How should you define proposal success?

It sounds so obvious that few companies bother to define it. But if you want to maximize your win rate, it’s worth giving some attention to how you define proposal success. You can't intentionally seek proposal success or consistently achieve it if you're just guessing at what it is.

Let's start by looking at some common ways that people try to define proposal success.

• Anything that wins! During the proposal phase you haven't won or lost, so it doesn't help you any to use that to define success for the proposal you are working on now.

• A compliant, on time submission. Your goal should not be to simply submit the proposal. A late submission might be a loss, but an on-time submission does not mean you will win. Even if all your proposals are submitted on time, you could still lose them all. Similarly, all proposals that make the competitive range will be compliant. But only one of them will win. Being RFP compliant does not make you better than all the other companies that are also RFP compliant.

• A defect free proposal. Being free of defects doesn't mean your proposal is better than all of the other ones submitted.

Proposal success is also not determined by the amount of effort put into it, how bad you want to win, how much you like it, whether it "sounds good," the most experienced person’s opinion, what the sales lead thinks, or even what makes The Powers That Be in your own company happy.

So just what the heck in the world is it?

Defining proposal success

If you submit a proposal that to the best of your knowledge reflects all the attributes of a winning proposal, you have done everything you can to achieve success. You just better make sure that the best of your knowledge actually reflects the way the customer thinks, evaluates, and decides. 

The way we like to say it is that what defines proposal success is whether the proposal reflects what it will take to win. 

Success comes when you:

1. Conduct a reliable discovery phase that determines what it will take to win in a way you can articulate.

2. Create a feedback loop that factors past customers' award decisions into future determinations of what it will take to win.

3. Measure your win rate and the impact of the things you do to change it.

4. Measure changes to your process by the impact they have on your win rate.

If you leave "what it will take to win" undefined, or leave it up to opinion, you are just gambling. If you set your sales process up so that it is driven by opinion, you will not be competitive against companies that put more thought into it than that. If your bid/no bid process, pursuit strategy, offering design, proposal writing, and proposal reviews are all driven by opinion, you will not be competitive against companies that better understand what it will take to win. Believing that you know is different from doing the research. Belief does not win proposals. Almost everyone who loses a proposal believes they should have won.

You may have great staff, but they will lose to the staff at another company who consistently put their energies into determining what it will take to win from the customer’s perspective, instead of basing their proposal on their opinions.

If you pursue proposal quality by holding reviews that are basically subjective opinion-fests, you should take note. You could do so much better.

Ensuring proposal success

To accomplish what it will take to win, you need to:

• Identify the attributes that make up what it will take to win

• Articulate them as quality criteria

• Assess the quality of your proposal by comparing it to those attributes

To do this, your quality criteria need to be reliable. If they don't accurately reflect what it will take to win, they can actually become counter-productive and hurt the quality of your proposals.

Your pursuit should start by researching what it will take to win. Sales should not just be about having “a relationship” with the customer and randomly finding out anything you can about the pursuit. Sales should use relationship marketing and intelligence gathering to discover what it will take to win. All the deliverables and progress reviews for the sales process should build toward being able to articulate this in the ways needed to win the proposal. They provide the input you need to create valid proposal quality criteria.

Then you need a review process that ensures your quality criteria are reliable by making sure that:

• Everyone is on the same page and that how you have defined what it will take to win reflects the best knowledge available throughout your entire organization.

• The quality criteria themselves are reviewed and approved for use based on what it will take to win. This should include verifying that how you define what it will take to win is based on how the customer will reach their decision, instead of how you think they should reach it.

When you do this, you define proposal success in a way that everyone can use to ensure their role contributes to achieving it. That is something that just basing your proposals on best efforts and opinions won’t do for you. 

How defining proposal success this way produces a better win rate

With this definition of proposal success, the people working on the proposal know what they need to accomplish. Before the proposal starts they need to discover what it will take to win. After it starts, what it will take to win should be turned into quality criteria so that the proposal writers can create a proposal based on what it will take to win. And to provide quality assurance, the proposal reviews should use the same quality criteria to determine whether the writers achieved what it will take to win.