Shipley Insights

Your bid/no-bid process is designed to stop you wasting time on opportunities that you are unlikely to win or will not benefit from winning. Make sure it is serving this purpose by continually reviewing your decisions against outcomes.   Promptly record and disseminate your gate decisions. To support subsequent analysis of gate decisions and foster

Regardless of your overarching organizational scheme, adhere to fundamental principles whenever writing to persuade your reader. These principles make your documents easier for customers to understand and improve the likelihood they will choose your proposal.   Persuasive communications conform to five fundamental organizational principles: Organize information as directed or according to the customer’s needs. Customers expect

  Consistent and positive messaging in early capture activities is easier to manage because the capture manager often plans, attends, facilitates, or arranges these activities. As an opportunity progresses, bidder conferences, site visits, and questions regarding solicitation documents introduce new individuals, including senior executives, who might know relatively little about the customer and the opportunity.

  Many businesses are good at describing their strengths, not so good at ensuring their offer has a competitive edge over other bidders. Use a Black Hat review when you know you have credible competition and you need to step up your game.   The ideal Black Hat review outcome is to credibly answer the

  Concise writing is easier to read and evaluate. Accordingly, it has a better chance of persuading the reader to reach the desired conclusion.   When reviewing and revising a proposal, break your writing down into three parts: paragraphs, sentences, and words. The goal is to make the text as short as possible while conveying

The pursuit of new business comes at a cost. Make sure that the opportunities you are investing in are aligned with your campaign plans or company strategic plans.   Consider these factors: ·         Potential for additional business ·         Product, market, and technology match ·         Fit to strategic business plan objectives ·         Corporate risks and chances

Here is a hint. There can be multiple reasons why deadlines for individual proposal tasks are constantly missed, but the most likely is that you have underestimated time allocated for some tasks and overestimated for others.   If you are told you have 20% of somebody’s time for three weeks: How do you work out

A proposal template that embeds and prompts for customer-focused writing can be an effective tool to remind your team to prepare proposals that address customer issues. But the template on its own can’t increase your win rate. You also need to monitor and manage its use to meet clearly defined, measurable quality standards.   Consider