by Dr. Pat Dougherty, VP Strategic Planning & DOD, SSD
 In my career, I’ve supported the preparation of several billions of dollars of aerospace proposals and have found common areas that are poorly executed or entirely neglected in the early stages of proposal writing. These proposal elements provide the foundation for the entire proposal and generally have a major impact on the probability of winning the effort. Over the next few newsletters, I will address each of these areas.
Area 1 - Understanding Why You Will Win
The first area commonly neglected before writing a proposal is identifying and implementing a win strategy. Teams will often give lip service to this area and generate statements like “we will win because we offer the lowest price”. This approach is often used to quickly check the box for identifying the win theme and the team can move on to “more productive” work like writing. While this can be considered a start to the process, it’s not nearly enough.
The win themes need to be developed by the team so that you have the benefit of knowledge gained by key individuals who have been involved in all aspects of the business opportunity. As a minimum you need input from technical leads, business development staff, program managers and senior management. I’ve developed a brainstorming exercise that takes about 3 hours to conduct with your team to come up with the win themes and strategy. My process identifies sensitive issues and biases with your customer, technical challenges and discriminators. Also, the process often leads you to some valuable ghosting topic areas to put into your proposal.
The major benefit of going through a process like this with your team is that you get the knowledge and verifications of intelligence data from many people. Without intelligence data verification you may find your team writing to address a piece of information that was offered by a team participant, but which is later proven to be inaccurate. Following bad intelligence is an easy way to waste B&P funds and burn out your staff.
Additionally, the authors, who need to know why you will win, will have been a part of the process to define the themes and win strategy. Hopefully, the process of including all the key authors in the generation of the themes and strategy will make it easier for them to buy into the final product and incorporate them into the text that they write for the proposal.
Don’t be surprised when the themes and win strategy evolve somewhat in the early proposal writing stages. If you did the brainstorming session correctly, you should only be making minor adjustments to the wording for the themes and win strategy. After these items are relatively stable for a few days, print them on large format paper and attach them to the walls of the war room as a reminder to the authors. At this point try to be less willing to make any changes to the refined themes and win strategy.
The 4 or 5 themes and single win strategy developed by the team and mounted on the wall provide guidance to your authors before they begin to write. It will save your team many headaches of re-writing later to fit the themes in a limited space and allows the authors to weave the story into their text the first time. When your customer puts down your proposal you want them to remember those 4 or 5 themes and why they should give the contract to you (your win strategy).
Following this process early may make the difference between winning a contract and just delivering a losing proposal on time.
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