5 ways MustWin Now increases your competitiveness

Instead of focusing on document assembly from lowest common denominator reusable parts from past proposals that were optimized in all the wrong ways for the current pursuit, MustWin Now focuses on helping you create a better proposal than your competitors. 

The design of MustWin Now puts the priority on doing whatever is necessary to win by supporting people working on proposals with the guidance, information, and management they need to write a better proposal than their competitors. It definitely makes things quicker and easier. But our priority is winning because that makes any effort required profitably worth it.

A big challenge with being competitive is that you start the proposal as you are, instead of how prepared you’d like to be. From the moment you start the pursuit, MustWin Now helps you be more effective, and that’s what makes you more competitive. 

1) Increasing competitiveness before RFP release

Most pre-RFP efforts get bogged down in teaming and end up contributing very little to the proposal. If you’re lucky, you get a list of themes. Sometimes you don’t even get that.

MustWin Now increases your competitiveness during the pre-RFP phase in four ways:

1. It prompts people to think about dozens of questions like what matters, what your differentiators are, how you should position or ghost against your competitors, how what you know about the customer should impact what you write, etc.
2. It guides you to turn what you know into instructions for proposal writers. This is crucial because it’s the bridge from “we know stuff” to “we know how to win.”
3. After RFP release, it provides tools to drive those instructions into the document in all the right places.
4. Its collaboration toolbox enables you to manage pre-RFP assignments, track progress, review results, ask questions, get help, and make the most of the time until the RFP is released.

2) Increasing your competitiveness when you start at RFP release

The challenge to starting at RFP release is to make the most of what you know. This requires quickly surfacing what you know and then figuring out how to make use of it in your proposal in ways that maximize your evaluation score. The Proposal Input Forms in MustWin Now are a variation on the pre-RFP forms designed for use at RFP release. They can increase your competitiveness in the four ways described above, even when you get a late start by quickly assessing what you do know about the customer, opportunity, competitive environment, and your own strengths and weaknesses. 

The quicker you can get this information to your proposal writers, the better. And MustWin Now lets you map the implications of what you know to individual proposal sections and assignments.

3) Increasing competitiveness by making your proposal about things that matter

If your writers don’t know what points to make, you are likely to produce a proposal that is, quite literally, pointless. You often see this when proposal teams put all their struggle and focus into creating a proposal that is merely RFP compliant. MustWin Now increases your competitiveness by:

1. Whether you start before or at RFP release, bringing forward your team’s knowledge about what matters to this particular customer and about this particular procurement.
2. Enabling you to quickly articulate the points you want to make in each proposal section before the writing starts.
3. Keeping the full text of the relevant RFP requirements in front of proposal writers, so they are writing compliant approaches, but doing it in the context of the points you want to make.

4) Increasing your competitiveness with better management and problem solving

Sometimes increasing your competitiveness means removing the problems that reduce it. Proposals frequently encounter problems. Your ability to deal with those problems quickly and effectively impacts your competitiveness. In MustWin Now we include the collaboration toolbox on every page as a reminder and to make it easier to surface issues. Once an issue has been reported it shows up in a dashboard where you can sort and filter by section, severity, user, deadline, and more. Users can click a single button and switch between whether they see the issues that affect them or all issues. A calendar view shows when things are due and what things are overdue. People can ask for help or a quick review of something they’ve done. You get continuous, real-time progress tracking and status awareness. You’ll find yourself conducting meetings with MustWin Now open to add or update issues, manage resources, and more. You’ll save time through quicker response, but more importantly, you’ll prevent last minute surprises and unresolved issues from damaging your competitiveness.

5) Increase your competitiveness by making sure nothing got overlooked

Between the Content Planning Tool and the Collaboration Toolbox, you can itemize what should get written, how it should be presented, who should be doing what, and any issues that have been encountered. Instead of open-ended subjective proposal reviews, you can validate that everything that was supposed to go into the proposal made it in and in the way it was supposed to be presented. You can track and work the issues through a process of elimination. But nothing hides. Nothing gets forgotten. 

Beating your competitors

Let your competitors struggle with immature paper-based processes that don’t really work in the real world. Let them fail at planning before they write. Let them make all the same excuses people have been making about proposals for decades. Regardless of what position you are in at the start the proposal, it’s the ink that makes it onto paper and gets put in front of the customer that counts. MustWin Now can help your people prepare a better proposal than they could have without it.