Chuck Keller is Owner of Keller Proposal Development and Training
and President of ProposalCafe.com

(excerpt from Proposal Writing: The Art of Friendly and Winning Persuasion)

So far, this chapter has centered on analyzing your readers and writing the proposal to meet their needs. What about the needs of the writer who is faced with a problem that even the best proposal writer can face: writer’s block, or the inability to begin or sustain a writing assignment? The following tips can help you start and then keep the words flowing.

Tip #1: Follow your outline and storyboard.

Use the outline and storyboard to get you moving at the outset—and keep you moving—by listing details that will form the basis of your writing.

Tip #2: Write quickly.

Force yourself to write quickly. Don’t worry about errors in word choice, grammar, or mechanics; just get as much material written as you can. Writers can slow themselves down when they dwell on every word, trying to create perfect copy during the drafting stage. Reserve that penchant for perfection for the editing process (assuming that perfection is ever attainable).

Tip #3: Write in any sequence.

Don’t feel compelled to write in the order the information occurs in the outline. Instead, start writing the body sections that you feel most inclined to write; then later piece the draft together.

Organizational Communications, Inc.

An important part of finishing any proposal is making the final page count. Many government agencies have a policy of returning excess pages to the bidder unread. At least one agency starts their review by counting pages from the front of the proposal. When they get to whatever their magic number is, they remove all the rest and send them back to the bidder unread. If this happens to your proposal, you have problems. Not only will your evaluators not see something that your team thought was important (whatever was in those returned pages), you will probably be judged "non responsive" to parts of the RFP. You will also have left your evaluators with the indelible impression that you cannot follow instructions… not exactly a message to make someone want to choose you instead of a competitor!

During the past 18 years, I have worked as a Proposal Manager / Technical Writer for many Fortune 500 companies and numerous medium and small businesses. My work has focused on helping Government contractors to prepare proposals ranging in size from $20,000 to $4 billion. These proposals have primarily been for contracts in the fields of telecommunications, information technology (IT), logistics, and base operations and maintenance (O&M) support contracts. In doing this work, I have noted the amount of effort individual companies place on planning the proposal process varies greatly. Many companies fail to win contracts they could win by not giving enough attention to prior proposal planning. However, the degree of efficiency in this critical aspect of securing Government contracts is not contingent on company size. There are many medium-size and small companies that are good at this - and they usually don't remain medium-size or small for long.

The amount of prior planning (the level of detail) in proposal operations planning has a direct impact on the quality of the final product a company submits to the Government for evaluation.It also has a significant impact on the efficiency of the assembled proposal team to produce a quality product. Stated differently, well-planned proposals cost less money to produce and result in a higher quality product. Two issues that cost companies money and should be addressed early in the planning process are: 1) In-house staff and outside consultants are expensive and their time on site needs to be thoroughly planned in the administrative sense. 2) An effective proposal file structure must be in place prior to beginning the writing effort. The structure should be simple and concise, and one that allows the writers to write efficiently within the proposal's time constraints.

Especially after reform in contracting, past performance has become the section that often decides who wins or loses the contract. The dozens of proposals we have worked during the past three years have usually assigned 30 - 40% of the total evaluation score to past performance. Past performance can assume an even more important position in the proposal, how-ever, because no Source Selection committee is going to awarda contract to a vendor lacking strong past performance.

The key questions are these: (1) How complete is the past performance archive? (2) How is the process of preparing thepast performance going to be managed? And (3) who is going to write the past performance?

It has been our experience that the number of companies that maintain an up-to-date past performance archive is small. The usual case is that the past performance citations are outof date, incomplete, or non-existent.