Proposal director vs proposal manager vs proposal coordinator vs proposal writer

The scope of work required to achieve a high proposal win rate is bigger than one person. If your company depends on winning proposals for its revenue, you may need a Proposal Department instead of a proposal person.

When to expand is really an ROI decision. When it comes to proposals, you do more to maximize your ROI by winning more than by keeping expenses low. It's time to expand your proposal department when adding another person will enable you to win far more than that person will cost.

What you don't want to do is fall into the trap of trying to figure out how few people you can get by on to fulfill your proposal volume. This leaves money on the table by failing to maximize your win rate. What you should pay attention to is how much revenue will result from even a small increase in your win rate. Improving your win rate, even without an increase in volume, can easily pay for the new staff needed to achieve it.

But once you've decided you need to expand your proposal support, how should you go about it? A good place to start is to consider the differences in the roles that proposal professionals often play and determine which will make the most contribution to improving win rate in your circumstances:

• The things that a Proposal Director does are different from what a Proposal Manager does. A Proposal Director might not, and probably should not, even manage individual proposals. A Proposal Director sets standards, defines processes, ensures staff are trained, and allocates resources across all of the company's proposals. They play a critical role in quality assurance for proposals. A Proposal Director also addresses problems that cross organizational boundaries, which is a common problem for proposals. A good way to look at it is that instead of managing proposals, a Proposal Director manages the win rate, ensuring that all proposals do what it takes to maximize their win rate and that the win rate continuously improves. A Proposal Director pays off by helping each proposal manager improve their win rate, and that collective revenue increase adds up to far more than the Proposal Director costs.
• A Proposal Manager implements the process for the development and submission of proposals. In an organization with a Proposal Director, they typically focus on the individual proposals they have been assigned. Proposal Managers herd the cats guide the proposal contributors through the process to complete their assignments. If the company has capture managers, a Proposal Manager works with the capture manager assigned to their proposal. A key requirement for a Proposal Manager is to understand how a compliance matrix helps you create a structure for the document that will meet the customer’s expectations. This is key for understanding the relationship between achieving RFP compliance and maximizing your evaluation score, and for providing a structure you can build your messaging around. When your Proposal Managers are focusing on submissions instead of wins, it's time to bring in additional Proposal Managers so that you have the resources to do what it takes to win instead of doing less to submit in volume.
• An organization with multiple Proposal Managers may also have a Production Manager who specializes in formatting and file management. The Production Manager is responsible for configuration management of the proposal information to prevent version conflicts, ensure backups, enable people to find the information they need, and improve efficiency. The Production Manager handles the initial setup of files so the proposal team can get to work, final production and formatting of files for delivery, and any baseline changes or file management at milestones in between. Increasing your production support can enable your Proposal Manager(s) to handle more volume and improve the production quality of your proposals. Production Managers typically cost less than Proposal Managers, but improving production quality also tends to have a limited impact on win rate. Production Management can also be treated like a stepping stone toward Proposal Management, and a way to train people to first become Proposal Coordinators and then through continued training become Proposal Managers. It's a promote from within and training them in how you want things to work approach instead of hiring people with experience obtained doing proposals the way other companies do them. The key is to train Proposal Managers to win instead of training them to produce. This approach works better when you have a Proposal Director guiding Proposal Managers to become winners.
• In most organizations, the role of Proposal Coordinator is poorly defined and ends up being a mini Proposal Manager, or someone who is cheaper, has less experience, has little or no authority and who assists the Proposal Manager. I prefer not to use the title "Proposal Coordinator" because it is too ambiguous and results in misuse of the role. I prefer to call them "Proposal Process Administrators" because what they should be doing is ensuring that process deliverables are completed, enhancing communications, facilitating expectation management, and helping to surface issues. The Proposal Director sets standards and the Proposal Manager sets expectations for achieving them. The Proposal Process Administrator documents the expectations, makes sure that everyone is aware of them, and discovers if there are any issues in fulfilling the expectations on time. This is the technical sounding way of saying that they track all the many, many moving parts that become a proposal so the Proposal Manager is managing expectations instead of tracking all the details.
• Proposal Writers are responsible for completing the narrative portion of the proposal. Most Proposal Writers are not specialists, and many proposals have at least one contributor who is doing proposal writing for the first time. A distinction can be made between Subject Matter Experts and Proposal Writers. Sometimes Subject Matter Experts are Proposal Writers and write proposal copy, and sometimes they just provide information to Proposal Writers. Either way, Proposal Writers are responsible for fulfilling expectations regarding their proposal assignments. They are also helpful for raising the bar on making your proposal writing reflect what it will take to win. The Proposal Manager runs the process, but shouldn't be taking writing assignments. A Proposal Manager who is writing the proposal is not managing the proposal. Adding a(nother) Proposal Writing to your team provides a writing resource that the Proposal Manager can count on to write based on what it will take to win, instead of writing based on their technical background.
• Proposal departments usually include specialists who form a supporting cast for the proposal. These may include graphics illustrators, editors, content managers, tool administrators, review team managers, production support staff, and others. Don't think of these staff as specialists who enable you to increase the volume of proposal submissions. Think of them as specialists who enable you to increase your win rate in the areas you are targeting for improvement.

Proposal organization at small companies vs large companies

Large companies have more people. But small businesses can be better organized. This directly impacts proposal development and win rates. Small businesses can have better win rates than large businesses. There's also the difference between small proposals and large proposals to consider. 

Small businesses often have one proposal specialist. Large businesses may have a whole department. But the curious thing is that what it will take to win your proposals is functionally the same whether you have a single person or a whole department to do it. Titles do not matter. What matters is whether you understand what it will take to win, have people with the skills to turn that understanding into proposals, and have the capacity to meet your bid volume. 

• Proposals at small companies. When a small business has one person effectively “doing” the entire proposal, it should still think in functional terms. Each person you hire will have strengths in some but not all the functions required. How will you fill the gaps? If you start with a junior or mid-level proposal specialist, who will play the role of Proposal Director? If you hire a proposal writer, will they be capable of creating a compliance matrix? 
  
  As you grow, how will you split the functions? Will you promote your first proposal specialist? Will they be capable of fulfilling the functional aspects of their new role? Will you hire someone new, give them a title, and just expect the work to get divided up? Or will you hire someone who can fill your functional gaps? As you grow, it is better to organize around covering the functionality required to win than it is to create positions based around the skills of the people you have or hire. First, identify your functional requirements and then map your people to them. Then fill the gaps. Along the way, you can also use consultants and training to address your gaps.
   
• Proposals at large companies. Large businesses need the ability to do more proposals at one time than a single person can support. They have multiple Proposal Managers. Their proposal volume also supports having specialists and a supporting cast (see above). As the number of Proposal Managers increases, they begin to need a Proposal Director. If they have a high volume, multiple locations, and major impact on the company's financial health, a large business might also add a Proposal Vice President. The difference between a Proposal Vice President and a Director is that the Proposal Vice President focuses on ROI. Proposal resourcing should be based on the ROI contribution of the Proposal Department to the company. When the Proposal Department plays a key role in the financial health of the company, ROI management needs the attention of someone who understands finance as well as proposals to interface with the company.