8 things you need to write a winning proposal

It’s not a certain style. It’s not a great layout. It’s not enough time to do proofreading or to have one more draft. It's not even what words you should use.

What you need is to know what to write about, the means to make sure it happens, and some way to know if what was written is what you want. What you really need is to:

1. Collect the right intelligence. In order to do the best job of proposing the best outcomes for the customer, you need to have an information advantage. Collecting the right information is as much about knowing what information to collect as it is how to get it. What you need to discover is what the customer needs to see in your proposal to reach their decision. 
2. Turn what you learn into something you can use in the proposal. You may think you’ve done a good job of collecting intelligence, but how does the intelligence you've collected impact the proposal? How do you turn it into black ink on paper? What should you say about what you've learned?  How will it impact whether the sale closes with a winning proposal? Instead of just seeking whatever you can find, you should seek specific information, collect it in the right format, and assess it with the proposal in mind. 
3. Have the right goals and action items, in the right sequence. The information you collect should build over time. But only if you keep gathering more detail as you go. For example, customer contacts and relationships, positioning, competitive assessments, and teaming are all inter-related. You need to do first things first. Start at a high level and then get more granular until you can answer all of the questions your proposal writers will have.
4. Get everyone on the same page. More people will touch the proposal than you realize. You need to get them all working together, sharing the same vision, and knowing what to do. Even if they are willing, this won't happen on it's own. You need to coordinate and manage expectations so that each person gets the information they need to make their contribution.
5. Have or develop the best offering. Pretty words will not help if you offer the wrong thing at the wrong price, or if someone else offers something better. Putting more effort into the proposal won't help if you are just selling what you've got instead of what the customer really wants or needs. Knowing what to offer takes you back to collecting the right intelligence. Remember, only the customer gets to decide what's the best offering. Your job is to know what the customer needs to see to decide that it's what you offer in your proposal.
6. Have a means to measure progress. You need to know if you are on track. And if you get off track, you need to know by how much so you can do something about it. You need to know before you run out of time. That means you need to plan what is going to be written in such a way that you can measure progress against the plan. Measuring progress requires more than an annotated outline you can check off. It means you need to plan your proposal content in a way that provides traceability from the 
7. Define and measure quality. You need to know whether the proposal is any good while there is still enough time to do something about it. But it starts with being able to define what the right proposal is. If you can’t do that, then you’re not even aiming at the right target. This means you have to have the quality criteria defined before you start writing, so that the writers know what target to aim at. If you do this, then not only do writers and reviewers work with the same set of quality criteria, but those same quality criteria give you a means to measure proposal quality.
8. Turn the art into a science. Measuring progress and quality means being able to quantify it. Both can be done if you have the right definitions. Collecting the right intelligence and turning it into something you can use in the proposal can both be measured. In addition to gaining progress and quality measurements, you also gain metrics that you can collect across a number of proposals to determine what correlates with your win rate. Instead of simply going by the gut feel of experienced people, you can actually make decisions based on hard data.

So how do you get what you need?

That’s where process comes in. You need a process to achieve the things listed above. Most companies don’t have a pre-RFP intelligence gathering process and a post-RFP proposal process, let alone a process that’s integrated. Most companies don’t actually have a documented process, they just have a way of doing things that evolved to deal with the pain caused by deadline pressures.

When we created the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, we based it on achieving what it will take to win a pursuit:

• Bring structure to what intelligence you collect and provide a means to measure it
• Ensure that what you learn gets incorporated into the proposal
• Put everything into the right sequence
• Get everyone on the same page
• Get the information you need to present the best offering
• Measure progress to ensure that everything is on track
• Provide a workable definition of proposal quality and a means to measure it
• Turn the art into a science by giving you a platform to collect metrics

The MustWin Process is at the heart of everything on PropLIBRARY. Instead of just providing a template, it shows you how to take what you know and use it to win.