Erika Dickson

Description You don’t create a proposal function and implement a new process that impacts other departments in a single step. It’s better to start simple and increase the sophistication over time. But where do you start? What is the least amount of process you can get away with? To understand this, you have to change how you think about process. It’s not about steps. You don’t start with fewer steps and add more over time. Instead, it’s about starting out with the right goals and improving your ability to fulfill them over time. Here is a basic list of goals that can get you started: Start the proposal with the information required to win it. This means developing an information advantage. Be able to articulate what it will take to win. This means having an information advantage and that requires relationship marketing that starts before the RFP is released. This is easy to say and hard to do. It is the core of Capture Management. Define proposal quality as one that reflects what it will take to win. This means articulating quality criteria for how to assess whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win. Turn what it will take to win into instructions for writers and criteria for reviewers before you start writing. The better you become at Proposal Content Planning, the smoother the proposal will go, the better you will mitigate your proposal risks, and the higher you win probability will go. Validate the content plan prior to writing the narrative. Without this critical step, the proposal outline and win strategies will drift all over the place and who knows what the proposal will end up being. To achieve this goal, you need to build around it instead of trying to fit it in. Review what was written to ensure that it reflects the content plan as well as what it will take to win. Don't just review the proposal to make sure it sounds good. Review it against a standard. Proposal Content Planning and with written quality criteria provides that standard. Achieving the goals matters more than the procedures you follow. You can evolve those procedures over time to more reliably achieve the goals. To simplify the process even further, simply remove items from the list. Take a look and see which items can be deleted. If you can find any. You might also prioritize according to where you currently feel the most pain. Is it pre-RFP pursuit? Figuring out what should go into the proposal and how to present it? Achieving consistently effective reviews? There is a stream of information that integrates them all. In many ways, managing the flow of information is what Capture Management is. But you can get started without having the entire process fully integrated. You can get started by just focusing on one goal. To implement the process, start by being clear about what the goals are. Then think through how to achieve each one. The more you document the process, the easier it will be to set expectations. However, simply having the goals is a huge step for getting everyone on the same page. Forget formal process language or telling people every little detail. Start with what goals to achieve and questions to answer. Give people checklists, examples, and suggestions for inspiration. Each time you successfully prepare a proposal using this approach, raise the bar. Improve your approach. If you run into problems or challenges, then consider adding goals to prevent them in the future.

Customers clearly think that price matters. They are also concerned about risk. If the price is too low, the risk goes up. What they want are the features, but what they need is compliance with the specifications and anything they are required to comply with. Your best clue as to which of these matter the most is the evaluation criteria in the RFP. Look at how they evaluate each item and how much weight they give it. Then make sure that your offering and the points of emphasis in your proposal reflect their priorities. Risk is about trust, your approach to risk mitigation, and your past performance. Trust is developed through relationship marketing, demonstrated understanding and expertise, and transparency. Trust is important because people buy from people they trust. But trust is difficult to specify or quantify in an RFP. This is the main reason why relationship marketing is so effective. So a risk averse customer will look at your approach to mitigating the risks (how well you understand what the risks are, as well as what you will do about them). They will also look at your past performance, since that is the easiest way to assess trustworthiness in an RFP. Keep in mind, when writing about risk mitigation or past performance, that the real underlying concern is trust. What your offering is, will provide, or will do matters to the customer. They’ll study your list of features because that can be itemized, but what they really want is the performance, results and benefits that result from those features. They also need compliance, both with the specifications they have written into the RFP and with any other things (laws, regulations, internal directives, etc.) that they have to comply with. When the customer assesses value, they look at the results or benefits of accepting your proposal, compared against the price. They also consider the likelihood of getting it at the price you proposed and whether you can/will deliver the benefits as described. In short, they consider whether they can trust your proposal. And they do all of this in comparison to any alternatives they may have (which can include doing nothing).

To build your proposal around what it will take to win, you must: Gather intelligence. Use the Readiness Reviews to gather intelligence about the opportunity, customer, and competitive environment. Assess what you learned. Based on the intelligence you gathered, articulate what it will take to win in the forms of lists so that you can base your win strategies and themes on it. Incorporate it into your Content Plan. To ensure that the proposal text reflects what it will take to win, you should include what it will take to win into the Content Plan. Validate that the finished proposal reflects what it will take to win. By using a Content Plan you can compare the narrative to the plan, which is in turn based on what it will take to win. The tricky part is the assessment, because that is where you turn it from a concept into the black ink on paper you need to win the proposal. To assess what it will take to win you must: Be selective. If you end up with a list that has a dozen things on it, you won’t be able to take focused action. Some things are more important than others. Part of reason why you need to gather intelligence is to discover which they are. If you have a long list and you can’t prioritize it, you need to gather better intelligence until you can. Be articulate. If you can’t say what it will take to win in writing, then you don’t know what it will take to win. Even if you have limited information or must make assumptions, you should still build your proposal around what you think it will take to win, and you should keep working at it until you can articulate it. Be criteria driven. It will help if you articulate what it will take to win as criteria that can be used to review the proposal and guide the authors. Make it add up to something. When you add up the items you’ve said make up what it will take to win, does it add up to something compelling? Is there a relationship between them? Do they reinforce each other? Make it tell a story. Out of the relationship between the items you’ve said make up what it will take to win, common themes will likely emerge. Can they be woven into a story that will drive the proposal writing and be meaningful and memorable to the customer?

Transparency is the idea that the customer can see the status of all project components and all project data. When you operate transparently, the customer knows about problems as soon as you do, and knows everything you do about them. When you operate transparently, the customer can tell if you have kept all your promises. Transparency is about not giving yourself anywhere to hide, and making sure the customer knows it. Transparency requires that you actually do things the way you promised in the proposal. Approaches Transparency works best on transaction based projects. It works especially well in environments where you can track metrics. Transparency requires that you give customers access to your tracking systems. While you can give customers access to paper-based tracking systems, it’s easier when you have a web portal. It also works best when tracking is in real time. It is normal to submit monthly reports to the customer that track issues. It is exceptional when you provide real-time access to the system where issues are reported, tracked, and resolved. Being exceptional is how you win. Instead of preparing reports by hand-collating the data and selectively classifying and editing the data, a transparent solution enables the customer to see the data as it comes in with no room for someone in the middle to selectively choose what and how to report. The cheap and easy way to be able to claim transparency is to give your customers access to unfiltered data. But this is sometimes just a way of hiding in plain sight and can increase the burden on the customer to oversee your performance. With a little more effort, you can quantify, classify, and label things so that you can provide data summaries and roll-ups in a quick and easy to understand online dashboard format. Think about what the customer needs to see to verify your performance and make that the first thing they see, preferably with a graphic display. Then enable them to drill down to the underlying data if they want. If you have an online system like this for managing and reporting project data, consider adding analytics features to it, not only for your use but for the customer’s as well. With analytics you can discover interesting correlations, like the ratio of problems to successes, the amount of effort consumed by problems vs. successes, the ROI for prevention efforts, the impact of adding staff on turnaround time, etc. When done right, this will give you plenty of facts to cite in future recompetes, and may also help justify contract modifications or changes to future RFPs. Sample Transparency Themes When you operate transparently, you can make statements like these: You will be able to see issues as soon as we do and you will see what we are doing to resolve them as soon as we do it. It’s more difficult to operate this transparently, because it gives us no place to hide. But we think the results make it worth it. At any point that you have a question about the status, you will be able to get an immediate answer from the same source we would consult ourselves. Unlike our competitors, we will have to meet every specification and keep every promise because you will be able to see any deviations. Operating this transparently lowers the oversight burden, because you have any information you wish to look at, when you wish to look at it, and can pick and choose where to focus your attention.

Ingredients What types of training will you offer? Who are the target audiences for the training? What is the training medium: instructor-led sessions, computer-based training, exercises, or simulations, or something else? Where will training be provided? What materials/courseware will be used? How you develop the curriculum? What certification(s) will students receive? What accreditation does your organization and/or instructors have? ApproachesDifferent goals can drive the need for training on a project. Training may be necessary for the use and adoption of specific tools, techniques, or solutions, or for more general, ongoing skills enhancement. Audiences can vary as well — training may be required for client staff, project staff, or others. When training is addressed in the Technical Approach, it is usually in the context of the particular aspect of the solution being discussed. When training is addressed in the Management Plan, the emphasis is generally on scheduling and administration of training, and training roles and responsibilities StrategiesIf the RFP does not require training, providing it anyway can be a competitive advantage. Training is often included as an after-thought, without much detail. Even when training is required, you can add value by providing it to more audiences, in more ways, and at more locations.

Content Plans are flexible. You can use them on simple, quick turnaround proposals or large complicated proposals. You can use them on proposals with strong centralized management and planning, and you can use them on decentralized highly collaborative proposals. In addition to figuring out what to say in your proposal, you can use Content Plans to provide training, guidance, communication, and even issue tracking. It helps to focus on the fundamentals. At its core, a Content Plan does two things: Sets expectations for writers so they know what they have to do to create the right proposal. Provides a set of specifications for reviewers to use to determine whether the authors achieved what they were supposed to achieve. The most important thing about implementing a Content Plan is not the appearance or the format, but the review. If you do not thoroughly review your Content Plan prior to writing, then your writers and reviewers may not be working from the same set of expectations. This is critically important.

Sometimes the customer needs you for ongoing services. Sometimes they need something created. And sometimes they need help solving a problem. When customers are procuring services, they face a lot of intangibles. When companies sell services, their capabilities may only be limited by their ability to hire people to do the work. This creates an environment in which the contractors tend to pursue anything they can and all look the same to the customer. It doesn’t help that most service contractors routinely claim to be “the most experienced” as their primary positioning. In this environment, positioning is even more important. To win, you need the customer to perceive your company as the best alternative for what they need when considered in the context of the competitive environment. And yet all the companies look the same and hire from the essentially the same labor pools. Sometimes the customer needs you for ongoing services. Sometimes they need something created. And sometimes they need help solving a problem. In each case, the way you should position your company to win is very different. Operations, Maintenance, Support, and Other Ongoing Services. The key issues for most customers who need ongoing services are coverage and efficiency. They need you there in the right places, at the right times, with the right qualifications. But they are almost always concerned with cost. And they need you to be responsive when issues come up and flexible as their needs change over time. They need to be confident that day in and day out you will be compliant with any rules, directives, policies, or procedures that are applicable to their environment. There will be a reason why they don’t just hire their own staff to do the ongoing work, and your positioning should demonstrate awareness of that, because it may represent a goal they are trying to fulfill. Since the customer lacks tangible specifications, they will usually focus on staff qualifications and experience in order to have something specific to evaluate. Experience needs to be related to customers concerns. For this customer, it might translate into efficiency or risk mitigation. Similarly, with quality, because there is no specific deliverable, it may really be about risk mitigation. Deliverables. When the customer needs something created, they are highly goal-driven. But their goals are more tangible than they are for customers with ongoing support needs. Whether they are asking for a vendor to create a building, a ship, or a report it’s still tangible. They want it delivered on schedule within budget and meeting all specifications. For this customer issues are more specific. For example quality and risk mitigation are usually about cost, schedule, or specifications. When the customer has a tangible deliverable in mind, the relevance of experience to what the customer wants delivered becomes more important. Since this is a goal driven customer, positioning against fulfilling the goal will be as important as (if not more important than) positioning against your ability to deliver. This customer usually has two key issues: what will you create and can they trust you to deliver it as promised? It is very important to make your offering a tangible vision they can trust. Solutions. Customers with problems to solve or challenges to overcome are curiously often the most risk averse. If they can’t solve it themselves, how can they know that you’ll be able to (let alone do it on schedule and within budget)? They have to trust you a lot in order to select you. Customers who are procuring solutions are highly goal driven and results focused. Their goal or the reason they need the problem solved may be as important to them as your approach. They want a solution that makes them better off and helps them achieve their goals. Customers who are procuring solutions tend to be less concerned about the components and more concerned with the results. They may need a wider variety of skills and expertise. They may or may not realize that. Solution vendors will often have far more expertise than the customer. This is important to remember, because the customer will be conducting the evaluation. Sometimes customers bring in consulting experts to help them perform the evaluation. The customer knows the result they are looking for, just not how to best achieve it. You may need to subtly help them understand how to make their decision. A customer’s service needs can often be framed as problems to solve. This works to the advantage of companies with strong expertise in many areas or when customers are results focused or lack subject matter expertise. It can also be a pricing strategy. Positioning In most services bids you can position as a provider of: Ongoing services or support; Deliverables; or Solutions Sometimes this will be obvious based on what the customer is asking for, but sometimes it won’t be. If you are careful and don’t present a mixed message, you may be able to position as more than one. For example, for a customer procuring training services you might position as a support services provider or as a performance solutions provider. It really depends on the nature of the customer’s needs and goals. However, the way you decide to position can have a major impact on whether the customer selects you. The different expectations, concerns, and motivations of customers in each of these areas creates an opportunity to present your offering in a way that will make it sound like a better match for their needs, even if it’s essentially the same as what the other vendors are offering.

Circumstance Sometimes the customer tells you exactly what to bid. Other times, they tell you what the problem or need is and ask you to propose a solution. When they tell you what to bid, everybody is bidding the same thing and it’s hard to stand out from the pack. Approaches When everybody is bidding the same thing, to establish a better value you must either: Offer more than what they asked for. If you focus on the deliverables, this can be challenging, because delivering more usually means incurring higher costs. And when everyone is bidding the same thing, cost gets a lot more attention. The trick is to identify things that you would either do anyway, or can do without adding cost. Provide a better way for them to get what they asked for. Better delivery terms, quality assurance, risk mitigation, faster delivery, training, and better maintenance are all examples of ways to add value. Don’t just meet the requirements, be the company that can deliver their goals. It’s not about you. If the customer can get what they want from anyone, then who cares about the company providing it? It won’t matter unless you make it matter, but it’s got to matter to them. Relate everything you will deliver to helping them fulfill their goals. Be more credible and trustworthy. You want the customer to believe they have a better chance of actually getting what they want from you. People buy from businesses they trust. A performance history, references, demonstrations, samples, insurance, back-up and risk mitigation plans, transparency, real-time reporting, availability, guarantees, and clear, un-evasive speech/writing are all things that can reinforce trust. Write a better proposal. When everybody is bidding the same thing, the way you describe and position yourself matters a whole lot more. Once you’ve established credibility and trust, it’s important to tell the right story. If they can get what they are asking for from anyone, why would they want to get it from you? If everybody is offering the same thing, then outside of the price all they have to impact their decision is your proposal. So what kind of story does it tell?

Circumstance The RFP will be awarded to the lowest priced, technically acceptable offer. This means that if an offer is compliant and meets the specifications, it will win if it has the lowest price. Better quality offers will lose if their price is not the lowest. Best value is not considered. Approaches When the standard is LPTA, you have no incentive to exceed the requirements if it is going to cost more. In fact, the incentive is to keep your costs as low as possible, even if it means barely scraping by when it comes to meeting the specifications. LPTA also changes your bid strategies in other ways. You won’t get extra points by going beyond the requirements. You get the most points by being credible. Strategy #1: Focus on credibility When everyone is lowballing the price, the customer has to really believe that you are going to deliver. So everything you do during the bid pursuit, from your relationship with the customer, to how you describe what you do in writing, should be done to maximize credibility. When is a price too low to believe? Because different people will answer that question differently, it’s not just a question of “what” to believe, but also one of “who” to believe. Your credibility determines whether you are believable. Strategy #2: Define price realism You can also try to influence how they define price realism. If the winning price is not realistic, then the winner will not deliver as promised. The customer should be on guard for this. But you can help them. For example, you can identify what items must be accounted for in the pricing so that the project does not fail. If anything on the list is not present or accounted for, then the pricing is questionable. You may also be able to cite examples of minimum costs for some items. You should try to identify things that you would like to include and that your competitors would not like to include. You should also try to identify things will raise the bar for lower priced competitors. Defining price realism works best when you can make your suggestions to the customer early enough to get them written into the RFP. Strategy #3: Influence what technically acceptable means You can also try to influence what is technically acceptable. If your approach exceeds the requirements, then you want that to become the requirement so that you can get the points, make life more difficult for your competitors, and keep them from undercutting your pricing with a lesser solution. Strategy #4: Focus on scope and not on rates Companies that lose on price often do it because they scoped the job too large. It wasn’t that their rates were too high or that they charged too much. It was because they offered to do more work that was minimally acceptable. People have a tendency to take into consideration everything that might be done, or try to offer quality by making sure all of the bases are covered. They include too much. They overbid. While you should be concerned about under bidding and not being able to perform (because negative past performance will kill your future), you need to get comfortable with minimal bidding in an LPTA evaluation. Conclusion: LPTA means you have to challenge whether a low price is really low, and whether a solution is really technically acceptable. It does no good to complain about losing on price with a superior solution. You have to anticipate the issues early and change the definition of LPTA to match your superior solution. If you have not influenced the solicitation, then all you can do is provide your rationale with your pricing and technical proposal and hope they consider it. Or you can get lean and mean and compete on price. Which brings us back to the issue of credibility. Contractors will be bidding lower prices and their performance will be impacted. Expect customers to pay more attention to past performance and references. Taking care of your performance track record will be an important part of establishing your credibility when it comes to having a LPTA solution. As the pendulum swings, don't be surprised if LPTA brings back super LONG RFPs that try to specify every little thing. Remember, the incentive for the bidder is to be minimally and literally compliant. People will be sticking more closely to the letter of the contract and not doing any extras. So the RFPs will have to specify it all. It’s just a matter of time before people realize that this isn’t actually saving any money, that rational people don’t buy things for themselves this way, and then the pendulum will swing the other way and bring back “best value.”

Circumstance Sometimes the customer tells you exactly what to bid. Other times, they tell you what the problem or need is and ask you to propose a solution. When they ask for a solution it can be hard to decide what to offer. Approaches Teach them what matters. They have to figure out how to compare apples and oranges. Instead of leaving it to them to figure out, you can help them by pointing out what matters. And if in your proposal they see the company with the best understanding of what matters, that’s a definite plus. The customer will first compare you against what they want. Before they consider how your proposal compares to the competition, and before they consider how well your proposal is presented, they ask whether what you are offering will meet their needs. If you are proposing a solution, the company with the best understanding of what the customer wants has a significant advantage. It is critical to resolve issues and tradeoffs like long-term vs. short-term, quality/speed/price, centralized vs. decentralized, etc., the same way the customer would. So how well do you know their preferences? Risk mitigation rules. They are placing a lot of trust in you when they don’t specify what to bid. How do they know that what you are proposing will work, meet their needs, and get delivered on time and on budget? Trust is a lot more important as well. But they really need to know that you’ve thought it through, have anticipated the challenges, and are going to be able to overcome them. What are they actually going to get? They’ve asked you to figure it out. Now they have to pick between proposals that are all different. So they want to look past the intangibles and focus on what they are actually going to get so they have something to compare. When they look at your proposal, how long does it take them to figure out what they are going to get? It’s all about the results. They’ve asked for a solution, so where does yours get them? This is where your ability to tell your story really matters. If they pick you, where will they end up? What will that future look like? Will it get them excited? The company that understands them will tell the right story. The company that says they understand but doesn’t paint the right picture for the future really doesn’t understand them at all.

Starting the proposal outline A detailed RFP will provide: Instructions for how to organize the proposal The evaluation criteria that will be used to assess the proposals, or at least a description of what’s important to the customer The requirements that your proposed offering should fulfill The outline needs to reflect the structure that the customer expects and incorporate everything that the customer wants you to address. Using a compliance matrix to complete your outline A compliance matrix is a tool that helps you align the relevant requirements from the RFP with the section of the proposal where it should be addressed. A compliance matrix is basically a table with rows for proposal sections and columns for RFP sections. Creating the outline and the compliance matrix go hand-in-hand. For each item in your proposal outline, the compliance matrix shows which RFP requirements are relevant. As you read the RFP, you discover requirements and decide where to address them within your outline. As you go along, you modify the outline until you have a place to address every requirement. The result is both your proposal outline, and a tool that shows which RFP requirements to address in each section. Creating an outline and a compliance matrix is the first step in creating a Proposal Content Plan. Neither the outline nor the compliance matrix is sufficient on its own to describe everything that needs to go into winning a proposal. But they are a good start. The outline provides the structure, and the compliance matrix helps you understand what you need to do to be compliant with the RFP. A Proposal Content Plan takes that foundation and adds to it everything else you need in your proposal in order to win.

When you can’t get the details to write what you want, you can still talk about things that are related in your proposal, and do it without any input. The following approaches are examples of how to do proposals, The Wrong Way. They are strategies for dealing with adverse circumstances where the best practices don’t apply. Use them inappropriately and they can cause you to lose. But if you have no choice and will otherwise be unable to submit anything, they can potentially save the day. Or at least let you submit something so that the loss isn’t entirely your fault. Describe your approach to figuring out what you will do instead of what you will do. Plan to have a plan. You can position this as a plan for delivery and base the schedule on when you will figure things out after the project starts. You can describe what you intend to give them and the benefits of having it even though you don’t know how it will be achieved. You can strengthen your approach and make it sound well thought through by describing your criteria and methodology for making decisions. Talk about things instead of identifying them. Talk about how important they are. Say how committed you are to them. Talk about the benefits of having them. Just don’t say what they actually are. This is great when talking about risks, metrics, or components of things. For example, you can talk about risk mitigation, without actually identifying the risks. Or talk about how metrics are an essential part of your approach, without actually identifying the metrics you will track. In the most extreme cases, you can even talk about your approaches without actually defining them. Talk about your experience instead. Talk about how you did it for others and how you’d like to do the same for them. Just don’t say what “the same” means. Talk about the similarity of the size, scope, and complexity of those projects to theirs. You may have to skip the parts where you explain how they are similar. One nice thing about this technique is that you can claim to be experienced, even if you can’t name the projects. Just make sure that you talk about the benefits of having that experience and how you will bring them to the new customer if selected! Focus on your capabilities. When you are really stuck and don’t know enough about the customer, what the delivery process will be, or your other projects to attempt the above, then focus on your capabilities. You can be capable of delivering everything the customer requires. If you can’t say how you’ll do it, how you’ll figure out how you’ll do it, what it consists of, or when/where you’ve done it before, spend your time talking about how capable you are of doing it. Just state your compliance. If you can’t get input explaining how you will fulfill the requirements, just say that you will fulfill them. This works best for items that get a cursory checklist-mentality evaluation and for proposals where the page limitation is ridiculously short compared to the page count of the requirements you are responding to. For anything else, it can be risky. Most RFPs tell you not to simply repeat the RFP requirements within your proposal and to explain how you will fulfill them. But sometimes the customer just wants you to acknowledge that you’ll fulfill them and make them part of the contract. Your need to get the proposal submitted before your deadline should be greater than your concern about the chance you might not get away with it before you try this approach. If you do, consider lumping as many requirements together as you can into tables where you can respond to them with a single statement and avoid a lot of writing. If all else fails, talk about your intent. What would you like the outcome to be? That is what you will deliver. You can look at goals and intent at the individual requirement level, as well as the project level, or even at the organizational level. Instead of competing on what you will do, it’s competing on how much more committed you are to how things will turn out. While this is the weakest form of proposal writing, it requires the least amount of input. This approach can also be done in combination with any of the others.

A Strategic Plan, in addition to identifying markets and targets, also defines the high-level positioning for your company. Unless it gets ignored. Most proposals are conducted without any consideration of the strategic plan, and all of the positioning elements like win strategies and themes are re-invented in isolation. Sometimes people who have read the strategic plan try to keep it in mind. The list of questions, goals, and actions items that the Readiness Review methodology uses gives you a vehicle to insert positioning actions and guidance into the pursuit. The Strategic Plan should also be used as a filter to guide bid/no bid decisions. Each of the Readiness Reviews is already a bid/no bid decision point. All you need to do is add the considerations from your Strategic Plan to turn them into a filter. By inserting positioning guidance and a strategic bid decision filter, you ensure that the proposals you submit reflect your Strategic Plan. You also help ensure that your bids add up to the market position you are seeking and that you waste less effort on opportunistic bidding. This is exactly what you need in an environment with more companies chasing fewer bids that are worth less and using fewer overhead staff to do it. When you integrate strategic planning and Readiness Reviews, you get a way to track metrics related to your strategic plan and how it impacts your win rate. At each Readiness Review, each question, goal, and action item gets graded. When you insert items related to your strategic planning objectives, they get graded as well. Track the grades and analyze their impact on your win rate. You will also be able to see how many bids do or don’t support your objectives, and you will also be able to measure when they start (on time or late) and whether they trend more or less strategically over time.

Ingredients What is your plan for quality control and quality assurance? Who is responsible for quality oversight? What standard operating procedures will you put into place? What standards you will use to assess and improve quality? What is the role quality planning in each phase of the project? How will the customer benefit from your approach to quality? How will you perform inspection, sampling, and review? What quality records will you keep? How will you solicit and collect feedback? What surveys will you conduct? How will you use feedback to improve quality? How will you collect and document lessons learned? How will you measure success? How will you define, measure, and address defects? What indicators of quality problems will you look for and how you will monitor them? How will your quality approach reduce the cost of rework, scrap, and failure and lower operational, support inventory, and material handling costs? How will your quality approach improve response times and other performance metrics? How will you achieve continuous improvement? Approaches When it is not a separate section of the proposal, it is often included under its own heading in the Management Plan. You can incorporate formal methodologies for Quality Assurance into your response. If you do not have any expertise with methodologies such as ISO 9000, Six Sigma, or the Capability Maturity Model, you should focus on inspection and validation of performance. For example, deliverables should comply with a set of specifications, and be inspected to ensure compliance. Your proposal should identify the standards and methods for performing inspections. Sampling may be used instead of inspecting every single item, but there should be some form of oversight of quality efforts. The proposal should also address how the inspections themselves will be verified and monitored. A Quality Control Plan should, at a minimum, address: Who will inspect what? How inspections will be conducted The frequency of inspections Who will oversee quality efforts? What quality records will be kept? A typical quality plan might include self-inspections using a checklist, inspections performed by an on-site manager using a similar checklist, and periodic inspection of a random sample of completed checklists by someone outside the project to ensure compliance. Quality Plans often include their own organization charts and roles/responsibilities tables. Quality Plans also often include tables of performance standards, inspection types and frequency, and quality record keeping. Another common element of quality programs is to ensure that processes are documented and that this documentation is maintained. If possible, you should include your process documentation (or at least a summary) in your proposal, to show the customer exactly what you will do, how and when you will measure and assess it, and how you will provide quality control. If you do not have the process documentation to include in the proposal, then you should describe how you will prepare it, what it will address, which processes will be included, when it will be completed, and how it will be maintained. Version control and configuration management are also important elements of quality assurance, especially with regards to your quality program documentation. Strategies In service proposals, customers want to know that they can trust you to perform as promised. In product proposals, they want to know that there won’t be any defects. Everybody promises quality in their proposals. Your quality plan should make your promises believable. When the RFP does not require a quality plan, providing one anyway can be a competitive advantage.

Most proposal introduction paragraphs are wasted space. They are written like the writer needed to get warmed up while figuring out what to say. And yet when the customer looks at your proposal, wondering what’s in it for them, it’s the first thing they read. The introduction is not for describing yourself before presenting the proposal. Everything that you say in the introduction should be presented in support of what the customer is going to get if they accept your proposal. Questions to Answer in the Introduction What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? How does your bid relate to the evaluation criteria? Why should they select your bid instead of that of a competitor? How does your proposal relate to what matters to the customer? What does the reader need to know before they read your proposal? Who are you, why do you matter to the customer, and what do they need to know about you before they read your proposal? Why should the customer trust you? Do you meet any customer standards for special consideration, such as being a small business or a local firm? Why are you sending them a proposal? What action do you want them to take? What alternatives do you need to address? What are your key qualifications? Do you need to introduce any team members or subcontractors right from the start? Do you have any examples to cite that are so compelling they should be in the first paragraph? What other customers have you worked for and are they so compelling they should be part of the introduction? Approaches If there is an RFP with written evaluation criteria, then the customer is more interested in scoring your proposal than reading it. You should make that easy, right from the beginning. If there are only a few evaluation criteria, then you should provide a sentence summarizing what the evaluator should conclude about your submission for each of the criteria. Your introduction might be a single sentence describing what the customer will get if they accept your proposal, a sentence for each of the evaluation criteria, and a conclusion that states why they should select your bid instead of that of a competitor. If you have never had contact with the customer before, then you may need to establish your qualifications. This does not mean that the introduction should be about describing your company. Its should not be about who you are, but rather about why you matter (to the customer). If the proposal was unsolicited, or if the customer has alternatives other than accepting a proposal, then you must motivate the customer to accept your proposal, and you should do that right from the beginning. If the customer is not sufficiently motivated, they may not even read further. The best way to motivate a customer is to focus on things that really matter to them. If the customer is facing a choice between alternatives, then you may wish to position yourself as better than those alternatives right from the beginning. If your bid includes teaming partners or subcontractors, you may or may not wish to introduce them at the start of the proposal. If the teaming partners are a key reason why the customer should select you, then you should introduce them in the beginning. If they are playing a support role, but aren’t a key reason why the customer would pick you over someone else, you can introduce them later in the document. Strategies for Writing the IntroductionWhen writing the introduction, you should focus only on those things that the customer must know before they read further. It’s tempting to see everything as “important.” But the introduction is more about what comes first than what’s important. Important things might go in the second paragraph (or anywhere appropriate in the rest of the document), after they’ve been properly introduced. Recipes for a Proposal Introduction Paragraph Here are half a dozen ways you can build a proposal introduction paragraph. Each describes the question to answer or what to say in the first and last paragraph, along with what should go in between. Standard introduction: First sentence: What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? Middle: What does the reader need to know before they read your proposal? Last sentence: Why should they select your bid instead of that of a competitor? For written evaluation criteria: First sentence: What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? Middle: One sentence addressing each major evaluation critierion Last sentence: Why should they select your bid instead of that of a competitor? Giving them what they want: First sentence: What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? Second sentence: Proof that your company can fulfill the requirements or meet the specifications Third sentence: Proof that your company can deliver or be trusted Last sentence: How they will benefit from your ability or experience handling projects of similar size, scope, and complexity First contact: First sentence: Why are you sending them this proposal? Second sentence: What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? Third sentence: Who are you and why do you matter to the customer? Last sentence: What do they need to know about you before they read your proposal? Choices: First sentence: What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? Second sentence: Why it’s their best alternative Third sentence: How it will fulfill their goals Last sentence: Why you are the best one to provide it Motivation: First sentence: What will the customer get if they accept your proposal? Second sentence: Why it’s their best alternative Third sentence: What they have to do to obtain it Last sentence: Why they need to take action now