4 things you need to win proposals consistently

Anyone can win a single proposal. What’s hard is winning consistently.

Winning proposals consistently is different from winning a single proposal. You have to make your goal winning every single one. Sure, we say that's our goal when the boss is around, but then distractions and budget happen and we don't behave like it's true.

Winning a single proposal is a simple matter of figuring out or guessing what the customer wants, presenting it as their best alternative, knowing what needs to happen for the customer to move forward, and earning enough of their trust through credible proposal writing that they do as you suggest. Or it's a simple matter of low-balling the price. Either can work.

What makes winning consistently so hard is that you start the proposal as you are, with what you have. And a lot of the time, it’s not what you should have. Getting good at winning consistently means always showing up with what you should have, including an information advantage, skilled staff, and a process that produces proposals based on what it will take to win. 

You can’t win consistently if proposals require playing catchup while trying to beat competitors who aren't. When you play catchup, part of your effort goes into getting to where you should have started, and only part of your effort goes into taking it further. Winning consistently requires consistent over-achieving and not consistent almost achieving or good-enough achieving. 

To behave like you really are trying to win every proposal you have to consistently do these four things, and do them well:

1. You need to start the proposal with an information advantage. If you don’t deliver the information it takes to write a winning proposal at the start, your only hope is to win on price or being a little better than your competitors somehow, and that's not much of a strategy. If instead of starting with an information advantage, you try to figure out something clever during the proposal, you will not be able to consistently beat those who do show up with some information beyond what's in the solicitation. If you want to consistently win you must, as an institutional doctrine, start every proposal with an information advantage. Instead of fishing for wins, try setting up a process based on the flow of information that a proposal needs in order to reflect what it will take to win. If you can't do that, you're not really trying to win.
2. Follow-through. It's not enough to want to win. You need to invest in winning. It needs the right effort, from the right people, fulfilling the right expectations. If your organization consistently starves its proposals of resources, fails to set the right expectations, or simply fails to deliver, then it cannot consistently win. It can, however, consistently lose. Is your win rate above or below 75%? That's a big clue about how much effort your organization really is putting into winning. What is the ROI of increasing your win rate? If you don't know, you're not even trying to win consistently. The path to consistently winning is not throwing bodies at proposals, increasing your bid volume, or having a proposal process. It is having an organizational culture that identifies what it will take to win, successfully delivers the right resources, and completes assignments on time as if winning matters.
3. Define proposal quality and have a way to measure whether you have achieved it. If you commit this sin, you will not consistently win. You must define proposal quality in a measurable way in order to know whether you have achieved it. You can't consistently win without knowing what it will take and measuring yourself against it. When you define what it will take to win for your writers so that they know what they need to do to achieve it and can compare what they’ve written against what it needs to be, then you can consistently achieve a quality proposal that reflects what it will take to win. No amount of reviewing on the back end, after the writing has been completed, can make up for knowing what it will take to win. It's not something you're going to trip over. Fixing the proposal at the back end is another variation of the catchup strategy.
4. Once you can define proposal quality, then you need to make sure your contributors have the right skills to deliver it. Proposal writing is a combination of planning and articulating everything from the customer’s perspective instead of your own. It is not something that comes naturally to most people. But when the same exact offering is presented from the customer’s perspective instead of being simply described, it shows more value and will consistently score higher. If you aren't coaching people to develop this skill, you're not trying to win. If you aren't coaching them successfully, you're not going to be able to win consistently.

Winning consistently is more about process than talent. It's about doing the right things in a verifiable way instead of finding people who just somehow already know. This means that companies can institutionalize the practices that lead to consistently winning. They can make it part of their culture. When staff are pulled in multiple directions and you know that proposals aren’t getting 100% of the attention of the people working on them, you know:

• You will go into every proposal giving it less than 100%
• Every proposal will be below your full potential
• You will enter into every competition with one hand tied behind your back
• Hoping for good enough is not much of a win strategy

To win consistently takes more than just talent. The most difficult aspect of winning proposals consistently is that it requires things that are outside of the control of people working on the proposal. It requires contributions from other people with other commitments. Winning consistently means doing everything in your power to make sure that they don’t let you down, and contingencies so that you can still win even when people do let you down. You need a process that:

• Shows them what information they need, where to get it, what to do with it, and how to transform it into a winning proposal
• Tells them how to prioritize their efforts
• Lets them know what the expectations are and gets everyone on the same page
• Tells them how to achieve their goals and not just what to do
• Enables them to measure progress and quality
• Catches them when they get off-track with enough time to do something about it

Having all that doesn’t mean that people won’t let you down. You won’t win every bid. But you will win more consistently. If you are winning less than half of your bids, you probably have some inconsistencies getting in the way.

When you do what is needed to win consistently, you get the best from everyone on your team, which is far more than the talent of any individual can achieve. When your competitors rely on talent, they will win on their good days. But mostly they will lose. That means there is an opportunity for you to be the one who mostly wins.

But you won’t get there by treating each proposal in isolation. You have to develop an organization that consistently does the things needed to win. You have to think that through, institutionalize it, and build it into your culture. That means you have to stop playing catchup and build things right from the beginning. Winning consistently is hard because it takes discipline, focus, and long-term effort. It’s so much easier just to show up and rely on your talent.