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  If winning proposals is a mission critical function for your company, then you can’t treat the proposal management process as a support or document production function. The goal of the proposal management process is to guide the people working on a proposal and enable them to be successful by accounting for the information, planning, and quality assurance needed. But this doesn’t really capture the importance of it. The proposal management process requires going beyond document producti

What happens when you start writing as soon as you have an outline… An outline is where you start. But it’s a long, long way from the finish line. If you start proposal writing from an outline, you will be giving your proposal writers zero guidance beyond a heading. And maybe an RFP. If they read it. You are expecting the writers to figure it all out. Even the best proposal writers need input and to think things through before they start writing. And less experienced writers tend to write

Sometimes it seems like the proposal schedule is a work of fiction or a plan that has failed before it has even begun. Sometimes you know the moment you give a proposal assignment that it will not be met.  Sometimes you and the person getting the assignment both know it is going to be ignored and no one is going to enforce the deadline. When this happens routinely, it can make being a proposal manager discouraging and feel pointless. The trap you should avoid falling into is to assume that

Our tangible training programs are all based on exercises that create the tools you’ll need to be successful. Instead of just talking about process, we’ll create the checklists you can use to improve your process. Instead of focusing on steps and procedures, we’ll focus on goals and accomplishments. We’ll help you understand how to approach each topic, how to define success, and how to measure your progress toward achieving it. These are private sessions. Only staff from your company will p

It's true that the odds of winning a proposal when you have never even talked to the customer go down so much that it may not be worth bidding. But the fact is that sometimes companies win them, so let's look at when it's possible to win and what you can do to increase your chances. Occasionally, in some markets, no one gets to know the customer before they surprise the world with an RFP. It largely depends on the nature of what they are procuring. Bidding blind is not worth it. Except when

Early in my career, after a terrible proposal experience, I’d focus on improving the proposal process because that is what I had control over. I thought with the right procedures and enough dedication to them we could fix any problem. There are a couple of problems with that: The proposal process is not sequential. It is goal driven. You won’t be successful focusing exclusively on the steps. There is more to success than following procedures. Over time I discovered that wha

Don’t start your proposal by thinking up everything that’s good about yourself that you should tell the customer. This can actually lead to bad proposal writing. Instead, start your proposal by think about what the customer needs to hear. But before you can do that, you have to know the customer. And before that, which person at the customer will be reading? Will it be the one receiving the services? The one who understands what is being procured? The one who runs the procurement

All proposals are competitive. Even if the RFP is completely wired to give the advantage to one preferred company and no one else bids, that company is competing against themselves. They can still blow it. And a naïve upstart can always come in and steal it away because they don’t know they can’t win. It may be rare, but it does happen. And customers are sometimes ready for something new. Which will the customer select? You should go into every proposal assuming it’s competitive and pus

With government multiple award RFPs of huge value becoming routine, this is a good time to reflect on the customer and how the number of proposals they receive impacts how they make their selection decisions.  What if they only get one proposal? If the customer only expects to get one proposal, or if that’s just the way it turns out, they approach the proposal with a few considerations: Does it meet their requirements? They have no other proposals to compare it to. So they compare

Claims are lame. After having sat through countless debriefs, especially the ones where the customer evaluated based on strengths and weaknesses, I’ve realized some things that explain a lot about proposals: I have never seen a customer agree that any of the thousands of claims made in those proposals were a strength.  The strengths cited by customers are almost always simple facts, like something you have or have done.  The weaknesses they cited were usually things that were

What goes through the customer’s head while they’re evaluating your proposal? In addition to all of the distractions like what time they have to pick the kids up from school today or what they’d like to do after work, the customer has a lot to consider when deciding whether to accept your proposal. Even if the evaluation is conducted formally by a robot, with forms and detailed procedures, they will still consider the big picture. But what’s in that picture? The customer will consider your

When the customer asks you to describe your experience, what should you write about it? Should you describe the work you did? Should you describe the results you achieved? Should you talk about something else? It turns out that when the customer asks for your experience, they could be could be asking for many different things. Past performance Past performance is something different from corporate experience. Past performance is a reference check to discover

A simple guide to what to write about in your proposals. Good things to write about in your proposals These are the things the customer is looking for, the things they want to see. Instead of talking around them, make a point related to them at the start of each paragraph.  Explanations and reasons “why.” The reasons why you do things show more insight and depth of understanding than a claim about what you do or how great you are.  Proofs. Proof points can be evaluated as s

Submitting low quality proposals and making it up in volume is a bad strategy. A better strategy is to target doing the least costly things that return the most revenue. When it comes to proposals, the things that generate the most revenue may not be what you think they are. A key lesson for companies that depend on proposals Preparing a proposal can be costly. But preparing a winning proposal returns a large amount of revenue. The problem is that not every proposal wins. When you incre

I’ve seen way too many proposals produced by experienced people that were thoroughly ordinary. In my worldview this means they sucked so bad it was embarrassing, because ordinary isn’t competitive. When your job is cranking out proposals at high volume under adverse circumstances, people tend to give up polishing them. If people do this long enough, they sometimes stop trying. But they continue to reliably crank out acceptably adequate ordinary proposals that they try really hard to make good. B

If you ever find yourself competing against me, please use these themes! I want you to use these themes because they are easy to beat. They basically promise the minimum. They demonstrate insecurity, lack of insight, and zero initiative. They sound like the claims people expect to hear made in bad commercials. They get ignored. They will never increase your evaluation score. They usually find their way into proposals when the writers haven’t received any better input and have to make someth

This is the collaboration form that appears throughout MustWin Now tool. It looks simple, but it can do a lot. For proposal managers, it can be used to issue and track assignments. For proposal contributors, it can be used to show what you've been assigned. Sometimes issues can be resolved with a simple phone call or email. But sometimes a phone call doesn't work and email can become unmanageable. You don't have to use MustWin Now for all of your collaboration, but if you do each item will

Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the input layer into the following areas: information, strategy, and offering design. In many companies, the scope of the proposal process begins with RFP release. However, proposals require input, and that input often must be gathered before the RFP is released. Regardless of how you define the scope of the proposal process, you should define the inputs a proposal requires to maximize your win rate. The input layer defines those input req

While every proposal process has goals, most processes are procedure-driven. Their focus is on completing tasks and steps. When we break down a major effort, we tend to think about the things "we need to do" to complete it. However, it is better to break things down by what must be accomplished instead of what you think people should do.  It's a bad sign when a process description brags about how many steps it has. Each extra step adds to the likelihood that it will break in practice and th

Why does everyone assume every proposal should have a proposal manager? Before you respond, take a deep breath and contemplate that. There are alternatives to the traditional proposal manager-led hierarchy.  If you think that proposal managers have all of the responsibility and none of the authority to do their jobs, maybe the problem is you have the wrong management model instead of a lack of authority. Most of the conflicts that are endemic to proposal development come from a lack of