Here is a set of principles that can help guide the design of a successful proposal process. They provide a set of standards against which you can assess your proposal. After all, if you don't know your goals, it's difficult to achieve them.
During the days when I had time to actively assist in proposal writing, I was often elected to prepare the management plan. During the past 30 years, I have probably prepared at least 150. I will never forget the first management plans I wrote. I was a Vice President at Computer Dynamics, a rapidly growing small business in Virginia Beach. The year was 1983; and this was my first experience writing a management plan. If I had had an MBA degree, the work would have been fairly straightforward. However, my degrees were in English, History, and Education.
As independent proposal consultants, we are often asked by customers to evaluate their own processes against those of other companies in their industry. We prefer to call these "best practices." Most often, this request is accompanied by showing, or offering to show, a specific proposal the company has recently submitted.
When we ask proposal specialists whether they have a proposal process, they will almost always answer “yes.” It would be embarrassing to do otherwise.
At a training presentation, I recently presented I was asked, "Who should write the proposal—the business unit, or the proposal department?" Sensing a trap and not wanting to get dragged into any internal politics, I gave the following nonanswer:
In a past life, I wrote proposal software. We had tons of leads, performed dozens of demonstrations, and even had some potential customers salivating. But ultimately I had to find another way to make a living.
This article discusses the important considerations facing organizations when building – or re-building – a Proposal Development Capability.
Here is a set of principals that can help guide the design of a successful proposal process. They provide a set of standards that you can assess your proposal against. After all, if you don't know your goals, it's difficult to achieve them.
Creating and maintaining "boilerplate" materials is a never-ending task in proposal shops. For small business, the problem is often creating the boilerplate.
Every company has a problem maintaining an up-dated library of corporate information. The information most needed for proposals falls in four general categories:
