Last week's installment discussed the necessity of pre-selling a sales opportunity before it appears as a public bid. This installment assumes that you have aggressively pre-sold an opportunity, you have identified the customer's needs and his perceived solutions, and the customer would like your company to win the contract.

Winning proposals are written from the customer's perspective. You can only accomplish this goal if you have met, or at least talked with, the customer prior to the release of the Request for Proposal. The keys to crafting successful proposals are demonstrating that:

• Your business truly understands the customer's needs.
• You have identified the solutions the customer is looking for and have successfully outlined how your business can provide those solutions.
• Your company understands the specific benefits the buyer is looking for and outlining how you can provide those benefits.

The proposal evaluation process is one of elimination. A committee of agency evaluators must wade through countless proposals (often more than fifteen or twenty) and score them against a set of published criteria. Most, if not all, of the evaluators will not be overly enthused about the chore in front of them.

When drafting your proposal, adopt the mindset of those reviewing them. Assume that the evaluator hopes to shorten his or her workload by quickly eliminating as many proposals as possible. Also presume that yours is the last document being reviewed. The goal is to write defensively to ensure that your document will not be eliminated. We are not suggesting that you should not write the proposal to win. It's merely a matter of perspective. Put your best foot forward while writing a proposal that is designed to survive elimination.

In writing the proposal, don't try to hit homeruns. Your company will not win that way. You will not score points by offering the government things they didn't ask for and you can lose points for not offering what the government needs. Be consistent. Cover all of your bases. It's better to respond competently (even if not brilliantly) on all points rather than to nail perfectly some points at the expense of others. If you miss on just one section of the proposal, you have given the evaluator a reason to eliminate you. Keep your technical people reigned in. Perhaps the federal buyer really only wants a Ford rather than a Cadillac (which you, of course, will have discerned during the pre-RFP sales process).

In summary, a great defense is your best offense. Make your proposal stand out by being clear, succinct and concise. Draft it with a "survivor's" mentality. Most importantly, your proposal must address the customer's needs and propose acceptable solutions to those issues (as identified by the customer during the relationship-building process).