Putting lipstick on a proposal pig

Proposal writers and proposal managers do not do their best work in isolation. They need:

• The company to be qualified and capable of complying with all of the RFP requirements.
• A rapid decision whether to bid that doesn’t waste time with the deadline clock ticking.
• An information advantage related to the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment.
• Winning strategies that provide differentiators related to what to bid, how to price it, and how to position it.
• Direction and details regarding what to offer.
• Teaming arrangements to be in place.
• All of this delivered on day one of the proposal.

Can a proposal manager can save a proposal when the company has none of these things and is making it all up as they go along? This is such an annoying question because lightning strikes. It is true that proposal managers have saved proposals without having the information normally needed to win. This doesn't make it a best practice, or even a profitable one.

It’s also the wrong question. The right question is whether on average the win rate for bids like these pays for the cost of pursuit. Even if they do, doing this habitually will lower the company’s return on investment. 

This is because trying to save a proposal like this is putting lipstick on a pig.

A proposal based on nothing more than the RFP is like competing with one hand behind your back. Your win probability will be dismal because you are competing against companies who are better prepared. An awesome proposal manager will be able to create a proposal that is merely acceptable. They might even be able to eke out a proposal that is pretty good. But what they can’t do is overcome decent competitors who are better prepared. Is this why your win rate is so low?

Taking a merely acceptable proposal and trying to dress it up, so it can pretend it has substance that it doesn’t, is putting lipstick on a pig. No one will be fooled.

What it's really asking is for the proposal manager to be the capture manager, start after RFP release, manage the solutioning, develop the pursuit strategies, staff it, price it to win, and do it all while managing the proposal. How can that be a path to increasing your win rate?

You’re asking the wrong person to win it for you

When you’re in an uncompetitive position, having the lowest price is the most reliable path to winning. A good pricing manager is far more likely to save you when the company has not properly prepared. But it may very well come at the cost of your past performance when you can't perform at that price, resulting in the loss of future revenue from being unable to win with bad past performance. And it will inevitably come with a loss in profit margin from having lowered your prices. This is the penalty you pay for being unprepared.

What can a proposal manager do to save it?

The best a proposal manager can do is to be a proposal professional instead of a hero. They can’t magic your proposal into showing insight and customer awareness if you have not delivered any to them. What a professional proposal manager can do is:

• Ensure you don't get thrown out, so you have a chance to win on price.
• Play the numbers game by using language that relates to the evaluation criteria, in the hope that the customer will see relevance instead of substance.
• Put lipstick on the pig for the customer who really only cares about price.
• Hope that this will be the time that the extremely low win probability will win.

A 1% win probability will result in a win once every hundred proposals, on average. It also means that one winning proposal will have to cover the cost of 100 submissions. Not only is it an extremely expensive way to bid, but the odds are that the winner was a result of having the lowest price. Combining low margins with high costs is not taught in business school for a reason. 

What can your company do to save it?

When you are facing a low win probability, especially when you have to unseat an incumbent, the company should take risks. You are probably going to lose anyway. It’s time to bid a compelling strategy that the customer might not agree with, but then again they might. When you don’t know because you lack customer awareness, the odds of guessing right with a risky strategy are better than winning with a substandard proposal because your competitors did an even worse job than you did. 

If you don't have the guts to cancel a bad capture pursuit, then take risks. If you're going to lose anyway, get bold and offer something truly differentiated that targets the customer's goals and aspirations. And if you don't know what their goals and aspirations are, then guess. Instead of writing to not get thrown out and relying on hope as a strategy, base your entire proposal on a guess about the customer's goals and aspirations. Guess at what an amazing proposal based on what you think the customer needs to hear would be instead of watering the proposal down to avoid getting thrown out.

This needs to be a corporate decision, because it switches the top priority for the Proposal Manager away from achieving RFP compliance. 

It is far better to not have to guess. Companies that don't have to guess win consistently. They have high win rates and a higher return on their proposal investment. They also don’t chase low margins with high costs by putting lipstick on a pig. They have the guts to no bid. What would your company's revenue be if your win rate doubled? Wouldn't that pay for a good capture effort?

Or you could keep putting lipstick on the pig.