Why a proposal outline or a compliance matrix is not enough to win your proposal

When it’s time to begin working on a proposal, most people start by thinking about what they should write in their proposal. Then they begin creating an outline. And that’s where they go wrong...

A proposal outline tells you the structure of the document and not what goes into it or how it should be presented. While you can annotate an outline, that approach can't hold everything that needs to go into a proposal and still be manageable. When you use an outline as your sole planning tool, you inherently limit the quality of your plans. A menu is not the same as a recipe. Giving your writers a menu and expecting them to prepare a gourmet meal they've never tried before is a recipe for losing.

The same is true if you create a compliance matrix. That will give you a more reliable outline and a valuable tool for create a compliant proposal. And that is all. Compliance is not enough to win.

A compliance matrix is a table that is used to match RFP requirements with relevant proposal outline items. A table can only hold so much data in so many columns before it becomes impractical. You can put the outline, the RFP requirements, and a handful of other things into columns. But you won't be able to address everything that should go into a proposal and how it needs to be presented in order to win. A compliance matrix is better than a menu. However, a list of ingredients still is not the same as having a recipe and will not reliably produce what you need in order to win. A gourmet chef will not beat other gourmet chefs without better planning and meal preparation.

For proposals, it helps if you think about gathering all of the elements required to win in a form that enables you to arrange them into a proposal. Only then can you:

• Figure out what should go where.
• Ensure that you follow the RFP’s instructions, address all of the RFP requirements, and are optimized against the RFP’s evaluation criteria.
• Ensure that you address what it will take to win, in every place and every way that it is applicable.
• Figure out where and how to address your customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence.
• Ensure that you have the right offering and can describe its features and benefits.
• Account for the key points, differentiators, strengths, and things you need to prove.
• Provide information and key details proposal writers will need.
• Anticipate your need for graphics.
• Anticipate any limits, assumptions to be made, or issues in addressing the requirements.
• Provide a means to validate what will be written before you invest the effort.
• Provide a means to validate what was written when the draft is complete.
• Based on the subjects that need to be addressed, identify who you need to write which parts.
• Provide a foundation for developing the schedule.
• Provide a means to measure progress to facilitate proposal management.
• Avoid putting effort into documentation that won’t be part of the finished proposal.

You need these things to successfully write a proposal. An outline, no matter how annotated, and a compliance matrix, no matter how many columns it has, won't give this to you. You need to transition from the compliance matrix and outline into something else that will guide your proposal writers to the winning proposal instead of expecting them to stumble across it on their own by making it up as they go along.

A compliance matrix and an outline are just the starting point for proposal planning. They define the structure of the document, but are not enough to plan its content. However, once you have the structure, you can implement a methodology that will enable you to plan the content.

Proposal Content Planning is a methodology that efficiently lets you collect what needs to go into the proposal and how to present it so that you can organize all the ingredients into a winning proposal. Once you know the structure for your proposal, you can treat it as a container and start filling it up. To ensure that you fill it up with the right material, we created a set of eight iterations that walk you through what to consider putting into your proposal. The idea is to:

• Create a planning document that will become the proposal, so that no effort is wasted.
• Ensure that you address everything you should by going through the eight iterations.
• Provide a baseline that you can validate prior to writing, and then validate the draft against.

Using a separate tool from the outline and compliance matrix enables you to do better planning. It also means that your outlining efforts need only to focus on the structure of the document.

When you connect the dots, what you end up with is a compliance matrix to organize the RFP requirements, an outline to organize the document responding to those requirements, and a content plan that organizes everything you know related to what it will take to win. The result is a proposal completely built around what it will take to win. An outline, even a heavily annotated outline, is not enough to guide your writers to consistently achieve this.