10 steps to creating high-scoring proposals

1. Design Proposals to Be Scored, Not Read

Evaluators don't read our proposals like novels—they read them like encyclopedia entries looking for areas and information to score.

Proposal as a scoring tool. Shift your mindset from creating a narrative to designing a document optimized for evaluation. Structure your proposal to align with the evaluation criteria, making it easy for evaluators to find and score relevant information. Use clear headings, cross-references, and compliance matrices to guide evaluators through your document.

Highlight strengths effectively. Make your proposal's strengths pop off the page using visual cues such as bold text, italics, pull quotes, colors, or icons. Present strengths using a feature/benefit/proof construct, explicitly demonstrating how each feature meets the strength criteria. This approach makes it easier for evaluators to identify and score your proposal's key selling points.

2. Use Strength-Based Solutioning for High-Scoring Proposals

Every high-scoring proposal begins by creating a high-scoring solution, so let's put our effort where it matters and create an outstanding or excellent solution that is rich in features that can be scored as strengths.

Four-step methodology:

1. Bound the scope
2. Create the basic solution
3. Identify features to be scored as strengths
4. Determine additional information needed

Iterative process. Apply this methodology iteratively, refining your solution as you gather more information and insights. Focus on developing features that exceed contract requirements, increase the likelihood of successful performance, or provide tangible benefits to the customer. By engineering strengths into your solution from the start, you create a foundation for a high-scoring proposal.

3. Draft Your Briefing to the Source Selection Authority Early

Let's draft the source selection statement along this journey in capture and then address it again during the proposal development phase.

Strengths budget. Set a target number of strengths for each evaluation factor and subfactor. This "strengths budget" guides your solution development and ensures you're creating an offer competitive enough to win. Innovate and refine your solution until you've engineered in enough strengths to meet or exceed your budget.

Early drafting benefits. By drafting your source selection briefing early in the process, you:

• Identify gaps in your proposal
• Ensure all key strengths are included
• Align your proposal with the evaluation perspective
• Drive features back into the proposal that might otherwise be missed

Continuously refine this draft throughout the capture and proposal development phases to maintain focus on what truly matters to the evaluators.

4. Structure Proposals Like Artwork: Three Layers

Think of artwork and think of strength-based solutioning—the two tie nicely together.

Three-layer approach:

1. Foundation layer: Compliant structure with responsive content
2. Middle layer: Strengths (features/benefits/proofs) allocated to appropriate sections
3. Final layer: Polish for easy evaluation, visual communication, and overall quality

Transformative process. This layered approach transforms a basic, compliant proposal into a compelling, customer-focused document rich in scorable strengths. The foundation ensures you meet all requirements, the middle layer adds the competitive edge, and the final layer enhances readability and impact.

5. Focus Proposal Effort on Scorable Elements

If you want to increase your proposal score, then put your effort where it really matters. Put it into engineering features into your solution that can be scored as strengths, and then convey them effectively in the proposal.

Prioritize strengths. Concentrate on developing and clearly presenting features that can be scored as strengths. These are elements that exceed requirements, increase the likelihood of successful performance, or offer unique benefits to the customer.

Efficiency tips:

• Stop discussing themes; focus on strengths
• Use executive summaries to showcase strengths
• Limit time spent polishing text that won't improve scores
• Increase the number and quality of strengths throughout the proposal

By focusing your efforts on scorable elements, you maximize the impact of your proposal and improve your chances of winning.

6. Review Proposals Like the Customer Does

We're rethinking the way companies conduct proposal reviews and building scoring into them, and it's changing the game for our clients.

Three-step review process:

1. First draft compliance review
2. Scoring review
3. Quality review

Scoring-focused approach. Instead of traditional color team reviews, conduct a scoring review that simulates the government evaluation process. Build a scoring worksheet based on the RFP's Section M, and have reviewers evaluate the proposal as government evaluators would. This approach identifies strengths and weaknesses more effectively than editorial reviews, allowing you to improve your competitive position.

7. Make Proposals Easy to Evaluate

When we do this, we've had government evaluators come back and thank our clients for writing proposals that were so easy to score.

Evaluator-friendly strategies:

• Highlight strengths so they pop off the page
• Showcase strengths in introductions to major sections
• Present strengths to stand out in sections
• Use feature/benefit/proof format for strengths
• Demonstrate how features/benefits meet strength criteria
• Structure proposal to cross-walk to evaluation criteria

Empathize with evaluators. Remember that evaluators often face time constraints and may not be subject matter experts. By making your proposal easy to navigate and score, you increase the likelihood that all your strengths will be recognized and credited.

8. Communicate Visually for Maximum Impact

We use visual communications to convey your strengths to evaluators who don't read text.

Visual communication importance. Recognize that different evaluators process information differently. Some focus on text, while others rely heavily on visual elements. By incorporating strong visual communication, you cater to all types of evaluators and improve overall comprehension.

Visual strategies:

• Use graphics, charts, and tables to convey key information
• Employ consistent visual cues for strengths (e.g., icons, colors)
• Ensure visuals are self-explanatory with clear captions
• Apply the "sleepy evaluator test": Can key points be understood in 10 seconds per page?

Effective visual communication helps your strengths stand out, even to skimming evaluators, increasing the chances of a high score.

9. Establish and Measure Proposal Excellence Standards

Measure all proposals against your standard—what gets measured gets improved.

Seven quality measures:

1. Compliant structure
2. Responsive content
3. Customer-focused
4. Compelling and feature-rich
5. Easy to evaluate
6. Good visual communications
7. Well-written

Implement and track. Establish these quality measures as your proposal standard and consistently evaluate your proposals against them. Track scores over time to identify trends and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach helps refine your proposal development process and increase win rates.

9. Transform Lessons Learned into Continuous Improvement

Keep lessons-learned statistics at the business unit level and use them to continually improve your capture and proposal processes.

Effective lessons learned process:

1. Hold two meetings: post-submission and post-debrief
2. Analyze strengths observed vs. strengths bid
3. Identify root causes for missed strengths
4. Plan corrective actions for future bids
5. Build a company strengths registry

Culture of improvement. Treat lessons learned as a critical part of your process, not just a formality. Use the insights gained to refine your capture strategy, solution development, and proposal writing. By consistently applying lessons learned, you can steadily improve your win rate and proposal efficiency over time.

Last updated: August 14, 2024