9 problems with achieving proposal accountability

Establishing proposal accountability sounds like something you should do. However, good luck with that. Try not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

For accountability, you need direct responsibility. That’s hard to find in proposal work. Proposal development is closer to research and development than it is to project management. The proposal process is a process to figure out the process instead of a set of procedures. And when the proposal is bigger than one person, nearly every task is a collaborative effort. Just bringing up the word accountability in this environment is enough to have unintended consequences that lower your win rate. 

But here’s the real reason to be extremely careful in how you manage proposal accountability: An environment where blame and shame results from work on proposals will kill your win rate. Winning proposals requires differentiation. Differentiation requires risks. No one takes risks in a blame and shame environment. Worse, everyone tries to be perfectly acceptable. They seek to be completely ordinary. And ordinary proposals lose to simply good proposals, let alone great proposals.

Even if you don’t practice the blame and shame variety of accountability, the mere presence of it is enough to turn people ordinary. When you combine that with the difficulty in establishing accountability in proposal work, you get an environment where focusing on accountability can do more to reduce clarity than improve it.

Here are 9 reasons why creating accountability for work on a proposal is so challenging that it usually does more harm than good:

1. Proposal development is collaborative work. You can’t disaggregate the contributions of individual people when writing a proposal. You know some did more than others and some did better, but you can’t quantify it. How do you measure the amount or quality of proposal writing? How do you measure the amount or quality of the input provided by each contributor? Comparing individual contributors ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. Instead of ranking them, try paying attention to who people want on their proposal team and who they don’t.
2. Proposal reviews are never sufficiently objective to create a quantified outcome. Even when proposals are scored during reviews, the outcome does not correlate to win or loss in a quantifiable way. Trying to pin proposal accountability to review outcomes ends up being a recipe for disaster, as it turns the proposal into an exercise that’s about gaming the review process.
3. If the goal is to measure your performance against winning or losing, you can’t until the customer decides. You do not get to decide whether a proposal is good enough to win. Only the customer can do that. And while you might feel good or bad about your chances at submission, you can’t reliably quantify your win probability before award. While people claim to have “algorithms,” the best you can do is to create an accountability system based on doing the things you hope will lead to winning. Then the outcome is determined by how well you understand what it will take to win, which is right where you want it.
4. RFP compliance is not the absolute people would like it to be. The simple fact that there can be 150 pages in a SOW with a page limit of 30 pages (or less) to respond to them all proves that some of the requirements will simply not get addressed in the proposal. Achieving RFP compliance depends on taking risks and the individual customer evaluator’s level of subjective interest. This makes holding people accountable for achieving RFP compliance impossible, unless you want to keep them in fear over something that’s out of their control.
5. Proposal development is not a single workflow. You can’t set reliable, precise metrics for each task. You don’t even have the same tasks on every proposal. Differences in RFPs force enough change that you can’t compare apples to apples. Forcing things to be the same to make them accountable will hurt your win rate by reducing the tailoring needed to optimize your win rate.
6. Proposal efficiency is properly measured by ROI and not task performance.  Holding people accountable for proposal metrics other than ROI brings enough negative incentives that it’s just not worth it. It’s much better to obsessively focus on ROI, but you have to assess it as the entire pursuit and capture function, and not as individually accountable efforts.
7. Correlation is not causality. You can determine which things correlate with your win rate. But a proposal loss with a clear cause is very rare, even with (also rare) detailed customer debriefs. Be very, very careful when using data to establish accountability because you almost certainly do not have statistical significance in your findings. Without statistical significance, you can be misled when drawing conclusions from the data.
8. The proposal team does not control the volume of proposals being bid. They do not control the amount of resources available, or more often, the lack thereof. During high volume bidding, they often make trade-off decisions based on what will have the least negative impact in order to get everything submitted instead of maximizing win probability by applying sufficient resources. And they usually don’t have the authority to cancel lower probability proposal efforts to increase the win probability of the others in some unquantified way. You decided that you want them to take this approach when you overloaded them with bids, because you thought that would be the best way to maximize revenue growth. Trying to hold them accountable for what you did will not achieve the results you are looking for.
9. The proposal team usually also does not control the pricing, which is a huge component of win probability. The proposal team can do everything supremely well and still lose because the pricing was wrong. And the pricing can be wrong because the work was overestimated, corporate overhead is too high, the staff bid was too expensive, etc. 

If accountability is the only tool you have for performance improvement, you might want to avoid proposals. As a baby step, you might focus on improving clarity of expectations ahead of accountability. If win rate is your top priority, you should focus on the things that improve collaboration before focusing on accountability. But do give a lot of consideration to the ROI of the pursuit and capture function, even if you don’t have statistical significance in your data.

I’ll be over here nurturing my team to take risks, write great proposals, and compete against you while you’re focusing on accountability.