Business and Finance

Win themes are too often neglected in many proposals. Frequently, both new and established companies forget that any proposal should instil confidence in the potential buyer, highlight your competitive advantage and show exactly why you are best suited for the job. Written proposals with an effective win theme almost always ensure you, the provider, a winning contract.

What is a win theme? A win theme can be defined as a concept presented in your proposal that is designed to persuade the buyer of your unique suitability to deliver the project. Find a single aspect that marks you as uniquely suited for a given project and present this to the buyer.

Creating compelling reasons to buy is why you land contracts. This is even more important if you are conducting business primarily over the Internet. Face to face interactions naturally work much better when it comes to creating lasting relationships. Online, you need to work harder to make yourself stand out. Distinguish yourself from competitors in every way possible.

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Constant qualification is the process of continuously evaluating all of your opportunities to check that you still want to and should be bidding. It is possible to get caught up in an opportunity that you are unlikely to win and that diverts valuable resources and time from other more suitable opportunities.

Firstly, you need to understand the importance of having a formal bid/no bid process. This is to help you understand when and why you should bid, and to make sure you avoid projects that you have a low probability of winning. Sometimes a decision is made early to bid but is that still the right decision as you learn more about the opportunity?

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Writing a proposal involves a lot more than just simply putting the words together…you have to make sure that your proposal document looks professional and that it gets to the client on time. You could have the best proposal in the world, but if it’s submitted after the deadline it is extremely likely that it won’t even be considered – especially in public sector procurement.

So what’s involved in producing a proposal? It’s just a question of printing it out and sending it off isn’t it? Sometimes yes – but there may be other things to consider. Here’s a quick list of all the things that you have to consider:

The proposal – the finished document is obviously the first thing you need in place. Make sure that this is the finished document – any red team review should have already been completed on draft versions.

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Proposal planning is essential to ensure that you have time to develop, write and produce a well though-out solution to the client’s requirement. Everyone who has written proposals regularly has occasionally wished that they had planned better, started earlier and various occasions stayed late trying to deal with an unsatisfactory and unfinished proposal.

Think of proposals as small projects – develop a plan. Think about all the relevant issues you must cover – how to meet their problem? How you have done similar work in the past? Who will work on the project? Do you need subcontractors or partners to help deliver the project? Who will work on the proposal? How will you present yourself to the client in order to win?

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Getting through pre-qualification is sometimes a difficult and tedious task. However, it is often a “necessary evil” in order to be considered for larger projects. Companies or individuals see this as a way of ensuring that any perspective consultants are both serious, professional and above all, qualified for the task at hand.

What is pre-qualification? Pre-Qualification us generally a series of test to ensure that suppliers meet a minimum set of standards. Quite frequently, larger organizations will require this qualification process to be completed before you get to even review any specific project specification.

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No matter how successful you are, eventually you will lose potential contracts. This is not always a bad thing – losing contracts can present you with opportunities to get closer to the client and get valuable feedback. It allows you to analyze what you did wrong, what was done right, and how you can improve your products, services…and proposals.

If you do lose a contract you should always ask for feedback and find out why you lost. Client’s are often happy to provide feedback to “soften the blow” of losing a contract. This is especially true if there was an elaborate qualification period or your proposal required an extensive amount of preparation and research.

Quite often, the deciding factor may be price and you may lose out on contracts where you proposed a superior product or service. Everyone who has lost a contract has been told that it was lost because they were too expensive…but how often have you been told you won because you were cheap?

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Read any book on sales or proposal writing. Go on a sales training course. One of the first topics that will be covered is features, advantages and benefits. Ultimately, any proposal whether verbal or written down has to persuade someone to take an action and this is done by demonstrating the benefits of taking that course of action.

In a smaller sale, especially with products it is often easy to list benefits, but with larger proposals you will have to search harder to understand the client’s business problem and explain the benefits of your solution – that is, how effectively and efficiently your solution solves their business problem.

Your solution should demonstrate not only value in price, but in the services that you offer. Value is the balance of cost versus benefit, therefore you need to be explicit in highlighting the benefits to the client.

Often when a contract has been lost, the client will tell you that you were too expensive – but no-one ever gets told that they won because they were the cheapest. It is the best solution that usually wins, the one that offers the best benefits. This may be the most expensive solution, but it still may offer the best value.

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