The art of writing a proposal is not rocket science but it does take experience. As contracting veterans know, RFP's demand that candidates meet a number of requirements - all or most of which must be addressed in the proposal. Good proposal managers possess the skill to recognize what is important and what isn't and to ensure that the final product is an easy-to-read, structured document. Many businesses don't have proposal managers and those that do overwork and overload them. To make matters worse, experienced proposal managers are a scarce commodity.

Drafting responsive proposal content requires a staff with good writing skills, technical expertise and more time than most imagine. Writing a page of clear and concise content takes far more time than even experienced writers estimate at the onset of a proposal effort. Original text must be edited repeatedly and those writers assigned to a proposal must also address their normal work tasks while trying to write the proposal.

Effective proposal writing and a company's ability to perform after winning an opportunity do not necessarily go hand in hand. The business which submits the best proposal may not eventually provide the best contract performance because the skill sets of the two endeavors are vastly different. Ideally, a company possesses both skill sets but often the best proposal does not come from the company that can provide the best value to the government.

So how does a company write winning proposals effectively? Although difficult to achieve, a company must have one or more experienced proposal managers. Management must support proposal mangers in every way possible and the proposal mangers must implement a very structured process for the writing of each proposal. The efforts of your sales staff and proposal writers must be tightly integrated so that your company ends up writing fewer proposals which, in the end, have a higher probability of winning.