Carl Dickson

Pursuit and capture set the stage for the proposal. But while the proposal process gets a lot of attention, pursuit and capture are often left to someone to just figure out. The roles are commonly referred to as sales, business development, or capture. Without much process or at least guidance, the entire pre-RFP phase can devolve into an exercise in lead tracking instead of lead pursuit and capture. This table implies what you should accomplish during pursuit and capture. You can build a process around it. But even if you don't have much of a process, you can improve performance simply by using it as a checklist. Many of these problems can't be solved by the people responsible for pursuit and capture on their own. Each of the layers has a different set of stakeholders. The strategic layer acts as input to pursuit and capture and should be addressed before it even begins. The executive layer contains decisions that are usually made higher up in the organization's hierarchy. The systems layer are things that you should address if you want to win all of your pursuits and not just the one you're chasing in this moment. The pursuit layer is specific to this opportunity, and curiously it's only a small portion of the issues faced. The offering layer requires partnership with the technical and operations side of the company. The proposal layer does not define the proposal effort, but merely what you want to deliver to the start of the proposal. One additional thing that this table can help you realize is how much of a disadvantage you are at if you start your proposal without having solved these problems. If your proposal win rate is low, the first place to start improving it is making sure you've addressed these issues before the proposal even starts.

This program is for people who want to build organizations that reliably win contracts. No. Let me rephrase. This program is for people who want to build their entire company around reliably winning contracts. This program is for people who want to grow by capturing the leads they chase, instead of chasing as many leads as they possibly can until they win something. Convenient format for applied learning and continuous improvement Each month there will be a new topic to focus on: Week 1: Online training in that month's topic. Week 2: Virtual meeting to answer questions, verify understanding, and introduce the assignment. Week 3: More online training and working on the assignment. Week 4: Assignment review and topic discussion. With only one scheduled meeting every two weeks, it's easy to work the course around your schedule. The assignments are designed to produce items of lasting value that are customized to your company. They are not repetitive drills. Each month the exercises will produce one or more checklists, forms, templates, etc. The goal is to demonstrate understanding while implementing things needed for your company to grow. It's applied learning with tangible takeaways and not just instruction.

Instead of looking at preparing proposals as a process, try looking at it as solving problems. A "process" implies steps. Proposal development is reactive, so processes based on steps tend to fail. But solving the problems you will face in preparing a proposal implies the process. The problems you face also imply the goals you should have. Most companies that think they have a proposal process still spend their time solving problems. So looking at those problems in an organized way can help you be better prepared to create your proposal. Here are a dozen proposal problems that are fundamental. There are hundreds of administrivia problems that come up. But they tend to fall under one of these. Solve these problems and you will be able to prepare great proposals. Of course, I have never seen any company, no matter how large, capable, or experienced, solve them all. But there is a clear difference between companies that have solutions in place for most of them and companies that do not. To help you along your journey, I have included links to the solutions and tips related to these problems that you'll find on PropLIBRARY. How should you prepare before the RFP is released? If you think you know what’s in the RFP before you see it, you’re probably just enough wrong to lose. Starting your proposal before the RFP is released is both risky and necessary. The challenge is to understand those risks and mitigate them. Solving how to prepare for your proposal ahead of RFP release is important. It is the only way to make it happen. How many resources do you need, and how should you organize and manage them? How much should you invest in your proposal? What management style and techniques should you use to manage the effort. There is no one-size fits-all approach that works for everyone. So solving how many people you need at your company for your proposals is key to being able to successfully prepare them. How should you manage risk and the inevitable issues that arise? You will make hundreds of trade-off decisions during your proposal. Each one represents a risk. Each one that you don’t make still represents a risk. What should you do to prevent the risks from causing your proposal to lose? Many of those risks will become issues. What will you do to track and resolve those issues? Is writing them down in a notebook really enough? What should happen immediately upon RFP release? Do you know what you'll do as soon as the RFP comes out? Or will you be making it up on the spot? Will you have a kickoff meeting? How will you get their proposal input? When will you get their input? In what format do you need their input? Do you know what input you need? Will they be able to supply it? Can you ask for it ahead of time so they have time to gather what you need? How do you produce an outline that fulfills everyone’s expectations and survives without being changed? Whose expectations matter the most? Is it the customer? What are the customer’s expectations? Or does someone at your company think they have a better idea? Do they? Should the writers be in control of the outline or should it be provided to them? Should the outline be based on an RFP compliance matrix? Don’t assume everyone sees the answers to these important questions the same way you do. Once you’ve got the answers then how do you get everyone to agree on the outline before they start writing? If you proceed without a formal decision regarding the outline that is difficult to change, the entire proposal is at risk of a disruptive outline change after writing starts. That kind of makes it important to get everyone on the same page regarding the outline. How do you figure out what to write before you start writing? An outline is not enough to guide the proposal writers to reliably produce a winning proposal. You need a plan for the content of the proposal, and you need it before the writing starts. Herding the cats into doing this is such a challenge that on most proposals people don’t even do it. There is no formal quality methodology on Earth that is based on “then smart people work really hard and just get it right.” If winning matters, you’ll put your heads together, overcome your resistance, and solve how you should plan the content of your proposal before you start writing it. How do you incorporate graphics and visual communication? Not only do you expect people to write something, but you want them to contribute to illustrating it as well? Don’t worry, you only need to include a lot of graphics and make your proposal visual if you want to win. You can create your graphics first and build the text around them, or you can write it and then illustrate it, so long as you end up with an effective message communicated visually. How do you incorporate contracts, pricing, and other stakeholder inputs? If the answer is that you write the proposal and then sprinkle them in, you can do better. If you are planning your content before you write it, that’s the best opportunity to solicit the maximum stakeholder input in a way that will not be disruptive. Pricing inputs can be so important to the text of the proposal, that some companies can build the proposal process around their pricing instead of the text. How do you validate the quality of your draft proposal? How do you know if the draft proposal is good enough? Is that just a matter of opinion? Whose? More importantly, how does the writer know whether it’s any good before it even gets to a review? What criteria define whether it’s good? What should the proposal writers be guided by? How you define quality matters. You can’t seek it or validate it if you can’t first define it. The procedures you use for validating the presence of proposal quality are less important than your ability to define it. How will you produce and submit the final proposal? Whether you are submitting electronic files or hardcopies, it has to get to the customer by their deadline. And because you don’t want to put all that effort into creating a great proposal only to lose in the last step, you should put some effort into it. So, making your final changes and packaging the proposal for delivery. Should you let that be a last minute rush, or force production to go according to plan with quality validation? What is your delivery plan? How many contingencies will you prepare for? How many backups will you have? When you spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in time preparing a proposal, it doesn’t make sense to sweat a couple of grand for duplicate or even triplicate deliveries. How should you use lessons learned, metrics, and measurements to improve your proposals? If you want to get better over time and increase your win rate, you have to change. Instead of being about reporting, brainstorming, or sharing, lessons learned meetings must be about change or they will have no impact. Do your meetings focus on the wrong lessons learned? So how is each stakeholder going to change to improve the next proposal? The best answers to that question will be data driven. What changes have the most impact on your win rate? You can’t rely on the experience of experts for this because your circumstances will be different from their experience. Instead, you should track the correlation between changes and your win rate over time. Try calculating what the impact of a 10% win rate improvement would be to your company. Then put that much effort into metrics, measurements, and win rate analytics.

Mark Amtower and I go back over a decade. That's Mark on the left and me on the right above. We have over 530 mutual connections on LinkedIn. I've been interviewed by Mark for his radio show at least seven times. But on the March 16th show we really got into it and explored the lies that contractors tell in their proposals as well as the huge insights about the proposal process I've had from building MustWin Now. Here are all the times I've been interviewed by Mark for Federal News Network that I could track down: Keys to winning government contracts, March 16, 2020 ‘Playing to win’ in the GovCon market, August 30, 2018 Winning proposals, March 3, 2017 Business development, capture & more, July 2, 2016 Content marketing and RFPs, November 16, 2015 Content marketing in business to government, December 22, 2014 Business development, FSSI, and more, January 15, 2013

Our instincts betray us. Playing it safe will lower your chances of winning. In our regular life, sometimes playing it safe is necessary for continued survival. But in order to have a superior, winning proposal, it must first be different. Different in a way that no one else can match. You don’t get there playing it safe. Anticipation and research. What professionals do is try to anticipate the issues, conduct research, and start the proposal already informed with your mitigations and strategies. Yeah, doing your homework is always best. The strategies below are mainly for procrastinators, outsiders, and underdogs. Make assumptions and document them. This is a classic engineering response. It’s not very accommodating and inflexible. Those traits can lower your chances of winning. If you had an extended amount of time you could try experimenting with different sets of assumptions. But the challenge here is to make winning decisions with the information you have now. Avoid rules. As humans, we like the simple certainty of rules. We like to know exactly what to do and what will happen. But this requires knowledge in full. We may not like it when things are uncertain, but we often live in an uncertain world. The problems caused by rules being applied to circumstances they didn’t anticipate can be major problems. When you don’t know what you need to know, look for solutions based on criteria and incentives over hard inflexible rules. But keep them simple because people crave certainty, even when it's irrational. Identify your risks and prioritize mitigation based on severity. If an analytic approach is the way to go, you can itemize your issues so they can be tracked and resolved. Otherwise, you’re just frantically reacting instead of moving forward deliberately. Seek options. If you can do it more than one way, then offer the options. Explain the pros and cons and let the customer choose. Better yet, arrange the options to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Start with the foundation and build on it. Manage decisions over time. The reason Agile and Spiral methodologies caught on was that customers recognized that they often don’t know all the details on day one. For projects where decisions get made over time, your approach to managing those decisions can be as important as the technical details for implementation. Under some circumstances, a quick decision that might be wrong but can be corrected is better than waiting for certainty. Let the circumstances of the customer’s environment and the nature of the project determine how you will manage those decisions, and use your proposal to demonstrate your insight regarding how to make them. Incentivize the customer. If you have a preference, or concerns like scalability, offer a business and pricing model that incentivizes the outcome you desire while giving the customer flexibility. This is only possible when the customer gives you flexibility in how you construct your pricing model. But for some bids, offering a superior pricing model can matter more than the technical details of your offering. Positioning. Position your approach against the possible customer preferences and concerns so that you show insight into the possibilities while covering them all. Many offerings can be applied in different ways, with different outcomes and characteristics. If it’s all the same to you, then offer the customer choices and help them make those choices. Along the way, you’ll not only be showing flexibility, but also insight. Profiling. If you don’t know the customer or what they prefer, perhaps you can envision what someone like the customer might prefer. You might create multiple possible profiles. And then design your offering and pitch to appeal to each of them. It’s bad when profiling is used in a restrictive way. But if you can use it to enhance the support you offer to someone new, it can be beneficial to them. Empathy. What would you care about if you were the customer? If all else fails, write to that. What would matter to you if you were in their shoes and dealing with their issues? What kind of help and support would you find beneficial? Alternative visions. What do you think should matter to the customer? If you really, really don’t know what the customer cares about, offer them your own vision and see if they go for it. It’s a high-risk strategy, but it can work. Think about how often you are indecisive or under what circumstances you might appreciate a suggestion for a completely different approach. If your vision is that good, it might just be worth ignoring the customer. Avoid muddying the waters. Overlapping issues and unknown variables compound the problem. Try to achieve clarity on as many as possible so you only have to guess about one unknown at a time. For example, if you are dealing with uncertain staffing, aren’t sure about your priorities, don’t know what the customer wants, and haven’t given any thought to what your win strategies should be, you’re going to have difficulty untangling all that. If you had answers to all of it except knowing what the customer wants you’d have a fighting chance at coming up with an approach that has a chance of working. Differentiate. Get out of the box. Be a contrarian. Go where the other competitors won’t. If there is something better, it will be hiding there. Don’t fear what you don’t know. Don’t retreat into your comfort zone because you are afraid of getting things wrong. What you don’t know might be an opportunity to come up with something better than what those who think they do know will put on the table. They might be more in the dark than they realize. A solution that addresses the challenges you face has a good chance of being a better solution than one that didn’t recognize the challenges at all. The last thing you want to do is to defer to authority. This is replacing strategy with CYA. The real problem with it is that the only authority that matters is the customer. They will decide whether you win or lose. So they are who you need to appeal to. And if you don’t know what will appeal to them the most, you need a strategy to maximize your chances. And if you do lose, it’s better to have given the customer a strong proposal that made them think about it than it is to have given the customer an ordinary, forgettable proposal that took no risks and held back because of what you didn’t know.

If you tell lies like those below, you hurt your credibility. Even when you tell them with good intent they still hurt your credibility. Even if you believe them, they hurt your credibility. Yet it seems like everyone does it. And if you tell the same lies that they do, your proposal will lack differentiators. Even though people know that customers only buy from people they trust, they tell lies like these that the customer can see straight through. The point here isn’t to hold a trial over the offense of lying, degrees of untruth, or whether it's true when you tell them. The point here is to realize that there are better ways to articulate why the customer should select you than to say things with such glaring credibility issues like: We’re better because we have experience. The fact that your company has experience is not the lie. But whether it makes you better probably is. None of the people who had that experience are still with the company, and even if they are they probably won’t be working on the new project being proposed. Besides, the odds are that nothing tangible was created from that experience that the company owns or will use on projects for other customers. Experience proves what a company did, and not what it can or will do. Experience is a good thing to have. But everyone who makes the competitive range will have sufficient experience. Having experience won't make you better. It's what you transform that experience into that makes you better. Talking about experience becomes a lie when it hides that you have nothing better to say. We can staff this project because we have [#] employees. But because they are all working on other projects, we’ll have to do just as much recruiting as smaller companies. Contractors can’t carry staff who are not assigned to projects for very long, if at all. Since those staff are all working on other projects full time, the idea that they could somehow consult with or involve them is unlikely. For all practical purposes, a company’s total staffing count has approximately zero impact on their ability to staff new projects. Your project will be of the utmost importance to us. Just like all of the other projects and competing priorities we have. “Utmost” in this context has no meaning. The importance of a project to a company has more to do with its revenue, profitability, and impact on past performance. We are fully committed to the success of this project. We’ll only pull our punches if that’s what we need to do to make this project we underbid profitable. We say we’re committed because we’re not at all sure how we’re going to or if we’re going to be able to achieve success on this project. If we knew, we’d say that instead. But we are really hopeful. We intend to be successful, whether we are or not. Customer satisfaction is our highest priority. So long as we're not distracted by all those other priorities that are actually higher. Quality is our highest priority. We do great work, except when we don’t. We have good reasons when we don’t. But it’s not like other things were higher priorities. We will comply with all the requirements in the RFP. Unless it would not be profitable to do so. Or we can’t figure out how. Or things take longer than we expect. Or… As a small business we are more nimble than larger companies. We’re all wearing 10 different hats, but we can turn on a dime. As a large business we have all the resources needed. They are all fully committed to other projects and you’ll never see them. But we do have them. We are ready to start on Day One of the contract. We’ll start by signing the contract. After that, we’ve got some recruiting to do, some credentialing, a project management office to get set up, and a bunch more action items before we can actually do productive work. As the incumbent we can start immediately. Never mind those pesky contract, staffing changes that require onboarding and training, and requirement changes. They won’t slow us down one bit! We have a successful track record. When you only look at the successes, it’s quite a record! How is it that companies with successful track records who prioritize customer service and quality don’t have perfect past performance scores? Just sayin’. We have a [insert your preferred lie] turnover rate. Just don’t ask how we calculated it or if we included incumbent contracts, voluntary or involuntary terminations, contract loss terminations, staff reassigned to other contracts, promoted staff who have to be replaced, medical leaves or disabilities, recently added positions, closed positions, etc… We bring capabilities in every aspect of the statement of work. We’ve even done some of them before. Technically this one is not a lie, because we have infinite capabilities because we can do anything we can hire people to do. And we always deliver on time. Oops. That one may not be true. Our staff have a combined total of [insert large number] years of experience. If you have 10 staff who worked for one year on something, is that the same as having 10 years of experience? So while the math is accurate, it’s a lie because it’s a substitution of something that’s not the same. Most of our business comes from repeat customers. If this is not true, it’s a sign that you’re losing most of your recompetes. In other words, every contractor does most of their business with repeat customers. So a better claim would be that we have never lost a recompete. But that probably would be a lie. Our mission is to [fill in the blank]. Your mission is really to win new contracts. Contract growth is the source of all opportunities in a company. Maintaining a high past performance score is a more powerful motivator than a mission statement. You only get to do the things you have in your current mission statement if you win new contracts. Nobody in your company is held accountable for mission statement fulfillment. But if you don’t win new contracts, heads will roll. We understand… When we found out about your needs because you released an RFP, we immediately checked out your website after deciding to bid and now feel so confident that we understand your needs that we’ve copied and pasted your mission statement into our proposal to prove it. We understand you so well that we’ll fully comply with all RFP requirements in our proposal even though our project team won’t even read it before starting the project. Well, maybe the project manager will. We're so good and understand so deeply we don’t even have to prove it, we can just state it. Do you think your customers don't realize any of this? What might they be thinking when they read your proposal? Behind each of my snarky comments is a hint at what to say instead of the lie. Every negative can be rephrased as a positive. So dump the lies that hurt your credibility and say something direct and authentic. Acknowledge the issues that make these statements lies and tell the customer what you do about them. And have fun ghosting your competition who are still saying these tired clichés. If you need help taking your proposals to a higher level, just let me know. I promise you will be my highest priority as I will achieve the utmost in customer satisfaction while delivering the best quality to my repeat customers through my amazing capabilities of being committed to the success of your proposal. If any one of those is good to use, then why isn't it better to use them all? Check out your past proposals. If you find you’ve made these mistakes in the past, reach out to me and I’ll show you how to write a much better proposal. And if your competition continues to make the same mistakes, your win rate will go way up.

This module is a chance to finalize the work from the previous exercises and prepare them for implementation. The course materials for this module provide an opportunity to reflect on what you have created so far, look at it from several perspectives, and ensure it is ready for real-world use. During this module you should review and make any improvements needed to the process items you have created. You should also apply final formatting and production to them (logos, headers, footers, usage statements, instructions, notices, etc.). Make whatever changes you think should be made so that people will be able to successfully implement the items you have created. Add new items if you think they are needed. Delete any items that aren't relevant or won't be used. When this module is complete, you should have a set of items for the pre-proposal process that are ready for use on live pursuits.

This module takes the approach to building lists of questions from the last module and applies it proposals that start at RFP release. The difference is subtle but important. Proposal inputs forms must ask questions that can be answered immediately and probably without being able to conduct much research. They are about discovering what you already know and articulating it in a way that proposal writers can use. They can have a big impact. Having some information to work with is a lot better than having none. Building a proposal around win strategies formed based on what you think or assume is better than makes them up based on the RFP. There is another benefit. It forces proposal writers to think through what they really need in terms of input. You can't train your organization to bring you the right input if you can't explain to them what that is. When those responsible for gathering intel have proposal input forms, they can begin to anticipate the needs of the proposal writers. This module has less new material to read and will require more time working on the exercise. It will require more time in introspection, thinking about what to ask for in order to put your response to the RFP requirements into context. When you combine proposal input forms with pursuit capture forms, you get materials to provide guidance whether the pursuit starts well in advance or suddenly.

Responding to RFP requirements is not simply a matter of checking off the fulfillment of each specification. Understanding the reasons why the customer asks for those requirements can give you insight into what really concerns them. Writing to what really concerns them can increase your win probability. Includes strategies for writing about fulfilling the RFP requirements, what might impact the customer's evaluation, and what can make the difference between winning and losing your proposal.

Here is an example of proposal writing for you to consider. I review a lot of proposals and see this style of writing all the time. In fact, a lot of people try to emulate it. How does this sound to you? Our company is based on the belief that our customers' needs are of the utmost importance. Our entire team is committed to meeting those needs. As a result, a high percentage of our business is from repeat customers and referrals. We would welcome the opportunity to earn your trust and deliver you the best service in the industry. It sounds perfectly ordinary. Lots of business documents sound like this. Actually, it sucks. Any one of those sentences is bad. Together it could be the worst proposal paragraph I have ever seen. The big problem with it is that it doesn't actually say anything credible. Well actually there are a quite a few problems with it. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the whole thing is a problem. There is nothing redeemable about it. And yes, it's that bad. And it is way too common. Consider: No one cares what your company "is based on." They care about what your company will do or deliver. If being based on something increases your ability to do or deliver, they care about how and not the fact that it was based on something. No one cares about your "beliefs." They care about what you will do. If there are reasons about your beliefs that produce better results or make your offering a better alternative, then they care about those reasons. Of course the "customers’ needs are of utmost importance." The very first sentence is not only a statement of the obvious, it’s also true of every other company bidding and does nothing to differentiate you. No one cares about your commitment. Or believes it. If you really are committed, let that show in what you do. If your commitment doesn’t lead to you doing things differently or better, then what good is it? You don’t need to say you are committed. You do need to be the best alternative. "...meeting those needs." Is that the best you can offer? Meeting their needs? Won’t everyone bidding be meeting the customer’s needs? Or at least claiming it with equal enthusiasm? "A high percentage of our business..." Does the customer really care about how you make your money? If they did, they would have asked about it in the RFP. If this was an important point, you’d quantify it. A percentage of repeat customers (as opposed to percentage of your revenue) might be a good thing, but it’s not going to impact your evaluation one bit. And oh by the way, if you are a government contractor the percentage of repeat customers had better be pretty darn high or you’re losing your recompetes. In the unlikely event that the customer does bother to think about it, it’s probably also true for all of your competitors. "We would welcome the opportunity..." This is not only a statement of the obvious, but it’s a self-serving one. Of course you welcome any viable business opportunity. "...to earn your trust." You’ve already missed one opportunity. Your introduction actually hurts your creditability. A promise from a vendor to earn the customer’s trust has very little value. But the actions you take to prove that you are trustworthy don’t. Transparency, oversight, accountability, quality assurance, past performance, testimonials, and more count. But this statement doesn’t. "...best service in the industry." Not only is this an unsubstantiated claim, it’s not believable. It’s a big industry. I question whether the firm writing this, or any of their competitors, has the best service in the industry. They might be pretty good. They might even have happy customers. But promising something that you probably can’t deliver does not help your credibility. If you think the quality of your service is something worth bragging about, then provide proof. Don’t brag. But do cite the evidence. And don’t make it about you, make it about what the customer will get as a result of selecting you. Take those parts out and there is nothing left. This paragraph is written to please the writer. It is not written to please the customer. It’s about how the writer wants to see their company and not about what the customer needs to see in order to make their decision. Lots of people write about how they’d like to be seen rather than what the customer cares about. Just so you know, I’ve written most of those sentences or their equivalents at one time or another. But never all at once. And not in the last decade or two. Learn faster than I did. How would I rewrite it? I wouldn’t. I’d delete it and start over. There is nothing in the example above that I’d bring forward. It says nothing of substance about the customer, company, or offering. How I'd structure the replacement introduction would depend on the RFP, customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. But typically, I would: Write an opening sentence about what the customer will get by selecting my company. Write a sentence introducing my company in terms of its most significant differentiators. Write one or more sentences linking our differentiators to the most significant evaluation criteria. Possibly reference proof points in the following paragraphs, if it can be done without being redundant. Think about what the customer needs to see in order to make a decision regarding what their best alternative is. Then help them make that decision with substance that goes beyond beliefs, commitments, statements of the obvious (no matter how grandiose), and unsubstantiated claims. Don’t write your proposal to sound good. Write your proposal to help the evaluator make a decision.

We publish our newsletter weekly. You will receive the next one when it comes out. Please make sure to put it on your email white list or move it to your priority tab so that your email software doesn't hide it from you. Here is the link for downloading your copy of our eBook: Turning Your Proposals Into a Competitive Advantage Here are some other useful links: Beginners should start here Why your good proposal is going to lose What is the simplest, easiest proposal process to get started with? Bid/no bid decisions: 6 approaches to making them and 10 things the process must get right How do you win before the RFP is even released? How to write a better technical approach To write better proposals, first learn how to read them like a customer How to tell if a proposal is well written The problem with proposal re-use repositories What is more important to your business than lead generation? 9 places you should invest to increase your proposal win rate Go back to the previous page

This eBook is your?reward for signing up for our newsletter. It addresses how to write great proposals, bid/no bid decisions, winning before the RFP is released, proposal re-use repositories, improving your win rate, and more! Within a week you should receive your first copy of our newsletter, with new free content and updates.

monthly_2025_08/2020-02-1211.30BringingstructuretothePre-RFPreleasephaseofopportunitypursuitArchivedonFebruary132020.mp4.679cb6bc9bc81e7b86b8210dc5b6beef.mp4

Why do customers ask you to describe your approaches in your proposal? What do customers care about related to your approaches? It's not what it seems... Plus strategies for writing about your approaches, what you should avoid when writing about them, what the customer will evaluate, and what can make the difference between winning and losing your proposal.

Most proposals are lost before the RFP is released. When you haven’t discovered what it will take to win and all you have to go by is what’s in the RFP, you are starting from a competitive disadvantage. You want to be the other company. The one that is starting from a competitive advantage. But even when you have staff “looking into it,” “researching it,” “chasing the lead,” “marketing the customer,” or whatever else you want to call it and doing it ahead of RFP release, most companies fail because their efforts don’t deliver what is needed to write a winning proposal. They try hard to gather what they think will be useful, but it turns out to be mostly disconnected from the proposal. The handoff from business development to the proposal often takes place in meetings. Sometimes there is no tangible handoff. It's all talk. With a very low signal to noise ratio. Sometimes you get slides from progress meetings. When you do have a dedicated capture effort, the handoff is often a report or a capture plan. Putting together a list of high-level theme statements that aren’t tied to anything that impacts the evaluation criteria and calling it a day is not going to help you win. Pre-RFP briefing slides and capture plans are usually not prepared for winning the proposal. They are prepared to justify the pursuit. That subtle distinction becomes important when you sit down to write the proposal. And while most capture plans address why we think we can win, they often skip how to build the proposal around it. Most business development and capture efforts amount to we think we can win and the proposal team will figure out how. In isolation. I know because I’ve parachuted in to try to rescue companies in this position way too many times. What’s missing?The reasons most information gathered before the proposal starts never impacts the proposal are because: The information you gather before the RFP is released is not mapped to the proposal outline. When you don't do this, your message will tend to be at too high a level and it will leave gaps. You think you’ve identified hot buttons. But they amount to “the customer isn’t happy with quality” or “the customer likes us” and oh by the way, there is no section in the RFP to specifically address what you have, no evaluation criteria relevant to it, and the proposal team has no idea what to do about any of it. Should they make things up or ignore them? If it’s not tied to the outline, it’s not clear where to talk about it or what to say about it. You gather information but you don't provide instructions for proposal writers on what to say and do about it. Most companies assume that proposal writers can take some raw intel and win a proposal with it. If the proposal writers can find the right place to work it in and know why it matters, that might be true. But usually it’s just not that clear. That may explain why most companies have such a low win rate. They think they are trying really hard, and they are. They just aren’t working effectively. Without both of these, your win rate drops. Gathering information is not enough. It’s understandable how this happensThere is no outline or evaluation criteria during the pre-RFP business development and capture phases. People have to gather intel and do their work without knowing what the outline will be. They have little control over what intel they’ll be able to find. Their mission is to prospect for that intel and not to work within the proposal structure that doesn’t even exist yet. But if they don’t roll their sleeves up and map their contributions to the outline after RFP release, then they haven’t completed what is needed from them to close the sale with a win. The people who have direct insight about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment must explain how to use those insights and not assume that writers can take high-level ambiguous statements not specifically related to anything in the proposal and somehow create a winning proposal out of them. They must map their insights to specific proposal sections in the context of the evaluation criteria for their efforts to impact whether they win.

Put the RFP aside, just for a moment. Meditate or ponder on the following before you start typing. Ask yourself, "Why should the customer select my offering over their other alternatives." Reach beyond your company's experience and qualifications. Reach all the way to why the customer will be better off if they select you, and how what they will get will be superior if they select you. Consider what matters or should matter to the customer about what you are going to write about. Now look at it through the lens of differentiation. What are the reasons why the customer should select you that no one else can offer? How will what the customer gets by selecting you be different and better than what anyone else can offer? Take all of that and consolidate it into the points you want to make. Everything you write should make a point. You don't want to write a pointless proposal. When you know what points you want to make you are ready to start organizing your proposal sections. In what sequence should you address your points? How should you group them? It’s time to go back to the RFP. Look at the instructions in the RFP before you look at the performance requirements. Build your organization around what the instructions ask for. Be very literal and use their words and headings. Figure out how to reorganize the points you want to make within the RFP's instructions. Do not get too attached to how you want to organize things. Organize them so that everything is where the customer expects to find them. And that will be where the RFP asks for them. Next look at the evaluation criteria in the RFP. What do they need to see for you to get the maximum score? Again, be very literal and use their words. Rewrite the points you want to make so that they maximize your score against the RFP. You want the customer to be able to easily give you the highest score because of the points you made. You want the customer to be able to find the evaluation criteria by keyword searching for them. Now look at the performance requirements in the RFP. Whatever you do, don't try to figure out your approaches by writing about them. Figure out your approaches first, and do it separately from proposal writing. The last thing to do before proposal writing is to bring it all together. Organize your responses to the performance requirements according to the points you want to make (which follow the instructions have you have optimized to score highly). Writing to fulfill the RFP requirements is good, but it is not good enough to win. To write a winning proposal, you must write your response to the performance requirements to prove the points that will persuade the customer that you are their best alternative and give you the highest score. This is your goal, and not merely describing your company or your offering. If you get to this point and are struggling, try looking at it in reverse. Each of your responses to the RFP performance requirements should make a point, and that point is not simply "here's what you asked for." That point should differentiate your offering and get to the heart of what the customer really wants. But it should also be worded to maximize your score against the RFP evaluation criteria. And it must be organized and presented to comply with the RFP instructions. Every time you are in doubt about what to write or find yourself struggling to edit something into what it needs to be, go back and reflect on what points you should be making. Focus on proving the points you need to make and the words will follow. Premium content exclusively for PropLIBRARY Subscribers: Online training courses in proposal writing: Introduction to proposal writing What to do when you receive a proposal assignment How contributors can help manage expectations during a proposal Setting priorities while writing How to go beyond RFP compliance A simple formula for proposal writing Proposal style and editorial issues Identifying graphics Inspiration for graphics Six things to do when you don’t have the input you need to write the winning proposal

Why do customers care about your capabilities? What do customers care about that's related to your capabilities? How do you use your capabilities to support other things that customer cares about? Strategies for writing about capabilities. What should you avoid writing about and what will the customer evaluate? What can make the difference between winning and losing?

Working on proposals as the only proposal specialist is like working without a net. But are you really alone? Sure, you might be the last one to touch the proposal. You might be the only one producing it. But if you have stakeholders, you are not alone. If you need input, you are not really alone. If people depend on your output, you are not really alone. If you are not really alone, you need to coordinate with the others who are involved or impacted. Even if you are truly the only one working on proposals, you still need to do things in a repeatable way that can be optimized, both for efficiency and for effectiveness. For coordination and optimization, you still need a proposal process. However, the process you need to optimize coordination between you and a handful of stakeholders is very different from the process you need to herd dozens of cats and hundreds of moving parts. Here is what you should focus on when you are the proposal specialist and have to do everything yourself: Instead of steps and procedures, build your proposal process around goals, reminders, and checklists. You don’t want to forget things, and it’s quicker to not have to figure things out every time. Sometimes checklists function as reminders, being lists of things you don’t want to forget, but sometimes reminders are simply that. And sometimes checklists are quality assurance or planning tools. You can accelerate thinking about your proposal by including things that aren’t always relevant but are worth considering on your checklists. When you’re under volume pressure and near your maximum capacity, sometimes it’s good to not have to remember and think through everything. Checklists can not only speed things up and improve quality, but they can also inspire you to create better proposals. You may not need written procedures for coordination, but you still need stakeholder reporting and communication. Instead of communicating to coordinate the production of many moving parts, you need to be prepared to communicate with the people who are impacted by what you do. Instead of thinking of it as “communication,” it may be better to think of it as expectation management. The best way to streamline communication is to build it in, make it automatic, and eliminate the need for communication as a separate or ad hoc activity. If people can see the status or automatically get updates, they won’t have to interrupt you to ask about things as often. Instead of document templates, think about creating communication templates so that you can communicate frequently but with minimal time required. Document the inputs you require and whether you got them. Don’t expect other people to know what information you need. You must itemize the information you need or they may not reliably get it for you. Forms, checklists, and templates can help you get what you need. Then you can track whether you get it and correlate this with your company’s win rate. This can be used to help the company realize the importance of getting the information to you and how important it is to maximizing the company's ROI. Quality validation is necessary to maximize win probability. On your own, it’s easier to get by with informal quality assessment and you may not need a formal proposal review process. But you still need to check your own work. Simply being careful does not count as quality assurance, even if you’re really good at it. Knowing what you need to validate and turning that into quality criteria will help you ensure that everything gets validated. Don't assume that reviewers simply know everything that needs to be checked in order to validate proposal quality. Help them give you the proposal validation you need. Using written quality criteria will not only increase the reliability of your efforts but can also be turned into checklists to accelerate things. Even people on their own need a plan. However, the plans that people need when doing things themselves are different from the plans that a team needs to get everyone on the same page. Individuals often call their plan a “to do” list. Instead of making your “to do” lists an ad hoc batch of reminders, make them deliberately considered lists of items required to effectively perform the necessary tasks. “To do” lists can also be turned into checklists, and you can also save, reuse, and improve them over time. Your history is defined by the records you keep. Under deadline pressure, it would be understandable if you gave up on keeping orderly files that weren’t directly needed as part of your workflow. But you need to keep track of your history. Don’t keep records just for the sake of doing it. Keep records so that when you need to look back you’ll have the data you need. Evidence of win rate and ROI. If you want to be more than just a production resource, you must prove your value. If you want to prove your value, you must do it quantitatively. You must prove that you deliver a positive ROI. The good news is that this shouldn’t be too hard. If you are the only proposal resource and you increase your company’s win rate by as little as 1%, you will likely bring in more revenue than you get paid. Learn the mathematics of win rate calculations so you can prove this. And gather the data. At a 20% win rate, increasing your company’s win rate by 10% is the same as finding 50% more leads. What would your company be willing to invest to get 50% more leads? You need to be able to get past hypotheticals and talk real numbers. Otherwise, you risk being seen as just a production resource that the accounting system classifies as an expense. The truth is you should be treated like a profit center, with as much impact on the company’s bottom line as its best salesperson. But that won’t happen until you prove it. With numbers. Notice how much of The Process can become simple checklists when you’re on your own? Just don’t think of them all as checklists. Divide your checklists into categories like plan, act, communicate, and review. Then your checklists will align with your process needs. You will have a proposal process, but it will be the kind of process that is useful even when it’s just you doing everything on your own. This approach also creates a foundation so that when the company grows and the proposal function needs to become more than just you, you can easily provide guidance to the newcomers. Win enough proposals and it will be worth it for the company to hire help to further maximize ROI. And when that happens, onboarding new staff will be so much easier when you have checklists for everything that needs to be done.

Companies generally start to embrace a proposal process when the number of people involved grows large enough to become difficult to coordinate. It would be better if they began to embrace a process as soon as they start caring about their win rate. The MustWin Process on PropLIBRARY enables a team of people to work together to maximize the company’s win rate. That’s great, but what if there’s no team? What if you are the team? Then doesn’t a proposal process designed to support large teams become overkill? Are you really alone? Sure, you might be the only one producing it. But if you have stakeholders, you are not alone. If you need input, you are not really alone. If people depend on your output, you are not really alone. If you are not really alone, you need to coordinate with the others who are involved or impacted. And that coordination indicates a need for a proposal process. Having a way of doing things is not the same as having a process, and people perform better when supported by a process instead of making it up as they go along. Even if you are truly the only one working on proposals you still need to do things in a repeatable way that can be optimized, both for efficiency and for effectiveness. But your process needs are different in some key ways. Instead of steps and procedures, build your proposal process around goals, reminders, and checklists. You don’t want to forget things, and it’s quicker not having to figure things out every time. Sometimes checklists function as reminders, being lists of things you don’t want to forget, but sometimes reminders are simply that. And sometimes checklists are quality assurance or planning tools. You can accelerate thinking about your proposal including things that aren’t always relevant but are worth considering on your checklists. When you’re under volume pressure and near your maximum capacity, sometimes it’s good to not have to remember and think through everything. Checklists can not only speed things up and improve quality, but they can also inspire you to create better proposals. You may not need written procedures for coordination, but you do need stakeholder reporting and communication. Instead of ad hoc emails to coordinate the production of many moving parts, you need to be prepared to communicate with the people who are impacted by what you do. Instead of thinking of it as “communication,” it may be better to think of it as expectation management. The best way to streamline communication is to build it in, make it automatic, and eliminate the need for communication as a separate or ad hoc activity. If people can see the status or automatically get updates, they won’t have to interrupt you to ask about things as often. Document the inputs you require and whether you got them. Don’t expect other people to just “do their jobs.” You must itemize the information you need or they may not reliably get it for you. Once you itemize the information you need, you can track whether you get it and correlate this with your company’s win rate. This can be used to help them realize the importance of getting the information to you. Quality validation is necessary to maximize win probability. On your own, it’s easier to get by with informal quality assurance and you may not need a formal proposal review process. But you still need to check your own work. Being careful does not count as quality assurance, even if you’re really good at it. Knowing what you need to validate and turning that into quality criteria will help you ensure that everything gets validated. Using written quality criteria will not only increase the reliability of your efforts, but can also be turned into checklists to accelerate things. Even people on their own need a plan. However, the plans that people need when doing things themselves are different from the plans that a team needs to get everyone on the same page. Individuals often call their plan a “to do” list. Instead of making your “to do” lists an ad hoc batch of reminders, make them deliberately considered lists of items required to effectively perform the necessary tasks. “To do” lists can also be turned into checklists, and you can also save, reuse, and improve them over time. This form of reuse can have a bigger impact than trying to recycle proposal content. Your history is defined by the records you keep. Under deadline pressure, it would be understandable if you gave up on keeping orderly files that weren’t directly needed as part of your workflow. But you need to keep track of your history. Don’t keep records just for the sake of doing it. Keep records so that when you need to look back you’ll have the data you need. Evidence of win rate and ROI. If you want to be more than just a production resource, you must prove your value. If you want to prove your value, you must do it quantitatively. You must prove that you deliver a positive ROI. The good news is that this shouldn’t be too hard. If you are the only proposal resource and you increase your company’s win rate by as little as 1%, you will likely bring in more revenue than you get paid. Learn the mathematics of win rate calculations so you can prove this. And gather the data. At a 20% win rate, increasing your company’s win rate by 10% is the same as finding 50% more leads. What would your company be willing to invest to get 50% more leads? You need to be able to get past hypotheticals and talk real numbers. Otherwise, you risk being seen as just a production resource that the accounting system classifies as an expense. The truth is you should be treated like a profit center, with as much impact on the company’s bottom line as its best salesperson. But that won’t happen until you prove it. With numbers. Notice how much of The Process can become simple checklists when you’re on your own? Just don’t think of them all as checklists. Divide your checklists into categories like plan, act, communicate, and review. Then your checklists will align with your process needs. You will have a proposal process, but it will be the kind of process that is useful even when it’s just you. This approach also creates a foundation so that when things grow and the proposal function no longer is just you, you can easily provide guidance to the newcomers.

This course divides the pre-RFP pursuit into these modules: Activities that occur during pre-RFP pursuit (this module) Bringing structure to the pre-RFP phase (next module) Preparing to transition from pre-RFP pursuit to the proposal Starting at RFP release (because it happens) This module is primary about setting the stage for customer interaction in anticipation of a proposal. In this module we'll document the activities that occur in a pursuit before the RFP is released and create checklists for some of them. We'll also work on the foundation for intelligence collection and building an information advantage. We need this foundation before we can start working on bringing structure to how these activities are conducted in the next module.

The first module is about defining the scope of what we're going to create together. Are we enhancing your existing process or building a new one? Are focusing on the pre-RFP phase or the proposal phase? We'll cover both, but how will we apply the material? That's why the first module focuses on discovery and discussion with stakeholders. The material in the first module is designed to be thought-provoking. The topics provide some background and context that will help once the introduction is complete and we start looking at pursuit and capture topic by topic and applying the material. When we meet to discuss this module bring your thoughts about what you would like to come out of this course with, both in terms of takeaways and in terms of what you'd like to build during the course to help achieve your goals. We'll share our thoughts, discuss it together, and spend the rest of the course applying future modules to fulfilling those goals.

When you are alone you have to work within your own limitations. What you know is all you know. What you can write is all that’s going into the proposal. What you can do before the deadline defines your standard of quality. It’s not about winning or creating a great proposal. It’s about whether you can complete the proposal at all. Here are some tips that won’t help you win, but they might help you get your proposals submitted. What is the minimally viable proposal submission? The gap between the minimally viable proposal submission and a great proposal is a concern for another day. Right now, you have to focus on the gaps between where you are and what constitutes the minimally viable submission. The minimally viable proposal submission is usually whatever won’t get your proposal thrown out. Perform triage. Only try to save the ones that can survive, because trying to save them all will only result in greater loss. Use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals to help you make decisions about priorities. Focus on filling your gaps. Since you’re on your own, you have no one to write the missing pieces. It’s just you and Google. You may have to cheat. You may have to do the proposal The Wrong Way. Yeah, it’s ugly. But it may be all you’ve got to work with... Write to what a customer like this one might want instead of what you know this customer wants. Describe what goes into your plans instead of providing an actual plan. Avoid commitment. Use numbers that aren’t precise. Think “more than” or “almost.” Streamline the formatting. Don’t use elaborate formats. Minimize keystrokes and clicks. Go for simple elegance instead of a work of art. Make sure the formatting is within your skill set. If you don’t have any win strategies, differentiators, value proposition, and reasons for the customer to select you to work with, then base them on what it will take to win. If you can’t be great and prove it, then simply be what the customer wants. Who, what, where, how, when, and why. Repeat that until you’ve got it memorized. Then whenever you need more detail, answer the ones you can. If you need an approach for something and you have no idea what it should be, you can talk all around it by addressing who, what, where, how, when, and why. Be prepared to do less. Peel it back like an onion. Do only the things that impact winning the most. And if that fails, do only the things needed for a minimally viable submission. Everything is a trade-off. Make your trade-off decisions based on what requires the least effort. Go up a level in granularity. Make this proposal a learning experience for your stakeholders. If this proposal isn’t going to be great, can you use it as a demonstration so things go better on the next one? Separate what changes from what doesn’t. Don’t mix the details that don’t change with the win strategies and customer insights that have to be tailored every time. Use a question and answer format, even when they don’t ask for it. You can organize reuse material around questions and answers. Questions and answers already make a point and have a defined context, reducing the editing required. Questions and answers stand alone and lend themselves to being interchangeable parts. If you find you’re working on proposals that don’t have a chance of winning, identify the criteria that can be used to decide when not to bid a pursuit. Complaining about having to work on low probability pursuits sounds like resistance. But providing a set of lead qualification criteria is something that people can take action on. Avoid using names. It waters things down, but the more you can avoid using customer, company, personnel and other names, the less editing you’ll have to do. For example, try to refer to people by their role. Be a big picture thinker. When you don’t even know the details, stick to the big picture. Avoid procedures and specifications. Embrace missions, goals, and intentions. Rely on what you do know. If all you know are your company’s qualifications, then make everything about them. Have research tools handy. Invest in relevant textbooks. Get a bookmark tool for your web browser. Make some friends. Why are you alone? Learn the language of return on investment. How much would your win rate need to increase to pay for some help? If you don’t know the numbers, learn them. The odds are that a small increase in win rate will more than pay for the help you need. I’ve talked to companies that bid everything they could find and had win rates as low as 7%. At 15% they’d double their revenue. It would be like doubling the number of leads they have. What would they invest to double the number of leads they have? That’s what they should be investing in improving their win rate. They need you to quantify and explain it to them. Note to companies reading this: If you don’t want your proposals written like this, don’t leave people alone. Get them the information they need. Every once in a while, give them a little help. If you see these things in your proposals, it’s a good indicator you’ve overloaded your staff, those who know the details aren’t providing them, or no one knows the details. Note to proposal staff: If you’re doing these things because you didn’t know any better, change now. If you understand the relationship between win rate, lead identification, and revenue, you’ll never let this happen. But we see it all the time. If you find yourself here and don’t know how to escape, reach out. We can help.

what matters to the customer.

Summary What the customer cares about depends on what they are buying. The closer things get to a commodity, the less the vendor matters and the more that price matters. The closer you get to a unique solution, the more trust and risk matter. Products and services can be either unique solutions or commodities, but what matters to the customer about products and services is different. How the customer perceives their need in relation to this chart matters. If it does not match what you offer, then your positioning will be wrong. Perceptions may not be clear and range over an area instead of point, and may be subject to change, although this can be a tough sale. How to correctly position your offering depends on having the right information about the customer and their needs. The items in the middle can lean towards the corners. For example, what matters about "risk" can depend on the nature of the offering. What is the nature of what your company's offering? Where is your offering in the mix? If a company is not highly focused, they all may seem to apply. Sometimes company's have multiple offering that might not group together on the chart. This might appeal to a broader group of customers, or require different approaches to market. The goal of thinking about this is to see if you can: Anticipate what will matter to the customer? Gain better customer insight by bringing some structure to your customer interactions? Implement a process or model that makes it easier to figure out what to do about it, once you've discovered what matters to the customer. Convert a structured like this into a process that drives customer awareness into the written proposal? You can use this model to connect the dots and streamline the transition from sales to the proposal. You can also use it to increase win probability, by bringing a little structure to your message development instead of making it up during proposal writing. Discussion topic: To design your process, you need to honestly assess what your company offers so that you can implement a process that guides people to discover the customer's concerns and address them with the correct positioning. Different people in your company may have a different perception of your offerings, making the discussion itself a valuable exercise, separate from the process considerations. Also, your current offerings may different from past or future intended offerings. Ultimately it is not even your perceptions that matter. Use the chart to discover what matters to the customer and how to position accordingly.

2019 adds up to some big numbers Since we started in 2001, we have had over 8 million visitors. That's nearly half a million visitors a year, on average. Over 71,000 have requested to join our newsletter. Over 3,500 became PropLIBRARY Subscribers. A lot of people who need to win proposals for their business to succeed give us their attention and we appreciate it so much. I remember when I started down this path and could remember all their names. I still try to respond to nearly all the support requests myself. The topics we published in 2019 covered a mixture of business development, capture, and proposals, with preparing to win as a common theme. The best free articles we published in 2019 Are you one of these 11 kinds of proposal manager? How to make better proposal decisions by using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Why you can’t just follow the steps to create a great proposal Examples of proposal content planning using MustWin Now 47 questions that tell you if the way you are preparing your proposals is any good Improving your win rate by asking the right questions Proposal writing: 10 before and after examples 16 things that need to happen long before proposal writing starts How to get ready to win before the RFP is released 6 examples of bad proposal writing and how to fix them In 2019 we released MustWin Now as a free benefit for PropLIBRARY Subscribers MustWin Now takes our recommendations related to how to win your pursuits, and turns them into a tool. Instead of learning about the MustWin Process via online training and written materials, and then implementing and following it, you simply use MustWin Now. The "process" simply becomes what you do, and what you do makes sense and delivers immediate gratification. And all of our online training and content becomes guidance available within the tool to inspire and accelerate everything people do to win your proposals. We thought about packaging it as a separate product, but instead we chose to add it on top of all the other benefits of subscribing to PropLIBRARY. We didn't even raise the price. If subscribing to our online training and content library and using it to supercharge your company's growth was worth it before, it is now doubly so. The best of the premium content we published for PropLIBRARY Subscribers in 2019 Our premium content is far more practical and detailed than the free articles listed above and provides information that is ready to use as checklists, templates, forms, etc. In 2019, we focused on a combination of process tools and and practical resources that can help solve key problems. The MustWin Process Architecture Assessing the impact of the organizational layer on your process Assessing the impact of the input layer on your process Assessing the impact of the performance layer on your process 6 targets for relationship marketing and 5 ways to reach out to potential customers How to build quality into every step of your proposal What's the difference between capabilities and corporate experience? A simple formula for influencing the RFP Why all proposal reviewers need training before every review Proposal Quality Validation Implementation FAQs Looking forward to 2020 Next year, our development efforts will focus on MustWin Now, while our content efforts will focus on integration. By integration, I not only mean integrating content with MustWin Now, but also integrating the articles themselves with how they are used. Think of the titles above organized through a user interface that enables people working on a pursuit to drill down to whatever detail they need in that moment, while using MustWin Now to take action on the recommendations. That's where we're heading. We're actually already there when it comes to topic coverage. But I want it to be more streamlined and intuitive, and that means reorganizing the content to better fit the new workflow. That ends up being quite a bit more work than it sounds. Don't expect a lot of fireworks and flash. The more intuitive we make things, the less things will stand out. PropLIBRARY and MustWin Now will just be there with what you need, when you need it, and it won't be as hard for you to produce great proposals. What you will notice is your win rate going up while your stress levels go down.