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still use multicolor highlighters as a shredding tool. Either way can be effective (and one is definitely cheaper, if a lot slower). For a detailed look at shredding an RFP and building a compliant and responsive proposal from the results, see Chapter 4.

       Getting the better of your competitors

      Competitive analysis is a legal business discipline that uses a variety of public sources and tools to help you choose the right strategy for setting yourself apart from your competitors. Check out your competitors’ websites to discover their latest product information and market strategies. Use social media to track your competitors’ claims and trending interests. If you have the funds, subscribe to competitive assessment research sites or reports.

      

Another way to capture knowledge about your rivals is to hold a competitor review with employees in your company who compete with or perhaps even work alongside them. You can explain the opportunity and collect insights and new perspectives. Your business may be one of those that finds new employees by luring them away from competitors. Ask around and talk with any colleagues who have recently worked for a competitor to discover whatever you can about the way it does business.

      Your goal as proposal writer is to shine a bright light on your competitors’ weaknesses while subtly touting your strengths. We proposal writers call that “ghosting” the competition. You can take the information you gather from your sources and prepare a SWOT analysis (which assesses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to create powerful discriminators for your solution and ghosting statements for your proposal. For more on creating persuasive content from your competitive analysis, see Chapters 5 and 7.

       Using the proposal as a communication platform

      Your goal in gathering customer and competitor information is to build tactics for creating a long-term and mutually beneficial business relationship, not just a one-and-done customer-vendor agreement. Use your initial work on a given opportunity to help establish a comprehensive communication plan for a particular company or even industry. For instance, what you learn from one engagement may

      ❯❯ Uncover a need for conceptual proposals for longer-range and multi-staged projects

      ❯❯ Enable you to establish customer-focused content for private websites and social media messaging

      ❯❯ Open doors for producing executive-level communiqués that open a dialogue with senior management perhaps, providing status on in-progress projects and forecasting future needs – both of which can result in more winning proposals

       Deciding to bid (or not)

      The bid/no-bid decision is the last action you take in the pre-proposal stage. It’s the last chance for you to bail before putting your resources behind a deal. You need to use the information from your customer investigation and SWOT analysis to make this either/or decision.

      

You need to make sure you have the following:

      ❯❯ A solution that can win over all others

      ❯❯ Proof that you can deliver the solution as your customer requires

      ❯❯ A strong win theme that addresses your customer’s hot buttons

      ❯❯ Commitment from your company to dedicate the resources you need to develop the proposal and win the bid

      You can find more about bid/no-bid decisions in Chapter 6.

       Developing your proposal from cover to cover

      Next comes the proposal development stage. This is where you do the bulk of your work over four phases – strategizing, planning, writing, and publishing.

      During the strategizing phase, you take the needs and vision of a customer, the products, services, and vision of your company, and the skills and insights of a team of specialists, and blend them into a cohesive argument that satisfies both the intellect and the heart of the decision maker. Planning is where you establish the structure of your proposal argument and the material you’ll use to support your argument. Writing is where you craft your descriptions, arguments, and get them ready to be published. And publishing is creating the physical or digital copies of the proposal and delivering it to the customer.

      

Proposal writers bring value to an organization in many ways, but none more so than by directing proposal development resources in the proposal development stage, working within the time constraints of a particular opportunity. Proposal writers may be better termed proposal managers at this point because they’re the glue that holds the whole operation together.

      The following sections 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.

      

Having a consistent structure and format for your RFP responses and proactive proposals will help you assemble a customized proposal for your customers and help them choose you over your competitors.

      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.

      

Your proposal process should be a standard to follow in every instance, with the flexibility to expand or contract like an accordion so you can respond professionally to large and small opportunities alike.

      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,

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