Professionally developed proposals always have the same characteristics — they are compliant, responsive, compelling, and customer focused. They present a solution that is easy to evaluate and score well — and they are aesthetically attractive.

Not all requests for proposals (RFP) call for an Executive Summary, and when proposals must have limited pages, it might be best to skip an Executive Summary. But for large proposals or RFPs that ask for an Executive Summary, here are seven steps to creating an effective one.

Proper positioning lays the groundwork for a win well before the acquisition takes place and makes you a partner in the acquisition development. If you help define the battlefield, your odds of winning increase.

Articulate roles at the beginning in a very concrete way…the more general the discussion, the more room for misinterpretation and frustration down the road.

You can win more business, write better proposals, and advance in your career if you focus on 7 proven steps that will raise your win probability

Those of us who want to retain some semblance of sanity and work/life balance have developed Proposal Factories encompassing a number of mechanisms and processes that enable us to produce and win these proposals without completely burning out our teams and ourselves—and without giving up our weekends.

At a Keynote luncheon on June 1, 2011 before more than 600 of her peers at the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) International Conference & Exhibits in Denver, CO, APMP awarded Lohfeld Consulting Group’s Brenda Crist the Steven S. Myers Award as the 2011 APMP Chapter Chair of the Year.

The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP), the international association representing proposal, business development, and capture management professionals, announced that nine of its members, including Lohfeld Consulting Group’s Brenda Crist and Wendy Frieman, were awarded the designation of APMP Fellow at the association’s recent Annual International Conference in Denver, CO.

Creating winning proposals is not the same as writing a proposal. Anyone can write a proposal for government work, given enough time and resources.

Capture and proposal management, as a practice and a profession, continually changes. Recently, we asked leading professionals what changes they expect to see by 2020, and I think some of the predictions will surprise you. Here are some humorous as well as common-sense extensions of where we are today and what you might expect to see in coming years.