take you on a whistle-stop tour through each phase.
Strategizing: Making the case for success
The strategizing phase is multilayered, so we take you through this step by step.
GETTING READY TO PROPOSE
You need to distill the preliminary fact-finding and speculative thinking of the pre-proposal stage into a specific strategy for this one opportunity. You have something tangible to work with: A final RFP or a diagnosed problem that can drive real work, helping your sales team to create real solutions.
Here’s where the real writing begins, too. You have to create tangible references to guide your contributors: win themes, value propositions, hot buttons, and discriminators. Better still, here’s where you work with your sales lead to write the executive summary (yes, you write it first), to lay a foundation for messaging that resonates throughout the proposal. See how to do all of this in Chapters 6, 7, and 9.
PUTTING THE RIGHT RESOURCES ON YOUR PROPOSAL
Creating a proposal takes at least a village – sometimes a small metropolis. Depending on your circumstances, a village may be a sole sales partner and a few specialists or a hundred or more individuals with unique skill and knowledge sets. Some specialists will be your sources for technical and messaging content, while others will be your resources for putting together the professional proposal: graphics specialists, production specialists, editors, and the like. Still others will be the objective, expert reviewers that all proposals need to reach their potential. Get more information on proposal roles and responsibilities in Chapter 8.
TAILORING THE PROCESS
Each proposal is unique because each solution for a customer is unique (if it’s not, your proposal probably won’t succeed). For that reason, you need to be ready to adjust your standard proposal process to fit the circumstances of each particular opportunity. It’s natural to think that responding to an RFP and creating a proactive proposal would follow two distinct processes, but that’s really not the case.
All proposals deserve the full rigor of a standard process. However, you may not need to customize the product description as much each time, or go through as many reviews, or you may not have enough time to do everything to the extent you normally would.
Planning: Scheduling the process
When you have all your process steps in place for this particular opportunity, devise a schedule that ensures you have time to do your work as you manage the efforts of your contributors. This may sound a little selfish, but no one outside the proposal business really understands what you go through to deliver an error-free, single-voice, professionally published proposal. You have to leave yourself ample time to review, revise, edit, and proofread the work.
Discover more about building an effective and suitable schedule in Chapter 8.
Writing: Crafting the story of your proposal
A proposal is an argument – but it’s also a story about how people help other people overcome problems and achieve their goals. Readers like stories, especially when they can relate to a character in that story. Stories are easier to read, and they motivate people to act in ways that other forms of writing can’t.
In Chapters 9 and 10, you discover how to write strong proposal stories, using a direct, active writing style that has actors performing actions to accomplish results. You see how to write win themes, compelling value propositions, and concrete benefit and proof statements. You find tips on what to do and what to avoid when you pull your content into a presentable shape, and how to make your proposal easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to accept. We even show you how to use all these tips to write a winning executive summary and clear, concise, and responsive answers to your customers’ questions.
Proposal writers usually “grow up” to become proposal managers. They add project management skills to their researching, authoring, and reviewing skills, and take the burden off sales and other specialists to make sure the proposal is responsive, compelling, and on time. Getting the proposal out the door is often an extraordinary challenge – setting up and managing reviews, creating and executing multimedia productions, and ensuring timely delivery to wherever the proposal must go. And the job doesn’t end with delivery. You may have to lead clarification efforts or coach oral presentations to help secure a win.
The proposal manager’s responsibilities may differ from company to company, but a true proposal manager is game for any job that ensures a successful submission. To find out more about how to submit your proposal successfully, see Chapter 12.
Publishing: Making your proposal visible
Proposals need to stand out in a crowd (or on an evaluator’s or decision maker’s desk or desktop). That doesn’t mean that you have to doll them up like the Griswold’s house at Christmas. It does mean that you find ways to tell your story visually as well as in words.
