Proposal planning begins prior to the kickoff, with the development of an outline. You have two options when planning an outline:
1. Develop a regular outline then use storyboards to think in a structured way through the sections
2. Develop an annotated outline with a proposal manager (perhaps with additional help from subject matter experts (SME)) providing guidance to the writers for the sections
After the kickoff meeting, people don’t really get to jump into writing right away. Instead, they should think first about what they are going to say, entering the brainstorming and research phase. This is where the authors make decisions on the final solution, come up with details, and find facts. Brainstorming can be done individually or in small groups.
I have to fess up, these days I’ve been embracing bad behavior in the midst of working long hours to keep the fun alive. It’s so much more interesting than being boring and conventional, or just trudging through the day.
Every business needs a pipeline, which is essentially a list of all the opportunities you are chasing, with their associated values, dates when they are going to be released and awarded, all the key information about each opportunity, metrics to see how well you are progressing with the pursuit, and a variety of other information that will help you track these opportunities better and increase your probability of winning them. You can start your pipeline as a spreadsheet, and as it grows, you might want to select an appropriate pipeline tool. For example, you could establish a pipeline in Microsoft SharePoint 360, Privia, Salesforce, or Central Desktop.
Government contractors who know how to play the game pay a lot of attention to pre-proposal preparation work and other activities aimed at raising your win probability, called capture. Essentially, capture is the equivalent of presales for commercial companies that deal with complex sales, albeit even more regimented. Complex sales is when you have to go beyond a handshake and a contract, have to position to win ahead of an RFP issuance, and then write a fairly complex proposal. The concept is old, but the term capture is relatively new, having gained recognition as a full-blown profession since the 1990s.
If the trickiest part of proposals was the process of preparing a compliant document with text and multiple graphics for submission, winning would be a lot easier. In the end, answering every requirement may prevent a proposal from being thrown out, but getting the win themes and subject matter expertise captured in hard-hitting text that speaks straight to the customer’s needs is what makes a winning difference. That winning prose is hard to produce. It takes a lot of time and effort and it causes prolonged suffering to everyone involved. Unfortunately, most pursuits do not get blessed with Stephen King-like engineers who can bang out several sections in a day, and they have limited budgets that don’t allow hiring a band of consultants. So, how can you get your team to write well?
It is an uphill battle. Authors usually face time limitations due to juggling their “day” jobs with proposal assignments. They also suffer from lack of confidence in their writing skills, writer’s block, procrastination, lack of exposure to basic writing tools and techniques, and bad habits such as indiscriminate reuse of old proposal text. Many people in technical professions seem to have the holy fear of writing the same way some non-technical people dread math.
The trouble is that proposal managers’ common bag of tricks with annotated outlines, requirements-filled storyboards, and threats to enforce deadlines does just the opposite of getting people to free up their time and get their creativity flowing. Motivation, creativity, and inspiration originate from the place opposite of linear thinking, forms, and threats. This is why storyboards are scarcely useful and often get abandoned after their review, when the “real writing” starts. Storyboards actually come from the movie industry, and they are based on the script that is already written. This tool was not created for people who do not yet know what to write. Paradoxically, just starting to write or issuing section assignments without instructions leads to an even worse output than using storyboards. It is often a difficult and tricky leap a proposal makes from storyboards to a good first draft.
Proposal management has made great strides as a profession in the last decade. It is easy to forget the laments we had a few years ago about some company leaders thinking of proposals as an administrative job. Once in a while we get a reminder, though: when I attended the 2013 APMP International Bid & Proposal Con Chapter Officers Workshop, a woman from Egypt erupted into a passionate speech about the plot of proposal professionals in the Middle East where companies still believe them to be glorified admins, while truthfully they are the lifeblood and the growth engine of an organization.
