Amanda Reid-Young

After targeting an opportunity and analysing their position, many sellers delay selecting what they are going to offer. They may continue to modify their solution, or carry too many solutions, alternates, or options through the sales cycle. While you may believe that this demonstrates flexibility, it can impact your ability to position with the customer

A good general rule for proposals is: “Don’t make evaluators do their own thinking”. Tell them clearly what you want them to know, and make sure they read it by highlighting those key messages. Graphics are an important tool when you are trying to foreground a particular piece of information. A picture may be worth

The power of photographs to convince people is still strong, even though most of us realise that they can easily be manipulated to distort the truth. Many organisations underuse photographs In proposals, simply because they have not planned ahead to collect photographic evidence. Plan to gather relevant photos throughout the sales process that you can

Response: Plan to concentrate your proposal efforts on answering the most important questions. If you can submit an Executive Summary, put extra work into developing a strong narrative that pulls together all the threads from the different questions and themes in the request. In addition, spend time identifying, on an 80-20 basis, which are the most

Have you spent a day writing a response to a word- or page-limited question in a proposal? And then spent two days eliminating the unnecessary words to bring it back within the limit? And then realised how much better the short version is? Customers limit word and page counts for exactly this reason. They want

2020 has seen us wrangling with all the administrative challenges of working from home. Telecommunications networks are feeling the strain. So are parents who are working remotely and sharing the space with children kept or sent home from school. Teleconferencing contends with competing demands. And some of you are struggling for the first time with

Many organisations tell us that they have a defined business development process – but only for specifically selected opportunities. Teams muddle through on other opportunities as best they can. To really switch on your organisation’s business development potential, you need to commit to a single, flexible, tailorable, scalable process – and for your leadership team

Have you ever used a previous Executive Summary and done a “search and replace” for the customer name? Yes, admit it! Every time you do that, you are effectively throwing out the work already done by your business development team. Instead, use Shipley tools including the Bidder Comparison, the Integrated Solution Worksheet and the Strategy