Center News

Don't You Lose That Contract!

Mar 8, 2009

By: Jon Coss, Finish Line Solutions

Veteran sales representatives often claim that "proposals can't win deals, but they can lose them." Their counterparts in proposal management roles are equally adamant in claiming that "garbage in equals garbage out" when explaining their struggles to create winning proposals from substandard sales efforts.

The bottom line, especially in difficult economies, is that proposals do matter. State and local government officials are managing tight budgets under an increasingly focused microscope. They require compliant, compelling proposals to support award decisions.

The proposals, in addition to final contracts, are the most important procurement artifacts against which to compare the final project results. Specific, compliant, substantiated proposals offer procurement and project staff a high level of comfort with the vendor's solution.

With this background, we offer the following list of common proposal mistakes. Each of these, on their own, may not be enough to lose a contract. But a combination of these, found throughout a proposal, can doom even the finest capture process.

1. Assuming your proposal will be read: Proposals are scored first, and read maybe. Referring the evaluator to other sections, printing in landscape (ever tried to rotate a huge binder on a crowded desk?) and inventing complex numbering schemes make it more difficult to score your response.

Solution: Include responses where they are asked for, use fold-out portrait pages, follow the response instructions and avoid ‘fixing' what you believe are mistakes in the RFP.

2. Writing to an ineffective strategy: Unbalanced strategies stress one area of your offer (i.e., technology) and ignore other areas (i.e., implementation risk or staff qualifications). Unenforced strategies often result in great executive summaries that are completely decoupled from the proposal body.

Solution: Create a balanced strategy that addresses all areas on which you will be evaluated, not just areas you believe are strengths. Decompose the strategy into each section of the proposal.

3. Not answering the question: This is one of the most obvious, but common proposal mistakes. There are lots of excuses for this mistake: the answer will highlight a weakness, the question should have been asked differently or the question had too many subcomponents to it. All the excuses lead to the same result: fewer points.

Solution: Deconstruct the requirements, use outlines, break out multi-part questions and use a compliance matrix (which can later be provided to your prospect as an evaluation matrix).

4. Making unsubstantiated claims: Making grandiose, hollow claims about your offering will cost you credibility and impact your points. Words like ‘numerous,' ‘many' and ‘unique' mean nothing.

Solution: Use real numbers, do not round off, do not ‘combine to hide' (i.e., Henry Aaron and I combined for 755 home runs) and remove any claims you cannot prove.

5. Falling victim to pleonasm: Pleonasm is the use of more words than is necessary to make your point. Try to remember that the evaluator is scoring other proposals in addition to yours. Long sentences and paragraphs might satisfy the Faulkner in you, but they exhaust the evaluator and often hide what you are trying to say.

Solution: Average fewer than eight characters per word, 20 words per sentence, and 3.5 sentences per paragraph. Sounds easy right?

6. Offering what you have: Paying cursory attention to the requirements and stressing the benefits of what you have (versus what the prospect is asking for) is a more common proposal mistake than you might imagine. This is closely related to acknowledging what is being asked for and responding with what they ‘should have asked for.'

Solution: Start with a customer-centric strategy, decompose the strategy into each major area of your response and use impartial evaluators.

7. Illustrating the text: Effective graphics increase recall, clearly communicate complex ideas, emotionally connect with many evaluators and improve the professional appearance of your submission. Using ‘cut and paste' graphics to break up text can confuse evaluators, highlight inconsistencies, require additional (often awkward) text to explain them and detract from the appearance of your bid.

Solution: Instead of illustrating the text, write to the graphics. Start your response effort by creating a meaningful graphic for each major theme and proposal section. Provide them to the authors and instruct them to support it with their writing.

8. Not connecting the dots: Most win themes that we review stop short of driving home tangible value to the prospect. Claims like "this will reduce your processing time by 25%" are meaningful but still require your prospects to work for the final benefit.

Solution: Complete the ‘win chain' by providing measurable benefits to each claim. The example provided above becomes far more meaningful by claiming that "The 25% processing time reduction applied to your 12 million annual claims will reduce processing time by 14,000 hours, saving you $1.7 million in annual temporary staffing costs." This provides tangible benefits and demonstrates your understanding of the client's issues.

Several of the mistakes we have described will likely appear obvious to veteran sales and proposal professionals. Of course, the obvious is what is most often overlooked. Other tips, such as ‘connecting the dots' to complete a value chain require a fair amount of work. This combination of doing what is required to be compliant, and then doing what is required to win is exactly what is needed in today's competitive IT sales environment.