6 Popular Proposal Goals for Annual Planning
With the start of a new year, many of us are hard at work planning out where to focus our energy for the next twelve months. Below is a list of a few popular proposal goals to inspire your planning, with steps you can take to actually achieve them!
#1 Increase Win Rate
One of the most popular proposal goals is to increase your team’s win rate. This one’s easy to track and measure, and it’s motivating once achieved because you know your efforts have achieved real results.
The actual percentage increase will vary depending on your team’s proposal strategy. For example, a company that responds to 8 RFPs a year and only wins one will have a much easier time doubling their rate than a company that responds to 100+ and winning 25. Keep this in mind when setting your goal to make sure it’s achievable.
Ways to Accomplish:
Refine Go/No Go Process to Focus on Top Opportunities. It’s easy to send out a proposal to any and every opportunity hoping that the numbers game will bring more revenue your way. However, to increase your win rate, it’s best to take the opposite approach and spend more time on the proposals where you are more likely to win. This extra attention could be the missing piece you need to connect with the buyer and close the deal.
Write for the Buyer. Relying too heavily on boilerplate content can result in proposals that aren’t as engaging as your competitors, ultimately inspiring the buyer to work with them instead. Once you narrow down your list of proposals, spend the extra time to tailor your content to that particular customer’s current goals and concerns. The more your proposal resonates with them, the more you’re likely to win the project.
Focus on Core Solution Area. Some companies bid on every opportunity if the work overlaps in any way with their main offering. While this strategy might result in new projects, more often than not, you’ll lose out to companies who are experts in that area. To increase your win rate, cut out the proposals that don’t align with your areas of expertise. You’ll spend more time on the opportunities that are easier for your company and refine your sales approach.
#2 Expand to New Market
A popular goal for many companies at the start of the year is to expand into a new market. For example, if you currently sell mainly to large enterprises, you might be ready to expand into the government sector. It’s a great goal for growing an organization, but keep in mind that if your goal is also to increase your win rate, this might make that more challenging.
That being said, companies expand to new markets every day and win proposals as part of that process. A clear strategy will make it easier for you to hit this goal.
Ways to Accomplish:
Form Partnerships. One of the most effective ways to expand into a new market is to team up with a company who already operates in that space and has complementary offerings. The exact type of partnership will depend on your solution and organizational goals, but prime/subcontractor relationships are very popular, especially if you’re trying to move into the government space. Since many of those opportunities ask for references in the industry, acting first as a subcontractor can help you learn about the industry while building your reference base.
Hire Industry Experts. Many industries have nuances that only those operating within them understand. As an example, if you’re hoping to win a Federal contract, hiring a sales person with a background in federal sales will help you to enter the industry more easily. If you’re a service-based organization, hiring team members from the industry to complete the work will also make your sales pitch more compelling.
Create New Proposal Content before RFP. When you decide to move into a new market, create new proposal content that speaks to that industry’s challenges and goals. For example, if you’re selling mainly to financial services companies but want to win a contract with your local school district, those two types of customers will have different priorities. Use any preliminary sales meetings and research to identify the differences and update your content when not on deadline so you can spend time creating a unique win strategy once the RFP is released.
#3 Reduce Time Spent on Proposals
A question that gets asked often is “How do I spend less time on proposals?” Whether you’re a sales professional, a business owner, or even a proposal writer, the goal is almost always to be more efficient with your time, especially when responding to RFPs with tight deadlines.
Similar to win rates, this goal is easy to track and monitor if you’re using any time tracking tool. The amount of time spent on a proposal will vary drastically from company to company. Some organizations have complicated solutions where a proposal is a minimum of 50 pages whereas others can send out a simple seven-page proposal and win the project. If you aren’t already tracking time spent on proposals, spending a month or quarter doing so can help you establish a good baseline to set a concrete and achievable goal.
Ways to Accomplish:
Revamp Proposal Content Library & Template. It’s easy to get wrapped up in deadlines and new projects without making any updates to your most important resource: your content library. If possible, dedicate a few weeks to updating the content you heavily tweak most often to reduce that time in the future. If you don’t have downtime, watch for any moments when working on a proposal where you are unable to use boilerplate as a starting point or have to rewrite most of it. In those cases, save that content to your library to prevent future headaches.
Proposal design can also take up too much time if your template is difficult to use. Watch for common design changes you often make and see if it can be incorporated into your template.
Focus on Solution Area with Expertise. Similar to the win rate goal, narrowing your focus to your core area of expertise can help to reduce time spent on proposals. For these types of projects, you likely have good boilerplate on hand, a deep understanding of your competitors and how to compete against them, and a familiarity with the most common questions asked by customers. Narrowing down your pool of proposals to your core offering can reduce time spent tracking down unusual questions and help free up time to create better proposals or focus on other priorities.
Improve Skill Set. Sometimes proposals take too much time because you haven’t had a chance to improve your writing skills. If this is the case, then practice, training, and feedback are the best ways to improve and make you more efficient at proposal writing.
#4 Create Better Performing Proposals
This goal is similar to increasing your win rate, though slightly less quantifiable (but not completely). Your company might be hitting the average metrics for your proposals, but you want to move beyond that and know that your proposals are resonating with buyers each and every time. This will help your company to stand out against top competitors and also better connect with future customers.
Ways to Accomplish:
Focus on Buyer. The best performing proposals are all about the customer. One way to measure this is to count how many times you mention your company compared to the customer in a proposal. The ideal is to have the customer mentioned at least twice as often as your company (if not three times). This is an easy way to see if your content is speaking to the buyer, and if not, rework your writing to hit that metric.
Dedicate Time to Top Opportunities. Incorporating all of your sales insights into a proposal takes time, and it’s hard to have the time to do so if you’re responding to too many RFPs at once. Instead, prioritize your proposals to work on mainly the best opportunities where your company is most likely to win. Tweak your content to connect with the buyer, and prepare to hear positive feedback from the customer once they’ve had a chance to review your thoughtful proposal!
Conduct Internal Strategy Meetings. A key to taking your proposals to a new level is to have the discussions needed to better understand the buyer, the competition, and how that impacts your sales pitch. Proposal strategy meetings are a must to achieve this. A few popular meetings are the Competitive Review where you discuss key competitors for that opportunity and develop a win strategy, a Proposal Brainstorming Session focused on establishing your win themes and competitive differentiators, and a Proposal Review where you read through the proposal with other “evaluators” to score your proposal and identify any weaknesses.
#5 Beat a Top Competitor
Sometimes, no matter what you do, there always seems to be that one competitor who manages to win every time. When this happens, it becomes a goal, or even a mission, for teams to create a proposal that finally beats this competitor. Fortunately, it is possible to make this happen!
Ways to Accomplish:
Conduct Research Pre-proposal to Develop Strategy. The more research you can conduct before working on the proposal, the stronger your competitive strategy will be. If your competitor operates in the public sector, use the FOIA process to review their proposals and see how they’re bidding. Hold debriefs with customers who awarded to the competitor, and if possible, meet with them to learn how the project is going and any potential pitfalls. Use all of this to create a larger competitive strategy that can be narrowed and focused for a specific RFP. *Need help refining your competitive strategy? Our consulting support can help!
Identify the Best Opportunity to Win. Conducting the above research will help you to identify the best opportunities for your company to win against the competitor. For example, if your competitor has a large national presence and pulls in resources across the country, then a customer really focused on supporting local businesses and citizens will give you a leg up if you’re a local organization. Conversely, if you know the competitor is an incumbent or is teaming up with an incumbent, then it will be harder to win than with a customer who hasn’t had many (if any) meetings with them. Try to learn this through sales conversations before the RFP to create your strongest strategy.
Focus top proposal and sales resources to follow a full strategic process. If you’re trying to win against a top competitor, you will likely need to follow a more detailed, rigorous process than you do for other, less competitive proposals. Prepare all of your key resources, including sales, proposals, legal, and anyone else who might be involved in the proposal, so they are ready to start working as soon as the RFP is released. If possible, have them focus exclusively on this proposal to conduct all of the key review meetings, rewrites, pricing discussions, and anything else that’s needed to create your best possible proposal.
#6 Respond to first RFP
While the above goals are geared more towards companies that have been responding to RFPs for a while, if you’re just entering the RFP space, your goal might be to respond to your first one. This is perhaps the most overwhelming of everything on this list because RFPs have many nuances and requirements that are exhausting to figure out while on a deadline. But the only way to win your first RFP is to actually respond to one, so this is the perfect goal if you’re ready to pursue larger contracts or enter a more RFP-heavy industry.
Ways to Accomplish:
Increase Marketing to Larger Organizations. As you can see from the above points, understanding buyers is key to crafting winning RFP responses. The best way to gain this insight is through sales meetings with potential buyers before they ever release an RFP. Ramping up your marketing will help you to better understand your audience and prepare for those RFPs. If you’re not sure where to get started, check out our guide here.
Develop Partnerships with Key Companies. Responding to your first RFP is similar to entering a new market as described above. Sometimes the best way to gain access to competitive RFPs is to work with a partner who already has the marketing and sales process established. Here you can learn more about how to position your company and get a taste for the RFP process without having to manage the entire response and contract on your own. Plus, if you’re in a field that wants references for similar projects, partners may be the only way to achieve this, depending on your current business.
Review Public Sector RFPs and Pursue Smaller Opportunities to Build Portfolio. A popular strategy for entering the world of RFPs is to review listings for public sector RFPs. Since they are in the public sector, all opportunities are available online either through an aggregate listing service or on the agency’s website. Many organizations find success by first pursuing a contract with their local government and then using the experience to pursue larger, more competitive RFPs.
