Proposal management techniques for improving your win rate
Proposal management is the closing of a sale through a written document using repeatable processes to guide a team of contributors. A proposal manager implements the process to plan and produce the proposal content, assign staff and coordinate their contributions, and validate proposal quality. Here are some proposal management best practices that you can use to help manage your proposals. The following articles provide proposal management tips and techniques to help you improve the quality of your proposals and your win rate.
6 Steps to Planning the Perfect Proposal Teaching something truly is the best way to learn it. When I developed the training materials for the MustWin Process, I invented a way to implement Content Planning that I like so much I’ll have to incorporate it into the process during the next change cycle.
The inspiration came from the need to present a Content Plan exercise and break it up into a series of manageable pieces that could fit on slides. Content Plans are supposed to act like a container to hold everything you want to go into the proposal. The problem is that “everything” covers a lot of material. The process provides a checklist, but even that is too long to fit on a slide.
This forced me to group the items on the checklist and put them in sequence. The result reflects the way people naturally work. It is an iterative process. Over a series of steps, the Content Plan evolves into something that anyone can make comprehensive. And the best part is that the steps are in order of priority. If you are working on a proposal with an incredibly short fuse and have to cut corners just to get things done in time, you can skip steps without the process breaking. The opposite is true --- the steps help you maximize the value of the time that you do have.
The first iteration creates the container. You take the outline, and allocate it to the correct page count, putting the headings approximately where they should fall in the document. You should do this using the format template of the final document, so that what you end up with is an empty shell document. Into this shell you add instructions to respond to the requirements from your compliance matrix. At this point, your content plan doesn’t have much in it besides what’s in the RFP, but it’s a start. Remember, that what goes into a content plan are placeholders and instructions (single lines or bullets). Not finished narrative. When completed, the content plan provides instructions for the writers and a baseline for reviews. It will turn writing into a process of elimination.
In the next iteration, you should add your win strategies, themes, points of emphasis, and instructions for how to optimize the response against the evaluation criteria. This will enable the authors to incorporate them and substantiate them in order to create a proposal that is focused on what it will take to win. If you are following the MustWin Process, you will already have this material prepared, so it’s just a matter of copying it into the Content Plan.
In the third iteration, you should insert instructions that identify your offering, or what you are going to propose. In the Content Plan, you should identify the key processes, steps, or components of the solution. You do not need to have all the details worked out --- just enough so that a reviewer can validate that it is the right offering to propose before you commit to writing all the details.
For the fourth iteration, you should insert instructions for how to incorporate your customer, opportunity, and competitive intelligence. This is where you tell the writers how to show that your knowledge and understanding exceeds that provided by the RFP. All too often, companies gather intelligence, but somehow it doesn’t make it into the proposal document. Again, if you are following the MustWin Process, you already have this information in the right format to easily use.
The fifth iteration is about considering the many ways to improve your visual communications. These include enhancements like features/benefits tables, navigation and scoring aids, tables and lists, RFP relevance boxes, examples, graphics ,etc. Add empty tables, placeholders for graphics, blank boxes, etc., with instructions for how the writers should complete them.
The sixth and final iteration is about identifying any assumptions, limitations, boundaries, or issues that must be resolved. These are often necessary to deal with ambiguities or flaws in the RFP. List the ones that you know about, to provide guidance to your writers. Also include instructions for the authors to capture any that they discover during the process of writing.
At this point, your Content Plan should reflect everything that needs to go into your proposal. You have a comprehensive blue print, that if followed, will produce the right proposal. And once your Content Plan is validated, your reviewers can use it to check the draft narrative, when it is complete, to ensure that the final document addresses everything that it should have. If you are unable to get to the sixth, fifth, or even the fourth iteration, you should still have a superior foundation and instructions that can be followed to write a winning proposal. If all you do is the first iteration, you will still have the foundation for creating a compliant proposal.
Are You Using The Wrong Lists to Manage Your Proposals? As quickly as possible, proposal managers try to turn the chaos in which most proposals start into a finite process, with all the parts known and tracked. The goal is to move from total chaos to an itemized “to do” list that you can work through, item by item, to completion. Some people are more organized than others, and as a result, some are more formal in their approach than others. The problem with this approach isn’t that people manage by making lists, it’s that this approach is totally dependent on the subjective decisions and skills of the list maker. If you want to improve the management of your proposals, a good place to start is by formalizing the way you go about making your lists.
Most people manage the content by using the outline as their list. They check off each item as it’s written. At this stage, they don’t know whether what was written is useful or not. That’s why they have proposal reviews. They set up another list of action items for implementing reviews, and then another list of action items to correct any issues the reviews discover.
From the very first list, they are on the wrong track.
Or maybe it’s that they are tracking the wrong things. If you are tracking section by section you are not tracking what you want. What you want is to win. In order to win you need to achieve certain things in writing. Those are the things that you need to track on your list.
Instead of asking people to complete a draft of the sections assigned to them, the first thing you should do is identify the items you need the authors to achieve in each section in order to win. In the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, we call this creating a Content Plan. A Content Plan acts like a recipe for the proposal. It facilitates the review process by providing a baseline to measure the proposal against. It enables you to verify whether the proposal achieves the goals it was supposed to. It also provides a list that both the authors and the proposal manager can use during writing to measure progress. No more waiting for a draft from the author, then waiting for it to be reviewed, only to find out that it totally missed the mark. With a Content Plan you can check off each goal as it is achieved. In fact, you can validate the fulfillment of each goal in real time, rather than waiting until all the sections are complete and sent off for review.
Instead of thinking in terms of proposal reviews that occur at certain milestones, it is better to think in terms of identifying the things you need to validate. When you do this, in addition to providing better scope definitions for the reviews, you can approach your reviews as a list of items to be completed. You have a list of specific proposal attributes to check. Some may happen at sit-around-a-table reviews, and some may not. Instead of trying to orchestrate meetings with unreliable results, your reviews target the items on your list to validate. When you’ve worked through your list, you have a fully validated proposal that you know is ready for submission.
The key to using lists to manage a proposal lies in making your lists relate to your goals rather than being simply a random collection of action items. The first step is to identify what it will take to win. Next turn them into instructions for writers, and then validate that that they where carried out in the document. The proposal effort then becomes finite, measurable and, most importantly, focused on achieving everything needed for you to win.
Most people manage the content by using the outline as their list. They check off each item as it’s written. At this stage, they don’t know whether what was written is useful or not. That’s why they have proposal reviews. They set up another list of action items for implementing reviews, and then another list of action items to correct any issues the reviews discover.
From the very first list, they are on the wrong track.
Or maybe it’s that they are tracking the wrong things. If you are tracking section by section you are not tracking what you want. What you want is to win. In order to win you need to achieve certain things in writing. Those are the things that you need to track on your list.
Instead of asking people to complete a draft of the sections assigned to them, the first thing you should do is identify the items you need the authors to achieve in each section in order to win. In the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process, we call this creating a Content Plan. A Content Plan acts like a recipe for the proposal. It facilitates the review process by providing a baseline to measure the proposal against. It enables you to verify whether the proposal achieves the goals it was supposed to. It also provides a list that both the authors and the proposal manager can use during writing to measure progress. No more waiting for a draft from the author, then waiting for it to be reviewed, only to find out that it totally missed the mark. With a Content Plan you can check off each goal as it is achieved. In fact, you can validate the fulfillment of each goal in real time, rather than waiting until all the sections are complete and sent off for review.
Instead of thinking in terms of proposal reviews that occur at certain milestones, it is better to think in terms of identifying the things you need to validate. When you do this, in addition to providing better scope definitions for the reviews, you can approach your reviews as a list of items to be completed. You have a list of specific proposal attributes to check. Some may happen at sit-around-a-table reviews, and some may not. Instead of trying to orchestrate meetings with unreliable results, your reviews target the items on your list to validate. When you’ve worked through your list, you have a fully validated proposal that you know is ready for submission.
The key to using lists to manage a proposal lies in making your lists relate to your goals rather than being simply a random collection of action items. The first step is to identify what it will take to win. Next turn them into instructions for writers, and then validate that that they where carried out in the document. The proposal effort then becomes finite, measurable and, most importantly, focused on achieving everything needed for you to win.
Coping with a bad RFP Many proposal problems are the result of having to deal with a bad RFP. Bad RFPs come in a number of different forms:
Too much detail. While it is not as big a problem as it used to be, some RFP authors try to document every specification and sub-specification possible for even the most minute requirement. While on one hand, they need to ensure that nobody proposes something sub-standard to reduce the price, specifying the requirements at too granular of a level creates its own problems. RFPs that say “do not simply restate the requirement in the proposal” but then go on to specify in great pain-staking detail exactly what you are to propose are a particular nuisance. Not enough detail. If customer doesn’t sufficiently describe what they want, it can be nearly impossible to write a proposal, let alone price it accurately. Requirements that contradict each other. Large RFPs often have multiple authors. If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, they can insert requirements that are impossible to meet since they contradict each other. Usually the only way to resolve a contradictory requirement is to submit it as a question to the customer. Poor organizational requirements. Service RFPs often specify that certain staffing is required. However, they often include just enough reporting detail to cause problems with creating a rational organization chart. Poor correlation between staffing and activities. Position descriptions provided in an RFP often conflict with the activities required. Either the description has requirements that aren’t necessary for the activities, or they don’t specify who should perform certain required activities. Inconsistent delivery schedules. The delivery schedules specified in the RFP often will not match up with the production requirements. Dependencies are often overlooked. A lack of correspondence between the instructions, evaluation criteria, and statement of work. RFP instructions often specify the outline that you should follow in your response. The evaluation criteria tells you how you will be graded, and should indicate what is important to the customer. Unfortunately they can also introduce new requirements and/or fail to account for portions required in the instructions. Missing or vague instructions, evaluation criteria, or statement of work. If the RFP does not include any instructions for how the proposal is to be formatted or organized, it makes it difficult to provide the information in a way that meets the customer’s expectations. If the evaluation criteria is missing or vague, you won’t know what is important to the customer (although that’s probably better than wrong or misleading evaluation criteria). There are a couple of techniques that you can use to cope with bad RFPs:
Make assumptions. If there is not enough detail, create your own and document it as a list of assumptions. Provide options. Providing options in your proposal lets them select how they want things to be interpreted. Ask questions. Ask A LOT of questions. Ask questions you don’t even need the answer to. Ask the same question three different ways. Just ask a lot of questions. And then ask for an extension because there are so many answers and not enough time to incorporate them all. It is a good idea to collect all of your questions for submission at one time, so that you don’t annoy the customer by calling every day with another question. If you have multiple authors, you should designate one person as the “stuck-ee” for consolidating the questions so that you don’t ask the same thing twice.
When asking questions, always reference the RFP page and paragraph number. Also, carefully consider how you want the question answered and format your question accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll get the answer they want to give and it won’t even address your question. They’re probably going to do that anyway (remember, they wrote the messed-up RFP to begin with), but at least you’ll have a chance of getting the information you need. Customers have an amazing ability to answer any question, no matter how it is worded, with “yes” or “no.” By carefully wording your question, you can prompt them to provide:
a yes/no answer, a numerical answer, a narrative clarification, or a selection from among a list of alternatives that you provide, The right way to cope with all of the above is to have a long-term customer relationship so that you have the information you need before the RFP is even released and know how the customer wants you to interpret what they have written. However, the purpose of this document is to help you do a proposal The Wrong Way, while preserving your chances of winning, as best as is possible.
Too much detail. While it is not as big a problem as it used to be, some RFP authors try to document every specification and sub-specification possible for even the most minute requirement. While on one hand, they need to ensure that nobody proposes something sub-standard to reduce the price, specifying the requirements at too granular of a level creates its own problems. RFPs that say “do not simply restate the requirement in the proposal” but then go on to specify in great pain-staking detail exactly what you are to propose are a particular nuisance. Not enough detail. If customer doesn’t sufficiently describe what they want, it can be nearly impossible to write a proposal, let alone price it accurately. Requirements that contradict each other. Large RFPs often have multiple authors. If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, they can insert requirements that are impossible to meet since they contradict each other. Usually the only way to resolve a contradictory requirement is to submit it as a question to the customer. Poor organizational requirements. Service RFPs often specify that certain staffing is required. However, they often include just enough reporting detail to cause problems with creating a rational organization chart. Poor correlation between staffing and activities. Position descriptions provided in an RFP often conflict with the activities required. Either the description has requirements that aren’t necessary for the activities, or they don’t specify who should perform certain required activities. Inconsistent delivery schedules. The delivery schedules specified in the RFP often will not match up with the production requirements. Dependencies are often overlooked. A lack of correspondence between the instructions, evaluation criteria, and statement of work. RFP instructions often specify the outline that you should follow in your response. The evaluation criteria tells you how you will be graded, and should indicate what is important to the customer. Unfortunately they can also introduce new requirements and/or fail to account for portions required in the instructions. Missing or vague instructions, evaluation criteria, or statement of work. If the RFP does not include any instructions for how the proposal is to be formatted or organized, it makes it difficult to provide the information in a way that meets the customer’s expectations. If the evaluation criteria is missing or vague, you won’t know what is important to the customer (although that’s probably better than wrong or misleading evaluation criteria). There are a couple of techniques that you can use to cope with bad RFPs:
Make assumptions. If there is not enough detail, create your own and document it as a list of assumptions. Provide options. Providing options in your proposal lets them select how they want things to be interpreted. Ask questions. Ask A LOT of questions. Ask questions you don’t even need the answer to. Ask the same question three different ways. Just ask a lot of questions. And then ask for an extension because there are so many answers and not enough time to incorporate them all. It is a good idea to collect all of your questions for submission at one time, so that you don’t annoy the customer by calling every day with another question. If you have multiple authors, you should designate one person as the “stuck-ee” for consolidating the questions so that you don’t ask the same thing twice.
When asking questions, always reference the RFP page and paragraph number. Also, carefully consider how you want the question answered and format your question accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll get the answer they want to give and it won’t even address your question. They’re probably going to do that anyway (remember, they wrote the messed-up RFP to begin with), but at least you’ll have a chance of getting the information you need. Customers have an amazing ability to answer any question, no matter how it is worded, with “yes” or “no.” By carefully wording your question, you can prompt them to provide:
a yes/no answer, a numerical answer, a narrative clarification, or a selection from among a list of alternatives that you provide, The right way to cope with all of the above is to have a long-term customer relationship so that you have the information you need before the RFP is even released and know how the customer wants you to interpret what they have written. However, the purpose of this document is to help you do a proposal The Wrong Way, while preserving your chances of winning, as best as is possible.
Planning Your Solution vs. Planning Your Content Depending on the type of work and how the RFP defines the requirements, you may need to conceptualize your approach as well as your content. This is typically true of proposals to provide solutions or to perform research. If the RFP does not tell you what to propose or how to do the work then you have to determine how you will achieve the goals in addition to what you will say about it.
Conceptualizing and validating your approach is basically an engineering problem. If you already have an engineering methodology, then we encourage you to use it. If you do not, then you need to:
Define the solution. What are you going to do in order to achieve the goals? What is your approach? Specify the solution. You need to document it so that others can collaborate. But you do not have to do this in a full narrative. We recommend using illustrations. They enable you to identify the components and annotate them where necessary. Simple hand sketches should suffice. Storyboards are a traditional approach to proposal planning that work better for planning solutions than they do for planning content. If your solution is too complex to render with a series of illustrations, then storyboards can be used to document it. If you use storyboards, then take care not to entangle solution planning with content planning. Validate the solution. Are you prepared to commit to this approach? Have all stakeholders provided input? Will it achieve the goals? Is it realistic, feasible, and efficient? Is it compliant? Is it within budget? Does it offer competitive advantages? Your validation plan for the proposal should address validating the solution separately from validating the content. Write the solution into your proposal. This can be as simple as transcribing the illustrations or storyboards into the Content Plan and then following through with the narrative. Regardless of the approach you take to planning the solution, you still need to plan how the content will be developed before you start writing. When both the solution plan and content plan have been validated, then you are ready to start writing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a proposal thrown into chaos because during a late-stage review someone decided the solution was wrong. When this happens, it’s a double-hit — in addition to the time you spent on the original solution, you also lose the time it took to write about it. That is why it’s critically important to validate the solution before you start writing it.
This is why storyboards were invented. Unfortunately, while storyboards work for brainstorming and validating a solution, they don’t work so well for content planning. And since many RFPs tell you the solution, people were trying to plan their content using the wrong tool. Ultimately most gave up, and that is why you hear people talking about storyboards but rarely actually using them.
In order to move forward, you must recognize that solution planning is different from content planning, and that not all proposals require solutions. When you do this, you can start using the right tool for the right job and avoid entangling the solution with the writing until after the solution has been validated.
Conceptualizing and validating your approach is basically an engineering problem. If you already have an engineering methodology, then we encourage you to use it. If you do not, then you need to:
Define the solution. What are you going to do in order to achieve the goals? What is your approach? Specify the solution. You need to document it so that others can collaborate. But you do not have to do this in a full narrative. We recommend using illustrations. They enable you to identify the components and annotate them where necessary. Simple hand sketches should suffice. Storyboards are a traditional approach to proposal planning that work better for planning solutions than they do for planning content. If your solution is too complex to render with a series of illustrations, then storyboards can be used to document it. If you use storyboards, then take care not to entangle solution planning with content planning. Validate the solution. Are you prepared to commit to this approach? Have all stakeholders provided input? Will it achieve the goals? Is it realistic, feasible, and efficient? Is it compliant? Is it within budget? Does it offer competitive advantages? Your validation plan for the proposal should address validating the solution separately from validating the content. Write the solution into your proposal. This can be as simple as transcribing the illustrations or storyboards into the Content Plan and then following through with the narrative. Regardless of the approach you take to planning the solution, you still need to plan how the content will be developed before you start writing. When both the solution plan and content plan have been validated, then you are ready to start writing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a proposal thrown into chaos because during a late-stage review someone decided the solution was wrong. When this happens, it’s a double-hit — in addition to the time you spent on the original solution, you also lose the time it took to write about it. That is why it’s critically important to validate the solution before you start writing it.
This is why storyboards were invented. Unfortunately, while storyboards work for brainstorming and validating a solution, they don’t work so well for content planning. And since many RFPs tell you the solution, people were trying to plan their content using the wrong tool. Ultimately most gave up, and that is why you hear people talking about storyboards but rarely actually using them.
In order to move forward, you must recognize that solution planning is different from content planning, and that not all proposals require solutions. When you do this, you can start using the right tool for the right job and avoid entangling the solution with the writing until after the solution has been validated.
Negative Past Performance Disaster: How One Company Overcame It One day I got a call from a company I had helped prepare a proposal. They are a staffing company that specializes in healthcare workers. They are a small business and had lost their last five bids in a row. They called because they received an email informing them that they did not make the competitive range on the proposal I helped them submit.
My stomach leapt into my chest. A decent proposal should always make the competitive range. I was wondering what on earth went wrong and why I didn't catch it.
We arranged for an immediate debrief by the customer. The debrief was handled by teleconference, so I was able to listen in. The debrief started with the evaluators introducing themselves. Then each one read the notes from their scoring sheets. There was no discussion, just a presentation of how the proposal was scored.
When the past performance evaluator started, he took great pains to emphasize that because they used surveys, the results were a snapshot in time and could be a little different on every bid. He qualified his response so much before he even started that I knew something was up.
In 2004, on one of the company's projects, they had not staffed the open positions quickly enough. The customer ultimately issued a cure notice. My client responded by replacing the project manager and adding resources. The project was currently operating within specifications. But it's possible that the customer held a grudge. They responded to a multiple choice survey by selecting the option that they would not choose to do business again with my client if given the choice.
In a past performance evaluation, this is the kiss of death. It doesn't matter if the company has fixed the problems. They have a negative mark that's on their "permanent record." The customer maintains a database in which all contract actions are recorded. Every time they look up the project, the negative information is there. Not only that, but the contract was coming up for recompete in just a few months. I met with the head of the company and discussed the potential disastrous impact of the news. We identified several things to do in response:
The head of the company should immediately meet face-to-face with the customer
To clarify the customer's position and give the company leader a chance to hear it directly from the customer To identify possible corrective actions To demonstrate commitment Even though the problems had been corrected, the company must rededicate efforts to restore customer satisfaction.
The goal must be to get the customer to enter into their database that the company has transformed into a superior contractor. The company must be prepared to go well beyond the requirements to achieve this. The company should recognize that "at risk" and low margin performance might be required. Use innovative bid strategies to overcome past performance evaluation issues.
Revise/strengthen the past performance write-up to drive home all the things the company has done to fix the problem. Team with companies that have proven positive past performance. Leverage the Mentor Protégé program to use the mentor's references instead of the company's references. Focus on developing business with other customers. Purchase access to market research tools to identify other customers who purchase the services offered by the company. Pursue other customers that do not have access to this customer's past performance database. Give customers true discriminators so they have a reason to select the company that goes beyond price and past performance. Within two weeks, the head of the company had scheduled a face-to-face meeting with the customer whose project had reported the negative past performance (not the potential customer that the bid was submitted to). The customer contact claimed she did not know who had completed the survey or why it was completed that way. The customer contact said she was actually satisfied with the company's current performance. The customer was pleased to see the CEO taking an active interest in customer satisfaction and agreed to work with the CEO on follow-ups.
This left us a little confused. Did the survey go to someone else, or was the customer seeking to avoid confrontation?
About a month after the debrief, the customer issued a new task order request under the current multiple-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract. The customer had not released any new task orders for the last 18 months. There were 10 companies eligible to bid on the task order. We polished the past performance write-up until it positively shone, while knowing that we had no control over what is in the customer's database. We called the customer to make sure that the right person would receive and respond to any surveys.
Ten days after the task order bid was submitted, we found out that we had won. Not only had we overcome any negative past performance, but we had won the only task order issued in 18 months and the last one to be issued before the contract recompete. We also broke the company's losing streak on bids.
So was it the past performance write-up that itemized all the corrective actions and tangibly showed that the company is not only a much better company but one with strong current performance, or was it the face-to-face visit by the CEO showing commitment to customer satisfaction? My bet is on the visit, but the write-up put in place the information that the evaluator needed to overcome what was in the database.
My stomach leapt into my chest. A decent proposal should always make the competitive range. I was wondering what on earth went wrong and why I didn't catch it.
We arranged for an immediate debrief by the customer. The debrief was handled by teleconference, so I was able to listen in. The debrief started with the evaluators introducing themselves. Then each one read the notes from their scoring sheets. There was no discussion, just a presentation of how the proposal was scored.
When the past performance evaluator started, he took great pains to emphasize that because they used surveys, the results were a snapshot in time and could be a little different on every bid. He qualified his response so much before he even started that I knew something was up.
In 2004, on one of the company's projects, they had not staffed the open positions quickly enough. The customer ultimately issued a cure notice. My client responded by replacing the project manager and adding resources. The project was currently operating within specifications. But it's possible that the customer held a grudge. They responded to a multiple choice survey by selecting the option that they would not choose to do business again with my client if given the choice.
In a past performance evaluation, this is the kiss of death. It doesn't matter if the company has fixed the problems. They have a negative mark that's on their "permanent record." The customer maintains a database in which all contract actions are recorded. Every time they look up the project, the negative information is there. Not only that, but the contract was coming up for recompete in just a few months. I met with the head of the company and discussed the potential disastrous impact of the news. We identified several things to do in response:
The head of the company should immediately meet face-to-face with the customer
To clarify the customer's position and give the company leader a chance to hear it directly from the customer To identify possible corrective actions To demonstrate commitment Even though the problems had been corrected, the company must rededicate efforts to restore customer satisfaction.
The goal must be to get the customer to enter into their database that the company has transformed into a superior contractor. The company must be prepared to go well beyond the requirements to achieve this. The company should recognize that "at risk" and low margin performance might be required. Use innovative bid strategies to overcome past performance evaluation issues.
Revise/strengthen the past performance write-up to drive home all the things the company has done to fix the problem. Team with companies that have proven positive past performance. Leverage the Mentor Protégé program to use the mentor's references instead of the company's references. Focus on developing business with other customers. Purchase access to market research tools to identify other customers who purchase the services offered by the company. Pursue other customers that do not have access to this customer's past performance database. Give customers true discriminators so they have a reason to select the company that goes beyond price and past performance. Within two weeks, the head of the company had scheduled a face-to-face meeting with the customer whose project had reported the negative past performance (not the potential customer that the bid was submitted to). The customer contact claimed she did not know who had completed the survey or why it was completed that way. The customer contact said she was actually satisfied with the company's current performance. The customer was pleased to see the CEO taking an active interest in customer satisfaction and agreed to work with the CEO on follow-ups.
This left us a little confused. Did the survey go to someone else, or was the customer seeking to avoid confrontation?
About a month after the debrief, the customer issued a new task order request under the current multiple-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract. The customer had not released any new task orders for the last 18 months. There were 10 companies eligible to bid on the task order. We polished the past performance write-up until it positively shone, while knowing that we had no control over what is in the customer's database. We called the customer to make sure that the right person would receive and respond to any surveys.
Ten days after the task order bid was submitted, we found out that we had won. Not only had we overcome any negative past performance, but we had won the only task order issued in 18 months and the last one to be issued before the contract recompete. We also broke the company's losing streak on bids.
So was it the past performance write-up that itemized all the corrective actions and tangibly showed that the company is not only a much better company but one with strong current performance, or was it the face-to-face visit by the CEO showing commitment to customer satisfaction? My bet is on the visit, but the write-up put in place the information that the evaluator needed to overcome what was in the database.
Why you should create your own draft RFP When customer's release a draft RFP, it makes it considerably easier to prepare ahead of the final RFP release. When they don't release a draft RFP, it is still just as important to prepare ahead of RFP release, but much harder to know exactly what information you need and what format to present it in. This alone is a big reason why many companies make the mistake of waiting until RFP release before putting pen to paper. If the customer doesn't release a draft RFP, you should consider making one yourself.
The exercise of creating your own draft RFP will force you to seek answers to key questions. How extensive will the scope of work be? Will there be a past performance review? Will it be a "best value" procurement or a price shoot-out? What will be the most important evaluation considerations?
You'll need to ask the customer these questions. In fact, you'll need to ask more than one person at the customer, since one person won't know all the answers and some may have conflicting opinions. Don't worry so much whether their answers match the final RFP exactly --- the differences can often tell you as much about the customers actual preferences and level of internal consensus as would similarities. The key is that it gets you talking to the customer and helps you develop an understanding about what it is they want, separate from what makes it into writing. You should specifically target developing an understanding of what problems the customer would like to see this procurement solve.
Going through the effort of creating your own draft RFP also gives you a rallying point for collecting information. For example, you can begin to identify relevant projects and collect contact data based on a high level understanding of the scope of work. You can begin determining your win themes as soon as you develop an understanding of the customer's evaluation considerations and preferences.
You can also begin doing competitive assessments based on your strengths and weaknesses while you can still ask the customer about what they consider important and their familiarity with your competition. And don't forget to do a critical self-examination. Does the client know you? What is your past performance record? Get this directly from the client and not from your project staff. Don't drink your own bath water --- no one wants to admit when they've had problems with their customer. Identifying problems early give you a chance to correct them, enables you to prepare your win themes and written material as a defense, and in the worst case might lead you to walk away from a bid that you cannot win.
Finally, make sure that your internally developed draft RFP is a written document, and not just someone's "understanding" of the customer's requirement. A written document can be distributed and the level of customer understanding assessed. It can be verified with others who know the customer. And when the final RFP is released, it can be compared, telling you what to keep, what to change, and providing additional insight into the customer.
The exercise of creating your own draft RFP will force you to seek answers to key questions. How extensive will the scope of work be? Will there be a past performance review? Will it be a "best value" procurement or a price shoot-out? What will be the most important evaluation considerations?
You'll need to ask the customer these questions. In fact, you'll need to ask more than one person at the customer, since one person won't know all the answers and some may have conflicting opinions. Don't worry so much whether their answers match the final RFP exactly --- the differences can often tell you as much about the customers actual preferences and level of internal consensus as would similarities. The key is that it gets you talking to the customer and helps you develop an understanding about what it is they want, separate from what makes it into writing. You should specifically target developing an understanding of what problems the customer would like to see this procurement solve.
Going through the effort of creating your own draft RFP also gives you a rallying point for collecting information. For example, you can begin to identify relevant projects and collect contact data based on a high level understanding of the scope of work. You can begin determining your win themes as soon as you develop an understanding of the customer's evaluation considerations and preferences.
You can also begin doing competitive assessments based on your strengths and weaknesses while you can still ask the customer about what they consider important and their familiarity with your competition. And don't forget to do a critical self-examination. Does the client know you? What is your past performance record? Get this directly from the client and not from your project staff. Don't drink your own bath water --- no one wants to admit when they've had problems with their customer. Identifying problems early give you a chance to correct them, enables you to prepare your win themes and written material as a defense, and in the worst case might lead you to walk away from a bid that you cannot win.
Finally, make sure that your internally developed draft RFP is a written document, and not just someone's "understanding" of the customer's requirement. A written document can be distributed and the level of customer understanding assessed. It can be verified with others who know the customer. And when the final RFP is released, it can be compared, telling you what to keep, what to change, and providing additional insight into the customer.
Questions to answer in your proposal The job of a proposal is to persuade a potential customer to do business with you. To achieve this goal it is critical that your proposal anticipate and answer all of your customer's questions.
A successful proposal usually results in a contract that sets the terms. Sometimes the proposal is a hurdle to be crossed before contractual negotiations begin. Sometimes the proposal is structured to be incorporated into the contract to facilitate things. In less complex environments, the contract may be included with the proposal to facilitate closing and implementation at award.
Because there is usually a distinction between the proposal and the contract, the proposal must answer the client’s questions so that you can get to the contract signing stage. Therefore your proposal should be laid out to provide clear answers and terms for doing business. For this reason, many people lay their proposals out in a question/answer format. However, if your proposal is in response to a written RFP, the RFP may contain formatting instructions that you will have to follow, and these instructions may not permit a question/answer format.
Here is a list of typical questions to answer in your proposal:
Who are you and why are you sending them this proposal? What the customer will get: products, configurations, capabilities, resources, services, effort, accomplishments/results, deliverables? How it will benefit them? How you will manage delivery/fulfillment? How long will it take? What are the risks and what you will do to mitigate them? Who will work on the project? Who will manage the project? What experience does your company have with similar projects? References/testimonials How you will ensure quality and customer satisfaction? How you will know/measure success? What will the customer will have to do or supply? What options do they have to select from? Future considerations Are there any other relevant capabilities, resources of your company? What assumptions did you make in writing the proposal? How much will it cost? What payment terms do you require? What legal/contractual requirements are there? The customer will also have questions that they don’t expect to be answered in your proposal. It is a good idea to at least imply answers to these questions as well. Here is a list:
What are their alternatives to working with you/who are your competitors Are they getting the best price Can they trust you
A successful proposal usually results in a contract that sets the terms. Sometimes the proposal is a hurdle to be crossed before contractual negotiations begin. Sometimes the proposal is structured to be incorporated into the contract to facilitate things. In less complex environments, the contract may be included with the proposal to facilitate closing and implementation at award.
Because there is usually a distinction between the proposal and the contract, the proposal must answer the client’s questions so that you can get to the contract signing stage. Therefore your proposal should be laid out to provide clear answers and terms for doing business. For this reason, many people lay their proposals out in a question/answer format. However, if your proposal is in response to a written RFP, the RFP may contain formatting instructions that you will have to follow, and these instructions may not permit a question/answer format.
Here is a list of typical questions to answer in your proposal:
Who are you and why are you sending them this proposal? What the customer will get: products, configurations, capabilities, resources, services, effort, accomplishments/results, deliverables? How it will benefit them? How you will manage delivery/fulfillment? How long will it take? What are the risks and what you will do to mitigate them? Who will work on the project? Who will manage the project? What experience does your company have with similar projects? References/testimonials How you will ensure quality and customer satisfaction? How you will know/measure success? What will the customer will have to do or supply? What options do they have to select from? Future considerations Are there any other relevant capabilities, resources of your company? What assumptions did you make in writing the proposal? How much will it cost? What payment terms do you require? What legal/contractual requirements are there? The customer will also have questions that they don’t expect to be answered in your proposal. It is a good idea to at least imply answers to these questions as well. Here is a list:
What are their alternatives to working with you/who are your competitors Are they getting the best price Can they trust you
Roles people play in developing a proposal Proposals responding to Federal Government RFPs can easily have 20-30 people working on them. It would be rare to do one with less than a half-dozen people involved. The following list shows why there are so many and what do they all do, to help you develop your proposal plan. This list is meant to be a typical break down --- not all companies or proposals will include all of the positions below, and some may add others.
Capture Manager. Has overall accountability for the new business development effort. This includes assuring proper corporate support is available when needed. Responds to the lead corporate executive with P&L accountability. Coordinates the efforts of business development, engineering, finance, contracts, program management, and proposal management specialists. The Capture Manager is in charge of the core team and contributes to the development of the proposal plan.
Proposal Manager. Has operational control over the proposal plan. Directs Volume Leads, Section Managers, Book bosses, Coordinators, and Production Managers. Implements proposal processes and planning. Sets and manages proposal schedules, plans, deadlines, and progress monitoring. Develops the proposal outline and compliance matrix. Obtains (or advises appropriate managers regarding the need for) proposal staffing and other resources. Oversees the coordination of all proposal activities. Unless specifically requested, the Proposal Manager typically has only coordination involvement in the Cost/Price Business Proposal.
Proposal Coordinator. Responsible for administrating proposal processes, providing configuration management, and preparing proposal related reports. Also responsible for administrating proposal related resources. Assists the Proposal Manager in tracking status and ensuring that deadlines are met. The Proposal Coordinator is a management position and not a clerical position. It requires significant understanding of computer applications and proposal processes.
Volume Managers, Section Managers, or Book Bosses. Proposals are typically broken down into volumes or sections, each requiring someone to oversee the development of that portion of the proposal. At the direction of the Proposal Manager, oversees the activities of the individual authors who write the proposal. May or may not take part in writing. Responsible for meeting scheduled deadlines, conforming to the proposal outline and compliance matrix, and inclusion of themes/discriminators, illustrations, and other material as directed. Responsible for implementing proposal processes and formats. Coordinates with others as required to ensure that proposal content is satisfactorily and consistently prepared. Usually participates in Review Team debriefs in order to incorporate feedback into their sections of the proposal. A half-dozen or more Section Managers would not be unusually for a typical proposal.
Subject Matter Expert. Provides specialized expertise to support the development of the technical approach and related writing. May separately serve as a Review Team Member or as a section author.
Author. Writes text and specifies illustrations for the proposal. Responsible for incorporating proposal strategies, themes/discriminators, technical/management features and benefits, and other material into the sections. Participation usually begins during storyboarding and continues through red team or final draft when the core team takes over. Edits text in compliance with the Proposal Manager or Section Leads guidance. Some authors may specialize in writing resumes or project summaries. A half-dozen to a dozen authors would not be unusual.
Review Team Leader. Directs the efforts of the Review Team Members and participates in scheduled proposal reviews. While not involved in content development, the review team leader should be identified early in the process and is typically a senior or executive manager. The review team leader establishes the criteria and assignments for each of the reviews, works with the Capture Manager to leverage the review processes to validate approaches and fulfillment, collects and structures Review Team Member comments, and leads the review debriefing.
Review Team Member. Review Team Members are assigned specific sections of the proposal to review and are provided direction by the Review Team Lead. Review Team Members are typically asked to review for compliance, clarity of presentation, score with regards to the evaluation criteria, adherence to proposal strategies, use of themes/discriminators, use of illustrations, and technical/management approach merit. Members will document deficiencies, items requiring clarification, and evaluation score according to the direction of the Review Team Lead, and will contribute to and attend debriefings as required. Review Team Members are generally drawn from senior staff who have not participated in the development of the proposal. They should be diligent and constructive. Anywhere from two to a dozen review team members would not be unusual.
Cost Strategist. Ensures that the cost volume is compliant, competitive, and compatible with the proposal. Develops the cost strategy and layout of the cost/business volume. Establishes the guidelines for the Basis of Estimates and Bill of Materials if required. Oversees the development of or writes any text required for the cost/business volume.
Contracts Specialist. Serves in an advisory role to the Capture Manager and Proposal Manager. Reviews the RFP for contractual matters, participates in strategy development to ensure that it is compliant with RFP clauses, and reviews the proposal for compliance. The Contracts Specialist is generally responsible for preparing required forms, clauses, representations, and certifications (typically found in Section K). These are typically included in the cost/pricing volume.
Production Specialist. Supervises production staff, including desktop publishing, layout, graphics, word processing, and editors. Responsible for preparing hard and soft copy from the author’s submissions and maintaining configuration management during the effort. Works with the Proposal Coordinator and the Proposal Manager to ensure deadlines are met and that the final output is compliant with the RFP and proposal plan.
Graphic Artist. Prepares illustrations for the proposal. Responsible for meeting deadlines, compliance with RFP formatting instructions, achieving visual consistency, and maintaining configuration management. May work from hand-drawn drafts or take electronic drafts.
Desktop Publishing/Layout Specialist. Develops formats and typographic styles that comply with the RFP and proposal plan. Responsible for integrating text and graphics into the finished copy, and for maintaining configuration management. May also perform limited word processing and illustration. Prepares both hard and soft copies as required.
Editor. Responsible for validating style, consistency, grammar, and syntax of the final document. Re-writes as needed to clarify and simplify text. Recommends additional graphics or modifications to existing graphics. May play a role in reducing the text to meet page limitations.
Capture Manager. Has overall accountability for the new business development effort. This includes assuring proper corporate support is available when needed. Responds to the lead corporate executive with P&L accountability. Coordinates the efforts of business development, engineering, finance, contracts, program management, and proposal management specialists. The Capture Manager is in charge of the core team and contributes to the development of the proposal plan.
Proposal Manager. Has operational control over the proposal plan. Directs Volume Leads, Section Managers, Book bosses, Coordinators, and Production Managers. Implements proposal processes and planning. Sets and manages proposal schedules, plans, deadlines, and progress monitoring. Develops the proposal outline and compliance matrix. Obtains (or advises appropriate managers regarding the need for) proposal staffing and other resources. Oversees the coordination of all proposal activities. Unless specifically requested, the Proposal Manager typically has only coordination involvement in the Cost/Price Business Proposal.
Proposal Coordinator. Responsible for administrating proposal processes, providing configuration management, and preparing proposal related reports. Also responsible for administrating proposal related resources. Assists the Proposal Manager in tracking status and ensuring that deadlines are met. The Proposal Coordinator is a management position and not a clerical position. It requires significant understanding of computer applications and proposal processes.
Volume Managers, Section Managers, or Book Bosses. Proposals are typically broken down into volumes or sections, each requiring someone to oversee the development of that portion of the proposal. At the direction of the Proposal Manager, oversees the activities of the individual authors who write the proposal. May or may not take part in writing. Responsible for meeting scheduled deadlines, conforming to the proposal outline and compliance matrix, and inclusion of themes/discriminators, illustrations, and other material as directed. Responsible for implementing proposal processes and formats. Coordinates with others as required to ensure that proposal content is satisfactorily and consistently prepared. Usually participates in Review Team debriefs in order to incorporate feedback into their sections of the proposal. A half-dozen or more Section Managers would not be unusually for a typical proposal.
Subject Matter Expert. Provides specialized expertise to support the development of the technical approach and related writing. May separately serve as a Review Team Member or as a section author.
Author. Writes text and specifies illustrations for the proposal. Responsible for incorporating proposal strategies, themes/discriminators, technical/management features and benefits, and other material into the sections. Participation usually begins during storyboarding and continues through red team or final draft when the core team takes over. Edits text in compliance with the Proposal Manager or Section Leads guidance. Some authors may specialize in writing resumes or project summaries. A half-dozen to a dozen authors would not be unusual.
Review Team Leader. Directs the efforts of the Review Team Members and participates in scheduled proposal reviews. While not involved in content development, the review team leader should be identified early in the process and is typically a senior or executive manager. The review team leader establishes the criteria and assignments for each of the reviews, works with the Capture Manager to leverage the review processes to validate approaches and fulfillment, collects and structures Review Team Member comments, and leads the review debriefing.
Review Team Member. Review Team Members are assigned specific sections of the proposal to review and are provided direction by the Review Team Lead. Review Team Members are typically asked to review for compliance, clarity of presentation, score with regards to the evaluation criteria, adherence to proposal strategies, use of themes/discriminators, use of illustrations, and technical/management approach merit. Members will document deficiencies, items requiring clarification, and evaluation score according to the direction of the Review Team Lead, and will contribute to and attend debriefings as required. Review Team Members are generally drawn from senior staff who have not participated in the development of the proposal. They should be diligent and constructive. Anywhere from two to a dozen review team members would not be unusual.
Cost Strategist. Ensures that the cost volume is compliant, competitive, and compatible with the proposal. Develops the cost strategy and layout of the cost/business volume. Establishes the guidelines for the Basis of Estimates and Bill of Materials if required. Oversees the development of or writes any text required for the cost/business volume.
Contracts Specialist. Serves in an advisory role to the Capture Manager and Proposal Manager. Reviews the RFP for contractual matters, participates in strategy development to ensure that it is compliant with RFP clauses, and reviews the proposal for compliance. The Contracts Specialist is generally responsible for preparing required forms, clauses, representations, and certifications (typically found in Section K). These are typically included in the cost/pricing volume.
Production Specialist. Supervises production staff, including desktop publishing, layout, graphics, word processing, and editors. Responsible for preparing hard and soft copy from the author’s submissions and maintaining configuration management during the effort. Works with the Proposal Coordinator and the Proposal Manager to ensure deadlines are met and that the final output is compliant with the RFP and proposal plan.
Graphic Artist. Prepares illustrations for the proposal. Responsible for meeting deadlines, compliance with RFP formatting instructions, achieving visual consistency, and maintaining configuration management. May work from hand-drawn drafts or take electronic drafts.
Desktop Publishing/Layout Specialist. Develops formats and typographic styles that comply with the RFP and proposal plan. Responsible for integrating text and graphics into the finished copy, and for maintaining configuration management. May also perform limited word processing and illustration. Prepares both hard and soft copies as required.
Editor. Responsible for validating style, consistency, grammar, and syntax of the final document. Re-writes as needed to clarify and simplify text. Recommends additional graphics or modifications to existing graphics. May play a role in reducing the text to meet page limitations.
Improving your proposal schedule and milestone planning Proposal schedules should be about more than just crossing off the items on your outline and counting the days until your deadline. Proposal schedules should be about whether you have achieved your goals and done the things necessary to win. In order to ensure those things get done, you need a Validation Plan to check each item. The following lists put the items you need to win in sequence and provides guidance for when they should be validated. The result is a set of proposal milestones that can be used to trigger reviews and measure progress.
Before RFP release, validate that:
The opportunity is worth pursuing You have identified what it will take to win so you can measure progress and quality against the list You have defined your win strategies You have identified and taken the actions needed to implement your win strategies You have collected the intelligence you will need to write the winning proposal You have properly positioned your company You have done everything you can to prepare for the proposal You are ready for RFP release At RFP release, validate that:
The RFP is what you expected The RFP does not contain any requirements that are show stoppers (including all performance standards, service levels, and other specifications) The contractual terms specified in the RFP are acceptable You are still interested in bidding Before you start writing, validate that:
Your proposal plans are ready to implement Your Win Strategies are correct and optimized against the evaluation criteria The compliance matrix includes all response requirements The outline includes all requirements from the compliance matrix in the correct sequence The Content Plan identifies everything needed to produce the right proposal, and can be used as a baseline to evaluate the draft against Each graphic in the Content Plan has the primary objective identified The schedule is the best allocation of time, and deadlines are realistic and enforceable Assignments are correct, no one is overloaded, and everyone who can contribute is included The Validation Plan is sufficient to meet the required quality standards The Production Plan is RFP compliant, properly sized and scoped, and will result in the right deliverable document Upon receipt of early drafts (incomplete), validate that:
The draft addresses everything in the Content Plan. Track deficiencies until gone. The draft is compliant with the RFP. Track deficiencies until gone. The draft contains experience citations in every place relevant/possible throughout the document. Make suggestions. The proposed approaches reflect the best cost/benefit trade-offs and the customer’s preferences. In every section, has every opportunity been taken to use graphics to communicate visually? Will you have any problems staying within any page limitations? Upon receipt of later drafts, validate that:
Any changes to the RFP have been incorporated. Nothing has changed in the document that might make it non-compliant. The draft will score against the evaluation criteria. The draft properly implements all win strategies. The draft reflects your full awareness of the customer. The draft positions you properly against the competition. The reasons why the customer should select you are clear. Are graphics used to replace text instead of being redundant? Is the primary objective or conclusion of each graphic clear? Is everything in the graphic appropriate for the anticipated audience? Does the graphic answer all of the questions that it should? Does the graphic present the subject matter accurately Are the graphics free of errors? The document is ready for production. Early Pricing Validation
The pricing model is properly structured The pricing targets are valid and competitive Assumptions are being collected and tracked Later Pricing Validation
The pricing data is compliant, accurate, and properly structured All ODCs and other costs are accounted for Explanations are properly provided for any pricing data that require them All assumptions are fully documented The pricing is compatible with the technical/management proposals The pricing data is competitive while meeting revenue/profit goals Production Validation
The document has been edited and proofread The document matches the specifications of the Production Plan The document has been assembled correctly The document is ready to package The packaging and labeling match the specifications of the Production Plan The document is ready to submit The document has been received
Before RFP release, validate that:
The opportunity is worth pursuing You have identified what it will take to win so you can measure progress and quality against the list You have defined your win strategies You have identified and taken the actions needed to implement your win strategies You have collected the intelligence you will need to write the winning proposal You have properly positioned your company You have done everything you can to prepare for the proposal You are ready for RFP release At RFP release, validate that:
The RFP is what you expected The RFP does not contain any requirements that are show stoppers (including all performance standards, service levels, and other specifications) The contractual terms specified in the RFP are acceptable You are still interested in bidding Before you start writing, validate that:
Your proposal plans are ready to implement Your Win Strategies are correct and optimized against the evaluation criteria The compliance matrix includes all response requirements The outline includes all requirements from the compliance matrix in the correct sequence The Content Plan identifies everything needed to produce the right proposal, and can be used as a baseline to evaluate the draft against Each graphic in the Content Plan has the primary objective identified The schedule is the best allocation of time, and deadlines are realistic and enforceable Assignments are correct, no one is overloaded, and everyone who can contribute is included The Validation Plan is sufficient to meet the required quality standards The Production Plan is RFP compliant, properly sized and scoped, and will result in the right deliverable document Upon receipt of early drafts (incomplete), validate that:
The draft addresses everything in the Content Plan. Track deficiencies until gone. The draft is compliant with the RFP. Track deficiencies until gone. The draft contains experience citations in every place relevant/possible throughout the document. Make suggestions. The proposed approaches reflect the best cost/benefit trade-offs and the customer’s preferences. In every section, has every opportunity been taken to use graphics to communicate visually? Will you have any problems staying within any page limitations? Upon receipt of later drafts, validate that:
Any changes to the RFP have been incorporated. Nothing has changed in the document that might make it non-compliant. The draft will score against the evaluation criteria. The draft properly implements all win strategies. The draft reflects your full awareness of the customer. The draft positions you properly against the competition. The reasons why the customer should select you are clear. Are graphics used to replace text instead of being redundant? Is the primary objective or conclusion of each graphic clear? Is everything in the graphic appropriate for the anticipated audience? Does the graphic answer all of the questions that it should? Does the graphic present the subject matter accurately Are the graphics free of errors? The document is ready for production. Early Pricing Validation
The pricing model is properly structured The pricing targets are valid and competitive Assumptions are being collected and tracked Later Pricing Validation
The pricing data is compliant, accurate, and properly structured All ODCs and other costs are accounted for Explanations are properly provided for any pricing data that require them All assumptions are fully documented The pricing is compatible with the technical/management proposals The pricing data is competitive while meeting revenue/profit goals Production Validation
The document has been edited and proofread The document matches the specifications of the Production Plan The document has been assembled correctly The document is ready to package The packaging and labeling match the specifications of the Production Plan The document is ready to submit The document has been received
Unsolvable Problem: Your proposal team argues over proposal quality This article is the first in a series offering solutions to the "unsolvable" problems of proposal development.
The nature of the problem. Everyone has an opinion. And the more that is at stake, the more they stick to their opinion. It doesn’t help that proposal quality is notoriously difficult to objectively define, let alone measure. It’s so hard that most people don’t even try. The result is that they end up arguing over whether the proposal is any good or which is the better approach to something. You can even catch them saying totally unproductive things like “I don’t know how to define it, but I’ll know when I see it.”
This also is an impediment to effective proposal reviews. Without a definition of proposal quality, reviewers are free to identify anything about the document that they don’t personally like. This not only leads to reviews that are not consistently effective, but also to reviews that contradict themselves or are even ignored as irrelevant.
What should you do about it? First, you need a definition for proposal quality. We recommend this one:
One reason we like this definition is that it forces you to identify what is necessary to win. When asked what it will take to win, technical staff tend to think in terms of solution features. But if you are submitting in response to a written RFP with a formal evaluation process, then you can start with what it will take to obtain the highest evaluation score. Add in anything that might disqualify you. Keep going until you have a decent list. Then start looking at what you have to do to achieve the things on your list.
You can build your entire process around your list of what it will take to win. Think about how it impacts the planning of your proposal content. You can no longer simply pass out an outline. There are items on your list that the authors need to address.
Once you have a draft, you can validate whether you have achieved the items on your list. You can build your entire review process around your list, and make it much more effective. Instead of having open-ended reviews, you have a scope definition for each review. Reviewers get guidance and accountability.
When you use this definition, you can measure your progress by tracking how many items you have achieved on your list of what it will take to win. This is a big improvement over simply crossing off items on the outline and counting the number of days until the deadline.
Defining quality makes a big difference because it is less subjective. It also helps by forcing people to define the standard at the beginning of the proposal instead of waiting until the end. It brings the planning of your content, the execution of reviews, the measuring of progress, and the goals you are trying to achieve all into alignment. By focusing your attention on what really matters, it leads to the desired outcome — winning.
The best part is, instead of arguing over what “good” means and what a “quality” proposal looks like, you can instead argue over what it will take to win. And that will be a far more productive argument.
The nature of the problem. Everyone has an opinion. And the more that is at stake, the more they stick to their opinion. It doesn’t help that proposal quality is notoriously difficult to objectively define, let alone measure. It’s so hard that most people don’t even try. The result is that they end up arguing over whether the proposal is any good or which is the better approach to something. You can even catch them saying totally unproductive things like “I don’t know how to define it, but I’ll know when I see it.”
This also is an impediment to effective proposal reviews. Without a definition of proposal quality, reviewers are free to identify anything about the document that they don’t personally like. This not only leads to reviews that are not consistently effective, but also to reviews that contradict themselves or are even ignored as irrelevant.
What should you do about it? First, you need a definition for proposal quality. We recommend this one:
One reason we like this definition is that it forces you to identify what is necessary to win. When asked what it will take to win, technical staff tend to think in terms of solution features. But if you are submitting in response to a written RFP with a formal evaluation process, then you can start with what it will take to obtain the highest evaluation score. Add in anything that might disqualify you. Keep going until you have a decent list. Then start looking at what you have to do to achieve the things on your list.
You can build your entire process around your list of what it will take to win. Think about how it impacts the planning of your proposal content. You can no longer simply pass out an outline. There are items on your list that the authors need to address.
Once you have a draft, you can validate whether you have achieved the items on your list. You can build your entire review process around your list, and make it much more effective. Instead of having open-ended reviews, you have a scope definition for each review. Reviewers get guidance and accountability.
When you use this definition, you can measure your progress by tracking how many items you have achieved on your list of what it will take to win. This is a big improvement over simply crossing off items on the outline and counting the number of days until the deadline.
Defining quality makes a big difference because it is less subjective. It also helps by forcing people to define the standard at the beginning of the proposal instead of waiting until the end. It brings the planning of your content, the execution of reviews, the measuring of progress, and the goals you are trying to achieve all into alignment. By focusing your attention on what really matters, it leads to the desired outcome — winning.
The best part is, instead of arguing over what “good” means and what a “quality” proposal looks like, you can instead argue over what it will take to win. And that will be a far more productive argument.
Unsolvable Problem: You're not ready at RFP release This article is the second in a series offering solutions to the "unsolvable" problems of proposal development.
Does this sound familiar? You feel like you never have the information you need when an RFP is released, even if it’s your company’s own recomplete. Even if your company knows about a bid ahead of the RFP release, it seems like the time somehow disappears without much to show for it. When the RFP is finally released, you find that you don’t have the staff you need to bid on the project let alone work on the proposal. People say that you have win strategies, but you can’t find them written down anywhere. In fact, you typically find yourself starting the proposal without anything in writing…
Our Solution: Perform Readiness Reviews during the period of time before the RFP is released. Each Readiness Review needs to have specific goals that lead to being ready to win at RFP release. While somewhat similar in concept, most “gate reviews” that we have seen somehow don’t actually get the team ready to write a winning proposal.
We recommend having four Readiness Reviews. For each review, prepare a list of questions and action items. More than anything else, this list will determine the success or failure of your reviews. Ours has 10-20 items on it for each review. At each review, the questions become more detailed. By the final review, you should be moving from collecting raw intelligence to staging information in a format ready to use in the proposal. We do not expect people to be able to answer all of the questions we ask. Instead, we look for them to answer as many as are humanly possible, and to provide help, guidance, and alternative approaches for the questions that they have been unable to answer.
At each review, assess whether the answers provided and actions taken are sufficient to prepare you for RFP release. We use a Red/Yellow/Green scale to grade the answers to each question. You should see answers that score a “Yellow” or “Red” in an early review move to “Green” by later review. While movement in the other direction is bad, it’s good to have an objective way to identify it when you are slipping.
We schedule the Readiness Reviews proportionally. This way if you find out about the opportunity one month before RFP release, you have a week to prepare for each review. If you are tracking a year in advance you have three months to prepare for each review. And if you find out about it at (or even after) RFP, it tells you what you need to find out in order to get caught up.
Our approach works because it provides guidance during the critical period before the RFP is released. It tells your business developers what intelligence you need collected and how your company should be positioned in order to win the proposal. It also provides a means to transfer knowledge and streamline the transition from business development to the proposal.
Readiness Reviews also enable you to measure your progress towards being ready for RFP release. This feedback is important. It shows you how much more you need to do in order to be prepared. It can also be used to show trends or areas of weakness across multiple pursuits.
Does this sound familiar? You feel like you never have the information you need when an RFP is released, even if it’s your company’s own recomplete. Even if your company knows about a bid ahead of the RFP release, it seems like the time somehow disappears without much to show for it. When the RFP is finally released, you find that you don’t have the staff you need to bid on the project let alone work on the proposal. People say that you have win strategies, but you can’t find them written down anywhere. In fact, you typically find yourself starting the proposal without anything in writing…
Our Solution: Perform Readiness Reviews during the period of time before the RFP is released. Each Readiness Review needs to have specific goals that lead to being ready to win at RFP release. While somewhat similar in concept, most “gate reviews” that we have seen somehow don’t actually get the team ready to write a winning proposal.
We recommend having four Readiness Reviews. For each review, prepare a list of questions and action items. More than anything else, this list will determine the success or failure of your reviews. Ours has 10-20 items on it for each review. At each review, the questions become more detailed. By the final review, you should be moving from collecting raw intelligence to staging information in a format ready to use in the proposal. We do not expect people to be able to answer all of the questions we ask. Instead, we look for them to answer as many as are humanly possible, and to provide help, guidance, and alternative approaches for the questions that they have been unable to answer.
At each review, assess whether the answers provided and actions taken are sufficient to prepare you for RFP release. We use a Red/Yellow/Green scale to grade the answers to each question. You should see answers that score a “Yellow” or “Red” in an early review move to “Green” by later review. While movement in the other direction is bad, it’s good to have an objective way to identify it when you are slipping.
We schedule the Readiness Reviews proportionally. This way if you find out about the opportunity one month before RFP release, you have a week to prepare for each review. If you are tracking a year in advance you have three months to prepare for each review. And if you find out about it at (or even after) RFP, it tells you what you need to find out in order to get caught up.
Our approach works because it provides guidance during the critical period before the RFP is released. It tells your business developers what intelligence you need collected and how your company should be positioned in order to win the proposal. It also provides a means to transfer knowledge and streamline the transition from business development to the proposal.
Readiness Reviews also enable you to measure your progress towards being ready for RFP release. This feedback is important. It shows you how much more you need to do in order to be prepared. It can also be used to show trends or areas of weakness across multiple pursuits.
Unsolvable Problem: No one follows the process Does this sound familiar?
Have you ever noticed that while everyone says they have a process, no one actually follows it during a pursuit? When people are given assignments they often go off and do what they think should be done, regardless of what's actually in the assignment. Reviews are usually based on subjective opinions instead of any meaningful criteria. When changes are requested, people often try to run out the clock so they don’t have to bother with them and can do what they planned to do in the first place.
Our solution:
Successful process documentation doesn’t just sit on a shelf. It gets used because it makes things easier. Not in some hypothetical time “down the road,” but right now and at every step. If your process isn’t written, ready to distribute immediately, followed by everyone, and if it doesn’t address pre-RFP as well as post-RFP activity, you need to replace it. When the people working on your proposal view the process documentation as an indispensable aid, then they will refer to it at every step and thank you for providing it. Here is what you need if you want people to follow your process:
Create a workbook instead of a process manual. Build your process around forms and checklists. Instead of thinking about policies and procedures, think about the issues that people face, and what you can put on paper to help them solve those issues. Think in terms of evolving your process instead of writing it. If you don’t have time to write it all down, then just assemble something helpful and add to it every chance you get. Grow it over time. Experiment with it. Watch it get better with each proposal. Each time you experience pain, write in a cure. Create something that can survive reality. Instead of flow charts, provide guidance for making decisions. Instead of trying to control how they do everything, try to help them achieve their goals. Think about the flow of information, and help them collect the right information at the right time and in the right format to accomplish the tasks. Make it easier to use the workbook than it is to wing it. Keep it short. Identify who needs to read what and encourage them to skip to the parts that matter to them. Collect only the information you need, and put it in a format that is re-useable. Instead of begging people to follow the process, you want them thinking why on earth they would try to figure things out by themselves when all they have to do is turn the page to find out what to do next. Give them a chance to opt-out. Give the Executive Sponsor of a proposal a chance to opt-out of your process. Put a copy of the process in their hands and encourage require them to read it before consenting. If they can’t commit to the time required for informed consent, then they are not capable of meeting the process requirements. For any process. If they don’t commit, all you can do is offer to facilitate production, but you can’t manage the proposal or ensure its quality. Opting in should be an all or nothing consideration. An Executive Sponsor wants, more than anything, to know what they can expect. Turn your process into expectations that you can commit to. For example, you can provide clarity of assignments, progress monitoring, expectation management, and quality validation. If they want those things, they have to pay the price. The price is their support in implementing the process. Think of your relationship with the Executive Sponsor like a contract. Both parties commit to certain things. Neither is forced to sign. However, both parties want things that motivate them to agree to the terms. Not only will most opt-in, but they’ll seek you out in order to get their expectations met reliably. When the Executive Sponsor feels he or she can rely on you, they will support you. It’s much more satisfying than waiting until you have a problem and begging for an audience.
Have you ever noticed that while everyone says they have a process, no one actually follows it during a pursuit? When people are given assignments they often go off and do what they think should be done, regardless of what's actually in the assignment. Reviews are usually based on subjective opinions instead of any meaningful criteria. When changes are requested, people often try to run out the clock so they don’t have to bother with them and can do what they planned to do in the first place.
Our solution:
Successful process documentation doesn’t just sit on a shelf. It gets used because it makes things easier. Not in some hypothetical time “down the road,” but right now and at every step. If your process isn’t written, ready to distribute immediately, followed by everyone, and if it doesn’t address pre-RFP as well as post-RFP activity, you need to replace it. When the people working on your proposal view the process documentation as an indispensable aid, then they will refer to it at every step and thank you for providing it. Here is what you need if you want people to follow your process:
Create a workbook instead of a process manual. Build your process around forms and checklists. Instead of thinking about policies and procedures, think about the issues that people face, and what you can put on paper to help them solve those issues. Think in terms of evolving your process instead of writing it. If you don’t have time to write it all down, then just assemble something helpful and add to it every chance you get. Grow it over time. Experiment with it. Watch it get better with each proposal. Each time you experience pain, write in a cure. Create something that can survive reality. Instead of flow charts, provide guidance for making decisions. Instead of trying to control how they do everything, try to help them achieve their goals. Think about the flow of information, and help them collect the right information at the right time and in the right format to accomplish the tasks. Make it easier to use the workbook than it is to wing it. Keep it short. Identify who needs to read what and encourage them to skip to the parts that matter to them. Collect only the information you need, and put it in a format that is re-useable. Instead of begging people to follow the process, you want them thinking why on earth they would try to figure things out by themselves when all they have to do is turn the page to find out what to do next. Give them a chance to opt-out. Give the Executive Sponsor of a proposal a chance to opt-out of your process. Put a copy of the process in their hands and encourage require them to read it before consenting. If they can’t commit to the time required for informed consent, then they are not capable of meeting the process requirements. For any process. If they don’t commit, all you can do is offer to facilitate production, but you can’t manage the proposal or ensure its quality. Opting in should be an all or nothing consideration. An Executive Sponsor wants, more than anything, to know what they can expect. Turn your process into expectations that you can commit to. For example, you can provide clarity of assignments, progress monitoring, expectation management, and quality validation. If they want those things, they have to pay the price. The price is their support in implementing the process. Think of your relationship with the Executive Sponsor like a contract. Both parties commit to certain things. Neither is forced to sign. However, both parties want things that motivate them to agree to the terms. Not only will most opt-in, but they’ll seek you out in order to get their expectations met reliably. When the Executive Sponsor feels he or she can rely on you, they will support you. It’s much more satisfying than waiting until you have a problem and begging for an audience.
What it Takes to Win You should structure your business development and proposal processes around what it will take to win. The problem is that most people prepare their proposals without having a clear idea what it will take to win. Only the customer really knows what that will take, so many companies don't even try to answer it.
Government RFPs make it easy to be lazy. They give you the evaluation criteria. The process is heavily regulated. You can follow the process, be RFP compliant, and even optimize against the evaluation criteria, all without really understanding what it will take to win. People frequently find themselves writing the proposal and then sprinkling some themes and win strategies in at the last minute.
When you ask yourself what it takes to win, each item you consider leads to more items that you need in order to get there. Each layer that you peel back takes you further back in time. It also tells you what you need to do at each step to arrive at the winning proposal. It can be a very helpful exercise to show people why they need to take action early in the process instead of waiting until the end.
To win a government proposal, you need to get the best score during the evaluation process, have the right price, and present the right offering. The right price is not always the lowest price. But it has to be competitive, within their budget, and well substantiated. The right offering must not only meet the specifications, but must also help the customer achieve their goals, wants, and desires.
To achieve the best score on a government proposal requires you to design your proposal around the evaluation criteria and process. Instead of simply writing the proposal, you must plan and design your content to achieve the best possible score. You also should establish a positive relationship with the customer before the RFP is released. If the customer wants to select you, it can only help your score.
Designing a proposal to win starts with having an outline that matches not only the instructions in the RFP, but also their evaluation forms and procedures. You should make smart use of layout design and navigation aids (RFP relevance boxes, cross-reference tables, etc.) to make it easier for the evaluators to see how to give you the maximum points for each section. Finally, you should communicate visually and use graphics to the maximum extent possible, to make it easier for the evaluators to quickly read, assess, and score your proposal. To do this, you are going to need to know how the customer evaluates their proposals --- not just what it says in the RFP, but their internal procedures, preferences, and tendencies. This information is available, and often even published, so often it's just a matter of asking about it early while you can still get it. Finally, keep in mind that each proposal is unique. Never use boilerplate unedited. There are so many variables in the customer, offering, evaluation criteria, and competitive environment, that you need to customize your design for each proposal.
You must plan your proposal's content in order to maximize its score. This starts by having an offering that reflects what the customer wants. But it also requires having good representation of the keywords in the RFP, the right points of emphasis, and alignment between your content and the evaluation criteria to maximize your score. Once you have achieved these things, you can focus on having a persuasive presentation. If you start by writing, and don't plan all of the goals the writing needs to accomplish, there is no way you can achieve the best possible score.
So how do you get the right offering that will make the customer want to select you, above and beyond the procedures for scoring the proposal? First, you need to have the right understanding of the customer's needs. The solution that you develop to meet the customer's needs must also fall within their budget. Achieving that means making accurate estimates and making the right trade-offs. The right trade-offs are the ones that reflect the customer's preferences. To achieve that means you have to know which trade-offs the customer would prefer. You also need to develop your offering to reflect how you wish to position yourself against the competition. Finally, in presenting your offering, you need to include the right level of detail. Doing this requires understanding what level of detail the customer wants. Ultimately, all you really need to do is to give the customer more of what they want than any competing offer. All you need to do this is to know more about the customer's current state, goals, issues, wants, desires, needs, level of consensus, politics, etc.
You cannot achieve this level of understanding from the RFP alone. To have the right understanding, you need to have a positive customer relationship, knowledge of their needs and the nature of the opportunity, and understanding of the competitive environment. A certain amount of self-awareness will also be required to understand the alignment of your own organization with the customer, as well as to anticipate what you need to do to pursue it.
So what does it really take to win? There is one thing that drives every item described above. To win you need the relationships that provide the intelligence you need to design and execute a winning plan. If you start with a winning proposal and peel back the layers, you end up going back in time to before the RFP is released. Winning starts with pre-RFP relationships. But it takes more than just the relationship itself. The relationship must satisfy the information needs of activity at every step along the way.
Whether you are developing your offering, planning and designing your proposal, or writing the proposal content, being successful requires information that is dependent on a pre-RFP relationship. A successful pursuit process will not only start pre-RFP and get that information, but will follow through to make sure that the information results in the best evaluation score backed by an offering that delivers what the customer wants at the right price.
Government RFPs make it easy to be lazy. They give you the evaluation criteria. The process is heavily regulated. You can follow the process, be RFP compliant, and even optimize against the evaluation criteria, all without really understanding what it will take to win. People frequently find themselves writing the proposal and then sprinkling some themes and win strategies in at the last minute.
When you ask yourself what it takes to win, each item you consider leads to more items that you need in order to get there. Each layer that you peel back takes you further back in time. It also tells you what you need to do at each step to arrive at the winning proposal. It can be a very helpful exercise to show people why they need to take action early in the process instead of waiting until the end.
To win a government proposal, you need to get the best score during the evaluation process, have the right price, and present the right offering. The right price is not always the lowest price. But it has to be competitive, within their budget, and well substantiated. The right offering must not only meet the specifications, but must also help the customer achieve their goals, wants, and desires.
To achieve the best score on a government proposal requires you to design your proposal around the evaluation criteria and process. Instead of simply writing the proposal, you must plan and design your content to achieve the best possible score. You also should establish a positive relationship with the customer before the RFP is released. If the customer wants to select you, it can only help your score.
Designing a proposal to win starts with having an outline that matches not only the instructions in the RFP, but also their evaluation forms and procedures. You should make smart use of layout design and navigation aids (RFP relevance boxes, cross-reference tables, etc.) to make it easier for the evaluators to see how to give you the maximum points for each section. Finally, you should communicate visually and use graphics to the maximum extent possible, to make it easier for the evaluators to quickly read, assess, and score your proposal. To do this, you are going to need to know how the customer evaluates their proposals --- not just what it says in the RFP, but their internal procedures, preferences, and tendencies. This information is available, and often even published, so often it's just a matter of asking about it early while you can still get it. Finally, keep in mind that each proposal is unique. Never use boilerplate unedited. There are so many variables in the customer, offering, evaluation criteria, and competitive environment, that you need to customize your design for each proposal.
You must plan your proposal's content in order to maximize its score. This starts by having an offering that reflects what the customer wants. But it also requires having good representation of the keywords in the RFP, the right points of emphasis, and alignment between your content and the evaluation criteria to maximize your score. Once you have achieved these things, you can focus on having a persuasive presentation. If you start by writing, and don't plan all of the goals the writing needs to accomplish, there is no way you can achieve the best possible score.
So how do you get the right offering that will make the customer want to select you, above and beyond the procedures for scoring the proposal? First, you need to have the right understanding of the customer's needs. The solution that you develop to meet the customer's needs must also fall within their budget. Achieving that means making accurate estimates and making the right trade-offs. The right trade-offs are the ones that reflect the customer's preferences. To achieve that means you have to know which trade-offs the customer would prefer. You also need to develop your offering to reflect how you wish to position yourself against the competition. Finally, in presenting your offering, you need to include the right level of detail. Doing this requires understanding what level of detail the customer wants. Ultimately, all you really need to do is to give the customer more of what they want than any competing offer. All you need to do this is to know more about the customer's current state, goals, issues, wants, desires, needs, level of consensus, politics, etc.
You cannot achieve this level of understanding from the RFP alone. To have the right understanding, you need to have a positive customer relationship, knowledge of their needs and the nature of the opportunity, and understanding of the competitive environment. A certain amount of self-awareness will also be required to understand the alignment of your own organization with the customer, as well as to anticipate what you need to do to pursue it.
So what does it really take to win? There is one thing that drives every item described above. To win you need the relationships that provide the intelligence you need to design and execute a winning plan. If you start with a winning proposal and peel back the layers, you end up going back in time to before the RFP is released. Winning starts with pre-RFP relationships. But it takes more than just the relationship itself. The relationship must satisfy the information needs of activity at every step along the way.
Whether you are developing your offering, planning and designing your proposal, or writing the proposal content, being successful requires information that is dependent on a pre-RFP relationship. A successful pursuit process will not only start pre-RFP and get that information, but will follow through to make sure that the information results in the best evaluation score backed by an offering that delivers what the customer wants at the right price.
What Makes a Must Win Opportunity Any Different? Must Win opportunities are important. A Must Win opportunity demands an even more heroic effort than all the other pursuits that people pour their hearts and souls into trying to win. Nobody really knows what the extra "something" should be, but if it's a Must Win opportunity, it's got to have it.
Must Wins are typically opportunities that are critical to the company for either strategic or financial reasons. Recompetes are often Must Wins because the company relies on them financially and in other ways. In a service business, the amount of money available for overhead and other expenses is a percentage of your total business. If you reduce that total, you must either reduce your overhead expenses or raise your rates/prices. It's so much better to win and not have to face that choice.
Must Wins can also be strategic, such as breaking into a new customer, releasing a new product, or launching a new service line/capability. In each of these cases, you need something that you can cite as a reference, so your first customers are critical to your success. They often merit extra effort to secure the win.
A Must Win opportunity isn't special just because someone named it so or because the company really wants to win. What separates a Must Win opportunity from other opportunities is resources. A Must Win opportunity is different because the company is prepared to do whatever it takes to win. If a Must Win opportunity pursuit is starved for resources, then it really isn't a "Must Win." It is worth noting that it is not sufficient to throw bodies at a Must Win opportunity. You need experienced, knowledgeable staff --- the kind whose availability is always in demand. A Must Win opportunity is not one to staff with people whose major qualification is that they happen to be available.
Must Win pursuits should be started long before the RFP is released. If an opportunity just pops up and gets labeled a Must Win, something is wrong. A Must Win that is known in advance but gets started late is also a bad sign. A major reason that companies hold off on starting a pursuit for a known opportunity is that it costs more to start early. However, starting early is one of the best ways to invest in a Must Win pursuit.
Even when they are started early, Must Wins often lose momentum, because they don't have a business development process in place that provides a way to measure progress. Many companies who start early follow the "let's find out everything we can" approach. This approach is rarely effective. You need to have clear goals regarding what you want to know and what you want to achieve before the RFP is released. Progress towards meeting these goals should be evaluated on a regular basis to determine whether strategies are sufficient to properly position your company to win.
As the name implies, companies try harder to capture Must Win opportunities. They often try to implement best practices and improve their processes to help ensure a better chance of capturing the Must Win. This approach requires lots of training and hand-holding since the staff working on the proposal, though experienced, may have limited exposure to the process. It may also require some patience since the people implementing the process may not have had a chance to fine tune it. The more outreach you do, the better. In addition to making sure that staff know with absolute clarity what is expected of them, you need to make sure that they understand how to go about completing their assignments.
It's much worse when companies who don't have process discipline try to invent it for their Must Wins. While most people understand the value of a good process, those who are inclined to resist know that they only have to outlast the proposal. If process discipline has not been part of the culture, you will always have people who will resist. If your assignments and process are well-defined, you will have many opportunities to evaluate performance. You may have better luck focusing on results than on process.
Takeaway
Merely saying that an opportunity is a "Must Win" will not make it so. If you want your Must Win pursuits to be meaningful, there are a few key things you must do:
Start early - but measure progress Provide sufficient resources - and make sure staff are experienced and capable Implement best practices and process - but provide lots of training and hand-holding If you do any one of the above without the other, your chances of winning go way down.
Final Note
Must Wins are typically opportunities that are critical to the company for either strategic or financial reasons. Recompetes are often Must Wins because the company relies on them financially and in other ways. In a service business, the amount of money available for overhead and other expenses is a percentage of your total business. If you reduce that total, you must either reduce your overhead expenses or raise your rates/prices. It's so much better to win and not have to face that choice.
Must Wins can also be strategic, such as breaking into a new customer, releasing a new product, or launching a new service line/capability. In each of these cases, you need something that you can cite as a reference, so your first customers are critical to your success. They often merit extra effort to secure the win.
A Must Win opportunity isn't special just because someone named it so or because the company really wants to win. What separates a Must Win opportunity from other opportunities is resources. A Must Win opportunity is different because the company is prepared to do whatever it takes to win. If a Must Win opportunity pursuit is starved for resources, then it really isn't a "Must Win." It is worth noting that it is not sufficient to throw bodies at a Must Win opportunity. You need experienced, knowledgeable staff --- the kind whose availability is always in demand. A Must Win opportunity is not one to staff with people whose major qualification is that they happen to be available.
Must Win pursuits should be started long before the RFP is released. If an opportunity just pops up and gets labeled a Must Win, something is wrong. A Must Win that is known in advance but gets started late is also a bad sign. A major reason that companies hold off on starting a pursuit for a known opportunity is that it costs more to start early. However, starting early is one of the best ways to invest in a Must Win pursuit.
Even when they are started early, Must Wins often lose momentum, because they don't have a business development process in place that provides a way to measure progress. Many companies who start early follow the "let's find out everything we can" approach. This approach is rarely effective. You need to have clear goals regarding what you want to know and what you want to achieve before the RFP is released. Progress towards meeting these goals should be evaluated on a regular basis to determine whether strategies are sufficient to properly position your company to win.
As the name implies, companies try harder to capture Must Win opportunities. They often try to implement best practices and improve their processes to help ensure a better chance of capturing the Must Win. This approach requires lots of training and hand-holding since the staff working on the proposal, though experienced, may have limited exposure to the process. It may also require some patience since the people implementing the process may not have had a chance to fine tune it. The more outreach you do, the better. In addition to making sure that staff know with absolute clarity what is expected of them, you need to make sure that they understand how to go about completing their assignments.
It's much worse when companies who don't have process discipline try to invent it for their Must Wins. While most people understand the value of a good process, those who are inclined to resist know that they only have to outlast the proposal. If process discipline has not been part of the culture, you will always have people who will resist. If your assignments and process are well-defined, you will have many opportunities to evaluate performance. You may have better luck focusing on results than on process.
Takeaway
Merely saying that an opportunity is a "Must Win" will not make it so. If you want your Must Win pursuits to be meaningful, there are a few key things you must do:
Start early - but measure progress Provide sufficient resources - and make sure staff are experienced and capable Implement best practices and process - but provide lots of training and hand-holding If you do any one of the above without the other, your chances of winning go way down.
Final Note
Proposal Teams Worry About the Wrong Things They say Nero fiddled while Rome burned. During proposals people argue while the deadline clock runs out. Take a look at some of the things they argue about. See if you can spot the common elements.
Can we win?
Many times companies go after an RFP because they can do the work, not because they can win the bid. Once the bid decision has been made, it’s no longer politically safe to ask “Can we win?” Besides, calculating win probability is a difficult and unreliable exercise. When you are assigned the task of completing a proposal, you are expected to believe with all your heart that you can win. Freed of the need to worry about whether or not you can win, most companies focus on whether they can complete the proposal in time and please the powers that be. This usually means that they worry more about passing their draft reviews than they do about winning.
Instead, try focusing on “What will it take to be competitive?” You don’t want to challenge the powers that be who decided to bid by asking whether you can win. But you do need to do the things that will get your proposal selected over those of your competitors. If you do a good job of defining what it will take to be competitive, then you create a set of criteria that you can measure the draft against. Then the things you ask people to do and how you assess their progress will come into alignment with what it will take to win.
Spelling and grammar
Editing is important. But if you look at everything written about quality writing, you will find editorial issues way over-represented. Worry about winning first. Editing may (or may not) be a factor in whether you win. But it is only one factor, and not the one with the biggest impact. This does not mean that you should submit a proposal full of typos. It means that the risk of not winning because you have one here or there is lower than the risk of not winning because you failed to articulate why the customer should select you. You probably have a greater chance of the customer noticing a layout error than a grammar error. When you must set priorities, base them on their impact on your proposal’s evaluation score. Editors love to challenge you with “but you never know…” This is not a justification to go to the head of the line. Prioritization means you take risks. Worry about things in the right order.
Style
Style is even lower on the hierarchy of needs than editing. Most proposals run out of time long before style can be addressed. Some people try to overcome that by passing out a style manual or editorial guide to the subject matter experts on the proposal. As if the people who don’t have time to write their sections are going to have time to read about style and change theirs in addition to completing their assignment. You are better off asking them to focus on content and ignore style. Then bring editors in after the assignments are complete to correct it. It’s more efficient that way. Of course you’ll probably run out of time and have to skip it. But that’s because it’s a lower priority, and putting your lower priority up front to distract people with questionable writing skills to begin with is not the answer.
Formatting the document for review
I have seen companies go through a 48-hour production cycle just to format a draft the same as the final before giving it to the reviewers. Usually this is because the reviewers want to see the document the “same way the customer will see it.” This is a good goal. You may find that reviewers do a better job of evaluating a well formatted document. But is it worth the time? To answer that you have to ask yourself what you are asking the reviewers to evaluate. Are you asking them to evaluate the formatting or design of the layout? This would be a waste since it’s going to go through a number of change cycles after the draft review and get reformatted at the end. Besides, is that really what you want your executive reviewers worrying about? Are you asking them to evaluate how easy it is to find things in the proposal? The odds are that any problems are due to a bad outline and if you haven’t validated your outline before the draft is written, then it’s too late to do much about it. If you itemize the things you want the evaluators to consider, then you’ll probably find that their assessment does not require any special formatting. And if they want it just because they want it and as executives they are used to getting what they want, then you did a bad job of training them. You will get more out of spending time setting review criteria and training your reviewers than you will on providing them copy that is formatted. You need to discuss reviews, the criteria for the reviews, and what “ready for review” means at the beginning of the process, long before you actually get to the review to set the right expectations. It’s a question of priorities. What do you (and the executives) want to drop in order to move formatting for reviews up on the list?
The Cover Graphic
Multiply the number of people times the length of time they spend discussing the cover graphic. You may be shocked to find that it consumes hours. Should it? A well designed text-only cover can be just as effective. The next time you go to a book store, notice how many covers have no graphic at all. Next consider whether it has ever impacted your decision to purchase a book. Still, you want to project a “quality” image. So how much time is it worth? The best way to minimize that time is to reduce the number of people involved and the number of discussions. Keep it simple.
Color Scheme
Like the cover graphic, it’s not worth hours of discussion. Pick something and move on. Or print in black and white. Focus on articulating your message. Have you given the customer a reason to select you? Is it compelling? They will have a much bigger impact than your color scheme.
How many graphics are there?
A winning proposal may have no graphics in it. None. Nada. Zilch. But only if it has a strong message. And if it has a strong message, then graphics can help it jump off the page. In order to successfully use graphics, you must have the message. This means you must be able to articulate why what you are trying to communicate should matter to the customer. Once you have that articulation down, then you can consider how graphics can make that message clear. If the message isn’t there, graphics won’t save you. Instead of asking yourself how many graphics you have, try asking whether you have a compelling message that clearly articulates why the customer should select you. If you do, then ask yourself how you can enhance that message using visuals. It’s not the number of graphics, it’s the effectiveness of your message that matters. If you don’t have the right message, then you need to fix that before you can address the issue of graphics.
Pricing
Instead of worrying about your price, worry about the scope. More proposals are lost because you bid too many hours or too much work than are lost because your rates are higher. Even if the RFP specifies the number of staff and/or hours, it is still better to worry about how much value you are delivering than it is to worry about how many pennies you can shave off your rates before you will lose staff. What you propose to do and how you propose to do it will ultimately have the biggest impact on both your chances of winning and your final price.
Conclusion
When one approach is clearly superior to another, people tend not to argue. They only argue when the difference between them is small enough to make the matter debatable. In other words, people tend to argue when it really doesn’t matter. Because arguing is stressful, people tend to worry when they anticipate an argument. In other words, people tend to worry about choices that really don’t matter.
People also tend to argue when limited time and resources mean they can’t have it all. They argue because they don’t want their position sacrificed in order to meet the deadline. These arguments are the worst kind, because the clock is running out while people debate and deliberate.
The result is that many of the things people worry or argue about on a proposal are either unnecessary or really about priorities. I find it curious how many of them have to do with production, which comes at the tail end when the deadline pressure is being felt the most. You’d think people would fight over the proposal plans or win strategies. Sometimes they do, but with plenty of time before the deadline, they either work something out or go into a passive resistance mode.
Can we win?
Many times companies go after an RFP because they can do the work, not because they can win the bid. Once the bid decision has been made, it’s no longer politically safe to ask “Can we win?” Besides, calculating win probability is a difficult and unreliable exercise. When you are assigned the task of completing a proposal, you are expected to believe with all your heart that you can win. Freed of the need to worry about whether or not you can win, most companies focus on whether they can complete the proposal in time and please the powers that be. This usually means that they worry more about passing their draft reviews than they do about winning.
Instead, try focusing on “What will it take to be competitive?” You don’t want to challenge the powers that be who decided to bid by asking whether you can win. But you do need to do the things that will get your proposal selected over those of your competitors. If you do a good job of defining what it will take to be competitive, then you create a set of criteria that you can measure the draft against. Then the things you ask people to do and how you assess their progress will come into alignment with what it will take to win.
Spelling and grammar
Editing is important. But if you look at everything written about quality writing, you will find editorial issues way over-represented. Worry about winning first. Editing may (or may not) be a factor in whether you win. But it is only one factor, and not the one with the biggest impact. This does not mean that you should submit a proposal full of typos. It means that the risk of not winning because you have one here or there is lower than the risk of not winning because you failed to articulate why the customer should select you. You probably have a greater chance of the customer noticing a layout error than a grammar error. When you must set priorities, base them on their impact on your proposal’s evaluation score. Editors love to challenge you with “but you never know…” This is not a justification to go to the head of the line. Prioritization means you take risks. Worry about things in the right order.
Style
Style is even lower on the hierarchy of needs than editing. Most proposals run out of time long before style can be addressed. Some people try to overcome that by passing out a style manual or editorial guide to the subject matter experts on the proposal. As if the people who don’t have time to write their sections are going to have time to read about style and change theirs in addition to completing their assignment. You are better off asking them to focus on content and ignore style. Then bring editors in after the assignments are complete to correct it. It’s more efficient that way. Of course you’ll probably run out of time and have to skip it. But that’s because it’s a lower priority, and putting your lower priority up front to distract people with questionable writing skills to begin with is not the answer.
Formatting the document for review
I have seen companies go through a 48-hour production cycle just to format a draft the same as the final before giving it to the reviewers. Usually this is because the reviewers want to see the document the “same way the customer will see it.” This is a good goal. You may find that reviewers do a better job of evaluating a well formatted document. But is it worth the time? To answer that you have to ask yourself what you are asking the reviewers to evaluate. Are you asking them to evaluate the formatting or design of the layout? This would be a waste since it’s going to go through a number of change cycles after the draft review and get reformatted at the end. Besides, is that really what you want your executive reviewers worrying about? Are you asking them to evaluate how easy it is to find things in the proposal? The odds are that any problems are due to a bad outline and if you haven’t validated your outline before the draft is written, then it’s too late to do much about it. If you itemize the things you want the evaluators to consider, then you’ll probably find that their assessment does not require any special formatting. And if they want it just because they want it and as executives they are used to getting what they want, then you did a bad job of training them. You will get more out of spending time setting review criteria and training your reviewers than you will on providing them copy that is formatted. You need to discuss reviews, the criteria for the reviews, and what “ready for review” means at the beginning of the process, long before you actually get to the review to set the right expectations. It’s a question of priorities. What do you (and the executives) want to drop in order to move formatting for reviews up on the list?
The Cover Graphic
Multiply the number of people times the length of time they spend discussing the cover graphic. You may be shocked to find that it consumes hours. Should it? A well designed text-only cover can be just as effective. The next time you go to a book store, notice how many covers have no graphic at all. Next consider whether it has ever impacted your decision to purchase a book. Still, you want to project a “quality” image. So how much time is it worth? The best way to minimize that time is to reduce the number of people involved and the number of discussions. Keep it simple.
Color Scheme
Like the cover graphic, it’s not worth hours of discussion. Pick something and move on. Or print in black and white. Focus on articulating your message. Have you given the customer a reason to select you? Is it compelling? They will have a much bigger impact than your color scheme.
How many graphics are there?
A winning proposal may have no graphics in it. None. Nada. Zilch. But only if it has a strong message. And if it has a strong message, then graphics can help it jump off the page. In order to successfully use graphics, you must have the message. This means you must be able to articulate why what you are trying to communicate should matter to the customer. Once you have that articulation down, then you can consider how graphics can make that message clear. If the message isn’t there, graphics won’t save you. Instead of asking yourself how many graphics you have, try asking whether you have a compelling message that clearly articulates why the customer should select you. If you do, then ask yourself how you can enhance that message using visuals. It’s not the number of graphics, it’s the effectiveness of your message that matters. If you don’t have the right message, then you need to fix that before you can address the issue of graphics.
Pricing
Instead of worrying about your price, worry about the scope. More proposals are lost because you bid too many hours or too much work than are lost because your rates are higher. Even if the RFP specifies the number of staff and/or hours, it is still better to worry about how much value you are delivering than it is to worry about how many pennies you can shave off your rates before you will lose staff. What you propose to do and how you propose to do it will ultimately have the biggest impact on both your chances of winning and your final price.
Conclusion
When one approach is clearly superior to another, people tend not to argue. They only argue when the difference between them is small enough to make the matter debatable. In other words, people tend to argue when it really doesn’t matter. Because arguing is stressful, people tend to worry when they anticipate an argument. In other words, people tend to worry about choices that really don’t matter.
People also tend to argue when limited time and resources mean they can’t have it all. They argue because they don’t want their position sacrificed in order to meet the deadline. These arguments are the worst kind, because the clock is running out while people debate and deliberate.
The result is that many of the things people worry or argue about on a proposal are either unnecessary or really about priorities. I find it curious how many of them have to do with production, which comes at the tail end when the deadline pressure is being felt the most. You’d think people would fight over the proposal plans or win strategies. Sometimes they do, but with plenty of time before the deadline, they either work something out or go into a passive resistance mode.
The Right Things to Worry About on Your Proposal Instead of worrying about the wrong things on your proposal , you should make sure that you worry about the right things. Here are eight things that should keep you awake at night...
Why will the customer select you, as opposed to a competitor? In every section of the proposal, you should base your response on answering this question. If you don’t know the answer, how can you possibly articulate it for the customer? While you’re at it, you might want to consider why the customer might select a competitor instead of you… and what you are going to do about it. You should worry about this until you are confident in your competitive advantage. And then continue to worry about it. What is not going to get done because you don’t have enough of the right staff assigned? If you don’t have enough people with the right skills, knowledge, and background working on the proposal, then those who are working on it will be rushed. If you have a few key people who are stretched thin, then they will be late meeting deadlines, take short cuts, and won’t have time to polish what they wrote or fix any problems. How is that going to impact your evaluation score? Can the writers deliver what you need from them? Separate from the issue of resource availability is resource capability. Can they deliver? Do they have the writing skills and knowledge needed? Your odds of getting what you need go up in direct proportion to the amount of planning detail you provide to them before they start writing. Once they start writing, you should watch closely for weakness (schedule or content) so that you can prepare contingency plans. Are the people you are counting on to provide customer awareness reliable? If the people advising you on the customer’s preferences are either biased, wrong, or covering up problems then you may be preparing a proposal for the wrong audience. Validating your customer awareness is tricky because you must address issues like bias and customer relationship problems objectively. Is the customer reliable? Does the customer understand their own requirements and what they are asking for? Will the customer follow through on what they have said they will do? Do they have internal consensus? Can they make a decision and stick to it? Will they deal openly and fairly? Can you trust them? What does the customer care about? You need to know this at every level: technical, management, compliance, evaluation criteria, etc. If you don’t know, then the success of your whole proposal rides on your ability to guess. Have you got the scope right? What are the limits on the project? How much? How long? How many people will it take? What should be included or excluded? Often a big difference in pricing isn’t the result of different rates or unit prices. It’s a result of bidding too many people or units, or including too much in the scope of the project. You should worry more about whether you have bid too much work or units rather than whether your rates or unit prices are too high. How do you get your reviewers to focus on the right things and not overlook anything? The more guidance you provide your reviewers, the more reliable the results. However, because reviewers tend to be senior managers, you’re often trying to direct people who have more authority than you have. The validation process we recommend is based on defining specific criteria to help ensure that you get what you need from the reviewers. However, you still need to make sure that the reviewers do not overlook anything. For example, you validate your plans to ensure they are correct before you start writing to them. The risk is that something will occur to them after the review, resulting in back-tracking, re-work, and lost time. There is more riding on whether you get the review of the plans right than there is in later reviews. That’s something worth worrying about.
Why will the customer select you, as opposed to a competitor? In every section of the proposal, you should base your response on answering this question. If you don’t know the answer, how can you possibly articulate it for the customer? While you’re at it, you might want to consider why the customer might select a competitor instead of you… and what you are going to do about it. You should worry about this until you are confident in your competitive advantage. And then continue to worry about it. What is not going to get done because you don’t have enough of the right staff assigned? If you don’t have enough people with the right skills, knowledge, and background working on the proposal, then those who are working on it will be rushed. If you have a few key people who are stretched thin, then they will be late meeting deadlines, take short cuts, and won’t have time to polish what they wrote or fix any problems. How is that going to impact your evaluation score? Can the writers deliver what you need from them? Separate from the issue of resource availability is resource capability. Can they deliver? Do they have the writing skills and knowledge needed? Your odds of getting what you need go up in direct proportion to the amount of planning detail you provide to them before they start writing. Once they start writing, you should watch closely for weakness (schedule or content) so that you can prepare contingency plans. Are the people you are counting on to provide customer awareness reliable? If the people advising you on the customer’s preferences are either biased, wrong, or covering up problems then you may be preparing a proposal for the wrong audience. Validating your customer awareness is tricky because you must address issues like bias and customer relationship problems objectively. Is the customer reliable? Does the customer understand their own requirements and what they are asking for? Will the customer follow through on what they have said they will do? Do they have internal consensus? Can they make a decision and stick to it? Will they deal openly and fairly? Can you trust them? What does the customer care about? You need to know this at every level: technical, management, compliance, evaluation criteria, etc. If you don’t know, then the success of your whole proposal rides on your ability to guess. Have you got the scope right? What are the limits on the project? How much? How long? How many people will it take? What should be included or excluded? Often a big difference in pricing isn’t the result of different rates or unit prices. It’s a result of bidding too many people or units, or including too much in the scope of the project. You should worry more about whether you have bid too much work or units rather than whether your rates or unit prices are too high. How do you get your reviewers to focus on the right things and not overlook anything? The more guidance you provide your reviewers, the more reliable the results. However, because reviewers tend to be senior managers, you’re often trying to direct people who have more authority than you have. The validation process we recommend is based on defining specific criteria to help ensure that you get what you need from the reviewers. However, you still need to make sure that the reviewers do not overlook anything. For example, you validate your plans to ensure they are correct before you start writing to them. The risk is that something will occur to them after the review, resulting in back-tracking, re-work, and lost time. There is more riding on whether you get the review of the plans right than there is in later reviews. That’s something worth worrying about.
Should you use permanent staff or consultants to do your proposals? Every company that creates proposals faces the question:
Do we use permanent staff or Do we outsource the proposal function, by using proposal consultants? This question is especially important to Government contractors, partly because a large effort is often required to prepare winning proposals. The question is often stated as follows: "What is the best way to invest our precious Bid & Proposal (B&P) dollars".
During the past 20 years, I have seen many companies facing this question. Their answers have ranged from keeping proposal preparation totally in house to outsourcing the entire proposal preparation process. Most companies fall in a spectrum between these two extremes, and use a mix of in-house staff and consultants. So the question becomes, "What is the right mix of permanent staff and proposal consultants?" The decision on where to be within this spectrum depends on two factors:
What are the business development goals: Let’s assume that the goal is to develop $40 million in new business during the next year. Let’s further assume that we have a 50% win rate and that we usually bid on contracts either in the $5-$10 million range or in the $20-$30 million range. Then arithmetic tells how many bids we will need to prepare, and our recent experience helps us estimate the quantity of skills and hours needed to get the work done. How granular are the proposals? Although business development goals help define the quantity of effort needed to get the bids prepared, the granularity of the bids is even more important in determining how much effort to outsource and how much to keep in-house. A company bidding a large number of smaller contracts may be able to spread the effort so that they can handle all of their proposals in house. In contrast, a company bidding a few large programs, with gaps of inactivity between bids, can usually get the work done more economically using proposal consultants. For many companies, the issue of whether to outsource or not and if so how much is not clear-cut. Given the uncertainty of RFP releases, for example, it is impossible to predict the timing of proposal efforts. Consequently, good luck in the release schedules may mean an evenly spaced workload that the in-house staff can handle well. However, when too many bids stack up at the same time, due to simultaneous release dates, the only solution may be to outsource.
Here are some guidelines for each approach:
Largely Permanent Staff Solutions
Bids are highly granular, and it is easy to maintain a steady-state proposal preparation operation; The group has valuable trade secrets that would be compromised by using consultant personnel; Business development goals are modest, and the in-house approach used in the past is satisfactory. Largely Outsourced Solutions
The company typically bids a few large programs, producing a peak-and-valley workload in proposal preparation; The company is bidding programs in which the specialized expertise needed to win the contract is not available; There is a peak in the workload, due to simultaneous releases of several RFPs; The company wishes to make a large and dramatic increase in the volume of contract wins. Nearly all the federal bidders we have seen maintain some type of a permanent proposal staff. In the case of those firms bidding large opportunities very infrequently, the permanent staff may be just a part-time coordinator. A more common behavior is for a firm to maintain at least the staff needed to pursue one proposal at any one time. This typically includes at minimum a proposal manager, technical writer, editor, and combined coordinator / desktop publisher / graphic artist. A few robust divisions of Fortune firms still maintain large departments with thirty or forty or more personnel.
Some companies with conservative business development goals outsource very little proposal work. They chose NOT to outsource, because they believed they could achieve their goals with only permanent staff. Many of those companies could have grown faster and could have achieved greater profits by using outside assistance to bid, and win, additional programs.
Do we use permanent staff or Do we outsource the proposal function, by using proposal consultants? This question is especially important to Government contractors, partly because a large effort is often required to prepare winning proposals. The question is often stated as follows: "What is the best way to invest our precious Bid & Proposal (B&P) dollars".
During the past 20 years, I have seen many companies facing this question. Their answers have ranged from keeping proposal preparation totally in house to outsourcing the entire proposal preparation process. Most companies fall in a spectrum between these two extremes, and use a mix of in-house staff and consultants. So the question becomes, "What is the right mix of permanent staff and proposal consultants?" The decision on where to be within this spectrum depends on two factors:
What are the business development goals: Let’s assume that the goal is to develop $40 million in new business during the next year. Let’s further assume that we have a 50% win rate and that we usually bid on contracts either in the $5-$10 million range or in the $20-$30 million range. Then arithmetic tells how many bids we will need to prepare, and our recent experience helps us estimate the quantity of skills and hours needed to get the work done. How granular are the proposals? Although business development goals help define the quantity of effort needed to get the bids prepared, the granularity of the bids is even more important in determining how much effort to outsource and how much to keep in-house. A company bidding a large number of smaller contracts may be able to spread the effort so that they can handle all of their proposals in house. In contrast, a company bidding a few large programs, with gaps of inactivity between bids, can usually get the work done more economically using proposal consultants. For many companies, the issue of whether to outsource or not and if so how much is not clear-cut. Given the uncertainty of RFP releases, for example, it is impossible to predict the timing of proposal efforts. Consequently, good luck in the release schedules may mean an evenly spaced workload that the in-house staff can handle well. However, when too many bids stack up at the same time, due to simultaneous release dates, the only solution may be to outsource.
Here are some guidelines for each approach:
Largely Permanent Staff Solutions
Bids are highly granular, and it is easy to maintain a steady-state proposal preparation operation; The group has valuable trade secrets that would be compromised by using consultant personnel; Business development goals are modest, and the in-house approach used in the past is satisfactory. Largely Outsourced Solutions
The company typically bids a few large programs, producing a peak-and-valley workload in proposal preparation; The company is bidding programs in which the specialized expertise needed to win the contract is not available; There is a peak in the workload, due to simultaneous releases of several RFPs; The company wishes to make a large and dramatic increase in the volume of contract wins. Nearly all the federal bidders we have seen maintain some type of a permanent proposal staff. In the case of those firms bidding large opportunities very infrequently, the permanent staff may be just a part-time coordinator. A more common behavior is for a firm to maintain at least the staff needed to pursue one proposal at any one time. This typically includes at minimum a proposal manager, technical writer, editor, and combined coordinator / desktop publisher / graphic artist. A few robust divisions of Fortune firms still maintain large departments with thirty or forty or more personnel.
Some companies with conservative business development goals outsource very little proposal work. They chose NOT to outsource, because they believed they could achieve their goals with only permanent staff. Many of those companies could have grown faster and could have achieved greater profits by using outside assistance to bid, and win, additional programs.
How many people do you need to produce a proposal? Large proposals can have dozens of people working on them. You may have that many people working on yours and not even realize it.
Proposals are typically organized into sections, with someone in charge of each. The person in charge of a section is typically called a book boss. A typical Federal Government proposal would be divided into technical approach, management plan, resumes, past performance, and cost/contracts volumes. Sometimes there are others (quality plan, deployment plan, sample tasks, etc.). Depending on the size of the proposal effort there may be several authors within each section being managed by the book boss. But even on a small proposal where the book boss is the primary author, you've got at least 5 people right there. On a commerce sales proposal, you'd probably start off with at least a sales person, sales support person, and technical/deployment representative involved.
On a proposal involving teaming partners, it is usually a good idea to provide them with a single point of contact, rather than have all of the book bosses contacting them directly. The team member point of contact forms a matrix with the book bosses, giving the proposal manager people who focus and report on the status of individual sections and people who focus and report on the status of subcontractors. It also provides the team members with one person who can present your full set of proposal requirements and better manage expectations.
On a small proposal with 2-3 subcontractors the capture manager might handle this, but on a larger proposal you'll need to dedicate someone to being the point of contact for your team members. It would not be difficult for a subcontractor coordinator to spend an hour on the phone with each team member (they have to address the needs of every proposal section). This means that if you want to cycle through the team members once each day, you'll need one coordinator for every 8 team members. If it's a large proposal with 20-30 team members, you need 3-4 people just to coordinate with your team members..
In addition to the proposal manager, you've got anywhere from 4-10 people at this stage. Now we start adding proposal support staff. You may have a proposal specialist involved to shepherd the process. On a small proposal, this person would coordinate with the book bosses and keep the tracking forms up to date. On a large proposal, there could be a coordinator for each section to maintain configuration management, complete tracking forms, etc. Add 1 to 5 people.
If you've got layout and production staff available, add a layout person (up to one per section), graphics artist, and copy manager. 3-8 people.
We're at 14-23 people. If you are collocating your staff for the duration of the proposal, with this many people involved, you'll want someone dedicated to logistics. Add 1 more. And since in most companies you have to fight to find available people and most are only available part time (so the actual body count is much higher), you'll need someone to focus on staffing. Otherwise, the proposal manager will spend all of his/her time chasing people and briefing them in. And finally don't forget to add the proposal manager, capture manager, red team leader, and executive in charge.
We end this tale with the count at 19 for a small proposal and 33 for a decent sized one, and we don't have multiple authors per section, subject matter experts, etc. Of course you could just do all the writing yourself and do your own production. That is exactly what will happen if you fail to budget for what doing a proposal really takes.
Proposals are typically organized into sections, with someone in charge of each. The person in charge of a section is typically called a book boss. A typical Federal Government proposal would be divided into technical approach, management plan, resumes, past performance, and cost/contracts volumes. Sometimes there are others (quality plan, deployment plan, sample tasks, etc.). Depending on the size of the proposal effort there may be several authors within each section being managed by the book boss. But even on a small proposal where the book boss is the primary author, you've got at least 5 people right there. On a commerce sales proposal, you'd probably start off with at least a sales person, sales support person, and technical/deployment representative involved.
On a proposal involving teaming partners, it is usually a good idea to provide them with a single point of contact, rather than have all of the book bosses contacting them directly. The team member point of contact forms a matrix with the book bosses, giving the proposal manager people who focus and report on the status of individual sections and people who focus and report on the status of subcontractors. It also provides the team members with one person who can present your full set of proposal requirements and better manage expectations.
On a small proposal with 2-3 subcontractors the capture manager might handle this, but on a larger proposal you'll need to dedicate someone to being the point of contact for your team members. It would not be difficult for a subcontractor coordinator to spend an hour on the phone with each team member (they have to address the needs of every proposal section). This means that if you want to cycle through the team members once each day, you'll need one coordinator for every 8 team members. If it's a large proposal with 20-30 team members, you need 3-4 people just to coordinate with your team members..
In addition to the proposal manager, you've got anywhere from 4-10 people at this stage. Now we start adding proposal support staff. You may have a proposal specialist involved to shepherd the process. On a small proposal, this person would coordinate with the book bosses and keep the tracking forms up to date. On a large proposal, there could be a coordinator for each section to maintain configuration management, complete tracking forms, etc. Add 1 to 5 people.
If you've got layout and production staff available, add a layout person (up to one per section), graphics artist, and copy manager. 3-8 people.
We're at 14-23 people. If you are collocating your staff for the duration of the proposal, with this many people involved, you'll want someone dedicated to logistics. Add 1 more. And since in most companies you have to fight to find available people and most are only available part time (so the actual body count is much higher), you'll need someone to focus on staffing. Otherwise, the proposal manager will spend all of his/her time chasing people and briefing them in. And finally don't forget to add the proposal manager, capture manager, red team leader, and executive in charge.
We end this tale with the count at 19 for a small proposal and 33 for a decent sized one, and we don't have multiple authors per section, subject matter experts, etc. Of course you could just do all the writing yourself and do your own production. That is exactly what will happen if you fail to budget for what doing a proposal really takes.
How much should a consultant cost? While as a consultant you can charge for your services based on value, fixed fees, commissions, or any other method, it is really helpful to think in terms of an hourly rate. There are only so many hours in a year. By converting everything to an hourly rate, even if you keep it to yourself, you'll have a better idea of how what you do compares to a make/buy determination and how you income compares to earning a salary.
You can convert an annual salary to an hourly rate by dividing it by 2080 (52 weeks * 5 days * 8 hours). However, there are several other factors that need to be included in the calculation.
The first is utilization. Consultants have to look for work in between jobs. While they are doing this, they are not getting paid. Consultants may spend only 50% of their time working. If they are busy, they may achieve 75% utilization. The first table below shows rates at 50% utilization, the second shows rates at 75% utilization.
Some consultants work as individuals and some work through agencies. If a company needs a single consultant they might hire an individual, but if they've got a large proposal and need a dozen consultants, they will be more likely to go to a company that can provide them with a total solution than work with a dozen individuals. When you use consultants provided by a company, there is overhead added to the rate. This overhead rate can be anywhere from 30% to 100%. In the tables below, we’ve provided figures for an overhead rate of 40% and 60% to give a fairly typical range.
Another factor that must be considered is benefits. Consultants do not get benefits packages in addition to their salary. If they want health insurance, they have to pay for it out-of-pocket, with no employer assistance. Payroll takes are normally split between the employee and his/her employer. Consultants pay a “Self-Employment” tax that is higher than what is deducted from employee paychecks. Even if you work with an individual consultant, it may be appropriate to factor in some overhead to cover these additional costs.
Very few consultants actually calculate these costs, and simply charge what they think they can get. Supply and demand ultimately determines the rates consultants charge. However, the tables below can help you get over the shock value when a consultant says they charge over $100/hr.
Determining how much you should pay for a consultant can be approximated by starting with what you would pay that person if they were a regular full-time employee. If you are looking for an entry-level person, $30-40k/yr would be a typical salary. An experienced proposal manager might cost $60-90k/yr, and an executive level manager even more.
The tables show how an annual salary converts to an hourly rate without overhead, with a 40% overhead, and a 60% overhead. The first table shows a consultant working at 50% utilization and the second shows 75% utilization. The purpose of these tables is not to set or compare rates, but to help you better understand what goes into the value equation.
Rates calculated with 50% utilization
Annual Salary Rate with 60% Overhead Rate with 40% Overhead Rate without Overhead 30,000 $35 $30 $22 40,000 $46 $40 $29 50,000 $58 $50 $36 60,000 $69 $60 $43 70,000 $80 $70 $50 80,000 $91 $80 $57 90,000 $104 $91 $65 100,000 $115 $101 $72 110,000 $126 $111 $79 120,000 138 $121 $86
Rates calculated with 75% utilization
Annual Salary Rate with 60% Overhead Rate with 40% Overhead Rate without Overhead 30,000 $29 $25 $18 40,000 $38 $34 $24 50,000 $48 $42 $30 60,000 $58 $50 $36 70,000 $67 $59 $42 80,000 $77 $67 $48 90,000 $86 $75 $54 100,000 $96 $84 $60 110,000 $106 $92 $66 120,000 $115 $101 $72
If you want to know how much in total it will cost to bring a consultant in to support a proposal, simply count the number of days between when they start and when the proposal is due. Some consultants offer a daily rate, some count every single hour worked.
Keep in mind that the customer has a great deal of control over how well prepared they are and how smoothly reviews go. With 30-50% of total hours expended on the proposal consumed near the very end, the customer can dramatically influence the amount of hours required to do the job. That usually has a bigger impact on the total spend than the hourly rate.
You can convert an annual salary to an hourly rate by dividing it by 2080 (52 weeks * 5 days * 8 hours). However, there are several other factors that need to be included in the calculation.
The first is utilization. Consultants have to look for work in between jobs. While they are doing this, they are not getting paid. Consultants may spend only 50% of their time working. If they are busy, they may achieve 75% utilization. The first table below shows rates at 50% utilization, the second shows rates at 75% utilization.
Some consultants work as individuals and some work through agencies. If a company needs a single consultant they might hire an individual, but if they've got a large proposal and need a dozen consultants, they will be more likely to go to a company that can provide them with a total solution than work with a dozen individuals. When you use consultants provided by a company, there is overhead added to the rate. This overhead rate can be anywhere from 30% to 100%. In the tables below, we’ve provided figures for an overhead rate of 40% and 60% to give a fairly typical range.
Another factor that must be considered is benefits. Consultants do not get benefits packages in addition to their salary. If they want health insurance, they have to pay for it out-of-pocket, with no employer assistance. Payroll takes are normally split between the employee and his/her employer. Consultants pay a “Self-Employment” tax that is higher than what is deducted from employee paychecks. Even if you work with an individual consultant, it may be appropriate to factor in some overhead to cover these additional costs.
Very few consultants actually calculate these costs, and simply charge what they think they can get. Supply and demand ultimately determines the rates consultants charge. However, the tables below can help you get over the shock value when a consultant says they charge over $100/hr.
Determining how much you should pay for a consultant can be approximated by starting with what you would pay that person if they were a regular full-time employee. If you are looking for an entry-level person, $30-40k/yr would be a typical salary. An experienced proposal manager might cost $60-90k/yr, and an executive level manager even more.
The tables show how an annual salary converts to an hourly rate without overhead, with a 40% overhead, and a 60% overhead. The first table shows a consultant working at 50% utilization and the second shows 75% utilization. The purpose of these tables is not to set or compare rates, but to help you better understand what goes into the value equation.
Rates calculated with 50% utilization
Annual Salary Rate with 60% Overhead Rate with 40% Overhead Rate without Overhead 30,000 $35 $30 $22 40,000 $46 $40 $29 50,000 $58 $50 $36 60,000 $69 $60 $43 70,000 $80 $70 $50 80,000 $91 $80 $57 90,000 $104 $91 $65 100,000 $115 $101 $72 110,000 $126 $111 $79 120,000 138 $121 $86
Rates calculated with 75% utilization
Annual Salary Rate with 60% Overhead Rate with 40% Overhead Rate without Overhead 30,000 $29 $25 $18 40,000 $38 $34 $24 50,000 $48 $42 $30 60,000 $58 $50 $36 70,000 $67 $59 $42 80,000 $77 $67 $48 90,000 $86 $75 $54 100,000 $96 $84 $60 110,000 $106 $92 $66 120,000 $115 $101 $72
If you want to know how much in total it will cost to bring a consultant in to support a proposal, simply count the number of days between when they start and when the proposal is due. Some consultants offer a daily rate, some count every single hour worked.
Keep in mind that the customer has a great deal of control over how well prepared they are and how smoothly reviews go. With 30-50% of total hours expended on the proposal consumed near the very end, the customer can dramatically influence the amount of hours required to do the job. That usually has a bigger impact on the total spend than the hourly rate.
Alternate Proposals – Why You Should (Almost!) Never Submit One As a part of Government solicitations, the customer will occasionally offer the option for offerors to submit an Alternate Proposal. My experience as a Proposal Manager tells me that this is rarely, if ever, a good idea, for the following five reasons:
The customer has no resources to evaluate it – Remember that the more proposals the customer receives, the more work is required by the Government. The Government’s budget to accomplish the evaluation of proposals– in estimated manpower – is typically established by the time the final version of the solicitation comes out. Therefore, the customer is more interested in DECREASING the evaluations required than in INCREASING the evaluations required, and an Alternate Proposal represents additional, and probably unbudgeted, work. This is NOT a good thing for the customer or for the offerors.
The customer doesn't want it -- In general, the solicitation tells just what the customer wants to buy. In the best circumstance for you as an offeror, you have been able to influence (in a legal way, of course) the customers’ description of what he wants to buy. So any OTHER solution is likely NOT what the customer wants to buy, and is therefore definitely "swimming upstream, against the current“, with the customer.
Doing so reflects the offeror’s arrogance – As an offeror, by submitting an Alternate Proposal, you are very likely demonstrating technical arrogance. In essence you are saying, "I have a BETTER idea.“ Unfortunately, that is a violation of one of my own personal rock-solid proposal rules, which is, "Don’t have a better idea; have HIS idea.“
It dilutes your own resources, and makes a quality job on the responsive proposal more difficult – Just as the Government has finite resources to evaluate incoming proposals, your own resources are finite, and probably determined no later than the release of the final solicitation. Therefore, using resources on an Alternate Proposal dilutes the resources for the responsive proposal. This makes doing a quality job on the responsive proposal more difficult. You don’t need this distraction.
It confuses the customer about what your firm really WANTS to do, and can be taken as a sign of a lack of commitment on the part of your management team to really DO the work described in the responsive offer – When you offer an Alternate Proposal, this says to the customer, "Hey, I’d really RATHER give you this Alternate Solution, and I really don’t believe in the Responsive Solution. Therefore, even if I WIN the contract based on my Responsive Solution, I’m not going to support that solution wholeheartedly, and I’m probably going to be fighting you during this entire contract." Again, this is NOT a good position to be in, as it decreases your chances of winning. AND even if you win, is likely to make program execution more difficult. "Almost"
When I say, "almost" never, I HAVE seen some circumstances where an alternate makes sense. Some circumstances where it makes sense to provide alternate proposals are as follows:
We were bidding to the USPS to manage Remote Bar Coding System (RBCS) sites. Each RFP included about 11 sites in different cities where the USPS needed service. The bidders could bid to operate a single site; all sites; or any number of the sites that were up for bid. The bidder opted to submit multiple proposals because different combinations of sites produced organizational advantages and disadvantages with an overall value to the USPS that couldn’t be predicted.
Sometimes it is the case that a bidder can offer a solution providing overwhelming value to the customer but which might cause the bidder to be unresponsive in some particulars of secondary importance.
Sometimes there has been minimal contact by any prospective offeror with the customer before the solicitation comes out, and the customer truly DOESN’T know what he wants to buy. I think these exceptions are RARE. So before planning to submit that Alternate Proposal, be sure it makes good business sense, and you have a specific strategy for winning, based on that Alternate Proposal.
Summary
It’s difficult enough to respond to the solicitation of record, and tell how you plan to provide a solution that the Government suggests. Diluting your proposal efforts with an Alternate Proposal is generally NOT a good idea.
The customer has no resources to evaluate it – Remember that the more proposals the customer receives, the more work is required by the Government. The Government’s budget to accomplish the evaluation of proposals– in estimated manpower – is typically established by the time the final version of the solicitation comes out. Therefore, the customer is more interested in DECREASING the evaluations required than in INCREASING the evaluations required, and an Alternate Proposal represents additional, and probably unbudgeted, work. This is NOT a good thing for the customer or for the offerors.
The customer doesn't want it -- In general, the solicitation tells just what the customer wants to buy. In the best circumstance for you as an offeror, you have been able to influence (in a legal way, of course) the customers’ description of what he wants to buy. So any OTHER solution is likely NOT what the customer wants to buy, and is therefore definitely "swimming upstream, against the current“, with the customer.
Doing so reflects the offeror’s arrogance – As an offeror, by submitting an Alternate Proposal, you are very likely demonstrating technical arrogance. In essence you are saying, "I have a BETTER idea.“ Unfortunately, that is a violation of one of my own personal rock-solid proposal rules, which is, "Don’t have a better idea; have HIS idea.“
It dilutes your own resources, and makes a quality job on the responsive proposal more difficult – Just as the Government has finite resources to evaluate incoming proposals, your own resources are finite, and probably determined no later than the release of the final solicitation. Therefore, using resources on an Alternate Proposal dilutes the resources for the responsive proposal. This makes doing a quality job on the responsive proposal more difficult. You don’t need this distraction.
It confuses the customer about what your firm really WANTS to do, and can be taken as a sign of a lack of commitment on the part of your management team to really DO the work described in the responsive offer – When you offer an Alternate Proposal, this says to the customer, "Hey, I’d really RATHER give you this Alternate Solution, and I really don’t believe in the Responsive Solution. Therefore, even if I WIN the contract based on my Responsive Solution, I’m not going to support that solution wholeheartedly, and I’m probably going to be fighting you during this entire contract." Again, this is NOT a good position to be in, as it decreases your chances of winning. AND even if you win, is likely to make program execution more difficult. "Almost"
When I say, "almost" never, I HAVE seen some circumstances where an alternate makes sense. Some circumstances where it makes sense to provide alternate proposals are as follows:
We were bidding to the USPS to manage Remote Bar Coding System (RBCS) sites. Each RFP included about 11 sites in different cities where the USPS needed service. The bidders could bid to operate a single site; all sites; or any number of the sites that were up for bid. The bidder opted to submit multiple proposals because different combinations of sites produced organizational advantages and disadvantages with an overall value to the USPS that couldn’t be predicted.
Sometimes it is the case that a bidder can offer a solution providing overwhelming value to the customer but which might cause the bidder to be unresponsive in some particulars of secondary importance.
Sometimes there has been minimal contact by any prospective offeror with the customer before the solicitation comes out, and the customer truly DOESN’T know what he wants to buy. I think these exceptions are RARE. So before planning to submit that Alternate Proposal, be sure it makes good business sense, and you have a specific strategy for winning, based on that Alternate Proposal.
Summary
It’s difficult enough to respond to the solicitation of record, and tell how you plan to provide a solution that the Government suggests. Diluting your proposal efforts with an Alternate Proposal is generally NOT a good idea.
The Top 10 ways to lose a proposal 10)
Start after RFP release. The winner has already started, the clock is ticking, and you don'’t have your act together? No bid.
9)
Start writing with the intent to improve the draft. You'’re going to write it wrong and then correct it with no way of knowing when it’'s right? No bid.
8)
Present things in a way that'’s “better” than what they ask for in the RFP. You're going to stray from being compliant, from giving things to them where they will be looking for it, and from how their evaluation forms will be structured? No bid.
7)
Run out of time. You’'re going to be so rushed at the tail end that you'’ll not only skip the “nice-to-haves” (that are really what’'s required to win), but you'’ll even skip proof reading and quality assurance and finally submit a document when you really don’'t know how good or bad (more likely) it is. No bid.
6)
Fail to incorporate your plans. You figured out what you need to do to win, what your solution will be, and what your message is, and then you set it aside to collect dust, unread. No bid.
5)
Compete against a better positioned competitor. Someone else knows the customer better. More importantly the customer knows them better. They know more about the procurement and have been working towards it longer. The customer doesn'’t even know your name. No bid.
4)
Fail to address things in the terminology of the evaluation criteria. The customer has not only told you what they want, but how they are going to score you during evaluation. You’'ve given them what you want to give them without concern for how they are going to make their selection. No bid.
3)
Don'’t know the customer well enough to give them more than they ask for.You’'ve read the RFP and feel you’'ve done an excellent job of addressing it. You will lose to someone who has not only addressed the RFP requirements, but why the customer put them in there in the first place. No bid.
2)
Drink your own bath water. Your internal staff tell you that the client likes you. But you haven’'t validated that the client likes you. You think because the customer likes you, they will like the proposal. But you haven'’t formally validated the proposal against the customers goals. You think because the customer likes you and will like your proposal, you feel you have a good chance of winning. But you haven'’t validated the proposal against the RFP, the evaluation criteria, any plan of what will be required to win, or any other metric. When you loose you will blame it on the customer’'s capriciousness. No bid.
1)
Be non-compliant. You're giving the customer what you have or what you want to offer instead of what they'’ve asked for. Or you'’ve simply overlooked something. Either way --- No bid.
Who owns the proposal? There can be a lot riding on a proposal – deadlines, stress, long hours, and even people’s jobs. As a result, everyone wants to be in control. In a well organized environment, this can be worked out amicably. In a chaotic environment where you have to do proposals The Wrong Way™, it can lead to turf battles that only make a bad proposal situation worse. Here are some of the things that people struggle for control of:
Who owns the solution? Deciding what hardware, software, services, and methodologies to bid can be difficult. On a large project, you might have subject matter experts working different parts of the solution. Try to make sure that one person has over all responsibility for the solution to be bid. Then focus on keeping that person on schedule. Who owns the project if you win? You will usually know during the proposal who the project manager will be upon award. Make sure that person is involved in the proposal. Hopefully it will be the person responsible for determining the solution. The person who owns the project on award is one of the few in the process who has a real reason to want to win. Who owns the resources? Make sure you know who owns the resources you will be drawing on to produce the proposal. Unfortunately this person probably won’t be working on the proposal, and knowing who they are may not do you any good. But having someone to complain about may help you vent. Who owns the text? It is very important to make absolutely clear who owns the text in the proposal. Who has the authority to determine or veto changes? Is it the person who determines the solution or the person who provides the resources? Is it an executive sponsor? Is it the proposal manager? Usually all of them struggle for power over the text. It may not really matter who the person is, so long as it’s one person and everyone knows who it is. If you can establish a clear hierarchy over the text, you can save countless hours fighting over it. Who owns the outline? The outline drives the text. But section authors sometimes take liberties with the outline. By annotating the outline, you can provide specific instructions regarding the text. To a certain degree, you can control how long a proposal will take and control proposal assignments by controlling the outline. Who owns the process? Are you going to use storyboards? How will the Red Team review be managed? What tracking forms must be completed? How will configuration management be maintained? Does “pens down” really mean “pens down?” Whoever owns the process makes these decisions and wields a lot of power. Unfortunately business line leaders and executive sponsors often claim the proposal manager has this authority, but don’t let him or her exercise it. Who owns the schedule? Who decides when things are due and who is going to have to work the weekend? The clock is ticking and you don’t have time to argue about when things should be due. While the person who sets the schedule should seek the buy-in of the proposal participants, they must be able to make enforceable decisions or else the proposal is doomed to be a last-minute mess. Traditionally, we call the owner of the process and schedule the Proposal Manager. The solution is traditionally owned by the Capture Manager, who often is the project manager upon award. The text may be owned by the Capture Manager or the Proposal Manager. Joint ownership is a recipe for indecision and struggle. Make sure it’s clear. Resources come from where ever you can scrounge them with the lead business line having the greatest responsibility to contribute.
Who owns the solution? Deciding what hardware, software, services, and methodologies to bid can be difficult. On a large project, you might have subject matter experts working different parts of the solution. Try to make sure that one person has over all responsibility for the solution to be bid. Then focus on keeping that person on schedule. Who owns the project if you win? You will usually know during the proposal who the project manager will be upon award. Make sure that person is involved in the proposal. Hopefully it will be the person responsible for determining the solution. The person who owns the project on award is one of the few in the process who has a real reason to want to win. Who owns the resources? Make sure you know who owns the resources you will be drawing on to produce the proposal. Unfortunately this person probably won’t be working on the proposal, and knowing who they are may not do you any good. But having someone to complain about may help you vent. Who owns the text? It is very important to make absolutely clear who owns the text in the proposal. Who has the authority to determine or veto changes? Is it the person who determines the solution or the person who provides the resources? Is it an executive sponsor? Is it the proposal manager? Usually all of them struggle for power over the text. It may not really matter who the person is, so long as it’s one person and everyone knows who it is. If you can establish a clear hierarchy over the text, you can save countless hours fighting over it. Who owns the outline? The outline drives the text. But section authors sometimes take liberties with the outline. By annotating the outline, you can provide specific instructions regarding the text. To a certain degree, you can control how long a proposal will take and control proposal assignments by controlling the outline. Who owns the process? Are you going to use storyboards? How will the Red Team review be managed? What tracking forms must be completed? How will configuration management be maintained? Does “pens down” really mean “pens down?” Whoever owns the process makes these decisions and wields a lot of power. Unfortunately business line leaders and executive sponsors often claim the proposal manager has this authority, but don’t let him or her exercise it. Who owns the schedule? Who decides when things are due and who is going to have to work the weekend? The clock is ticking and you don’t have time to argue about when things should be due. While the person who sets the schedule should seek the buy-in of the proposal participants, they must be able to make enforceable decisions or else the proposal is doomed to be a last-minute mess. Traditionally, we call the owner of the process and schedule the Proposal Manager. The solution is traditionally owned by the Capture Manager, who often is the project manager upon award. The text may be owned by the Capture Manager or the Proposal Manager. Joint ownership is a recipe for indecision and struggle. Make sure it’s clear. Resources come from where ever you can scrounge them with the lead business line having the greatest responsibility to contribute.
Thoughts On Discipline In The Proposal Process From A Proposal Veteran The last 20 years has seen substantial acceptance in the Federal marketing arena, of notions of applied process in proposal development. Responding to Federal requests for bids has become more complex, leading to increased task specialization and professionalism. References, for instance, to "pink teams" and "black hat reviews" are common enough to be accepted as understood in context (even when they patently aren't).
Nearly all companies bidding on Federal contracts either have processes in place or a longing intention of having them. And there is now sufficient evidence to support the idea that such processes can actually make a difference, particularly in order to successfully pursue large procurement opportunities.
Despite all this, it is also evident there is trouble in River City. The challenge, particularly in small and mid-sized companies, now seems threefold: (1) convincing folks to follow the process, any process, (2) providing sufficient sheltered time and resources to work the process, and (3) fighting a nagging suspicion that the process, even when followed, might not be as efficacious as hoped. Any conversation with proposal practitioners tends to circulate back to discussions of how to make the process work, how to tinker with it. One industry expert, Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com, has gone so far as to make a case that our sacred review structure is flawed and needs to be replaced with documented performance measures.
The reality is, in a world of layered multi-tasking and conflicting priorities, it is difficult to bring sufficient focus to a proposal team to produce positive results from what is essentially orderly madness. What we want, after all, is not only (1) a responsive, compliant document delivered on time, but also (2) one that does not have to be produced by Herculean efforts. We all want to have lives outside the war room or simply at least time for our other jobs.
Discipline in the process
I'd like to suggest something more modest, something that might be useful in a number of venues, large and small: Focus on the discipline in the process, whatever process. The trick, from this perspective, is to think through ways to enable process participants to do three things:
Learn whatever methods they need to accomplish their assigned proposal task Use those methods consistently Apply self control-i.e., apply methods when needed and as needed Small and mid-sized companies do not have the luxury of fully dedicated proposal resources. Most people in the process have day jobs. They often face conflicting or unclear priorities, and there is usually a substantial disconnect between actions and outcomes in the proposal process. This is because of the complexity of the Federal procurement process: Until you have substantial experience with half a dozen proposals, it is hard to appreciate the strange things that are asked for and the odd outlines one is required to follow.
I have come to believe that three elements enhance the discipline in the process, that is, the sensible application of the appropriate methods:
Management directive and emphasis-As always, direction comes from the top. In order for folks to seriously attend to proposal development work, the messages have to come from senior management. Training-We need to think through training and not just annual business development training. Because proposal development isn't their regular job, most participants need focused training on what is required of them for this proposal, this time. Structure of the environment-In some ways, this is the most important because by structuring the environment effectively we can leverage (1) and (2). There are three aspects of the environment that are easy to structure and that, when structured, make proposal work easier for participants: Space-This is about where one does the proposal work. Choices-Here we limit the choices that people have to help them focus on the right things Activities-These include whatever traditional process elements are in play; the key is simplifying and focusing them Space
Having dedicated space is, of course, the logic behind the idea of a proposal war room. In today's distributed work environment with teaming partners far and wide, what is needed is a virtual war room more so then a physical one. We are talking about a designated workspace for each opportunity effort. Everything goes in it; nothing stays outside.
There are software programs, such as Privia by Synchris, and network organizational structures that enable such a venue. No matter how clumsy the mechanism, the proposal team gains substantially by structuring the workspace-and eliminating multiple emails and document versions. The trick here is gaining and maintaining control over the document. Version control, at its most basic, is essential for sanity and security.
Effective version control, which is best maintained through a dedicated space, helps writers be responsible ("this is yours, with your name on it") and, as necessary, gets them off the hook (documenting who took over and made those changes). Doing both of these helps reinforce the expectations the proposal team has for the individuals, which in turn reinforces the discipline applied by those individuals to the proposal.
As part of structuring the space, the proposal manager should use all the tricks of the trade for preparing the document: templates, checklists, etc. When you think of these from a discipline point of view, a few enhancements suggest themselves. Instead of just handing out a section template, what about personalizing it with the specific file name to be used and the correct (and only) section numbers to be used. Many do this now, but it helps to think of doing it not to make the proposal manager's job easier but to make the writer's job easier.
And this is where focused training comes in: Specifically, how do you use the template or checklist? This also provides an opportunity for reinforcing things like language consistency.
By structuring the space from the start-and this means from the start of the opportunity, not just the start of the proposal-a substantial benefit accrues to the team in terms of continuity and consistency.
Choices
Templates, of course, are the traditional way of limiting choices. Enhancing these with lists of words to use and not use, as well as specific win themes adds a level of structure. And storyboards take this aspect about as far as it can probably go.
But where else do choices need to be limited? One challenging area is in reviewing and commenting on proposal sections, both in process and at any formal review points. The objective here is to limit the choices available to reviewers-i.e., we need to tell them what we need in the review. At the same time, we need to provide them sufficient latitude to be helpful when so inclined. A technique for doing this can be the ubiquitous comment sheet, but one that is further tuned to this particular proposal and this particular review. For instance, push reviewers into commenting relative to the client's evaluation criteria. Don't ask them to do this; make it difficult for them not to do this.
One of the more effective combinations is to provide training to reviewers, supplemented with checklists. "Training" here and elsewhere is really a euphemism: talk to the participants, explain what is expected, and give them feedback. It is not particularly a sit-down, watch-a-PowerPoint-presentation effort.
Activities
Because so many of the proposal participants don't regularly work on proposals, requirements and expectations should be laid out with clarity. The best way to do this is by using roles and functions, rather than personalities to organize and motivate the proposal team.
This means clarifying the difference between capture manager, proposal manager, proposal coordinator, proposal writer, and proposal reviewer. We also need to specify, for this individual, in this role, at this time, on this proposal:
What are their responsibilities and what expectations does the team have for them in this role? What should they not be doing? When should they be done? Summary
I believe that we need to change the conversation slightly, away from process and towards enhancing discipline given whatever the state of your process might be. This is most important in proposal environments that suffer from a lack of dedicated resources, such as in small and mid-sized companies.
By structuring the proposal environment-the physical and virtual space and the methods and processes-it makes it easier for people to do the right thing, especially people who don't do proposals for a living.
Nearly all companies bidding on Federal contracts either have processes in place or a longing intention of having them. And there is now sufficient evidence to support the idea that such processes can actually make a difference, particularly in order to successfully pursue large procurement opportunities.
Despite all this, it is also evident there is trouble in River City. The challenge, particularly in small and mid-sized companies, now seems threefold: (1) convincing folks to follow the process, any process, (2) providing sufficient sheltered time and resources to work the process, and (3) fighting a nagging suspicion that the process, even when followed, might not be as efficacious as hoped. Any conversation with proposal practitioners tends to circulate back to discussions of how to make the process work, how to tinker with it. One industry expert, Carl Dickson of CapturePlanning.com, has gone so far as to make a case that our sacred review structure is flawed and needs to be replaced with documented performance measures.
The reality is, in a world of layered multi-tasking and conflicting priorities, it is difficult to bring sufficient focus to a proposal team to produce positive results from what is essentially orderly madness. What we want, after all, is not only (1) a responsive, compliant document delivered on time, but also (2) one that does not have to be produced by Herculean efforts. We all want to have lives outside the war room or simply at least time for our other jobs.
Discipline in the process
I'd like to suggest something more modest, something that might be useful in a number of venues, large and small: Focus on the discipline in the process, whatever process. The trick, from this perspective, is to think through ways to enable process participants to do three things:
Learn whatever methods they need to accomplish their assigned proposal task Use those methods consistently Apply self control-i.e., apply methods when needed and as needed Small and mid-sized companies do not have the luxury of fully dedicated proposal resources. Most people in the process have day jobs. They often face conflicting or unclear priorities, and there is usually a substantial disconnect between actions and outcomes in the proposal process. This is because of the complexity of the Federal procurement process: Until you have substantial experience with half a dozen proposals, it is hard to appreciate the strange things that are asked for and the odd outlines one is required to follow.
I have come to believe that three elements enhance the discipline in the process, that is, the sensible application of the appropriate methods:
Management directive and emphasis-As always, direction comes from the top. In order for folks to seriously attend to proposal development work, the messages have to come from senior management. Training-We need to think through training and not just annual business development training. Because proposal development isn't their regular job, most participants need focused training on what is required of them for this proposal, this time. Structure of the environment-In some ways, this is the most important because by structuring the environment effectively we can leverage (1) and (2). There are three aspects of the environment that are easy to structure and that, when structured, make proposal work easier for participants: Space-This is about where one does the proposal work. Choices-Here we limit the choices that people have to help them focus on the right things Activities-These include whatever traditional process elements are in play; the key is simplifying and focusing them Space
Having dedicated space is, of course, the logic behind the idea of a proposal war room. In today's distributed work environment with teaming partners far and wide, what is needed is a virtual war room more so then a physical one. We are talking about a designated workspace for each opportunity effort. Everything goes in it; nothing stays outside.
There are software programs, such as Privia by Synchris, and network organizational structures that enable such a venue. No matter how clumsy the mechanism, the proposal team gains substantially by structuring the workspace-and eliminating multiple emails and document versions. The trick here is gaining and maintaining control over the document. Version control, at its most basic, is essential for sanity and security.
Effective version control, which is best maintained through a dedicated space, helps writers be responsible ("this is yours, with your name on it") and, as necessary, gets them off the hook (documenting who took over and made those changes). Doing both of these helps reinforce the expectations the proposal team has for the individuals, which in turn reinforces the discipline applied by those individuals to the proposal.
As part of structuring the space, the proposal manager should use all the tricks of the trade for preparing the document: templates, checklists, etc. When you think of these from a discipline point of view, a few enhancements suggest themselves. Instead of just handing out a section template, what about personalizing it with the specific file name to be used and the correct (and only) section numbers to be used. Many do this now, but it helps to think of doing it not to make the proposal manager's job easier but to make the writer's job easier.
And this is where focused training comes in: Specifically, how do you use the template or checklist? This also provides an opportunity for reinforcing things like language consistency.
By structuring the space from the start-and this means from the start of the opportunity, not just the start of the proposal-a substantial benefit accrues to the team in terms of continuity and consistency.
Choices
Templates, of course, are the traditional way of limiting choices. Enhancing these with lists of words to use and not use, as well as specific win themes adds a level of structure. And storyboards take this aspect about as far as it can probably go.
But where else do choices need to be limited? One challenging area is in reviewing and commenting on proposal sections, both in process and at any formal review points. The objective here is to limit the choices available to reviewers-i.e., we need to tell them what we need in the review. At the same time, we need to provide them sufficient latitude to be helpful when so inclined. A technique for doing this can be the ubiquitous comment sheet, but one that is further tuned to this particular proposal and this particular review. For instance, push reviewers into commenting relative to the client's evaluation criteria. Don't ask them to do this; make it difficult for them not to do this.
One of the more effective combinations is to provide training to reviewers, supplemented with checklists. "Training" here and elsewhere is really a euphemism: talk to the participants, explain what is expected, and give them feedback. It is not particularly a sit-down, watch-a-PowerPoint-presentation effort.
Activities
Because so many of the proposal participants don't regularly work on proposals, requirements and expectations should be laid out with clarity. The best way to do this is by using roles and functions, rather than personalities to organize and motivate the proposal team.
This means clarifying the difference between capture manager, proposal manager, proposal coordinator, proposal writer, and proposal reviewer. We also need to specify, for this individual, in this role, at this time, on this proposal:
What are their responsibilities and what expectations does the team have for them in this role? What should they not be doing? When should they be done? Summary
I believe that we need to change the conversation slightly, away from process and towards enhancing discipline given whatever the state of your process might be. This is most important in proposal environments that suffer from a lack of dedicated resources, such as in small and mid-sized companies.
By structuring the proposal environment-the physical and virtual space and the methods and processes-it makes it easier for people to do the right thing, especially people who don't do proposals for a living.
Configuration management during proposal development A proposal has a lot of moving parts. The solution you are proposing can change. Multiply the number of authors by the number of files contributed by each. The contents of those many are often constantly changing. The assignments of people to proposal sections and consequently files change from time to time. Even the requirement itself can change with a cascading effect on every part of the proposal that it touches. Configuration management refers to maintaining control of the proposal in spite of all the changes.
These changes happen throughout the proposal, but have the greatest affect in the later stages of development, as you approach final production. One overlooked file version conflict during final production can ruin a perfectly good proposal.
There are software solutions for file/document management, but lack of software is no excuse for not tracking versions and maintaining configuration control. Automated approaches to document and configuration management can always be emulated using completely manual methods.
Likewise, having software does not free you from the burden of diligence. No software approach alone will ensure configuration management. It requires the voluntary efforts of participants. People have to accept it and follow it constantly.
Whether manual or automated, a configuration management system can be strict and burdensome, or convenient but tolerant of risk. You must decide what balance to strike for your particular proposal. You may also choose to implement different levels of configuration management at different stages of the proposal.
Some elements that your configuration management system should include:
Document every change. This is typically handled by keeping hardcopy markups or using software change tracking features. Your must be able to answer who made a change and if necessary roll it back. Similarly, you should also check to ensure every change was made as requested. Having the requested changes documented helps. Tracking forms documenting what came in when from who and when it was completed. Procedures that ensure that more than one person cannot make changes to the same document at the same time. This is often the source of version conflicts. Untangling them can be a nightmare. You are far better off preventing them. Check-in/Check-out procedures are often used for this. These goals are typically achieve with tracking and sign-off sheets. They may be low tech and labor intensive, but they can save the day.
One issue that you will have to contend with is that widespread use of software enables authors to make their own changes without going through hardcopy markups. While this is can be a huge improvement in speed and efficiency, it comes at the cost of configuration management. You can end up without an audit trail. You will have to determine where to strike the balance between risk, effort, and convenience.
These changes happen throughout the proposal, but have the greatest affect in the later stages of development, as you approach final production. One overlooked file version conflict during final production can ruin a perfectly good proposal.
There are software solutions for file/document management, but lack of software is no excuse for not tracking versions and maintaining configuration control. Automated approaches to document and configuration management can always be emulated using completely manual methods.
Likewise, having software does not free you from the burden of diligence. No software approach alone will ensure configuration management. It requires the voluntary efforts of participants. People have to accept it and follow it constantly.
Whether manual or automated, a configuration management system can be strict and burdensome, or convenient but tolerant of risk. You must decide what balance to strike for your particular proposal. You may also choose to implement different levels of configuration management at different stages of the proposal.
Some elements that your configuration management system should include:
Document every change. This is typically handled by keeping hardcopy markups or using software change tracking features. Your must be able to answer who made a change and if necessary roll it back. Similarly, you should also check to ensure every change was made as requested. Having the requested changes documented helps. Tracking forms documenting what came in when from who and when it was completed. Procedures that ensure that more than one person cannot make changes to the same document at the same time. This is often the source of version conflicts. Untangling them can be a nightmare. You are far better off preventing them. Check-in/Check-out procedures are often used for this. These goals are typically achieve with tracking and sign-off sheets. They may be low tech and labor intensive, but they can save the day.
One issue that you will have to contend with is that widespread use of software enables authors to make their own changes without going through hardcopy markups. While this is can be a huge improvement in speed and efficiency, it comes at the cost of configuration management. You can end up without an audit trail. You will have to determine where to strike the balance between risk, effort, and convenience.