Carl Dickson

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.

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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.

Getting ahead of the RFP is critical for relationship marketing and obtaining an information advantage. Getting ahead of the RFP does not have to be hard, but it can take a long time. Those that put the time and effort into it are able to achieve an information advantage as well as a competitive advantage. This is a PDF handout, suitable for printing. It includes a cheat sheet you can print and posts on your wall as a constant reminder. ?

Slow down. Take your time. Get comfortable. Ponder the meaning of it all. These topic hubs lead to hundreds of links with over a thousand pages worth of material. Don't try to consume it all in one sitting. Study them like a book that can change the future of your company and the direction of your career. Or maybe just give you an occasional smile. Before the proposal: business development and capture Relationship marketing Making effective bid/no bid decisions Preparing for proposals ahead of RFP release How to respond to Request for Proposals (RFP) and win How to design an offering your customer will love How to plan your proposal content so it meets everyone's expectations Articulating bid strategies and proposal themes Writing proposals from the customer's perspective Making proposal writing faster and easier Making proposals simple Recycling proposals, creating proposal templates, boilerplate, and re-use libraries How to validate the quality of your proposal Successful proposal process implementation Winning vs. Losing Proposal win rates and how to improve them Doing proposals the wrong way Now. What are you going to do about it all?

Form for implementing our recommendations from the article, 36 ways to tailor proposal re-use content before using it. Use it to assess proposal re-use material against the current environment to enable you to determine how to best tailor it.

When you recycle proposal content, you can’t rely on people to simply tailor it. You can’t rely on them because you can’t count on them to be aware of everything that has changed. Unless you tell them. Re-using proposal content requires more than just updating it. It requires changing the context to reflect everything that has changed about the customer, your company, your offering, the competitive environment, and the external world. People often think nothing has changed. Sometimes this is because the work that they will do on the project really will be the same as what they did before. However, while the work may be the same, the words required to win it likely will have changed far more than anyone realizes. I challenge you to find out. I challenge you to do a before and after comparison. The challenge is to compare your current circumstances with the previous circumstances to determine what has changed in the environment that should also change the writing. It’s a simple before and after comparison. Only it’s not so simple. There are a lot of considerations. After reviewing them you may confidently conclude that nothing has changed. Or you might discover that it will take longer to edit what you have than to create something fresh. I’m betting that re-use will only save you time if you do not properly assess what needs to change. But take the challenge and find out. If you have or intend to build a proposal re-use library, you should build in procedures for doing this assessment every single time your content is recycled. You should challenge your users to prove that re-use is safe and that it will save time. For form for quick implementation. PropLIBRARY subscribers can also use MustWin Now to guide your proposal contributors to make considerations like these and write your proposals based on them. Consider each of the following to determine what is different about the circumstances for this proposal that should be used to tailor your re-use material: Who will perform the activities described? Who will receive the results described? Who will be impacted? Who will interact? Who will oversee performance? What RFP requirements are new? What is required to achieve compliance under the new RFP? What RFP contract terms and pricing requirements have changed? What RFP formatting and submission requirements have changed? What RFP terminology is different? What matters to this customer? What points should be made? What results need to be achieved? What approaches, procedures, methods, etc., need to change? What tools, assets, resources, etc., are needed? What subcontractors or teammates will be used? What needs to be updated? What differentiates our offering? What is required to get the highest score under the new evaluation criteria? What risks are anticipated? Where will work be performed? Where will deliveries be made? Where will work products be used? Where will resources be obtained from? How will schedules change? How will the customer be impacted? How will risks be mitigated? How will quality assurance be achieved? How will roles and responsibilities be defined? When will performance start and end? When will interactions occur? When will decisions be made? When will customer participation and input be required? Why were these options selected and these trade-offs chosen? Why does what we’re proposing matter? Why is what we’re proposing this customer’s best alternative? We prefer to use questions like these in MustWin Now to drive people to write a great proposal that is a perfect match for the new circumstances and is optimized to win. Writing to win is profitable. Recycling to avoid writing may enable you to complete the document but is less profitable. The increase in your win rate easily pays for doing your proposal well compared to taking an easier approach that produces a less competitive proposal. Instead of accelerating your efforts and helping you get ahead, recycling proposal content means starting from behind. Instead of thinking it through and moving forward, recycling proposal content means you think it through and then go back and have to think some more about how to fix what was done before. You may actually have more work to do because you started from something already written. But often the only way to get people to realize that is to have them try. So challenge them!

Most proposals are won or lost before they begin. Either you go into the proposal with an information advantage, or you are trying to fake your way through the proposal without one. Even though this is true, most companies don't have a mature process for pursuing a lead before the proposal starts. Their process amounts to: Hire a good salesperson, whatever that means, to dig up some information. Create the illusion of process by having bid/no bid reviews. As a company matures, bid/no bid criteria tend to become more sophisticated. However, believing you have a chance at winning is not the same thing as having the information you need to write the winning proposal. Having a standard for whether to bid a pursuit is not the same thing as having a process for lead pursuit and capture. When most companies start thinking about formalizing their pursuit and capture process, they often only think about activities, like meetings, events, and contacts. And because they don't know what sequence the events will occur in, they can't imagine how to turn it into a process. They create bid/no bid criteria and often just make the rest up as they go along. What they need are goals for pursuit and capture. Goals inform people about what they should accomplish. And goals can be used to prepare to close the sale with a winning proposal. 1. Establish that you have an acceptable lead When your prospecting efforts appear to have found something, you need to establish that it's an acceptable lead. Some companies track every lead they consider. Some companies only track leads they intend to pursue. Some companies incentivize lead discovery. It’s not a lead until it has been accepted as such. Note that an acceptable lead still needs to be qualified as worth investing in pursuit. An acceptable lead is generally one worth looking into so you can determine whether it is a potential match for your company. What is required to identify a lead as acceptable at your company? 2. Qualify that the lead is worth the expense of pursuit Once you have a lead, the next goal is to qualify the lead and prove that it is worth pursuing. This goal is an investment decision, because capturing a pursuit is expensive. Some companies have rigorous requirements for qualifying a lead, while other companies merely need to know if they can do the work. The level of effort put into lead qualification is usually proportionate to the cost of closing the sale with a winning proposal. If you sell commodities and crank out lots of proposals, lead qualification might be a simple checklist. If you sell complex services or unique solutions in a competitive environment with large, complex proposal efforts, you should put more effort into proving your leads are worth the cost of pursuit. The criteria used for lead qualification are often similar, if not identical, to what you use for making bid/no bid decisions. A company with an ineffective bid/no bid process will also usually have an ineffective lead qualification process. In an effective bid/no bid decision process, each goal, step, or review is another bid/no bid decision gate. Each one is an opportunity to cancel a pursuit that is a bad investment. When you limit each decision to whether to take the pursuit to the next phase, the decision criteria can be more specific. You don’t have to do a detailed win probability assessment in the early stages. But in later stages that would certainly be one of the considerations. In early stages you will be operating with less information and what is acceptable then may not be acceptable for bid decisions in later stages. 3. Pursue with the intent to capture Once you have qualified that a lead is worth pursuing, the next goal is to prepare to capture the pursuit. This requires achieving several goals all at once: Discover what it will take to win Develop an information advantage Respond to customer requests (requests for information, sources sought notices, draft RFPs, etc.) Determine what to offer This phase might take 80% of the pre-proposal capture level of effort. It will require regular (weekly or monthly) progress reviews. 8. Prepare proposal input If the sale closes with a winning proposal, then it's critical that the pursuit process delivers the information needed to write a winning proposal, in the form that proposal writers will need it in. Otherwise, all that effort may not do anything to impact the award decision. What good is having an information advantage, if you don't take action on the information you have? What good is having an information advantage, if the proposal writers are unaware of its significance, or what to do with that information in the particular sections of the proposal where it is relevant? If all you do is gather information and wait until RFP release, you will not achieve the highest win rate possible. What about relationship marketing? Having a customer relationship is not the goal. A customer relationship is a means to achieving your goals. Every one of these goals will be more easily accomplished with a strong customer relationship. None of these goals may be possible to achieve without a strong customer relationship. The strength of your customer relationship is often a good lead qualification and bid/no bid decision criterion. The strength of your customer relationship can be measured by how well it produces an information advantage. Turning your goals into a process Each goal will have activities to accomplish. Each will also have process deliverables to complete. And each will have quality criteria that define whether the goal has been successfully accomplished. You should articulate your goals and design your process deliverables so that the result produces the information advantage required to close the sale with a winning proposal. That is what having a pursuit and capture process look like. It requires more than just holding progress meetings. The Goldilocks pursuit and capture process Introducing too much structure all at once can be overwhelming. A goal-driven process can be introduced a little at a time. Achieving the goals is far more important than the procedures used in achieving them. If all you do is define your goals and nothing more, you will improve performance. As an organization matures, it can introduce things that make achieving the goals easier. This is the real reason to have quality criteria. Quality criteria are better used to enable people to know when they’ve accomplished a goal, rather than simply using them to catch defects in performance. A goal-driven process is less about procedures and forcing people to do things in a particular way, and more about helping people accomplish their goals. Setting up pre-proposal goals enables you to seek a Goldilocks solution. You don’t want too little structure. You don’t want too much structure. You want just the right amount of structure. Just the right amount of structure makes performance easier for people while maximizing your win rate.

The things you need to know to determine if a lead is worth pursuing are different from what you need to know to close the sale with a winning proposal. A sales process that qualifies your leads is important. It is also not enough to win. If you are addressing "Should we pursue this" and "Should we bid this" as if they are the same thing in a single meeting, it's a bad sign. Lead qualification is a determination of whether it is worth investing in the pursuit of a business lead. A qualified lead is worth pursuing. A lead that is not qualified is not worth the time or expense. Sometimes companies try to base their lead qualification and bid/no bid decisions on their probability of winning the pursuit. But if we’re being honest, this is just a guessing game. You may be using a carefully concocted algorithm and going for a SWAG instead of a WAG (look them up), but it’s still a WAG. Instead of trying to calculate probability, you will get better information by considering whether the lead meets criteria like: Size, scope, and complexity Staffing, resource, and qualification requirements Anticipated release schedule Risk Your ability to bid competitively (the best you can achieve by trying to predict win probability) Strengths and weaknesses relative to your competitors Relevance to the company’s strategic plans and target markets Acceptable terms and conditions Any information advantage or other advantages you might have Your differentiators Most companies include information like the above in their lead tracking or CRM systems. However, most companies miss other important considerations that include whether you have an information advantage and your readiness to write a great proposal (this is not the same as willingness to try). Whether you have an information advantage, how strong your information advantage is, and whether your information advantage provides what is needed to write a great proposal can all be quantified. Whether the customer will pick your bid to win can’t be quantified. Whether you are ready to write a great proposal is determined by whether you can answer the questions your proposal writers will have when writing the proposal. Most companies rely on salespeople to supply the right information based on their experience alone and their proposals end up being based on: The random nuggets of insight their salespeople dig up Whether those random nuggets get articulated and delivered in a form the proposal writers can use, which is usually not the case While it is clearly better than nothing to work with and can sometimes be decisive, it is also clear that people are fallible and perform better as part of a process that provides inspiration, guidance, and reminders. No matter how good your proposal writers are at wording around the information they don’t have, they can’t write as strongly as they could if they had the right information. Proposal writers have lots of questions. On PropLIBRARY you will find hundreds of examples of the questions that proposal writers typically have so they can write a better proposal. Your ability to anticipate these questions determines your success at developing an information advantage. Training your salespeople to answer these questions and giving them the tools that integrate these questions into the pursuit enable your salespeople to operate at a higher level. It’s the difference between sending them out into the field on their own, and sending them out with the tools and support they need to play an active role in gathering the information needed to close the sale with a win. All people do better work when they have quality checklists, guidance, and tools to work with. One of the reasons that companies have capture managers is because going from lead qualification to developing an information advantage requires different goals and customer interactions. It also requires knowing what questions to ask, which in turn requires understanding the nature of what your company offers, what it will take to be competitive, what goes into a winning offering, and what will be required to write the winning proposal. Capture managers specialize in going beyond lead qualification and preparing for a proposal. But even capture managers perform better with checklists and tools to guide them.

Companies that want to get better at doing proposals often struggle with their proposal process. They struggle with the steps. They struggle meeting deadlines. They struggle with time management. But mostly, they just struggle. Part of the reason for the all the struggles is their process. It’s not that it needs improvement. It needs replacing. And it’s not just the process that needs replacing. It’s the whole way you look at the proposal process. Proposals are not completed in stepsIt would be more accurate to describe proposals as a flow of information. Information flows from the customer to people in your company where it gets transformed, travels through the RFP, gets filtered into sections according to the outline, and ultimately put on paper. But the information does not flow in a straight line. It meanders. It flows back on itself. It goes in circles. It builds. It changes. The proposal “process” should not be thought of as steps. That’s how you end up with one step called “writing” that never ends, and another step called “reviewing” that endlessly repeats. The proposal “process” is really a collection of things you do to guide an unpredictable amount of information, from unpredictable sources, in unpredictable forms, from whatever it is at the beginning to what it needs to become in order to win the proposal. Here are five alternative ways to look at the proposal process that can help you find more success at channeling and guiding this information into what it needs to become: Training. If you work with different people on every proposal, then you can think of the entire effort as training. The final exam is the proposal. Or maybe it’s better to think of the proposal as a dissertation with a team of authors. Each thing that you need people to do is an assignment. Sometimes you need to teach how to complete the assignment. You should have rubrics that tell people what is required for successful assignment completion. Tutoring should be available for people who fall behind. You’re showing them how to win a proposal instead of mandating a process for them to follow. Questions and answers. Questions are a great way to gather the information you need. Questions can also be used to inquire whether the information is in the right format or whether it’s been transformed in the way needed. Questions can make suggestions or offer considerations. You can script the entire “process” as a series of questions. If you do, there will be a lot of questions. A whole lot of questions. But if you set them up as checklists, they aren’t perceived as a burden. Picture a checklist of questions to determine whether you are ready to start something. Another checklist of questions for what you need to consider when doing it. And another checklist of questions for how to tell when you’ve completed it successfully. Questions can do a lot more to help people contribute to the flow of information than a process diagram. Goals. A goal-driven proposal process can leave the steps up to the participants to figure out. A goal-driven process can also improve people’s willingness to follow the process, by giving them an easy way to achieve their goals. After all, following something called The Proposal Process really isn’t important. It’s fulfilling the goals that lead to winning that’s important. Quality validation. Can you define success? Can you define success for every activity? Then why not give contributors the success criteria at the beginning? When each activity is wrapped with success criteria, it’s as good as having a “process.” Thinking through and being able to put your success criteria in writing may do more to achieve the desired results than have a “process.” Issue tracking. Everything is an issue. Literally. A proposal assignment is an issue to be resolved. A lack of information or resources is an issue. Show stoppers are issues. But so are simple questions. Accounting for what needs to be written and writing to incorporate all of the ingredients that need to go into the section are also issues. Instead of tasking assignments and then dealing with the issues that come up, just track issues. A contributor’s role on the proposal is not to write something that crosses off an item on the outline. A contributor’s role on the proposal is to resolve issues. Individuals can have issues directed to them. But as a team, the goal is to resolve all of the issues that might get in the way of submitting a winning proposal.

The customer?s key concerns are often unspoken. While the RFP will ask you to describe your qualifications, it often won?t say that they are asking for your qualifications so they can determine whether they should trust you. When you realize this, you can write about your qualifications in the context of proving that you are trustworthy. Talking directly to the customer?s concerns gives the customer more of what they are really looking for and raises the apparent value of your proposal.

Your proposal process is broken. But don’t feel bad. Everyone’s proposal process is broken. And while it might be easier to accept that the proposal process can always be improved, it's better to be honest about just how broken it is. I have worked on countless proposals at a few hundred different companies. Some proposal process implementations are better than others. But all of them have serious defects and people are usually in denial about it. This doesn’t get their proposal process fixed. In fact, it makes their proposal win rates lower than they could be. This might be the single biggest thing keeping companies from maximizing their win rate. When people don’t know how to fix their proposal process, they sometimes conclude that it’s the environment that’s broken and not the process. The truth is they’re both broken, and while you might not be able to change the environment, you can change the process. And maybe fixing your process will improve the environment. When problems appear unsolvable, people stop paying attention to them. They stop thinking of them as problems. Many of the issues on this list are tolerated by most companies, because they don’t believe they can fix them. Rather than evangelize about our process recommendations, this article is about how to recognize when your proposal process is broken but solvable. People talk about the proposal instead of creating a tangible plan for the proposal People bring information to the proposal instead of what to do about it Any research done before the RFP is released doesn’t end up being useful for preparing the proposal Intelligence gathering is based on whatever people are able to find instead of discovering what it will take to win The top reasons given for bidding include “we can do the work,” “we have the experience” or “the opportunity is perfect for us” The compliance matrix isn’t validated before proposal writing starts The proposal outline is reviewed at Red Team The top goal after receiving the RFP is to start writing People think it’s easier to skip the process than follow it Proposal writers don’t know what the reviewers expect Self-assessment tools aren’t provided to proposal writers Proposal writing starts from copy recycled from a past proposal Proposal writers can’t tell you how to achieve RFP compliance Proposal writers can’t tell you how their sections will be scored or what they need to do to achieve a top score Proposal writers either don’t start from the points they are trying to prove, or don’t know what points they should be proving Proposal writers have questions that could have been answered, but no one asked the questions Win strategies are developed after proposal writing starts Win strategies aren’t validated until the Red Team Your plan for what to say in your proposal doesn’t go any further than a compliance matrix, outline, and occasionally some attachments like a list of themes People figure out what to propose by writing about it Key documents don’t make it to the proposal writers Key documents are ignored by the proposal writers The highest priority for proposal writers is completing their assignments and not getting the top score The highest priority for proposal writers is their other work Single points of failure Color team labels are used and no two people define them the same way Reviewers arrive without having read the RFP Reviewers decide what to look for on their own No two reviewers define proposal quality the same way Reviews don’t start until the proposal is in finished form or “the way the customer will see it” The most important person changes everything when they finally get around to looking at it There are no written proposal quality criteria Priorities and decisions aren’t based on the potential impact to the score of the proposal Decisions are based on what you think, instead of what the customer thinks Someone thinks there’s a better way than what it says in the RFP How many of these occurred during your last proposal?Rather than trying to solve them one at a time, look for common root causes. If you solve the root cause, you can fix many problems at once. For example, most of the items related to the proposal review process are a result of not defining proposal quality or having written proposal quality criteria. Many of the items related to proposal writing are a result of giving up on finding a way to plan the proposal before you start writing it. Solving some of them will require you to look at things differently. The proposal process is not about paper. Sure, it ends up on paper, but how it gets there is the result of a flow of information. Information must be sought, recorded, transformed, validated, and guided into a winning proposal. If you start by asking yourself how to create the document, you’ll end up with problems like those above. However, if you start by asking what information you need, where it comes from, and what guidance the other people you work with need to gather, then record, transform, and validate that information, you will see much better results.

Growth is the source of all opportunity for a contractor. Prices are locked in for the duration of the contract. Even when you account for pricing escalations, that usually just covers inflation, and not promotions, new hires, new tools, etc. Without growth, most contractors can’t even tread water for very long. Without growth, rising costs will force them to cut overhead expenses. Investing for the future almost always comes from growth. Everybody in the company benefits from its growth. If you got a raise and it wasn’t offset by cutting somewhere else, it came from growth. If you’re sitting on a new chair, it was probably paid for by growth. If you can’t get a new chair approved, there probably isn’t enough growth. If you want a promotion, you need the company to grow enough to grant it. A growing company is a happy place. A company that is treading water can be stifling. A contractor that is shrinking is a fearful place. The same, by the way, is true of people. People need growth to prosper. Most growth for a contractor comes through winning proposals. You don’t have to work on proposals. You get to work on proposals. You get to grow. You get to bring growth to the others you work with. Whatever you think your job or corporate mission is, it's really about growth. Growth Hack #1 Proposals are an investment and not an expense. People minimize expenses. When an investment is paying off, you go all in. But you have to know when an investment is generating a positive return. Win rate is a proxy for ROI. Carefully track what things are impacting your win rate (it can be counterintuitive and rules of thumb aren’t). If you want to grow by winning proposals, then instead of minimizing your proposal efforts you should invest in doing your proposals better. Growth Hack #2 Growth comes from winning and not from chasing leads. At a 30% win rate, a 10% increase is mathematically the same as adding 30% more leads. How much would a company invest in gaining 30% more leads? But increasing your win rate is better because you don’t have to chase 30% more leads to achieve it. Increasing your win rate is also more profitable than chasing more leads. On top of all that, increasing your win rate will pay off again next year, but you'll have to find new leads to chase. So invest as much as you would in getting 30% more leads into increasing your win rate and you’ll be better off. Hoping for more leads is not the same as winning. It's time to get serious about winning business. Growth Hack #3 Winning easily pays for more winning. What is 1% of your proposal submissions last year? Now multiply that by 10. That is what a 10% win rate improvement would have returned. It’s typically many times what it would cost to do your proposals well. Doesn’t that make the effort a worthwhile investment? Shouldn't you respond to RFPs like you're trying to get good at it? Growth Hack #4 Shortcuts kill your ability to grow. Do you think that it’s too hard to get ahead of the RFP? Or that you can’t make your subject matter experts available to adequately support proposals? Or that executives are too important to read the RFP before participating in a proposal review? Or that it makes financial sense to stretch the people trying to win as thinly as possible? Shortcuts like these reduce your win rate, and the cost of them is far more than it saves. It’s penny wise and pound foolish. See Growth Hack #3 and run the numbers in the other direction. Is it worth a few hours of cost reduction if it produces a 1% reduction in win rate? A reduction in win rate typically costs you far more than the “cost savings” of trying to get by on the cheap. Most companies lose before they even start their proposals. Growth Hack #5 Growth requires everyone to participate. Proposals need subject matter expertise. They need customer awareness. They need competitive intelligence. They need a price to win. They need appropriate terms and conditions. They need staffing. They need facilities. They absolutely depend on having great past performance. Not only does everyone in the company benefit from growth, but everyone in the company has something to contribute to achieving that growth. If you want to do proposals bigger than yourself, you've got to make contributing to growth the normal routine and not an exception. Growth Hack #6 Beware the hand-offs. Now that you’ve got everyone contributing, you’ve got a problem. Are people worked in silos, or are their efforts integrated? Is sales delivering the information needed to write a winning proposal to the people writing the proposal? Is sales even participating in the proposal? Are the project staff who have customer contact providing insight? What about the hand-off to pricing? Is pricing working in isolation from your win strategies? Is pricing introducing strategies that aren’t reflected in your proposal narrative? Every hand-off is a chance for things to get watered down. Here's a list of 90 things someone needs to do to win proposals and who is usually responsible. Growth Hack #7 Work backwards from the goal. What will it take to win? How do know whether the draft proposal reflects it? How do you build your proposal around it? How do you discover what it will take to win? The goal that you are trying to achieve informs each prior step required to fulfill it. Your proposal process shouldn’t start from a blank sheet of paper. It should start from a winning proposal and reverse engineer it. Your proposal process should be goal-driven and not steps that people can ignore or skip. Growth Hack #8 Small companies can’t put off growth. You’re pulled in many different directions. You wear many hats. The only thing that will make it better is growth. Prioritize what you must do to achieve that growth. Only bid what you can win, and do what it takes to win what you bid. Growth Hack #9 Don’t be afraid of losing. One thing that holds companies back from investing in improving their win rate is that they worry about not actually achieving an increase in their win rate. This is partially a result of not knowing how to improve their win rate. It's also partially because they still view proposals as creative expression based on people just trying hard, instead of a deliberate process based on quality validation. But it’s funny how they never avoid investing in sales just because it might not bring in the business or they haven’t already identified the leads they intend to pursue. Growth Hack #10 If you can’t follow your proposal process, you have the wrong proposal process. Most companies don’t follow their own proposal process. It’s usually not because they aren’t capable or dedicated. Or because the process isn't enforced. It’s because their proposal process is based on common but flawed ideas. Don’t beat your head against a wall. Throw your broken process out and start over. It's worth the investment. Proposals can be a lot of work, but they shouldn’t be a struggle every time. If you accept that a chaotic train wreck is normal for proposals, then you will never achieve the highest win rate possible for your organization. Growth Hack #11 Healthy growth requires developing and maintaining an information advantage. Maximizing your proposal win rate requires having an information advantage about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. When writing proposals, an information advantage is a competitive advantage. All of your customer interactions, whether sales, technical, or otherwise, should be part of developing and maintaining your information advantage.

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