One of the most common but harmful mistakes proposal teams make is failing to read and understand an entire RFP. Instead, many teams quickly build an outline from instructions and dive into writing.

Begin to cultivate responsiveness long before RFP release. To be responsive, you must know your customer beyond the written requirements. Starting early means you can help shape the request for your specific response.

Have a wonderful Friday with this phrase of the day: “Market Identification” The market identification stage helps organizations ensure that they spend marketing budgets and resources on the most likely targets for profitable business opportunities.

Conducting a lessons-learned review on each major bid opportunity is a critical best practice. Lessons learned should be well documented and stored for others to access and reference for future sales opportunities.

When presenting a proposal, how do you make sure your message sticks? Public speaking is a very common fear, and someone who is not from sales may steer away from public speaking if possible. Practicing public speaking is absolutely vital to ensure your message sticks. #APMP

What compels a customer to buy one company’s products and services over another? How does a company distinguish itself from the competition to win new business? What can companies do to improve the odds of submitting the winning proposal?

You can often find out most of what you want to know about your competitors by asking your colleagues. The challenge is figuring out who knows what, where those people can be found, and how to share that information with the writing team.

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Proposal themes should flow from the opportunity/sales strategy, win themes, customer hot buttons, your features, benefits, and discriminators. Using either a draft solicitation or a previous, similar solicitation from the customer, create a top-level outline of your proposal.

Make sure you are prepared to quickly and accurately answer any client's questions. The faster and more accurately you can respond to the questions, the more time you get to spend on solutions. Your client will be more confident in your ability to deliver what is needed.

#DidYouKnow? The Oxford Guide to Plain English recommends simple words and short sentences of no more than 15–20 words. Check the readability statistics when you write using the word processing software tools. Write clear, direct sentences in an active voice.

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Effective marketing, positioning, and selling are critical to winning business—the proposal then verifies the winning solution. A poor proposal, how ever, can kill a deal.

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A good executive summary is unique to each opportunity because solutions, client requirements, and competitors differ from one opportunity to the next.

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#DidYouKnow? An important source of competitive intelligence data is information shared by colleagues. Proposal teams should work to gain information from others in their organizations. #ProudToBeAPMP #APMP

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