5 Reasons Your Proposals Aren’t Winning
You’ve checked and rechecked your submission criteria, you’ve vetted your content six times over … and still your proposals aren’t bringing in business. If it’s not the proposals, maybe it’s you – specifically, your approach to crafting RFP responses. Let’s take a look at the following five common RFP pitfalls and see if they sound familiar.
You’re too close. You know your company, products, and services inside and out. But can you also take a step back and evaluate your proposal with an outside perspective? You might have winning arguments, but if they require understanding and context that people outside your business just don’t have, they might not win the contract.
Your proposals are written for the private sector, not the government sector. Let’s face it: Government projects are an entirely different animal from commercial projects. They have different personnel, different processes, and different timelines. Frankly, most days government jargon barely sounds like English. To win government contracts, you have to translate your private sector marketing into engaging government-speak.
You’re more skilled at doing your business than growing your business. When most people start their own business, it’s because they feel called to do it. They’re passionate about it. Marketing that business, on the other hand, can feel like a chore – like a necessary evil. Rest assured: If your passion doesn’t come through in your proposal, you’re going to lose out to companies whose passion shines in theirs.
Your RFP response needs a top-to-bottom shakeup. Imagine you totally re-engineered your business’s proposal processes. What would it look like? How would you identify, source, and respond to RFPs? Who in your company currently isn’t in the proposal process but should be – and which people on your proposal team are doing more harm than good? Given how important proposals are for the future of your business, putting some thought to the ideal RFP response team could be incredibly valuable.
You need to think strategically. Strategic thinking might start at the top, but it shouldn’t end there. As much as you can, support your organization’s efforts to think purposefully, and drive that strategic thinking all the way down into the proposal – into the individual contracts you’re bidding on. You might find your proposal process isn’t the problem – it’s that the work you’re bidding on is misaligned with your company’s priorities and value proposition.
Business owners hire outside help all the time – to look at finances, to manage their recruiting, to run their marketing, even to decorate their offices. Yet they keep their proposal processes under wraps. The truth is, if you’re a government contractor, there’s not a single function on your staff more important than writing winning proposals. Giving this team and this process the right amount of support can pay for itself several times over. We at WinBiz specialize in helping small and medium-sized businesses win government contracts. We can provide the objectivity and informed perspective you need to re-evaluate your proposal process and improve your win rate.
