Welcome to the New Year!
Are you and your team looking for ways to make 2020 a year of better bid proposals? As a start, we recommend following the links below to our favourite blog posts of 2019.
Making efficient bid/no-bid decisions
Using a process to create alignment on whether to bid saves time needed either to complete the proposal or move on to other priorities. Evaluate your knowledge of the prospect and project, other likely competitors, and your capabilities and strategic factors.
Complex2Clear’s free bid/no-bid decision tool makes a great place to begin developing a process that works for you.
Building a strategy
Anyone who follows our posts knows the critical importance of building strategy around the prospect’s issues, and then showing responsiveness and positioning your offer against the competition.
If you expect to be responding to RFQs in 2020, be sure to read our posts on showing capability, demonstrating capability to stay aligned and expressing a unified voice across a an RFQ response.
Planning to go informal?
Informal proposals—those solicited outside a formal bid process—offer both seller and buyer a chance to reach agreement on an ideal solution without the effort and expense of a formal bid process.
But don’t call in any opportunities that come your way in 2020. Instead, read our posts on informal proposal basics, how to organize your informal proposal, developing informal proposal content and selling to your prospect on the idea of an informal proposal.
Proposal management picks
Close management and disciplined reviews are critical to achieving compliance and messaging alignment in large proposal narratives. See these posts on preparing narrative writers, proposal management pre-Red Team, managing a proposal Red Team review and managing in the final stretch to proposal submission.
Disciplined bid win-loss reviews enable learning from your successes and failures. See these posts on how to plan and conduct win-loss interviews, report on the results, and analyse win-loss trends over time.
Want more?
The links above are just a taste of more than 50 posts last year. See Complex2Clear’s blog index to explore the rest of our 2019 (and earlier) posts. And use the form to subscribe to our monthly blog summary for a steady stream of winning ideas.
