Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.—Leo Tolstoy To appreciate a proposal that creates positive behavioral differentiation, first consider varieties of proposals that negatively differentiate. At the far end of “poor” on the spectrum of proposal quality are the off-the-shelf brochures and price lists. Believe it or not, suppliers sometimes put these in the mail in response to a customer’s request for a proposal. Bordering on being disrespectful, these kinds of responses show no insight into the customer’s problems and little real desire for the work. They are a convenience to the supplier but signal, correctly, that the supplier has taken no time to learn more about the customer’s needs and expended no energy to customize a response. What we like about them, however, is that they are easy to compete against because it’s not hard to behaviorally differentiate yourself if your competitors are this careless.
Next on the negative hit parade are proposals built wholly or mostly from boilerplate, which includes standard descriptions, off-the-shelf résumés and experience write-ups, and sections of previous proposals. Boilerplate is a convenience for proposal writers who argue, reasonably, that reinventing the wheel is a waste of time, but danger is afoot when you beg, borrow, and steal passages from previous proposals. One high-tech company we know of—which wishes to remain nameless—was bidding on a large contract for the U.S. Air Force. It had previously bid on a U.S. Army contract for a similar system, and its proposal team borrowed liberally from the Army proposal as they wrote the one for the Air Force. In numerous places throughout the document they neglected to change the customer’s name, although their most egregious faux pas was not misnaming the customer in the text but doing it on the cover. Further, in what can only be described as a suicidal moment, the proposal proudly declared, “We will provide the U.S. Army with the highest possible quality and attention to detail.” This story lacks a happy ending, except for the competitors. When we saw what they had done, we were inclined to ask, “Can you spell interservice rivalry?” Boilerplate is a convenience, but if you use it, then “paying attention to detail” has to be more than a slogan. You have to ensure that each word, sentence, paragraph, section, and visual actually addresses what your current customer is asking for. Untailored boilerplate is rarely on target, though it can provide the raw material from which to construct an excellent proposal.
Next on the negative ledger are proposals that we would describe as noncompliant descriptions of capability. A surprising number of these kinds of proposals are submitted every year. In these proposals, the authors have looked at the bid request document and tried to provide the information requested, but they have not been meticulous in responding to every request or requirement, and they have focused almost exclusively on their own capabilities and products. These are generally very difficult proposals for customers to evaluate because it isn’t immediately clear whether the information customers requested is in the proposal. The biggest problem with these proposals is compliance, and they generally lose because evaluators can’t find the information they need, usually because the proposal writers have not answered the mail. These proposals often contain a disproportionately high amount of boilerplate and are not well designed. The signals they send to customers are “We don’t care enough to do a better job,” or “We’re behind the eight ball on your proposal, and, frankly, this is the best we can do. So how will you score us on the chemistry test? How will you translate this behavioral message into how well we will manage your project? What’s your conclusion about that commitment to service and quality we kept telling you about in middle game?”
Proposal writers are strongly inclined to tell their story the best way they know how, which is to organize their thoughts in a manner that is logical to them. However, this is often a fatal error. Proposal evaluators do their jobs by comparing each proposal to a set of requirements and criteria, which are typically spelled out in the RFP, technical specifications, or scope of work. In the evaluation process, they look at proposals to see how well each bidder is addressing the requirements or meeting the criteria. So proposals that are organized the way their authors think they should be are often terribly frustrating for the evaluators, who are following the “script” dictated by the RFP and related documents. This leads us to the first of our suggestions for creating behaviorally differentiated proposals: answer the mail. If the customer asks how you would handle areas A, B, C, and D, then be sure your proposal provides information on areas A, B, C, and D—in that order. Although the customer’s logic in asking for information may not be apparent to you (or make sense), you are not the audience and you are not the customer. So a cardinal rule of proposal writing is to give customers exactly what they ask for in the order they ask for it. If you did this and this alone, you would make it much easier for customers to read your proposals and would behaviorally differentiate yourself from a great many competing suppliers who don’t follow this simple rule.
Being compliant means providing all the information customers ask for. If you fail to comply fully, you have failed the customer’s first tests: Can you listen? Do you understand what we want? Will you give us what we want? Can we trust that your solution will meet our needs? The finest proposals not only answer the mail; they do it so their compliance is transparent. They are meticulous in following the customer’s lead. They are scrupulous in addressing every requirement—in the order the customer listed them. They use the customer’s language, and they provide aids to help the evaluators see their compliance more easily. Responsiveness goes well beyond mere compliance. Bear in mind that no RFP can ever fully capture the customer’s intent. The RFP writers are human and typically work in a procurement function, which means they are not the end user or even the ultimate buyer of what they are attempting to define and discuss. They may be restricted from describing everything that would be helpful for suppliers to know. Even when no restrictions exist, few RFP writers are skillful enough to convey fully not only customers’ requirements but also their goals, underlying concerns, key issues or hot buttons, and values.
In short, what most RFPs lack is insight. They present the official and superficial (though usually detailed) picture of what the customer wants, but they generally fail to enlighten suppliers about the more subtle and intangible factors that led to the customer’s decision to purchase this product or service and the hopes, fears, and political concerns that will drive the customer’s supplier selection decision. Compliant proposals focus on the supplier’s capability to deliver what the customer has specified in the RFP. Consequently, they focus on the supplier and the features of the supplier’s solution rather than the customer and the benefits those features provide. They describe, but they don’t sell, and there is a powerful difference between the two approaches.
Responsive proposals do more. They demonstrate how the bidder will help customers achieve their business goals, not just their project or procurement goals. The latter goals are not the end. They are the means to the end, and a responsive proposal shows astute awareness of this distinction. What most proposals fail to recognize is that customers are not in the problem-solving business. The millions they are about to invest are just that—an investment—and their ultimate goals define the return on investment (ROI) they must get as a business. Solving the problem is how they will do it. The proposal that maps a clear path through the problem or immediate need to those business goals is a proposal that truly understands what’s driving the investment and what’s at stake. To write a responsive proposal, then, you must incorporate the middle game insights you discovered while working with the customer into the text and visuals in ways that demonstrate your superior understanding of the customer’s needs, goals, and underlying drivers.
Beyond compliance and responsiveness, proposals that behaviorally differentiate you from competing proposals do an excellent job of explaining the logic underlying your offer. In other words, throughout every part of your proposal, you answer four key questions: Why us? Why not them? So what? and How so? The first two questions remind us that proposals are sales tools. The answers explain why customers should choose you (why your solution is best) and why they should not choose your competitors. It is not good business practice to attack your competitors by name, but you should attack their areas of weakness. When customers have finished reading your proposal, they should understand clearly why you and your solution are preferable and why your competitors’ solutions are undesirable. Next, in answering the So what? question, you are explaining to customers why you have chosen the solution, products, or features you are proposing. You might say, for example, “Our project team brings 323 years of aggregate experience to this challenge.” So what? What do those 323 years do for the customer? This is the WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) factor. Everything you propose has no meaning except in what it does for the customer, and explaining the So whats for every feature of your offer makes the customer’s WIIFM clear.
If you could read customers’ minds while they assess proposals or presentations, you might be staggered at how often the “So what?” occurs and never gets answered. Furthermore, keep in mind that the people who evaluate your proposals do not award you the deal. They recommend you to their decision-makers. So if they try to recommend your company by repeating all the features you trotted out in your proposal—those 323 years of experience—the decision-makers will also respond with “So what?” The evaluators need benefits to answer that question for their executives. A proposal that gives them those answers has behaved exceptionally well, and when the evaluators decide to recommend your company and solution, they have just joined your sales force. Behaviorally, you need to give them what they need to sell you, your company, and your offer, and to unsell your competitors in the process.
Likewise, if you make a benefit-related claim (that your approach will improve the customer’s configuration management, for example), then you are obliged to explain how so. We have been reviewing proposals for the past twenty-five years, and our experience over that period suggests that 80 to 90 percent of all proposals fail to answer these four questions consistently and well. When they do, they are award-winning knockouts and are dazzlingly effective with customers, but as we said earlier, it’s difficult to persuade the engineers, technicians, and scientists who write many proposal sections to think this way. It’s just not in their DNA.
The finest proposals also manifest a clear and compelling strategy and a strong and repeated set of messages or themes. The writers are clear about why the customer should choose them. They build themes based on their most powerful differentiators and sales messages, and those themes appear at every appropriate point—in the executive summary, in volume or section summaries, at the beginning of relevant paragraphs, as sidebar comments, and in visuals and captions. The key messages are reinforced in so many ways it’s impossible for customers not to get the message, yet in the most artful of proposals, this is done subtly. The themes don’t reach out and smack readers in the face; they simply keep appearing, in various forms, understated here and plainly stated there, so the cumulative effect is persuasive and memorable.
Some readers derive most of their information from the words on the page; others are more visually oriented and respond best to visual representations of the major ideas in a proposal. Consequently, the most impactful proposals are about 30 percent visual, which means that on the whole about one page in three or four is visual. Of course, the visuals should be integrated into the text, and many visuals are half-page or quarter-page in size. Still, your proposals will be more effective if they contain a lot of high-impact visuals. Visuals draw the eye and engage the imagination. One articulate visual, presented well, has more power than pages and pages of text. Annotated visuals are especially compelling. These have short captions that draw readers to and explain important parts of the illustration. A well-annotated visual is like a walking tour of the illustration, drawing the reader’s eyes to what the bidder wants to emphasize and making the journey more enlightening.
Decades ago the fad among large defense contractors was to produce “visually oriented proposals” in which each page of text was matched with an opposite page of visuals. This stilted format did not last long, but it did emphasize how important visuals are in telling a compelling story—and this is the more important lesson. Imagine the effect if a publication such as National Geographic suddenly dropped those brilliant photographs and maps, leaving only the text to be read. Or if it just attached those pictures at the back of each issue rather than integrating them with the articles. The impact would be numbing and perhaps fatal. Similarly, proposals must tell a compelling story. A good story told poorly will lose every time to a good story told well. Assuming all else is equal—that you and your key competitors are credible and acceptable, that your price is competitive, and that each company has good relationships in the customer’s organization—the winning team will be the one that has been most compelling in the presentation of its offer. Artistry matters.
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.—Leo Tolstoy
What also matters is the ease of evaluation. Proposals that are easy to evaluate tend to get higher scores because, simply put, the evaluators like them. Of course, you must have a good solution and so forth, but if you give two proposals to an evaluator and one is easy to evaluate and the other hard to evaluate, the former will get higher technical scores even if they propose exactly the same technology, the same products, and the same solution. Why? Because the evaluators are human, and they develop a positive attitude toward proposals that make their lives easier, and vice versa. No matter how objective customers want the process of proposal evaluation to be, the simple truth is that the difference between higher and lower scores depends largely on each evaluator’s judgment. So how do you make your proposals easier to evaluate?
First, be sure to answer the mail. Be steadfastly compliant. Turn the RFP into a checklist of requirements and make sure you respond to every single request for information. Sometimes, a single sentence in an RFP may include three or four separate pieces to respond to. Respond to each of them. Moreover, as we said earlier, follow the customer’s organization. Don’t invent your own. In many cases, evaluators will not read your proposal word for word. In fact, if they have to, you’re making them work too hard to choose you. So by designing a reader-friendly proposal that emphatically delivers all your key messages—including powerful answers to those four questions discussed earlier—you are, in fact, making it easier for them to choose your proposal, especially if they have to slog through your competitors’ proposals. Relatively speaking, yours was a pleasure to evaluate: compliant, responsive, and compelling.
Make your compliance transparent. Create a “compliance checklist” that shows, side by side, their requirements from the RFP and the page in your proposal where you respond to them. Submit this checklist with your proposal.
Use customers’ language. You may refer to something as a thing-amajig, but if they call it a widget, then you should call it a widget. Even simple practices like this can make your proposal easier for evaluators to follow, and it shows more respect than insisting on your own terminology. We once wrote a proposal for a large aerospace manufacturer. After winning, we had a chance to talk to the head of its evaluation team, and he said, “Reading your proposal was like reading my own thoughts.” When you follow their structure and use their terms, you increase their comfort with you—in part because it says that you’ve listened to them, in part because it shows you’re not arrogant, and in part because it convinces them that you will deliver what they want. How could it get any better than that?
Proposal specialist DeNeil Hogan Petersen tells an interesting story about making proposals easier to evaluate:
In 1988, I was hired to build a proposal department for a company that sold hand-held computer systems to municipalities and utilities for meter reading and parking ticket management. These systems are common now but were fairly new at the time. The industry practice was for all the competitors to supply the customer with a document called “bid specs” listing the specifications for their hardware, software, and maintenance programs. The customer would then prepare an RFP incorporating the various bid specs (e.g., “the hand-held unit must be waterproof and capable of being dropped from a height of six feet onto pavement,” “the software must be capable of identifying and escalating scofflaw information and downloading to the hand-held units for immediate action on the street,” or “the vendor must offer prepaid overnight shipping to and from the maintenance facility”). Thus, the typical proposal had a lengthy section entitled “Response to Specifications.” The standard response was a numbered list with yes/no or compliant/noncompliant.
Initially, I repeated the customer’s specifications in the response section, with a checklist identifying whether we complied with or exceeded the requirement (which we often did) and a narrative explanation. The customer feedback on our proposals was very positive, especially for the simple act of repeating their requirements, and it wasn’t long before we started noticing RFP’s asking for a checklist response. The copies of our competitors’ proposals and bid specs our sales reps were able to obtain verified they had started doing the same things.
Then one of the sales reps suggested we start supplying bid specs on disk, which was a pretty novel idea for the time. I rewrote ours like an actual RFP, without mentioning our name in the technical specifications, and including proposal instructions. This we presented as an RFP preparation tool, inviting the customer to use verbatim or edit as necessary, and of course they did. Even when they inserted competitors’ specifications in place of ours, they tended to use our proposal instructions, forcing our competitors to respond in our format and making the task of preparing proposals a lot easier for us. Again, the feedback on the RFP-style bid specs was extremely positive.²
Her experience illustrates not only good proposal practice but also the entropic forces that drive all markets toward commodities. Best practices will invariably be adopted by the market and spread to other competitors. Nonetheless, it is better to lead the pack than follow it. First movers have the behavioral advantage in every kind of market, and if you can behave in innovative ways with customers—even though it may raise their expectations and eventually cause your competitors to copy your practices—you will still have gained the advantage by outbehaving your competitors to start with.
Another in our arsenal of best proposal practices is the brochure executive summary, and this one is a blockbuster. Research on the effectiveness of various practices in proposals has shown that creating a brochure executive summary can more than double your probability of winning. Proposals often include executive summaries but many are perfunctory, uninspired, and uninspiring. We began our work on the brochure executive summary years ago while helping a large telecommunications firm bid on the telephone system for a state’s college and university system (we told this story in Winning Behavior). Since then, we have seen brochure executive summaries used in countless competitions. If they are well designed and well executed, they can make a powerful difference because, unlike the full proposals, these executive summaries are getting your best messages to the people who will ultimately make the buying decision. Several years ago, we helped a large engineering and construction firm study its proposal wins and losses. The firm isolated a number of potential contributing factors, including the presence or absence of brochure executive summaries, and examined fifty opportunities—half of them wins and half losses. A factor analysis revealed that when the firm included brochure executive summaries with its proposals, it was two and one-half times more likely to win.
The most recent innovations in proposal design are outgrowths of the personal computer and its bombastic cousin, the Internet. In recent years, we have seen proposals submitted on CD-ROM; electronic executive summaries with hierarchical levels of detail that allowed customers to go as deep or shallow on a topic as they wished; and interactive proposals that featured searchable slide show presentations, animated flowcharts, “peelable” illustrations in which customers could peer inside drawings and plant configurations, executive summaries with embedded movies instead of the standard still photographs (so the supplier’s key people could “speak” to customers), movies of related projects that showed innovative features and approaches, and other high-tech ways of displaying information so it was more useful, more interesting, and more informative for customers. Some years ago, these capabilities were prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to create, but today’s computer technology is making them affordable and within reach of most proposal departments, even in smaller companies.
So, let’s summarize. How do you behaviorally differentiate yourself in the proposal itself? First, you ensure that you are 100 percent compliant and responsive. You answer the mail and show insight into the customer’s goals, needs, and key issues. Compliance and responsiveness are fundamental. Failing to do this is likely to differentiate you negatively. Next, you ensure that your proposals are customer oriented, focusing on customers’ needs and on the benefits to them of your proposed products and services. Answer the four key questions throughout your proposals: Why us? Why not them? So what? and How so? If you use boilerplate, be sure to customize it (and use the find and replace function in your software to ensure that you change all previous customers’ names in the document). Base your proposals on a clear and compelling strategy with themes and messages repeated verbally and visually throughout, and do everything you can to make the proposals easy to evaluate. Finally, use brochure executive summaries and state-of-the-art software tools to make your proposals interesting, informative, engaging, and appealing, especially to your customers’ executives.
To customers, your proposals are more than promises of your future behavior; they are your behavior. Your proposals are often the first tangible evidence customers have of your quality, your ability to listen, your willingness to be flexible, your attention to detail, and so on. Whether you intend it or not, your proposals are symbols of you, and they have the potential to be symbolic behavioral differentiators—either positively or negatively. So if you claim to be customer oriented, don’t submit a “we” proposal. If you say you excel at meeting project schedules, don’t request a deadline extension. If you pride yourself on paying attention to details, make sure your proposals are error free. If you claim to be state-of-the-art, prove it in the quality of your proposals and executive summaries. If you say you understand the customer’s real issues and concerns, show those insights in the document. Your proposals are not warm-ups for the main event; they are a very real part of the main event. Your behavior doesn’t start when you get the contract; it starts back in early middle game—and nowhere is it more important in business development than now, when customers are making the selection decision.
Like all marketing and sales tools, proposals are creators of impressions. Artful proposals shape readers’ perceptions and work as much on the intuitive and subliminal level as they do on the rational, descriptive level. Artful proposals persuade on many levels and build the impressions they create from the complex interplay of strategy, knowledge, language, design, emphasis, visualization, and packaging.