Lessons Learned

We do a lot of work on proposals and associated capture strategies, frequently leveraging our large stable of partners and affiliates. In the last couple of years we have been engaged in senior leadership roles on two multi-billion dollar opportunities and in supporting roles on a varied collection of smaller bids. Typically we operate as Proposal Manager or the right hand of the client’s proposal manager. Often we are called in to Red Team mature proposals. It is exhausting, but highly rewarding work.

Over the years we have worked with some amazing people on a wide range of proposals. We have learned a great deal from our colleagues, clients and partners, and we continue to learn with each engagement.

We have captured as much of our learning as possible in our Strategists Cookbook and in a collection of best practice documents.

If a lot of what you read below seems obvious, it is not because consultants only sell you what you already know. We have yet to see an Executive or proposal team that gets all of this right, and we have worked for some frighteningly talented people. Have a look at our articles on Psychological Biases for more on why this all seems obvious.

Proposals are About Much More than Writing

There is a general misconception that proposals are all about writing.  However, when they are properly planned and managed, writing is a small part of the overall project, largely because you only have to do it once.

Winning proposals are not created by heroes at the 11th hour.  Early and interim reviews, with time for reflection and correction, are critical.

Proposals are all about strategy, positioning, superior responses, competitive ghosting, consistency, selling language, well considered compliance, smart program design, risk management, etc. Writing is easy if the overall plan and approach is sound.

The business of running a major proposal is as much about internal comms and coordination as it is about external comms, selling and the creation of a deliverable bid package. Below, we explore, at a high level, some of the key areas that get overlooked in the early phases of proposal preparation.

Advance Preparation

Bid and proposal funding is discretionary and comes straight off the corporation’s bottom line.  Often the inclination is to hold off, wait for the opportunity to mature, and then spend. This is generally a mistake.

Failure to launch early and sort out teaming, major subs, should cost, program design options, competitive analysis and bid cost/team composition is a major factor in poor and failed bids in our experience.

Advance preparation is critical, as the proposal preparation period is, it seems inevitably, frantic.  Advance preparation need not be expensive, and can inform multiple proposals.  This work will also feed into ongoing bid/no-bid assessments and opportunity funnel triage, ultimately resulting in better forecasts.

Scope and Complexity

Proposals are frequently much larger in scope than generally appreciated.  This holds true for small and large programs, but is much more evident when the opportunity is complex programmatically, technically, commercially and competitively.

Proposals to the Canadian Government are often very complex and massive documents that must respond in detail to highly proscriptive RFPs. Occasionally, and more often than you might expect, foreign Executive leaders have great difficultly wrapping their heads around the peculiarities of the procurement process in Canada, the expectations of compliant and responsive proposals, and the demands for extensive and thoroughly documented industrial offsets.

It is absolutely critical that the scope and complexity of bids into Canada is fully understood early on at the level of Executive approval, as influences decisions about staffing, preparatory work load, partnering, compliance, costing and pricing.

Strategy Development

Create a capture plan as early as possible.  It will be full of holes, but this is an illuminating outcome as you then know what areas of the strategy need work.  The plan will evolve, and it will start to point out critical risks, overall themes, the likely competitive landscape and the need for key partners.

From this plan, you may identify critical areas of change that will need to be managed and carefully implemented to make the resulting program viable. This could include process development, organizational change, new technologies, partnerships, roles and responsibilities, changes to long help engineering methodologies, etc.

Planning

Proposal preparation efforts are often frantic; with a small group of heroes “burning the midnight oil” towards the end to get the documents and analyses completed just in time. Frantic last minute effort creates risk, reduces the quality of the proposal, and does not allow the management team to fully evaluate options and strategies for both winning and maximizing their financial return.  It does not have to be this way.

Winning proposals come from a step-by-step approach which ensures that critical proposal artefacts are created first, and as early as possible.   We recommend that you develop a tailored pre-planned, incremental approach to producing a winning bid and to delivering it to a willing and receptive customer.

For preliminary planning, take the response period and divide it into four equal length sections as follows:

• Design: Design your program, solution, industrial structure, proposal layout, value propositions, should-cost, proposal team, program organization structures, draft executive summary, etc. Follow up with a team kickoff.
• Write: Write the text and set a hard deadline for completion. Force authors to complete their work in this period and to submit text and graphics by the end of this phase. Follow up with a Red Team review.
• Polish: Finish the writing,and polish the text and graphics to drive home your key messages. Verify that you are compliant and that you have sufficient proof of compliance to win rated points. Write in one voice and look for potentially non-compliant statements. Work to eliminate perceptions of risk. Follow up with another Red Team review.
• Publish: Allow a lot of time to publish and get approvals. Some of this will be consumed by slips. Don’t underestimate how much effort is associated with pulling all of the data together. Allow for last minute hiccups in formatting, printing etc. This is also the period when costing turns into pricing, and there needs to be time to do this and to ensure that what you wrote and what you costed are the same thing.

Also, and important – know who really signs off on your bid and make sure that they are engaged early and often. More than one well considered bid has been rejected because it blindsided the ultimate approval gate.

Positioning

Answer the following questions as early as possible:

• Are you going to be Prime, or do you need to ride someone else’s coat tails?
• If you are a foreign supplier, what in-country partners do you need, for technical and programmatic support and for political capital.
• Are you dealing with a positive or negative in-country or in-market legacy?
• Do you need lobbying and communications support?
• Are you positioning as high reliability, high quality and performance, high value, low cost, maximum industrial benefits, …?
• What will your competition be saying about themselves and about you?

Some of this is hard. Many Executives push these decision off to see how the competitive landscape is developing. Many partners are reluctant brides, waiting for the best deal. Despite this elaborate corporate dance, develop options and preferences early, engage and listen, weigh your options and don’t wait until it is too late to develop the winning approach. This is a very very common point of risk and failure.

Honest Self-Assessments

We spend so much time developing competitive positioning and investing in competitive language that we start to believe our own … well you know.  With such a strong emotional and intellectual investment in how we want to be perceived, it can become very difficult to see both how we are actually perceived and how our competition will exploit our weaknesses.

It is difficult to be completely objective about yourself. It is critical; to know what you know and what you don’t. A good read, if not slightly irreverent, on unknowns and unknowns is provided here.

Honest Competitive Analyses

Conduct a Black Hat review (Color Reviews are covered in detail in the Strategists Cookbook).  Your review team needs to swallow their competitive juices and work hard to see the world from the perspective of your competitors and customer.  Properly motivated, the black hat team will provide a highly informed critical assessment.

We are continually surprised by the low levels of real objective competitive intelligence that most bidders have at their disposal. We can’t emphasize the value to solid intel.

Work hard on competitive analysis. You will be surprised what you can learn from data that is publicly available.

Coordination and Teamwork

There is no place for lone wolves in a major proposal program.  There is also no need for micro managing, so long as proper planning and coordination is in place.  The Proposal Manager sets the tone here, and clear communication and exceptional up front planning make this much easier.

Coordination is the by-product of effective planning and communication.  Up front work that clearly defines milestones, expectations, preferred language, proposal structure, program plan, degrees of compliance, etc. will go a long way towards eliminating the confusion that results in last minute re-writes and unnecessarily high prices.

It is astonishing how many experienced and senior proposal teams blow off scheduled reviews because they are too busy writing. This is a common and critical failure.

Teamwork is also fostered by regular heartbeat meetings (there is always active and passive resistance to these at the beginning) and a series of reviews that focus on substance and consistency rather than nit-picking and editorializing.

Compelling Messaging

Experience has taught us that you can’t start capture planning too early and that it is very difficult to get a large number of authors, across a number of organizations, to use common winning themes and value propositions.  There are solutions to these common proposal problems, and much valuable work can be completed before the RFP is formally released.

If this task proves difficult, it suggests, early on, that you don’t have your positioning clearly sorted out – something that needs to be fixed first.

Persuasive Value Propositions

Generally, the product or service being offered is mature, thus it should be relatively easy to develop key value propositions.  From this, will fall the “winning words” that you will employ in various forms throughout the proposal and your ongoing communications strategy. Start now.

Artefact Reuse

If you are proposing to deliver a mature product or service, then others have come before you.  There will be previous examples of proposals, costing and pricing data, graphics, major subcontractor quotes, ILS Plan and Program Plan, and supporting documents relating to quality and processes.

Seek out the scarred and wounded from the last proposal – they are a repository of lessons learned (or at least lessons encountered).

All of this provides a significant step up, even if you can’t use these documents essentially “as is”.

Start digging early and build a library of examples and best practices.  A small team can quickly review this material in the light of the new opportunity, at minimum expense, and their efforts are not lost if the RFP slips.

Throwing a Forward Pass to the Execution Team

Proposals are designed to communicate a solution that results in a win.  They also set the stage for the resulting program execution, and this is an important outcome.

Too often after a win, the execution team immediately shelves the proposal and starts to design a program that suits their preferences.

Not only can this annoy and confuse the customer, it can lead to significant deviations from anticipated cash flow and margins and can introduce risks that were not anticipated during pricing.  Further, it is possible that the execution team will give away items that were specifically not bid and held for post award negotiations and plus ups.  In the worst case, we have seen programs terminated as a result of significant deviations.

Effective Reviews

Smart people are often free spirits who rebel against process and oversight.

Proposal projects go off the rails when the Proposal Manager loses lock on progress.  Authors are notorious for holding off on delivering draft text for review.  Inevitably, late in the process, the Proposal Manger finds a few big holes, and scrambles to pull it all together.  The result is poor writing in some volumes, the absence of a single voice, and disconnects between the master schedule, costing, compliance and list of deliverables.  Some of these can be fatal, resulting in a bid that is declared non-compliant and/or non-responsive.

It is possible, however to give people the scope they need to be productive and creative, while managing the entire effort to a graceful conclusion. We have documented best practices for proposal reviews in our Strategists Cookbook.

Engaging Experts

At various stages throughout the proposal process, it is helpful to pull in experts and seasoned professionals who are not intimately involved in the pursuit or the proposal.  These may be sourced from within your organization and/or be trusted outsiders.  They are particularly helpful with Black Hat sessions, early strategy sessions, and Pink and Red Team reviews.

Beware of group think and self serving preconceptions that cloud your ability to clearly understand the competitive landscape. Perversely, the more successful you are, the more likely you are to be blindsided.

Price-to-Win and Gaming the Bid

Other bidders, particularly North America corporations, will employ a variety of fairly sophisticated “gaming” strategies and methodologies to try to secure the “best value” assessment.  These processes can be very onerous, and are often over used in conjunction with a highly prescribed over-arching corporate pursuit process.

We recommend that a tailored subset of these pursuit processes be employed unless there is a standing directive to use an existing corporate process.  The intent is to generate a highly competitive bid, while minimizing associated cost and complexity.

We have developed price gaming strategies on some proposals that simultaneously reduced the bid price, increased project revenues and pumped up margins – it feels like magic.

Synappsys has a large Monte-Carlo price to win analytical tool that is designed to be tailored for each unique bidding opportunity.  Key outputs from this tool are the “price window” that you must be within to be competitive and win and the sensitivity of win probability (Pwin) to changes in degrees of compliance and price.

Smart Compliance Analyses

In addition to Price-to-Win, we recommend the development of a post-contact award change proposal plan.  In this case, you identify gaps and holes in the Statement of Work and Requirements Specification that will present opportunities for contact amendments during the execution of the project or, even possibly during negotiations.

Your competition will be doing this.  They will bring their price down as low as possible, planning to grow the program later.   

Price to win and price gaming inform the value of compliance. This lets to value rated requirements and make decisions about what you must include in the bid and what you should hold in you back pocket for later.

Comprehensive Risk Assessments

Internal risk teams frequently generate generic risks that have little value to the proposal and project management teams.

As an independent third party with experience in risk analysis, Synappsys (and our partners) can facilitate risk sessions that identify real risks and their impact.  We also have a simple, but effective, risk analysis tool that creates high quality reports suitable for inclusion in a major proposal.

This work produces critical language that will be included in the proposal text and defines risk mitigation work packages that should be included in the detailed program and pricing or in the price contingency.

Smart, Flexible Estimating

Frequently, estimating involves a very detailed roll up of costs, and this process can get out of control.  The result is a “precisely wrong number”.  “Precise” because it is based on a comprehensive cost rollup, and “wrong” because these are, after all, estimates.

If the program value is $100M, and the estimate is good to within + or – 1% ($1M), counting paper clips doesn’t really add much value to the overall rollup.

Smart, flexible estimating considers each major work package, and looks for the most appropriate estimating technique.  In some cases a parametric analysis is sufficient.  Sometimes a detailed labour estimate is warranted.  Sometimes a similar BOM can be used and a factor added for minor variations and changes or changes in quantity.  Sometimes, you count paper clips, but not very often.

Executive Buy-in

Most corporations have developed review processes to ensure that their executive are not blindsided by a rogue bid resplendent with risk and eager innocent optimism.

Part of the Proposal and Capture Manger’s mandates is to ensure regular and clear communication throughout the pursuit to ensure that final reviews do not cough up surprises.

It is critical that the proposal team create clear and complete summary data relating to the competitive landscape, risks (technical, programmatic, customer, geographical, political), degree of non-recurring development, impact on capital and infrastructure, strategic fit, partnerships, assessed win probability, likely margins, etc.

If you are undertaking a new approach, some form of price gaming, a significant deviation in terms of product design, in service support arrangements, industrial offsets, work-shares with foreign partners, etc., you are well advised to push this up the chain early and often, lest you get a firm “no” during final corporate level bid review.

First Things First – Executive Summary

The first draft of the Executive Summary should be written before the RFP is released.

This section of the proposal can be written by a small core group.  This will result in a clear and brief description of the bid, the solution, the industrial team structure and workshares, commitments with regard to IRBs, etc.  It will include key value propositions and use the winning language that we want all proposal authors to use.

This section is then updated immediately after RFP release and distributed to all authors at the proposal kick-off meeting, providing clear direction in an easy-to-read format. Initially, there may be many graphics placeholders, and there may be unresolved issues, but never the less, this is a key first step.

If you have difficulty writing most of this early on, it is a clear indication that you don’t have a well thought out solution. This needs to be resolved before you unleash a marching army of writers.

Writing and Editing

Once you have all of the above in hand, you can start writing. With any luck, this will occur BEFORE the formal bid process is kicked off by the RFP drop. Then you will truly be ahead of the game and able to concentrate on winning.