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Always start with the gold standard. Your proposal process is your road map to success (but every road map allows for detours and shortcuts as necessary). Chapter 6 walks you through the details of building your standard process.

       Planning: Scheduling the process

      When you have all your process steps in place for this particular opportunity, devise a schedule that ensures you have time to do your work as you manage the efforts of your contributors. This may sound a little selfish, but no one outside the proposal business really understands what you go through to deliver an error-free, single-voice, professionally published proposal. You have to leave yourself ample time to review, revise, edit, and proofread the work.

      Discover more about building an effective and suitable schedule in Chapter 8.

       Writing: Crafting the story of your proposal

      A proposal is an argument – but it’s also a story about how people help other people overcome problems and achieve their goals. Readers like stories, especially when they can relate to a character in that story. Stories are easier to read, and they motivate people to act in ways that other forms of writing can’t.

      

A proposal story is basically about benefits and value. Every portion of your proposal needs to focus on the business outcomes, not the means by which you deliver the outcomes. A proposal is about your customer – not your company, not your products, not your industry accolades, and not your history. Don’t take this the wrong way; those items have their value as proofs that you can do what you claim – proofs like past performance, testimonials, and recognized innovations. But they’re there only to show that you can help your customer do what it wants and needs to do.

      In Chapters 9 and 10, you discover how to write strong proposal stories, using a direct, active writing style that has actors performing actions to accomplish results. You see how to write win themes, compelling value propositions, and concrete benefit and proof statements. You find tips on what to do and what to avoid when you pull your content into a presentable shape, and how to make your proposal easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to accept. We even show you how to use all these tips to write a winning executive summary and clear, concise, and responsive answers to your customers’ questions.

      Proposal writers usually “grow up” to become proposal managers. They add project management skills to their researching, authoring, and reviewing skills, and take the burden off sales and other specialists to make sure the proposal is responsive, compelling, and on time. Getting the proposal out the door is often an extraordinary challenge – setting up and managing reviews, creating and executing multimedia productions, and ensuring timely delivery to wherever the proposal must go. And the job doesn’t end with delivery. You may have to lead clarification efforts or coach oral presentations to help secure a win.

      The proposal manager’s responsibilities may differ from company to company, but a true proposal manager is game for any job that ensures a successful submission. To find out more about how to submit your proposal successfully, see Chapter 12.

       Publishing: Making your proposal visible

      Proposals need to stand out in a crowd (or on an evaluator’s or decision maker’s desk or desktop). That doesn’t mean that you have to doll them up like the Griswold’s house at Christmas. It does mean that you find ways to tell your story visually as well as in words.

      

Make your proposal look like your customer. Start with the cover. Put the customer’s name and logo (if appropriate) in the first place they’ll look (that is, the top-left corner for Western audiences). Create visual themes that complement your verbal themes. Carry those themes throughout the proposal. You can create accessible content by using professional layout techniques. Use white space to unite similar content and separate the rest. Use bold headings that let your readers scan your proposal to get a sense of the storyline.

      

The writing techniques we discuss in the preceding section work even better when you illustrate them. Try to tell your story through graphics, refer to them in your text version of the information, and reinforce both with an action caption (that explains the relevance of the graphic) beneath the illustration.

      You can find out more about creating eye-catching proposals in Chapter 11.

       Proposing better all the time

      The hallmark of a professional proposal writer or manager is a commitment to continual improvement. You can display that commitment in many ways:

      Our recommended proposal process includes continual improvement as its third and final stage. We make it part of the overall process for a reason: If you don’t plan for it and make it a habit, it won’t happen.

      

Every time you work a proposal through your proposal process, you’re going to learn something. For example, you may discover that

      ❯❯ A process step is unnecessary in some situations.

      ❯❯ A process step is ineffective as or where it stands.

      ❯❯ A tool isn’t getting the job done.

      ❯❯ A contributor is more successful when doing something a different way.

      Your job as a proposal professional is to offer opportunities for these lessons learned to be voiced, captured, and distributed to the right people to improve the process. You have to champion this effort, because most of your colleagues will, by necessity, go back to their regular roles after the proposal is completed and submitted. But you’ll also have to work at it, because your next proposal is never more than minutes away.

      You can find out more about harvesting and sharing lessons learned in Chapter 15.

      As a proposal writer, one of your best sources for improving your writing and management skills is the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP). In Chapter 15, you find out about how APMP can help increase your professional status by providing educational opportunities, networking venues, a three-tier certification path, professional mentoring programs, and programs for building and sharing knowledge.

      The APMP’s Body of Knowledge (BoK) is the source for most of the information you find in the rest of this book, including the ten templates, worksheets, and checklists in Chapter 16. These are just a few of the many helpful tools available within the BoK. For even more, go to www.apmp.org.

      

Before you explore the rest of this book, here are a few things we want to plant in your head as you use this resource to help you build better proposals. These are the attributes of true proposal professionals, regardless of the size or makeup of an organization. These

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