Clear thinking

A recent post made the case for including a pricing executive summary in proposals. The aim is to show your offer was carefully developed, and is realistic and more attractive than alternatives. This post shows how to make that summary easy to consume and responsive...

Because price matters so much, it makes sense to invest in presenting it as favourably as possible. Despite this, many companies relegate price to a single number at the back of informal proposals and submit only the issuer-supplied pricing forms in formal bids. A...

Although our posts focus mainly on differentiating and presenting your proposal’s technical offer, we’d never suggest price is unimportant. Even in the case of two-envelope RFPs, where prices are revealed only after the narratives are scored, price looms large in the...

Recent posts covered managing large narratives to submission, including preparing proposal writers for success, pre-Red Team management, and running a Red Team review. This post provides guidance for managing from Red Team to submission. Immediately following Red...

This is part of a series on how to manage large proposal narratives to submission. Recent posts focused on preparing proposal writers for success and pre-Red Team management. This entry provides guidance on running a Red Team review session. Red Team review input As...

This is part of a series that explains how to manage large narratives. Our last post focussed on preparing proposal writers for success. Today’s entry includes tools and processes for managing the period from kickoff to Red Team review. Red Team review planning NOTE:...

This blog series explores managing large narratives. This post explains how to set up proposal writers to be successful.Most content developers are not professional writers. They typically have other responsibilities as their main focus and fit proposal writing in...

Good management practice gets the proposal writing team aligned at the outset, and then reviews and provides helpful feedback on drafts at key milestones to submission. This approach is especially critical to achieving logical consistency and one voice in large...

Recent posts have focused on setting up a bid win-loss review process, conducting bid win-loss interviews and reporting on bid win-loss reviews. Companies conducting large numbers of reviews per year should also consider using win-loss analyses to aggregate review...

We recently posted on how to plan and conduct win-loss interviews. Here we look at reporting the feedback. Aim to write a brief, plain language report likely to get read by senior managers and executives. Structuring, formatting and writing for reader friendliness are...