Do you cringe at the thought of responding to a request for proposal? Does your win rate suffer due to poorly-written documents? Do you have difficulty selling your solution in writing?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you need to invest in a proposal team.
Building a proposal practice can be a daunting task. Alleviate common challenges by following these five steps.
1. Select the right people with the right skills.
Responding to solicitations requires highly-skilled individuals willing to sacrifice nights and weekends for the greater good of your company. Not everyone has the rare skill mix of persuasive writing, cross-functional leadership, incredible attention to detail and exceptional organization.
When starting your proposal practice, invest in a professional experienced in managing the entire bid lifecycle including:
- Qualifying the opportunity
- Assigning responsibilities
- Hosting strategy meetings
- Working with subject-matter experts
- Persuasive writing
- Managing a content library
- Delivering the response
- Capturing lessons learned
2. Align the proposal team with the sales team.
Whether you hire one proposal professional or are ready to launch a small team, responding to solicitations is a sales activity. Consider, would you send your paralegal or accounts receivable supervisor to prospect a new client?
Proposal professionals sell your solution directly to your clients. Their mission is to get to the negotiating table and win. Align the goals and expectations of your proposal team to support sales. In doing so, you will prevent scope creep that will interfere with the core practice.
3. Provide executive sponsorship.
The success of your proposal team hinges on executive sponsorship. Develop a culture that embraces proposal development as a critical component of sales. By sponsoring your proposal practice from the top down, you will remove red tape and barriers that will negatively influence your response and occupy your persuasive writers with time-consuming and unproductive activities.
The proposal professional's role is to be the project manager of the response. All members of your organization have a duty to provide the best possible content in a timely manner. Your executive sponsor will help you secure employee buy-in to support and value the proposal function.
4. Centralize leadership and resources.
Mirror your proposal practice in the same form of reporting structure and coverage as your sales team. The art of proposal management is a creative process that requires research, archiving information and writing. Performance feedback will come from individuals at all levels of your organization from billing managers to the CEO. The final product will be tangible and measurable.
Store information written and captured by your team in a centralized content library accessible to all of your proposal professionals and, in some cases, your subject-matter experts. This will increase your response time and ensure consistent messaging.
5. Give ample access to company data.
Work with your proposal team to develop answers that satisfy the client and protect your confidential data. Dodging a client question could be the difference between winning and losing. Make sure your proposal professionals have the right information to sell your solution and build trust with the client.
Determine what information is off limits and find work-arounds. If you prefer not to disclose your financials, have other sources of information available to show the financial health and strength of your company. If you cannot disclose client names, identify clients only by industry and description.
Companies today are hiring consultants and competitive buying tools to select vendors. Your competitors are investing in proposal resources. You should as well.
