Know the client...early on

It's often said that a race is not won at the beginning but it can be lost. Is it the same with proposal writing? Maybe you cannot win your proposal at an early stage, but you can certainly put yourself in a position not to win it.

This really comes down to re-thinking your proposal development strategy, in that it ceases to be about just writing a winning proposal but encompasses everything you know about customer relationships. Having a good customer relationship won't necessarily help you win new business, but having a poor customer relationship puts you at a severe disadvantage.

It's important to get to know the client and what drives there business. There have been many great books recently on the idea of consultancy selling - not just doing a product pitch to show off features and benefits - but in you providing a service through your sales. This requires you to understand the clients business, knowing how to solve their problems and being able to express how your solution will avoid the negative ramifications of both inaction and choosing an alternative and inferior solution. 

You need to understand the client well enough to be able to put forward a solution, a clear position on the benefits and advantages of your solution and a return on investment model.

Now we approach the end of the race - where you can not just lose, but you can win. Knowledge is not enough and client relationships are not enough (most of the time). This is where your proposal development skills need to come to the fore.

The proposal must reflect your knowledge and your client relationships and your solution. It is here that you in-depth, long-time cultivated understanding of the clients business can be exploited. You proposal is there to persuade the client that they must change the direction they are going in by moving in your direction - that is where the race is won.

If you truly have taken the time and effort to know and understand the client's needs and you truly believe in the product and/or service that you offer it should be easy to be passionate and persuasive. You have all the tools - use them because in this race there are very few prizes for second place.

Late night last night?

So it was Thursday last night, the day before many proposals have to be submitted at the end of the week.

How many proposal writers were on their third slice of cold pizza and second cup of warm coke still trying to get their proposal finished before getting up early this morning to get to the office print it out before the last minute courier delivery on Friday afternoon?

Sound familiar? Most proposal writers at some point in time have had close calls - the ones which were got in just in time. Many proposal writers may even have a story of running to hand deliver a proposal in order to meet the submission deadline.

There are a lot of proposals put together this way, that miss out on important review and quality checks. And if you have ever put a proposal together tis way how successful was it?

Then think about the pother way, the proposal that was planned and executed early. It gets reviewed properly - the financials are checked (you better hope late night guy didn't mess that part up) and then it gets edited. It's printed and bound to look professional and is sent early to ensure that it gets there on time.

You may have won work preparing proposals both ways. But I bet you won more being better prepared and by re-reading, improving and re-writing.

It's a far more enjoyable way to work too.

Learn more about how you can get your Thursday evenings back with the Learn to Write Proposals bid management and quality review tools.

Power words

I like power words - really good descriptors or triggers.  

I'm going to include some of my proposal power words soon and talk about how to use them. In the meantime, Learn to Write Proposals Members can check out the Power Words Section in the www.learntowriteproposals.com Member's Section.

Here though are some of the most important power wrods in sales history. What else would you add to the list?

You

Yes

Free

Money

Save

Results

Easy

Discovery

Proven

New

Love

Guarantee

Fast

Why

How

Secrets

Sale

Now

Power

Safe

Announcing

Discount

Offer

Informative

Indispensable

Irresistible

Introducing

Moneysaving      

How to improve your win rate

Writing proposals can be expensive. In large corporations a dedicated team with a dedicated budget will work on putting together each discrete complex solution. In medium sized organisations there may be a dedicated bid team to work alongside account managers to produce proposals. And in the small organisation maybe the owner/manager works late each night putting together the proposals.

However proposals are produced they take time and resources...and that means money.

How often has your organisation done a precise calculation of the cost of producing one proposal? Do you have any idea? or is it just included in the overall sales/cost-of-doing-business overhead?

In the Learn to Write Proposal Survey the average time to produce a proposal is around one week. Assuming one member of staff working on the proposal for that length of time the cost is in the thousands of dollars...and for small business that's a lot of cash.

Then think about your win rate..and multiply that by the cost of each bid to produce. Chances are, it's becoming a lot of money for no reward. Let's hope that the work you win is delivering good margins.

Now analyse which proposals you won. What was the differentiating factor? Customer knowledge? Better solution? Was it just a better proposal?

So what if you could win all the work you went for? OK...that might be unrealistic, but you should at least be able to cut down the number of the proposals you lose - and that is going to benefit you in two ways - firstly it will save you the money it costs to produce the proposal but secondly it will allow to utilise you time finding better opportunities and working on winning the opportunities that you do decide to bid on.

So how do you decide which bids to go for? Better qualification. At regular points from when the opportunity has been identified to when the proposal is submitted you should qualify the opportunity.

The Learn to Write Proposals "Prospect Qualification Toolkit" is an interactive tool that helps you identify where your prospective opportunity is weak based on some typical criteria (explicit or not) that buying decisions are made on. This helps you identify early on non-starters or opportunities that were initially pursued that should be shelved.

Using this tool also helps you prioritise your opportunities 

When you've reached the point of no return (when you are always going to submit the bid) it helps you identify weak points that require work in order to maximise your chances of success.

The easiest way to improve your win rate, improve the ROI of your bid team investment and lower your costs isn't just to throw extra resources against every opportunity, but to analyze opportunities to decide which ones you can realistically  win.

3 things that annoy clients

Here are three things that annoy clients. Maybe they're obvious, even outrageous...but they do happen.

Not answering the specification. How many times has a client received a proposal that doesn't really provide a solution to what was proposed?

Not including all the required information. How does the client make an informed decision?

The wrong name in the proposal. Who is the proposal for? Did the proposal just use a load of cut and paste from an earlier proposal?

Elementary and stupid mistakes maybe. But now ask yourself...have you ever done any of them? I bet you didn't win the work.

Do RFPs lead to bad proposals?

Some organisations are incredibly concerned with the appearance of impartiality and fairness in the RFP process. Yet, I believe that this is potentially damaging for them.

Don't misunderstand me...I'm not against fairness. I don't want my competitor holding an advantage over me that I don't know about. Although I do want to try and mine my relationship with the client as far as I can for valuable information and to ensure I'm not at a disadvantage.

It's the approach that some organisations go through. We all know the potential gains of working with people you know and trust. So why create a procurement system that denies any contact with the client other than online forums? Why have a response template sent out that counts exactly the number of characters in each response section? Why use an expensive e-procurement system that is frustrating and seems irrelevant for for many suppliers?

Why? Several reasons. Firstly - transparency and audit trail. If there's a complaint about the process or preferential treatment, it's easy for the buyer to say that it isn't so...look at the Chinese wall we surrounded ourselves with.

Secondly - evaluation. If every response is the same style and format, it should be easier to objectively evaluate and score that response.

Thirdly - management of suppliers and procurement opportunities. It's easy to control and manage external relationships and supplies, especially when the e-procurement function is within a larger corporate ERP system.

Fourthly - Cost. If all proposals are equal, then surely it makes it easier to procure the supplier with the lowest price...especially when using a reverse auctioning system.

But at what cost to the client. Surely some flexibility to allow one of your suppliers to demonstrate some out-of-the-box thinking, to come up with a creative solution for your need. To show that just because it's big business purchasing it doesn't mean that small supplier entrepreneurship needs to be quashed. 

Creative proposals are better for creative and bespoke solutions. OK - if you need 1,000,000 widgets then a system like this might work for you (though I know that the widget suppliers find them overkill). But when you have an opportunity to get new, fresh ideas from new, fresh business and individuals, don't stop the lateral thinking before it's even begun by only allowing proposals that don't have graphics. Treat yourself to new thinking by opening to the possibilities that a completely open response format would allow.

Free (and open source) software that you can use

There's a lot of good stuff out there. Good stuff that can potentially make our life easier.

The vast majority of use use MS Word to write our proposals, our letters - pretty much everything, but with the development of some great web services there are some tools that can help make your life easier. 

One of the biggest problems with MS Word is, and always has been, the difficulty of effective collaboration on a document. When everything is created with an application on your machine (often with you storing the files on your machine) it's hard to work on a document with someone else. There are ways round it - splitting up the document, version control etc, but wouldn't it be fantastic to have two people working on the same document at once?

Well, there is a pretty impressive suite of business apps at www.zoho.com, one of them is an online word processor. Just starting the application makes you realise that this isn't a cut-down web-based alternative to MS Word, this is a serious application in it's own right. 

But the feature I love about this application is the ability to invite users to share the document with you and allow them to work on it simultaneously in real time. 

Have you ever been working on a proposal and due to resource limitations had to email a copy of a document to several contributors and then spend another half day (or night) inserting it into the final proposal template and re-formatting it?

Or when you are in a hurry to get the document complete and you need to make changes to a section whilst someone else works on another section...whilst someone else is proofreading...

The opportunity for a genuine collaborative tool such as this to cut down time on proposal writing is massive.  There are other toosl - document history and the ability to go offline with documents (and the application) for work away from the web and synchronisation when you return online.

Combine this with online chat or Skype; use the new Google Chrome web browser and save Zoho Writer as an application on your desktop and this is what the web is about. This is what collaboration is all about.  

This can only make your proposal writing easier and your proposals better.

This is where we are now and for sure there are some features that we need from MS Word that are missing (mail merge for example). At the moment I'll be writing proposals in MS Word using the Learn to Write Proposals "Proposal Accelerator" and using Zoho for the collaborative elements but how much longer before we don't need to buy that expensive word processing application any more.

I'll be discussing how you can get some of my favorite and free time-saving, proposal-helping applications soon here in my blog.