I’m always surprised when teams pitch business, lose, and then can’t tell me why they lost when I ask. Chances are you lost for one of three reasons, and I’ll get to those in a bit. For now, ask yourself while you lick your wounds: What type of bidder was I?

I’m sometimes asked how to put together winning proposals, either as part of counsel given to clients or water-cooler conversations with colleagues launching their own consulting careers. While best practices are going to vary a bit from industry to industry, the following outline wins work if executed strongly.

Talk to PR and marketing agency types, and you’ll hear all manner of moans and groans over Requests For Propopsals (RFPs) or their lesser-seen siblings, the Request For Information (RFI) or Request For Quote (RFQ).

Why? Well, part of it is just Pollyanna-ish thinking about how business comes in the door — a surprising number of agencies grow their practices through purely organic networking and word-of-mouth marketing. This isn’t a bad move (more on that in another post), but it’s hard to be known by all the right people all the time. Now and then, a great piece of work will come up and you’re going to have to walk through the beauty pageant just like everyone else.

But the other reason agencies sometimes shy away from competitive bids is a little more basic: There are a lot of unreasonable, unclear or otherwise undesirable RFPs out there. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

We constantly hear from clients that they want the people in the interview to be the ones doing the work. For a small shop, that’s a huge advantage because small shops generally have a greater percentage of senior folks as a portion of their overall staff.

But before you get to do the work, you have to win them over. Herewith (c’mon, where else but my blog can I get away with a word like that?), some rules we follow religiously that tend to break the conventional wisdom…

I’m often surprised by the number of businesses — not just mom-and-pop operations but sizable enterprises — that don’t have a formal process for their new-business leads.

If you’re in that camp, then there’s a 100% probability you’re leaving money on the table — and here’s a quick process that will get you started on the road to more revenue.