Chapter 17: Proposal Metrics: How to Measure Your Success

You should regularly take the pulse of your proposal operation by measuring both performance and proficiency. In measuring performance, you want to make sure the work you are doing and the results that work is producing are in alignment with the company's goals. In measuring proficiency, you need to define what tasks proposal writers perform and which of those tasks have the greatest impact on producing successful projects. Then you can measure whether or not the people involved have the right skills at the right level of proficiency.

Why bother measuring all of this stuff? Well, if you want to improve your proposal process, if you want it to produce more wins and require less time and money, you have to be able to track what you're doing and measure the results.

Measuring Success—the First Steps

To improve your proposal process in a systematic way, you must first decide what it is you want to measure. Which measurements are truly meaningful?

The second step is to develop a baseline of data based on the "old'' way of handling the task. If you don't know where you are, it's pretty hard to figure out if you're moving in the right direction.

The third element in measuring results is to implement a system that will collect the appropriate measures from the "new'' process. This may be a matter of self-reporting on the outcome of each sales opportunity, but it could require a more structured effort, such as conducting a win/loss analysis or tracking hours of effort.