5 ways to integrate the MustWin process into your daily routine

How you get people in the habit of following a process depends on how you roll out or introduce the process to them. Most people like change to be incremental. Focusing on one problem at a time is easier to swallow then changing how you do everything from start to finish. Here are five ways that companies can begin implementing PropLIBRARY, based on where they see their biggest needs for improvement. You don't have to start at the beginning, you can start with any one of the following:

1. Implement Readiness Reviews to tell you what information to seek and to provide measurable progress checks that ensure readiness to win at RFP release. They are designed to make the best use of the time available, so if you start ahead of RFP release they define your preparation goals. If you start at RFP, they assess what you know in order to progress as best you can. If your weakness is knowing enough about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment to create superior win strategies and you have influence over how the pre-RFP process is conducted, this is a good place to start.
2. Implement Content Planning to provide a better way to figure out what to write. If you lack inspiration, or if you find yourself creating an endless cycle of draft after draft seeking to stumble across what should go in your proposal, then by introducing our Content Planning methodology you can learn how to nail it on the first draft. Once you start using Content Planning, you set the stage for Proposal Quality Validation, and quickly realize that you need Readiness Reviews to provide the right information to complete the plans.
3. Implement Proposal Quality Validation to achieve consistently effective reviews. Most companies review their proposals. But most reviews have questionable value because the approach to the reviews amounts to rounding up experienced people and asking for their opinions without any structure or guidance. The MustWin Process uses Proposal Quality Validation to define quality and measure it. It achieves consistently effective reviews. When combined with Content Planning, it enables writers to know how they will be graded while they are doing the writing so that reviews become less traumatic. Because Proposal Quality Validation links the narrative drafts to the Content Plan which is in turn based on the output of the Readiness Reviews, when you implement all three you get a fully integrated process.
4. Implement metrics and measurements to get scientific about strategy. By far the best way to implement the MustWin Process is to implement it as part of a company-wide metrics program and then change the reports used in executive level meetings to include the metrics. The MustWin Process enables progress and quality to be measured in ways that have never before been possible. Instead of talking in circles about the leads you are tracking, start talking about your Readiness Review scores and watch you win rates soar because people will have to actually achieve goals in order to have the metrics to report. Content Planning will enable you to measure the progress of writing. Proposal Quality Validation will enable you to measure the quality of your proposals. Track the metrics over time and you’ll discover things about what increases the win rate at your company that will surprise you. The biggest problem with this approach is that it is top-down. It requires the executive level to adopt the process first.
5. Just wing it. If you jump into PropLIBRARY and start anywhere, you can improve upon the status quo. Even if you skip all that process mumbo-jumbo and go straight to the Proposal Cookbooks to speed up the writing, you’ll discover the way they are structured makes the writer think about strategies and approaches. Once you get them thinking about it, it’s a small step to get them to think about it in advance and start using Content Planning, or to start doing Readiness Reviews to help them figure out which approaches and strategies lead to the best chance of winning.

You can go slow or go fast

You can implement the MustWin Process all at once, or phase it in over a year or two. You can implement it on a proposal-by-proposal or division-by-division basis. It can also be used in centralized and decentralized ways, with a central group issuing plans or all participants collaborating on them. You can even phase in the level of process formality.

For example, you might implement Content Planning with the Proposal Group taking it down to a certain level, and then handing it off to the proposal writers. In the beginning, you might provide some guidance on how to take it further and not force it. Once they are familiar with it, you can raise the bar and implement reviews of the completed Content Plans. Still later, you can add Proposal Quality Validation and/or Readiness Reviews.

You can do this by raising the bar on a monthly schedule, with webinars and guidance provided each month, or you can do it by raising the bar after the completion of each proposal. By phasing it in like this you give people a chance to get familiar with it and build their skills. But this also pushes out how long it takes to realize the benefits from the process. In some organizations it might be better just to go all in and implement the whole thing from the beginning. You have to decide what’s right for the culture at your organization.