Clear thinking

A recent post focused on describing relevant experience in proposals. This week, we'll look at how to document your past performance. Just to be clear: Experience refers to your past involvement on projects similar to the one on which you’re bidding. Performance...

A recent post described the fundamentals of including relevant experience and past performance in proposals. This week, we’ll look at how to describe your relevant experience. Three levels of experience Relevant experience can include overall experience, experience...

Not surprisingly, bid issuers look to relevant experience and past performance as indictors of a proponent’s ability to perform successfully. These factors are heavily weighted in every RFP scoring system we see. Experience and performance are not the same. Experience...

Welcome to 2019—let’s make it a year of better proposals. Our January 2019 newsletter noted the economic uncertainty we face and the likelihood that the pace of infrastructure and other capital spending may slow, beginning this year. In a climate of fewer projects, it...

Large bid processes usually include a presentation phase. Since public speaking ranks alongside death as a major fear, it’s no wonder many team members dread this part of competitions. No one likes speech making—so start by resolving not to give a speech. Instead,...

Recent posts focused on business development, including understanding the prospect and developing value propositions. This post recommends you go a step further and develop a capture plan—especially for highly attractive opportunities. The aim of pursuit is to...

In past posts we discussed how to use the capture team’s knowledge of the prospect (including likely evaluators) and your competitors to analyse the issues for each section. See this post on how to use a competitive solutions matrix. For each issue, strive to express...

Once we understand how to build value propositions for economic buyers, technical buyers and user buyers, let’s translate that knowledge into bid wins. Take the following actions to put value at the centre of your bid effort. Build value propositions as part of your...

Recent posts looked at value propositions for economic buyers and for technical buyers. This week we’ll focus on value props for user buyers. Evaluation teams for large RFPs always include user buyers. As the name implies, these individuals will use the solution in...

A recent post explained the importance of focusing client relationships on value creation. We included a value proposition for a company selling shipping productivity software. That value proposition was aimed at the economic buyer, the decision maker we naturally...