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services and products through proposals. Many regulated industries and government entities must, by statute, set up an RFP competition so they can create a fair basis for comparing vendors and solutions. Others release RFPs because they know pretty much what they want and are trying to find the best, lowest-cost provider. Still others release RFPs because they’re unhappy with their current provider’s performance and know that an RFP can remedy the situation, one way or another.

      

Some companies request proposals to validate a prior decision (when they’ve already chosen a vendor) or merely to apply pressure to a current provider to lower its price. The better your relationship with the customer, the better your chance of avoiding being used as a tool for making an incumbent more responsive.

Preparing to Propose

      Well-written proposals are a product of a well-defined and closely followed process. That’s why we spend so much of this book walking you through the three major phases of proposal development:

      ❯❯ Pre-proposal stage

      ❯❯ Proposal development stage

      ❯❯ Post-proposal stage

      

If you look at the bigger picture, proposal development is just a part of the overall sales or business development process in a company. You acknowledge that relationship by starting the proposal process long before an RFP is released or a salesperson has uncovered that proactive opportunity – back in what some sales organizations may call their pre-sales process (when they create and formalize their sales strategies for a customer). And we recommend staying involved long after the proposal is delivered, the contract is signed, and the work is underway, so you can be ready to do even better before the next opportunity (whether with either the same customer or a different one). (To better understand the scope of the proposal process, turn to Chapter 6, where we take you through each stage in more detail.)

      The following sections introduce this three-stage proposal process to give you a big-picture view from the proposal writer’s perspective.

       Starting before the beginning

      We begin before you even know you have an opportunity: The pre-proposal stage. It’s where you make many key decisions that can make or break your efforts to build a winning proposal.

      Your goal is to get involved well before a proposal is a certain outcome. In some segments (like government), it’s easier – you may receive a draft RFP to work with, sometimes with significant lead time before the final RFP is released. In other cases, you get a warning from the sales representative that a customer is gearing up for a procurement or that the rep has discovered an opportunity for a proactive proposal. The best scenario is when your sales clients invite you to their sales planning sessions to ensure that you’re engaged as soon as you see an opportunity on the horizon.

      Here’s why getting ahead of the game is so important: If you don’t get involved early, you may never recover. RFP responses are “reactive” proposals, and you don’t want to be the only bidder who’s reacting when an RFP is released. If you have no prior warning, that’s about all you can do. It’s hard enough to win an RFP – you don’t want to see the competition two goals ahead before you take the field.

      The following sections consider how you can gain – and keep – the advantage ahead of the proposal development stage.

       Becoming the trusted advisor

      The best way to get engaged early is to become the trusted response resource who brings serious value to your sales organization’s planning during its pre-sales process. Start capturing historical records about your engagements with your customers: The strategies you use, the win themes you develop, and the lessons you learn. Make those available, along with archived prior proposals for the customer and even some that you’ve created for other companies with similar problems. Your colleagues will start seeing you as an essential part of their success.

       Looking for the right opportunities

      As a proposal writer, you want to be included in the sales strategy sessions that determine when and how you’ll be engaged on a proposal project. You also want to be involved when the sales team assesses whether an opportunity is winnable or not. This is where your archive of information and even your personal experience can influence decisions.

      

Your resources are limited (indeed, you may be the only resource). You have to focus on only those deals that your company has a real chance of winning, or you’ll become stretched too thin, or your work may be marginalized because you’re seen as ineffective.

      Influencing your sales team to get involved early in the right opportunities can mean the difference between success and failure. It means you may be able to influence the questions a customer asks in an RFP. It may mean that you get to pose questions directly to the customer for a proactive proposal. Chapter 3 looks at the value of having a strong relationship with your customer and how this can influence the proposal process in your favor.

       Making it all about the customer

      If you take away only one golden nugget from this book, make it this one: Your proposal is all about your customer – it’s not about you. Use your customer’s terms to describe its problem and your shared vision for a solution. Place your solution into the customer’s environment – customize your proposal’s look and language so it reflects the customer’s brand, its colors, its imagery, and its logo. Go easy on the boilerplate, and customize your source material to better reflect your customer’s working environment.

      

One way to “think customer” is to identify the pain the customer goes through as a result of the problem you want to solve. When you identify the most pressing, emotionally charged needs and clearly depict the pain they cause, you’re said to be pushing the customer’s hot buttons (for more about hot buttons, see Chapter 2). These are the most meaningful issues to your customer and the reasons a customer will buy. Downplay your solution’s features (what it does) and play up the benefits (what your customer gets or can do from the solution) instead. If you can show that you alone can provide that single benefit that solves the customer’s hot-button problem, you’ll win the deal (see Chapters 7 and 9 for guidance on how to develop and write feature and benefit statements).

       Gathering and providing the right information

      

Seeing things through your customers’ eyes is the difference between complying with your customers’ requirements and truly responding to their needs. Compliant proposals can win; responsive proposal do win. How do you figure out what your customers need? You ask a lot of questions.

      You won’t know your customer’s hot buttons if you don’t gather the right information. How do you do this (especially when you’re not the salesperson and never escape the back office)? If your opportunity is proactive, you ask questions. You ask the customer. If your company won’t let you, you ask the customer rep or the customer support tech. You ask thoughtful, probing questions that get to the heart of the customer’s problem, and you listen closely to the answers so you can write like the customer talks.

      If you’re responding to an RFP, you do all the above and shred the RFP. By shredding, we mean parsing, or separating, every requirement as a stand-alone topic to address in your response. Sometimes, that’s easy: Just follow the number scheme that the customer provides in the RFP. But sometimes, customers are sneaky. They bury requirements, using trigger words like will, shall, must, and should to indicate that a requirement follows. Some sophisticated proposal

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