Are your struggles over proposal priorities healthy or bad?

There are two reasons why your company struggles with conflicting priorities during proposals:

• Everything is a tradeoff and the tradeoffs impact people differently.
• Decision makers struggle with the same tradeoffs and so have not brought clarity to everyone else.

Here’s how this causes a reduction in your win rate. People with experience and knowledge are always in demand within a company, especially when it comes to finding people to contribute to proposals. There are many things competing for their attention. People like this can easily become a bottleneck, making proposal outcomes dependent on their availability. When you do get a sliver of their availability, it may be enough to call an assignment done, but not enough to win.

To address this, you need more people with similar experience and knowledge. To afford more people, you need growth.

If you measure the success of your proposal efforts by their ROI, you will find that it’s almost always worth cultivating resources that can contribute to proposals and eliminate win rate stealing bottlenecks. Just compare the cost to the return of an increase, even a small one, in your win rate.

Growth vs Operations

What the balance should be between growth vs operations is a strategic decision. But it is a decision that should be made and communicated. Getting by without addressing it and hoping to get more out of people by stretching them is actually a recipe for ensuring that you don’t get enough of them, and that makes it a recipe for lower win rates. The cost of lowering your win rate by overloading people is far higher than any potential cost of deciding how to balance growth vs operations and communicating it clearly.

All opportunity comes from growth. But nearly all revenue comes from operations. If you focus too much on operations, it comes at the expense of future revenue. But sometimes you have to pay the bills you have today before you can think about growth. This is a balancing act, with no right or wrong answer, and it’s okay to wobble back and forth according to your finances. However, keep in mind that getting help requires growth and growth pays for the investment. Build discussing priorities and a commitment to investing in growth into your corporate culture so that it becomes a part of daily life for everyone in the organization. 

How do accounting fictions and realities impact your win rate?

It doesn’t cost anything to give people on salary more work to do. Or does it? Organizing your company around the expectation that all proposal work will be done after operations staff complete their “day job” turns all proposal work into rush jobs by fatigued people. What impact will making this a standard operating procedure have on your win rate? 

It doesn’t cost anything to give proposal staff on salary more proposals to do in the same amount of time. Or does it? Here’s what you give up:

• Quality. People under time pressure process things instead of considering them. They skim instead of reading. They favor "good enough" to get to the next step over accomplishing goals.
• Win strategies. People under time pressure accept ordinary, acceptable proposal writing instead of great proposal writing.
• Oversight, guidance, and help for proposal contributors. Under time pressure, instead of coaching proposal contributors to get from good to great, they may just get left to figure things out on their own.

The proposals will still get “done.” They will be submitted. They will sound good and be acceptable. They might even be good, but they will consistently lose to competitors who write great proposals. Losing proposals reduces your ROI.

By adding too many low probability proposals just because there’s “a chance” you might win them, it’s easy to actually reduce the win probability of the proposals that have an excellent chance of winning. Decide carefully instead of automatically based on the flawed premise that all “opportunities” are worth pursuing. Make your decisions based on what will improve your ROI the most.

Some companies track their proposal costs and some don’t. Companies that don’t track these costs are more willing to do whatever it takes to win. And sometimes this encourages being wasteful. Some companies have budgets for proposals that encourage people to manage their resources better, but they can also incentivize people to avoid investing in preparation. What often gets lost in these calculations is the impact on win rate and the impact win rate has on ROI. 

These are the calculations that should guide executive decision making. Getting more proposals done cheaply does not equate to winning more proposals and growing revenue. In fact, putting more effort into winning more of the proposals you bid can easily pays for the extra attention. Teach everyone to understand win rate math and to account for proposals as investments instead of costs.

Cost savings 

Cost “savings” that reduces win rate can easily cost the company more in lost revenue than any possible “savings.” Meanwhile, things that improve win rate help cover a lot of costs. But there is also cash flow to consider. Future revenue does not pay today’s bills. Unless you’re well financed and confident in that future. Choose today’s priority carefully because your future depends on it.

On the ground truths

When proposal staff have to struggle to get resources to commit to supporting proposals, it is usually because executive leadership has failed to set expectations and priorities. As the above shows, hard choices may be needed. When those choices are made, staff know what the company’s priorities are and shouldn’t have to fight over them. 

They may have to struggle to deal with the outcome, but they don’t have to struggle with each other. This is key and important for developing your corporate culture. You want people to work together on the struggles and not work against each other because of them.

Making priority communication part of your culture

If every meeting should end with reviewing the action items, then every meeting should also include a discussion of priorities and how to manage them. Talking out priority conflicts at the beginning has a positive impact on team building and corporate culture. Instead of letting priority conflicts become a wedge that drives people apart, you can turn priority conflicts into just another problem that people work together to resolve. Build a culture based on struggling together instead of struggling against each other.