presenting what you want to say about yourself. This in turn makes the entire proposal process about discovering what the customer wants to see and then building your proposal around that. Your revenue depends on getting both sides of the last item right: Discovering what the customer wants to see requires insight that comes from making contact, doing your research, and developing empathy for the evaluator. Building your proposal around what the customer wants to see requires developing a content plan for your proposal that positions your strengths in a way that supports the customer’s needs and preferences. So how do you achieve these things? You've come to the right place! We've been writing about how to discover what it will take to win for decades. We've spent a similar amount of time writing about how to refactor and reengineer your proposal process. And all along we've focused on maximizing win rates and return on investment. Signs that you're doing it all wrong If your proposals are very descriptive and procedural they tend to be all about you and what you do, instead of being about the customer. Search your proposals for the word "will" and you'll see what I mean. If your proposals are based exclusively on the RFP, they don't show any real insight into the customer, their environment, stakeholders, or their concerns. How can you expect the customer to accept your proposal if you don't talk about what the customer is trying to achieve or anything beyond doing what they asked for? If you don't position your proposal in any particular way other than as competent, then all you are doing is competing on price. If you don't provide input to the proposal team that includes insights about what matters regarding the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, then no matter how they try, you'll end up with a mediocre proposal. You can expect to lose more proposals than you win. Probably a lot more. Maybe you can get by like that, but you won't prosper to your full potential. You won't maximize your ROI. Proposal cost and benefits The cost of doing what it will take to win is less than what your business loses through not doing it or minimizing the effort you put into your proposals. Discovering what the customer wants to see in your proposals before you write them is one of the lowest cost things you can do to maximize your revenue. If you are going to be in the business of bidding competitively proposals, then be in the business of preparing proposals that better reflect what the customer wants to see than those of your competitors. Being in the business of preparing low-cost proposals based only on what’s in the RFP and saying great things about yourself will not turn you into a competitive company. Or maximize your revenue. No matter how many you submit. You can’t make up for mediocre proposals by doing them in volume. Keeping proposal costs low so you can do more of them will actually increase your costs and lower your ROI because you’ll be paying to lose more often. Your competitors will submit fewer proposals and end up with more revenue. And you’ll be left desperately searching for more RFPs to bid, as long as you try to make up for it in volume.

A simple guide to what to write about in your proposals. Good things to write about in your proposals These are the things the customer is looking for, the things they want to see. Instead of talking around them, make a point related to them at the start of each paragraph. Explanations and reasons “why.” The reasons why you do things show more insight and depth of understanding than a claim about what you do or how great you are. Proofs. Proof points can be evaluated as strengths. Things that are unproven are often just noise. Details. Providing details can earn confidence and show that you know what to do. It’s not the claim of having a process that matters. It’s the steps. It’s not the claim of being qualified that counts. It’s the details. Differentiators. You must be different in order to be better. Customers often evaluate by looking for the differences between your proposal and the others. Visuals. Seeing is believing and an illustration is easier to process than a bunch of text. Replace as much text as you can with visuals. Bad things to write about in your proposals The evaluator doesn’t want to read your proposal. So filling your proposal with things that sound good to you but don’t actually help the evaluator assess your proposal may make you feel good, but it won’t help you win. In fact, it may hurt your credibility and do more to lower your score than raise it. No matter how beneficial it sounds or how pleased with yourself you are for writing it. Claims. Look carefully at what you just wrote. What did you claim? If you claimed anything without an explanation or proof, consider deleting it. Unsubstantiated claims are not likely to be evaluated as a strength. And because they hurt your credibility, they are more likely to hurt your score than raise it. Descriptions. Descriptions may inform, but they do not show insight. Sometimes they are really just claims. Don’t let the RFP fool you by asking you to “describe” your approaches. What the customer really needs to know is whether you are credible and whether your approaches address their concerns and will deliver the results they are looking for. Beliefs, commitment, intentions, or values. Not only will these never get scored as strengths, but they can take something that might have been a strength and water it down. Instead of being committed to something, just do it. Talking around the point. Instead of building their proposals around the points they want to make, stating those points, and then substantiating them, many people talk around the subject until they find a point and don’t make it until the last sentence. The customer may have skipped to the next paragraph by then because you weren’t saying anything they could evaluate. Get straight to the point you want to make in the very first sentence, and then substantiate it. Anything that does not pass the “So what?” test. After each sentence ask “So what?” If the sentence doesn’t pass the test, it needs to be deleted or fixed. Every single sentence in a proposal needs to pass the “So what?” test. If it doesn’t, then either delete the sentence or fix it. Plus some things you can skip writing about in your proposals These subjects are important. But you can’t simply make claims about them. Focus on what you do about them and not claiming the word. Compliance. Your claims about it or your intention to deliver it simply do not matter. The customer will be the judge of compliance. The things you do to achieve it, on the other hand, do matter. "We will comply with everything in the RFP" will not score highly (or at all). Proving that all requirements will be fulfilled, checked, and double-checked will improve your chances greatly. Strengths. You don’t need to tell the customer your strengths. You do need to prove that you have them and what the impact will be. Proof can earn you recognition. Customers pay attention to proof statements. Claims about your strengths are often ignored. And when they earn you an eye roll, they do more harm than good. Your understanding. Your claim about understanding or description of the customer or project do not demonstrate understanding. You are not helping the customer perform their evaluation by telling them things they already know. Besides, understanding needs to be demonstrated and that’s best done through results. If your approach delivers the right results, in the right way, and addresses their concerns, then it’s obvious that you understand. Show your insights and the reasons why you do the things you do. That is how the customer can see you understand what you are doing.

When the customer asks you to describe your experience, what should you write about it? Should you describe the work you did? Should you describe the results you achieved? Should you talk about something else? It turns out that when the customer asks for your experience, they could be could be asking for many different things. Past performance Past performance is something different from corporate experience. Past performance is a reference check to discover whether the customer was happy with your performance, with some additional information requested so they can determine if it is relevant to them. They often define relevance as size, scope, and complexity. So was it comparable in size, were the type and extent of the work similar, and was it just as complicated or difficult as what they need? They are not interested in your claims of greatness. It’s a reference check and they’ll check that for themselves. They do want to know whether the reference is for a project that is similar to theirs. Sometimes customers ask for experience as a proof of capability. They know that companies will say anything about their capabilities to win a proposal. So a request for past performance is a reference check. And while, as they say in the stock market, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” it does demonstrate that at least you’ve done it before and presumably are capable of doing it again. It’s a more reliable indicator than a vendor’s claim of capability. Corporate experience Corporate experience is more broad than a reference check. It can be anything from a citation or anecdote, to a project description. Corporate experience opens up the discussion to projects that don’t have to be exact matches. Corporate experience can be meaningful if it demonstrates you have relevant resources, capabilities beyond what they’ve asked for, coverage of their requirements, or other beneficial considerations. When the customer asks for your corporate experience with no further explanation, take a look at the evaluation criteria in the RFP and see what they are focusing on. Is it results? Is it relevance? Or knowledge, resources, staffing, innovation, or something else? What one customer might care about regarding your experience may be different from what the next customer cares about. Be very, very careful reusing your project descriptions. When they ask about the experience of your staff, they are asking for whether they’ve ever done what they’ll be doing on the new project. They could be looking for proof of capability. Or they could be looking for insights and lessons learned. They could be looking for how they work and not just what they’ve done before. They could be trying to gauge whether they’ll speak the same language and what they’ll be like to work with. If they ask for a resume, they might be looking for something specific. So don’t assume that they just want a work history. Making the evaluation objective Customers struggle with comparing apples to apples and with justifying their decisions. So they frequently ask for things that are easy to evaluate, even though they have other concerns. For example, they might ask for your years of experience. That's nice, objective, and easy to evaluate. Unfortunately, it's also nearly meaningless. Just because the company did a project, doesn't mean that anyone involved in it will be involved in the new project. It doesn't mean that any of the policies, procedures, or information assets developed from the old project will transfer or even be relevant to the new project. So give them what they asked for. And do it well. But also address what they are really concerned about and what really matters to them. Focus on getting the top score You should always write about your experience so that the new customer will give you the best score. If you talk about the things you did but the new customer is more concerned with your ability to overcome the challenges and risks, you won’t get the best score. And vice versa. Just don’t assume that writing about experience is cut and dry — even if the RFP makes it seem so. If you think you know what "experience" is, there’s a good chance the customer is concerned about something else. So drop your preconceptions and discover what the customer is really looking for when they use the word “experience.”

How should you position your experience to get the best score? You may need to position things differently in different sections of the proposal where experience is relevant. Make sure you thoroughly tailor any experience write-ups you might be reusing to match the way you will be positioning it. You can’t be all things to all people. What matters about your corporate experience to the new customer? Don’t try to position against all of these that sound beneficial. Carefully select the ones that will have the most impact on the proposal evaluation and tailor your write-ups around them. Examples of ways to position your corporate experience: Capabilities. Capabilities are easily claimed but difficult to prove. Customers often turn to experience as a proof point for capability. When this is the case, write about your experience as proof of your ability to do the things required by the RFP. Innovation. How do you prove your claim that you will be innovative? One way to do that is through past examples of things you did that were innovative. Responsiveness. If the customer is concerned about responsiveness, then a demonstration is better than a claim. Show that you’ve been responsive in the past. Size. Is your experience relevant? Can you show past projects that were comparable in size to the new project? Scope. Is your experience relevant? Can you show that your past projects covered the same range of work, skills, locations, or other scope attributes? Complexity. Is your experience relevant? How did the difficulty and complexity of your past projects relate to what the RFP requires? Coverage of the SOW. Can you show that you have done everything required by the RFP? Achievement. What did you accomplish that’s noteworthy and relevant to the new RFP? Accomplishments trump claims. Proven approaches. Can you show that you have implemented all of the approaches that you are proposing, and that they have been proven under similar conditions? Resources. Do you have sufficient depth and breadth? Do you have enough depth of resources to cover all contingencies and to deploy them quickly when needed? Do you have breadth of resources to cover every type that might be required? Proof. What claims in your proposal can you use experience to prove? Can you make the proof itemized, quantified, or evidence-based? Customer satisfaction. Was the customer happy with your performance? Would they do business with you again? Did they ask for more? Did they see a positive return on their investment? Did they say nice things about you that you can cite as testimonials? Risk mitigation. Everyone claims to be the low risk provider. What does your experience demonstrate about your ability to mitigate risks? Challenges. Every project has challenges. Have you overcome challenges like the ones the new customer is concerned about? Sometimes how you handle challenges matters more than how you handle the day-to-day routine. Examples from your experience can carry more weight than claims about your ability to meet the challenges. Surges. Everyone says they can handle the peak workloads. But that’s just talk. What kind of surges have you handled in the past? Quality. Everyone says they will deliver the highest quality. Can you prove the quality of your past work? Speed. Can you deliver quickly enough? Can you meet the deadlines? Is your project schedule real or a work of fiction? What is your past track record? Make sure you provide details and don’t just claim you have a great track record of on-time delivery. Exceeding the specifications. How many times have you written that you will “meet or exceed” the specifications in the RFP? How many times did you prove it? If you have actually done it, then you should consider featuring that in your project descriptions. Formalization and maturity. If your new customer is looking for the kind of expertise that helps the customer formalize and improve the maturity of their processes, helps them reduce chaos, improves repeatability, traceability, and all that process goodness, then instead of simply describing the tasks you performed on previous contracts, consider describing how you introduced more formal and mature processes and the benefits they brought to your previous customers. Executive oversight. I’ve seen a lot of proposals say that some high-level executive will be personally responsible for customer satisfaction or similar words. Quite often the customer may only interact with that executive once or twice a year. If that level of responsiveness will matter to your new customer, then show how actively involved your executives have been in the past and what a difference it made. Improvements. Sometimes a customer needs to make improvements or turn things around. The work you’ve done that brought benefits to previous customers can often be positioned as similar improvements. You might even be able to position the improvements as change management. Solutions. There is a big difference between services to operate or maintain something and services needed to solve a specific problem. This is true even though many projects contain elements of both. Because of this many projects could be positioned as either one. Stakeholders. Some contracts benefit the customer’s stakeholders more directly than they do the customer. And sometimes there are a number of stakeholders who interact with a project. Make sure you are positioning your experience to focus on the right parties. Foundation building. If the customer is preparing for the future, they may see value in experience that shows you built a foundation for your previous customers and how it benefited them. Flexibility and adaptation. Sometimes the customer isn’t sure what will happen over the life of the contract. And even though there will be a contract with pricing based on the requirements in the RFP, they may desire flexibility. Flexibility is easy to promise, but challenging to deliver. Examples from your past can help you substantiate that you really are flexible. Claims that you will partner with the customer and work collaboratively are similar. Staffing. I have seen a lot of proposals promise that a company will fully staff the project on-time because it has dedicated recruiters. But how reliable is that? If on-time staffing is important to your new customer, consider citing examples of how quickly you’ve staffed previous contracts. The same applies to retaining the incumbent contractor’s staff or retention in general. Lies, damn, lies, and statistics. What can you quantify? What can you aggregate across all your projects? Or your entire team? If you can’t roll up the numbers and show statistics, then cherry pick the numbers or provide anecdotes. Sometimes a single example is more credible than all your claims. Tools. If specific tools are important to the customer or critical to the success of the project, instead of organizing your experience by the tasks performed, consider organizing it by the tools you used and the benefits that resulted from how you used them. Budget. Every customer is concerned about cost overruns. Some projects are particularly susceptible to them. Saying you won’t go over budget just won’t cut it. Showing examples from your past projects where you’ve come in under budget is a lot more credible. A few more considerations Consider showing your experience in a table or matrix. Projects in rows and SOW requirements as columns. Or projects in columns and skills as rows. You can use dots or colored backgrounds at the intersections to show coverage, depth, or breadth. You can also add dates or quantities. A matrix makes for a great introduction or summary of your experience. Consider using the examples above for competitive positioning. All of the examples above can be used to show why you are better than your competitors, and not just for positioning your experience. They are even potential ways to differentiate your proposal. This is because it's really a list of things the customer might care about. Everything in a proposal should be positioned against things that the customer cares about. You want to submit the proposal that the customer cares about the most, because it best reflects the things that matter to them. Make sure the previous customer agrees. It is entirely possible when writing positioning copy to turn something minor into the primary focus. If there is even the potential for a reference check, make sure that the previous customer agrees with how you have characterized your experience. If there is any disagreement, no matter how defensible you think your claims are, it could damage your chances with the new customer. Positioning your experience should be about perspective and not completely changing the nature of what you did.

What goes through the customer’s head while they’re evaluating your proposal? In addition to all of the distractions like what time they have to pick the kids up from school today or what they’d like to do after work, the customer has a lot to consider when deciding whether to accept your proposal. Even if the evaluation is conducted formally by a robot, with forms and detailed procedures, they will still consider the big picture. But what’s in that picture? The customer will consider your approaches, qualifications, and pricing. But they will also consider: Is it enough? Big enough, small enough, cheap enough, expensive enough, fast enough? Their own environment The risks they face Whether they can trust you Their preferred approach or solution How much confidence they have in your proposed offering What the future will be like if they accept your proposal Their aspirations for the future Their disappointments Their questions Things they’d like to try Things they’d like to avoid Whether you speak the same language they do (and nationality might have nothing to do with it) What they’ll have to do if they accept your proposal Whether they want to work with you Things that have changed or are going to change Whether they want the kind of change you are proposing Pricing and financial considerations Contractual matters Rules and regulations Standards, measures, and specifications Conflicts for their attention The problems encountered with other vendors in the past External pressures Input from all of their stakeholders Timing Trends What they know. And what they don’t know. The path of least resistance Whether they could be making a mistake Whether there will be resistance to their decision Accountability What their organization needs What they as an individual prefer When a company that thought they had the opportunity wired loses, there’s a good chance it’s because they missed one of these. When someone tells you "they know" what the customer wants, ask them questions based on these. We rarely know the customer as well as we might claim. But the better way to look at it is as ways to get to know the customer. I mean really get to know them. Think of this list as discussion topics. When the customer sees you as an asset instead of a vendor and cares enough about you as a person to share their world, these are topics to explore. However you approach it, your win probability is determined by how well you know all the things the customer will consider during evaluation. The reason we use terminology like “discovering what it will take to win” and “building an information advantage” in the MustWin Process that is available to PropLIBRARY subscribers is that knowing more of these things than your competitors gives you a critical advantage over them. Of course, that’s only true if you: Convert the intelligence you gather into insights that will impact the proposal Use your insights to position what you offer in your proposal in ways that prove you are the customer’s best alternative Demonstrate to the customer that you are the most thought through vendor Add the most value Prove that getting to know each other is worth the investment you both made and point to the even greater things your continued partnership will achieve in the future The premium content PropLIBRARY subscribers gain access to shows you how to do all these things as well. Or you could just wait for the customer’s announcement, put effort into a proposal without any customer insights, and hope that today’s the day that all of your competitors' proposals will somehow be weaker than your proposal.

Before you are ready to start your proposal, it would be a good idea to discover what it will take to win. It's a bit hard to write a proposal based on what it will take to win if you can't articulate it. But before... Before you can articulate what it will take to win you need to... Transition to features Transition to screenshots Close it out