Shipley Insights

Proposal strategy can be implemented in four fundamental ways: Emphasise your strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, highlight your competitors’ weaknesses, downplay your competitors’ strengths. Of these four, most Business Development teams and Bid Managers tend to focus most on the first – emphasising your strengths. It feels right – tell them how good we are, they

…Simplify or replace long words and wordy phrases The more simply an idea is presented, the more understandable and credible it is. Consider the two words below: a) utilise b) use Choosing use, rather than utilise, makes your documents easier to read, quickly, thereby easier for evaluation and on the evaluators themselves.

Style – sum of the choices that writers make (including document presentation, sentence structure and word choice). Tone – the impact on the reader (customer-focused, informative, sincere etc). Consider the tone of a brochure, regional newspaper, fashion journal, scientific journal, poem, maintenance manual. Each seeks acceptance from a specific audience. Each makes specific style choices

While intelligent, many proposal evaluators are not as expert as the writers when it comes to the technical language used to describe solutions. Use of jargon in such instances can obscure meaning and make it more challenging for the evaluators. Make your proposals easier to evaluate by: 1.Minimising jargon (in general) 2.Replacing jargon with plain

Customer Focused individuals and organisations: 1.Cite the customer organisation’s vision 2.Link the customer’s vision directly to the immediate purchase 3.Cite the customer’s hot buttons 4.Make customer ownership of the hot buttons explicit 5.Address each hot button in the order listed 6.Name the customer before the seller in paragraphs and sentences 7.Name the customer as many

Photographs, visual records of time, tend to be trusted by readers and as such convey to evaluators realism and authenticity. Photographs can, therefore, be used very effectively, to: •reinforce key strategic messages (at the emotional level) •reduce risk through proof of relevant experience

Differentiators are features of your offer/solution that differ from your Competitors’ offer. Discriminators differentiate you from your competition but also address the things your Clients’ actually care about. Identify discriminators by understanding your customer, your competitors and yourself. When Clients’ cannot identify discriminators among the various offers, then low price becomes the main factor in