How Important is Your Proposal Leader?
By Dan Safford

A couple of months ago I was conducting my proposal class for a group of engineers at a mid-sized firm. These people write a lot of proposals, maybe 100 per year. At lunch one of them—a fellow who’d been working proposals for 15 years or so—approached me.

He said. “It seems like every time we write a proposal, no one’s really in charge. Oh sure, we have a guy who’s been tapped to lead the effort, but all he really does is hand out assignments then goes off and does other work and I never see him again. We hand our sections into the marketing coordinator, who formats the proposal and makes it look pretty. I’m pretty sure the proposals get reviewed by the boss, but I don’t know for sure.”

The he asked me, “How important is it to have a dedicated proposal leader?”

Well, as you might guess, my answer was pretty emphatic:

IT’S ESSENTIAL!!!!

I apologize for shouting. But I do think it’s important. Here’s why:

Every project needs a leader. And proposal projects are no different. The leader sets the overall vision for the proposal, and makes sure that vision is threaded throughout the appropriate sections. The leader makes sure the necessary resources are allocated to the proposal effort, and will fight for them as hard as she can. A leader will make sure that people will work together, even through the high stress of a deadline driven proposal. A leader can make the difference between a winning proposal and a loser.

Now let’s make one thing clear here: I’m not talking about just having an administrator, someone who is process minded, as the proposal leader. A winning proposal requires someone with a vested interest in winning, who has a stake and can motivate the team to follow a well-conceived strategy. Here are some guidelines for selecting a leader:

The leader should be selected early. Ideally, she will lead the pre-RFP marketing activities, and will have a good understanding of the client’s project and his hot button issues. She will use this knowledge to drive the win strategy for the proposal. This person should be in charge of the post-proposal activities as well, such as the short-list presentation.

If you pick the proposal leader late, after the RFP has arrived, his learning curve will be twice as steep; he’ll have to learn what the client wants, and how to structure the proposal to deliver it. And the simple fact of proposal life is that there will never be enough time before the due date to learn all of what he would have known had he been involved since the beginning of the marketing effort.

The leader should be selected on the basis of her ability to lead, not on her ability to do the technical job. This means management needs to pick the best person for the job, and stick with her from the beginning to the end. This shows commitment to winning.

If appropriate, the proposal leader should be the project/program manager. As the eventual project manager, she has a vested interest in winning. She knows that she will be on the hook for performing according to the promises she makes. This will make her work harder to make the proposal as complete as possible. 

Once selected, the leader should be kept on the job, not pulled off to take care of some other important job. This happens all too often, and when it does, it disrupts the continuity of the effort. It also sends a strong signal to the rest of the team that, despite all the talk of winning, management doesn’t consider the proposal as important as the other job. This is a sure morale killer.

Finally, the proposal leader must be the glue that holds the effort together. She must be open to all ideas, not just her own. She has to understand that proposals are high-stress efforts, and she can reduce the stress by giving the writers specific direction from her if they are to produce sections that contribute to the overall strategy, rather than letting them figure it out on their own. She will know how to work with all levels of the organization responsible for getting the proposal out the door, from the technical team to upper management to the legal staff to the production coordinator.

Selecting this leader falls on management’s shoulders, and it means making hard choices. A person with these attributes is valuable in any organization, and it’s a great temptation to use her on multiple projects. But if the proposal is important enough, and it will be to at least one of your competitors in the running, then you’ll use her talents where you get the greatest return—on a winning proposal.