Articles

With a complicated Request for Proposals (RFP), it can be hard to figure out what the customer wants. You can create a compliance matrix to allocate the requirements to your proposal outline, but with a complicated RFP there can be a combination of broad items that apply to whole sections, ridiculously specific items that are hard to integrate, contradictory items, ambiguous items, poorly explained items, items that use questionable vocabulary, etc. No amount of questions you can ask, even if yo

We get tons of inspiration for our articles from participating in discussions in our group on LinkedIn. We were thinking about something we posted there recently on the topic of what to do when you get an RFP. We realized that some people set themselves up for failure right from the beginning. When you get an RFP, do you do the things that lead to winning or the things that lead to losing? Do you assume you are going to bid and start work on the proposal or do you look for reasons not to b

Is it the statement of work? The evaluation criteria? The pricing model? Those are all important, but if you want to win there is something about an RFP that is even more important. The problem is that it’s not even in the RFP itself. Anyone can write a proposal that responds to what it says in the RFP, and certainly your competitors can do so. But when you try to write a great proposal, you’ll quickly start asking questions about the RFP, and you won’t find those answers in the document.

The release of the RFP is the moment of truth. Either you are prepared or you are not. You will either be ready to issue assignments, or trying to figure everything out. The first thing to do is to distribute copies of the RFP to those who will be involved. Here is a sample RFP distribution list to speed this up. Then you should follow a checklist to make sure you quickly consider everything you should, without overlooking anything. The deadline for asking questions about the RFP

Understanding the content and structure of a Government RFP, as shown below, enables you to write better proposals. The content of a U.S. Federal Government RFP is mandated by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). The FAR is a very lengthy and detailed set of rules that defines what must go into a Federal RFP and how it must be structured, as well as the acquisition and RFP process. Government RFPs that are based on the FAR are broken down into sections that are identified by letter (A - M).

The first step in responding to RFPs is to decide whether to bid. One you've decided to bid, then you need to plan the proposal. For some proposals, like those responding to a U.S. Government Request for Proposals (RFP), if you don't follow the RFP's instructions precisely your proposal can be rejected without even being read. This makes RFP compliance absolutely critical for winning. This is true for most, if not all, B2G RFPs. RFPs can be intimidating if you don't know how to read th

The right words to use in a proposal are the ones that the customer needs to hear to reach a decision in your favor. This can be hard to figure out. Luckily, when the customer releases an RFP, they give you those words. Before you put pen to paper, proposal writing requires you to interpret and understand the RFP. This skill has more to do with your ability to win a proposal than your writing skills. Where to find the words you need to use When a customer writes an RFP, they identi

Why do so many businesses set themselves up to fail? Just because you are capable of doing the work a customer needs does not mean that you matter. If you don't matter, the only way you can be competitive is on price. The closer you get to a commodity, the more important price is. With a commodity, every vendor is providing the same thing and which vendor you get it from does not matter. The closer you get to a complex solution or services, the more price gives way to credibility and value.

Should you bid everything? Or should you carefully pick and choose what you bid? How should you qualify which leads are worth pursuing? How do you decide which leads are worth bidding? If you have to justify dropping a lead instead of justifying pursuing a lead, you might want to change the dialog surrounding your bid decisions. To help you know when it's time to rethink your bid/no bid process, we created a list with nine ways to know if your bid decision process needs improvement to hel

Improving proposal quality leads to higher win rates. Improving proposal quality requires more than just having reviews. And the proposal reviews you do have must be consistently effective. Most are not. Achieving consistently effective proposal reviews requires more than just asking some experienced people to show up, read what you've got, and give their opinions. It requires more than marking up the document with subjective corrections. Subjective reviews may not even be better than nothing.

It’s easy to confuse strategic planning with business planning. However, what business you want to be in and how you should allocate resources to do business are two very different issues. If you jump ahead to business planning without having done a thorough job of strategic planning, you risk achieving great resource allocation applied to the wrong strategies. You might think that you know what businesses you are in and want to be in, but that does not give you a strategic plan. If your strat

An information advantage is the most important ingredient for a winning proposal. Relationship marketing can be measured by its ability to deliver an information advantage. Most companies are exposed to plenty of information about their bids. But they don’t necessary flow it to the right places or transform it into what is needed to win. Being able to maximize the advantage you derive from the information you have is a key skill for companies that do business by winning proposals. Th

The CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process is an opportunity pursuit process that starts as soon as a lead is identified so that the way intelligence is gathered supports the closing of the sale with the submission of a proposal.  Most “Must Wins” are already lost when the RFP comes out. Even companies who start early often find that time slips by and end up feeling unprepared when the RFP is released.  The CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process provides you with a way to track and measure progress so

How much does it cost to do things the right way? What does doing things the right way mean when it comes to what you should offer in your proposal?   Doesn't doing things the right way prevent problems? Doesn't preventing problems reduce costs? Where is the line where the cost of doing things right becomes greater than the cost of the problems? Isn't that something worth discussing with your customer? Obviously preventing problems is best, but the customer usually expects there to be

Most people approach reviewing a proposal the same way they approached reviewing papers in school. They think of the task as reading and commenting. Unfortunately this is only one way to review a proposal, and it is far from the most effective. Consider: What are reviewers supposed to be commenting on? Are reviewers following a checklist or compliance matrix? Will reviewers complete a form or have questions to answer? Are reviewers even working from a definition fo

When a proposal has an absolute deadline, it’s important to know that things are on track towards completion. But that’s easy to say and hard to do. It’s even harder when there are multiple people involved in the effort to create the proposal. 1. Milestones Proposals typically start with making assignments and setting deadlines. Then you wait for the deadline and find out the assignments aren’t complete. Or worse, the assignments look complete, but the quality is low. Either way, you have

We make a distinction between win strategies and themes. Win strategies are what you do in order to win, and themes are what you say in order to win. Win strategies often imply what your themes will be about, and may include delivering certain messages. But sometimes they are action items that have nothing to do with the document. Win strategies are mostly about how you should position yourself and how to get into position. But there are a lot of different ways to position your company and

Here is a nice long list of topics to discuss and things to discover when you are talking with your customers. While they are presented as questions, you should not necessarily ask them directly. Rather you should weave them into your conversation and relationship. Obviously you won’t be able to touch on all of them in a single meeting. But they can help you create a contact plan, inspire you to dig deeper, and give you targets for follow-ups. All of them have the potential to produce intelligen

If it’s so obvious that your proposal should describe your strengths and downplay your weaknesses, why do so many proposals do such a poor job of proposal writing? This article was written after spending a day discussing that with a customer who evaluates proposals. I love testing my assumptions and learning everything I can about the customer's perspective from an actual customer. The customer I spent the day talking to worked in the Federal Government. But this topic is one of those that

Hiring a great proposal writer means going past the interview and recognizing great proposal writing and the skills that produce it.  Many well-spoken candidates for proposal writing jobs who give a great interview often end up being ordinary writers. Many, if not most, highly experienced proposal professionals are ordinary writers — it’s the law of averages at work. This is even true of consultants who are proposal writers for hire. However, if you want to win you don't want to hire the mi