Clear thinking

A recent post showed how taking an information architecture approach makes proposals easier to read and score. This and future posts explain how to operationalize this approach to achieve internal consistency in RFQs and RFPs. Identify and group required content As...

A common-sense way to help evaluators understand and appreciate your proposal is to make reading and scoring it easier. And a good way to do that is by structuring information consistently. The challenge Proposal content, especially for large bids, is usually...

Since winning bid competitions is important to your company’s success, you and your team likely put a lot of effort into developing strong proposals. Given the stakes involved, you may assume that proposal evaluators are equally serious about their jobs. In fact, that...

Recent posts covered proposal win-loss reviews, using FOI requests, and a process for assessing competitors’ proposals. If you’ve taken these steps to evaluate your proposals, you likely have a list of improvement priorities. So, let’s get started. The big picture...

A recent post explained how to use Freedom of Information requests to obtain your competitors’ bid proposals. The next step is to compare those proposals against your own to find areas where you can improve. Since you’ve invested effort in getting the proposal, it’s...

Government agencies are typically the largest bid issuers in North America—and nearly all are governed by Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation. That means they are legally required to release responses to their RFPs and documentation on their award decisions....

Proposal evaluators can usually find ways to adjust the technical score in favour of a preferred candidate to offset small price disadvantages. That means bids lost by a few percentage points—say, less than five—were likely winnable. This is why it’s essential to...

Once you understand differentiators and how to develop differentiators with specifics, the next step is using them to maximum advantage in proposals. Features only you offer and that your prospect cares about can be your winning advantage. Deploy differentiators often...

Bidders often squander potential advantage by talking about their differentiators in general terms. Avoid this mistake by adding specifics that make your claims more difficult to match. This post explains how to better differentiate your team, performance, experience...

Differentiators are features that a) cannot be claimed by your competitors, and b) are important to your prospect. In tight competitions—especially where there is little difference in price—small degrees of differentiation is often the difference between winning and...