Your entire timeline depends on people with conflicting priorities delivering proposal sections by a certain date. When they don't, it usually means one thing: an inferior proposal.
Once a section on the critical path comes in late, you have two options. Spend less time on other proposal tasks than you planned, or throw more hours and people at it. Neither makes your proposal better.
The real causes of late proposal sections
I'll be frank. The problem isn't conflicting priorities or laziness. It's two things you can control: your mindset and your planning methodology.
Cause 1: mindset
Everybody has invisible scripts, things we subconsciously tell ourselves that frame our world. Early in my career, at prebid meetings surrounded by boilers and chillers, mine was: "Keep your mouth shut. Leave all things engineery to the engineers." Ten years later, I consider it my duty to ask technical questions in front of clients. Seven times out of ten, someone says, "That's a good question."
A common script among proposal managers is the victim mindset: "I'm doing my job and they're not doing theirs." It feels true, and it leaves you powerless. Your circle of influence is often far greater than you think. If you want to buy a corporate jet, get buy-in from the top. If you want to schedule proposals differently, you don't need it.
Cause 2: planning methodology
Most schedules give technical staff every available day and leave no cushion, so one slip breaks everything. Here's how to build float into your proposal schedule, with an example you can try.
What technical staff must provide on every proposal
The line between marketing and the technical team can be nebulous, and it depends on your systems and on where your staff fall on the Proposal Experience Spectrum. In nearly every case, these four things have to come from the technical staff.
Client and project information
Everything they know about the client, the project, and related needs, wants, challenges, concerns, and preferences. Even with a database, there may be an important tidbit that was never communicated.
Resume review
Each staff member should review their resume before submission. There may be an important tidbit missing or an embarrassing discrepancy. At the very least, someone involved in that person's project history should review it.
Technical and management approach
Well-trained marketing staff can draft technical approaches, but the final approach must come from the technical staff. They're the ones who will execute it, so it must represent their plan. The management approach, schedule, and other technical elements belong here too.
Price
The technical staff will have to work within the budget, so they need input. The final price may be a strategic business decision, higher or lower than their estimate. It must be approved by the people with authority to contractually bind your company.
What about everything else?
There's nothing else that can't be developed, gathered, or produced by a well-trained marketing or business development staff. That should change what you ask technical staff for, and make each request easier to say yes to.
The course gives you the exact scripts I use to get proposal sections on time, plus a master class on getting the technical staff on your side.
See the whole course
I've submitted over 1,000 proposals and created Proposal Management Mastery. The American Institute of Architects included my relevancy formula for proposals in The Architect's Handbook of Professional Practice.