Clear thinking

We recently highlighted the importance of making fast and accurate bid/no-bid decisions. This post describes the first step—assessing your relationship with the prospect and knowledge of the requirements. How familiar is the prospect? Most RFP issuers prefer to work...

Many companies have unresolved tension between those who want to respond to more bid opportunities and those who want to focus on fewer bids and aim for a higher win percentage. Bid more, even if success rate drops? Sales teams responsible for filtering opportunities...

Proposals are often the only strategic, outward-facing documents for which companies rely on non-writers. That’s because proposal writing requires technical expertise and, although some subject matter experts (SMEs) are fine writers, many are not. Copyediting will...

Callouts are short text strings set in an eye-catching font and/or colour block designed to draw attention. Proposal teams use the attention-grabbing power of callouts to ensure evaluators note and remember key messages. This post explains how to use callouts to...

Most proposal teams use graphics (photos, illustrations, charts, graphs, etc.) to avoid endless “walls of text” in their proposals. Graphics add interest—but they only have selling power when accompanied by strong captions. Think about how you read a magazine Do you...

Evaluators tend to skim RFP responses, rather than reading them carefully. For this reason, lists are an excellent way to ensure important information is easy for evaluators to find and score. When creating lists, or copyediting lists created by content developers,...

Recently we’ve focused on the benefits of standardizing proposal content. Standardized content can improve both quality and efficiency. Standardization is not an invitation to simply cut-and-paste content. Every proposal still needs to show you understand the prospect...

Earlier this month we covered the benefits of standardized proposal content and how to apply standardization to proposal resumes and project sheets. The idea is not simply to cut-and-paste sections from previous proposals—but to take advantage of inherent similarities...

Standardizing content allows proposal teams more time to build out their strategies, improving both efficiency and quality. This post looks at two ideal standardization candidates—resumes and project descriptions. Like all proposal content, resumes and project sheets...

Every proposal team looks for ways to reuse proposal content. We never recommend copying and pasting entire sections, and then searching and replacing the prospect’s name. But between that extreme and writing all content from scratch, there’s plenty of room to use...