Everyone says they have a proposal process. But what little they have on paper to describe it is different from what they actually do in practice. In many ways, the proposal process is something that is in continual development. It’s not something you write down and are done with.
But what should concern you is that most of the hundreds of proposal process implementations I have seen have critical flaws. I'm not even talking about procedure mistakes. I'm talking about having the wrong goals and leading people in the wrong direction. I’m talking about mistakes that hurt your win rate. And they are in all phases of the process: pre-RFP, before proposal writing starts, the review process, and how you wrap it up and submit it.
The difference between a 30% win rate and a 40% win rate is a 25% compounded rate of growth --- without any more leads than what you currently have. If you don’t know what that means, run it by your finance department and ask them to show you how those numbers would impact your company. You don’t want mistakes in your process getting in the way of that kind of growth. You want to be leading the charge to make the changes that will deliver that kind of growth.
Don’t:
Build your proposal process around your schedule. It seems like working from the calendar and the amount of time you have might be a good place to start, but it is misleading. Schedule drives how you implement your process. It should not drive how you design the process itself. The proposal process is based on what it will take to win. And that really doesn’t change whether you have less than a week or more than a month to prepare your proposal. Certainly, time and resources change. But what you need to accomplish remains the same. Your process should adapt to the schedule and not be defined by it.
Define roles based on the people you have. What it will take to win remains the same whether you are on your own, working with two other people, or you have a team with dozens of people or more. The things that need to be done remain the same. You just do them with more or less formality, skip more or less of them, and do them in more or less detail. Define your roles based on what it will take to win and then allocate that to the resources you have. Whatever you do, don't design your proposal process around the individuals you have and their capabilities. Design it around what it needs to be and then figure out how the individuals you have available can live up to that.
Build your proposal around steps instead of goals. Steps often break in practice because customers rarely ask for the same thing in the same way. But your goals remain the same. The steps you take to accomplish your goals can be flexible. Goals inform the steps and give people more insight regarding what to do than a step like “Review the proposal.” The goal should not be to write a proposal. Or even to win a proposal, because that is out of your hands. The goal should be to write something that fulfills your proposal quality criteria.
Fail to define quality. If you don’t define proposal quality in writing, you leave it to people’s individual opinions and will get inconsistent outcomes and ineffective reviews.
Fail to start by assessing your input. Don't ask for input at the start of a proposal and just accept it. Don't ask for input and continue on if you don't get any. If you don’t assess the input you have to work with, you won’t ever get any quality input and maybe no input at all. An assessment shines a light on the failure to provide input at the start.
Build your proposal process around more than one draft. A proposal process based on an unspecified number of draft cycles will degrade into writing without creating a content plan or trying to discover what the proposal should be by writing and re-writing until time runs out. Either way, it will not maximize your win rate.
Make your proposal process up as you go along. If you identify phases, claim you have a process, and then make up everything in between as you go along while trying to be relatively consistent each time, you do not have a process. You have a way of doing things. If no one other than a particular person can implement "the process," then you do not have a process. Create a process that anyone can follow, preferably with very little training. This can be done if you have a goal-driven process.
Start from boilerplate. If you don’t know the win strategies, the points you are trying to make, and how you want to position things, you aren't even ready to consider boilerplate. You don't know what you will be looking for or how to tell when you find it. If you start by loading up the proposal with recycled content, instead of thinking through what it will take to win, you might get a proposal that’s good enough to submit. Good enough to submit may be enough to look like you’re doing your job, but it is not good enough to consistently win.
Fail to articulate what it will take to win before you start writing. You can’t prove it if you don’t know what it is. If you don’t start from being able to articulate your winning strategies, then you risk writing and re-writing and never finding them and effectively implementing them before you run out of time. Proposals that start this way tend to end up literally pointless. You don’t want a proposal that is a collection of beneficial-sounding platitudes wrapped around statements that the company will do whatever the customer wants. You don’t just want a process that creates a proposal. You want a process that discovers what it will take to win and then creates a proposal based on it.
Focus on abstract concepts like themes instead of tangible realities like differentiators. Themes are good. Usually. If they don’t degrade into beneficial-sounding platitudes that do nothing to help you win. This is especially true when you are working with proposal contributors who don’t understand how to win. Differentiators are easier to understand and assess. Push for differentiators instead of settling for the same themes everyone else uses.
Ignore scalability. Since what you need to do to win is the same for a large proposal and a small proposal, a short proposal and a long proposal, you need a process that scales. You don’t need a different process for each. Allow the procedures to vary, but standardize the goals. Since what changes is the availability of resources and time, create a process that enables each activity to be done with different levels of resources and effort while working towards the same goals.
Put the proposal manager in charge of reviews. You might need a refresher on the difference between quality control and quality assurance. A proposal manager can provide quality control. But a manager can’t provide quality assurance for their own work products. If you want quality assurance, a proposal manager shouldn’t be leading, training, conducting, or participating in the proposal reviews. Quality assurance requires a perspective outside the proposal effort, that can consider whether the goals for the proposal at that stage have been accomplished without considering the compromises it took to get there. Your company needs quality assurance in the proposal process because it needs to validate that the proposal is what the company wants it to be. Your long-term win rate depends on it.
Give the proposal manager writing assignments. If a proposal manager is writing, that proposal manager is not managing. Can they do a little of both? Definitely. Do you really want only a little bit of your proposals to be managed? Or for them to be managed a little bit less?
Make excuses for not following your own process. If on every proposal you do not follow the process as it is written, you have the wrong process. Or more accurately, you do not have a process. What you labelled as "The Process" has not been implemented. Instead, you are making it up as you go along and making excuses at the expense of your win rate. When you catch yourself explaining why this proposal requires a different approach and you’re doing it on every proposal, you need to throw out your process and start over. It means your process is based on the wrong assumptions.
Fail to build the foundation for tomorrow. You’ve got to start somewhere. No company, department, or proposal ever has the resources it needs. But if you build your process around what you’ve got to work with, it will hold you back. It won’t adapt as your organization grows. Don’t build your process around the people and resources you have. Build it around what it will take to win and allocate the effort to accomplish that to what you have to work with. That way, as things change, you can reallocate resources, add specialists, and drop them into an existing structure. It also provides valuable feedback regarding where adding resources can improve your win rate.
Change your process each time you hire someone. If you’re changing your process with each new hire, that’s a sign that your process was built around the people you had instead of what it will take to win. It’s also a sign that every proposal process you had was merely a personal way of doing things.
Ignore performance measurement. Be data driven. Otherwise you’re either making assumptions or just guessing, while claiming things are based on your “experience.”
Fail to speak in the language of ROI. Why do you need more resources? Why should more effort be put into delivering the input you need at the start of a proposal? Is your review process as effective as it could be? Is it worth planning before you write? Learn not only to quantify these things, but how to explain their contribution to maximizing return on investment (ROI). Companies invest in things that generate the largest return. The proposal function is potentially one of the largest contributors to ROI in your company. But you have to prove that. If you can’t speak the language of ROI, no one is going to listen.
Trust people. A process that trusts people to do things correctly is a bad process. Just telling people what to do is not a process. A process should support people. It should wrap them in guidance, get them what they need to be successful, make it easier to achieve their goals by following the process than by going rogue, check their work, and make it impossible to fail.
How many of these mistakes does your company make? I’ve seen behind the curtains at how proposals are done at a few hundred companies. Every one made at least one of them. Most made several. And yes, some companies make all of them. Every single one is a chance to improve your win rate and maximize your ROI.
Choose the mistakes you will make. They may be necessary today, but they come with a price. If it impacts your win rate, that price could be orders of magnitude greater than what it would have taken to correct.
What's your score?
How many of these mistakes have you made or seen being made? What changes are you going to make after reading this article? Which of these would you like to fix, but can't? What would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments below.
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