Knowledge is key to developing any compelling bid and demonstrating your understanding of your client’s key issues and what you understand about the opportunity in your response is essential. In addition, you must align your offer to the client’s key drivers, develop win themes that will differentiate you from competitors, and present a persuasive and client-focused response. Win themes are tactical messages generated for a specific bid that supports an overall strategy that links the client’s drivers with the discriminating features of your offer.
TIP: When planning proposal content, remember to include the themes throughout the response.
To develop a compelling response, you need to create and expand on your win themes by considering the features of your offer and how these features will benefit your client or the project. Furthermore, you need to provide evidence to demonstrate your capability and lastly, ask yourself whether your features and perceived benefits are unique.
Different ways to demonstrate evidence include:
- Lessons learned
- Skills availability and project transition tables
- Project case studies
- Pull quotes
- Client testimonials
- Hard evidence like customer satisfaction surveys
- Workflow diagrams.
TIP: Keep a list of validated evidence in your knowledge library to accelerate creating a winning proposal.
