Benchmarks that Matter
When I’m evaluating a proposal team, the first things I ask are questions to help me understand where the team is in their development. The measures I use come from benchmarking studies of proposal teams. I’m always interested in new benchmarking studies so I know what is shifting as “best practices.”
Charlie Divine just finished a benchmarking study for the Business Development Institute International. They found 182 parameters in common among the best proposal teams in the world, and determined that a small subset of these (10 or so) are critical to building outstanding proposal teams.
The entire report will be distributed at their event, November 18, in McLean Virginia, BDI Fifth Annual Leadership Conference. Check in and see if you can attend the session. (Sorry for the late notice. Charlie and I only got together on this yesterday.)
I’m always interested in what others see as critical components for proposal teams.
Whether you are part of a large organization or small, the requirements for successful proposal teams have many similarities. A huge firm may have big systems and fancier tools, but the benchmark study describes the necessities within the reach of small and medium sized firms.
Here’s one of my favorites: Proposal Planning Framework Tool (AKA Storyboards).
The study confirmed that the best teams use a framework planning tool in pre-proposal planning. It is an indicator of their success. All the best teams have this. Storyboards, Annotated Outlines or Proposal Maps are Framework Tools.
- Effective organizations institutionalize their framework processes
- Storyboards predominate in collocated environments
- In virtual environments, online tools are used to provide framework capability (for example, electronic storyboards)
As the BDI report says, “Framework planning tools ensure strategies and themes are communicated clearly.”
One of the most popular pages on my website is the first page describing Storyboards. However, most folks look at these innocent forms and skip over them. They think “we all know this” and “we just need to get started writing!” and those folks produce proposals that might win 50 percent of the time.
Teams that win 80 percent or more of their proposals don’t skip over Storyboards.
“The storyboards saved us more than 30 percent of the time writing the proposal.”
said Scott Reed of Radian Intl LLC, after working with my team for the first time. He’d been doing proposals the hard way for a few years, and was surprised how much more effective he could be by using this “Framework Planning Tool.”
Once you master Storyboards, you find them useful for all your writing projects.
There’s much more in this report. If you can make the session, you’ll come away with ideas for your own team. I know Charlie and he’s an inspriration to the team he developed at SBC, and so this should be a good session. You’ll have the report to take home, which your boss may find compelling when you are explaining the changes you want to make on your team.
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