We all dream of winning it big. If you want your business to win it big, there is something you need to master that’s more important that finding big leads. You have to create an organization that can do things bigger than yourself.
Source: How to create proposals that are bigger than yourself | PropLibrary
Figuring out what should go into your proposal is the most important part of the proposal process. You need more than an outline or a compliance matrix to figure out what to write. The MustWin Process provides a flexible way to plan the content of your proposals and uses it to solve many of the problems people encounter when preparing their proposals. How you plan proposal content implies how to prepare to win the proposal during the business development phase that occurs before the proposal effort even starts. The instructions that constitute a Proposal Content Plan also provide a baseline for how you review and validate the quality of your proposals.
Source: Figuring out what to say in your proposals | PropLibrary
A lot of companies do exactly the wrong thing when faced with a must win opportunity. They try to make sure they don’t lose. They give the customer exactly what they ask for in the RFP. They may even make improvements here or there, if they can do it within the boundaries of the instructions. They try to be exactly what the RFP says the customer wants. They never realize that they are setting themselves up to lose.
Source: Why your good proposal is going to lose | PropLibrary
When we write proposals, we often don’t know what the customer cares about. This is the main reason companies talk about how great they are. We write about things we assume the customer cares about or write fear they might care about, because in reality we don’t know. The result is a proposal that isn’t what the customer wants, written in a way the customer doesn’t want to read. The difference between winning and losing is often how you handle not knowing what the customer wants as well as you should.
Source: How to create a proposal that the customer cares about | PropLibrary
Creating a proposal is easy. Working with other people is hard. Combine the two and you’ve got trouble.
A big part of the problem is that other people have opinions. They have their own ways of doing things. When you’re trying to do your proposal a certain way or say things in a certain way, it often doesn’t work out that way when other people are involved.
Sometimes you know you have an opportunity coming up and you want to get a head start on the proposal. Unfortunately, what a lot of people do to prepare for the proposal actually does more harm than good. So here are 3 things people do to prepare for an upcoming proposal that are counterproductive, 3 ways to prepare that can help you win, and 3 that can go either way.
Source: How to prepare for a proposal ahead of RFP release | PropLibrary
Conducting a proposal review with little or no preparation beyond printing the proposal and a copy of the RFP can be worse than not doing any review at all. You shouldn’t conduct every proposal review as if they are all the same. If you focus on having one major proposal review, you are probably making both of these mistakes. Passing proposal reviews should not be about trying the same ineffective approach only harder this time.
Source: Validating the quality of your proposals | PropLibrary
Everything you do, from lead qualification through proposal submission, should be based on what it will take to win.
The primary missions of business development, capture, and proposal management are all very different. And yet, they share the same goal: winning.
