Our Blog

Our proposals start off chaotic and get worse. When proposal development starts without a plan, the result is chaotic and can lead to underdeveloped proposals. The team will be exhausted before the work actually begins.

A recent trend in the past few New Years has been to throw resolutions out the window. People claim they come with too much pressure, and most aren’t met by the year’s end anyway. Starting up a new proposal could prompt similar stress for proposal managers, especially if a recent proposal started with a good kickoff and went downhill from there.

Our proposals start off chaotic and get worse. When proposal development starts without a plan, the result is chaotic and can lead to underdeveloped proposals. The team will be exhausted before the work actually begins.

As workforce and workload management continue to accelerate toward a virtual and flexible approach to achieving outcomes, adhering to a defined and disciplined pursuit management framework has become more important than ever...

Most of us understand that hope is not a good strategy, but don’t know how to put good practices in place.

While the phrase, “everybody gets a trophy” has become aligned with a sense of entitlement...

Probability of Win (Pwin) remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in business development today...

Win rates seem like pretty simple statistics—what percentage of your qualified opportunities are you winning?...Learn from past proposals and when to end a pursuit.

For some people, efficiency is synonymous with speed. Sometimes there is very little time from when the RFP drops to the submission deadline, and this means the proposal team must work very hard and very quickly to prepare a proposal for submission. However, efficiency is not just doing things as quickly as possible. It is also about doing things right the first time, so you do not waste time on rework.

Sales and proposal professionals often focus too little on benefits and fail to link key solution features to benefits. Or worse, they wait to articulate the benefit until the end of a proposal section. When the benefits are buried, the customer won’t see how your solution is best and may decline your offer...

A myth is defined as a story without an author that is passed along…a popular belief or story that has become associated with a person, institution, or occurrence (like a proposal).We pulsed hundreds of proposal development professionals to ask them about proposal-related myths they run into and deal with in their profession. Here are a few. Fact or fiction? Myth or reality?

All businesses know the realistic price they can offer for services. What can you do when you’ve performed a competitive analysis and discovered you cannot compete with the low prices your competitors are predicted to offer?

Winning a task order master contract is not easy! Typically, many people have worked many hours (and many after-hours) to help our organization win this master contract...

Losing a bid is hard. It’s easy to get swept up in disappointment, to see the flaws in your proposal, and to blame others for mistakes. This breaks down the morale of the team and quality can absolutely suffer. Mistakes need to be addressed in a lessons learned review, but don’t dwell on them. There’s usually more to losing than what’s in the proposal...

Yes, a proposal must persuade the customer and help lead them to a buying decision. But the words and visuals on the page or screen don’t tell the whole story. There’s much more to winning business than developing a compliant, compelling, and persuasive proposal...

We may have the perfect solution for our customer’s problem. Another probability is that we have the perfect solution for what we perceive the customer’s problem to be. The customer may not trust you because you missed the mark by explaining your solution more than you listened to their needs...

This is one of the most common questions in our industry. The funny thing is most people and organizations want to create all sorts of complex dynamics, conspiracy theories, dreams, fables, and excuses as to why their proposals fail to win and why their win rates and capture ratios are so low...

Many of us think our proposals and our writing is focused on the customer. We write about the features of our offer, but we’re falling short. Why? We might be trying to sell them on solutions they don’t need and the customer quickly loses interest and our proposal goes straight in the trash. Apply these guidelines to improve readability and increase your probability of winning the business...

In most effective proposals, all weaknesses, known or potentially known to the customer, are addressed in the proposal. Proposal contributors generally have no issues talking up their company’s unique strengths, but what is the best way to address weaknesses in your company or other threats to winning the contract?

While the proposal team is separate from the capture or opportunity team, this shouldn’t automatically sever any communication between them...

When positioning for a strategic opportunity, any advantage should be considered to improve the opportunity’s Probability of Win...

Proposals require a lot of planning up front. Many companies have done all the work to make sure the message is accurate. But when the submission is rewarded, that company still may not be selected. The issue could be in the details...

Today we are in a fiercely complicated and competitive environment. Many companies have seen their revenue go flat or decline. In order to survive and thrive, we need to improve our business development and capture skills. We must be as good at winning business as we are at our core business...

You’re responding to a lot of RFPs but not winning much business.Many companies believe that casting a wide net and submitting proposals for every opportunity that comes their way will increase revenue. However, this is not the case. Responding to every RFP can spread your resources and proposal team thin, leading to poor proposals and less business overall.