Position to win means the planning phase before a Request for Proposal is issued. It is poor practice to react to an RFP without having thought through what markets you are targeting and what is your value proposition. Countless hours can be spent generating proposals for opportunities that you have little chance of winning. Easy to say, but it involves making some hard choices.

We can help you:
✓ Define what is your competitive edge
✓ Develop case studies that create a story about your strengths
✓ Develop a response library
✓ Benchmark your current proposal management capability

Go or no go means the decision reached after receiving a request for proposal as to whether the opportunity is worth pursuing. The scope of work may not align with your capability or experience. The timescale may not fit your current utilisation. The specification may be written around a competitor.

If you have responded to a range of bids you will know that some clients are more sophisticated than others. If you have a choice about whether to submit a quality solution, or a price-driven solution, it can help to know the relative evaluation priorities of price and non-price factors.

We can help you:
✓ Develop 'Go/no-go' framework
✓ Calibrate the model with your sales pipeline
✓ Assess the sophistication of the client
✓ Determine whether a decision not to bid might damage your reputation

Proposal writing refers to the phase of developing and writing the proposal. This is often done against a deadline and requiring multiple team members to complete tasks in a relatively consistent way.

The challenge of creating customised content to address the specific questions of each RFP can lead to fragmented and incoherent responses. It is common that there is no 'red thread' discernible in a bid because the bidder's message has got lost in the rush to submit a conforming bid. That's assuming that you can understand procurement-speak.

We can help you:
✓ Develop 'win themes' so that your responses hammer home what makes you different
✓ Draft the content so your responses are DOPE; structured in a way to score most points
✓ Support live bid response
✓ Review your draft bid

At the table refers to the fact that submitting the proposal is not the end-game. Most procurement processes are multi-stage, with shortlisted respondents selected for subsequent negotiation. "Beyond the Shortlist" refers to our capability to support you from the proposal to the negotiating table.

The challenge in developing proposals is to create a sufficiently competitive bid to be shortlisted but to leave enough value in reserve that the negotiation process doesn't turn a just-profitable bid into a loss-making contract.

We can help you:
✓ Develop negotiation plan with your team
✓ Support your team in negotiation
✓ Lead the negotiation team
✓ Conduct a post-project debrief to capture lessons learned