Egos and Proposals

On Tuesday I spent nearly 20 hours putting the India proposal together. That's right -- writing, editing, changes, formatting, etc., were going on up until the last minute. But the good news is that the proposal is done and gone! No more India, at least until we get questions or a BAFO.

So basically, my client, their subcontractors and I worked on that proposal for almost two months. If you were to look at the first draft and the final version, you would see that every section (and probably every paragraph) is totally different. My guess is that we produced at least 15 drafts of the proposal over the two-month period.

That brings me to the title of this blog post -- egos and proposals. When you work on a proposal as part of a team you need to have thick skin and let your ego fly out the window. Oftentimes, whatever you write will be edited, changed, or thrown out by others. If you are new to proposal writing, it can be devastating to find that the pieces you worked so hard on were changed so drastically by other people that you no longer recognize them as pieces that you wrote. Or worse, that your pieces were not used at all. That is what happened to me when I first started writing, and I wondered why I even bothered to write stuff if no one was going to use it.

It still happens to me. With the India proposal, for example, I wrote several pieces for various sections. In the final version of the proposal, I recognized perhaps two or three paragraphs and a few sentences that had been left intact. Everything else I had written had been changed or deleted. And the same was true for pieces written by everyone else.

Did it bother me? Not really. Did it bother others that their work wasn't used or had been heavily edited? I doubt it -- they were experienced proposal writers. And experienced proposal writers recognize that it is the end result that is important. The objective is to make the proposal as good as it can be. Making improvements to a proposal is part of the process, and it doesn't matter if it is you or other members of your proposal team who make those improvements.

So don't let your ego get in the way of a proposal. Everything you write can probably be improved upon by someone else. And in the end, the proposal will be better for it.