How To Become INDISPENSABLE. 

It can deflate you. 

When a proposal lands on our desk, we think about all the time that is going to be sucked away from other things we'd rather be getting done. 

Yet, we dream of the big win--when we win a proposal, we get to put our people in the field making clients happy. Winning keeps people employed and lets our team live the lives they dream of. 

We spend hours struggling, trying to create a message that effectively highlights our differentiators and strengths and addresses all the client's expectations (both written in the RFP and not). 

But we end up staring at the same old text. Or worse yet, that piece you spend hours on gets sent back with orders to rewrite it.

 And at the end of the day, do you even know whether what you just wrote will get the selection committee to choose you? 

It doesn’t have to be like this.

In fact, writing proposals CAN feel easy. It can be enjoyable. It can give you a renewed sense of confidence and purpose. And, when done right, it can make people see you as indispensable. 

Indispensable isn’t just when you have confidence knowing you can help anybody win contracts. It’s not when you know how to craft a technical approach (even when you don’t have the technical expertise). 

No. You’re indispensable when THEY know you can do it. 

I’m going to show you how to become indispensable. 

But first I need to tell you about my biggest failure and a time when I was the very definition of dispensable. 

You're NEXT 

2002 was the worst year of my life. 

I was a business development coordinator, working on proposals for an engineering firm in Princeton, NJ. 

To say things were going bad is an understatement. 

I worked outrageous hours, at times dragging out of the office at 2 in the morning…. 

…I smelled of FedEx truck exhaust from frantically chasing so many of them with proposal packages under my arm…. 

…I was grinding close to 200 proposals out the door each year... 

…I put everything I had into this job, but still felt like a was running on a hamster wheel… 

Despite my tireless effort, we were getting beat left and right. We watched as firms, who we knew didn’t have the talent or reputation we did, won contracts that should have been ours. 

I sat in my cubicle outside the Senior Vice President’s office as, each week, he would get a call from Los Angeles to lay off more staff. I watched as my friends were escorted by security out our front door. 

They never saw it coming. They never thought of themselves as dispensable. 

And I watched this every Friday, feeling like dirt. 

The hardest part was there was nothing I could do about it. We needed work. I wanted to fix things. But I didn’t know what to do. 

Sure, I had taken marketing classes in college. I had even designed ads for a newspaper and a large retailer. 

But when push came to shove, I had no idea how to convince anyone to buy our professional services, like engineering or design-build. 

I didn’t know the words to say or the questions to ask. 

I didn’t know how or why clients made decisions. 

I walked into work each day feeling worthless, feeling powerless. My confidence was at an all-time low. Then I’d go home and I couldn’t sleep. 

It was a Thursday, when one of our project managers was fired. And on that same day, the office manager (who hated me) walked up to my cubicle… 

…leaned in… 

…put two fingers up to her throat… 

…looked me straight in the eyes… 

…and with a throat slicing motion said… 

…”You’re next!” 

My jaw dropped. Is this what it had come to? Was I next? 

After that, I resigned myself to the fact that my time at the firm, the work I had done on all those proposals… 

…was a failure. 

In my first real job out of college, I had failed. 

I was not the person I thought I was. I was dispensable. 

A few days later, I walked into my Senior Vice President’s office and told him what I believed to be the truth. The firm didn’t need someone like me. 

They needed someone who knew… 

…what to say to clients… 

…the questions to ask… 

…and how to convince them to buy our services. 

He agreed. And the following week, I was jobless. 

There I was. I had no idea, or prospects, for what I would do with my life. The only thing I knew was that I never wanted to work on a proposal ever again. 

But one phone call would change that, and my life, forever. 

The Journey From Dispensable to INDISPENSABLE  

I was sitting on my couch, in my pajamas, when I got the call… 

…it was another engineering firm that wanted to interview me. 

But the thing was, I had never applied to this firm. I had never even sent them a resume. Heck, I’d never even heard of them. 

An engineering firm calling me, out of the blue like that, and wanting me to interview was about as likely as snow in July. 

Why me? 

How did they even get my number? 

I didn’t want anything to do with proposals anymore, but my curiosity got the best of me. 

I strapped on a tie and walked into this firm’s office. 

As fate would have it, someone I had met a few years before was now working at this firm. He saw something in me and recommended me for this job. 

Over the next decade, under his mentorship (and the mentorship of others), I submitted proposals to agencies across the country. 

I read every book I could find on proposals, copywriting, and social psychology. I had the fortune to meet some of the top proposal professionals, networkers, and psychology researchers in the world. 

In this small firm, I had the pleasure of going up against…and beating…some of the top names in the industry. I felt a renewed sense of purpose as competitors protested our wins, shocked when we swooped in and “stole” a contract they thought was wired for them. 

And what I learned not only changed my perception of the world, but it helped me realize how wrong I truly was. 

I Thought I Knew How To Write. I Was WRONG.

It blew my mind. 

I always thought I was a “good writer.” Heck, I even had a degree in journalism. 

But everything I had been taught about writing was wrong. It didn’t apply to proposal writing. 

In fact, a lot of what works in proposal writing is completely counterintuitive. To be successful with proposals, I had to forget everything I was taught in high school and college and learn how to write a different way… 

… a way that would persuade people. 

And I didn’t just have to relearn writing. I had to learn social psychology and how people really make decisions. This is stuff we’re never taught in college. 

To master proposal writing, to become indispensable, I had to grow my proposals in five different areas. 

Now, I’m going to show you how to learn in five weeks, what took me over 10 years.