Jessica Pryke - Shipley Asia Pacific - Page 3

Colour is a visual emphasis device and can be used to reinforce your strategy throughout your response and convey the essence of the sale. Use coloured highlights and graphics to: •Enhance the impact of your Executive Summary •Highlight or illustrate the benefit of a product or service •Support your claims of experience and offer proof

Does your customer focused approach extend to your appendices as well as your proposal? Make life for evaluators easier by streamlining your proposals using appendices, attachments and annexes. To align yourself to best practice: • Place content of interest to most evaluators in the body of the proposal, using attachments and appendices for specialist information

Proposals written in strong, clear language are more persuasive, decisive and confident. Customers want the bidder to: • Accept responsibility • Make things happen • Appear confident • Meet requirements • Solve their problems Sentences are typically shorter, more dynamic and more forceful. Active voice is emphatic, decisive and accepts responsibility for action. Passive voice

Help your readers quickly access the key messages in your proposal by conveying them in graphics with supporting captions. Graphics help catch the reader’s eye, but by adding a caption you can deliver a persuasive message. Good captions interpret, inform and persuade. Effective captions: • Connect a customer benefit to the feature depicted in the

…. starting with focusing on opportunities you have a real chance of winning.   Improving your bid decision gate discipline is one of the most effective ways to improve win rates and can double if not triple win rates. Bid decisions are aimed at eliminating opportunities or sales leads that you have a low probability

  …’As a general rule’… ‘a large proportion of’ … and other wordy phrases undermine your message.     Simplicity counts. Long words raise suspicion. The more simply an idea is presented, the more understandable and credible the message, person, organisation behind it.   Selecting the wrong word makes the reader question:   •your literacy,

Strategy is best developed during the pre-RFP capture phase. Document strategies to move the bidder to a favoured position, categorized as actions you will take to: •leverage strengths •mitigate weaknesses •neutralise competitor strengths •highlight (ethically) competitor weaknesses During the proposal phase, shift from action to message – the outputs of the above actions become benefits

Many organisations will spend countless dollars investing in sales training and activities related to opportunity capture, yet fail because the investment made in the pursuit of an opportunity does not make it into the proposal document itself. What happens when your response is compliant only and lands on the desk of an evaluator that has

…Prospects must explicitly acknowledge or confirm the value of a feature, to convert its advantage into a benefit. Sellers that claim to know the benefits of their offerings before collaborating with the prospect are guessing. The risk of failing to test your assumptions about benefits delivered to your prospect by solution features, is that prospects

Compliance means strict adherence to the customer’s bid request. Responsiveness means addressing the customer’s underlying needs. Responsive solutions are not necessarily compliant however often contain a greater benefit to the client. The relationship between responsiveness and compliance should, therefore, be used when determining your solution and strategy. Make sure to understand your client and whether