Shipley Insights

Brain imaging research has shown that all decisions involve a complex interplay between the emotional and logical centres of the human brain. By collaborating with the customer throughout the sales process, you can gain information, develop rapport, validate assumptions and assess your progress in persuading them that your organisation can best meet their needs. While

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

We are a leader in our field The thing that makes us different is our people We are uniquely placed to fulfil your needs We believe we are the best people to help you The problem with this approach is: It’s all about the seller, when the focus should be on the buyer Competitors are

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

How much do you consider this before posting? I regularly see posts from people and businesses patting themselves on the back for securing a new contract. Think about whether this self-congratulatory content is helping to improve your current or prospective client’s perception of you. Is this content better suited to internal communications to improve team

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