Creating a win strategy re-use library

When most people think of a proposal re-use library, they think of pre-written proposal sections. We’ve invented a new kind that can have a far greater impact on your win rates. Instead of trying to capture all of your proposal text and recycle it, which turns out to have a negative impact on your win rate, try focusing on your win strategies instead.

When you do enough proposals, you start to see patterns emerging. In similar circumstances, you position yourself in similar ways. For example, when you are not the incumbent, you emphasize innovation. When you are the incumbent, you address innovation but counter with risk mitigation. Good customer intelligence could take you in a different direction, but when all else is equal, you tend to use the same tools.

A simple formula

What we’ve found, in exploring how to combine our Content Planning Methodology with our Proposal Recipe approach to creating re-use libraries, is that you can recycle your win strategies. All you have to do is capture:

• On this topic,
• In this set of circumstances (customer, opportunity, and competitive environments),
• Here is how we positioned ourselves.

Implementation

What you get is similar to the Proposal Recipe format we recommend. You end up with a set of files, each one including:

• A topic
• A series of headings and text describing each set of circumstances
• An approach to positioning under each heading

You can take this simple foundation further by also addressing:

• Resources that your company has (staffing counts, locations, equipment, tools, processes, data, etc.)
• Anticipated customer concerns, risks, and mitigations
• What matters (about the circumstances or offering)
• Differentiators
• Value propositions
• Your organization's preferences and why
• Relevant market research
• Relevant project/experience examples
• Testimonials
• Competitive issues
• Known trade-offs
• Relevant existing graphics
• Examples of potentially relevant graphics
• Points of contact and coordination

Topics might include capabilities, experience, management approaches, processes, procedures, phases, or anything similar that fits the nature of what you offer.

Circumstances could be when you are the incumbent, not the incumbent, things are new, things are established, high risk, low risk, efficiency is vital, quality is vital, when all the customer cares about is price, you are competing with certain companies or types of companies, or anything similar.

Your positioning should reflect what you want the customer to conclude about you. This might relate to your ability to meet their goals, comply with their requirements, accomplish great things, deliver at or above their expectations, be worthy of a top evaluation score, or anything similar. Keep in mind that positioning happens in relation to other things, like the competition, RFP, things you know about the customer, etc.

You should also include proof points, supporting data, metrics, etc., with your positioning statements. Just simply having a library of proof points can be immensely helpful during proposal writing. But proof points mapped to topics and circumstances with the positioning language to use is golden.

Then add your strengths and weaknesses

If you mine your strengths for differentiators and prepare defensive positions for any weaknesses, you can help future proposal writers do a much better job of identifying the winning strategies. Anyone who is competent can write a proposal based on following the instructions. But coming up with the winning strategies is a challenge. This is where you can provide some inspiration.

Even if the evaluation criteria don't mention the words "strengths" or "weaknesses," you can often score well by addressing your strengths and defending against weaknesses. If you replace positioning with strengths and weaknesses in the formula above, it becomes: on this topic, in these circumstances, here are our strengths and weaknesses to defend against.

Be honest about your weaknesses. If you really want to win, you'll find ways to turn your biggest weaknesses into your biggest strengths. For example, if you don't already have all of the staff you should to be competitive, focus on having the strongest recruiting approach and emphasize that everyone faces the possibility of turnover at any time and that you are the most reliable long term. If your competitors lose a key person, they'll be hobbled.

The goal is to accelerate proposal writing by accelerating thinking. If people have to discover the right win strategies from scratch, it will take them longer to figure out what to write before they can even start writing.

You don't need to recycle your approaches and solutions

Recycling approaches and solutions is the kind of content recycling that does more harm than good. Having a win strategy library, however, inspires people to tailor approaches and solutions and go beyond simply meeting the RFP requirements. A reuse library based on recycling approaches and solutions degrades into approaches and solutions that are not optimized to score well and are not competitive. A win strategy reuse library helps people go beyond mere RFP compliance.

Don't try to predetermine every word

If you keep things short (at the bullet level), then you can easily copy from your win strategy library into future Content Plans in the form of instructions. These new instructions will explain how to position the other details already in the Content Plan. This will combine what to write with how to write it and produce a far better proposal far more quickly.

And because this approach addresses strategy and positioning, it directly relates to your ability to win. Over time you not only accelerate the development of your win strategies, but you also strengthen them.

When this will really help is when you are using junior staff to help prepare the proposals. In my experience this is, give or take, roughly all proposals. Being able to look up what strategies work best in which circumstances will help your proposal staff think strategically.

Recycling proposal text only leads to staff getting the proposal done quickly by changing as little as possible. A win strategy re-use library gets staff thinking strategically, which can transform all of the text in the proposal. But it still accelerates things, because most of the time spent on a proposal is spent trying to figure out what context to put things in. And most of the time wasted on a proposal is a result of someone coming in after it’s written and asking pesky questions about strategy that should have been asked at the beginning.

A win strategy re-use library can also help you get to the point where you are reviewing your strategies before you write the narrative. It can help you get to the point where you review what you are going to say in the proposal before you write it. That way you only have to write it once.